Lord Samper's Library

 I can't believe it was a year ago that I read R.J. Barker's 'The Bone Ships'... It was though and here's the review to prove it ;o)  It was right at the end of the review that I said I'd be all settled down and waiting for book two... Well, it's almost that time. 'Call of the Bone Ships' is out towards the end of next month so I figured now was a great time to have a look at the cover art and blurb (there's also the small fact that I've been doing Halloween stuff with the girls so a cover art post is all I'm good for right now but it still would have been about 'Call of the Bone Ships', honest!) First up then, the cover art... Just look at that cover... Gorgeous, isn't it? I'm more of a 'I know what I like' kind of guy, rather than someone who knows the first thing about artwork, but I love the 'map feel' of this cover and I love how fresh and crisp it looks, I'm guessing rather like the seas that the...

I think I read somewhere that this season is going to be ten episodes long; if that's the case then I'm officially halfway through :o) If you've been following my 'World Beyond' posts then you'll know that it's been a strange old road, so far, with consistency being sought but never quite found, at least as far as I can see anyway. I've got my suspicions about why this is, naïve to a fault teenagers and the zombie apocalypse (sorry, the 'empty' apocalypse) just don't go together. Having said that though, 45 year old me clearly isn't the target audience so I'll happily admit that I may well have missed the point entirely. Who knows? All you can do is keep watching and, five episodes in, I'm here for the long haul. And I'm kind of glad that I am. 'Madman Across the Water' might (just might) be the episode where it all comes together and promises good things that the show might just actually deliver... There's still ...

A year ago today, I was thinking to myself that if I didn't start blogging again then I'd just be coming home each night and idly flicking through Youtube, pretty much just waiting to go back to work in the morning and doing the whole thing all over again... I needed something to do that would make me think a little more about what I was reading/ watching and something that would get me interacting with people outside work, even if was just on Twitter. So I hit the 'create blog' button, of course I did :o) And now it's a year later. Wow, where did that year go? I'm talking in terms of this blog of course, we all know what this year has been like don't we...It's been an awful year out there but in this little tiny corner of the internet, it's been alright actually. My mental health hasn't been great so at times, I've been pretty impressed that I've kept things going here to be honest. Of course it helps that I'm talking about books, an...

This book is probably the main reason why there's a 'Tales from the Lower Shelves' thing going on here. I was looking for a comic to read, that I hadn't read in a while, and remembered that there's a whole shelf of comic books right at the bottom of the big book case. I had a little browse and found 'Enemy of the State' which, conveniently, I hadn't read for at least a couple of years. So I had a read and here we are. To be honest, I was a little surprised to be reminded that this book was on the shelf at all as I'm not a massive fan of Wolverine. I don't mind him as such, I just feel like there's only so far you can take a character like Wolverine before the constant stream of ex/dead girlfriends and bitter attitude needs a major readjustment, which you can't do because it's Wolverine and that's who he is , don't you dare change him! Which makes it all the more surprising that this book is in my collection at all; I've g...

These are not my bookshelves by the way although I wish they were... I wanted to come up with something new, for the blog, (the 'Books for the TBR Pile' posts seem a little hit and miss at the moment which is fair enough given as they're dependant on cool books being in charity shops...) and this is where my slightly bemused brain landed me. Lets see if it works or not... Circumstance has led me to have to be pretty ruthless in culling the shelves, over the last few years, but I've still got masses of books in my flat. Far too many in fact, I may just have to cull a few more... But anyway. I was looking at my books and comic books, the other day, and realised that I've unconciously put all the cool ones (that I'm likely to go back to) on shelves that are either at eye level or shelves that I don't have to bend over to get to. Because I've got arthritis in one knee and gout in my feet and there are days when it bloody hurts to pick a book from the botto...

It happens... For every time that the hunt turns up a pile of books, there will inevitably be occasions where very few books (or even none at all *shudder*) are found. That's just the nature of it and this week just gone has definitely been one of those weeks. mostly because I've been stuck looking in the same old charity shops (I need to get further afield but that's not happening any time soon) but also because I'm trying to get my Christmas shopping done a little earlier this year which has left me a little short. That's not a bad thing, actually, as it's encouraging me to read some of the books I've already bought (albeit not very quickly, more on that in a bit) but it doesn't help me a lot with posts like this...  I've started this post though so I'll finish ;o) I did manage to find one book whilst walking through Lewisham town centre, on my way from A to B. I stopped off for a quick look in Traid and found this little beauty... I say 'l...

It's becoming a bit of a habit... The days are just packed full of stuff at the moment and by the time it's all done, there's not really time for much else other than to watch a movie and go to bed. My TBR pile is looking a little dusty at the moment, I've got the week off work so will have to see if I can do something about that... In the meantime, tonight was all about watching 'Snatchers', a film that I'd seen covered on 'Carnage Counts' and thought to myself, 'I need to give that a shot...' And once the DVD came through the letterbox, that's exactly what I did :o) One night stands come with their own set of problems but no-one faced a morning after like Sara's... After a night with her ex-boyfriend, Sara wakes up pregnant, nine months pregnant... The only person she can trust is her ex-best friend, Hayley but a trip to the clinic and one dead doctor later; it's clear that things are even less normal than they already thoug...

It's a bit late in the day but I was up really late last night, and really early this morning, trying to get work done and I've been playing catch up ever since... Hopefully tomorrow will be a bit easier. I did find some time though to watch the latest episode of 'The Walking Dead: World Beyond', about two o'clock in the morning but never mind. I'm only four episodes in but have passed that strange point you get to when you know that you're going to watch the rest of the season, no matter what happens. At the same time though, I'm constantly feeling that I'm only ever about half an hour from turning the show off, removing it from my watchlist and pretending it never happened. Confused? I certainly am, it feels like there are too many peaks and troughs and that the show is still trying to hit its stride. For every moment where we get a real look at the 'World Beyond', there are several more where our travellers are trying to work out who they...

I know I said I'd be reading more 'Elric' but remember that post about the 'Reading Slump' ( last week )? Well, 'The Eternal Champion' was one of the books that I ended up getting into while trying to beat that slump and I actually managed to finish it so figured it should have it's time on the blog. For the record, I'm still in the middle of that slump but it's not like I don't have enough interesting books to read so I'm going to beat the slump, one book at a time... But back to 'The Eternal Champion'... It has literally been years since I read this book and all I could really remember about it was, well... not a lot really. So I got reading and while 'The Eternal Champion' ended up being really easy to get into, I found out the hard way why I didn't really remember much about it. Turns out that there isn't an awful lot to remember, certainly not in terms of the supposed hero himself anyway... John Daker drea...

Yesterday was full of trying to get loads of work done (and I did but there is still loads to do...) so when I finally got round to turning my computer off, I was in no fit state to read anything. What I was in a fit state for though (albeit barely) was to watch a couple of movies so that's exactly what I did, my Amazon Prime watchlist was in need of a little pruning after all... ;o) And by the end of the evening, I'd discovered a new guilty pleasure in one film and got really hacked off with a character in the other film. But which film was which...? Oh who am I kidding? You know and if you don't know, I'll tell you :o) 'Dead Heat' (1988) An undead cop and his partner must chase down the villain who killed him... Don't laugh (ok, you can laugh) but it turns out that I'd been getting 'Dead Heat' confused with 'Red Heat' and never watched either until 'Carnage Counts' (subscribe to their channel on Youtube, it's great) ran ...

I'll be honest, I'm still not a hundred percent sure, sometimes, that there really needs to be a 'Warhammer Horror', not when you look at the rich vein of horror that already runs through the 40K and 'Age of Sigmar' lines. The horror is already there in the way that the warp ensnares the souls of the unwary and in arcane rituals carried out away from the eyes of normal people (although is anyone really normal in these settings...? That's a question for another time). I look at the line and think, why is it making a point of calling itself horror when everyone already knows that Warhammer = Horror? It's at roughly that point though, that I stop to remind myself that just because I'm middle-aged now, it doesn't mean that I have to act all cantankerous ;o) I love horror and I love Black Library books, of course I'm going to read more of the same! And it was that attitude that led me to a copy of 'The House of Night and Chain'; a book t...

You can tell when it's been a tough few days when the short story posts start to crop up on the blog. Actually, looking back over the last couple of weeks, short story posts have done a lot more than just crop up... Oh well, it hasn't been the best week and a bit but it could be worse I guess. And it's no great chore reading more short stories, is it? I don't know if it's me getting older but I'm enjoying short stories so much more these days. I still appreciate what goes into craftng a novel but there's less room in a short story and all that same stuff has to go in... The end result just feels a little more, I don't know, intricate? Everything has to fit together and work straight away as you don't have the luxury of being able to iron the creases out over several chapters. So yeah, I do love a good short story at the moment. It's the season for reading that's a little more scary but to be honest, I find that any time of year is the right...

I think my Shudder subscription might finally be starting to pay for itself... :o) I've been trying to watch a little more horror than usual, since I started this blog (almost a year ago now...) Not only that but I've been trying to watch different stuff instead of my usual favourites that I keep going back to. Not that they won't all be featured here at some point but, you know... it's always good to try different stuff every now and then. I've had a lot of good luck with 'horror anthology films' (is that what you call them? Well, that's what I'm going to call them) in the last few years and the 'Creepshow' series, that I watched a couple of months ago, ended up being really good as well. With that in mind, when I saw adverts for 'The Mortuary Collection', I knew that I had to give it a go. And I'm glad that I did. I was a little dubious when I saw the run time was just under two hours (there's not enough time, these days, to...

I was lucky enough to receive an advance proof of 'The Stranger Times', this week, and once I figure out when is an acceptable time to review it (the book itself won't be published until the middle of January next year), you'll definitely see something posted about it here. In the meantime though, there's no harm in giving you guys a little heads up, is there...? There are dark forces at work in our world (and in Manchester in particular), so thank God The Stranger Times is on hand to report them . . . A weekly newspaper dedicated to the weird and the wonderful (but mostly the weird), it is the go-to publication for the unexplained and inexplicable. At least that's their pitch. The reality is rather less auspicious. Their editor is a drunken, foul-tempered and foul-mouthed husk of a man who thinks little of the publication he edits. His staff are a ragtag group of misfits. And as for the assistant editor . . . well, that job is a revolving door - and it has just...

Where has the day gone...? One minute I was struggling to wake up for an early start. The next thing I know, I'm looking at it being Sunday in about half an hour's time... Oh well. Hopefully Sunday will be as good as today was, because it was a good one, in part because I got to root through piles of old books in Deptford Market, more on that in a bit. We've already established that when I get stressed or low, I end up buying loads of books in a misguided attempt to feel better (although I do end up with more books so I win overall). Well, this week has been a bit of a nightmare so the resulting book buying went... critical... Seriously, I'm hoping for a quieter week, next week, as I'm running out of room for books in my flat :o( Do you want to have a look? Yeah, you do... Lets start off with the usual suspects. I'm collecting the 'Elric' stories in single volumes as these aren't quite so daunting when you pick them up and lets be honest, the covers ...

When we last left the group, Hope was about to face up to some demons by putting herself in danger to help her friends. It's a Friday which means we get to go back and find out what happened next. And... Well, we're still stuck in the middle of a tyre fire and true to form, not a lot actually happens until the last few minutes. This time though, things are a little different; 'The Tyger and the Lamb' ended up being an episode of 'World Beyond' that I wanted to go back and watch again instead of an episode that you feel like you have to get through in the hope that the next episode will work for you. Things are starting to take shape now, I'm not sure that we needed to wait three episodes for it to happen but it feels like we're finally on the move so I'm not going to complain too loudly.. ;o) Two of my big complaints, last week, were that seemed to be very little point to Silas and that the story really takes a hit when the Civic Republic have to m...

I've hit a bit of a reading slump this week. Okay, a lot of a reading slump... Nothing seems to have gone quite right this week, either at home or at work, and my ability to get into (and stick with) a good book has taken a real beating as a result. Just two more days until the weekend, just two more days... What do you do when you hit a reading slump like this...? I'll tell you what I do... I go for this scattergun approach where I will frantically read anything to hand and see if any of hem make it past the first fifty pages. Sometimes it even works, this week though... This week, I've ended up with another little mini TBR pile to go with all the other little TBR piles that keep cropping up around the flat. The good thing about this is that I get to post a few pictures and have a 'Lazy Post Day' here :o) Look, I'm about due one of those. Don't judge me... ;o) Take a look then and let me know if you've read any of these or if any take your fancy... Thes...

I was full of 'Imperial Assassins are so awesome' after reading 'Divine Sanction' last night; honestly, I was like a little kid... If you read my review you'll see why . With that in mind then, it was no surprise then that when I saw another 'Assassinorum' short story by Robert Rath (while looking for 'Divine Sanction' cover art to 'borrow') I was pretty much all over it right away. It ended up being a bit of a race against time to finish 'Iron Sight' as I've only got the one charger in the flat, right now, and that was charging my phone. I did it though and 'Iron Sight' ended up being well worth that extra effort. There are few in the Imperium more patient than a Vindicare Assassin. These superlative killers wait for days or weeks to take the perfect shot, ending their target's life with a single squeeze of the trigger. For Absolom Raithe, his patience has reached its limit. For 27 days, his target has eluded him. ...