Lord Samper's Library

So yesterday was a productive one but left me with no energy to do anything but watch 'Superstore' (again) when I finally got home. I really need to find a new series to watch, but anyway... Where does that leave today's blog then? Not in as bad a place as you'd think ;o) I thought I'd take advantage of earlier blogging endeavours and present you with a Michael Moorcock post from way back in 2014 (thanks 'Past Me'!) I have no idea where my copy of 'The Golden Barge' is right now so this is the next best thing. Normal service should resume after this weekend, when I've had a chance to catch up with my reading, but for now... The last time I had anything to say about ‘The Golden Barge’, the year was 2011 (only just though…) and my thoughts went along the lines of… ‘With certain stories in ‘The Time Dweller’ the problem for me was that whatever Moorcock was trying to say was drowned out in a mass of admittedly beautiful but overall stifling imagery

Page Count: 9 Pages If you’re looking to read ‘The Dead Remember’ (and if not, you really should), Project Gutenberg has a copy Here while Amazon can sort you out if you have a Kindle. If you’re looking for a physical copy, ‘The Dead Remember’ can be found in Del Rey’s ‘The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard’ collection but I found in a collection called… You guessed it ;o) I was just coming out of finishing ‘The Nest’ and fancied a quick read while I caught my breath and decided what to read next. And it really was as simple as seeing the title, on the cover, and thinking to myself, ‘I wonder if that’s the title of one of the stories?’ It was, I read it and now I get to tell you all about it ;o) Jim Gordon killed a man and his wife, in a drunken rage, and now he is a man waiting to die. The woman’s dying words were to curse him; he would die within the week and she would be there when the time came. Jim has promised his brother that he will go out fighting, but will he be given that

I thoroughly enjoyed reading ‘Hellhound’, the other week , enough so that when it came round to last weekend, I knew that I wanted to read some more ‘when nature attacks’ horror. My ‘Guy N. Smith Shelf’ normally delivers on that front but I knew that I had a couple of other Valancourt books in that vein so went looking for whichever one I found first. I will read Peter Tonkin’s ‘Killer’ one day but it was ‘The Nest’ that I found first and that’s what saw me through the weekend and yesterday’s commute to and from work. Bloody hell… what a read it was. Let me tell you about it… It was just an ordinary garbage dump on peaceful Cape Cod. No one ever imagined that conditions were perfect for breeding, that it was a warm womb, fetid, moist, and with food so plentiful that everything creeping, crawling, and slithering could gorge to satiation. Then a change in poison control was made, resulting in an unforeseen mutation. Now the giant mutant cockroaches are ready to leave their nest—in search

I wasn't a hundred percent sold on Season 1 but I didn't think it was that bad. It will probably be a while before I give it another go but I don't regret the go that I gave it, if you know what I mean ;o) Season 2 though... This is more like the real deal... So, it doesn't look like there'll be a huge wait to find out who Sauron is this time and if that's Annatar (which I think it is) then it may be that Season 2 sails closer to the established lore than Season 1 did. I can work with that :o) The only question I have is around what the time gap is between the two Seasons, that's not a huge deal though. Season 2 of 'The Rings of Power' will be hitting Prime on August 29th.

Page Count: 252 Pages Remember the other day when I said I’d tell you all about the sequel to Graham McNeill’s ‘The Ambassador’ ? Well, today is the day I’ll be doing just that 😉 Quick thoughts are the order of the day though… I’ve got a full day ahead of me so should try and get a little more sleep than normal. The other reason…? Well… There isn’t an awful lot to say about this one, let me try and explain… Retired general Kaspar von Velten returns to the frozen city if Kislev to continue his duties as the Emperor’s ambassador to the court of Tsarina Katarina. With the massed hordes of Chaos marching towards the strategic rock formation know as Ursun’s Teeth, the combined armies of the Empire and Kislev must ride out to meet them in battle. But with the outbreak of plague and a string of assassinations, it becomes clear that a Chaos agent is operating within the city and Kaspar must foil them before they bring the defences tumbling down… ‘Ursun’s Teeth’ is a bit of an odd one to try a

Sorry about the silent blog over the last couple of days... Last week did for me, in the end, and so Saturday ended up being about sleeping in and then revisiting 'Captain America: Civil War' (still very cool). I had my kids over on Sunday so blogging was never on the agenda, playing 'Crash Team Racing' (with my youngest) was though ;o)  I'll tell you what else I did... In the middle of trying to tidy up the flat a little, I gathered all the books that I've been reading (and a few that I want to read soon) into one reasonably sized pile so that I don't have to keep looking for random books every time I fancy a read. Look at me being all organised ;o) This approach worked pretty well last time so I thought it would be worth giving it another go and seeing what happened. Lets take a look, shall we? First up are the books that I've been dipping in and out of over the last week. Two 'Conan' books didn't make it across from the last TBR pile, not

I came across this tale in L. Sprague De Camp’s ‘Swords & Sorcery’ collection, you might have better luck clicking Here if you fancy reading it for yourself. Every so often (more like ‘far too often’…) I find myself in the position where I’ve somehow got four books on the go and I’m not making headway on any of them. Just the right time then to step away from those books, grab a short story collection from the shelves and see if anything takes my fancy. It usually does. I picked up ‘Swords and Sorcery’ with the notion of reading either Howard’s ‘Shadows in the Moonlight’ (maybe another time) or Lord Dunsany’s ‘Distressing Tale of Thangobrind the Jeweler’ but then I saw ‘The Testament of Athammaus’, lurking at the back of the book, and that was my mind made up for me ;o) Let me tell you about it. Commoriom ‘was aforetime the resplendent, high-built capital, and the marble and granite crown of all Hyperborea’... until one day when everyone suddenly left and the deserted city fell in

Every so often, everything kind of catches up with me and one of those things has to be shoved to one side, for later, so that I can get anything else done at all. I can tell that today is going to be one of those days so I'm doing myself a favour and recycling an old review, just to give myself a little room to breathe. I hope you don't mind ;o) I'm all about Fantasy and Horror these days so I thought it would make a change if today focused on some Science Fiction of the 'Masterwork kind'. A little digging came up with 'Man Plus'; a title that I think is well worth a read, even if it's unlikely, right now, that I'll go back for a re-read. The full review can be found over Here but all the important bits follow below... According to computer predictions, colonisation of Mars is mankind’s only hope of avoiding extinction; the Man Plus Programme is an exercise in biological engineering that will pave the way to humankind being able to live on the Red

I’d never read anything by Ronald Malfi and payday had just happened so it was but the work of a minute, or two, to hop onto Amazon and have me a copy of ‘They Lurk’. Why ‘They Lurk’? Easy ;o) I thought a collection of novellas would give me a broader picture of what Malfi writes about, ‘After the Fade’ already looked like the kind of thing that I’d be into (and it was, but more on that in a moment…) and I was keen to see what the other novellas delivered. The original plan then was to dip into ‘They Lurk’ as and when I needed to something short to read, probably on the bus to and from work. As it turned out though, the commute took longer than expected and by the time I got to lunch, I was enjoying ‘They Lurk’ so much that it was very easy to just keep reading. I ended up polishing the whole thing off yesterday and it was time very much well spent. I’ll take a quick look at each novella, in a little more detail, but as a whole, ‘They Lurk’ was a very good read and I’ve already got ‘Gh

It’s taken me a little while to get to this book; not the fault of the book at all, more my habit of stacking books in large piles and then completely forgetting what book is where… I’d like to say that I’ll beat this habit but, no, that’s not happening :o( Anyway… I got there in the end, last week was a little bit of a nightmare and weeks like that are always the best time to read more of the adventures of Gotrek Gurnisson so… let me tell you about the time when Gotrek went up against Nurgle’s most pestilent followers. Gotrek Gurnisson, the legendary Slayer, picks up a new accomplice – and faces a truly grotesque challenge in the disease-ridden spawn of the Plague God himself. Deep in the wilds of Ghyran, a former warrior priest preaches for humanity to reject the gods. The sole survivor of a massacred Dawnbringer Crusade, Amara Fidellus believes that Sigmar has betrayed her. But when she faces execution for such blasphemy, it’s only the intervention of a drunken, taciturn and incre

A sequel to the last 'Movie Night' post that is, I didn't spend yesterday watching sequels... ;o) I've struggled to get into anything reading wise, after finishing 'Deathworlder', so I gave my brain the weekend off, settled down in my favourite chair and set about trying to make a dent in my Prime watchlist. And this is the post where I tell all about what I watched yesterday :o) Lets do it, 'The Last Hope' (2020) The world has been devastated by the virus that has reanimated the dead to consume the living. Australia has so far remained unscathed through a brutal border protection policy and internment facilities. Derek Jones and the High Risk Response Unit restore order to the internment facilities when law and order breaks down. When the arrival of a mysterious girl collides with the uprising at the Briar's Hill Detention Centre, will Australia, the last hope for many, finally fall? I'm not going to lie, a lot of this movie's budget clearly

Apologies for the brief radio silence yesterday. I'm not going to lie, I was asleep for a large chunk of it and then I was at my daughter's birthday party for another large chunk. That's all just scene setting though ;o) The chunk that we're here for is the bit where I sat in my chair and watched a couple of movies; one a re-watch (albeit for the first time a number of years) and the other one a random find on Prime. Let me tell you about them... 'Assault on Precinct 13' (1976) A Highway Patrol Officer, two criminals and a station secretary defend a defunct Los Angeles Precinct office against a siege by a bloodthirsty street gang bent on revenge... I first watched 'Assault on Precinct 13' years ago, at college, and seem to remember sitting through it but not really getting into it as much as I'd hoped. It's funny how things can change a few years (okay, a number of years, damn I'm old) down the line... 'Assault on Precinct 13' is curr

Page Count: 156 Pages The original plan was for this post to be all about Richard Strachan’s ‘Blightslayer’ and that held true right up until I got home last night and thought I’d read a few pages of ‘Hell Hound’ before I went out and cast my vote. Very soon, a ‘few pages’ became the ‘whole book and I won’t lie, I was lucky that I still had time to make it to the polling station afterwards but anyway… As good as it is, ‘Blightslayer’ is going to have to wait a little bit. I am all about ‘Hell Hound’ right now. Let me tell you about it, quick thoughts for a very slim read... ‘What are the possibilities of my strength? That is a thought I have never had before. What if some morning as the old woman stood at the head of the staircase she were suddenly to feel a weight thrusting against the back of her legs? What if she were to lunge forward, grasping at the air, striking her thin skull against the edge of a stair? What would become of me if she were found unmoving at the bottom of the sta

Page Count: 245 pages (well, more like 244 and a half) I have to go looking for them now but there are still a few books, lurking here and there, that I read while I was taking a take from the blog last year. And while I’ve got a few books on the go and haven’t finished any of them, finding a book like ‘The Ambassador’ really gives me a little breathing space ;o) It’s a short read so lets not hang around this paragraph too long. Lets get to it… In the Icy Northern Wastes, a mighty army of darkness prepares to sweep southward and lay waste to the civilized lands of the Empire. In this dangerous time, retired Imperial general Kaspar von Velten is sent to Kislev as ambassador to the court of Tsarina Katarin. Unused ot the power struggles and politics at court, Kaspar is forced to use all the skills and resources at his command to in order to survive in this cold and hostile land. As winter draws in, can Kaspar re-forge the fragile alliance between the Empire and Kislev and prepare its tro

Before I get into the review proper, thank you Black Library for sending me a copy of ‘Deathworlder’ in return for a fair and honest review. Talking of ‘fair and honest’… There will be loads of the latter but I enjoyed the hell out of ‘Deathworlder’ so… We’ll see how being fair goes ;o) That’s your only warning, lets talk ‘Deathworlder’… Lazulai is a world beyond the brink, its battle against the tyranids all but lost. Once-magnificent cities lie in ruin. The seas boil. The skies crack. Horrific alien bioforms devour. In mere days the planet will be consumed. The 903rd Catachan ‘Night Shrikes’ defend one of the last fortresses still standing. Led by Major Wulf Khan, to die fighting is all that is expected of them… until she is given one last mission: to lead a squad through the apocalypse and recover a piece of archeotech that may doom or deliver the entire Lazulai System. Facing insurmountable odds and zero hope for aid, the major must hold her squad together as they pick their way