Lord Samper's Library

And it paid off a couple of debts, leaving enough to take my girls out for some book shopping, pizza and a quick dash into Boots for what ended up being the most pungent hand sanitizer I have ever come across. I suspect parts of Covent Garden in particular still smell of raspberry... ;o) And if you're wondering about the pizza, it was mostly ham and pineapple for me. My stomach is still feeling fragile so I didn't want to tempt fate with anything more adventurous (and I actually quite like ham and pineapple these days)... But you're here for the books, not the pizza :o) Forbidden Planet and the Trafalgar Square Waterstones now have a little more of my money, lets take a look at what I got in exchange (along with a couple of other books that found their way to mine over the last few days)... The two big purchases from Forbidden Planet. I've been enjoying Titan's 'Conan' output so 'City of the Dead' was an easy choice and I'd never read any of the ...

Today is a free day so I'm going to use it to catch up with the reading that I planned on doing last weekend; that and get over the dose of food poisoning (or whatever the hell it was, I'm still not sure...) that I had the other day. Not going to lie, I feel pretty wiped out right now which is the ideal excuse to do nothing apart from read books ;o) While I do that then... I like to leave trailers on the blog, mostly to remind myself that the whole movie isn't far away as well as still feel pleased that I am able to post video clips on the blog (honestly, anything feels like an achievement these days, don't take that away from me!) So here are three that I found yesterday ;o) 'V/H/S Beyond' arrives on Shudder next week and I'll probably end up subscribing again, so I can catch it, I love the 'V/H/S' series :o) 'Azrael' came out yesterday, according to the trailer, but I'm not sure if that means here as well or just in the US, I'll hav...

I can’t quite believe that there’s only the one episode left, after this, and then Season 2 will be over. Seriously, how can a season that sometimes felt like it was dragging interminably suddenly be one episode away from ending? I’m half joking ;o) On the whole, I’ve enjoyed ‘The Rings of Power’ but it has always come with a slight feeling that the actual story was suffering under the weight of trying to get all the main players into position for what seemed like another round of getting everyone into position. All I’ve ever really wanted was for ‘Rings of Power’ to be actually moving towards something and last week’s episode felt like that was finally happening. I’m really happy to say that this week’s episode carried on in that vein and has made the Season Finale something that I’m really looking forward to. As always, I’ll try not to be spoilery about the content of ‘Doomed to Die’, just in case you haven’t seen it yet. Lets just say that Adar and Sauron’s plans are about to come ...

Looking back over the blog, it’s been a long time since I last did one of these posts; just over two years in fact so we’re well overdue another ‘Fighting Fantasy’ post here ;o) When the blog was a little younger, I used to have a great time reading these books to my girls but they’ve since moved on to other stuff and… That’s ok :o) I was kind of half expecting it and if I’m being honest, I quite fancied tackling this one on my own (just like I used to, way back in the day) ;o) So with all that said then, let me tell all about the Dungeon on Blood Island… Jealous of Baron Sukumvit's Deathtrap Dungeon, Lord Carnuss forced six hundred shackled souls to build the ultimate dungeon on Blood Island. He's filled the labyrinth with savage creatures and deadly traps, and offered the fabled prize of the Golden Orb of Fang to any brave Adventurer who can find it and escape from the dungeon alive. Are YOU brave enough to enter the Dungeon on Blood Island? If you’re a fan of the series then...

Page Count: 223 Pages Before we get into the review, a thank you to Black Library and Jude Reid for supplying me with a copy of ‘Daemonbreaker’ in exchange for a fair and honest review. It took me a little longer than planned to get round to reading ‘Daemonbreaker’ and that’s all on me. I didn’t realise until a couple of days ago just how easy it is for a Kindle to hide itself in a flat crammed full of books… (The universe dropping another ‘subtle’ hint that I should get my eyes tested, anyway…) I got there in the end :o) The last few days have seen me not be able to focus on any one book, until I picked up ‘Daemonbreaker’. That should tell you all you need to know but you probably need a little more than that to go on, right? Lets see what I can do for you. The Imperium burns in the face of Abaddon’s Thirteenth Black Crusade, bringing with it the damnation of entire sectors and countless worlds. As the Despoiler’s malevolent gaze turns to Cadia, the sacred warhost of the Adepta Sorori...

I was in no fit state to get any reading done, over the weekend, but luckily, I was in just the right mood to sit in my comfy chair and watch some TV. Well, a lot of TV actually ;o) Me and my eldest have a little movie night on Friday so I thought I'd take the opportunity to watch 'Alien vs. Predator' and 'Alien vs. Predator Requiem' and see if either would work for next Friday. It won't surprise you to learn that we'll be watching one but not the other... And I'd never seen a 'Saw' movie, until I saw that 'Jigsaw' was on Netflix and I thought 'why not...' Let me tell you about them ;o) 'Alien vs. Predator' (2004) A pyramid lies between the Antarctic ice. But what has it called, and what is hatching within it...? An archaeological team are caught between two warring alien species, one of which must not be allowed to escape the pyramid... Sometimes I feel like I'm the only person who enjoys 'Alien vs, Predator';...

I'm not even sure who some of these people are (that's what happens when you cancel your Disney+ subscription and fall behind with the MCU films) but it looks pretty cool nonetheless so... I'm in :o) 'Thunderbolts' will be in cinemas, May next year. (Left to Right: Big Russian guy from the 'Black Widow' movie, Not a clue, Winter Soldier, Black Widows little sister (?) and US Agent. That's two out of five, could do better...)

  Page Count: 14 Pages 'The Sleep of the Dead' can be found in the 'Tales of the Old World' collection but... You'd probably already figured that out. I have started this post with a pretty big clue ;o) Anyway... All my good intentions, of reading loads over the weekend, met a poor end when, well... If I wasn't asleep, I just couldn't focus on whatever was in front of me. It happens, hopefully things will pick up over the rest of the week. I really wanted the first post of the week to be about something I'd actually read though and I'd been meaning to get back into 'Tales of the Old World' so that's just what I did. Whatever Warhammer setting he's writing in, Darius Hinks is always a good bet for a tale well told so 'The Sleep of the Dead' pretty much chose itself. Let me tell you about it... ;o) The drawing room of Count Rothenburg has seen many tall tales told, the tale of Gustav Insel may be the only one that actually happe...

For all my plans of actually reading some of the books I actually own, before buying even more... Well, I had some birthday money and I got paid right in the middle of a challenging week so yep, I folded and bought some more books. I wasn't even dignified about it ;o) Add 'The Blacktongue Thief' to the mix and a solid weekend's worth of reading awaits ;o) Let me show you what has come through the door over the last couple of days... (Sorry about the quality of the photos this time round, I seem to be getting worse at holding a camera steady) Turns out that all I need to hear are the words 'Die Hard in a castle' and I will pick up the book in question which, this time, is Cameron Johnston's 'The Last Shield'. This will be my next 'big read' after 'The Blacktongue Thief'. 'The Dungeon on Blood Island' is me indulging my inner child (who is thoroughly spoilt anyway but...) with a little Fighting Fantasy :o) I've got an hour o...

Work hasn't exactly been giving me a kicking this week but it has very definitely been letting me know who is charge (clue: I'm not the one in charge...) Oh well, one more day and it's the weekend ;o) So, not a lot of energy for reading then (although 'The Blacktongue Thief' continues to be excellent whenever I get a chance to read a few pages) so I thought I'd use last night to watch some utterly daft horror instead. That and the latest episode of 'Rings of Power'. Let me tell you all about it, daft horror first... 'Freddy vs. Jason' (2003) The children of Elm Street have forgotten Freddy Krueger. leaving him stuck in Hell. Freddy isn't without a plan though, enlisting the 'help' of Jason Voorhees to see if another killing spree will jog a few memories. Unfortunately for Freddy though, Jason is a little too good at what he does... With a group of teenagers stuck in the middle, these two horror icons will battle it out to the... Well,...

Page Count: 320 Pages I actually read this book some months ago (and I’ve only just found it again, under a pile of bills...) so you’re going to be hard pressed to get much more than quick thoughts and general impressions here. For completeness sake though (and the fact that I’m nowhere near finishing any of the other books that I’ve got on the go…), I’m going to give it a shot ;o) Here goes... In the savage Old World, dark powers gather around the ancient mountain top city of Middenheim, the City of the White Wolf. Only the noble Templar Knights of Ulric and a few unlikely allies stand to defend her against the insidious servants of Death. I ended up really enjoying ‘Hammers of Ulric’ but damn, the book really made me work for it in the early stages. What we’re looking at here is a collection of shorter tales that gradually tie together; by the end of the book and you realise that you’ve actually just been reading one complete book the whole time. I like that approach and it’s not oft...

A birthday and a day off work, all at the same time... Just what this Graeme needed :o) I pretty much camped out in Waterstones until I found a couple of books that I fancied and I had a little read over some coffee. A little bit of PS4 with my youngest in the evening (and damn, how did she get so good at Fifa...?) and that was one perfect day in the bag :o) Now I just need to get my head round turning fifty next year...  While I do that, and try not to think about work in the morning, have a quick look at the books I found yesterday. And it will be a quick look as I only grabbed a couple. I really want to concentrate on the books that are already on my shelves but, you know... Birthday and all that ;o) My reading isn't going brilliantly, at the moment, so I thought I'd go back to my roots (as it were) and find some new fantasy to read. Okay, neither of these will be particularly new to you guys but I don't make it into Waterstones all that often so... They're fairly ne...

 If this picture makes an appearance, it can only mean one thing ;o) Yep, I'm another year older although I wouldn't necessarily say another year wiser ;o) And if that wasn't enough, I've got the day off as well. There will be plenty of books, cake and coffee; I may even take a little time out to try and make a dent in one of the books that I have on the go. You have a good one too, I'll see you back here tomorrow ;o)

While I spend the day trying to finish just one of any number of books that I've picked up over the last few days (yep, I can't get into anything right now), take a look at the trailer for the remake of 'Salem's Lot' which will be showing on Max at the beginning of October... I don't know about you but to me, it feels like we're in an age of film where every remake of a Stephen King film, or TV show, is an immediate improvement on the original. Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy the original versions of 'It', 'The Stand' and so on but... you know what I mean? Either way, I've got high hopes for this version of 'Salem's Lot' ;o) Will it encourage me to dig out my old copy for a re-read...? Maybe, it's not like I'm getting into any of the other books that I have on the go right now...

This post is a little bit later than planned but I’ll be honest, that’s been a running theme for everything this week… ;o) I’m so glad that it’s finally the weekend, how about you? I finally got round to watching ‘Halls of Stone’ last night and really wanted to get my thoughts down before the weekend brushes them all away; especially as last week’s episode really made it look like the show was finally starting to build up a head of steam. That wasn’t the case this week but I think that was all for a very good reason… As always, no episode recaps here. If you’re after one of those then I would go and read the latest post over at Reactor Magazine , I am constantly in awe of how thoroughly they recap and cover each episode. Just quick thoughts here I’m afraid, that’s about all I have the energy for right now. And with that said, lets have a quick chat about ‘Halls of Stone’. I’ll be honest, in the early stages of ‘Halls of Stone’, I was ready to come on here and have a right old moan. ...

Thanks to one thing and another (amongst other things…), this week has been a shocking week for getting any reading done. You probably noticed that I threw all my toys out of the pram and just didn’t bother posting at all yesterday ;o) Funnily enough, I thought I might have better luck yesterday when I had to pop out and pick up my prescription; a short bus ride is always a good moment to read a few pages… Nope, I packed my glasses but no book… Luckily, Brockley Books is fairly near the pharmacy so I popped in afterwards, just so I’d have something to read on the way back :o) When I was a lot younger, I had a copy of ‘Peter Davison’s Book of Alien Planets’ but never came across its companion collection, the ‘Book of Alien Monsters’. When I saw a copy in Brockley Books then, I made sure that I grabbed it. My inner child deserved a little closure, plus the cover still looks awesome ;o) Quick thoughts then on a couple of short stories that I read on the way home… ‘Beyond Lies the Wub’ – P...

‘Cimmerian September’ has got me over another ‘reading slump’; I’m really excited to see what I can read this month as far as ‘Conan’ tales go. The plan is to write about at least a couple of Howard’s original tales but I’ve also been having fun just looking through my bookshelves to see which books I’d forgotten that I owned. Any excuse for a ‘bookshelf browse’ and a re-read ;o) All of which led me to Conan’s team-up with one Elric of Melnibone… Conan first met Elric back in #14 ( A Sword Called Stormbringer ) of ‘Conan the Barbarian’ back in 1972. It was a short-lived team-up, concluding in #15 ( The Green Empress of Melnibone ) and then they both went on their merry (well, ‘doom-laden’ in the case of Elric) ways. Moorcock, and James Cawthorn, supplied the plot; Roy Thomas and Barry Smith adapted it. I first came across the story in the early 2000s, working in a psychiatric hospital where one of the patients had an extensive collection of Moorcock books. It took me a little while lon...

You know that feeling you get when you read an amazing book and you come away feeling like the book must have been left in the shop for you to find? Not anyone else, just you, the universe somehow knew that you’d be in the shop and left you a book that it knew you’d really enjoy. Well, that’s me and ‘Rover Red Charlie’; a book that I enjoyed so much that I’m actually going to find it difficult to read anything else for the next few days (while it works through my system). My timing is as bad as ever, I should probably have left that until the end of my post… Oh well, If you want to duck out now, that’s fine. Just make sure that you find yourself a copy of ‘Rover Red Charlie’. If you’re still here, lets see if I can explain myself a little better… My name is Charlie and I am a dog. So are my friends Red and Rover. Something happened to the Feeders. We don’t know what. We don’t know why. But they began to hurt each other. They hurt and hurt and hurt and hurt until none of them were left....

  Sorry about the radio silence these last couple of days... Saturday was always meant to be a 'no blogging day'; yesterday was meant to be a blogging day but ended up being a 'hanging out with my daughters and playing FIFA, Crash Team Racing and Fallout' day instead. I regret nothing, especially when we met the dog in Fallout whom I haven't known for long but is clearly a good dog ;o) So yesterday's post becomes today's post instead. I'm a little bit late to the party (see the above paragraph) so I'm not going to go into great depth for this latest episode of 'The Rings of Power', everyone else has had a lot to say about it already. Nope, what you're getting here are quick thoughts and impressions (what little energy I have is needed elsewhere today, dammit). If you're after an in-depth recap of the episode, have a click Here . Otherwise, lets go... I'm running the risk of repeating myself a little too much but my main issue with...

Page Count: 20 Pages I didn’t realize this until the other but September isn’t just the month of my birthday… Nope. Presumably for alliterative purposes (but also to celebrate great stories), September is also the month where fans celebrate ‘Cimmerian September’ by either reading Howard’s original tales or the pastiche novels and comics that continue the tales of that most famous barbarian. Or both, you don’t have to read one or the other ;o) I thought I’d get involved this year so you can absolutely expect to see a little more Conan here before the month is out. L.Sprague De Camp and Lin Carter helped keep Conan’s tales alive, either by completing some of Howard’s unfinished tales or by filling in gaps, in the timeline, with stories entirely their own. Again, I’m no scholar of Robert E. Howard but his name is next to the title so I’m assuming that ‘The Bloodstained God’ was taken on and completed by De Camp. I found this tale in an old copy of ‘Conan of Cimmeria’; I’m not sure where e...

I had a bit of a day yesterday... Nothing bad or even out of the ordinary really, just one of those days where you feel like you're trying to squeeze twenty five hours worth of stuff into a twenty four hour day. You know what I mean, don't you? ;o) By the time I'd dropped my youngest daughter back with her Mum and her sister. I was pretty much done for the day. I still haven't quite decided on my next read so I thought I'd watch a few movies instead. And here's the post where I tell you all about them ;o) One surprisingly good movie, one that... wasn't bad and a 'creature feature' to round things off. 'Ghost Stories' (2017) Professor Phillip Goodman devotes his life to exposing phony psychics and fraudulent supernatural shenanigans. His skepticism soon gets put to the test when he receives news of three chilling and inexplicable cases - each of which seem to have a sinister connection to the professor's own life... If you're a regular...

Page Count: 393 Pages It feels like a lot longer than it actually has been (I’m blaming, well… everything) but… I hadn’t read any fantasy in a while and I wanted to do something about that sooner rather than later. Where better place to kick off then, than with the new book from Greg Keyes. I’ll always have a lot of time for his ‘Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone’ series (which may be due a re-read now) so the prospect of a brand new fantasy, in ‘The Wind the Sweeps the Stars’, had me pretty excited to get reading. A weekend of house sitting and a days commuting was all I needed to finish the book, which should tell you a fair bit. That would make for a short post here though so lets see if I can do better than that, shall we…? ALONE AGAINST AN EMPIRE... When Yash of Zeltah arrives in the fortress city of Honaq, she is greeted as a barbarian, a simple pawn. Her marriage to prince Chej has been arranged, they say, to avert war. Yet she knows the truth, for the armies already ravage the land....

A little departure from my normal fare but this is what happens when I have a lot of nostalgia, for the books I read as a much smaller Graeme, and a little disposable income. Sometimes you just have to go with it ;o) I was massively into the ‘Fighting Fantasy’ books during the eighties (and perhaps a little more of the nineties than I should have been) so it wasn’t too much of a leap to read anything else with a dragon on the front and a promise that I could decide how the story went. I can’t quite remember when I got my copy of ‘The Siege of the Dragonriders’, the smart money is on either a birthday or a Christmas, but it was a lot of fun to read; especially because you weren’t just stuck with one character (you could chose to be either the Wizard or the Warrior) and the gaming system was very simple. Seriously, no dice rolling, just flipping a coin or closing your eyes and seeing which colour you saw first. I could do that :o) So… I kept my copy for years until it fell victim to a ‘p...