Lord Samper's Library

Nope, it’s a not a ‘Conan’ book that no-one has ever heard of… I had a hospital appointment, yesterday afternoon, and followed it up with a trip to Forbidden Planet on the way home. It made sense ;o) They didn’t have exactly what I was looking for but that’s OK, I can always go back. In the meantime then, here’s a what I came home with; a small lesson in remembering to stay up to date with single issues… ‘Conan the Barbarian #30’ – Zub, Braithwaite, Rodriguez (Titan Comics/Heroic Signature) This one would have made a lot more sense if I had picked up #29 but, here I am; that’s on me, not the comic. What we have here then is Conan as seen through the eyes of an assassin on a mission to kill him; there’s just no context as to why etc. And that’s not the showstopper you’d think. It was very interesting to see Conan’s character (and the lands of Shem) unfold under the gaze of the Son of the Tooth and I could see this issue working very well as a starting point for new readers. It looks lik...

There is only war, of course there is. That’s what you get for starting a sentence like that… ;o) And to be honest, that was just what I needed yesterday. Roadworks outside my flat, until about half three in the morning, is one of the worse ways to start the day; feeling all nauseous from my chemo medication was a pretty shitty way to round the day off. Fingers crossed for a better day today! Anyway… I fancied some reading that would wake me up a little and a spot of Warhammer 40K is always good for that. I wasn’t in the place to take on a full length novel though so one browse through Amazon later, I had three short stories all lined up on the Kindle app, ready to go. Just some quick thoughts today, mainly because these are all particularly short stories (not that I’m moaning this time round, ‘quick reads’ were the order of the day). Lets take a look, shall we…? ‘The Tithe’ – Ben Counter (Black Library) Brother Scoiven of the Imperial Fists brings death to the foe in his primarch’s n...

  Page Count: 291 Pages Another day, another ‘Aliens Omnibus’… Well, half an ‘Aliens Omnibus’ ;o) It’s not quite how I saw this years reading going (although I did buy the books so I really should have seen it coming at some point) but I’m enjoying it nonetheless. That love of ‘sci-fi horror’ has never really left me and the xenomorphs do it so well. And if that wasn’t enough, it always fun to watch dysfunctional groups of Colonial Marines pour ridiculous amounts of bullets etc into the Aliens, reducing them to acid drenched chunks of… Well, whatever they’re made of. What are the Aliens made of? Anyone? Anyway… Yesterday was a ‘commuting day’ and that led me to go looking for a book that would wake me up, in the morning, but would also be something that I could relax with on the bus home. Sounded like just the right time to pick up an ‘Aliens’ tie-in novel… ;o) The Alien Queen is dead, the hive mind left to flounder… and on a world bereft of its leader, two strains of Alien divide ...

  Page Count: 206 Pages Regular visitors to the blog (and casual visitors too, this blog has been around for a little while now…) will know that this ‘Doctor Who’ fan loves the show even more when things suddenly veer into horror territory. It’s not ‘cosmic horror’ in the truest sense of the word but definitely a reminder of just how alien aliens can be when you’re discovering them for the first time. ‘Image of the Fendahl’ , ‘Full Circle’ and ‘The Curse of Fenric’ spring to mind. Anyway… It’s no surprise then that ‘The Impossible Planet’ and ‘The Satan Pit’ were two early favourites in the new series (although I say that, how old are those episodes now?) and when I realised that they were getting their own novelization? I settled down to wait, not for that long as it turned out ;o) Again, regular visitors will know that I’m always keen to settle down with one of the new ‘Doctor Who’ novelizations; books that are happy to expand on things rather than just relay what happened on t...

  Page Count: 230 Pages I normally open these posts with a little ramble about how a book came to my attention, this time though? The last couple of weeks have been a bit of a blur, what with one thing and another, and honestly, it’s like ‘Night Shoot’ just turned up on my doorstep, demanding to be read. Rationally, I know that I must have ordered it. I just can’t remember when or why. Anyway… I had some free time on my hands yesterday (finally!) and wanted something that I could just dive into and let the plot ‘happen at me’ (well, that was an awkward phrase but, you know what I mean). The blurb describes ‘Night Shoot’ as ‘a delirious homage to the slasher movies of the 1980s’ so I figured it could very well be the book I was looking for. And you know what? My eyebrows invariably raise when a blurb gets all cocky and full of itself but on this occasion, the blurb was telling the truth… A group of desperate student film makers break into Crawford Manor for an unauthorized night sho...

Well, not really ;o) This blog tends to do better when I talk about books, not so much when the focus is more on my having a moan. Lets just say that the last couple of days have been pretty hectic (with a fairly equal split between fun stuff and... not so fun) and my reading has hit a bit of a wall as a result. There's a small pile of books, all of which I've managed to get a few pages into but no further. You know the story... ;o) Well, today is looking like a quiet one so the plan is to do something about that small pile of books. I'm not going to finish them all but hopefully, I'll get a couple under my belt and go into this week with a few things to write about. Fingers crossed... Anyway, lets take a look at that TBR Pile, Right now, it's looking like 'The Satan Pit' and 'Night Shoot' will be what I sit down with today, possibly 'The Boys' Omnibus (Vol 1.) as well, lets see. I've got no other plans at the moment. The other books are ...

I'll be honest... I'm shattered and last night's episode of 'The Boys' hit pretty hard, for me anyway; no spoilers here but... Damn those final scenes were hard to watch, not all heroes have superpowers... :o( Off the back of that, I wasn't really up for writing a post, but didn't want an empty space here, so... 'Past Me' gave me a nudge and offered me the use of an old post from an older blog. I need a little break so I was happy to accept ;o) One of the things that I enjoy about this blog, in particular, is being able to highlight books that were great, back in the day, but have fallen off everyone's radar over the years. Genre fiction is always looking forward (and that's natural) but you're always guaranteed to find a few gems if you have one eye on the rear view mirror at the same time. And that's where 'Low Town' comes in, a book that I read about fifteen years ago but is still worth a look today. If you fancy paying a v...

  Page Count: 261 Pages When I picked up ‘The Complete Aliens Omnibus: Volume 1’ last week, the plan was to read the three books in between, well… All the other books that are waiting ‘patiently’ in the TBR pile. No urgency, just another way of adding a tiny bit of variety to my reading diet ;o) And now here I am, a few days later, having just finished off what I can only describe as an ‘Aliens Reading Frenzy’. What happened? Well, my posts on ‘Earth Hive’ and ‘Nightmare Asylum’ can speak for themselves but the bottom line is that fun was in short supply until I found it here. That’s what led me into ‘The Female War’, in record time, let me tell you about it… Ellen Ripley is back! Waking from a long journey in space with a mysterious hole in her memory, Ripley finds her way to the Gateway station and a meeting with Wilks and Billie. Ripley has the beginnings of a plan, a plan that might help humanity take the Earth back from the Aliens. Ripley also has a secret though, one that s...

  Page Count: 52 Pages It’s not just zombie movies that I’ll watch, regardless of quality… If a film, or book, starts with the words ‘Earth vs.’? I’ll be there for it. And now I’ve said that, I’m just going to have to read ‘Earth vs. the Nudist Camp Freaks’ and ‘Earth vs. the Star Mummy’ (the two other novellas in this series) as well. I wouldn’t want to make a liar out of myself (dammit). Anyway… One of my ‘daily blog visits’ is ‘Paperback Warrior’ and that’s where I first saw that 1950s Earth had a problem on its hands with a big ol’ horde of Lava Spiders . Well, I had to head to Pine Grove and check out the situation… Tonight’s special features takes place on a quiet Friday night in the small coastal town of Pine Grove. Strange lights appear over Shasta Island and an explosion rocks the beachfront. Fireballs rain down from the sky as lava bubbles from the hidden volcano, unleashing a nightmare of hellfire and blood on the town. Watch in horror as the Lava Spiders surge across ...

  Page Count: 271 Pages Well, yesterday wasn’t the ‘day of reading’ that I’d planned; more like a day of playing on my phone (with an ill-advised break for a scary movie that wasn’t scary at all) and trying to stay awake. It did get to a point though where I thought, ‘if I don’t read something now…’ and resolved to do something about that. The immediate TBR pile wasn’t particularly inspiring so in the end, I figured I’d go back to the ‘Aliens Omnibus’ and see what happened after Wilks and Billie escaped the Alien home world. ‘Earth Hive’ had its issues but there was enough there for me to want to keep reading . Turns out that it was a good choice of mine :o) ‘Nightmare Asylum’ was a big improvement on ‘Earth Hive’ and all of a sudden, I’m back in the groove again. Billie, Wilks and Bueller (well, half of him anyway…) have escaped the Alien home world, on board a pre-programmed robot ship, destination unknown. They will eventually make it back to Earth but not until they’ve spent so...

I really almost did... :o)  Reading has kind of stalled over the last few days (mostly work but I’ve also developed an annoying habit of falling asleep the second I turn my work laptop off…) I’ve got no plans for today so hopefully I’ll be able to do something about that, fingers crossed ;o) In the meantime? I’ve had better luck staying awake for movies over the last week (although I still managed to sleep through a good chunk of ‘Shin Godzilla’, dammit) so let me quickly tell you about some of those… ‘Rammbock: Berlin Undead’ (2010) For better or worse, I’ve never been what you’d call an ambitious man but I do have things that I want to do, one of those being to watch as many zombie movies as I possibly can. Not your ‘standard ambition’ but it gets me through the day ;o) Anyway… ‘Rammbock’ is a zombie movie that I seemed to keep finding in various ‘zombie movies you should watch’ YouTube videos but never managed to track down the film itself. That changed the other day when it su...

  Page Count: 277 Pages Sorry about the ‘blog silence’ yesterday… Blame it on a mixture of work and a ‘long lunch break’ involving a trip to my GP and then on to the hospital for more blood tests. Yay. It did give me a bit more free time, for reading, though so I’m not complaining too much. Work continues to be demanding so I was pretty glad to escape into a book. Anyway… I’ve had ‘The Complete Aliens Omnibus: Volume 1’ on my shelf for a couple of years now but have somehow never quite got round to picking it up; it’s a thick old book and I think that’s put me off a little. Until yesterday that is… Instead of taking on the whole book at once, I thought I’d tackle it ‘one book at a time’ instead and, here I am. ‘Earth Hive’ was up first and… They come in silence like death in the night. They are perfect killing machines. They are the Aliens and some people value them above all else. But the attempt to weaponize a creature of such tremendous power is a very dangerous game for the inh...

  Page Count: 126 Pages If you see an old ‘Doctor Who’ book featured here, the odds are that a copy of it came home from the library with me, when I was a lot younger, and now I’m trying to find my way back to a time when things were a little more care-free (even if I didn’t realise it at the time…) What? Work has been a nightmare recently and a ‘nostalgia hit’ makes everything a little easier to manage ;o) That was definitely the mood I was in yesterday, that’s why I settled down with a copy of ‘The Face of Evil’ and tried to put a little distance between me and everything else. And it worked, that’s the main thing. Setting the controls for Earth, the Doctor is surprised when the TARDIS lands in a primeval forest. Has the tracer gone wrong or has some impulse, deep in his unconscious mind, directed him to this alien planet? As he explores, the Doctor meets Leela, a warrior banished from the tribe of the Sevateem; through her, it gradually becomes apparent that the constant war bet...

Of course I prefer any 'Evil Dead' movie/show that has Ash in it, of course I do. I mean, who wouldn't? I do have a soft spot for the newer movies though, especially how they are slowly stepping outside the established continuity and starting to do their own thing. 'Evil Dead Burn' is looking pretty good, check it out... Well, a small part of my July just got booked up. How about you?

  Page Count: 165 Pages Well, that’s another Bank Holiday Weekend over and it will surprise absolutely no-one here when I tell you that the TBR pile, I made the other day, looks pretty much the same as it did. I had all the best intentions but as great as the weekend was, and it was, it didn’t leave me with much time for reading. Oh well, hopefully the rest of the week will be different. We’ll see… I did get a little bit of reading done though, all 165 pages of ‘Come Closer’; a book that I came across on Amazon, a few weeks ago, and eventually picked up for precisely nothing in the Greenwich Waterstones (thanks, ‘Waterstones Loyalty Card’!) Yesterday was very much a day for a ‘short read’ and while that normally means an old ‘Doctor Who’ book, this time round I fancied a little horror. And that’s where ‘Come Closer’ came in… There was no reason to assume anything out of the ordinary was going on. Strange noises in the apartment. Impulsive behaviour. Intense dreams. It wasn't li...

No blogging for me today... Yesterday was unexpectedly busy (very cool but... unexpectedly busy) and my youngest daughter is coming over later today. Again, very cool but I also want to take some time for myself, before I go back to work tomorrow and things kick off again. What's that? If I'm not blogging... Then what's all this? Fair question :o) Well, the short answer is that is that I'm pinching an old post, from an older blog, to sit here and look busy while I do other things (one of which may actually be reading some of the books that I posted about the other day...) A little 'Conan' for you this time, and a little reminder that there is a very clear line separating the 'Conan' works of REH from, well, everyone else. At least there is for me... You can find the original review over Here but I've changed very little, just tidied things up a bit. There has always been something about my commute that makes me want to escape into a genre novel, mo...

  Page Count: 112 Pages My eldest daughter had a friend over, yesterday afternoon, and that was my cue to take my youngest daughter into town for Frappucino’s and a spot of shopping, Really, it was meant to be about picking some bits and pieces up for my youngest but… There is a Waterstones bang in the middle of two places that we were headed to, I’d won some money on a scratch card and… There was a copy of ‘Predator Versus Spiderman’ on the shelf. I’ve always had a soft spot for the ‘Predator’ movies (the franchise is a hell of a lot more consistent that the ‘Alien’ series), even more so since I introduced them to my eldest. These days then, I’m a little more willing to give other media a go so, here we are… Marvel's greatest hero faces off against the galaxy's greatest hunter in Benjamin Percy's grittiest PREDATOR series yet! In PREDATOR VS. WOLVERINE, we saw a single Predator stalk the killing machine Wolverine. In PREDATOR VS. BLACK PANTHER, Yautja invaded Wakanda and n...

I love a Bank Holiday weekend, especially after I've just spent a fairly stressful three weeks in charge of my team at work... I know it's tempting fate to say this but... I'm really glad that's done and that my boss will be back in the office next week. Yep, I said it :o) This Bank Holiday weekend has come at just the right time then. And what does this Graeme do when he has a little extra time on his hands...? Yep, exactly right, I took a little time out last night, to pick a few books that I'd like to take a shot at. I owed it to myself ;o) Lets take a look, shall we? This time round, I'm going for quick reads balanced out by a book that is ideal for what I'm hoping is a Bank Holiday where I just camp out in the comfy chair, all day long (it might happen). And it's not the book that you think it is ;o) This TBR pile is a little 'Doctor Who' heavy but they're fun reads and a great way to feel like I'm making inroads into a much larger T...

What with one thing and another (work, mostly), this week caught up with me last night and made it clear that I'd be sleeping rather than actually reading anything. I couldn't say no really... I've got a three day weekend coming up so hopefully I can make up for that. In the meantime, you lucky folks get a trailer for the upcoming new 'Resident Evil' movie. I really enjoyed 'Weapons' (never saw 'Barbarian' though, should probably do something about that...) so I'm feeling optimistic for this one... It won't be in the cinema until September (which doesn't feel all that far away now, come to think of it) so hopefully there will be at least another trailer between now and then.