Lord Samper's Library

  Page Count: 326 Pages It feels like a while since I last had an ‘Aliens’ post here (‘Aliens: Genocide’, back in May , just in case you were wondering…) but I have been pecking away at ‘Alien Harvest’, a page here and then a few pages here. And that should be a little bit of a red flag right there. The four preceding ‘Aliens’ novels (or, one and a half omnibuses) were all very readable and, ultimately, a lot of fun despite a few misgivings here and there. ‘Alien Harvest’ though…? Honestly, it has taken me weeks to get through and if it wasn’t for my generally enjoying the franchise (and being an awkward middle-aged chap who sometimes, just won’t let a book beat him…), I’d have DNF’d this book and moved on without a second thought. I didn’t though (because I’m awkward and needed the win) and here I am, trying to make a little sense of how I feel about ‘Alien Harvest’. Lets see how I do… Royal jelly, the most illicit of Alien by-products, is keeping Dr, Stan Myakovsky alive. A once ...

  Page Count: 138 Pages ‘The bones were still warm; but they were picked clean. They had even eaten their own dead.’ This spine-chilling collection from Bram Stoker showcases five haunting tales, including the newly discovered ‘Gibbet Hill’. From ‘Dracula’s Guest’, thought to be the original excised opening of Dracula itself, to the sinister ‘The Judge’s House’, each gripping story will leave you breathless, perhaps afraid to turn out the lights. Dare you explore the darkness? Like I said yesterday, I came across ‘The Burial of the Rats’ (in Waterstones) and had the exact amount of change on me. That was all it took :o) A little bit impulsive of me but that’s half the fun of spending time in bookshops. And again, other than ‘Dracula’, I’d never read anything else of Stoker’s so it felt like a good time to do something about that. Well, that’s exactly what I did, and… I’ll be honest, none of the stories left me particularly breathless and when I went to bed last night, I still turne...

Apologies for the blogging silence over the last couple of days... In the end, it just got so hot that I had to focus my energy on getting work done and just park the blog for a little bit. When I wasn't working, I was either taking a nap or watching the 'Chucky' TV show (better than I thought it would be); once I'm done with the third season, I'll see about getting a post up here ;o) And then it got to yesterday afternoon and I realised that I'd pretty much been stuck in the house for a couple of days (it's hot inside and out but 'inside' is a lot more comfortable). Greenwich is only down the road from mine so I figured I'd pop out and find a couple of bookshops with decent air-conditioning, or a big ol' fan up a corner. Yep, I bought books... I'd try and come up with a decent (and humorous) excuse but it is far too hot for that as well. It was the least I could do... ;o) Just a short one today as, well... You can see the photo ;o) '...

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that while it's never too cold to curl up with a good book (or I'm assuming, a bad one), it can definitely be too warm. Well, we're in the middle of another heat-wave over here and yep, I've got very little reading under my belt this week. I mean, I have managed a couple of books but you should see the pile of books where I've either read a few pages or picked the book up, only to put it straight back down again. Oh well, there's always next week etc ;o) So, what have I been doing in the meantime? I've been watching movies of course ;o) Nothing too demanding (no surprise there...), just good fun to watch, that's all I'm good for at the moment. Lets take a quick look at them then... 'Slither' (2006) Something falls out of the sky and crashes in the woods outside Wheelsy, South Carolina; local resident Grant Grant finds it but it also finds him... Soon, local pets are going missing and then, the residents of Wheelsy...

  Page Count: 256 Pages Long ago, there lived a Graeme who was having a pretty rough time and bought loads of comic books to cheer himself up. Some tough lessons, about the transient nature of money, followed but the comic books stuck around for a little longer so, things (kind of) balanced out ;o) One of those comic books was the collected ‘Old Man Logan’ and it was an awesome read (yes, I was that Graeme, in case you hadn’t worked it out). Thanks to the aforementioned transient nature of money, and the need for more, I had to get rid of my old copy but a couple of weeks ago, I saw another copy for sale and figured that it was time to pay ‘Old Man Logan’ another visit. When eBay is full of overpriced second hand copies, it’s nice to see Marvel do the decent thing and publish a new edition. Or, more likely, see an opportunity to make more money. Either way, I have a new book so I’m happy :o) A future world savaged and sundered by super villains, the United States ain’t what it used...

  Page Count: 242 Pages A ‘Did Not Finish’ is something that you hope you will never meet but the law of averages makes it pretty much inevitable that you will. The thing is though, the tricky little beasts are brilliant at disguising themselves as regular books… You never see the ambush coming until it’s too late for you to do anything about it. Before you even really know what’s happened, the cool looking book, that you thought you’d try, turned out to be a ‘Did Not Finish’ and you’re left looking for another book to read instead. Oh well, not the worst problem to have but infuriating at the same time, especially when you’ve had a rough day and fancied a quiet read. All of which is a slightly long-winded way of saying that I never thought I’d see the day where a book by Stephen Graham Jones ended up being a ‘Did Not Finish’ in its most devilish disguise yet. But here we are :o) The good news though, is that I think that it was more about me than any fault in the book itself. Some...

  Page Count: 238 Pages It has been an absolute age since I last read the ‘Dark Tower’ books (I was at least a couple of years away from my eldest daughter being born) so, seeing as none of the other books in the TBR pile were working for me, I figured it was about time I did something about that. I’m not setting myself any ‘reading goals’ or anything like that; I’m struggling with work deadlines (as it is) and I want this to be fun, not a chore. I’m just going to read along until Roland makes it to the top of the Dark Tower, even though I know what he finds once he gets there. Considering I picked up ‘The Gunslinger’ on Saturday and finished it the same day, well… It might not take that long to polish off the rest of the series. We shall see. Anyway… Roland of Gilead, the Last Gunslinger, is a haunting figure. A loner, on a spellbinding journey into good and evil, in a desolate world which frighteningly mirrors our own. In his first step towards the powerful and mysterious Dark To...

Today's post is brought to you by 'Tiny Apocalypse', shown here (for context) with his compatriots 'Slim Apocalypse' and, erm... 'Slightly Dusty Apocalypse'... 'Slightly Dusty' will have a name-change very soon :o) 'Tiny' and 'Slim' (who actually has extendable legs, which is awesome) came home with me after yesterday's visit to the Hilly Fields Fair in Lewisham. I love the Fair, partly because they have a petting zoo but mostly because they have loads of stalls, that sell all sorts of stuff, and I'm a big fan of browsing. My daughter isn't as big a fan but she's only young, she'll learn ;o) There were a couple of book stalls and while there wasn't a lot there for the likes of me, I did pick up a couple of books. And because it's me, I also picked up another book on the way home ;o) Lets take a quick look... I did read 'The Wounded Land' , way back in the day, (even then, I had a habit of reading se...

  Page Count: 159 Pages Remember the really cool TBR pile that I made the other day …? Well, the plan is still to read them all but this week has been a tough one (insert usual stresses here) and after polishing off ‘Conan and the Living Plague’ , nothing else from the pile grabbed me and demanded to be read. It happens, I’m hoping that the weekend will be a little kinder and let me choose something. Anyway… In the meantime, it wasn’t like I was just going to read nothing at all ;o) And there is a small pile of unread ‘Doctor Who’ books for this kind of situation… I picked up ‘The Invasion’ a few weeks ago and so it was at the top of that pile, waiting to be read. And that’s exactly what I did. ‘The Invasion’ didn’t exactly make it easy for me but still ended up being a decent way to put a little space between me and the day I’d just had… Materialising in outer space, the TARDIS is immediately targetted by a missile fired from the dark side of the moon. Back on Earth, the newly for...

  It was a lovely ‘late spring/early summer’ (I honestly don’t know when one ends and the other begins…) kind of evening, last night, so you can guess what I did after I’d dropped my daughter off with their Mum… The title, of the post, kind of gives the game away but still, give yourself a bonus point if your first thought was, ‘I bet he went straight home and watched the first two Hellraiser movies’. Because that’s exactly what I did ;o) I’m going through one of those phases where whatever book I pick up, it doesn’t work for me and I have to move onto something else (which kind of puts paid to that TBR Pile I put together the other day…) I know what I’m like, and I know what I like, so it’s not a case of every single book in the flat suddenly becoming a crap read. This is a reaction to work stress, mental stress and a couple of other stresses that I won’t mention here (all sprinkled with a little ADHD). I can’t concentrate on a book so on went the telly for a little ‘Hellraiser’, ...

  Page Count: 352 Pages Just a quick one today, mostly because I’m shattered already (and today is going to be a busy one) but also because I’m 99% certain that I’m the last person to have read ‘Preacher’ and I don’t think I’m going to say anything that people don’t already know. Having said that though, I hadn’t read any ‘Preacher’, until the other day, and this blog helps me keep track of what I’ve read (amongst other things) so… Here we are. The other week, I had a rather nice scratch card win and there was a copy of ‘Preacher: Book One’ on the shelf in Waterstones. I’m not a hundred percent sure what happened next but all of a sudden, I was outside the shop and there was a copy of ‘Preacher: Book One’ in my bag. Funny how that seems to happen… It took me a while to get round to actually reading it but read it I did and… Merging with a bizarre spiritual force called Genesis, Texan Preacher Jesse Custer becomes completely disillusioned with the beliefs that he had dedicated his ...

  Page Count: 250 Pages After finishing ‘Conan And The Emerald Lotus’ a couple of weeks ago, I wasn’t in a mad rush to jump straight into ‘Conan And The Living Plague’. Nothing against ‘The Emerald Lotus’ but… Oh, just click Here and read my post if you haven’t already ;o) At the same time though, I can’t seem to leave a book unfinished at the moment and both of these books happen to be in the ‘City Of The Dead’ omnibus so… Here we are. Yesterday was a long one, what with one thing and another (and then another…) so after I’d turned my laptop off, I sat down and started reading. And… A Shemite wizard seeks to create a potion to use as a lethal weapon. Instead, he unwittingly unleashes a hideous monster on the city of Dulcine. Hired to loot the city of its treasures, Conan and his mercenary companions find themselves trapped in the depths of the city’s keep. To escape, they must defeat the creature and its plague wracked undead followers, then face otherworldly horrors beyond morta...

This weekend didn’t involve much reading at all… It did involve a picnic, flying a kite, watching ‘Superstore’ (again), getting beaten at Uno (again, again and again...) and falling asleep when I really should have stayed awake. Reading though, not so much. That’s just the way it goes sometimes, I’ll just have to try harder this week ;o) It’s me doing the talking though so there was a little reading that happened around the edges of all the other stuff. And it absolutely won’t surprise you, in the least, to hear that is was all about ‘Conan’, ‘Event Horizon’ and a little Warhammer 40K to round things off. They were all quick reads so it’s very much a ‘quick thoughts’ kind of post today, hope you don’t mind… ‘Event Horizon: Inferno’ #2 – Ward, Carey, Honchar (ID Dark) It feels like an absolute age since I picked up #1 (it has only been a few weeks but damn, the time hasn’t exactly flown…) so I tried #2, promptly went back for a re-read of #1 and then tackled #2 again. It all made a li...

So, 'Walking Dead Night' didn't happen last night, and I was at a bit of a loose end so you can guess what happened next... An evening spent browsing my bookshelves and making a little TBR Pile, that's what happened next :o) Reading that last sentence back does leave me feeling like I should question where my life has taken me (it certainly didn't take me out last night...) but on the other hand, I love my bookshelves :o) Anyway... The occasional 'TBR Post' helps me stick with what I'm reading (rather than just reading a few pages of something and getting distracted by something else) so, lets take a look at how I spent my Friday night... Here's what I'm working my way through at the moment, you'll more than likely see posts pop up next week. 'Conan and the Living Plague' looks like it could be a bit of an improvement on 'The Emerald Lotus' and 'Alien Harvest' is... Another 'heist' story. I'm ok with that...

The last few weeks have actually been better, for reading, than I thought. Go me :o) Scroll back and you’ll see that I’ve managed to get a few books, and short stories etc, under my belt. What I haven’t done though, is mention the comic books that I’ve also read in that time. This post will be where I remedy that ;o) Just some quick thoughts today though. I’ve got a bit of a day to get through and I need to save a little energy for ‘Walking Dead Night’ with my eldest daughter (seriously, the chemotherapy has me falling asleep at the drop of a hat, don’t want to do that tonight!) Also, a couple of these books didn’t exactly leave me with a lot to say about them, see if you can guess which ones they are… ‘Everything Dead & Dying’ – Brombal, Phillips, Martin, Bidikar (Image) Page Count: 176 Pages Jack Chandler is the sole survivor of the zombie apocalypse in his rural farming community, but rather than eliminate them, he has chosen to continue living alongside the undead ― including t...

  Page Count: 126 Pages If you were to look up the word ‘prolific’ in the dictionary, there would be a picture of Adrian Tchaikovsky next to it, presumably of him writing a book. Now, that may not be quite true (although it has been a while since I looked up the word ‘prolific’ in the dictionary…) but there’s no doubt that Tchaikovsky is one of the harder working genre authors at the moment. His output is not to be sniffed at :o) It was a bit of a treat then to see Tchaikovsky carve out his own little spot in the Warhammer 40K universe but, as a fantasy fan first and foremost, it was even more of a treat to see him finally set foot in the Mortal Realms. Especially as I’ve always seen him as an author who is more than willing to deep dive into a Race/Species and really look at what makes them tick. And there isn’t that much to work with when it comes to Ogors, is there…? It took me a little while to get round to it (no surprises there…) but I finally read ‘On the Shoulders of Gian...

Page Count: 178 Pages My reading continues to take me down very familiar paths (short ones) and you know what…? That suits me just fine ;o) It’s not a bad life but there is rather a lot of it going on right now and as someone who (mostly) likes everything to be in the correct place… Lets just say that there’s a lot of ‘filing’ that’s outstanding ;o) Oh well, just a few days until the weekend. When I get a chance to escape into a book then, time is at a premium so I’m looking for reads that I know I’ll enjoy. I’m looking to recharge, not waste more energy ;o) A little ‘Doctor Who’ is usually a safe bet then and when I saw ‘The Crimson Horror’ on my favourite Greenwich Market book stall, I picked it up with some comfort reading in mind. As it turned out, ‘The Crimson Horror’ wasn’t a bad way to spend an evening, just not for the reasons that I’d been anticipating… ‘We must get to the bottom of this dark and queer business, no matter what the cost!’ Something ghastly is afoot in Victori...

  Page Count: 220 Pages I spent a large chunk of yesterday afternoon at the hospital (nothing urgent, just a regular appointment for blood tests and so on) so of course I made sure that I had a book in my bag; for the queue in the pharmacy if nothing else ;o) And when I’m stuck in a long, and seemingly never ending queue, the best book to have in your bag (in my bag anyway…) is a ‘Warhammer 40K’ book. Your mileage will undoubtedly vary but a large slice of ‘all out warfare’ will always make the wait in a line a little easier; especially when the pharmacy forget to put your number up on the screen and it turns out your medication was waiting on the side the whole time… Sorry, had to get that off my chest. I’ve been enjoying William Crowe’s ‘Veterans of the Fall’ collection (check out my reviews of ‘Tattershield’ and ‘Tatters of Hope’), and I figured I wouldn’t be in the hospital that long, so I thought I’d take the chance to read the final novella and finish off the book. Given how ...

  As I’ve mentioned previously, the plan was to have a post here for each of the novellas from Ronald Malfi’s ‘Ghostwritten’ collection. I started off well with ‘The Skin of Her Teeth’ and was pretty pleased when I kept things going with ‘The Dark Brothers’ Last Ride’ (last week was tough, the blog was lucky to get any posts at all…) And while things continued in that manner, over the weekend, when I read ‘This Book Belongs to Olo’; my reading plans ended up hitting a bump. I should have seen it coming really… I finished ‘This Book Belongs to Olo’ and just kept going, I didn’t want to wait for another week ;o) That should tell you all you need to know about my experience with ‘Ghostwritten’ but that would make for a very short post here so I’ll tell you about those final two novellas in a minute. As far as the collection, as a whole, goes, I would highly recommend you give ‘Ghostwritten’ a go if you haven’t already. And if you have, well… read it again. I will be doing just that ...