Rev. Zombie

Bummed Its Over

Revisado: 01-22-24

This was such a fun series. Listened to it twice and wish there was more

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Not For Everyone, But Perfect For What It Is

Revisado: 03-30-21

This second volume in Appelcline's Designers & Dragons gives us an in-depth and incredibly well-researched look at those companies that appeared during the Golden Age of the RPG Industry. Tabletop gamers who want a peek at what actually transpired at the time, why some games and companies failed, where they ended up, the people behind it, the lawsuits, the mismanagement, bad luck, and what trends steered the exploding 80's gaming market should pick this up. It's a must for any gamer who wants the history of the hobby.
I look forward to the release of the 3rd book. I only wish Audible listed this as a series. As of now, it appears like "The 70's" and "The 80's" are two separate books and not Books 1 and 2 of the Designers & Dragons Series.

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Firefly Without the Parts You Love

Revisado: 03-10-20

Do you love Firefly?
Have you ever wanted a whole book about Serenity’s lovable crew that relies on you already loving them rather than giving you a reason to?
Did you ever wonder what Firefly would be like without the witty banter that it was famous for?
Do you like endless references to the old show crammed in and awkwardly placed at every conceivable moment for 17 straight chapters, while simultaneously not adding to what you already know, almost like a clumsy best-of script with references to the show shoehorned in every 45 seconds?
Then boy oh boy, do I have the book for you!
I wanted to like this book. I really did. But it reads like clumsy fan-fiction that relies on the reader already loving the source materiel so that the novel doesn’t have to go through the minimal effort to engage the reader. There are massive info-dumps, interrupted by show references, and little else for the first half of the novel. After chapter 17, it begins to tell its own story and that was mostly a flashback of Mal when he was young, as if they had a short-story and figured out how to bloat it up to a full-sized novel, link it to the Firefly ‘Verse, and sell it to people who would be so blinded by nostalgia that they wouldn’t notice that it was a lazy cash-grab.

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Fun Story

Revisado: 03-08-18

Imagine Veronica Mars, meets Twin Peaks, and also make Veronica a shapeshiter (a weredeer to be precise) and you have a good idea of what I Was a Teenage Weredeer is about. Our heroine Jane Doe is stubborn, sincere, and intelligent. She's investigating a murder case in which her brother is the prime suspect. We have a lot of enemies, allies, and enemies that become allies.

There are a lot of deer puns in this book. I'm not a pun person, myself. Though neither is our hero, which does help. There is a self-awareness to the story because it's an ode to fiction that came before it. It's a little too heavy on the pop-culture references. Many of those references feel a bit too dated for our 18-year-old heroine. My suspension of disbelief can totally accept this town of shape-shifters, however the commanding knowledge that the two teenage leads posses of 80's/90's pop-culture was a bit too much. This being said, despite my dislike of puns and the double-helping of pop-culture, the novel sucked me right into it. This is a fun listen. And as much as I groaned at the deer puns (I had no idea there could be so many puns made about deer) I kept reading because its a damned entertaining story.

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A Fun Adventure

Revisado: 07-13-17

This is a dystopian near-future novel in a similar vein of 1984, V For Vendetta, or Equilibrium. It reminds me the most of Equilibrium (though there is no Gun-Fu). After religious extremists caused a several horrible tragedies, the new government has outlawed religion, and other emotional things. We are now in a strictly enforced world that is ruled by logic, reason, and fear.

Our hero, Rafael, is drafted into service by the government to help then root out a network of Believers who are smuggling religious artifacts. Rafael is not a classic hero. He's just a history professor and he isn't too keen on being forced into a dangerous situation.

The story moves along quickly after that, becoming an International chase full of riddles, history, and daring escapes. It was fun.

It's compared to Indiana Jones. I see it more of Orwell meets Dan Brown.

Some reviewers have found the idea of the American society turning its back on religion as unbelievable. I don't. It's Speculative Fiction, no more than any of the dystopian stories I already named - no more than The Man In High Castle shows an alternate present based off a common history. The 'how' we got to this isn't important. Pogach gives a little information on how this society came to be, but nothing more than necessary to understand that this is where we are now.

However, I believe that a logical and efficient society would have at least gone with the Metric System.

The Narator, Terry Self, was very good with the pacing and the voices. There were a couple moments he seemed to stumble and it wasn't edited out. Overall, he was extremely good.

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Cyberpunk meets Hitman

Revisado: 04-26-17

I've enjoyed several of C.T. Phipps' other stories, and Agent G: Infiltrator has been my favorite so-far. Here we follow G (just G) an elite assassin for hire much in the same vein as Agent 47 from the Hitman video game franchise(which I'm also a huge fan of). In order to become the perfect killer, G's memories have been wiped, giving him no loyalties to anyone outside his employer.

Phipps gives us a lot of action, double-crossing, and shootouts as we follow our hero across the world. G and the other assassin of his kind are enhanced with cybernetic upgrades, making them even more than human. Mix that with their moral blank-slate, compliments of the Agency's mind-wipe, and we have a cast of very lethal and superhuman killers. (As a huge Cyberpunk fan, I found this much to my liking.)

The ending for me was my favorite part. I enjoy a good twist.

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Delightfully Dark

Revisado: 04-14-17

Originally appearing in the Blackguards Anthology, The Long Kiss is a story about a man that is fleeing his past, a past which includes betrayal, murder, and a whole lot of gold. It's a short listen at 35 minutes, and is delightfully dark.

Macleod Andrew does a fantastic job performing this little tale.

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Rough Opening But Quickly Improves

Revisado: 11-18-16

Excellent addition to the MHI series.

The beginning was pretty rough, as the heroes attend a monster-hunting conference and MHI meets its competitors. One of the biggest annoyances I have with the series is the running sentiment that anyone that's not with MHI (either government or other companies) is either evil or painfully incompetent. That sentiment got cranked up to 11 as MHI butts heads with a rival company right out the gate. The over-macho chest-pounding really turned me off, but quickly that mood changed and the hero confessed it was his own personal bias (not really, since the rival characters have always been evil or incompetent) and Owen begins to warm up to many of the other hunters and most of their rivalries turn more toward friendly.

Convention setting aside, the plot quickly picks up as the heroes are thrust into a dangerous situation that requires the combined skills and experience of all the best hunters in the world. The action is wonderful. The characters continue to grow, and there are more than enough 1-liners for comedic moments. I plowed through the second half of the book at full-speed.

I give the first quarter of it a low 3-stars and the remaining 75% a high 4-stars. Averages out to a solid 4.

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So Close to Greatness

Revisado: 08-22-16

The story is wonderful. I loved the full cast, and the music is great. However the execution of transforming Joe Hill's story into an audio performance was poorly done. There are several times that there are looong cuts of silence. It might have only been a few seconds, but a few seconds of dead air means that listeners are wondering if something wen't wrong with their device. Any audio producer should know this, yet they continued doing it.

The biggest problem is that there are many many times that I, as the listener, had zero idea what was going on. This could have been fixed with adding a narrator telling you ("He grabs the gun") or having the characters state what they are doing (I grabbed the gun!), but an action scene that is just grunts and banging is not as clear as the producers might think. This story was updated and written to be used as an audio performance, but it's like they assumed I'd have the original graphic novel open in my hands like the read-along storybooks I had as a kid. But it wasn't supposed to be that way.

Overall I enjoyed it, but because of it's terrible execution I can't recommend it. I'd love to hear more full cast performances like these, but only if they make them more listener-friendly.

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Archer meets Hellboy

Revisado: 08-04-16

A mix between James Bond spy fiction and Hellboy, Derek Hawthorne is employed by a secret, international organization known as The House. The House's function is protect the world from all the monsters, renegade wizards, and whatever else goes bump in the night. Derek works in the Red Room, the division in charge of covert ops, assassination, and all the super-fun spy stuff.

The book is fairly light-hearted, Derek is more Sterling Archer than Bond. He's sarcastic and openly jokes about many of the more common tropes in both the Urban Fantasy and Spy-Fi genres. It's got a lot of humor, but also a lot of action which places it in a category that makes it difficult to drop into a specific genre. Mostly, it's a parody.

I recommend it, but don't come in expecting anything super-serious.

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