Pixie Skulls

Awesome Introduction to Biopunk

Revisado: 04-18-22

I'm temped to call this title quintessential Biopunk, but I'm hardly an expert on the genre so it feels a bit like telling stories right out of school to do so. Regardless this is a great listen and well worth the time and cost of admission. The stories are imaginative, engaging, and well preformed and they really paint a picture of the bizarre, frightening, and fantastic place the near future has become. Too that end I also really appreciated that while the stories certainly take place in a dystopia, the author avoided adding a gratuitous amount of bleakness to the setting which I find can often be a failing of the overall 'punk' genres. The only small complaint I have is that the final story felt a little out of place with others, and almost seemed like it should have been included in a different anthology (even though it took place in the same setting as the rest). Still this doesn't diminish the overall quality of the product and I encourage anyone even remotely interested in Biopunk to give it a try.

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The King is dead, long live the Queen

Revisado: 06-11-19

To be honest this has been my favorite book of this series since Book 3 and I’m thinking Mavericks is really the direction I want to see this series headed towards in the future. I feel like the original series has pretty much written itself into a corner and the rose of the Joe and Skippy dynamic has long since lost its bloom and withered into so much Beavis and Butthead type stupidity.

I like that Perkins can actually talk and interact with aliens (as oppose to just hiding from them) and I like that she doesn’t come across as a moron in 90% of the conversations she has with other people. There’s plenty of ‘space commando’ stuff in this (like any other book in this series), but I also felt like there is a lot more world building in terms of alien culture than we’ve seen in the past few book - both of which are the two greatest strengths of this series in my opinion.

The author’s sense of humor remains largely a miss for me and I wish he’d scale back the attempts of including romance and intimacy because I find his writing has the sex appeal of cold oatmeal in a styrofoam cup. Still none of this was enough to prevent me from enjoying the story as a whole and I’m excited about where the next book is going to lead.

Ultimately I think I’m done with Bishop’s pirates, but I plan keep going on with Perkins and the Mavericks.

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A great premises that didn’t quite deliver

Revisado: 10-23-18

I really like the idea behind this story: a “haunted forest” just appears out of nowhere and after the initial shock the people who happened to own the land it sprouted out of turn it into a tourist attraction without ever really understanding what it is or why it’s there. It has air of ‘magical realism’ where the incredible and fantastic is quickly accepted as reality and eventually considered mundane in a surreal kind of way. Unfortunately as the story progresses and the mystery of the forest is revealed that quality disappears with it and the plot becomes fairly generic and unremarkable. The only other thing this story has going for it is a considerable number of descriptions of monsters killing or at least trying to kill a lot of hapless victims - so if you're into that than this book might be for you.

One additional critique, which I normally wouldn’t make but it really stuck out to me here, is that I was very aware a man (or more accurately two men) wrote this story. Pretty much all the female characters are gratuitously sexualized by the male characters (Mark and Hannah being by far the most tedious example). The male characters never (or at least rarely) actually express these feelings but since most the story is told from the perspective of various male characters you get a ton of it through their inner monologue and after awhile it just started to wear on me. Even when a situation is entirely unsexy the potential sexual nature of the situation has to be pointed out. For example: ‘Normally Ben wouldn’t have minded Sally falling on top of him like that, but the bloody stump of her severed head sort of spoiled the moment.’ This isn’t actually from the story, but there is a lot of stuff like this. I don’t know if the writers were playing off of that whole “men think about sex every 7 seconds” thing/myth for authenticity or what, but I found this theme incredibly annoying and immersion breaking.

In terms of performance it was fine, the reader’s voice was good though occasionally a bit snarky in tone and didn’t do much to add additional horror to the overall story.

Ultimately if you are really into many different monsters killing people over and over again (Cabin in the Woods style) then this story might be for you, otherwise you’ll probably be disappointed.

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A good edition to my library

Revisado: 07-15-18

I've read/listened to two Datlow horror anthologies previously and I'm beginning to see a pattern. Each one has had a couple of stories I love, a couple I like, a few I hate and the rest are fairly middle of the road.

What makes this one my favorite of the three however is the reader. Fleet Cooper has got the goods, not to mention the range. Psycho magical murder hobo, snooty English scholarly aristocrat, Bostonian working-class single mother, 1930s era gangster tough guy - Cooper can do them all and he's never better than when he's in the realm of horror. His involvement in this project pushes it from a decent audiobook to a great one for me.

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esto le resultó útil a 2 personas