Skip to content

Tag: Daryl Gregory

Shortly Ever After: September

The accidental theme of this month’s Shortly Ever After is perspective, and the vastly different worlds we inhabit depending on where we’re standing. (I’m trying so hard not to say anything about These Troubled Times ™ because it’s beginning to seem like I have lost the ability to write a blog post without referencing These Troubled Times ™, but I swear to God I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to do it!) While I do love SFF for its mad ideas about what could be or might be someday, I also love its ability to make me…

Leave a Comment

Review: Spoonbenders, Daryl Gregory

Note: I received a copy of Spoonbenders from the publisher for review consideration. Frabjous day! Daryl Gregory — one of my favorite new(ish) SF authors — has a new book out! Spoonbenders follows the adventures of the Telemachuses, who long ago achieved fame and fortune as the Amazing Telemachus Family, performing feats of telepathy, clairvoyance, and telekinesis for secret CIA projects and live television audiences. But that is all twenty years in the past, and matriach Maureen Telemachus is long dead. Then Matty, the only son of human lie detector Irene Telemachus, discovers suddenly that he can astral project. The…

8 Comments

My most anticipated books of 2015 (so far)

I love publisher catalogs, y’all. I can’t describe how much I love them. It’s because I judge books by their covers, and publishers’ catalogs offer me the opportunity to do that on a grand scale. So here are a few of the books from 2015 for which I am excited, in no particular order. Flood of Fire, the last in Amitav Ghosh’s wonderful Ibis trilogy, appears in August, and then I can at last set about getting matching copies of all three. Sea of Poppies was one of my favorite books of its year, and while River of Smoke was…

31 Comments

Review: We Are All Completely Fine, Daryl Gregory

Note: I received a digital galley of We Are All Completely Fine from the publisher for review consideration. DARYL GREGORY AUTHOR DISCOVERY YEAR CONTINUES. Not only has Daryl Gregory produced another fine piece of science fiction — this one a novella — but I have at last discovered why I love his books so much. It’s cause his wife is a psychologist! (He thanks her in the acknowledgements.) No wonder Gregory wrote about crazy people so brilliantly in Afterparty. No wonder he is always writing about confronting impossible, insane situations with the only available tools (science, therapy) and knowing all…

19 Comments

Review: Afterparty, Daryl Gregory

Note: I received a copy of Afterparty from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. Not to be repetitive, but I’m going to go ahead and start this review the same way I’ve started all my Daryl Gregory reviews this year: I am so excited about Daryl Gregory. There are writers in this world I love better and will reread oftener, but I am excited about Daryl Gregory because he has such good ideas. He has such good ideas that I enjoyed a zombie novel. He has such good ideas that I annoyed my relatives by forcing them to…

17 Comments

Review: The Devil’s Alphabet, Daryl Gregory

As mentioned in this space a few weeks ago, I was more excited by the first couple of chapters of Pandemonium than I have been by the first few chapters of any book I’ve read in a while. Naturally, I was excited to check out more of Gregory’s work. Like Pandemonium, The Devil’s Alphabet drew me in with its premise, but didn’t quite succeed in bringing the plot home. Okay. Here’s the premise. Bear with me for a bit. When Paxton was a kid, his town was hit with what’s now known as Transcription Divergence Syndrome, which killed some of…

11 Comments

Pandemonium, Daryl Gregory

Am I just reading a lot of good speculative fiction lately, or is speculative fiction being extra awesome recently? The beginning: Pandemonium has a killer premise in a lot of ways. First, the basic premise baldly stated — a world exactly like ours except that starting in the 1940s/1950s, random acts of demonic possession started happening — is awesome. Second, the particulars of the premise — there are only about 100 known demons, who possess people for brief periods of time (a few minutes to a few days, usually), act out fairly consistent scenes, and then jump to another victim…

5 Comments