nigellicus's reviews
1566 reviews

The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler

Go to review page

adventurous dark emotional tense

5.0

If elephants never forget, it turns out mammoths really hold onto their grudges.

American Elsewhere by Robert Jackson Bennett

Go to review page

adventurous dark mysterious tense

5.0

What if the gods were one of us?

The Farthest Shore by Ursula K. Le Guin

Go to review page

adventurous dark emotional mysterious tense

5.0

The Earthsea Trilogy (before it became the Earthsea Cycle) cemented its reputation and its literary standing with this fraught and eerie quest in search of a man who has returned from death and therefore destroyed all meaning in life magic is draining from the world, but not just magic; all craft and drive, ambition and openness. Archmage Ged and a young prince Arren voyage across the archipelago to find a place from which there is no returning.
If the trilogy has been about anything, it has been about growth to maturity, of mastering oneself and the nature of responsibility. The Farthest Shore is a return of the king narrative, ultimately, where the greatest good that can happen to Earthsea is for a king to assume the throne. I suspect we're in allegorical territory here, with Earthsea's fairy tale roots on show, where a person can only truly be said to rule oneself when one has confronted death and accepted it and found greater joy and meaning in life having done so. Or maybe LeGuin's a monarchist.
I suppose on reflection that this makes it seem worthy and dry, a heavy spiritual message for a piece of children's fantasy, rest assured this is a beautifully written, keenly observed, wise, harrowing, terrifying and ultimately quietly uplifting book. It has dragons, too.

Not a Speck of Light: Stories by Laird Barron

Go to review page

challenging dark mysterious tense

5.0

Get comsic, get grim, get weird, get a nice big dog and head out into the wild wastes of Alaska to find the strange and terrible horrors waiting for you there, or maybe just poke your head into the attic, or drop by at a freind's party, terrible things are uncoiling everywhere, including inside the husk of blood and meat you call yourself. Laird barron nearly died to bring you these messages, the least you could do is devour it until it begins to devour you.

The Amateur by Robert Littell

Go to review page

adventurous dark tense

5.0

When the wife of a CIA cryptanalyst is murdered in a terrorist attack and his superiors rule out going after the culprits, he decides to blackmail them into training him and sending him across the Czech border so he can do it himself. No sooner is he across than he finds himself being hunted by the Russians and the CIA. It's a very eighties cynical-about-the-Cold-War thriller, though some of his others are a LOT darker. Still, there are the usual twists and turns and betrayals, though I can't decide if it was clever or climsy for a character to remark, reeling off various methods of assasination, that you could scare someone to death with an x-ray machine, which our protagonist later proceeds to do. The protagonist himself is oddly unlikeable, even in his grief, and I'm almost certain it's intentional. There's a new film adaptation coming, and I'm curious as to how they'll update it.

King Nyx by Kirsten Bakis

Go to review page

adventurous dark emotional mysterious tense

5.0

Anna Fort and her husband Charles, he of Forteana fame, are invited to a rich man's island where Charles is to spend the summer wrting his book. Finding themselves qurantined with another married couple before being allowed to stay in the house, they try to make the best of it. Three girls have gone missing and there are lights in the woods. Anna is haunted by memories of a long-gone friend as well as her own seemingly anomalous encounter with a rain of blood, and revisited by the voice of her childhood toy crow, King Nyx. Something is very wrong on the island, and it may be connected to Anna's own past in ways that should be impossible.

A subtle, intriguing thriller about women, and the men who take advantage of them to exercise their own brilliance.

The Burning Girls by C.J. Tudor

Go to review page

adventurous dark tense

5.0

Vicars and murder in, well, somewhere in England, I guess?

The Gathering by C.J. Tudor

Go to review page

adventurous dark tense

5.0

Vampires and murder in Alaska.

Zombieslayer by Nathan Long

Go to review page