Edmund Lester

My review of Stefan Petrucha's Blood Prophecy is now live at New Myths - go check it out http://www.newmyths.com/

Anyone of a certain age will have grown up watching programmes like the Six Million Dollar Man, Knight Rider and of course, the A-Team. They are cherished childhood memories. The problem is whenever Hollywood decides to revisit one of your icons and update it a feeling of dread grows within you. It did for me when I heard there was a new A-Team coming. He backstory is updated, with the team’s framing taking place in the Iraq War rather than Vietnam. They are imprisoned separately in various security prisons, and in the case of Murdock a high security mental health unit. That is until they are broken out of prison to undertake a covert operation to… To tell you the truth the plot is about the least important part of this movie. If you’re like me, remembering your 80s childhood self the things that are important are the characters, the silly, over-the-top, gung-ho actions and the implausible gadget-building. And they are all here. Liam Neeson is excellent as Hannibal Smith, hamming it up...

Monster Dionysus (great name) hunts demons and other mythical or paranormal creatures for living. He works freelance for the Cryptobiological Containment and Rescue Services. He has a succubus girlfriend prone to mad jealous rages, a trans-dimensional being in the form of a cut-out paper gnome. He works his magic using runes written on post-it notes and today he is blue. At least blue means he’s invulnerable – useful when fighting yetis. Judy Hines is a normal, and works in an all-night convenience store, the Food Plus Mart, where Yetis have decided to raid the ice cream. Unlike her co-workers, she doesn’t cower in a corner hoping they go away. She calls Animal Control Services – a call that gets re-routed when she utters the word “yeti”, resulting in Monster entering her life. Monster arrives, and with help from Judy (and his fortuitous invincibility) the yetis are soon captured or killed. And so, despite the loss of her place of employment Judy’s life should return to normal, the mem...

Have a new bunch of film reviews under consideration for Murky Depths. Films in questions are - Saw: The Final Chapter (yeah I know a little late) - Alien vs Ninja - Prowl Will try to get some more film watching in this weekend so I can keep up the pace... ..recovery is going well I think

New Myths have accepted a review from me - for Stefan Petucha's Blood Prophesy. And turned down the review for A. Lee Martinez's Monster. 50% is an acceptance rate I'll take. And I'll post the Martinez review on here soon. Oh and I've sent in another 3 articles to them - fingers crossed.

Just found out another six short film reviews of mine will be appearing on the Murky Depths website soon. These will be for - The Bleeding Burke & Hare Devil's Playground Husk Let Me In Little Big Soldier You don't have to wait to visit them, go check out their site anyway - http://www.murkydepths.com/

Okay, if you read this blog (hey, someone might) you may hvae noticed a distinct lack of any activity whatsoever in recent times. Sorry! I'm afraid I've been a little unwell of late and really haven't been in the mood to type in blog entries - or to do much of anything to be totally honest. I finally gave in to the fact I was feeling like crap and went to see someone about it. Result is I was diagnosed with severe depressive disorder - clinical depression in old money. It's fun let me tell you. (Yes, I'm lying) So I was put on pills to alleviate the symptoms. First citalopram and then fluoxetine. Neither of which seemed to do me much positive good and both of which came with a whole host of side effects that made me feel crappier. I'm now off meds and trying to deal with things (unless doc advises I go on other meds - we'll see). I'm hoping to find enough strength to start getting my life back - and hopefully developing some new coping strategies for the...

Long ago mankind was constantly warring against Demonkind. Then mankind started inventing things, thing that gave them a definite advantage over the vampires, demons, werewolves, ghouls and other paranormal creatures. Rather than just wait for the inevitable, the demons decided running away was better than being dead and so left the dimension, setting up Nekropolis, a vast artificial realm ruled over by the Darklords. Matt Richter is a cop from Cleveland, or rather he was. Two years prior to the start of this tale Matt had followed a suspect through a portal and ended up in Nekropolis surrounded by all the monsters he could ever have imagined. Not long afterwards he ended up dead. Still around, but dead - in short a zombie, although self-willed and with all of his cop instincts intact. Devona Kanti is a vampire, daughter of a Darklord and keeper of his collection. One of the items, the Dawnstone, in the collection is missing, a powerful artefact that could kill her father. Devona hi...

A while ago I began posting reviews of books that had, for one reason or another, never been sold. It seemed to go well, I gained a couple of blog followers and got generally good comments. Well the time I feel has come to revisit this idea in a slightly changd format. I was lucky enough to encounter a horror/dark fiction ezine called nossa morte when it launched in 2007. I sold to their very first issue. In fact I sold to every single issue they did - at least one review in each with three in one issue. They are defunct sadly - been that way for more than a year now and the site is no longer on the net. So I thought I should recycle the reviews I wrote for them and post them here. Tonight I will (shortly) be posting the review for Tim Waggoner's Nekropolis, a sublimely brilliant comic dark fantasy.

Okay, it's been a while since my last post. I could claim one excuse or another for not posting to this blog more often. And in reality the reasons I would give are not just excuses but true. I mentioned in an earlier post my mother dying over Christmas. This has left a lot of processing - sorting out her house, funerals, cancelling paper deliveries, chaning utilities etc. And then there's the emptying of her house... On top of all this there is the flu that has been plaguing my life since Christmas Day, one week of feeling really ill then lurking in the background with occasional ickiness repeats. And then there's the fact I've been trying to concentrate on writing a novel, which isn't going too badly - up to 14,500 words and an aim to get over 80,000 by the end of March - yeah I know it's tight but I need to set deadlines so I will get on with it. But some things have been happening I wanted to post. Firstly there's some news on my reviews being released/p...

After putting up with me and my writing attempts over the last four years my wife wrote a short story (to be fair she has planned out a novel and written the first few chapters but this is her first short). Anyway, it surprised me by being a little surreal. It was good though, so I submitted it to Eschatology Journal for her - the market that accepted my short story Chicken last week. And today they accepted it. So on the 12th of May this year her story, entitled "The Dance" willl be published on their site. Wow, eh. I feel really chuffed, I have to say Anyway if you want to go check their site out, obviously without the story live yet but still well worth a visit, here's the link - http://eschatologyjournal.org/ Oh, and her pen name is Carey Lester. I'm freaked and very chuffed. I may have said that before

My story Chicken will be posted to Eschatology on April 6th

Just received the email that my short story Chicken (1000 words) will be appearing in online zine Eschatology Journal this spring. More details to follow In the meantime, here's the web address - http://eschatologyjournal.org/

It's been a while since my last blog. Not far off two months. I've been twittering a bit - easier to do as the iPhone lives in my pocket 24-7 and I've written a review or two (ok, maybe 20) but in truth my time on this PC has been limited. And the reason has been my mother. At the end of October she was taken into hospital after a fall and diagnosed with an infection (which had caused the dizziness that meant she fell). Well we thought that that was all but it was soon clear that her faculties were very impaired. She didn't recover them when the fever was cured and she was diagnosed with advanced Alzheimer's. They tell me that the infection increased the speed of onset - I'm not a doctor but I trust they know what they're doing. So we set about loooking for nursing care for her and visited a number of homes that could provide the level of care she needed. We even thought we'd found one - out by King's Lynn - and were going to visit it this week to c...