Review 2 of L.H. Maynard's and M.P.N. Sims's Black Cathedral

-

What do you get if you throw a secret government ghost-hunting organisation, psychic powers, ley lines, a maverick investigator who hates his boss, sinister multinational corporations, satanic cults, a secret Vatican order and a remote, deserted Scottish island into a pot and stir.

Well by rights it should be an ungodly mess, a disjointed novel crammed to overflowing with so many overused dark fiction stereotypes you wonder how they managed to close the book's covers. It almost reads like a season trailer for the X-Files.

Somehow though Maynard and Sims have managed to make all these pieces fit together into a cohesive whole. Not perfect by any means but it is entertaining. The characters are engaging; the plot is well paced; the organisation (Department 18) has sufficient promise to sustain the promised series and the cult at the crux of the plot is original enough to keep your interest. Not a bad start - let's see where book two goes.

Book Details

ISBN: 08439-6199-6

Page Count: 287

Price: $7.99

Format: Paperback

Release: January 2009

Publisher: Leisure Books (Dorchester Publishing)

Webpage:

http://www.dorchesterpub.com/Dorch/productdetail.cfm?product_ID=2272&L1=1

　

　

　

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review of Ray Garton - Bestial

-
In horror movie-land sequels are pretty much a par for the course. You make a good horror film, it seems it only makes sense to go back and milk the idea a second time. In the world of horror books (note - not dark fantasy or paranormal romance, I mean HORROR) this has been less common. I'm not saying they don't exist - Graham Masterton's Manitou and James Herbert's Rats both started series - and sure you get books set in a repeated environs - take Gary Braunbeck's Cedar Hill short stories and novels, and Stephen King's version of Maine. But straight sequels, picking up the action from the end of the prior book or soon after, haven't filled the shelves in bookstores. I guess part of the reason for this is the rather final end that most horror books have. Zombies are destroyed, vampires staked, demons exorcised, witches burned etc, etc. Okay, Dracula can be resurrected over and over but mostly you get to the end and that's it. Recently though this seems ...
Read more

Review of Bill Bryson - Shakespeare: The World as a Stage

-
Although best known for his travel books this is far from Bryson's first venture into other fields. He has written the obligatory (for a writer) book of personal memoirs ("The Life and Time of the Thunderbolt Kid"), a book or two on the English language ("Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words") and even one on the sum total of human knowledge ("A Short History of Nearly Everything"). And now he has turned his hand to biography with this book on the greatest of all authors. This feels remarkably well researched - despite being such a short book he lists three and a half pages of selected bibliography. This amount of available research material does not mean, however, that much is actually known about Shakespeare life - far from it. Bryson even makes fun of this fact throughout the book. The book explains the few known facts of Shakespeare's life and how they are known - his birth (or rather his baptism, the exact date of his birth being infe...
Read more

19 Days - some boasts, some general

-
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...
Read more