Threefer

 A while back, I bought a 3 in one volume of James Herbert novels for the last novel included, one that was advertised in a pulp paperback I read as a kid. 

Any rate, let's break these down.

The lead novel, The Fog, sadly has nothing to do with John Carpenter's 80's film. Instead, we're in a small village in south central England where an Earthquake manages to unleash long buried genetically modified germs that make hosts violent. (The book was published in the early 70's, but it kind of reminds me of the more recent Mad Cow outbreak.) Our hero, Mr. Holman, is a former government man, who somehow gains immunity from the germs, but given the cloud of yellow germs has an almost sentience going on, it's a long process trying to stop it. The narrative here tends to drift a bit, as we get occasional scenes of what happens to people caught in the fog before everything resolves at the end. 

In the middle lies The Spear, wherein Mr. Steadman, a former SAS and Mossad Agent now working as a gumshoe goes up against a British-German conspiracy involving the Thule Society and the Longinius's Spear. 

And last, we wind up with Sepulchre, in which Mr. Halloran, who also worked in Army intelligence, but who now works for a company protecting people from kidnapping, ends up dealing with a client trying to bring back Bel-Marduke. 

All three are breathless and pulpy reads, albeit enjoyable breathless and pulpy reads. There are prescient bits in here; in The Fog, an infected pilot steers his jumbo jet into a major London landmark, for instance. 

We also have some problematic bits and a few mixed bags thrown in. One particularly bad part is the reveal of a hermaphrodite in The Spear, whose reveal is met with revulsion and a severe beating. Both The Fog and Sepulchre include minor gay characters, which is rare in that era of horror; however, in both, the gay guys are on the bad side. On the other hand, they fact that they're gay doesn't make them evil in these narratives, they just have other evil acts they perform that do. 

Fun reads, but definitely from a different era. 

It's a different world

 My brother, Charles Ebert, published an anthology of his short fiction titled A World Where Sandy Never Died and Other Worlds, which I finished up a few days ago (and haven't had a chance to review yet, because of my hideous work schedule this week.)

This work collects 12 stories, 11 of which were published elsewhere, and each comes with a preface talking a bit about the story. Most fall somewhere under the umbrella of "Soft Sci-Fi" or "Near Future Sci-Fi", although more than a few are under different headings.  

Honestly, I was happy a story I heard him read out loud at a convention was included here ("Hauntings"), since it's almost a play on Beetlejuice in terms of trying to get rid of a problem tenant. 

We have a much more "could be current" story in "The Ossuaries", where the connections between historical atrocities and our modern age come really into focus, as does the choice between fulfilling a dream or temporarily preventing an echo or a previous atrocity. 

I enjoyed the title story, which concerns people people slipping between universes to find albums from artists who died in our world but survived in others. While I'm not as passionate about the artists mentioned in here as the author is, I kept picturing other ways to enjoy such excursions, and wondering if one could build a much larger story on world presented here. 

For me, those 3 are the highlights of the collection. They're all good and well written, but these three are the ones that stuck with me. I believe this one is on Amazon, so if you have some extra cash, give it a whirl.

This is why we tell the story

 In a case of falling victim to targeted adverts, I ended up buying Stephen Purdy's Second Edition of Flop Musicals of the Twenty-First Century Part I: The Creatives thanks to something I saw scrolling. 

According to his afterword, this came about due to a question of of a theater seminar he was leading, which lead into getting in touch with people involved in several levels of productions that are now considered failures. 

Frankly, some of them I expected to be included (Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark), some I was surprised to see were considered flops (Rocky), most I had never heard of, and in a few cases (Lestat) I found myself wondering who thought they'd be a good idea in the first place. 

Anyway, the book covers 13 musicals that either did not return the money invested in them, closed very quickly, or really disappointed in other ways. (In almost every case, ticket sales were below 50% for every performance prior to closing; most shows need at least 70% to remain profitable enough to keep running.) In some cases, like Glory Days, Wonderland, and King Kong, the shows never really got taken through a lot of development processes like out of town tryouts or workshops, and therefore couldn't get the kinks worked out prior to arriving in New York. Others did well out of town, but failed to find an audience in New York (Cheeseburger in Paradise.) Some (Dance of the Vampires) had too many cooks trying to fix things (In that last case, the star of the show got all kinds of creative control, and wound up becoming "Liberace as a Vampire"). Some had dream teams of creatives, like Elton John and Bernie Taupin working with big name choreographers, but the book kept changing while the music didn't (Lestat. Again, I have yet to figure out how a condensed version of Anne Rice would work as a musical. If by some chance one of our local troupes produces it, I'd love to see it.) 

Hearing more about Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark was also very entertaining, since the music I heard from it was good (written by Bono and The Edge from U2), but all I ever heard was the number of accidents involving the show. While the accidents likely did play a big part in the fact it lost $20,000,000, the number of rewrites (the first act ended with a battle between Green Goblin and Spider-Man, the second act involved a new character named Arachne trying to trap Peter in her web in dreams... The words tap dancing spiders was used to describe this. It was supposed to end with a big shot of webbing cannoned off the stage onto a screen like a splash page in the comics. Sadly, the device never worked, everyone hated the second act, so they stretched out Act I into two acts, with a thrilling aerial finale.)

Another, Glory Days, has the honor of being one of the rare shows to close the night it opens. Which is sad, since by all accounts, the show was a diamond in the rough, and ran into issue of hitting Broadway before it was really ready to be there. (It fell victim to market research saying a scaled down intimate show would play well in a cavernous setting.) Which is sad, since the plot synopsis listed with the show makes it sound like it would be a good watch, but the stress of the show evidently nearly ended the friendship of the guys who wrote it. 

Cheeseburger in Paradise evidently did really well in tryouts in more tropical climes, but New Yorkers (and tourists) evidently weren't all that interested in getting drunk and listening Jimmy Buffet songs. 

By far the one thing that sticks out in almost every story here is exactly how many good things people involved in these shows had to say about them. These folks remain invested in things that have long since gone dark, telling fun tales from behind the scenes, and discussing why they think their show didn't find an audience. 

All told, while some of the shows in here might find new life either touring or a revival either in New York or a local production, they all succeeded in opening on Broadway, a feat not every show gets. And frankly, it sounds like many of these shows deserve another chance somewhere.

Mages in this series are like Spinal Tap drummers

 And as the twofer concludes, Jak Koke's Beyond the Pale concludes the Dragoneheart Saga, wrapping up the various story lines we've been confused by for two books now. 

Burnout, now Billy, is still possessed by Lethe, and being held captive in Atzlan. Ryan has the Dragon Heart, but needs to find a way to get it to Thayla in the spirit realm. A young blood mage who is entranced by Thayla is trying to break free of her mentor. They get a new Mage, Talon (who stars in his own series), and start meeting some of the bigger names in the setting, like Harlequin, the elf who may or may not predate the 6th Age. 

By the end, everyone is either dead or redeemed, we know what Lethe is, and Ryan finally gets the answers he's been seeking. 

The conclusion here is a hell of a lot better written than the preceding books. I do have to wonder how much of it is canon, though, since it reveals a solution to a fairly major mystery in the setting. 

Really fun read to conclude the trilogy. Worth the slog through the past two books.

Ghost Gangsters

 Morgan Brice returns to Cape May with Blink, as we join Ben and Eric on another adventure in ghosts and gangsters. 

Friend Jaxon wants to reopen an old theater with the Arts Council. Problem being said theater is cursed by a strega, and Jaxon winds up in a coma. 

In the mean time, the Russian Mob and the Newark Mob are gunning for our heroes thanks to their former jobs. 

It's pretty much what I've come to expect from these, fairly breezy, a bit of smut, and the incongruity of two guys trying to protect each other from their pasts also dealing with domestic issues, like whether or not to propose or even move in together. This one does have a nice twist towards the end, involving the best Spielberg reference in print currently.

Fun, light, and good for a relaxing evening.