Conjured

Conjured  

Sarah Beth Durst

Conjured is a very thrilling read that involves both mystery and magic. Sarah Beth Durst combined these addictive and complimentary aspects to create a small masterpiece of a book that readers won’t want to put down.

Eve has no memory of her past. She knows she has been given a new face, name, and home, because she is part of the Witness Protection Program. But there are other things she knows that the WitSec doesn't tell her: her past memories are crucial to solving the murder of the Magician and the multiverse victims. Eve co-operates with the WitSec, but every time she tries to use her own magic, she has chilling visions of the Magician and the Storyteller, and wakes up to find she has lost days, even weeks, of memory and life.

Striking an unlikely friendship with Zachary, who helps her explore her magical boundaries, and spending time with others in the Witness Protection Program, Eve learns more than she’s supposed to, and starts to have doubts about whose side she should be on, and where she is from.

An exhilarating, spellbinding read, Conjured follows Eve as she uncovers her magical and horrific past in order to move forward in life. When the most gruesome news has surfaced (the murders have started again) Eve must choose between running away or risking everything to prove that how we start out in this world does not dictate the person we become.

Readers will love it!

Ellie Young is currently a grade 12 student at Bishop Macdonell. She loves reading with a huge passion, but when not being a complete bookworm, you can find her playing basketball, working, and having tons of fun being a teenager. She also love writing and what better way to practice then by doing reviews for The Bookshelf?

The Longings of Wayward Girls

The Longings of Wayward Girls

Karen Brown

Lust. The instinct to reproduce. It’s our most primal urge (besides hunger). In this novel, Karen Brown meditates on the suffering that goes along with love and lust. This is Brown’s debut as a novelist, but Publishers Weekly named her short story collection Little Sinners and Other Stories as a Best Book of 2012.

Set in an middle-class suburb near Hartford, Connecticut, The Longings of Wayward Girls is a psychological novel. The main character, Sadie Watkins, is a thirty-six-year-old stay-at-home mother of two, and she’s grieving her recent miscarriage. In her undone state of mind, she starts an affair with a new neighbour, Ray Filley, a man she’d last seen twenty-four years ago. She senses that something unseemly happened between her mother and Ray when he was a teenager, and that hunch leads Sadie on a journey toward the painful truths hidden in her fuzzy memories of the summer of 1979, the year she turned thirteen. Sadie calls it “that summer,” when everything changed.

Brown’s powerful technique mesmerized me. First, mirroring the rift in Sadie’s memory, the chapters flip back and forth between 1979 and 2003 (the story’s current time). That structure is a hypnotic device; it drew me into Sadie’s world, in which the past often seems indistinguishable from the present. I got the eerie, dreamlike feeling that the past was living itself over again. Second, beyond its psychological effects, the novel excels at description. Heat, thunderstorms, humidity, children’s dirty feet, birds, and insects (especially cicadas)—Brown describes these things in a way that transported me to the essence of a New England summer.

This is a haunting tale, one that will enchant lovers of psychological suspense.

Bob Young's short stories have been published in the literary journals Other Voices, Postscripts to Darkness, and Great Lakes Review. Visit his website: robertbyoung.blogspot.ca.

Mrs. Poe

Mrs. Poe
By Lynn Cullen

Mrs. Poe is not a biography of Edgar Allan Poe’s wife nor is it a romantic love story. Author Lynn Cullen deliberately planned it that way, leaving the reader to decide on the meaning behind the ambiguous title.

When a newspaper editor advises her to write “shivery tales for ladies,” protagonist Frances Osgood playfully responds, “You’d like me to be a sort of Mrs. Poe.” An acclaimed poet in her own right, Frances had also dabbled in children’s literature. But as the wife of a philandering portrait painter, she could no longer afford that luxury. So, it is not surprising that she welcomes the opportunity to meet the mysterious Poe, if only to help her career. What follows is a flirtation, a seduction, and an illicit love affair.

While reading, I could easily imagine myself sitting in one of those New York parlors, listening with rapt attention to Poe and the other members of the literary crowd, among them, “a Bohemian poetess in her gypsy hoops earrings and loose vest; the elderly Mr. Audubon in his buckskin costume” and “Mr. Walter Whitman, who belligerently wore the long-tailed frock coat and ruffles from an earlier era.”

In writing this novel, Lynn Cullen demonstrates superb storytelling abilities and meticulous attention to detail, expertly blending mystery, romance, and history. Where the actual facts are incomplete, she fills in the gaps beautifully.

After retiring from a 31-year teaching career, Joanne Guidoccio launched a second act as a writer. Her articles, book reviews and short stories have appeared in newspapers, magazines and online. Last month, Soul Mate Publishing released her debut novel, Between Land and Sea, as an ebook on Amazon. You can visit her website at www.joanneguidoccio.com

Dead North: Canadian Zombie Fiction

Dead North: Canadian Zombie Fiction

Edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

I feel like most Canadian fiction would do better if it wasn't so relentlessly marketed as such. Every time I listen to the yearly edition of Canada Reads on CBC, so much attention seems to be drawn to the fact that the author is Canadian that being Canadian becomes a gimmick. Latched onto like a lamprey with a Napoleon complex, this kind of marketing strategy often ends up neglecting the more important factors, like whether or not the content of the story is actually enjoyable. Dead North, a collection of zombie short stories by exclusively Canadian authors, is the first of its kind that I've seen to buck this trend, using the diverse cultural mythology of the Great White North to put a number of unique spins on an otherwise over-saturated genre.

Within its pages, you'll find everything from traditional Romero zombies, undead whales, and risen corpses of the demonically possessed variety, to Wendigos, and even a twisted retelling of a much beloved Grimm fairy tale. Of course, with over 20 different authors contributing to the volume, the quality does vary (“Waiting for Jenny Rex”, in particular, is an exercise in shameless gimmick-whoring), but the vast majority were well-written enough so as to keep my curiosity peaked.

Besides its inclusion of 99 different flavours of rotted flesh for the zombie connoisseur, the characters and structure of the various tales are in and of themselves so diverse that they never get monotonous. While some are the typical tales of horror, betrayal, and shambling hordes that we've come to know and love, others simply use the zombie apocalypse as a frame within which to tell a number of intriguing, personal stories. Dead North quite literally travels from coast-to-coast, from a Vancouver weed grow-op run by a fanatical, religious hippie, to the frozen tundra (where the “dead-heads” make for good eating; if you know how to suss out the sickness), and even the fishing villages of Nova Scotia.

It becomes clear through reading this volume that the zombie genre has quite a bit more value for the ambitious author to excavate before we salt their bones, burn the remains, and otherwise lay this cultural obsession to rest. Those looking for a novel twist on their beloved cannibalistic horrors should set aside some time to check this one out; it's a lot of fun.

Vincent Smith is a taoist, aspiring writer, and dyed-in-the-wool psychology geek at the University of Gueh. You can find his writing on video games, comics, movies, and all things geek over at The Rogue's Gallery.   

Why People Believe Weird Things

Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of our Time

Michael Shermer

Belief – be it in the supernatural or in the merely mundane – is often an individual and deeply personal endeavour. In other words, our beliefs matter greatly to us. Unfortunately, not all of those beliefs are as logically sound as others. In fact, some of them are just plain weird.

In Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of our Time, American science writer and long-time skeptic Michael Shermer delves into the world of ESP, Alien Abductions, Holocaust Denial, and much more. He pits reason and science against our most bizarre popular beliefs, and offers a frequently meticulous breakdown and analysis of those beliefs and their respective movements.

Some readers may be surprised by the similarities that Shermer draws. After all, it’s not every day that someone compares creationists to Holocaust deniers. Still, Shermer’s arguments are always respectful and well-conceived, and never vindictive or petty.

If Why People Believe Weird Things has any drawback, it’s that its writing is sometimes dense, making it occasionally slow going for readers new to the science and philosophy genres. Make no mistake, this is no light bathroom reading material – thinking caps are required. But maybe that’s the point: weird beliefs come easily; sound judgement and critical thinking, on the other hand, take work. And in the case of Why People Believe Weird Things, that work is equally compelling and thought provoking.

While a glass cutter by day, by night Z.S. Roe spends his time writing fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.  His writings have appeared in various publications, including the Cambridge Times, The Silhouette, and The Toronto Sun, among others.  Most recently, his short story “Peeping Tara” appeared in issue 13 of Dark Moon Digest.  You can visit his blog at www.zsroe.com

The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

Edited by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer

Fiction today is thoroughly categorized. Walk into any bookstore and you can easily find what you're looking for stuck under a neatly printed label, be it fantasy or mystery or romance. But what about those stories that escape generalization? Those odd ones, those black sheep, that refuse to be labeled under any one category?

Well, they can be found within the pages of The Weird, a mammoth tome edited by renowned author/editor couple Jeff and Ann VanderMeer. The Weird is a collection of fiction written over the past hundred years, from 1908 to 2011. Its stories are by turns creepy, intriguing, and mesmerizing, and each one is written by a different author. Some names will be familiar—Stephen King, NeilGaiman, George R. R. Martin. Others such as Haruki Murakami, Olympe Bhêly-Quenum, and Leonora Carrington await discovery.

Not only is The Weird a chance to experience the odd side of fiction, it's also an opportunity to discover unfamiliar authors, most outside our cultural boundaries. The Weird is lengthy (1,100-odd double-columned pages) but worth the time and effort. Most readers will find themselves eagerly sucked into this book, for once The Weird latches on its tentacles, it never lets go.... Five stars from this reviewer.

Robert Green is a confirmed bibliophile and aspiring writer whose love of sci-fi has caused him to own many more books than he has physical room for. He is also the owner and creator of the up-and-coming company Verity Books, which can be seen at various cons throughout the year. Any questions or comments can be sent to veritybooksanddvds@gmail.com or facebook.com/veritybooksanddvds.

The Facades

The Facades

By Eric Lundgren

It’s ironic – and scary – that Lundgren published this dystopian novel shortly before Detroit declared bankruptcy, because the world you’ll experience in The Facades is eerily close to Motown’s state of decline, only worse. The story takes place now (or perhaps in the near future) in the fictional city of Trude, somewhere in the American Midwest, and, as part of the rich humour in this book, Lundgren riffs on Trude’s Scandinavian and German background: the surnames, the street names, and the local opera house’s weakness for Wagner.

Disintegration is the theme, and it drives the plot: will Sven Norberg, a mild-mannered legal clerk, find his missing opera star wife, reconcile with his born-again Christian son, and put his family back together? Will he ever understand why it fell apart, like the city of Trude itself? Will he come to understand his own mental breakdown?

The characters, humour, and ideas here gave me a full-bodied read. First, there’s Norberg, who’s a pitiable character, a man who can’t accept his luck in love, when he married Molly, an attractive opera singer. He has reservations about his worthiness, and the public attention that Molly gets irritates him. But when Molly goes missing, the strength of Norberg’s love shows in his dogged tries at finding her. The minor characters – from a cop called “The Oracle,” to a crazy local architect – are perhaps farfetched, but a lot of fun. And while I found the plot to be sometimes dull, humour kept me reading. Wit is everywhere. Reader expectations are often reversed, and Lundgren breaks the conventions of the mystery novel to hilarious effect. The book is a deep read, bringing in psychology, classical music and opera, and the disintegration of the American economy.

So, a multi-layered story. If you’re looking for a challenging – and funny – literary novel, spend some time in Trude. But be prepared to be as disturbed as you are entertained.

Bob Young's short stories have been published in the literary journals Other Voices, Postscripts to Darkness, and Great Lakes Review. Visit his website: robertbyoung.blogspot.ca.