I’ve been away from the blog for longer than normal because I’m spending most of my free time editing the sequel to Enoch’s Device. I always keep reading, however, and recently finished The Templar’s Cross: A Medieval Mystery by J. R. Tomlin. Here’s my review. The Templar’s Cross is an intriguing whodunit set in fifteenth…
On Sunday, Starz will premiere American Gods, based on the fantasy bestseller by Neil Gaiman. From the trailers, the show looks amazing. But it will be pretty damn hard to exceed the novel. Here’s why. By the time I finished American Gods, I felt the same way I did when I finished Stephen King’s The…
Neil Gaiman has been one of the most famous fantasy writers for a while now, though I’ll admit it’s taken me an overly long time to actually read one of his books. That ended recently, however, when I tore through The Ocean at the End of the Lane. Here’s my review. The Ocean at the…
While I’ve been writing about Black Sails, a prequel to Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, today I’m posting a review of Robert Masello’s The Jekyll Revelation, a story based on another of Stevenson’s famous tales. The Jekyll Revelation is a clever play on Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr….
For my final post of 2016, here’s my review of Seth Grahame-Smith’s Unholy Night. I had hoped to write this before Christmas, as the book is somewhat pertinent to that event, but alas holiday shopping and work got in the way. Yet as they say, better late than never . . . I may never…
Today, Fresh-scraped Vellum is one of the final stops on the blog tour for Written in the Ashes, a wonderful historical fantasy by author K. Hollan Van Zandt. It’s published by Harper Collins and available here. I was also lucky enough to interview Ms. Van Zandt, and that interview follows my review of the novel….
I recently finished Dead Man’s Reach by D.B. Jackson, the fourth book in his Thieftaker series. The book turned out to be another excellent installment in Jackson’s historical fantasy tale set in Colonial Boston. Here’s my review. Dead Man’s Reach presents another mystery for Ethan Kaille, a thieftaker whose job involves hunting down thieves and…
Isn’t this Throwback Thursday? In honor of this fairly recent tradition, I’m re-posting my 2012 review of one of the greatest works of epic fiction I’ve read in a long, long time . . . For several years now, I’ve been interested in medieval Spain, and about a quarter of my first novel takes place in…
Every once in a while I’ll reread one of my favorite novels for inspiration, and this summer that read was The Archer’s Tale by Bernard Cornwell. It reminded me how much I loved his Grail Quest series, and how pieces of it helped inspire my first novel, Enoch’s Device. I consider The Archer’s Tale to be a…
I’m still figuring out what to do in a post Game of Thrones world, so this week I’m resurrecting a post from the summer of 2013. Hope you enjoy it. For the third year in a row, I plan to spend my summer vacation in the Bahamas. It’s hard not to like the Caribbean with…
These days, it’s quite rare when I agree to do a book review. The problem is time. There’s just not much of it given my job and my writing. But David’s pitch for his novel The Conjurers caught my eye, and I’m glad I read it. The subtitle of The Conjurers is “A Gritty Fantasy of…