Placeholder for caption that doesn't even suggest a spoiler. You're welcome.

To say that Drew Goddard (Cloverfield, Lost) and Joss Whedon’s The Cabin in the Woods is a horror movie doesn’t do it justice. It’s a gross oversimplification of the broader concept. Before I proceed, permit me to clarify that I’m under no delusions like “The Cabin in the Woods isn’t a horror movie”. It most definitely is a horror movie and a fairly gory one at that. People die. Gratuitously. Be sure that Goddard’s decision to conceal the more grizzly details of certain deaths serves only to preserve the viewer’s sensitivity to such things for the biggest punch when it really mattered. Think of it like giving up coffee for 30 days so that on the 31st, when you drink three pots in a single hour, you see God. This isn’t a criticism, mind you. I simply feel compelled to emphasize the bloody nature of this movie to disspell any notion that it will be a Whedonesque flick in the campy Buffy/Angel style of  horror. To be honest, I expected The Cabin in the Woods to lean toward being viscerally sterile. While it isn’t High Tension or Hostel, it’s also not good, clean, prime-time-television fun.

Now that I’ve told you what this movie isn’t, I’ll tell you what it is. The Cabin in the Woods is a heavily layered movie which tells a story that’s far deeper than “these people over here want to do despicable things to those people over there.” Dare I say its an intelligent horror movie. Almost immediately, the viewer is presented with disparate but internally consistent elements. What I appreciated was that the meaning of these disparate elements wasn’t immediately handed to the viewer on a silver platter in bite-sized pieces. I had time to ponder them and develop my own Theory of Everything before the explanations began to roll in. This movie clearly isn’t a Masterpiece Theater mystery and it’s entirely likely that you’ll have narrowed what’s going on to one of two options by the time the puzzle starts filling in. Despite that, quite literally anything can happen until the very last line of dialog.

Fans of horror will appreciate this movie for it’s creative fusion of thematic elements and a sense of self-awareness not seen since Scream (1996). Whedon devotees will recognize this  self-awareness as well as the  rapid-fire, apropos-yet-witty dialog. Also, fans of Dollhouse will love that Fran Kranz got the opportunity to shine (and shine he did!), though fans of Chris Hemsworth (Thor) and Jesse Williams (Grey’s Anatomy) will be disappointed in the scarcity of shirtless scenes.

I really wish I could tell you more about this movie but I can’t without including spoilers. In fact, as I was thinking about how I hadn’t seen a single trailer for this movie, it struck me that any trailer would necessarily either (a) be devoid of spoilers but completely misrepresent the movie or (b) accurately represent the movie while simultaneously negating any need to actually see it. This is a brilliant film so the idea of spoiling anything and, as a result, dampening the initial journey of discovery makes me sad. If you’re inclined to see The Cabin in the Woods, then do so in a theater on the big screen and do it before someone blows the secrets for you. Seriously.

 5 out of 5!

Georgia’s story is not about your momma’s vampire or your teenage sparkling vampire.  It’s about a new – old vampire!

Love this part from the book!

 The smell of the best became like aged bourbon.  It was rotten and harsh.  It tasted like burnt wood, with a swirl of sugar through it.

Remnants of Life takes us along in the adventures of Samantha/Samoda from the world we understand of life into the other world of after ‘death’.

Get it here at Amazon

Or Get it in Print here 

Check out her website and publishers web site:

www.georgialjones.com

www.blackwyrm.com

MidSouthCon-30 was so much fun!  One of my favorite people, Stephen Zimmer, had some great insight into his world.  Check out the video below!  I love this guy!

check him out here: http://www.stephenzimmer.com/

The 18th book in Fandemonium’s arsenal of Stargate SG-1 novels is out. Written by Sabine C. Bauer, Transitions falls shockingly short.

Sabine Bauer is not a newbie to the Stargate franchise. Her first novel, Trail by Fire, was the first Stargate book Fandemonium ever published, and I decided right then and there that I really liked her work. Later she wrote Survival of the Fittest, another fantastic SG-1 story, and then she took on Atlantis with Mirror Mirror. Trial by Fire was very accurate as far as the franchise canon goes. It is set in season seven and does very well at playing into Daniel’s return from Ascension and Jack’s previous encounter with our friend Baal. After having endured the work of American authors who didn’t know their Jaffa from their Tok’ra, I adored Bauer’s well researched and original story, and my favorite original character of all time. It is truly worthy of it’s own review, which I promise I will get to.

Mirror Mirror was a little different from Trial by Fire as far as plot style. It is in some ways psychological test of the characters. The characters encounter a device that fractures time, spitting each character off though all the potenial forks in the road that they could have taken. For instance, we see what could have happened to Elizabeth Weir if, after waking to rotate the ZPMs, the statis chamber wouldn’t work again and she is left alone in a sleeping city as seen in ‘Before I Sleep’. While it is a season two story and I am not as well trained in Atlantis canon as some fans I know, I didn’t find any obvious errors and I really enjoyed the book.

Survival of the Fittest is definitely the meatiest of Bauer’s first three books. I really enjoyed the depth of the story, and it is still among my favorite books of the novel series. However, it has a canyon-sized plot hole. According to events that the characters mention, the main antagonist, the ever annoying Colonel Simons, should have been in jail along side his pet Goa’uld. Try as I might, I couldn’t find a way for Bauer to have sidestepped this gaping hole and still keep all of her puzzle pieces. It was a real shame but I forgave her and I highly recommend the book.

Transitions, however . . . . I think that Bauer bit off much more than she could chew. Transitions is an SG-1/Atlantis crossover novel, and it is the first of its kind. Sonny Whitelaw and Elizabeth Christensen wrote Blood Ties, which is basically an Atlantis novel that includes Daniel Jackson. (I highly recommend it!) Transitions however is a true two full cast crossover. This made reading fun but not in a good way. Every time something huge happened on Earth with SG-1, the next chapter would send you to Atlantis until another cliffhanger chapter sent you back. In most stories this works really well, but in Transitions, the related events taking place between Earth and Atlantis took much too long to come together despite the prologue that attempted to provide the trigger event for the whole book.

I was so excited about this book when I first started hearing about it because it is the first book to bring back Cassandra Fraiser, the adopted daughter of the late lamented Dr. Janet Fraiser. Fans only saw Cassie three times during the course of the series, but it is a widely held belief that she is an integral part of SG-1′s life outside of Cheyanne Mountain. I became a lot more skeptical when I realized that the book would also be a crossover. I mean, that’s a lot to cram into 341 pages. It is a truly daunting task, which is no doubt why no one has tried it before! Plus, I really feel that Cassie should have been on the cover of this book!

Sometimes the devil is in the details, but for Transitions the devil is in the timing. The story is set right after SG-1′s season 8 concluded. The Goa’uld are decimated and declawed, the Replicators have been destroyed, Brigadier General Jack O’Neill has been offered another promotion and a position in Washington, Daniel Jackson is packing to go to Atlantis, Teal’c is on Dakara helping to establish the new Jaffa nation, and Sam Carter is trying to figure out what she is going to do next without her team. This is a perfectly fertile place for this novel, and it does a really good job of filling in that gap of time before season nine when the show returned and for fans, it was a nightmare without explanation. Not only does it show how we got there, but it also goes a long way to explain why Sam chose to lead R&D because Cassie was going through a “tough time.” Unfortunately filling in that gap is the only thing this story does well. Read the rest of this entry »

The Resurrection of Magic

Part One: Skin Hunger
Part Two: Sacred Scars

Several years ago at Dragon*Con, I met a young adult author named Kathleen Duey in the Hyatt Regency at the top of an escalator. I believe, and I might be wrong about this, I nearly knocked her down. Regardless, she was charming and polite and I promised to read her new novel “Skin Hunger.”

I never read young adult fiction as a child, going straight from non-fiction and Marvel comics to Leon Uris, Frank Herbert, and Ann McCaffery at age 11 or 12. I discovered young adult literature before starting college when I encountered a A Wrinkle in Time and the works of C.S. Lewis. I have made it through the Harry Potter books and the folks tales of Laurence Yep. I tried to read Twilight, I swear I tried. It didn’t go well.

Recently I ordered both of Kathleen Duey’s resurrection of magic books on Audible.com and prepared myself for an urban fantasy similar to Vampire Diaries. The setting could not have been more different, instead of a modern world, the tale was starts out in ren-fest/Tolkien world of magic and market places. I was honestly disappointed with how mundane and cookie-cutter this world seemed to be. I continued to listen. Within a few chapters I realized that this world was not like any I had ever encountered in literature, and that story I was reading was not going directly from point “A” to point “Z” and that the Resurrection of Magic would have very, very dark and bloody consequences.

The single defining feature of the books is actually their duality. The initial tales feature the live of the young girl Sadima as she discovers her magic ability to hear animals, finds that her skills might contribute to the restoration of magic overall, falls in love with a young Magician, Franklin, and deals with the mysterious and questionable Somiss, another magician. The other story covers Hahp as he attends a school of magic, suffers frightening horrors, and is the student of a magician, Franklin, and deals with the mysterious and questionable Somiss, another magician.

There is no clear sense of time early in either story, and it is difficult to tell immediately how Franklin and Somiss can be in both stories though the tales appear to be centuries apart.  This mystery works it way through both tales and they descend into pain, suffering, and loss. These two stories are tired very closely.

Skin Hunger, and its sequel Sacred Scars are both highly recommended for their vivid storytelling and incredible characters and struggles.  The one warning I give to he reader…have Sacred Scars on hand to immediately start digging in when Skin Hunger dies.