The Review Turns
Mar. 18th, 2016 09:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bluegargantuaHey,
Read through a couple of items in the past few weeks.
First up Brotherhood of the Wheel by R. S. Belcher (a moment of silence for that last name, please). I was interested in this story because it's similar to an idea I had and I was curious to see a treatment of it.
The basic gist is that the Tmeplars (it's always the Templars) have survived into the modern day by breaking into three groups. The group we follow here is the titular Brotherhood of the Wheel. It's made up of truckers, bikers, highway police and road crews. Their job is to keep the roads safe from psycho killers and evil occult forces.
Jimmie Aussapile is a long-haul trucker and a member of the Brotherhood. After a busy night chasing down a killer, he's on his way home when a ghostly hitchhiker puts out her thumb. Jimmie drives her home only to discover that before she was killed, she left a tape recording that specifically mentions that Jimmie needs to help track down something monstrous that killed her and her friends and is after children.
Jimmie is joined by Heck, a biker who needs to be initiated into the Brotherhood to claim his place as club president, and Lovina, a police investigator from New Orleans who is also on the trail of some missing children. Meanwhile, Ava and her friends were in a car accident and they've been towed to a strange, mysterious town called Four Houses that's not on any map and has terrible shadow people who come out at night.
It's a pretty good book. Lots of POV switches and each character is pretty well defined -- the author notes what they've got playing in their vehicles which is a nice touch. The magic "makes sense" and the action sequences are all well handled.
The only small nit is that there's lots of references to real-world things, which is appropriate and does a lot to help root the time and place, but I suspect the book won't age terribly well. Still, if you want a bit more Convoy in your urban fantasy this is the book for you.
Next up, more light reading from Microcosm Publishing. This time it's Dream Whip #15 The Pedal Powered Movie Tour by Bill Brown. Pretty much does what it says on the tin. Bill Brown made a small indie movie about the US/Mexico border. He wanted to take the film cross-country and have screenings here and there. So he got together with a couple of friends, they got their bikes in order and set off from Washington D.C. to ride across the country. They get as far as the Kansas/Colorado border before switching back to cars -- but in fairness, they started the trip really late in the year and although they were pretty sensible riders, they were still quite new and probably couldn't have crossed the Rockies in winter.
Anyway, the book is really a very thick zine written in a stream-of-consciousness style in a "handwriting" font (which is quite legible, thankfully). Brown discusses the various places he bikes through and the people he meets along the way. It's a charming story and since he never really encounters anything too terrible other than wind and rain it's pretty sedate. I'm not sure I'm really up for a cross-country bike trip, but it seems a bit more reasonable after reading Brown's account.
And yes, I'm still slowly working my way through the Mark Twain Autobiography. The book is just a bit too unwieldy to carry around with me so I may have to break down and buy the kindle or audio book version.
later
Tom
Read through a couple of items in the past few weeks.
First up Brotherhood of the Wheel by R. S. Belcher (a moment of silence for that last name, please). I was interested in this story because it's similar to an idea I had and I was curious to see a treatment of it.
The basic gist is that the Tmeplars (it's always the Templars) have survived into the modern day by breaking into three groups. The group we follow here is the titular Brotherhood of the Wheel. It's made up of truckers, bikers, highway police and road crews. Their job is to keep the roads safe from psycho killers and evil occult forces.
Jimmie Aussapile is a long-haul trucker and a member of the Brotherhood. After a busy night chasing down a killer, he's on his way home when a ghostly hitchhiker puts out her thumb. Jimmie drives her home only to discover that before she was killed, she left a tape recording that specifically mentions that Jimmie needs to help track down something monstrous that killed her and her friends and is after children.
Jimmie is joined by Heck, a biker who needs to be initiated into the Brotherhood to claim his place as club president, and Lovina, a police investigator from New Orleans who is also on the trail of some missing children. Meanwhile, Ava and her friends were in a car accident and they've been towed to a strange, mysterious town called Four Houses that's not on any map and has terrible shadow people who come out at night.
It's a pretty good book. Lots of POV switches and each character is pretty well defined -- the author notes what they've got playing in their vehicles which is a nice touch. The magic "makes sense" and the action sequences are all well handled.
The only small nit is that there's lots of references to real-world things, which is appropriate and does a lot to help root the time and place, but I suspect the book won't age terribly well. Still, if you want a bit more Convoy in your urban fantasy this is the book for you.
Next up, more light reading from Microcosm Publishing. This time it's Dream Whip #15 The Pedal Powered Movie Tour by Bill Brown. Pretty much does what it says on the tin. Bill Brown made a small indie movie about the US/Mexico border. He wanted to take the film cross-country and have screenings here and there. So he got together with a couple of friends, they got their bikes in order and set off from Washington D.C. to ride across the country. They get as far as the Kansas/Colorado border before switching back to cars -- but in fairness, they started the trip really late in the year and although they were pretty sensible riders, they were still quite new and probably couldn't have crossed the Rockies in winter.
Anyway, the book is really a very thick zine written in a stream-of-consciousness style in a "handwriting" font (which is quite legible, thankfully). Brown discusses the various places he bikes through and the people he meets along the way. It's a charming story and since he never really encounters anything too terrible other than wind and rain it's pretty sedate. I'm not sure I'm really up for a cross-country bike trip, but it seems a bit more reasonable after reading Brown's account.
And yes, I'm still slowly working my way through the Mark Twain Autobiography. The book is just a bit too unwieldy to carry around with me so I may have to break down and buy the kindle or audio book version.
later
Tom
