​I know, I know, I was going to take a pause form The Boys for a minute, but the thing is our library has inexplicably decided to only acquire manga now instead of proper graphic novels and I like proper graphic novels, even ones as improper as The Boys, and so here I am, back again…
Book six features Stormfront, the Nazi superpowered evil f*cker who gets just one storyline here and gets to be the protagonist of the entire season 3 of the tv show. Albeit, unrecognizably so with a gender switch up.
The rest of the book are origin stories, at long last. Mother’s Milk spills his, followed by the baguette-fencing distinctly Gallic-flavored tale of Frenchie and concluded by the tragic story of Female. At long last, the wee lad can contextualize the people who so reluctantly works with.
More artist changes. All functional, all within the preestablished parameters, more or less. Terror is looking good. And what more can you really ask for.

Just when you thought The Boys, the raunchiest, most in your face, testosterone driven balls to the wall sort of comic couldn’t get any wilder, welcome to volume five.
Once a year all the supers get together at a fancy resort for an award ceremony/giant orgy. This is their story. The one that finally features penises, which it pretty chaste and a long wait for a publication like that.
Nd while the supers are shtupping and The Boys are snooping, there is some political intrigue unfolding too. Lots going on…if the superhero orgy wasn’t enough to attract your attention. Another fun one in the fun series. Still not the original artist, outside of covers. I’m pretty used to those changes now. The basic characters stay mostly the same looking. Also, you get to see The Boys is something other than their usual getups.
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​I was really looking forward to reading this book. Yet for some reason it took me a while to get to. And having read it, now I’m thinking maybe I was right in putting it off.
But the initial appeal – the awesome retro style cover, the fact that the author’s previous book was pretty great, the plot summary – was so there. Two days and 416 pages later I wanted my time back. Why? Well…
First and foremost, this book is overwritten. Dramatically indulgently so. It’s the sort of story that makes perfect sense to the author, but the way he takes his readers there is so convoluted, so meandering, so serpentine that by the end of the journey you’re mostly exhausted into indifference. And lamentably, the end of the journey is so underwhelming, that it doesn’t even seem worth the trip at all.
The basic story of a true crime writer moving into the place where crimes occurred to write his next bestseller and becoming obsessed with it, blurring the reality and fiction, it great. But the perspective shifts are tiresome. Also, a good reminder of why I don’t care for true crime as a genre – it’s so sensationalist, so prurient, so loaded with presupposition and speculation. Was this book meant to satirize it? Who knows. For all I know, this book was meant to be a sleeping aid. It’s certainly effective at that.
The sad thing is that Darnielle is such a talented writer. If you just focus on writing in this story. If you can do that somehow. If you can ignore things, like random Arthurian-style legends popping up. If you can ignore how blatantly self-aware Darnielle seems to be of his writing skills and how indulgent he is with it. The endless sentences, the endless paragraphs, the narrative so dense you need a machete to get through. The substance here ends up all but obscured by the padding. The trees take over the forest. It’s a muddle and a slog and a labor to get through.
And so, despite the awesome cover and despite the praises, I definitely wouldn’t recommend it and I definitely didn’t think it was worth the time. It’s the sort of book that ends up a critical darling, especially when a serious source (New York Times or the like) wants to feature a work of speculative fiction, but there is a striking difference between literary and overwritten and this sizable tome lands heavily on the overwritten side of the fence. Overstylized, overdone, messy. Very disappointing. Nowhere as scary as it is marketed. Nowhere as thrilling as it thinks it might be. Slow, slow, slow. Pass.

Tell me if you’ve read or watched this one before – two women with considerable age difference begin a passionate romance, only one of them is married and a mother and is so profoundly entrenched in her conventional life that she is torn between what she wants and what she believes she ought to be happy with.
Yes, that is essentially the plot of Carol, a stunning novel and its superb cinematic adaptation, for which both of its leads were robbed of Oscars, it stands to mention.
Now, switch a few elements around, tweak a few things and rewrite it Sex and the City style and you’ll get this debut. One the author interestingly enough specifically describes as close to her but not a memoir. Um…no one probably thought that until you said something and now it’s one of those a lady doth protest too much things, but anyway….
Meet Merit. Merit is a devoted wife and a mother, who’s been with her husband Cory since college. They’ve made two young kids, an endeavor Merit doesn’t seem to get a lot of joy out of, because she misses having a proper life out in the world, not one circumscribed by wailing babies and dirty diapers. Why did she then have a second child with that attitude, you might ask? Well, because apparently motherhood is like that…thoughtless.
Mind you, as a society we’ve come a long way from not wanting to so much as show pregnancy back in I Love Lucy days to Lost Daughter present, where it’s ok now to admit that motherhood is difficult and may not be for everyone. So, this book, hip to that, is all about how difficult motherhood has been for Merit.
She slaps on a t-shirt and some pants, walks in and lands a good job, despite her on and off employment history - there was that time she took off to be an artist too. Because it’s that kind of story.
Continuing with the wildly realistic streak there, her boss is stunning. And awesome. And fun. So much wordage is devoted to it, that you’d have to be an idiot not to see where this is going, but it nevertheless is going to take its time getting there. Until there, there will be a very close friendship the likes of which most women don’t really strike up after college days, and a lot of drinking.
And a lot of calling each other the B word, which is apparently ok because these people are straight of the Sex and the City production lot extras, so much so they actually believe that the only people who understand them are gay men. And honestly, the B word in a causal situation seems stupid and in one of the more sincere heartfelt moments is just grating. But there it is, anyway. Over and over again.
Anyway, eventually Merit realizes her attraction is more that friendly and the two proceed to have an affair. This is where the women’s fiction conventions slide further down into the cheddary romance.
But Merit is torn between her familial obligations and her heart/other organs. The author chooses to address it with a cheap trick of an ending. Because she wants to play with your emotions. Because she believes you’ll care enough and forgive her cheap trickery. I dunno. Something like that.
And so, there you go, behold a conglomeration of clichés, repackaged into original estrogen heavy romance of love and motherhood and sex.
And oh, let’s mention the fact that when a condom malfunction leads to another pregnancy, Merit who can barely handle the two kids or in fact can’t and has pawned them off onto a FT babysitter, appears immediately and completely on board with having another kid. WTF? Why?
 If you end up just feeling sorry for Cory, it’s well justified. There’s nothing really wrong with him and he tries his best, but Merit is just impossible to please because the author told her Cory isn’t her person. It’s almost comical the way she hates every single thing he does and yet seriously considers staying with him anyway.
Anyway, there you go. If nothing said in this review deters you from reading this book, then you and it will get along like a house on fire. Any critical discernment will probably be very much like a fire to a book. But then again, who knows, Lifetime television is popular for a reason. And this is totally their movie of the week. Thanks Netgalley.

​The Boys are back in town. Adventure #4. This time all in one seven comic arc. Killer cover, though the art inside varies and I believe it still has the same (different form the original) artist as the last book. It is disorienting and I kind of with the comics would stick with the same people. It’s like if the show suddenly changed actors midway through to the lookalikes. Sure, it makes the wee lad more handsome and distinctly less Simon Pegg-y, but you get used to one thing and then…
At any rate, in this adventure the wee lad goes undercover with a group of young superheroes stylized like a bunch of frat bros and all sorts of shenanigans ensue. As brash and brutal and raunchy as you’ve come to expect and just as fun too, though the fun does get somewhat tiresome after a while, which brings one to the inevitable conclusion that perhaps in this instance the show might have a leg up over the books.
It isn’t unheard of. The Umbrella Academy show is a huge supersized improvement upon the comics it’s based on.
With Boys the different is much less dramatic, but the show has more nuances, more intricacies and more tonal variety, wherein the books are just wild with testosterone and sass and vulgarity…and that’s basically the lot of it.
Nevertheless, it’s still plenty entertaining and I’ve every intention of reading more, but maybe not is such close succession.
The alternate covers addition is excellent and well worth checking out too.

​An alien invasion tale by the way of the creature feature, Black Tide is stunningly mismarketed as Cujo meets the Quiet Place. The worst thing about derivative unimaginative comparison-based descriptions like that is that it’s misleading and sets up wrong expectations. I’m so glad I didn’t read it prior to going into this book.
Do we even need to compare a book to a preexisting popular work? Can it just stand on its own two (or many) legs? This book certainly tries. To be fair, there isn’t much to the story here plot-wise. It takes place virtually in real time during an alien invasion (you want a comparison, how about Cloverfield?) with a tiny cast of three people and a Labrador.
One of the main characters is Beth, a snarky and sarcastic but kind funny 33-year-old trainwreck of a person who’s trying to change her ways by building up a career of hopping from place to place housesitting. Is she really a trainwreck or did her mother just do such a thorough number of convincing her of it…you kind of have to read to find out. The fact that a 33-year-old woman’s entire sense of self-worth and self-esteem comes from her mother is pretty lamentable, but then again Beth doesn’t really read her age, she reads much, much younger. Alternatively, she reads very much like a millennial her age might.
Mike, her circumstantial partner in crime/neighbor, is about a decade older and also reads a lot younger. A movie producer in exile, he’s been moping around his beachhouse, bemoaning the end of his relationship, the end for which he has been holding himself responsible.
Mike’s all set to off himself out of his sorrows, when Beth pops along, the booze, they schmooze, the carouse, and the next morning it’s Apocalypse.
And now the two of them, plus Jake the Labrador, are stuck dealing with a variety of creepy creatures, some of which are not even conventionally visible.
And so, real time, detail by gory detail, Mike and Beth must fight to survive their new and terrifying reality. Along the way they’ll find romance and meet their innerheroes, get tough and get going…because it’s that kind of a story. There’s a kid there too, but she doesn’t get nearly as much screen time until later.
So, overall, it’s kind of fun if all one very drawn out one note sort of fun. It’s lightly humorous, it has a lot of creature effects. It’s hip in a very young almost YA sort of way, although it’s definitely not YA and then it just ends…like maybe there might be a sequel or maybe it’s just a classic off into the sunset sort of thing. Middle of the road sort of read, albeit reasonably entertaining. Thanks Netgalley.

​After you Get Some random adventures in book two, The Boys return to the basics of what they do so well – watching the supers;  and The Boys comics return to what they do best, continue to unravel the backstory behind the world of superpowered menaces.
This volume once again employs the format of two self-contained stories and sees a lot of scenes and storylines from season one of the tv show, specifically the creation of supers and the notorious plane scene. Plus, there’s the blossoming young romance and violence, violence, buckets of it. Terror gets some nice scenes too, personal favorite.
The art changes once again here, but this time it isn’t in the wrong direction, in fact, it makes a wee lad more handsome, but overall, it’s very similar to the original style.
There’s all the raunchy amorality and glib jocularity you’ve come to expect, in technicolor. Overall, loads of fun. Recommended.

​I knew it was going to be impossible not to compare the books to the tv show, so I’m not even going to try. Wherein book one was a pretty close match, book two is something of a digression. It’s two Boys (own) adventures in one book with two self-contained arcs.
The first one takes on homosexual themes (some supers lean that way, some get murderous with it) with such a well-meant but strange and dated and brash aggressively-Boys style that it probably wouldn’t quite work for a modern snowflake audience and their PC sensibilities.
The second is pure message-free fun as the Boys roll behind the Iron Curtain into a snowy Moscow for some fun under the winter sun, featuring Vas, a retired local super who looks like a giant, obscenely well-hung demented Santa.
It’s all in your face, loud and foul-languaged sort of shenanigans you’ve come to expect from Boys, but overall on a much smaller scale than traditional Boys universe, which is to say these tales are more like offshoots from the story tree. Still fun, but looking forward to getting back to the main.
Also, the art changes in like the very last comic/last art of the second story so weirdly and abruptly and not as an improvement, and makes Wee lad look completely different among other things. Get Some, but then go back to the origins.

​Graham Masterton has long been one of my all-time favorite genre authors. Though admittedly I’ve not followed his recent work too closely; the man began veering into detective stories, worse yet detective series and so my interest ebbed accordingly. But this novel promises such exciting things – cults, cannibals, subterranean terrors – that it seemed like the right choice to check out if only to see if Masterton still got it. And surprise, surprise, he definitely still does. Way to age properly, like some sort of nightmare wine.
This is actually one of his detective series novels, from somewhere in the middle it seems, and I didn’t even care. The way the book is structured, it doesn’t really seem to require any prior knowledge of this world going in. There are two detectives, a Muslim woman and a white (I think? Is it ever specified?) man in England who headline the team of investigators assigned to a terrifying series of brutal murders. To uncover the truth, they’ll have to descend into the world below the streets of London, the world of abandoned metro tracks and forgotten secrets.
I love that for a book setting, one of my favorite books is set below London’s streets. The cannibal thing…well, it’s pretty brutal even among the famous cannibal fiction. Masterton is certain to remind you throughout this book time and again that though he may be branching out with detective aspect, he is still very much a teller of terrors and a whisperer of visceral nightmares.
There are other things here that are very much Masterton of old, including a killer backstory with a Nazi connection no less and fascinating esoteric religion/mythology angle. And overall, this is just pure fun. Gory AF, but lots of fun.
The writing is dynamic, the characters are likable or interesting or both, Masterton even proves his hip and woke status here and there (way to stay current), and the story is genuinely entertaining. Despite being over 400 pages, it speeds by too. Don’t know why I stayed away from these books for so long. Lesson learned. Fans of the Masterton of old, rejoice, the man is still fun to read. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley.