David C. Stewart

Marvelous March – Week 4

This post is part of a year long effort of monthly themes – a focus to point my attention at each month that revolves around either a culture I’d like to learn more about or a piece of popular culture that I’m in the mood for or simply love. This idea stemmed from the popular…

Marvelous March – Week 3

Logan This movie is what can happen when you pry the reins of the X-Men from Bryan Singer’s perverted, slimy fingers. This might be one of the best Marvel movies outside of the MCU, in all honesty. It is so different from everything else in the Fox line-up. Gone are cheesy action scenes, overblown dialogue,…

Marvelous March – Week 2

Marvelous March – Week 1

Final Flanuary – A Month of Final Fantasy

Bone Ships, RJ Barker

In an era where almost every new fantasy book is about a band of Dungeons and Dragons style adventurers bounding around a fully-built and populated world, along comes RJ Barker to completely buck this welcome trend and write a fantasy book that is also a high seas adventure in the vein of Patrick O’Brian and Dudley Pope but also…

Kingshold, D.P. Woolliscraft

Kingshold is a difficult book for me to review. On paper, this book has everything I might want from a political fantasy – it’s tinged with humor and features some common but welcome fantasy tropes. The cover is some of the most beautiful fantasy artwork I have ever seen, and were I to see this…

Faithless, Graham Austin-King

There is no shortage of blacksmithing in fantasy. From the very beginning, we had dwarves pounding mithril in the ancient Mines of Moria, and after Tolkien, it is almost rare to find a fantasy novel without some type of weapon-smithing or armor-forging. But something being common does not mean that it is well-told nor interesting….

Playing FFXIV in 2019 (why you should do it, too)

I have had an on-again/off-again love affair with Final Fantasy XIV since its relaunch back in 2013. I started playing it when it was a PS3 game, transitioned to PS4 with the Heavensward expansion, and then to the PC with the Stormblood expansion. I had no where to transition to with the Shadowbringers expansion, but…

Kings of Paradise, Richard Nell

Kings of Paradise begins unlike any book I have ever read. I young boy sits before a fire, roasting parts of a human child over a fire so that he might cannibalize the dead remains. This circumstantial cannibal is Ruka, and he is one of the most complicated and intriguing characters I have ever read…

The Poppy War, R.F. Kuang

Upon finishing The Poppy War, I had two very pressing questions: Why was it called The Poppy War, and why does the cover show, presumably, its main character wielding a bow when she never even touches one within the book’s pages? I was not questioning the book’s plot, it’s quite solid, nor the characters, which are…

City of Kings, Rob J. Hayes

Originally posted over at Fantasy Hive One of the first fantasy books I ever read was David Gemmell’s Legend. Legend is the story of a siege and a retired hero who comes down from his mountain retreat to sacrifice his life to hold that siege. It’s a titanic book, even at a mere 345 pages,…