Book Review: Predator: If It Bleeds

Review Written by Casey Douglass

I found myself in the mood for some Yautja-fueled, violent entertainment a few weeks ago, so when Titan Books’ Predator: If It Bleeds was suggested in my Amazon recommendations, it didn’t take much for me to buy it. It’s a collection of sixteen stories from some of the authors you’ll already likely be familiar with if you’ve read any of the various Alien/Predator comics and novels over the years, authors such as Tim Lebbon, John Shirley, Kevin J. Anderson, S.D Perry and Steve Perry.

Many of the tales in Predator: If It Bleeds drop the Yautja into a novel period of human history, pitting the humans of that time against the alien hunter. Other stories are set in the harsh, sci-fi future that I personally prefer, but that’s not to say that the historical ones weren’t fun. The best of these, in my opinion, came from Larry Correia and is called Three Sparks. It is set in Samurai era Japan, and it answers the question: How would a samurai fare against a Yautja warrior? I think what makes this one particularly enjoyable is the craftiness of the main character, the stubborn prejudices of the people in charge, and the way that the skirmishes with the Yautja play-out.

Another tale that stands out for me is Drug War by Bryan Thomas Schmidt and Holly Roberds. It reacquaints us with two of the characters from Predator 2: Mike Harrigan and Garber (Adam Baldwin’s left-hand-man to Gary Busey’s Peter Keys). It takes place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, some years after the events of the second film. I felt it was really nice to see Harrigan and Garber cross paths again, especially in such a different setting when compared to L.A. As you might expect, another guest pops-up in their reunion, causing them both to have to face the monster of their past once again.

Of the tales set in the future, I think Jonathan Maberry’s Gameworld is my favourite. Set among “the rocks”, the asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars, Gameworld is a place where all kinds sketchy things can take place. In the words of the story: “If you wanted to bet on it, have sex with it, eat it, or kill it, Chiba could set it up.” (Chiba being the mastermind trillionaire who created it). The main thing Chiba has a penchant for, is fights between all manner of creatures, human, animal, and transgenic mixtures of the two. A tiger with snake jaws and puffer fish toxin being just one example. I’m sure you can guess who, or what, the hapless protagonist (not Chiba) of this tale ends up having to face. This story was such good fun.

Another future-based tale that I found a lot of enjoyment in was Kevin J. Anderson’s Indigenous Species. Set on a colony planet racked with hardship, that happens to be called Hardscrabble, the story sees the settlers struggling against the local environment and the local giant, vicious beasts called gruzzlys. These creatures are a menace to the colonists and their livestock, and, wouldn’t you know it, a certain mask-wearing, cloaking race of aliens think that the creatures make for excellent trophies. This doesn’t necessarily solve the colonists’ problem, but gives them one more thing to worry about. I loved the other-worldly setting of this story, and the double dose of being alone on a strange planet on the one hand, and alone, against various threats on top of this. A double heap of trouble, you might say.

Even though I’ve only mentioned four stories in any depth, the others were all well worth a read. The only ones that I didn’t really click with were those in settings that didn’t really interest me, but even these often managed to have something to keep me reading. I also enjoyed the stories that made good use of switching between the human and Yautja points of view, such as Steve Perry’s Rematch and S.D Perry’s Skeld’s Keep. This gives the reader an excellent insight into what’s going on in the Yautja’s alien brain, when plans go wrong, or they find themselves facing a heavy defeat.

If you fancy reading some short Predator-based tales, stories that flit through history and set some of the human world’s various warriors against the stealthy hunters, Predator: If it Bleeds is a collection of stories that you should definitely take a look at.

Book Title: Predator: If It Bleeds

Book Author: Anthology

Publisher: Titan Books

Released: 17 Oct 2017

ISBN: 9781785655401

Current Price: £7.39 (paperback) / £3.99 (Kindle) (As of Amazon.co.uk on 12th Oct 2020)

Book Review: Aliens: Phalanx

Book Review: Aliens: Phalanx

Review by Casey Douglass

One of the things that drives me to stories that feature xenomorphs is that they often mix science fiction and horror. When I read the blurb for Scott Sigler’s Aliens: Phalanx, I was almost put off by the word “medieval” in the description. My first reaction was that it didn’t sound like it was for me. My love for anything starring a xenomorph eventually burst through that initial resistance, and I purchased the book. Were my own personal misgivings proven correct, or was I blown away like a face-hugger disintegrating in pulse-rifle fire? Read on to find out.

The events in Aliens: Phalanx take place on Ataegina, a rugged continent of mountains and ravines. The inhabitants have been slaughtered by black-husked ‘demons’, the survivors driven to living in subterranean mountain keeps. People don’t venture above ground often, but the ones that do, the Runners, race between the various holds to trade goods. These mainly take the form of various essential medicines, but this doesn't stop them bringing a variety of luxury items too.

The book follows Ahiliyah, a young woman who is one such runner, as she serves Lemeth Hold and tries to earn her keep. She also wants to become a warrior, but in Lemeth Hold, women aren't warriors. She runs with two others, the large framed warrior-in-training Brandun, and a weaselly little gobshite called Creen. Brandun is a warrior-in-training and is already blessed with a larger frame than is expected for someone of his age. He is also a little slow at times, which Creen loves to point out to him by calling him “dumbdun”. Creen is actually the comic-relief in many ways, coming out with many cruel words but also displaying vulgar humour in almost equal measure. It is this trio that the reader gets to know during the course of the book, how their already limited world becomes yet more dangerous, as the demons start to eradicate the last traces of humanity in Ataegina.

The societal landscape, the relationships between the various holds, plays an integral part in the pressures that fall on the dwindling people. Due to the nature of the threat from the demons outside, what doesn’t naturally grow in one hold often ends up being an urgent item for another. There are a number of illnesses that can afflict people. Imbid flowers grow abundantly in Lemeth Hold, and Imbid Soup is the cure for something called Weakling Disease. If another hold is suffering from such a disease, runners from Lemeth will trade Imbid flowers for something that they might need to treat their own hold’s different outbreak of illness. Add into this the usual way that humans become greedy, paranoid and even religious zealots, and the politics between holds becomes a true driving force, and often hindrance, to them actually working together.

When the humans clash with the demons, the weapons they have at hand are knives, spears and shields. On my first thoughts about this notion, I think I was guilty of thinking “How the hell are they going to fight them with spears?” in a “Pfft” kind attitude. It didn’t take too long to think the exact same question with a more curious “How will they?” frame of mind. Having finished the book, I didn’t realise that the answer could be so exhilarating. Just as in the films, if you go from the pulse-rifles of Aliens to the cleavers and machetes of Alien3, there’s an exhilaration to be found in that.

The holds themselves are also aptly suited to this kind of horror. The humans are trying to shut out the danger, but by doing so, they have to live claustrophobic and grim lives. They use strangely glowing water in glow-pipe plumbing to light their dark corridors, harvest plants and make use of anything that sits within their “safe” realm. When things take a turn for the worst - as you’d expect they would in a tale like this – these corridors turn from claustrophobic passageways into tunnels of death. I’m not sure what is more scary, meeting a xenomorph on open ground and seeing it dart at you from hundreds of yards away, or hearing one coming towards you along a dark tunnel. Probably the latter...

Aliens: Phalanx is a very satisfying tale. We get to see all three of the runners rise-up in their hold, fighting against prejudice, fear and politics, even sometimes against each other. They all become nicely fleshed out characters with more about them than their more obvious traits. They all grow as people too, and their relationship changes and strengthens as events unfold. It was nice to see a society that viewed the xenomorphs in a different way, as demons and semi-supernatural rather than naïve humans stumbling across them on a spaceship-based jaunt across the galaxy. The story itself escalates in a way that any xenomorph fan will enjoy, and the culmination at the end is the kind that sets the previous events in a slightly different frame, which I thoroughly appreciated. Aliens: Phalanx is a brilliant story, and I’m very glad that I decided to give it a try.

Book Title: Aliens: Phalanx

Book Author: Scott Sigler

Publisher: Titan Books

Released: 25 Feb 2020

Price: £7.99 paperback / £4.74 Kindle (currently)

ISBN: 9781789094015

Dark Book Review: Alien: Prototype

Dark Book Review: Alien: Prototype

Review by Casey Douglass

I seem to devour books set in the Alien universe faster than almost any other story. There’s just something about the bleak evil corporation mentality, the vast distances and the Xenomorph, a creature that still makes me shiver at how cool it damn well is. Titan Books has a whole host of novels that fill in gaps in the Alien chronology and they’re all well worth a read if you’re an Alien fan. Tim Waggoner’s Alien: Prototype is the latest release, and I recently treated myself to the Kindle edition with some left over Xmas money.

Alien: Prototype opens with some deep-space piracy. Tamar Prather is a spy who has been tasked with hanging around unsavoury types, the kind that attack and ransack other spacecraft. She is there because Venture, a Weyland-Yutani competitor, is always on the look out for valuable swag that can give it an edge against the other mega-corporations. And wouldn’t you know it, Tamar steals a very precious cargo. Ovoid. Glistening. You get the picture. This “prize” ends up at The Lodge, Venture’s facility on a planet called Jericho 3. The arrival of the egg precipitates events, much like one of those naughty chaos butterflies, but whipping up its own kind of dark hurricane.

The egg falls into the hands of Dr Gagnon, the stereotypical “mad scientist” type who becomes fascinated with the organism it contains. He also has no real morals holding him back from certain kinds of experiments, the kind that don’t often end well. He ends up with a Xenomorph, but there are complications. It’s not the same as the regular variety of Xeno, this one has picked up an extra ingredient in its mixture, one that makes it even deadlier than the normal kind. I know it’s a bit difficult to imagine how a creature like this could be any more dangerous. Maybe the mental image of a great white shark with a machine gun will serve here. Nope, this Xeno is far more dangerous than that!

As with any decent Alien tale, this Xeno is faced by people who are determined to stop it running amok. Zula Hendricks is an ex-Colonial Marine who has turned her hand to training a more civilian kind of security force, and it is her group of wet-behind-the-ears recruits that have to swallow their fear and face something truly dangerous, rather than the various neutered experiences they have received in their training to date. I won’t say much more as I really don’t want to spoil the sense of discovery you’ll get if you decide to read the book.

Alien: Prototype is a fun, relatively fast-paced book, with so many of the elements that I enjoy in an Alien novel. There is greed, some synthetic humans, and a bit of creature worship, along with a variety of encounters and combat situations that keep the interest. There are the typical scenes where the unaware get jumped by the Xeno, and there are scenes where the “very much aware” clash with it in desperate combat. There is some novel use of technology at times, and the “extra danger” this Xenomorph embodies is a really nice touch to add a splash of novelty to proceedings.

If you enjoyed any of the other Titan Books novels, such as Out of the Shadows or The Cold Forge, I think you’ll enjoy Alien: Prototype. If you’ve yet to dip into this series of novels, but love the Alien universe, I also think you’ll enjoy this book.

(Alien: Prototype takes place between the Alien: Isolation book and the Aliens: Resistance comic series.)

Book Title: Alien: Prototype

Book Author: Tim Waggoner

Publisher: Titan Books
Published: October 2019

ISBN: 9781789090918

RRP: $8.99 (paperback)

Dark Book Review: Nod

Dark Book Review: Nod

Review written by Casey Douglass

As a sufferer of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with sleep. The hate part is that it no longer refreshes me as it used to, the love aspect comes from it sucking eight or more hours out of my day, hours that I’d have no idea what to do with, and bugger all energy to do it with. When browsing the Kindle Store a week ago, I saw that Adrian Barnes’ Nod was on offer for 99p. I read the blurb (below) and promptly bought it.

Dawn breaks over Vancouver and no-one in the world has slept the night before, or almost no-one. A few people, perhaps one in ten thousand can still sleep, and they've all shared the same golden dream. A handful of children still sleep as well, but what they're dreaming remains a mystery. After six days of absolute sleep deprivation, psychosis will set in. After four weeks, the body will die. In the interim, panic ensues and a bizarre new world arises in which those previously on the fringes of society take the lead. One couple experience a lifetime in a week as he continues to sleep, she begins to disintegrate before him, and the new world swallows the old one whole...

Paul is a lover of words, an author and etymological explorer who likes nothing more than to spend time alone away from most other people, studiously writing and quietly living his life. His latest project is a book about the history of sidetracked words, words that have seen their use changed or forgotten. He thinks about calling it Nod in reference to the biblical tale of Cain being sent there when he was expelled from Adam’s domain. He lives with his partner Tanya, and they carve out the best life they can. Then the world stops sleeping, and the tiny differences between them soon open up into breezy gulfs, as she succumbs to madness from lack of sleep and he has to watch it happen.

I was impressed with the way Nod showed the world going to hell, when something as everyday as sleep is taken out of the equation. From the experts on TV spouting guesses and opinions as fact (hmm, wonder what that reminds me of), to humanities chimp-mind emerging as panic takes over, it all seems very feasible. People turn on each other, power and water supply goes the way of the dodo, and psychopaths rule. The sleeper vs non-sleeper thing also gives rise to some great detail, such as people who sleep having to pretend that they can’t, or risk being attacked. This is a situation Paul soon finds himself in, Tanya having to use make-up to blacken the bags under his eyes.

Alongside the scenes of society dozily tearing itself to shreds, there is all the weirdness that goes along with it, particularly in relation to Paul’s book Nod. Let me put it this way, the wrong person sees it and three realities end up colliding, the remembered “normal” reality, the current sleep-deprived, end of the world one, and the reality of Nod and its disciples. Paul, understandably, finds his mind flitting between all three, particularly when he is running at the edge of exhaustion.

There is more to the narrative than I’ve revealed above but I really wanted to save some things for the reader to discover if they decide to read Nod (the real book, not Paul’s inadvertent world-builder). It was a supremely easy read, the more trippy/reality-bending elements not really slowing things down or making me pause to scratch my head. If you are a fan of post-apocalyptic fiction, maybe someone who enjoys the kind where the humans are the biggest threat rather than zombies, some kind of plague, or whatever, Nod might just be the book for you. I give Nod 4/5, it was a very enjoyable read and it’s a book I’d happily recommend.

Nod Book Cover © Copyright Titan Books

Book Title: Nod

Author: Adrian Barnes

Publisher: Titan Books

ISBN: 9781783298228

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Dark Book Review - Alien: Invasion (The Rage War #2)

If you are a fan of the Alien/Predator universe, you might be interested in my review of Tim Lebbon's next installment in the Rage War book series: Alien: Invasion. If you have yet to hear about it, there is a link in the first paragraph proper of the review that will take you to my review of the first book in the series: Predator: Incursion. Click here to go to Geek Syndicate and have a read.

Alien: Invasion cover Image © Copyright Titan Books

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Dark Review - Predator: Incursion (The Rage War #1)

I review the first in a new trilogy of books set in the Alien and Predator universe on Geek Syndicate. Predator: Incursion starts things off with a fun dose of creature mayhem and human peril. Click here to read my full review.

Book Cover Image © Copyright Titan Books

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Dark Book Review - The Art and Making of Hannibal: The Television Series

I take a look at The Art and Making of Hannibal: The Television Series, a fantastic book that gives great behind the scenes insight into one of the darkest and most interesting TV series in a long time. You can read my full review on Geek Syndicate here.

 Image © NBCUniversal Media LLC. And Titan Books

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Dark Book Review - The Art and Making of Penny Dreadful

Penny Dreadful is one of my favourite series, so when the chance to review The Art and Making of Penny Dreadful came up, I jumped on it. You can read the result on Geek Syndicate here.

Image © Copyright /Titan Books / SHOWTIME Networks Inc.

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