Works updated

I’ve been keeping myself busy and out of trouble thanks to the Clarion West Write-a-Thon, which I will be posting about very soon. I’ve also been reviewing everything I can get my hands on for The Coast, Halifax’s weekly alternative paper. Usually I review comics and weird documentaries, but lately I’ve been reading enough new book releases to review those. Especially of interest to genre fans would be my review of Lauren Beuke’s latest, The Shining Girls, and Mark Z. Danielewski’s gothic horror The Fifty Year Sword. Earlier in the year I also reviewed Hugh Howey’s Wool omnibus, but that review only ever appeared in print and not online. Here it is for posterity:

The Wool Omnibus is a collection of post-apocalyptic novellas originally published as a series of e-books. Thanks to its popularity among sci-fi fans the series became a hit and has become a success story not only for self-publishing but e-books as well. The story takes place in Silo 18, a humongous underground bunker that reaches deep into the earth. Anyone who causes trouble is sent outside to die on the surface. Wool is a fun read and Howey squeezes the underground setting for maximum claustrophobia. But even though it’s written well it’s hard not to feel like there was a missed opportunity. Wool may be part of the vanguard when it comes to online publishing, but story-wise it covers a lot of the same ground as other post-apocalyptic novels. You end up wishing that the plot was as ground breaking as the format.