The Hell-Hound of the Baskervilles (Warlock Holmes #2) 4.5Stars

This review is written with a GPL 4.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at WordPress & Blogspot by Bookstooge’s Exalted Permission

Title: The Hell-Hound of the Baskervilles
Series: Warlock Holmes #2
Author: Gabriel Denning
Rating: 4.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Fantasy Parody
Pages: 251
Words: 91K

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In the previous book, A Study in Brimstone, the book ends with Moriarty having possessed Holmes’ body and about to send a fireball at Watson to kill him. This book starts after that point.

Watson knew something was off with Holmes, so he poisoned his tea, shot him in the chest 4 or 6 times and then kicked the fireball back into his face, thus effectively killing Holmes’ body and hopefully displacing Moriarty. Now Watson, not sure that Holmes is actually dead, has to keep the corpse a secret while filling the place with fresh flowers every day to hide the smell of rotting corpse.

Thankfully, a case comes along that Watson can solve on his own AND has the side effect of bringing Holmes fully back to life, just not of restoring his body though. So for the whole book Holmes is in a state of corpsicle’ness that is very slowly healing. Great stuff!

Once again, familiarity with the Sherlock Holmes canon of stories will make for a fuller, richer and more enjoyable read, mainly because you’ll get just how the author is japing at the originals. Making fun of something is much more satisfying if you know WHAT is being made fun of after all.

The humor is once again right up my alley. In the second story, “Silver Blaze: Murder Horse”, Holmes is trying to get addicted to gambling so he’ll have another connection to the common man. Of course, the horse he bets on goes missing and he has to solve the case or else he can’t get addicted to gambling. In the process, he magically teraports in several dead horse corpses to the flat. I was laughing my head off and my stomach hurt. It was fantastic!

The first four stories were short stories and just like the real canon, The Hell-Hound of the Baskervilles is a novella, so it takes up the majority of the book. We find out a lot about Warlock Holmes’ origins and I must admit, the humor just wasn’t there. It was a very grim story and while Denning did try to lighten things up (Foofy the Hell-hound anyone?), there just wasn’t that bust a gut laughing experience I was hoping for. And the ending is yet another “Oh no, what have I done?” kind of thing as Watson realizes that maybe Moriarty isn’t actually gone.

I really enjoyed this and tore through it in two evenings. If rotting corpses and horse corpsicles don’t make you laugh though, you might want to avoid this series.

★★★★✬

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From the Publisher & Table of Contents

Click to Open

• The adventure of the blackened beryls

• Silver Blaze: murder horse

• The reigateway to another world

• The adventure of the solitary tricyclist

• The hell-hound of the Baskervilles

The game’s afoot once more as Holmes and Watson face off against Moriarty’s gang, the Pinkertons, flesh-eating horses, a parliament of imps, boredom, Surrey, a disappointing butler demon, a succubus, a wicked lord, an overly-Canadian lord, a tricycle-fight to the death and the dreaded Pumpcrow. Oh, and a hell hound, one assumes.

Fear - MTG 4E

With all those skulls, that is Where Angels Fear to Tread.
ba dum tish! Thank you, thank you, I’ll be here all week….
….and that’s a threat you should Fear!

Book Recommendations II

Please read the Intro Post if you haven’t already. It explains pretty much everything (except how to use your microwave. Nobody can explain that!) Given how many responses I got from the Get-Go, my plans to collect responses over several months fell by the wayside. I’m able to start right away! That makes me pretty happy.

Recommendations & Responses

Beaton recommended Murtagh by Christopher Paolini. Now, I have read the previous books in the Inheritance Cycle, but I’d rather cut out my eyeballs with a pickle than read another book by Paolini. But just to be clear, in case you missed that subtle context, that is a N-O-.

Snapdragon recommended Merlin: The Lost Years. She was upfront that it was Young Adult. So I gave it an extra 5 seconds of thought but decided that I just wasn’t up to facing YA at this point in my life. So no-go.

Lashaan recommended the comic book Batman/The Shadow: The Murder Geniuses. Given my penchant for reading the ultra-pulpy, ultra-awesome Shadow novels, this was a no brainer. YES!

Chartreuse Flag Hall of Shame

Now we come to the S-A-D part of these Book Recommendations posts. The part where someone has recommended something so egregious, so outlandish, so beyond the pale of good taste and common decency that I am forced to respond with the Nuclear Option. No, not banning them from my blog, but something even worse. I give them the shameful Chartreuse Flag. This flag of infamy will affect future generations and possibly destroy worlds. It’s that bad.

And Jennifer Mugrage has more than earned it. She not only earned it, she brought three shovels, one for each hand and a one for her mouth, to dig her own grave. She had the unmitigated gall to suggest I read a Miss Marple Mystery, knowing how I feel about them. For those who don’t know, Miss Marple is a small town busy body who sticks her nose where it doesn’t belong and solves crimes, without even being a real part of the story. She’s almost as bad as Poirot.

The Most Important Part

Recommend me some more books!!!! Leave a comment with your recommendation of books you think I should respond to. I have the list of all the recommendations so far, so don’t you worry, I’ll be getting to them all eventually. And I had a lot of fun doing this 🙂

• Book Recommendations I

Marvel Champions: The Playening II

Bookstooge MacLeod, also known as the Immortal Lowlander, once again assembled his Hero’s deck to face the villainous Rhino!

Knowing that being all schemey/weemey wasn’t his thing, The Lowlander chose She-Hulk to do some serious face bashing!

With the help of Aggression cards like Relentless Assault, which took out a minion AND damaged the Rhino enough to kill his first iteration, things were looking pretty good.

Finally, with the help of 2 Tac Teams, I simply sniped Rhino down to 3 health and beat him to death with one final attack by She-Hulk. It was a brutal slugfest with almost no worrying about scheming. She-Hulk pretty much stayed in hero form so the Rhino had no time to scheme.

The downside was that she was down to 1 health by the end and I gambled everything on the final draw of the villain deck being a flop. To be honest, I got lucky.

This took me a while but mainly because a lot of the cards were new to me and I had to read them and figure out how they worked together. I plan on using the same deck next month and hoping to have a slightly different game with less immediate face bashing. I’d like to experiment using some scheme thwarting. But until then, remember:

There Can Be…..
…..Only None!

Book Haul of Misery I

I just opened this last night. It has sat unopened on my bookshelf for the last 5 years. Misery.

Four score and ten months ago, I began a Journey of Misery the likes of which I hope never to repeat. Sit down, be welcomed Stranger, to my cozy camp fire and I will relate the first part (of three) of my Journey of Misery.

Eons ago, in the vast misty days of yore, Lord Larry did announce that Vault Books would be releasing his Grimnoir Trilogy in a special leatherbound edition. This was broadcast throughout the land in the middle of 2017, The initial announcement by Vault Books did proclaim that this trilogy would be released on a set schedule with the first book, Hard Magic, to be released in the summer of 2017. At some point that was retconned with no notice to read “Hard Magic will be released in 2018”.

For unknown reasons, and with no updates, the first book was not released until mid 2019, two YEARS after it was supposed to be. And even that was because I, along with others, went and bugged Correia on his website, on twitter and on facebook. All we all really wanted were some updates and reasons for the delay and we got bupkiss.

2 Years Late

With this being two years late, or even just one year if you’re going by the retcon data at Vault Books, I was expecting to get all three of my books (I had ordered the numbered bundle, and I was the Incredible #98) at once. Oh, I was so naive. I received Hard Magic, and Hard Magic alone.

By this point I didn’t know if I would ever get the next two books, so I did not open the package. Like the picture at the top states, I waited 5 years to open this. And last night was the night. I will be showcasing what I paid for all those years ago.

Dust cover. Very nice looking.

The Actual Cover.

The Inside Page.

Besides my eyes, this is one more reason why I buy ebooks now. They are either available or they are not. There is no delay and no stony silence about where your money went.

Thankyou Stranger, for sitting down with me and listening to my opening ramble, I sure do appreciate it. What’s that? You have to leave for work now? Sure, I understand. But I’ll be here next Friday too, with part two of this tale of woe and misery, if you think you can bear it.

The Arms Deal (Groo the Wanderer #31) 3.5Stars

This review is written with a GPL 4.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at WordPress & Blogspot, by Bookstooge’s Exalted Permission

Title: The Arms Deal
Series: Groo the Wanderer #31
Author: Sergio Aragones
Rating: 3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Comics
Pages: 23
Words: 2K

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Ahhh, Groo. Sometimes when he tries to do the right thing he completely ruins everything, for everybody. Then you have comics like this where he pretty much lets well enough alone and Fate takes a hand and dishes out punishment to those who deserve it, through Groo 🙂

Groo’s lack of math skills are really shown here, whether’s counting thousands of kopins or fighting people, once he has to count above one, he’s lost. It still all works out for the best in the end though 😀

★★★✬☆

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From Bookstooge.blog

Groo has plenty of money from the previous comic. Pal and Drumm cheat him out of it with bad weapons. Only for Groo to be so dumb as to make his money back but also to get another whole load of weapons. And he sells them all, makes tons of money AND gets to fight both armies at the end.

• All of My “Groo the Wanderer” Reviews

The Infinite and the Divine (Warhammer 40K: Necrons) 3.5Stars

This review is written with a GPL 4.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at WordPress & Blogspot by Bookstooge’s Exalted Permission

Title: The Infinite and the Divine
Series: Warhammer 40K: Necrons
Author: Robert Rath
Rating: 3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: SF
Pages: 339
Words: 112K

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This book came across my radar back in January, when Mark Reviewed It. It deals with two Necrons, Trazyn the Infinite and Orikan the Divine, hence the title of the book.

Oh yes, I plan to interject various Magic the Gathering cards from the Warhammer Commander set from 2022. Prepare yourselves accordingly!

They have always been enemies, even when they were still flesh and the Bio-Transference Ceremony that turned the entire Necrontyr race into Immortal Metal Necrons hasn’t stopped that rivalry.

They have found a Magical Boojum that one wants to hoard and the other wants to investigate. So for the next 10,000 years they fight and backstab and occasionally work together to figure out just what this Magical Boojum is. Well, bad news guys. It was a trap all along! The Necrons were tricked by a race called the C’Tan, godlike beings, who ate their souls when they turned the Necrontyr into the Necrons. Pretty sneaky. Well, the Necrons weren’t too happy about that and did their best to wipe out the C’Tan. They did a pretty good job, except they didn’t quite destroy them all. Those they couldn’t destroy they put into Shards, basically permanent prison. One Shard didn’t take this sitting down and decided to do something and eventually break free. Which is what this Magical Boojum does. The C’Tan breaks free, Orikan and Trazyn are forced to work together to destroy it and the book ends with both Necrons having a piece of a sub-shard which they are convinced they can handle, secretly and on their own. Sigh.

While not as bad as Farsight, this book still does rely on the reader having some knowledge of the Warhammer 40K universe. Too much in my opinion. You have to know that the space elves destroyed their society by creating one of the Chaos Gods. You have to know that the C’Tan forced the Necrontyr into becoming the Necrons. You have to have heard of the Horus Heresy and understand that it was a civil war in the human empire. There is an instance of the Empire of Mankind performing an Exterminatus on the planet that the Magical Boojum is hidden on, but the author does a pretty good job of explaining that so you aren’t left flailing, trying to figure out what it is.

Rath also does an excellent job of showing how time is so different for a race that is functionally immortal. The middle section of the book encompasses just over 8,000 years and Rath has both characters look up and realize 2,000 years have passed while they’ve been doing whatever. The “time” aspect was handled very well.

The end of the book is one massive battle that starts as a betrayal between Orikan and Trazyn and then spirals out of control as they realize that a C’Tan has tricked them both. They throw everything they have against him and barely make it out. Rath throws in tons of Necron military types to the mix and eventually my eyes just glazed over and I read it all as “then another Necron did something something something”.

Overall, I enjoyed this and found out a lot about the Necrons, but that wouldn’t have happened without input from Mark. I was doing a buddy-read with Dave and he had just as many questions as I did. The blind leading the blind as it were.

One the plus side, I got to showcase a bunch of Magic Cards, so that’s a big plus, hahahahaa.

★★★✬☆

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From TVTropes.com

Synopsis – click to open

the novel follows two Necron lords, Trazyn the Infinite, a collector of ancient artifacts, and Orikan the Diviner, a powerful chronomancer. Trazyn and Orikan have been enemies for millennia, but when Orikan steals the Astrarium Mysterios from Trazyn’s collection, believing it to be the key to unlocking an ancient power, the two are dragged into direct conflict. Over the course of ten thousand years, they go from competing over ownership of the Mysterios, to working together to unlock its secrets, to stabbing each other in the back over it. Their feud reshapes timelines, dooms planets, and threatens to either destroy or restore the entire Necron race.