Bleeding Hearts 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: Bleeding Hearts
Series: ----------
Editor: Alfred Hitchcock
Rating: 3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Crime Fiction
Pages: 171
Words: 67K
Publish: 1974

Man, engaging stories here.

We start off with a story, The Plays the Thing, about a thespian who finally has his big chance on Broadway to play Hamlet. But he’s gone off the deep end and kills his leading lady and uses her skull in the scene where Hamlet is talking about “Alas, poor Yorick!”. He left her body in a traveling trunk. What a nutjob eh?

The next story that stood out to me was The Sensitive Juror. By the end it strained credulity, as the entire story was based on the murderer being able to psychically manipulate a woman on each jury to be sympathetic to him. Even without that little reveal at the at, it was obvious where this story was going, as the current narrator (the sensitive juror) relates the murder trial, which we then re-tread by following her down the almost exact same path. It was just creepy.

Then we had another Fat Jow story, Fat Jow and Chance. This wasn’t so much a mystery as just a community coming together to right a wrong that the Law didn’t recognize as a wrong. It decided me on looking into the Fat Jow stories as an entity unto themselves. Which figures, because it turns out that they were only written for the Alfred Hitchcock collections and I couldn’t even find out any info on the author Robert Alan Blair. Makes me wonder if he was a “house author” and some poor schlub just wrote several Fat Jow stories to pad things out. Oh well.

I like when a story totally subverts your expectations, like how M. Night Shyamalan would put twists into his movies. Well, that happens with Motive: Another Woman in a big way. The story starts out describing a marriage that almost fell apart due to the husband’s philandering. He and his wife work things out and he gets back on the straight and narrow, for 5 years. Then he starts going out to the movies every Sunday evening and his wife doesn’t go with him because the crowded theatre gave her headaches. One day she overhears her husband talking about seeing a young Mrs Bennet the other night. The woman realizes her husband has gone back to his philandering ways, so she plans out a home invasion cover story where she “accidentally” kills her husband thinking he is a burglar. Only for the story to end with her seeing the title of the latest movie at the theatre “The Young Mrs Bennett”. And it just ends. We’re left to imagine what the woman is thinking and feeling, realizing her husband was still staying faithful to her and that she had just murdered him.

I think this is going to be my new “format” for these Hitchcock collections. Just talk about 3-4 stories and let that be the review. Unless I am feeling funny and write a post to amuse myself with my trademark wit and wonder ;-)

★★★✬☆

Table of Contents:

Introduction by Alfred Hitchcock

THE PLAY’S THE THING by Robert Bloch

THE EXECUTIONER by H. A. DeRosso

MAN ON A LEASH by Jack Ritchie

THE DEEP SIX (Novelette) by Richard Hardwick

HIDDEN TIGER by Michael Brett

THE SENSITIVE JUROR by Richard Deming

FAT JOW AND CHANCE by Robert Alan Blair

SLAY THE WICKED (Novelette) by Frank Sisk

INTO THE MORGUE by Hal Ellson

I’LL BE LOVING YOU by Fletcher Flora

MOTIVE: ANOTHER WOMAN by Donald Honig

THE BROTHERHOOD by Theodore Mathieson

THE FINAL REEL by John Lutz

CHIMPS AIN’T CHAMPS by Talmage Powell

• All of My “Alfred Hitchcock” Reviews

Hypnotic Specter - MTG 4E

 

I hated playing against this card. A flyer that made you discard from your hand. And discard at random too. That could really hurt sometimes. You had the perfect card but weren't ready to use it and then BAM, you have to discard it. Flying creatures weren't as ubiquitous as they are now, so Hypnotic Specter was a serious threat.

August '25 Roundup & Ramblings

 

Raw Data:

Novels - 22 ↑

Short Stories - 1 -

Manga/Graphic Novels - 0 ↓

Comics - 1 -

Average Rating - 3.10 ↑

Pages - 6484 ↑↑

Words - 2071 ↑↑

The Bad:

A Kiss Before Dying - 1.5stars of horribleness

See Them Die - 2stars of me stopping the 87th Precinct books

The Good:

A Wizard of Earthsea - 5stars of still good as ever!

Lord of the Isles - 4stars of re-reading'ness

Miscellaneous Posts:

• Hurkyl's Recall - MTG 4E
• [Art] The Summer Maiden
• Hurloon Minotaur - MTG 4E
• Hurricane - MTG 4E
• Hurr Jackal - MTG 4E

Personal:

I was off of work due to my eye, again. Thankfully, I am now back to work and everything is working as it should. 2 months of not working has not treated us well and thus I am actually happy to be back at work and earning money again. Bills don't magically disappear. And that is all I am going to say on that subject.

Because of the enforced time off, I read a massive amount. 24 book reviews made themselves right at home on the blog. I read almost twice as many books and I did read twice as many pages and words. Near the beginning of the month I began posting reviews on Saturdays because I realized what a tsunami of reviews was coming down the pipeline. I didn't want to end up 6 weeks ahead as 4 weeks is my limit. After that, I begin forgetting what I wrote in the review and can't intelligently respond to comments (some might say I don't anyway, but phooey to them! hahahahaha).

This past week was my return to work. Oh man, had I gotten soft. I did more walking on Tuesday-Thursday than I did in the previous two months combined. I woke up Friday (the day I was getting my eye injection) and my legs and lower back hurt and were stiff enough that I had to take some acetaminophen (tylenol) to get going. Thankfully, Monday is Labor Day, so I have that off. That means I only have to work 4 days this week and I have a feeling I'm going to hurt as bad by the end of this week as I was by the end of last. Getting back into fighting shape is going to be hard and brutal. At least my books aren't beating up on my this bad!

Plans for Next Month:

Work more, read less and desperately try to get the creative juices flowing again. 24 book reviews in one month just killed my creative side. I'd kill to be creative again.

Ghosts (Hell Divers #2) 2Stars

 

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: Ghosts
Series: Hell Divers #2
Author: Nicholas Smith
Rating: 2 of 5 Stars
Genre: SF
Pages: 247
Words: 82K
Publish: 2017

Yep, I’m done. There are times when mediocrity is even worse than badness. This is paint by numbers writing. No heart, no soul, no talent. I can’t think of a more damning review except to say that Smith needs to stop writing. And those fething jackasses who keep buying his books month after month need to learn what a good book actually is.

If readers won’t have standards, neither will writers. I condemn them both! I have nothing more to say.

★★☆☆☆

From the Publisher

Ten years ago, Hell Diver Xavier “X” Rodriguez fell to Earth. Those he left behind went on without him aboard the airship he once called home.
Michael Everheart -- the boy once known as Tin -- has grown into a man and the commander of Hell Diver Raptor Team. While Michael dives to help keep the Hive in the air, Captain Leon Jordan rules with an iron fist at the helm of the ship. But unrest stirs under his strict leadership as a prophecy of hope sweeps the lower decks.
When a mysterious distress signal calls the Hell Divers to the surface, Michael and his loyal team begin to uncover long-buried truths and the secrets Captain Jordan will do anything to keep. They dive so humanity survives… but will they survive the ultimate betrayal?

Shards of Honor (Vorkosigan Saga #1) 3Stars

 

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: Shards of Honor
Series: Vorkosigan Saga #1
Author: Lois Bujold
Rating: 3 of 5 Stars
Genre: SF
Pages: 222
Words: 80K
Publish: 1986

My eyes, my eyes, my manly eyes! Aaaaaaaahhhhhhhh……

I didn’t realize this was going to be a romance. Of course, romance fans would cry out that their delicate feelings had been manhandled by all the science fiction, so both camps should be unhappy. I HATE when authors like Bujold pull crap like this. I almost rage quit the first time “his long eye lashes” were mentioned. Even as I’m writing this review I’m getting upset.

Bloody expectations. If I had known this had female wish fulfillment elements (like Mack Bolan the Executioner is male wish fulfillment) I would have been prepared, as much as I could be anyway. I do not want to read a book where I am in a woman’s head as she’s thinking about some guy and all her feelin’z. Spare me!

The story is still decent and I do plan on reading more. BUT! I will be putting on my man armor when I go to read future books so any “romanz thoughtz” bounce off and don’t stab me in the back. And I’m bringing a gun to that knife fight.

Bookstooge's Man Armor Mark I

★★★☆☆

From Wikipedia

Cordelia Naismith, the captain of a Betan Astronomical Survey ship, is exploring a newly discovered planet when her base camp is attacked. While investigating, she is surprised by a soldier, hits her head on a rock, and awakens to find that, while most of her crew has escaped, she is marooned with an injured Betan ensign and Captain Lord Aral Vorkosigan of Barrayar, notorious as the "Butcher of Komarr", who has been left for dead by a treacherous rival. During their five-day hike to a secret Barrayaran cache, she finds Vorkosigan not at all the monster his reputation suggests, and she is strongly attracted to him.

When the trio reaches the base camp, Vorkosigan regains command of his crew. He returns to his ship with Cordelia and her crewman as his nominal prisoners. She meets Sergeant Bothari, a career soldier with mental problems which he controls through adherence to rules and an attachment to a strong commander—in this case, Vorkosigan.

Vorkosigan informs Cordelia that upon their arrival on Barrayar, she will be free to return to Beta Colony; however, he asks her to marry him and remain on Barrayar as Lady Vorkosigan. Before she can consider his request, the crew of her ship, who have returned against her orders, join forces with Vorkosigan's rivals to "rescue" her. Cordelia helps defeat the resulting mutiny before returning with her crew to Beta Colony. During her captivity, she realizes that the Barrayarans seized the planet because the system it is in provides a way to reach Escobar. Escobar is a rich system with many "wormhole" access points and thus control over a lot of interstellar trade.

The invasion of Escobar is led by Crown Prince Serg Vorbarra, the vicious son and heir of Emperor Ezar. Now a captain in the Betan Expeditionary Force, Cordelia goes to Escobar in command of a decoy ship that distracts the Barrayaran ships on picket duty at the wormhole exit so that transport ships can deliver a devastating new Betan weapon to the defenders. She is captured by the sadistic Admiral Vorrutyer, who orders Sergeant Bothari to rape her. Bothari refuses, calling her "Admiral Vorkosigan's prisoner". Vorrutyer, Vorkosigan's embittered ex-lover, decides to do the job himself. As she fills a profound psychological need of his, Bothari kills Vorrutyer before he can do anything. Vorkosigan, having heard Vorrutyer is holding Cordelia captive, comes to kill him himself, only to find the deed already done. He hides Cordelia and Bothari in his cabin. In disgrace, he has been assigned a minor role in the invasion under the watchful eye of Imperial Security Lieutenant Simon Illyan, who has a brain implant that gives him total recall of all he sees and hears. However, he is required to report only to the Emperor, so he does nothing when Vorkosigan concocts a story that Cordelia killed Vorrutyer and escaped.

The new weapons enable the Escobarans to drive the Barrayarans back with heavy losses. Crown Prince Serg and his flagship are lost, as are all officers senior to Vorkosigan, leaving him in charge. He commands his fleet's retreat under fire. Cordelia overhears one critical fact and deduces that the entire invasion was orchestrated by the dying Emperor to remove his unstable son (via an honorable death in battle) and discredit the war party in order to avert a civil war after his death. When Vorkosigan no longer needs to hide her in his cabin, she is placed in the brig. When the ship is attacked, Cordelia is injured when the violent maneuvers toss her around her cell.

Cordelia recovers in a prison camp on the same planet where she first met Vorkosigan. The camp inmates, mostly women, have been mistreated and in some cases raped by their captors. When Vorkosigan finds out, he summarily executes the commanding officer. Cordelia assumes command of the POWs by virtue of her rank and spends much of her time dealing directly with Vorkosigan. She informs him she knows the real reason for the Escobar campaign. She again rejects his marriage proposal because she sees what Barrayaran society does to people.

When the war ends, prisoners are exchanged. Vorkosigan has to deal with some uterine replicators – artificial wombs, each containing a fetus from a prisoner raped by a Barrayaran soldier; one of the fetuses is Bothari's. The Escobarans refuse to take them, so Vorkosigan arranges for their care and later adoption on Barrayar.

On her way back to Beta Colony, Cordelia is unable to convince a psychiatrist that her injuries are not the result of being tortured by Vorkosigan, and her fervent denials only make it seem she has been psychologically tampered with; she is suspected of being an unwitting Barrayaran mole. She fears that she will be interrogated using drugs and reveal damaging information about Vorkosigan.

She escapes to Barrayar and marries Vorkosigan. She also encounters Bothari, now one of Vorkosigan's father's personal guards and somewhat saner, thanks to better medical care. Bothari's daughter Elena is cared for by a local woman.

The dying Emperor Ezar Vorbarra wants Aral to become the regent to his grandson and heir, the four-year-old Prince Gregor Vorbarra. Aral at first refuses, but Cordelia convinces him to take the job.

Slave (Groo the Wanderer #43) 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: Slave
Series: Groo the Wanderer #43
Author: Sergio Aragones
Rating: 3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Comics
Pages: 24
Words: 2K
Publish: 1988

The misadventures occasioned by Granny Groo continue. Granny sells Groo into slavery and tells Rufferto (Groo’s dog) to guard Groo’s swords. Thus she gets rid of both Groo and Rufferto, gets some money and goes on her way unhindered.

There is a running gag (one among many) about Groo being called “mendicant” and going ballistic about it because he doesn’t know what it means but thinks it is an insult. Aragones leans HARD into that joke in the following panel. I laughed my head off:

Of course Groo and Rufferto (now Rufferto the Swordsdog!) are reunited. Considering Granny stole away, I am kind of hoping Aragones is done with her character for now and we get somebody new for Groo to interact with. We’ll see what future issues hold.

I thoroughly enjoyed this 24 page comic. I laughed, then I laughed some more and finally, I laughed even more. Aragones humor, while not exactly like mine, parallels it enough that he never fails to get a good chuckle from me. I always look forward to reading the Groo comic each month and I want to keep it that way. If I was in a weird mood, I could read 20 Groo comics in a row and have a Groo Month, but I know I would burn out and that is a fate I want to avoid at all costs.

★★★✬☆

From Bookstooge

After the debacle from the previous issue, Groo and Granny are chased out of town by an angry mob. Granny wants to recoup some of what she lost AND get rid of Groo. She convinces Groo she is going to sell him as a slave and then “save” him later, like she used to do when he was a child. She gives Groo’s swords to Rufferto and sells Groo into slavery. Without his swords, Groo is helpless. Rufferto is very proud of now being a Swordsdog and brags to all the local dogs, who laugh at him. Even as an unarmed slave, Groo gets into so much trouble that everyone wants to kill him and without his swords, everybody IS about to kill him. Rufferto shows up at the last second and gives Groo his swords and thus the tables are turned on everybody else. Groo and Rufferto are reunited in their proper role as Unstoppable Swordsman and Trusty Canine Companion. The issue ends with Groo wondering how Granny is going to rescue him since he already rescued himself.

• All of My “Groo the Wanderer” Reviews

Lord of the Isles (Lord of the Isles #1) 4Stars

 

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: Lord of the Isles
Series: Lord of the Isles #1
Author: David Drake
Rating: 4 of 5 Stars
Genre: Epic Fantasy
Pages: 681
Words: 199K
Publish: 1997

Ahhh, the 90’s. A mythic time when everybody and their brother was writing an Epic Fantasy series so big, so fantastic that it was sure to top the book charts and become immortalized forever. Jordan, Martin, Goodkind, Erikson, Weiss & Hickman, Cook and Williams, just to name the authors that spring to my mind. Us fantasy fans ate it up with a spoon and asked for more! Authors like David Drake took up the challenge and churned out their own epics, which nobody would remember, nor, in all honesty, should they.

The strength of the Lord of the Isles series was that Drake turned them out every 12-18 months. He wrote a total of nine books from 1997 to 2008 and he finished up the story. He gave us what we wanted and we got our fix almost every year, like the junkies we were. Bloody magical mayhem with main characters punching their way through a maelstrom of demons and otherworldly monsters. It was fantastic.

The weakness of the Lord of the Isles series was that Drake turned them out every 12-18 months. The action was fast and furious, but the characters were about as deep as cardboard. Stock, cliched phrases defined who the characters were. They weren’t people, they were tropes.

When I first read Lord of the Isles (the book, not the entire series) in ‘97, I loved it so much that my brother gave me his hardcover copy for my birthday. I was happy as a clam. As each book came out I enjoyed them even while realizing how shallow they were. I got my magical mayhem fix and that was all I was looking for. Once Drake had finished the Lord of the Isles series, he began another unrelated series and I realized he was writing almost the same story with pieces just moved around and I gave up on him. I had not recorded or reviewed that I had read the first three books in the Lord of the Isles series so in 2012-2013 I remedied that but stopped after book three as I then had all nine books in the series recorded.

Which brings us to 2025. I am always looking for books and series to re-read (you can see some of my reasoning in my old post “Why I re-read” from 2018) and I remembered how much I had enjoyed Lord of the Isles and so the whole series went into the tbr rotation. I also remember how wooden Drake made his characters though, so I decided to break the series up by interspersing it with the Dracule Files. I’d read three of the Dracula books, then three of the Lord of the Isles books, then Dracula, rinse and repeat. That gave me a break and I vaguely remembered the nine books being broken up, story wise, into three trilogies, so that would work out well too. Which FINALLY brings us to the actual review of this specific book.

I usually compare books to food. I haven’t done that in a while and I’m not going to do it here either. But I have found that I like to compare the books I read to other things that I have an emotional resonance with or against, depending on the book in question. This time I’m going to compare it to a music album I came across years ago. Gregorian: The Dark Side of the Chant. I’d say the album cover describes it well enough. It also describes this book.

There are six main characters who all meet in a small village, go their separate ways, have an unending stream of world shaking adventures and then come back together to have the biggest adventure of all. Then it is revealed that that was just the tip of the iceberg, so stay turned for the next book!

We get everything from cannibal eskimos to humanoid insectivores to slime liches to parasitic demon trees to literal demons and boy howdy, do our characters mow through them like they are on a rocket powered lawn mower.

The weakness I talked about before are all here, in smaller doses so for this book it isn’t intolerable. But it is why this will never get more than 4stars from me and I suspect that after this series re-read that I will not consider re-reading it again. I did debate about even re-reading the entire series after finishing this one book, but that streak of masochism I have buried deep inside of me decided to show up and so I’ll be reading the whole series, no matter how much I suffer. Much like the read of Neuromancer, this will be A Project and not just a read. But it shouldn’t be a hate read as I plan on ringing every drop of enjoyment out of the series that I can :-D Magical mayhem and demon guts all over the place has a special spot in my hard little grinchy heart, hahahahaa.

★★★★☆

From the Publisher

Into this world, as the wellsprings of magical power rise to a millennial height, a sorceress from a thousand years past is cast upon the shore of a small island. She has survived the cataclysm that destroyed the powerful empire of the Isles in her time. She finds herself in a small town far from the new centers of power, but among a small group who, all unknowing, will become the focus of a new struggle for dominance and magical power that will shake this world, and others.

For The Hooded One, the most powerful sorcerer of all time, has also survived the ancient catastrophe he created. The peace of the small village is destroyed in an instant, and the young principles must set out on a quest to meet their destiny.

• Lord of the Isles (2013 Review)