Simon R. Green

Something from the Nightside

/ crookedreviews / Leave a comment

So I’m trying to kickstart myself into reading again which is a weird thing for me but as I mentioned, I just haven’t felt like reading much recently (again weird). So I opened my omnibus A Walk on the Nightside to do this because Simon R Green is one of my favorite authors ever. I just finished rereading Something from the Nightside, which was the very first of the Nightside novels and one that I haven’t read for a while.

We start out in real London where our leading man, John Taylor, is lounging in his run down private detective office when rich business woman Joanna Barrett walks in. Joanna’s daughter, Cathie, is missing after running away. She wants her daughter found and John Taylor is her last chance. He often is. She mentions that her previous private detectives told her that Cathie went into somewhere called the Nightside and then refused to go any further (with good reason as we see later). So for an exorbitant amount of money, John Taylor takes Joanna to the hidden heart of London.

The Nightside is a place where literally anything goes. You can buy, sell or trade your soul, or someone else’s, to get what you want or need. John Taylor grew up here and ran five years ago in order to survive. John Taylor is something of a wanted man but he doesn’t really know why. His mother, long missing, was not human. Finding this out caused his father to drink himself to death, leaving  John as an orphan. Something about what his mother is causes people to try and kill him, for things he might possibly do in the future. Of course, John Taylor is a smart ass, so people try to kill him for his winning personality as well. This info is pretty important in the Nightside arc.

So John and Joanna are in the Nightside where Joanna is trying to sort things out. Being a regular schmo from London, she’d never really dreamed about a place like this, where it’s always three o’clock in the morning and anything goes. With a few run ins with the usual characters in the Nightside, none of them good, John eventually takes them to Strangefellows, the oldest bar in the world. I love Strangefellows and I love its bartender Alex Morrissey. I don’t know what it is, but I do.

John gets a tip to check out a place called the Fortress. The Fortress is for those who have been abducted by aliens (for realsies) and just don’t want to put up with that shit any more. They’re paranoid and armed to the teeth. Pretty usual for the Nightside. They also take any anyone who needs protection and for the most part, no one tries to screw with them. John thinks it makes perfect sense that a teenage runaway with a tough family life would find her way there so off they set after a quick talk with one of John’s old ‘friends’, Razor Eddie (another personal fav of mine).

Before they can get too far, the enemies that John had been running from when he left the Nightside five years ago corner them outside the bar. I always thought the Harrowing were creepy. Faceless, emotionless hommunculi with only one mission: Kill John. A little Weeping Angels, yes? John is terrified to the point where he actually gives up for the most part. He tries fighting a bit but he realizes that he just cannot compete with these creatures. And then Razor Eddie rides to the rescue, so to speak, and carves up the Harrowing into bitty pieces. He tipped off those of John’s enemies who control the Harrowing in order to send them a message by destroying their creatures. Nothing is ever simple in the Nightside.

So, imminent death and destruction avoided, John and Joanna take an honest to god horse and carriage to the Fortress where they meet up with another of John’s old friends, Suzie Shooter. Also known as Shotgun Suzie and Oh-Christ-Its-Her-Run. 🙂 She’s a bounty hunter with no heart of gold. She’s a monster (in a way, I never really felt that but that’s what Green is trying to get across), made that way by the circumstances of her life. She is a damn good bounty hunter and exceedingly loyal to John in her way (at this point, she’ll still bring him in if she’s got good paper on him).

Suzie is at The Fortress to pick up a bounty, which has resulted in a fire-fight with the locals. John diffuses the situation for the most part and manages to talk Suzie into helping with his missing teenager case (for a price, of course). Someone in the Fortress (unnamed alien abductee) explains to John that Cathie had been there but had left a few days ago. Someone or more likely something was calling her to Blaiston Street. Blaiston Street is pretty much rock bottom for Nightsiders. So what would a teenager be doing there? And happy about it to boot?

Only one way to find out! So off they trot once more only to get stuck in a timeslip. A timeslip are eddies in time that can throw you forward or backward, either for a little bit or for a lot. People are always falling into and out of timeslips in the Nightside, sometimes on purpose.  In this timeslip, John and Joanna get thrown into the future, an apocalyptic one. Everything but the bugs (and I’m talking like Starship Troopers big damn bugs here) and Razor Eddie is dead. Even the m0on is gone.

Razor Eddie, being immortal, is the last living person on earth and that is not a good thing. I won’t go into details about what Eddie goes through (because gross) but he explains to John that this particular future is all John’s fault. He doesn’t give too much information because Eddie is pretty well insane by now but he reveals that this future is a mere 82 years from the time that John stepped back into the Nightside and that this happened in some way because of John searching for his mother.

After figuring a way out (a very painful one) of this timeslip future, John takes Joanna to the Hawks Wind Bar & Grill. The Hawks Wind is a ghost establishment. It is forever stuck in the 60s. Everything in the menu, everything in the jukebox is all real 60s stuff. But any time you spend there, stays there. You will leave the Hawks Wind at the moment you initially entered it, so its a great place to recuperate if you’re on a time crunch.

Here we are introduced to the mysterious Walker (I always pictured him as Anthony Head from Buffy and Merlin), who ostensibly runs things in the Nightside on behalf of the shadowy Authorities. He basically taps John to deal with whatever is happening on Blaiston Street because some very important people have gone missing there, not just the riff-raff and runaways.

With nothing else for it, even if he hates doing Walker any sort of favors, John and Joanna head to Blaiston Street. John uses his gift of finding things (a sort of third eye deal, courtesy of his not-at-all-human mother) to see that Cathie has been here recently and has entered a house…that doesn’t exist. Which is apparently strange even for the Nightside. Suzie shows up moments later and with that, the three of them enter the house.

It is a quintessential creepy haunted house type house. The three of them get herded upstairs and find Cathie. Cathie is quite literally half the person she was. The house that isn’t there is a predator and is eating her alive, body and soul. And convincing her that she’s happy about it. Well, John doesn’t want to put up with that and he pretty well challenges the house to give up Cathie.

That doesn’t go over well and the house cuts off all means of escape. Deciding the newcomers are far to dangerous to be getting on with, the house decides to make a quick meal of the threesome. Its in the confusion of fighting the house and trying to find a way out that its revealed that Joanna Barrett really isn’t Joanna Barrett. She was made a la the Harrowing to be the perfect lure for getting John back into the Nightside, though she really didn’t know it. She kills herself by allowing the house to eat her and John, pissed off and upset on so many levels that he’ll never speak of, uses his gift to find the heart of the weird creature and kill it.

After that, it’s a matter of blasting holes in the carcass and getting himself, Cathie and Suzie out before it collapses on them. John never did get paid for finding her, but Cathie adopts him anyway. Rating: B. Its a good read for sure but it is a little expositiony. Its clearly setting up things to come and giving you a taste of the people who are going to be major players in the Nightside arc. You don’t need to read this to understand the rest of the series but its so much more fun if you do because Green really likes to interconnect all of his stories. You’ll get his in-jokes if you read everything. Read it. READ IT! 😉

Spirits From Beyond

/ crookedreviews / Leave a comment

Oh Simon R Green. How I love thee. Even though your Ghostfinders books aren’t quite as good as the Nightside, Secret Histories, Deathstalker and Hawk & Fisher novels. They’re still a right side better than a lot of the schlock on the market today. It continually amazes me how Green can pump out such original stories. And I absolutely love how he can twine together all of his stories with some little in thing like the Rainbow Road or what not.

Now, on to Spirits From Beyond. This is the latest Ghostfinders book, just released within the last few weeks so be warned there be SPOILERS here. Spirits opens up with our beloved cocky-arse JC Chance (kind of an unwieldy name in my opinion) alone in his bedroom attempting and failing to sleep. Ever since his ghostly girlfriend Kim disappeared a few books back, he’s been something of an insomniac apparently.

So here’s poor JC, trying to bully his brain into letting him finally sleep when lo and behold! Kim turns up at the foot of the bed. She tells him that he must come fight for her at the Chimera House (where she disappeared) or she’ll never be able to come home to him.  So of course that means he calls up teammates “Happy” Jack Palmer and Melody Chambers. Luckily he does not call them mid-shag as Melody has rigged up some tech so any call JC makes to them immediately transfers to his TV.

JC gives them what low-down he can and breaks every traffic law known to man to get get to their place and then Chimera House. To be fair, he’s doing this in London and that’s not really out of the ordinary. 😉 At any rate, they get to Chimera House, which is still standing despite the previous promise from big boss Catherine Latimer that it would be torn down. So it is, of course, the perfect place for a trap by the fiendish (and still not directly seen) Flesh Undying.

Luckily for our Ghostfinding friends, or unluckily for the Flesh Undying, the trap fails. Instead of waking the ghost of an uber-powerful proto-god from another dimension, the Ghostfinders make a friend when they help him pass over, as one might expect from a Ghostfinder. By this point, the Flesh Undying should really learn not to underestimate these guys. But that wouldn’t make the books nearly as fun to read.

Once they’ve dispatched this god, JC Chance gets fired up. He’s tired of stumbling around in the dark, worried about moles in the Carnacki Institute and what his boss is up to, he takes the troops on a field trip to the Secret Libraries of the Carnacki Institute. Supposedly there are all sorts of books people really shouldn’t have or read there. Technically speaking, the team is not supposed to get in there until they have the official go-ahead from Latimer, but that has never stopped JC Chance before.

Their little soiree into the Libraries catches Latimer’s attention, and not in a good way. The team is blundering about, making waves and disrupting her own secret investigations into the traitor(s?) of the Institute. So she packs them all off to the southwest to deal with a haunted inn. Like you do.

The King’s Arms is located in fictional town Bishop’s Fording. The inn sounds a bit like Strangefellows in the Nightside in that its has been around in one form or another for so long nobody can remember it not being there. Unfortunately, the King’s Arms is located in a Bad Place. Something so terribly evil happened there at some point that it keeps spawning terrible events such as suicides and mysteriously missing guests etc.

The owner of the inn used to work for Carnacki before retiring, though never as a ghostfinder. He was raised in Bishop’s Fording and has a history with the town and with the inn. He requested JC and his team and got much more than he bargained for. What happens at the inn? Read it and find out!

This book, Spirits from Beyond, is much better than the previous books in this series but we’re still no closer to getting answers to the questions the team has been asking? What is the Flesh Undying and how do they beat it? Who is the traitor in the Institute? And what exactly happened to JC down in the London Underground? I have a feeling that we might be getting some answers in the next book, because there was a tantalizing little bit of dangling bait at the end of this book that hints to both a new book and, possibly, some answers. Eventually.

Worth the read, I’d say, though I’m still waiting for more Secret Histories. Rating: B/B+

Casino Infernale

/ crookedreviews / Leave a comment

*SPOLIERS* Oh Simon R. Green, how I love thee. Green brings back his secret agent Eddie Drood in Casino Infernale, the latest in the Secret Histories arc. Like the rest of the Secret Histories books, this title is also a play on a James Bond title. Which is fitting considering that Eddie Drood’s alter ego is Shaman Bond. And Shaman Bond is the one who has to do the heavy lifting in this book.

In a previous book, Eddie and his lady love Molly Metcalf killed Crow Lee (The Most Evil Man in the World. He doesn’t always drink beer but when he does…). Apparently Crow Lee has left some sort of Inheritance (yes, capitalized) to whoever can find it first. Considering the man was called The Most Evil Man in the World, whatever the Inheritance is (no one knows), it isn’t anything good. People and various organizations around the world are already making trouble trying to find it.

So the Droods call in a Summit of the major players in the supernatural world. Only representatives from the UK show up, all of which appear in other books by Green: The London Knights, the Crowley Project, the Carnacki Institute and the Nightside (love Dead Boy).  The problem is, with so many major players in one place, they have to find a suitably neutral place. That place? The Martian Tombs. Natch.

So everyone there decides that the Crow Lee Inheritance is too dangerous to just be out there, but they can’t decide what to do about it. Until the Armourer (official Drood representative to the Summit) suggests breaking the Shadow Bank at the Casino Infernale. So anyone of you lot who have seen Casino Royale with the delectable Daniel Craig will recognize this basic plot bunny. Eddie gets the nom to break the bank because he’s the only one at the Summit who basically has the balls and the practical know how to break the bank at a casino.

What he doesn’t know when he agrees to do this at the Summit is that the family has to take away the one thing that makes him a Drood, his torc. The Casino Infernale has ways to see Drood armour (yes, I’m usuing the British spelling as the writer is British and I’m a total anglophile) and it is just too dangerous to send him on this mission as a Drood. So, naked in a sense but not completely defenseless, Eddie (now as Shaman Bond) and Molly go to the Casino Royale to gamble their way to the top.

They have, of course, some very nice little toys from the Armourer: a chameleon card deck (exactly what it sounds like), Eddie’s repeating Colt revolver (never runs out of bullets. It’s magic!) and two little black disks that when combined open anything. There’s a catch to this breaking the bank thing though. The Shadow Bank doesn’t deal in money really. They deal with souls. And when Shaman Bond arrives on the scene, he finds that his newly discovered parents who were supposed to be helping him pave his way in had actually bet and lost his soul. Way to go mom and dad!

But through a combination of luck, nastiness and trickier, Eddie and Molly keep winning, racking up the souls until they get invited to the Big Game (yes, capitalized). Do they make it to the end? Does Eddie get his soul back?  Read it and find out! Because seriously, Simon R Green couldn’t have been any more on with this book if he was a light switch. It was awesome! And there is definitely going to be another book because there are unanswered questions. And they said there would be on the last page. 😉 Rating: A+++ Seriously. Read it.

Angels of Light and Darkness

/ crookedreviews / Leave a comment

So I went on vacation this last week and I managed to not read the entire time. Weird, I know but I had wine to taste instead. 🙂 But before I went on vacation, I re-read the second book in Simon R. Green’s Nightside arc, Angels of Light and Darkness. In this book, John Taylor is hired by Father Jude who represents the Vatican. The Pope wants to hire Taylor to find a very powerful, very dangerous object. If it gets out into the world and the wrong hands, it could lead to the end of the world. Quite literally.

And the object? The Unholy Grail. This is (supposedly mind you, since I have absolutely no idea if such an object exists/existed) the cup that Judas drank out of at the last supper. Yes, that Judas. Yes, that last supper. An object like that would be very powerful an anyone’s hands. There really isn’t a ‘right hands’ or a ‘wrong hands’ in the Nightside. The whole place is very…in between.

But the Vatican isn’t the only interested party. When Taylor first tries to use his special gift to find the Unholy Grail right off the bat, his mind gets hijacked by Above and Below (yes, I feel that the capitals are necessary). Each side wants it for their own use, each wanted to bring about the end of days on their own terms. Each side believes that this cup will guarantee them victory over the other side. Taylor tricks his way out of the situation by pitting Above against Below and escaping in the melee.

With using his gift out, Taylor has to pound the pavement doing the usual PI bit of finding clues and rattling cages. He picks up Suzie Shooter (also known as Oh Christ, it’s her! Run!) and off the go, bashing heads, demanding answers and being general nuisances. Meanwhile, angels from both sides are in the Nightside, grabbing random people in search of the same thing. Unfortunately for the grabees, they don’t usually come back alive.

Taylor and Suzie follow leads, get the crap kicked out of them and run from the angels until they find out who exactly has the Grail. Of course they find it! It wouldn’t be nearly so interesting if they didn’t. 😉 But to find out who done it, you need to read the book! Please do. I’m rather fond of Simon R. Green and the more people read his books, the more he’ll write.

Rating: B. Solid book but not one of my absolute favorite Nightsides. Great intro into the series though, even if it is the second book and not the first.

Ghost of a Dream

/ crookedreviews / Leave a comment

So I wasn’t too sure what to make of the Ghostfinders stories from Simon R. Green at first. I LOVE Simon R. Green, easily one of my top 5 authors. But the first book was really kind of meh. The second book was a bit better and this third one, Ghost of a Dream is a bit better than that.

Ghost of a Dream starts out with our favorite (read only) Ghost Hunters JC Chance, Melody Chambers and “Happy” Jack Palmer on the case of a ghost train, which is just an awesome concept. I love ghost train stories. At any rate, they’ve been sent up north to figure out why Bad Things have been happening to an abandoned train station called Bradleigh Halt that was supposed to get refurbished by a local steam train enthusiasts society.

The event behind the haunting is a missing train from the Victorian Era. It went in a tunnel near Bradleigh Halt and never came out. Now it wants to come home from the Outside and its bringing Something back with it.  Its up to JC, Melody and Happy to figure out what that Something is and how to kick it’s arse back to where it came from.

That’s the first sort of intro story that Simon often puts in his stories, a little teaser to whet your appetite for the real deal and the bigger, badder nasty. The second story is a tad more interesting. It takes place very soon after the Bradleigh Halt incident at a theater that was out of production for twenty years. The owners of said theater apparently have pull with the Carnacki Institute’s big cheese, Catherine Latimer, and so the three Ghostfinders find themselves on what appears to be a typical haunting.

And when I say typical I mean typical. All of the little spooky incidents are the sorts of things that people up and down the centuries have been claiming  as proof of ghosts: flickering lights, cold spots, eerie noises and doors opening and closing on their own. Nothing is outright malevolent at first but something is definitely there and definitely powerful and definitely after the two actors who are re-opening the theater.

JC and his team have to find out why and not only that, but another big, bad nasty is taking the opportunity to try and finish them off. Will they survive?! Duhn-duhn-DUUUUUUUUUUHN! Well, SPOILERS, they do survive because the series is clearly not over yet but it there was a bit of a cliffhanger moment at the very end that made me go “YOU CAN’T DO THAT TO ME!!”. So over all, I’d say that this isn’t quite as good as Hawk&Fisher, Deathstalker or the Nightside story arcs…yet. It has potential and it seems to be working up to it slowly. So I do recommend the books because I will always recommend Simon R. Green. Rating B.

Beyond the Blue Moon

/ crookedreviews / Leave a comment

After catching up on Sandman Slim, I felt in the mood to revisit some Simon R. Green. Specifically, I felt like re-reading Beyond the Blue Moon, the final book in the Forest Kingdom arc. These books have been out quite a long time, but even so, I suppose I should just warn for spoilers if you haven’t read them yet.

Beyond the Blue Moon starts out in Haven with Guard Captains Hawk and Fisher who, along with all other Guardsmen, have been called in to quell a burgeoning riot on the docks. The human workers aren’t happy with the zombie scab labor. They really don’t want to hurt these people who are just trying to provide for their families the only way the can. Of course, it all goes to hell in a hand basket quite quickly.

Hawk and Fisher make it through the riot-cum-zombie massacre thought skill and sheer bloody mindedness but they pay a heavy emotional price for it. They didn’t kill anyone they knew but they didn’t want to kill anyone in this case. Most of the now dead were only trying to make a living. They’re feeling a bit depressed about their circumstances and wondering how to change it when they get an unwanted visitor.

Allen Chance is the official Questor for the Forest Kingdom and he has come to find Prince Rupert and Princess Julia, legends of the Dark Night, to figure out how who killed King Harald. Needless to say, they are less than pleased by this but they hear out the young man who is quite earnest. And he has a bloody great dog who talks. In the end, they decide that this is just the impetus they need to get the hell out of Haven. But they don’t go quietly. They raid the Guards stores and take out every criminal they could never lay hands on because they were too well connected through bribes and politics.

When they get back they find that the murder of Harald isn’t the only thing they have to deal with. There are all sorts of political factions vying for control of the court, most of whom want to Queen out of the way in one form or another. Plus something called the Inverted Cathedral has popped up-or in this case, down, hence the inverted. Hawk and Fisher have to figure out what the Inverted Cathedral is for, how to stop the Blue Moon from coming back and, if they have time, find a killer. Just another day in the life of Hawk and Fisher.

It is an excellent novel, an excellent series. A+. Read it!

Live and Let Drood

/ crookedreviews / Leave a comment

Oh.  My. God. Simon R. Green has done it again. Live and Let Drood is the latest in the Secret Histories arc featuring Eddie Drood, secret agent. Eddie has just recovered from his last mission to Castle Frankenstein against the Immortals. He’s returning home with his lady love, Molly Metcalf, when he runs into something he never thought possible: a completely destroyed Drood Hall.

With his family seemingly dead, Eddie goes looking for clues in the ruined hall for revenge. Who could possibly be powerful enough to take down the mighty and paranoid Drood family? Eddie has to find out what happened to his family and get revenge. But not all is as it seems and some questions from Eddie’s past are going to be answered while more are raised.

I’m not going to give too much away since this is a brand spankin’ new book. But it is fantastic! And I’m happy to report that it is NOT the last of the Secret Histories. There is at least one more due out called (at the moment) Casino Infernale. So get this book! A+ And if anyone knows of any books similar to Simon R. Green, please let me know!

Hellworld

/ crookedreviews / 1 Comment

Right, well, I’ve read quite a few books since the last review but I’ll start with the one I just finished, Simon R. Green’s Hellworld. This is one of the Deathstalker lead ins. It features a squad of the Empire’s least finest being sent down as the first colonists on a newly discovered world, Wolf IV. They’re referred to as a hell squad and they are expendable. They are fodder in case the new world contains an alien presence. Otherwise it’s their job to get the planet ready for the proper colonists.

The squad is lead by Captain Hunter, a former Rim commander. The squad contains two Imperial Marines, Lindholm and Corbie, an esper named DeChance, one Doctor Williams and an Investigator named Krystel. All of these people have done something to seriously piss off the Empress, which as established under the Deathstalker novels is not a good idea.

There is nothing known about Wolf IV when this squad is sent down other than it is capable of supporting life. When they land, it’s a situation of ‘a little too quiet’. There are no nature sounds like birds or insects. The ground is hard and cracked and the whole planet has quite an active volcanic area some miles from the landing zone. It looks like it’s going to be a very boring time on the planet until the ship’s sensors pick up what is very definitely an alien city some fifteen or so miles from the landing site.

The decision is made to investigate the city in case there is a current alien presence on the planet. First though, they have to make it through the forest that is between them and the city. Only it isn’t a forest as we know here on earth. This forest is sentient and hungry. In the end, they have to go around rather than through, meaning the group gets split in half.

After a harrowing night and a couple more alien attacks, both groups make it to the city where they apparently lose contact with each other due to outside interference. Turns out that there is a building, a machine really, in the middle of the city that is the cause of pretty much everything. It’s power runs the aliens, so to speak, and it is quite definitely insane.

I’d forgotten how good this book is. I hadn’t read this or the other two pre-Deathstalker novels in years mainly because I didn’t own them and they were out of print until recently (Kindle is awesome!). The only one of the books I really remembered was Mistworld so I went into this book with a blank slate as it were and I was not disappointed. I’m a huge Simon R Green fan and this was a very good book. Get it. A.

A Hard Day’s Knight

/ crookedreviews / Leave a comment

As I’ve stated before (I think…), I am a HUGE Simon R. Green fan. I love his writing. It’s evocative and witty and so very British. He reminds me of a very dark Douglas Adams. At any rate, I just re-read his latest Nightside novel A Hard Day’s Knight. I love this book, and the series, and I highly recommend them.

In A Hard Day’s Knight, private detective John Taylor starts off trying to relax from the end of the last book’s events. Spoiler alert: John has killed the infamous Walker. But let’s face it, the man had it coming. I love the Walker character but he was a right arse. At any rate, John comes home to Suzie Shooter and finds something on the table that he really, really doesn’t want. Excalibur. Yes, the Excalibur. And it isn’t what he thinks it is.

Well, alright, it’s a sword. But it’s so much more than that. And John, being neither good nor pure, has been given a special dispensation from the Lady of the Lake to bear Excalibur and find King Arthur. Yes, that King Arthur. Something of a spoiler alert, the Lady of the Lake is Gayle from his stand alone story Drinking Midnight Wine.I absolutely love when Green brings elements from his other stories together. 🙂

Unfortunately, everyone and their brother wants Excalibur and are quite determined to wrest it from John’s control. They make quite a mess of John and Suzie’s front yard…well, front land mine zone really. So in order to figure out how to get rid of the damn thing, John decides to go to the London Knights, the descendents of Arthur’s original knights. Before he gets too far though, he’s forced to accept the title of Walker and clean up a nasty little soul bomb. Some days, you should just stay in bed with the lights off.

And just to make things even more complicated…the Elves have decided to go to war with each other. On Earth. Hopefully wiping out the humans while they fight. So, just the usual day, or night, in the Nightside. It’s a great story and I can’t wait for the next book, The Bride Wore Black Leather. So get it, read it. A+ And I really hope Puck comes back in future Simon R. Green books. 🙂

Two New Anthologies

/ crookedreviews / Leave a comment

Okay, so with Tropical Storm Irene shutting down the T here in the Boston hub area, I don’t have a whole heck of a lot to do today. New post time! I just finished two anthologies: Home Improvement: Undead Edition and Blood Lite II. As I’ve stated, I love these urban fantasy type anthologies because you get introduced to authors you may not have heard of previously.

Home Improvement: Undead Edition focuses on stories of people (mostly but not always supernatural) doing, you guessed it, home improvements that are disrupted because of ghosts. Some of the stories are fun and some of them are a bit more serious. Charlaine Harris contributes a Sookie Stackhouse short and Simon R Green gives an original short.

Blood Lite II is mostly supernatural creatures getting their feed on. This one was a bit funnier than Home Improvement. In one memorable moment, one author used the angry ghosts of primates doing what primates at zoos tend to do and coined the phrase polter-schiests. I LOST IT. I was on the train home and giggling for about ten minutes.

So I thought they were both pretty solid B books. As always with anthologies there are some hits and some misses but over all they were pretty good. And with Borders going out of business, you can get some pretty sweet deals, so no excuses!