Michael Hicks

Very Fun Start! Now, Where's Season 2?!

Reviewed: 10-24-23

Amber Benson and Christopher Golden do a fine job spinning off a multiversal Buffyverse story that brings back actress Charisma Carpenter and her character of Cordelia Chase -- now a vampire slayer from a different Earth. It's a welcome return, too, with both the actress and character given a much-needed focus after being waylaid in the fourth season of Angel by series creator Joss Whedon.

Slayers is also a welcome return to the world Whedon created without all the excess toxic baggage of its creator, with series staples like Spike, Giles, Anya, and others coming back for another go-round... or at least some version or another (or more) of them. Cordelia has arrived on our Earth to recruit Spike to help her save her world, which is threatened by Drusilla, Queen of the Vampires, who is close to unleashing a magic spell that will make her and her vamp minions immune to sunlight. Tagging along is a brand-new slayer, one of the hundreds of women activated in the wake of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series finale, Indira Nunnally, a Buffy fangirl who has decided Spike will be her mentor, whether he wants to or not.

Benson and Golden have been entrenched in the world of Buffy the Vampire Slayer for a good, long while, with the former giving life to the series' character Tara Maclay and the latter having written a number of media tie-ins for the property. Both are well-suited to help revive the Buffyverse, and Slayers gives a good idea of what to expect from their capable hands should Audible commission additional "seasons." Slayers isn't quite as frighteningly apocalyptic as some of its televised predecessors, and feels relatively low-stakes (no pun intended) following the series finales of both Buffy and Angel with its focus on Drusilla's magical shenanigans, but it certainly is an enjoyable romp nonetheless. Mostly, it just feels great to have characters like Giles back in action, and switching the setting over to an alternate reality, sans Buffy Summers, allows for a proper return to form with familiar locales, like a Sunnydale that hasn't been sucked into a Hellmouth and the occult bookshop, The Magic Box. There's a lot here for long-time fans to appreciate, not the least of which being the return of the show's actors themselves, and no doubt there will be much clamoring for Benson and Golden to pen another batch of Audible Original episodes and the return of a few other familiar faces (or voices) -- especially given the groundwork they lay for a second season in the final moments of Slayers.

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The Golden Age of the Jedi Is Dull

Reviewed: 09-12-23

The biggest problem with Light of the Jedi is that it just isn't very interesting. Set maybe 200 years before A New Hope, Charles Soule takes us into the heart of the Golden Age of the New Republic and the Jedi Order was a powerful force to be reckoned with. Therein lies the central problem -- having dozens upon dozens of Jedi pouring out the wazoo isn't anywhere near as intriguing as one lone Jedi facing insurmountable odds (not to mention evil in control of an entire galaxy's worth of military might). The threat they face in the Nihil obviously isn't as insurmountable as Soule presents, and thanks to the prequel trilogy, we already know the Jedi Order and the Republic is safe for now, which presents our second problem -- this trip back in time isn't really of any interest to anybody except the diehard loyalist Star Wars geeks who must know every inch of geeky Star Wars history, regardless of how ho-hum and mediocre it all is.

We're introduced to this new old era just as a catastrophe in hyperspace threatens an entire solar system and disrupts interstellar travel. Soule drags the emergency out for every inch he can, and then some. Unfortunately, it all reads (or in this case, since I listened to the audiobook, sounds) like a much duller riff on John Scalzi's Interdependency series, which dealt with its own interstellar calamity in far more enjoyable and interesting ways. It's not until the climax that Light of the Jedi sparks a modicum of interest and the Nihil prove themselves to be a remarkable adversary with their incredibly dirty fighting styles, not to mention some political in-fighting betwixt them. By then, though, it's too late to salvage the preceding 12 hours and change.

Narrator Marc Thompson does the best he can with the material, providing an incredible array of diverse character voices. Soule's prose devolves into moments of silliness, though, as with the Wookie Jedi whose "speech" is translated mid-growl for the benefit (?) of the reader. Not even Thompson's talents can save us from the grating goofiness of dialogue that goes like, "GRRRRROOOOWWWHY Hidey ho, good neighbor!"* Aside from that nonsense, the production values are as strong as they've ever been with a Star Wars audiobook. Thompson brings the universe to life, with plenty of sound effects and music from the Lucasfilm library to accompany his reading and make for an authentic Star Wars listening experience.

The biggest problem with Light of the Jedi, though, is that it confirms something I've been feeling for a long while now, amidst Disney's proliferation of Star Wars media between the new trilogy, video games, comic books, novels, and Disney series. I'm completely burned out on Star Wars. In fact, I'm longing for the quiet, Star Wars-free, almost-decade-long gap between Return of the Jedi and Heir to the Empire, when this universe felt larger, and certainly much more mysterious and compelling.

* (Not actual dialogue)

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Those Who Do Not Know The Past...

Reviewed: 09-01-23

Jared Yates Sexton provides a compelling historical overview of the insanity that is Christian conservatism, further reinforcing Christopher Hitchens' conclusion that religion poisons everything. From ancient Rome to the modern-day Trump circus, Sexton illustrates how religious nuttery, racism, and Republicanism have become so deeply enmeshed that it is now utterly impossible to have one without the other.

He also shows that not only are modern-day Republican values utterly reprehensible but entirely unoriginal, with their apocalyptic world views intertwined with their skewed views of patriotism virtually unchanged and unchallenged for centuries. Fitting, I suppose, for such a backwards political party that strives to do little more than usurp power at all costs and turn the clock back to the Dark Ages.

The Midnight Kingdom is, ultimately, Exhibit A for why Republicans so badly want to ban books and endlessly work to undermine and attempt to eradicate science, history, and education.

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1 person found this helpful

Creepy bug horror!

Reviewed: 05-24-23

Dashes of cosmic horror, body horror, evil in the woods horror — good stuff! Marc Vietor’s narration is great too, and suitably creepy when needed (I don’t ever want to hear a speak-and-say again in my whole freaking life!). Overall, this was a pretty good listen.

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Dirty Good Listen

Reviewed: 03-05-23

Overall, The Sexy Librarian’s Dirty 30 is a pretty solid anthology of erotica. Not all the stories worked for me, but the ones that did were fantastically sexy escapes. Rose Caraway is easily my favorite erotica narrator and even those stories that weren’t up my alley consistently had one perfect quality — her lovely voice! My pick for standout story comes by way of Chase Morgan’s “On the Rocks,” which finds a married couple getting frisky on the beach, only to discover another couple getting down on the other side of the large rock separating them. Combining public lovemaking, exhibitionism, and voyeurism, Caraway’s reading of Morgan’s story is pure, perfect, unfettered aural sex. This story alone is worth the price of admission!

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Frosty Bits is Hot, Hot, Hot

Reviewed: 04-13-22 Listener received this title free

Frosty Bits, third in the series of erotic romance stand-alone Desire by Design titles, was my introduction to Remi Wild and hoo boy did it ever satisfy. So much so, that it was roughly around the half-way mark when I bought the first two books to catch up on the series. I was hooked on Wild's premise of a hedonistic island vacation operated by Desire by Design, and after only roughly 3 1/2 hours, I was definitely not ready to leave this paradise behind.

After being dumped by her fiancé for being frigid, Cadence resolves to fix herself. Her frigidity has been an issue, and although she's been with multiple men before her fiancé, she's never been able to orgasm. Their couple's therapist had recommended a vacation to a hedonistic resort, which Jeremy balked at, but upon being dumped Cadence makes the impulsive decision to go through with it and discover how to get in tune with her body. Helping her along the way is her assigned host, Declan, a grizzly beast of a man who is there to serve Cadence in her journey of pleasure and self-discovery.

First of all, I absolutely fell in love with this couple. Declan's a great guy, very warm and open, and fully in touch with his romantic side. Cadence is fun, too, especially when she's dropping lines about being "beaver dammed" by another islander, being left to struggle with a "blue bean," and geeking out over Star Wars. She's such a fun, vivacious woman to root for, and I really wanted her to succeed in her mission to discover her own self-worth and unbridled sexuality. It sucked listening to her, via Sheila Wilder's terrific performance, get down on herself for not being able to orgasm and feeling inadequate, blaming herself - wrongly - for being deficient.

Thankfully, Declan's a supportive partner, one who fully centers Cadence's needs. And here's where I get to Frosty Bits's second WOW factor. The STEAM, y'all. Good lord! Remi Wild definitely knows how to write effective foreplay and sex scenes, with the former leaving you wanting more, and the latter building up so much anticipation that you definitely, definitely, definitely need more, if you know what I mean. There were some tantalizing moments and potential scenarios that I would have liked to have seen played out more fully, but such moments wouldn't have been true to Cadence's personality...at least not at this stage of her growth. Maybe in a sequel, though? Hmmmm...

Wild also builds a fantastic concept with the hedonistic resort of Desire by Design. Man, could I ever go for a resort vacation like this! Just as a listener, I didn't want to leave this island! Thankfully I know how have two more books to get caught up on.

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Great Conclusion To The Interdependency!

Reviewed: 08-31-20

John Scalzi wraps up his Interdependency trilogy with The Last Emperox, a fitting and satisfying conclusion to this fun and highly accessible sci-fi series revolving around an interstellar civilization's last days.

Spread across the stars, the planets of the Interdependency are united by a series of flow streams that make rapid travel across the vast distances of space possible. Unfortunately, the flow streams are collapsing, and soon the systems of the Interdependency will be cut off from one another, and the trade routes that exist between planets and keep life as we know it up and running will be no more.

The flow streams operate as an analog to our present-day concerns of climate change and the ways in which rapid environmental changes and disasters will impact our own society. There's plenty of people more than willing to stick their head in the sand and ignore the threats these changes promise, but for the rich and powerful 1% it's a chance to gain more power, money, and influence as they cash in on the trauma and devastation wreaked across the other 99% of the population.

The Last Emperox, like the previous two volumes, largely revolves around the palace intrigue surrounding Emperox Grayland II as she races against time to save the lives of billions of people, coming into conflict with her rivals in the House of Wu, and the machinations and behind-the-scenes manipulations of Nadashe Nohamapetan, who has already attempted to assassinate Grayland twice previously in an effort to wrest control of the Interdependency for herself.

While it's not the grimdark equivalent of Game of Thrones in space, it does have its fair share of political games, financial interests, and assassinations, and Scalzi certainly manages to pack a wallop on a couple of occasions. One savagely abrupt event hit me particularly hard and left me reeling, to the point that I had to stop listening to this audiobook edition in order to process what had just happened. I was shellshocked and left swearing at the author for quite awhile, even as I was left wondering how the hell the rest of the book was going to shake out. Don't get me wrong, I trusted Scalzi to know what he was doing and to deliver on the premise laid forth over the course of these three books but... damn. Goddamn.

Wil Wheaton returns, as expected, to narrate, and frankly I wouldn't have it any other way. I'm sure I've said it in reviews of the previous two Interdependency books, but for my money there is no one better to narrate Scalzi's words than Wil Wheaton. They're a perfect match, and while I haven't listened to much else Scalzi has written beyond this series and The Dispatcher, I'm very eager to get to Wheaton's other readings of this author's works.

For a new Scalzi fan, The Interdependency has been a terrific introduction to this author and his style. He doesn't over-write, and his prose and dialogue is filled with a tremendous sense of humor and wit that left me laughing out loud at multiple points, even in the face of some truly awful bad guys doing awful bad guy things. He doesn't get bogged down in the science of the Flow, opting for layman's explanations rather than hard science infodumps, which make it all the more engaging and easy going.

As the last book in a trilogy, The Last Emperox ends on a satisfying note and wraps up the various character arcs in dramatic fashion. One particular relationship even left me a bit misty-eyed and hopeful, so kudos to Scalzi for pulling that delicate balancing act off successfully! We might not see these characters again, although the door is certainly open for some to return should the author so choose, but I can at least rest content in the fact that I still have plenty more of this author's work to explore, particularly those read by Wheaton! Not a bad deal, as far as I'm concerned.

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Lots of Corny Fun!

Reviewed: 08-14-20

Doctor Chelli Lona Aphra makes her audiodrama debut with this self-titled adaptation scripted by Sarah Kuhn! Kuhn draws from the Marvel Comics area of the Star Wars expanded universe, where Aphra was originally conceived and developed as a new and prominent character for Kieron Gillen's Darth Vader comic. Along the way, she briefly crossed over to Jason Aaron's Star Wars after the Vader Down crossover event. All of that material forms the crux of this Doctor Aphra audiobook.

For those who are not already familiar with Doctor Aphra, imagine Harrison Ford's most famous characters - Han Solo and Indiana Jones - smashed into one gender-flipped, morally ambiguous antiheroine. Part smuggler, part archeologist, a dash of rogue scientist, Aphra advises us early on not to trust her. Her brains and easy duplicitousness, though, make her the perfect pawn for Darth Vader, who recruits her to track down information on the boy who destroyed the Death Star.

Aphra and Vader make for a fun odd-couple, given that neither can fully trust the other and, once drawn into Vader's orbit, her life expectancy becomes entwined with her usefulness. For bonus funsies, Aphra has herself a crew of homicidal droids - think the evil, dark twins of C-3PO and R2-D2 - who love nothing more than torturing and murdering humans. A healthy amount of tension exists between these groups given their natural disloyalties and competing goals.

It's a lot of corny, cheeseball fun, and if you've read the comics this book was based on plenty of it will ring familiar. Kuhn does explore the past relationship between Aphra and Sana Starros, another character originally created for the comics, this one from Aaron's Star Wars, in greater detail than was paid in the comics and it gives the proceedings an extra bit of dramatic and emotional weight. Where Kuhn's scripting stumbles a bit is its attempts to circumvent the various other subplots weaving throughout the Star Wars comics. Some of it is handled OK, but a few cracks appear late in the story where some, in this audiobook at least, Random Characters With A History appear. Certain subplots are adapted here, like a jailbreak late in the book, but without the supporting material that went into developing those storylines within the comic's continuity they feel shoehorned in and the payoffs lack the necessary oomph.

And while my fanboy heart insists that actress Chloe Bennett (best known for her role in another Marvel property, this one TV's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.) is the perfect Doctor Aphra should this character ever make her way to film or television (you paying attention here, Disney?), I certainly can't argue with a voice talent like Emily Woo Zeller taking the reins. Zeller does a great job bringing Aphra to life, as does the rest of the voice cast. Like the other Star Wars audiobooks, this is a sonic delight and positively a full-on LucasFilm experience. You get the music, blaster noises, lightsaber hums, rumbling space ship engines, and all the rest of their sound catalog to compliment all the voice work.

I, for one, am glad to see Doctor Aphra spin out of the comic books and have more attention slung her way. Her audiodrama debut was plenty enjoyable, and I hope this is but the first of many more Doctor Aphra adventures. I hope, too, that we can get some original Doc Aphra adventures that don't rely solely on adapting past material but that can exist alongside her Marvel appearances.

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An Abstract, Lynchian Industrial Hellscape

Reviewed: 05-08-20

Discussing Factory Town is a bit difficult, since its plot hinges so directly on an early action taken by the book's central character, Russell Carver. I'm going to give you a great big SPOILER WARNING for this whole damn review, and it begins now.

The book opens with Carver's suicide with a bullet to his temple, and what follows is a mental sojourn through the shattered mind of a man in his death throes. The material is part nightmare, part memory, part remembrance, all of it filtered through a dying, gunshot shattered brain.

Told in first person point-of-view, author Jon Bassoff takes us through the surreal, fluid dream-scape of Factory Town and its ever-shifting landscape. For instance, Carver enters a run-down, abandoned theater, but exits a hospital. He hears music playing from a radio, but discovers it's actually an a cappella band. These aren't errors of the author or a failing of the editor, so much as it's an effort to capture the "logic," such as it is, of a lucid, waking nightmare. Things shift - people, buildings, the entire town - with the impermanence of a truly screwy dream.

The characters that exist beyond Carver are representations of figures in his own life, stand-ins from his own abusive childhood and the living traumas that were his parents. During Carver's urgent search for Alana, a lost runaway, the narrative is rife with figments of the things that could have been in Carver's own life. Virtually everything in Factory Town is shaped by Carver's personal history and experiences, both the things he remembers and that which he is trying to hide or escape from.

Bassoff uses all of this as a template to explore the repercussions of abuse, and how the sins of the father are inherited by the son. It's a story of the nature of evil, and whether or not we can actually control our destinies. How much of our inner demons are genetically encoded, and how much of is learned behavior? A lot of the horror in this book is buried in symbolism or tucked away in inferences, but there's a few shocks to be had for sure.

Donald Corren does a fantastic job with the narration. His reading his clear and precise, and he provides enough differing voices to make it clear who's talking in conversations, adopting a suitably gravely voice for Carver but not overdoing it.

I found Factory Town to having a surprising amount of depth, and the writing is crisp with a few fun turns of phrase. One of my favorite lines in the book explains the strangeness of this disturbed city with "All them chemicals leaking into the town's hippocampus..." I also expect this book to be a rather divisive read, depending on one's patience for a rather non-straightforward narrative. This one is a far cry from conventional horror, but rich in character and environment. If you're curious what an abstract, hellish, industrial What Dreams May Come by way of David Lynch might look like, this one is well worth the investment.

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Wolf Hunt Stands Out From The Pack!

Reviewed: 05-02-20 Listener received this title free

My original WOLF HUNT audiobook review and many others can be found at Audiobook Reviewer.

I imagine Jeff Strand’s elevator pitch for Wolf Hunt being along the lines of ‘The Sopranos Meet The Wolfman.’ If this intrigues you, then it’s really about all that needs to be said of Strand’s funny, bloody werewolf romp. Frankly, it’s all I would have needed to be hooked straightaway. If this does not intrigue you, then I’m afraid I can’t help you.

George and Lou are not exactly made guys, and deny even being mobsters at all, but they are clearly some well-connected thugs who have little problem breaking thumbs over debts owed to their bosses. They’re tasked with transporting a bad dude named Ivan across Florida to a crime lord, with Ivan locked in a cage. Strand sets up his story in a fun way, with a lot of dispute over Ivan’s credentials as a werewolf and plenty of is-he or isn’t-he back and forth (George and Lou aren’t buying it, and Ivan has fun stringing them along). Things quickly go south, and after saving and accidentally kidnapping Michelle, the thugs are in a race to stop Ivan before he can wreak all kinds of carnage across the Sunshine State.

Strand does a beautiful job balancing wit with werewolf violence, and one early scene in particular stands out as being a gruesomely effective showcase to Ivan’s psychopathy, while also solidifying the bloody courtship between he and George. Although Wolf Hunt has a number of gory instances, there’s a certain lightness to the work as a whole thanks to a lot of humorous banter and a handful of characters that are actually fun to spend seven hours with.

Besides Stand’s quirkiness, a lot of this fun is owed to narrator Scott Thomas, who seems to be enjoying himself quite a bit and effortlessly brings the material to life. He provides each character with a distinct voice and speech pattern, which makes it easy to discern who is saying what during stretches of dialogue, and keeps the listen fresh throughout. Thomas hits all the right notes and delivers an excellent performance. The production values are fine, too, and Thomas’ work comes through without a hitch.

If you’re looking for a genuinely fun and comedic horror listen, Wolf Hunt definitely stands out from the pack.

[Audiobook provided for review by the audiobookreviewer dot com, July 2016]

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