Category: Review

The Wide Game
By Michael West
Re-release 2013 Seventh Star Press
www.bymichaelwest.com
Order from Amazon here
10 / 10 Arjays—because everyone knows Arjays are the coolest thing ever!

This text below was originally written for a previous edition of the novel, now out of print.

“When you’re in high school, it all seems so serious. Every little thing has cosmic ramifications. Everything is life and death. It’s only when you get some distance you realize it wasn’t that way at all.” This bit of dialog appears late in the novel The Wide Game, spoken without a trace of irony. And the reader knows by this point in the story that Paul Rice, our protagonist, would punch the speaker in the face if she were anyone other than his wife.

Those who give in to the numbing effects of time and distance forget that a small percentage of every high school class never graduates due to suicide. For those lucky enough (or unfortunate enough, one could convincingly argue) to have a high school sweetheart, they experience a love more powerful and more pure than any to come after, resulting in scars of the heart and soul that never entirely heal afterwards. Some high school friends remain friends the rest of our lives. Music and movies make a far deeper impression. High school is an experience of feelings at its most pure, not because we can’t distance ourselves, but because most of us have not built up the walls that life and experience force us to build. The walls built between our true exposed selves and the rest of the word. Because high school teaches us to build those walls.

So okay, I’m three paragraphs in, and I haven’t talked about the monsters. If you read Skull Full of Kisses (and if not, why haven’t you?) then you already know West can deliver on the scary. In The Wide Game, the scary comes in the form of an unspeakable evil that rises from the cornfield in a variety of terrible shapes and methods, and as the mystery unfolds, the motivation works beautifully. The blood is spilled, the scary things come. Terror ensues. Much has been said about the horror in this horror novel in plenty of other reviews. If you are here for a great horror novel, The Wide Game delivers.

But what impressed me more about The Wide Game is West’s ability to create fully developed characters, even the ones that won’t make it to the end.

Paul Rice, in the year 1997, returns to the small town he grew up in with great reluctance for his ten year high school reunion. Paul visits his mother’s home with his wife and two children, so grandma can watch the children and Paul and his wife can head off to the reunion proper. We hear references to a great tragedy during the class of 1987 Wide Game—essentially an annual small town senior tradition scavenger hunt / graduation party held in a giant cornfield. We learn that Paul, then a film major and participant in the game, actually captured some of these events on his video camera.

Wisely, the book doesn’t spend a lot of time in 1997, but quickly jumps back to 1987, where we experience the events “live” as they unfold. And here is where the novel really resonated with me.

We are dealing with the mid-80s, teenagers, and mass murder. Yes, West flirts with many of the teen horror movie conventions of the time. You have the high school sweethearts; the obsession with music and M-TV; The 80’s slang; the nerd and the bully; the bodyguard who defends the nerd; the jock; the stoners; the Laverne-and-Shirley-like best girlfriends. Incredibly and in spite of this, West manages to avoid the typical dumb teenager clichés while paying homage to the era that brought us these great clichés.

Paul is very much in love with Deidra, and West takes his time developing their passion and budding romance, letting the reader experience it firsthand. The rest of the novel relies on the reader caring about them, and taking the time to develop the relationship pays off. Rather than bringing the story to a halt, it’s my favorite series of scenes. Paul and Deidra are sweet and likeable and sincere, and any reader whose heart is not made of gargoyle stone will get vested in their story. All this while already knowing that Paul’s wife in 1997 is named Mary, not Deidra.

Paul falls hard for Deidra, invests his heart, his soul, and his creative romantic energy the way only a swooning teenager can—before the first heartbreak, the first shattering of romantic dreams, the first time you realize your destiny was not as set as you thought.

I don’t know if West based this on reality, but I can take a guess. Having experienced a similar arc in my own high school experience (well, minus the being chased by psychotic pissed-off spirits in a cornfield part) West opens a creative vein of truth to bring the perfect touch of honesty to his fiction. For me the high school hi-jinks resonate to the point of a near-flashback, and the reunion worked equally well for reasons that enter into spoiler territory.

Bottom line: If you’re just looking for a great scary book, you can’t go wrong with The Wide Game. Even if the 80s high school setting means nothing to you, you’re still in for a great time. If, however, you happen to a couple years on either side of age 40, The Wide Game could very well serve as a wonderful, chilling reminder of a past when “Every little thing has cosmic ramifications…[and] Everything is life and death.”

Spellbent; Lucy A. Snyder; Del Rey/Ballentine Books 2009

Book one of the Jessie Shimmer series; http://www.sff.net/people/lucy-snyder/

A review by R.J Sullivan

Score: 9/10 Arjays—because everyone knows Arjays are the coolest thing ever!

First of all, anyone who says fantasy art covers play no role in selling a book has never seen Spellbent.  In December 2010 I attended Apex Day in Lexington, Kentucky, with the Indiana Horror Writers, and in choosing from the overwhelming number of titles on display, I happened to look over at Spellbent. SOLD!

Okay, confession time. I’m a sucker for Tanya Huff and Elizabeth Moon. They tend to write sci-fi series novels about tough military and/or mercenary gals with giant guns blasting giant holes in bug-eyed monsters while slapping their boyfriends around and barking orders. It’s a sort of sci-fi junk food that I’ve acquired a taste for, and I’m not saying they’re great literature, but they are a heck of a lot of fun.

So I’m looking at this cover and I’m pretty sure this book is going to be great, and I’m also sure I know exactly how this book is going to play out.

I was half-right. The book WAS great—but it didn’t play out the way I thought.  It far exceeded my expectations.

While I was all set for an Aliens inspired Ripley-esque action piece (not that there’s anything wrong with that!) what I got instead was a book that tapped an entirely different vibe, but one that resonates with me just as much—the hero-against-all-odds tale. See, while I’m a Tanya Huff junkie, I’m even more of a Spider-Man/Stan Lee junkie, and I love any story of the underdog struggling against incredible odds. (This should be no surprise to anyone who’s read Haunting Blue, but I digress)

Okay, let’s get to it. And we start off—with the reason for minus one Arjay. We have Our Hero, Sorcerer’s Apprentice and hot twenty-something Jessie, and her former-college professor-now-sorcerer-and-lover Cooper.  This is just me being totally honest, as a middle aged guy, I could not get on board for Jessie and Cooper.  In fact, I found the whole thing decidedly creepy. Much is made throughout the first chapter of Jessie and Cooper’s sorcery exploits; much more is made of their sexual exploits, and how Cooper can’t keep his hands off of Jessie and how Jessie loves every minute of it. And since this is Jessie’s story, the reader is not given Cooper’s perspective. But I found it just a bit suspicious and frankly, a bit disturbing in an icky way.

In fact, later in the book, when Jessie is desperate to find Cooper, accusations are made. Evidence is presented, and the case is made that Cooper wasn’t interested in training Jessie at all, but just wanted to take advantage of her naivety and use and abuse her body while not really taking her seriously as a student of the magical arts. Jessie, of course, doesn’t believe a word of it, and stays true to her mission to save Cooper. But as I read the evidence, well, the accusations made perfect sense to me.

To be clear, I absolutely bought that Jessie was committed to Cooper. But it’s like watching a good friend giving themselves over to a relationship when you’re not entirely sure if the other person deserves that commitment or knows how lucky they are.  So—minor spoiler here—Cooper spends the majority of the book MIA, and frankly, Cooper still has to prove himself to me.

So enough on the quibbling point. Jessie and Cooper are off on a routine assignment, to cast a simple weather spell for a disgruntled farmer, when apparently a portal to another dimension–possibly Hell–opens up and swallows Cooper.  As if that’s not bad enough, Cooper has been pulled into Hell and something else has been transferred to our dimension—a really aggressive hellhound demon beasty thing. And it’s on a rampage.

At this point we meet Pal, Jessie’s familiar. Until this moment, Jessie has been unable to form a mental bond with Pal. Not that it matters; Pal is a ferret, which really doesn’t do Jessie a lot of good against an aggressive hellhound demon beasty thing. However, as people aren’t supposed to know that there are wizards in their everyday existence, the beasty has to be tracked down and killed ASAP, and Jessie is the only one who even knows about it.

To summarize, Jessie is terribly unprepared for the fight. While she does ultimately manage to stop the beastie, she takes a serious pummeling, making it clear that whatever Cooper’s intentions, she was terribly unprepared for an eventuality like this.

Much later, the council of sorcerers that run the world behind the scenes close in on Jessie and order her to give up her efforts to rescue Cooper. And they won’t take no for an answer, or play fair while they wait. And so, terribly injured, cut off from most of her magic powers, and even given a sort of magical “mark” so that other magic users will know not to help her, we watch Jessie refuse to follow orders, continue with her plans to save her lover, to a point where I could point to a spot in the book where I said to myself, “this is not worth it, I would give up right here, sign what I needed to, get my powers back, and abandon Cooper to his fate.”

But that’s why Jessie is a hero and why I just write about them. For the next 300 plus enjoyable pages we meet a delightful and intriguing cast of supporting characters while learning how this magic secret society operates in the real world, as the plot takes a number of dark twists, turns and revelations, all of which would be an incredible disservice for me to discuss or reveal.

Spellbent is easily the best novel I’ve read in a long time, but you don’t need me to tell you that. The novel has earned a 2010 Stoker nomination for Best First Novel (winners announced in June!), and the best news is, there’s two more books in the series to check out.

Note: I have every intention of contributing book reviews to the Sci-Fi Guys Book Review site as often as my very slow reading pace allows. This review ended up on my own blog because Rodney already wrote his own rave of Spellbent here.