Blade and Bone – D. K. Holmberg

Sanaron is a city of fog and violence; a place where even the past can disappear.

Kanar Reims, an ex-soldier known as the Blackheart, hides a dangerous secret. Exiled from the Realmsguard, he wants nothing to do with the kind of magic that destroyed his life.

That is until his team of mercenaries is offered a job they can’t refuse.

He’ll need the help of others working in the city: An assassin who uses the bones of her enemies in her art. An archer with strange skills. And a stranded sailor whose loyalties are unknown.

Impossible wealth awaits if they succeed, but far more is at stake if they fail, for a deadly magic will be unleashed upon the world.

Bloodbane: Quest of Lance – T. J. Marquis

What a horrible night to be invaded by psychos from the 65th Dimension.

Lance Cutfield just wants to get home to his wife and daughter.

But in his way stands a legion of Once-men, blood sorcerers, and countless foul creatures infesting the wilderness.

Lance must use his working man’s strength, and every tool at his disposal, to bring the fight to his foes.

Little do these ‘Baneborn’ know, they’ve chosen a predator for their prey…

Quest of Lance is a pulpy gamelit adventure with very lite RPG elements.

Breaker of Horizons – NoDragons

Nic has been Selected.

Chosen to leave his own body behind and become a monster.

Chosen to live or die on his own wits. His own strengths.

He’ll adventure out into a new realm as a foot soldier for the System’s relentless integration of new worlds. Fighting to break the natives into submission.

But Nic has never loved the System, or cared for his home planet, a depleted husk of a world that the System forgot long ago. With blue skies overhead and green forest to the horizons, he might just fall in love with this strange planet named Earth…

That would leave him with few friends and a thousand enemies. That would leave him clawing, biting, scratching to survive.

Extinction Level Event (The Pantheon Saga #8) – C. C. Ekeke

Aegis vs Damocles. One Last Dance.

Damocles’s latest attack has killed thousands in the city of San Miguel, including a beloved superhero.

Aegis is hellbent on stopping Damocles before his murderous crusade continues, avenging both the city he swore to protect and his fallen mentor.

But can he? Aegis’s superpowers have grown unstable and at times diminished. Meanwhile most of America’s superheroes are either imprisoned or in hiding thanks to the sweeping overreach of a corrupt President.

Yet this teen superhero and what remains of his allies are our best hope against a psychotic supervillain with the power to level cities and a small army of supermen at his command.

Is the Shield of Justice prepared for the biggest battle of his life?

Are you?

Read More

Blue Saint (St. Tommy N.Y.P.D. #12) – Declan Finn

Terrorists destroyed a church by supernatural means. Trans surgery patients have disappeared. Chinese spies have been slaughtered. MS-13 are on the march. A hurricane is coming.

This is one storm coming straight for Thomas Nolan.

Old enemies want him, his city, and everyone he loves destroyed. Every choice, every ally, every enemy, has all come to this.

All Hell is about to break loose.

If Tommy is going to die, he’s going to take them with him.

A Dream of Wings & Flame – Cale Plamman

The blood of dragons pumps through his veins. Greatness awaits!

Kobolds cower at the bottom of the foodchain, forced to eke out a meager existence in the most wretched of caves.

Most have made peace with their lot in life; one of eating scraps and carrion. They hide and run from predators, delaying the inevitable day when they aren’t fast or sneaky enough to make their escape.

But not Samazzar. Sam is different from other Kobold pups.

Traps and caves might keep him and his people alive, but sometimes, just living isn’t enough. Dragon blood runs through him, and Sam isn’t willing to settle for mere survival. Whether by claw, magic, or cunning, one day he will soar above the plains, predator rather than prey.

And nothing–be it the mockery of his tribe, the hazards of the deep caves, or even the almost insurmountable difficulty of successfully evolving his bloodline–nothing is going to stop him.

The Pale City (Rites of Resurrection #1) – Marshall J. Moore

Only the dead can save the living.

In Albastine, the dead are made into mindless servants known as Attendants, incapable of harming the living unless commanded to by the soldier-necromancer Legates.

Forced into an early retirement, Legate Gaius Cassius Calvus struggles to find purpose in his civilian life—until he is called upon to examine the apparent suicide of one of Albastine’s senators. Cassius’s necromantic powers reveal that the man was murdered—and the weapon used to kill him was an Attendant.

Knowing that only another Legate could command an Attendant to kill, Cassius sets out to discover the truth behind the assassination. His investigation leads him through the foggy streets and brooding towers of Albastine as he slowly uncovers a conspiracy that threatens to shake the Pale City to its very foundations. Should he fail, the Republic he has sworn his life—and death—to serve falls with him.

Raven’s Peace (Peacekeepers of Sol #1) – Glynn Stewart

Ten thousand stars, once chained, taste freedom
An eternal empire, once undefeated, falls to pieces
An alliance, once united, now lacks a common foe
War was hard enough. Peace may be impossible

For seventeen years, Colonel Henry Wong and the United Planets Space Force have fought the Kenmiri Empire. They drove the alien overlords back from humanity’s borders into their own stars and found allies among the Kenmiri’s slaves and subjects.

Now the war is over. A great Gathering has been called of the allies who fought the war, but they only ever shared a common enemy. With the Kenmiri in retreat, a thousand new agendas are revealed.

The United Planets Alliance wants peace above all else. Their allies want everything from new homes to new empires – and all too many of them are prepared to do anything to achieve their goals! Read More

Apocalypse Redux – Jakob H. Greif

The worst thing about the end of the world is we did it to ourselves

Isaac Thoma lived to see the last handful of survivors defeat the demonic champion. He is now alone, his past in ashes, the last and most powerful human on a blighted Earth. But what if he could go back?

Hurled back in time, Isaac has one chance to change it all. A chance to warn humanity of their impending doom. A chance to stop the [System] before shortsightedness and lust for power can render humanity extinct. Facing malign deities, demonic hordes, and the unstoppable march of human greed, Isaac will give his all to prevent the end that has already happened on the day the world became quantified.

Gates of Hell – Rick Partlow

Kyle Washaki ‘Wash’ Williams thought his life couldn’t get any more complicated. Then the aliens showed up…

After his mom died from cancer, Wash gave up his girlfriend and his dream of being a career Army officer to stay home and take care of his father, a former Special Forces soldier stricken with PTSD. Wash works three jobs just to pay the bills, and one of them is at the ranch of the man who’s engaged to his ex-girlfriend, Jimmy Bonner.

Sound rough? He thought so too…until a portal to a hell-world of giant, insectoid aliens opens behind the ranch house, sucking Wash and Jimmy into the nightmare domain of the Hive Mind, a monstrous, underground blob of brain tissue that stretches across multiple planets through the Gate System.

It exists only to spread itself across the universe. And its next target is Earth.

Will Wash be able to defend the planet from conquest by a swarm of giant alien insects? And will Jimmy be able to put aside his rivalry with Wash to fight for Earth, or will he decide that an alien horde is the perfect tool to dispose of his old enemy?

The answer lies on the other side…of the Gates of Hell.

The Path of Ascension – C. Mantis

Orphaned by monsters, Matt must power-up to save others from the same fate.

Matt plans to delve the rifts responsible for the monsters that destroyed his city and murdered his parents. But his dreams are crushed when his Tier 1 Talent is rated as detrimental and no guild or group will take him.

Working at a nearby inn, he meets a mysterious and powerful couple who give him a chance to join the Path of Ascension, an empire-wide race to ascend the Tiers and become living legends.

With their recommendation and a stolen Skill, Matt begins his journey to the peak of power. Maybe then, he can get vengeance he seeks…

Running from the Gods (The Seventh Shaman #1) – D. T. Read

No matter how far he runs, he can’t run far enough.

Blamed for the accidental deaths of two family members, Akuleh—Ku to his friends—flees his shamanic society to fight in an interstellar war. An excellent bush pilot, he gets accepted for flight training, even though he’s underage—a quality that makes him the target of abuse from many of his peers.

But when Machitew, death demon of his people’s ancient tales, begins stalking Ku for his own bone-chilling purposes, bad things start happening to the people around him… making it impossible for him to concentrate on both his studies and his flying.

Enemies abound, both within the training squadron and in the black of space, and it quickly becomes apparent that not only is Ku’s nation losing the war, but Ku is also losing his personal battle with Machitew.

Ku will have to rely on his neglected “chanter” background—something he has been derided for in the past—as well as his skillful piloting, if he’s going to save his homeworld… and his soul. Read More

“Then let us pursue without asking what we chase, and when we catch it, let us chase again.”

Mangos is the Mongoose, a skilled, boastful, and hotheaded swordsman, while Kat is the Meerkat, a beautiful yet mysterious woman who favors the oblique approach to her well-chosen blade. Together, they’ll take on any job to keep their purses full and their cups overflowing.

Pursuit Without Asking, by Jim Breyfogle, collects the first five Mongoose and Meerkat stories, of which “The Battlefield of Kerres” and “Brandy and Dye” have been reviewed here in depth. Also included are “The Sword of the Mongoose”, where Mangos learns of the location of a rare masterwork sword, “The Valley of Terzol”, in which Kat and Mangos guard an archivist through the jungle ruins of a fallen empire , and “The Burning Fish”, where they are commissioned to recover a rare animal sacred to a goddess. The non-Mongoose and Meerkat “Deathwater” and appendices of Mangos and Kat-inspired role-playing modules and character sheets round out Pursuit Without Asking.

As mentioned before, the introduction to Mangos and Kat in “The Battlefield of Kerres” is serviceable, but thin compared to later stories. Fortunately, the characters and prose grow more complex with the next story. By the time the Mongoose and Meerkat face off against a giant serpent in “The Valley of Terzol”, the two have the light and breezy banter of long companions who have risked their lives together on countless occasions. Yet for all the time together, Kat still surprises Mangos. Each new story teases out another detail of this secretive adventurer. Scholarly yet skilled with a blade, beautiful yet unapproachable, always attacked first by monsters, each new revelation only adds to the mystery around Kat, making her more exotic.

And Breyfogle has a knack for the exotic. Jungle ruin, tropical islands, mountainous canyons, magic-ravage battlefield–each new tale thrusts Mangos and Kat into a new setting with strange people and stranger challenges.

Breyfogle has mastered small-scope fantasy, keeping the constant string of odd jobs fresh. Where some authors lean too heavily on the sword and sorcery standby of hacking through evil cultists, Mongoose and Meerkat find themselves more as hired muscle for many mercantile schemes. This thrusts them into different intrigues than just secret societies, and it also requires a bit more thought in solving mysteries and getting paid than just swinging a sword. Yet there is action to spare, as varied as the settings: mountaintop chases on crumbling paths, swims through piranha-filled waters, and the inevitable crossing of blades. The perils are all immediate and local, but brief glimpses of wider events can be seen.

Fortunately, there are more exotic settings and revelations in store for Mangos and Kat, as new volumes of Cirsova magazine feature the follow ups to the tales in Pursuit Without Asking.

Beautiful. Genius. Glorious. The list of adjectives used to describe sorceress Lina Inverse are limitless…

…or so Lina says about herself. Most of the people who get to know this bandit-robbing sorceress just think she’s just in love with her own voice. But there is magical talent to Lina, and she’ll need it. An idol she recently “recovered” from a bandit stronghold holds the key to reviving the dark lord, and trolls, chimeras, and a suspicious wandering priest all want it. And they’re all prepared to take it from Lina, along with her head.

I haven’t come across as strong a 1st person character voice since Kei’s in The Great Adventure of the Dirty Pair. Sometimes a little too strong, as you may have guessed if you’ve seen the anime. But translation hasn’t dampened Lina Inverse any, nor has it tempered her self-absorbed attention-seeking. It’s curious that those aspects tend to get cranked up in male-written light novels, and suppressed in female-written ones. Guess the obsession with the manic pixie crosses cultures. Your tolerance for the narrative voice of the Slayers, by Hajime Kanzaka, will vary, depending on how willing you are to tolerate attention-seeking teen-aged girls.

Slayers is humorous sword and sorcery, at turns poking fun and embracing the conventions of fantasy and swashbuckling action. The narration is heavy on the banter, whether it’s between Lina and the reader or Lina and her self-professed guardian, the swordsman Gourry Gabriev. Gourry tends to get Flanderized into idiocy in later adaptations, but the original is perceptive and witty when he’s not being used as a device for Lina to explain the magical chess matches she gets wrapped up in. Besides, Lina is the definition of unreliable narrator.

As for the conventions, Slayers seesaws between peril and comedy. The peril is always real, whether from unkillable trolls to the resurrected Dark Lord. If anything, the anime tended to tone down the stakes to life, limb, and virtue. The humor comes from the responses, usually played against type. Lina is the type of action girl to save herself, but, given the right rescuer, she’ll gleefully scream like a damsel-in-distress–and love every minute of the change in pace. It’s these surprise reactions, consistent with characterization, that keep the gristle and gloom at bay. And by keeping the humor to banter and response, the peril does not get undercut by irony. The sincerity of pulp fantasy is preserved.

Mongoose and Meerkat and Slayers are often mentioned together in PulpRev circles for their similarities. And for more than just the wandering duos of male swordsmen and female magic users. And while Mangos and Kat do not indulge in the rapid manzai comedic wordplay of Lina and Gourry, both duos bring an enthusiastic swashbuckling flair to their travels. These carefree adventurers embrace the adventuring life freely, relishing equally in the clash of blades and the draining of cups. And sometimes quick wits and a quicker tongue are needed to extract these pairs from the latest town’s plots. And when one adventure is done, they dust themselves off and set out over the horizon to the next.

Or more simply put, Mongoose and Meerkat and Slayers overflow with the celebration of life and living.