Bayou Bytes Blog

 All of Us Villains is being marketed as magic meets The Hunger Games , and though I've grown wary of dystopian fiction, it was enough to make me grab the title.  To some extent, this comparison is apt.  Seven kids from Ilvernath's great families compete every twenty years. The last kid standing wins their family exclusive access to the town's hidden well of high magick.  But this year's competition is different. Someone in the know published a novel explicitly detailing the nature of the competition and when it becomes a bestseller, little Ilvernath's big secret becomes front page news.   Even though the seven champions thrown into the ring this year have gone to incredible lengths to prepare for the tournament, things have changed. They're starting to rebel from the inside.  By the time I was done with this novel, I was certain that comparing it to The Hunger Games was selling it short. For a novel with so many characters, they are remarkably disti...

As you might expect, we're starting October off with an eerie novel. The Death of Jane Lawrence is a brand new novel from Caitlin Starling, who you might remember is the author of The Luminous Dead (a novel that I am aggressively recommending to this day). I really enjoy Starling's writing style, as well as the way she builds suspense, so if you're in the mood for a dark thriller, this could be the book for you.  When Jane's foster father accepts a position in another town, she decides the most practical option is to stay behind and marry. She pursues the local physician, Dr. Lawrence. An awkward and introverted man, he accepts Jane's proposition, with the added condition that she must never spend the night at his out of town estate. Though she initially agrees, an unfortunate carriage accident deposits her on his doorstep in the midst of a terrible storm.  The man she finds in the darkened estate is very different from the one she married, haunted and terrified b...

 Evelyn Perdanu owns of of the most powerful shipping companies in the dying city of Delphinium. Once a rich and successful port, war has cut Delphinium off from most of it's resources and the city is slowly fading. While many of the rich party in an attempt to ignore their slow decline, Evelyn leads a solitary and calculating existence. When one of her ships returns to port, she is horrified to find a mysterious illness onboard.  Despite her efforts, the sickness soon spreads beyond her ship. Infected persons, with an undeniable glint in their eye and manic energy, begin turning up in her daily life. And soon it becomes apparent that she is the common factor. Whatever is driving the infected, it's after Evelyn.  She retreats to the safety of her manor, determined to find answers. A cure if she can, before the whole city is overrun. This is a fantasy horror story, brought to you by the author of The Luminous Dead. Which I have praised extensively, and reviewed here . ...

I picked up Salvation Day because it was included on a list of Luminous Dead read-alikes. It's been two years since I've read The Luminous Dead , and I still bring it up every chance I get. So I should have known I'd be a little disappointed by anything I tried to compare to it.  Still, Wallace wrote a solid story. Salvation Day switches back and forth between two narrators.  Jaswinder Bhattacharya was the sole survivor of the House of Wisdom disaster. Ten years ago, when he was just twelve, a deadly virus broke out aboard the space station, killing everyone within 24 hours.   House of Wisdom has floated silently in orbit for ten years, and Jas has spent each one trying to forget that fateful day.   But Jas is the only person who can open the genetic locks aboard the ship, and Zahra and her crew need him. They're outsiders, brought together by a man named Adam, who has a plan to free them all from Earth's oppressive government.   If they can ab...

The Orsk furniture store is an Ikea rip-off in Cleveland, Ohio. It has a gigantic showroom, full of furniture with unpronounceable names arranged in a maze that will trap you for hours. Also it's haunted.  The first thing to know about this book is that the physical copy is stunning.   Hendrix was so committed to the knockoff Ikea concept that the book perfectly mimics an Ikea catalog. With a slightly disturbing furniture arrangement on its glossy cover, it's the exact dimensions of the real thing. The book opens to a map of the Orsk showroom and includes illustrations of relevant furniture pieces at the beginning of each chapter.   This is another story that toes the line between comedy and horror. The odd occurrences happening in the Orsk showroom after dark are classic haunted house moves, but they're combined with the horror that is working a retail job. The main character faces not only vengeful ghosts, but also coworkers who are...

 Holly is a young trans vampire, who has recently joined a vast underground colony. Modeling themselves after the honeybee, these vampires dutifully perform their assigned duties and defer only to the Hierophant, their founder. All Holly wants is to be fully accepted, for the Hierophant to give him a new name, which will wipe away the last of his human past and mark him as a true member of the colony.  But the Hierophant seems to be rebuking Holly at every turn, and Holly begins to wonder if this is really where he belongs. The Mellification  was an interesting story. At about two hundred pages, this is a novella rather than a full novel. And though it's a good plot, I think the length counts against it. This story introduces not only Holly, his partner Cain, and the Hierophant, but it also throws in some perspective switches and introduces you to Lila and Claudia -- two vampires locked in an eternal rivalry that dates back to their time as humans. It would have really be...

The Grace Year by Kim Liggett Though this is a dystopian YA story, there are no big revolutions happening in The Grace Year by Kim Liggett. Revolutions realistically begin as small acts over the span of many rebellions, and in puritanical Garner County, the rebellions are happening in girls like 15 year old Tierney Jones.  Raised as a cynical tomboy in a society that believes women are harborers of harmful magic, Tierney is disdainful of the repressive roles women play in their society and dismissive of women and girls in general.  "I'm not like the other girls" is something Tierney never says outright, but it's something that tracks with her thought process. The Grace Year deconstructs this line of thinking, but it's a messy process. She's got to build relationships with other girls that test her preconceptions, but ultimately, Tierney relies mostly on herself. She's a strong heroine who doesn't sway with the wind-- she trusts what she can see-- and a...

Leviathan Wakes  is the first book in The Expanse series. It is also the source material for the TV show, The Expanse . A joint effort between Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck (who have adopted the pen name James S. A. Corey), The Expanse books currently have eight installations. The ninth and final volume is set to come out within the next year. This is the perfect time to jump on board if you haven't read them yet.  Leviathan Wakes  is set in the near future. Humans have colonized portions of the solar system, with bases on the moon, Mars, and in the Asteroid Belt. But after generations in different environments, physiological and cultural differences have become a prominent source of tension. Martians in their harsh environment are a military-based society, relying on strict order to survive on the rough planet. Belters live entirely on atmosphere-less rocks, valuing teamwork and resource rationing. Both see Earthers as spoiled and selfish people who never have to wonder w...

There's an urban legend in Briar Glen. When young Lucy Gallows found a road in the woods and followed it, she and the road disappeared. She was never seen again, and now she haunts the forest...   It's 2017, and Sara has been the weird loner at school ever since her sister disappeared one year ago. The official story is that Becca ran off with her boyfriend, but Sara knows the truth. Becca had gone into the woods searching for Lucy's ghost. Unable to give up on her sister, and irritated that the world moved on without her, Sara has become distant from her family and friends.    But on the anniversary of Becca's disappearance, a text message goes out to the entire school, inviting the kids to "play the game" - to go into the woods and find Lucy.    Sara knows this may be her only chance to follow Becca and learn what really happened to her.    Armed with a book of Becca's notes and her previously estranged friends, Sara...

In  The Luminous Dead,  Caitlin Starling decided to take on a challenge by building an entire story with two characters and a cave. And it did not disappoint.   On Gyre's planet, the fastest way to make money is to work as a caver, mapping caves and finding mineral deposits deep below the surface. But the caves are perilous, full of steep drops, flooded passages, and the  Tunnelers . These worm-like monsters seem to swim through solid rock, causing earthquakes and cave-ins. The only way to send cavers down without attracting a  Tunneler  is to send someone in alone, encased in a high-tech closed environment suit.    If Gyre does one assignment and survives, she'll have enough money to get off world for good. So she  fakes  her credentials and successfully gets hired on as a caver.  But once she's in the cave she's completely alone. Her only company is  Em , a voice in her ear, the handler who is watchin...

Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero Cantero's  Meddling Kids  is an obvious but decidedly off brand take on Scooby-Doo. He uses the familiar dynamic of four kids and a dog who fight crime as a foundation for a whole new story. The group spent their childhood summers in Blyton Hills, a sleepy mining town, catching elaborate and incompetent criminals. It was always a man in a ridiculous monster mask. Until it wasn't. Here the similarities to Scooby-Doo end. In the summer of 1977, the kids got in over their heads. They managed to pull a mask off another criminal and send him to jail, but they've suffered severe psychological repercussions from that last fateful case. Now it’s 1990 and the kids are all grown up. Kerri (Velma), got a degree in biology before her anxieties got to her. Now she bartends and is plagued by constant nightmares of that night. Andy is our Daphne, who joined the air force before ending up in and subsequent...

Courtesy of  nydailynews.com For a while, it seemed that the king of psychological horror books had stepped down.  Stephen King's books in the last decade have tended to be off-the-wall, weird, difficult to follow, and were just overall disjointed, badly written, and uninteresting.  Fans everywhere continued to buy the books and slouch through them, out of respect for his past works.  And then, in 2013,  Doctor Sleep  happened. With Doctor Sleep , we saw the return of the Stephen King we grew to love (amazing stories!) and hate (sleepless nights!).  While still reeling from the revelations, thrills, and horrors seen in Doctor Sleep , fans were then hit in June 2014 with King's first hard-boiled crime novel, Mr. Mercedes ; it was a success not only with King fans, but also with crime/mystery fans. It appears that King has finally moved on from his brush with death in 1999, when a distracted driver ran him over with a van.  The accident clearl...