The Sting meets Fight Club in this magical, action-packed sequel to Caster by Elsie Chapman.
Yes, Aza Wu now has magic back. But like all things in her life, it has come at a great cost. After the tournament, Aza is able to pay off her parents' debt to Saint Willow. Unfortunately, the cost of the gathering spell she used to strip Finch of his magic has put her permanently in the employ of the gang leader. Aza has been doing little errands using real magic - collecting debts, putting the squeeze on new businesses in the district. But that had never been the plan. Saint Willow is nothing if not ambitious and having Aza as a fighter is much more lucrative than as a fixer. Especially if she can control the outcome. Aza is going to have to put it all on the line again to get out of this situation!
Read more: Spell Starter - Elsie Chapman
Review: A Blast of Hunters by David Rix
- Written by Seregil of Rhiminee
- Category: Reviews
David Rix's A Blast of Hunters was published by Snuggly Books in July 2019.
About David Rix:
David Rix is an author, composer, editor, artist and publisher active in the area of Slipstream, Speculative Fiction and Horror - not to mention hints of absurdism, miserablism, naturism and pissed-offism. Contemporary classical music, the seashore, urban underground, railways, rocks and canals. His published books are What the Giants were Saying, the chapbook Brown is the New Black and the novella/story collection Feather, which was shortlisted for the Edge Hill prize. In addition, his works have appeared in various places, the most notable being many of the Strange Tales series of anthologies from Tartarus Press, Monster Book For Girls from Exaggerated Press, Creeping Crawlers from Shadow Publishing, and Marked to Die from Snuggly Books. He also runs and creates the art for Eibonvale Press, which focuses on innovative and unusual new slipstream writing. As an editor, his first anthology Rustblind and Silverbright, a collection of Slipstream stories connected to the railways, was shortlisted for the British Fantasy Award in the Best Anthology category.
Click here to visit his official website.
About A Blast of Hunters:
London in the near future. A familiar city where the faces of the passers-by are painted with pain and where thoughts are dark and restless. For one of the city’s lost residents, waiting for oblivion on the railway tracks late one night, nothing should ever have mattered again. Instead, a chance encounter plunges him into the chasms of the city - to a place where prophecies of doom are muttered and where the urban hunters prowl, as the spectres of the Measuring Men walk the streets, rulers in hand.
A story of outsiders and subversion.
REVIEW: A BLAST OF HUNTERS BY DAVID RIX
Read more: Review: A Blast of Hunters by David Rix
Guest post: What the World Needs Now is Ridiculousness, Sweet Ridiculousness by Sean Gibson
- Written by Seregil of Rhiminee
- Category: Guest Post
Risingshadow has an opportunity to feature a guest post by Sean Gibson, who is the author of The Part About the Dragon Was (Mostly) True (The Parliament House, Dec 2020).
About Sean Gibson:
Sean Gibson is not a professional mini biography writer (if he were, this would be much more compelling). Instead, he’s a marketing professional by day, hangs out with his amazing wife, son, and daughter by night, and writes somewhere in between. He holds a BA in English Literature from Ohio Wesleyan University and an MBA from the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University, but he really wishes he had been able to matriculate at Hogwarts (he would have been in Hufflepuff for sure). Sean is a fan of sports teams from Detroit, a distressingly large number of bands that rose to prominence in the 1980s, and writing in the third person. He currently resides in Northern Virginia, and, given how much he hates moving, and given that his house has an awesome library, is likely to remain there for some time.
In addition to The Chronicle of Heloise & Grimple, Sean is the author of The Camelot Shadow and its prequel short, "The Strange Task Before Me." He has written extensively for Kirkus Reviews, and his book reviews have also appeared in Esquire.
A new book featuring Heloise, The Part About the Dragon Was (Mostly) True, is slated for release in December 2020 from Parliament House Books.
Follow him on Twitter @Gibknight, but only if you're really bored and enjoy tomfoolery.
About The Part About the Dragon Was (Mostly) True:
Sure, you think you know the story of the fearsome red dragon, Dragonia.
How it terrorized the village of Skendrick until a brave band of heroes answered the noble villagers' call for aid. How nothing could stop those courageous souls from facing down the dragon. How they emerged victorious and laden with treasure.
But, even in a world filled with epic adventures and tales of derring-do, where dragons, goblins, and unlicensed prestidigitators run amok, legendary heroes don't always know what they're doing. Sometimes they're clueless. Sometimes beleaguered townsfolk are more hapless than helpless. And orcs? They're not always assholes, and sometimes they don't actually want to eat your children.
Heloise the Bard, Erithea's most renowned storyteller (at least, to hear her tell it), is here to set the record straight. See, it turns out adventuring isn't easy, and true heroism is as rare as an articulate villager.
Having spent decades propagating this particular myth (which, incidentally, she wrote), she's finally able to tell the real story — for which she just so happened to have a front-row seat.
Welcome to Erithea. I hope you brought a change of undergarments — things are going to get messy.
Guest post: What the World Needs Now is Ridiculousness, Sweet Ridiculousness by Sean Gibson
Review: The Part About the Dragon Was (Mostly) True by Sean Gibson
- Written by Seregil of Rhiminee
- Category: Reviews
Sean Gibson's The Part About the Dragon Was (Mostly) True will be published by The Parliament House in December 2020.
About Sean Gibson:
Sean Gibson is not a professional mini biography writer (if he were, this would be much more compelling). Instead, he’s a marketing professional by day, hangs out with his amazing wife, son, and daughter by night, and writes somewhere in between. He holds a BA in English Literature from Ohio Wesleyan University and an MBA from the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University, but he really wishes he had been able to matriculate at Hogwarts (he would have been in Hufflepuff for sure). Sean is a fan of sports teams from Detroit, a distressingly large number of bands that rose to prominence in the 1980s, and writing in the third person. He currently resides in Northern Virginia, and, given how much he hates moving, and given that his house has an awesome library, is likely to remain there for some time.
In addition to The Chronicle of Heloise & Grimple, Sean is the author of The Camelot Shadow and its prequel short, "The Strange Task Before Me." He has written extensively for Kirkus Reviews, and his book reviews have also appeared in Esquire.
A new book featuring Heloise, The Part About the Dragon Was (Mostly) True, is slated for release in December 2020 from Parliament House Books.
Follow him on Twitter @Gibknight, but only if you're really bored and enjoy tomfoolery.
About The Part About the Dragon Was (Mostly) True:
Sure, you think you know the story of the fearsome red dragon, Dragonia.
How it terrorized the village of Skendrick until a brave band of heroes answered the noble villagers' call for aid. How nothing could stop those courageous souls from facing down the dragon. How they emerged victorious and laden with treasure.
But, even in a world filled with epic adventures and tales of derring-do, where dragons, goblins, and unlicensed prestidigitators run amok, legendary heroes don't always know what they're doing. Sometimes they're clueless. Sometimes beleaguered townsfolk are more hapless than helpless. And orcs? They're not always assholes, and sometimes they don't actually want to eat your children.
Heloise the Bard, Erithea's most renowned storyteller (at least, to hear her tell it), is here to set the record straight. See, it turns out adventuring isn't easy, and true heroism is as rare as an articulate villager.
Having spent decades propagating this particular myth (which, incidentally, she wrote), she's finally able to tell the real story — for which she just so happened to have a front-row seat.
Welcome to Erithea. I hope you brought a change of undergarments — things are going to get messy.
REVIEW: THE PART ABOUT THE DRAGON WAS (MOSTLY) TRUE BY SEAN GIBSON
Read more: Review: The Part About the Dragon Was (Mostly) True by Sean Gibson
Review: Well of Bones by Chase Walker
- Written by Seregil of Rhiminee
- Category: Reviews
Chase Walker's Well of Bones was published in February 2020.
About Chase Walker:
Chase Walker was born in California and raised in Southern Nevada. He spent his childhood telling stories - stories that more often than not got him into trouble for stretching the truth. As a child, he idolized heroes like Indiana Jones and Luke Skywalker, who had a knack for getting out of the trouble they inevitably found themselves in. As he grew older, his tastes expanded beyond Steven Spielberg and George Lucas films. He joined the Army and found that its hurry-up-and-wait lifestyle was perfect for whipping out a paperback and reading a little Joe Abercrombie or Michael Crichton during the short bouts of downtime. He fell deeply in love with reading and discovered a whole new way to tell his stories. Writing became a hobby quickly, and then a passion.
Today, Chase is living a self-sufficient life in rural Kansas with his wife and a small menagerie of animals. Together they raise crops, chickens, and sometimes a little cain. He divides his time between the family homestead and his full-time job as an army mechanic. You would be hard-pressed ever to find him not working with his hands. He can most often be spotted turning wrenches under the hood of an old 1977 International Harvester Scout II or pounding away at a keyboard with skinned knuckles and dirty fingernails.
Chase's stories are inspired by a lifetime of adventure, by his ten plus years of service in the Army, and by the eccentric personalities who color his own world. He tries to inject a healthy dose of reality into his stories, even as he lets his imagination run wild creating fantasy worlds. He goes about with notebook in hand, collecting from his daily life the ideas that will spark his next story. A passionate story-teller above all else, he is always striving to improve his craft on paper.
Click here to visit his official website.
About Well of Bones:
War is a bloody affair for an infantryman. The war for expansion into a new world is no different for Jake Zimmar. He would do anything to get out of combat - even join an obscure division of witch hunters and monster slayers. Jake no longer fears the tales of his youth - the monsters are long gone if they ever existed at all.
Assigned to investigate some strange happenings on a small island colony, Jake and his new allies quickly find themselves in a different kind of struggle for survival. The age-old evil that stirs under the island is an evil beyond that of the creatures of myth.
A dark cave guards even darker secrets. Inside, Jake finds more blood... and long-forgotten nightmares made flesh.
Beware the Well of Bones
REVIEW: WELL OF BONES BY CHASE WALKER
Read more: Review: Well of Bones by Chase Walker
Review: Stella by Josh Dygert
- Written by Seregil of Rhiminee
- Category: Reviews
Josh Dygert's Stella was published in April 2020.
About Josh Dygert:
Josh Dygert’s short stories have appeared in a number of online magazines and anthologies, including in the #1 Amazon Bestselling Horror Anthology Secret Stairs. He is also the author of a middle-grade fantasy novel called The Story Traveler, which is available from Amazon. He studied English and Theater in college and now teaches middle school English.
Click here to visit his official website.
About Stella:
Stella knew the names of the stars before she knew her alphabet. Although Stella's mother disappeared when she was too small to remember, she grows up happy beneath bright Indiana stars in the small town of Torrance with her father, her dog, and her best friend.
When a meteor lands in her father's cornfields, Stella and her father run after the fallen star. Stella watches as her father touches the star. The moment he does, he disappears in a flash of golden starlight. Stella never sees her father again.
From that moment on, Stella is terrified of the stars she always loved. She leaves Torrance, her dog, and her best friend only to discover that the truth she needs is still in Torrance. As a total eclipse approaches, Stella must find the courage to face her stars.
REVIEW: STELLA BY JOSH DYGERT
Read more: Review: Stella by Josh Dygert