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THE GRAVE LISTENERS

A creepy and entertaining tale about a misbegotten quest to cheat death.

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Two men vie for the job of detecting people who’ve been buried alive in Frank’s gonzo fantasy tale.

This yarn unfolds in a vaguely Eastern European village where a Grave Listener named Volushka plies his trade: camping out next to fresh graves and listening, by way of a tube poked into a buried coffin, for sounds that indicate that an apparently deceased person has revived. Volushka spends solitary, uneventful days boozing and sleeping in the cemetery, but at night he must fend off the ghosts, witches, and vampires who frequent the area. He’s also vehemently disliked by the local villagers. He’s a large, imposing man with a room-emptying odor and a propensity for nasty jibes: “was she prone to lunatic, farting rampages?” he queries a bereaved family. He’s also regularly beaten by everyone from a brothel proprietor to an old woman at a well to a 5-year-old boy named Benzi with whom he endlessly trades juvenile barbs. Volushka’s life is disrupted when a stranger named Marcabrusa appears and decides to take over his cushy gig. Swayed by the new arrival’s silver tongue, the townsfolk beat Volushka unconscious and give the listening job to Marcabrusa, who promptly unearths nine buried-alive villagers felled by a mysterious epidemic. Volushka repairs to the swampy lair of the Witch of Gore Mal Gore and, after a horrifying sexual encounter, obtains a magic powder that temporarily makes a person appear to be dead. He then hatches a plot to stage a listening showdown between himself and Marcabrusa over the graves of two twin girls.

Frank’s novel has the grotesquerie of a Tim Burton movie, the droll corruption of a Mark Twain story (camouflaged by pompous oratory), and the cheerful brutality of a Punch and Judy show. The characters have few redeeming qualities; Volushka is a loathsome tangle of grandiosity, cowardice, and hypocrisy; he has a conniving intellect, but is also profoundly stupid. However, he’s humanized by his inability to dissemble and scheme just as well as his adversaries. The narrative is certainly over the top, but Frank manages to mine comedic gold in scenes that combine verbal fireworks with clever slapstick. In one hilarious bit, Volushka and Benzi are forced to translate their usual screaming match into silent pantomime beside the bed of two slumbering villagers. For all its farcical elements, the novel also gets at themes of belonging, loneliness, and the paranoia of small, insular groups panicked by superstition and sudden disaster. Frank’s prose is elegant and vivid, but the more pungent details are always at the service of character and meaning, as in a sketch of the witch, who likes Volushka’s looks: “The form of a body slowly emerged from a flickering mist, surrounded by a poisonous corona. A croaking, ancient, hollow voice pulled itself out of a raspy echo and shivered in its loneliness, wroth and infernal grief. ‘You’re a plump one.’ ” The result is an inventive, mordantly funny story with a blighted but yearning soul.

A creepy and entertaining tale about a misbegotten quest to cheat death.

Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2023

ISBN: 9798987782408

Page Count: 144

Publisher: Amazon Digital Services LLC

Review Posted Online: July 20, 2023

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IRON FLAME

From the Empyrean series , Vol. 2

Unrelenting, and not in a good way.

A young Navarrian woman faces even greater challenges in her second year at dragon-riding school.

Violet Sorrengail did all the normal things one would do as a first-year student at Basgiath War College: made new friends, fell in love, and survived multiple assassination attempts. She was also the first rider to ever bond with two dragons: Tairn, a powerful black dragon with a distinguished battle history, and Andarna, a baby dragon too young to carry a rider. At the end of Fourth Wing (2023), Violet and her lover, Xaden Riorson, discovered that Navarre is under attack from wyvern, evil two-legged dragons, and venin, soulless monsters that harvest energy from the ground. Navarrians had always been told that these were monsters of legend and myth, not real creatures dangerously close to breaking through Navarre’s wards and attacking civilian populations. In this overly long sequel, Violet, Xaden, and their dragons are determined to find a way to protect Navarre, despite the fact that the army and government hid the truth about these creatures. Due to the machinations of several traitorous instructors at Basgiath, Xaden and Violet are separated for most of the book—he’s stationed at a distant outpost, leaving her to handle the treacherous, cutthroat world of the war college on her own. Violet is repeatedly threatened by her new vice commandant, a brutal man who wants to silence her. Although Violet and her dragons continue to model extreme bravery, the novel feels repetitive and more than a little sloppy, leaving obvious questions about the world unanswered. The book is full of action and just as full of plot holes, including scenes that are illogical or disconnected from the main narrative. Secondary characters are ignored until a scene requires them to assist Violet or to be killed in the endless violence that plagues their school.

Unrelenting, and not in a good way.

Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023

ISBN: 9781649374172

Page Count: 640

Publisher: Red Tower

Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024

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FOURTH WING

From the Empyrean series , Vol. 1

Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.

On the orders of her mother, a woman goes to dragon-riding school.

Even though her mother is a general in Navarre’s army, 20-year-old Violet Sorrengail was raised by her father to follow his path as a scribe. After his death, though, Violet's mother shocks her by forcing her to enter the elite and deadly dragon rider academy at Basgiath War College. Most students die at the War College: during training sessions, at the hands of their classmates, or by the very dragons they hope to one day be paired with. From Day One, Violet is targeted by her classmates, some because they hate her mother, others because they think she’s too physically frail to succeed. She must survive a daily gauntlet of physical challenges and the deadly attacks of classmates, which she does with the help of secret knowledge handed down by her two older siblings, who'd been students there before her. Violet is at the mercy of the plot rather than being in charge of it, hurtling through one obstacle after another. As a result, the story is action-packed and fast-paced, but Violet is a strange mix of pure competence and total passivity, always managing to come out on the winning side. The book is categorized as romantasy, with Violet pulled between the comforting love she feels from her childhood best friend, Dain Aetos, and the incendiary attraction she feels for family enemy Xaden Riorson. However, the way Dain constantly undermines Violet's abilities and his lack of character development make this an unconvincing storyline. The plots and subplots aren’t well-integrated, with the first half purely focused on Violet’s training, followed by a brief detour for romance, and then a final focus on outside threats.

Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.

Pub Date: May 2, 2023

ISBN: 9781649374042

Page Count: 528

Publisher: Red Tower

Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2024

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