Alex Hansen's Blog

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Yet another of my novels is now available in ebook and paperback on Amazon.com.

Approxitation is a satirical view of interpersonal relationships and low-level corporate life.  As Rudy and several of his colleagues all vie for a promotion in their office, they each encounter stumbling blocks that are debilitating to them but inadequately addressed by the people in their lives.  Through the diverse and often disparate perspectives of multiple narrators, we see our heroes’ company beset by sad and silly dramas that result in employee turnover and personal failures.

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My newest novel is now available from Amazon!  The Shoals of Ammoron chronicles an ancient civilization’s crisis when a democratic ruler named Pahoran is ousted by a reckless monarch in the midst of an ongoing war with a neighboring country.  Pictured on the cover is Moroni, the brutal military commander Pahoran is forced to enlist to take back the capital city and to save his people from ruin.

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Over the last several months, the final two installments of the New Devil series have been released on Amazon:  Tenuous Alliance and The Salvific Void.  This marks the conclusion of young Jason Giles’ struggles against the endlessly shifting loyalties of Hell’s most powerful players and his final push to, essentially, save the universe.

Since this is (finally!) the thrilling culmination of a complicated confluence of events in the underworld (as well as the end of three years of sporadic book releases), I’ve put the entire story into one volume.  It’s available as an ebook or a physical paperback from Amazon.

It’s satisfying, of course, to release the series as a completed, self-contained product.  It’s also a relief to put something I’m proud of behind me and look forward to newer projects.  I’m working on a few novels at the moment (including the final followup to Tiem Mechine and Tiem Hopper) and hope to have something great out before year’s end.

Stay tuned!

I haven’t had much of an online presence these past few months, but I haven’t died.  And I haven’t stopped writing.

For those following the New Devil series, I finally have a small update for you.  Volume 8, Dam of the Damned, is now available on Amazon.  And Volume 9, Inglorious Descent, is up for pre-order until its release in early May.

I’m also starting work on what should be the conclusion to Jason’s adventures in Hell.  It would be nice to end the series at an even ten volumes, but I have a lot of important material I’d like to cover and I’m not sure if I’ll be able to do it in one shot or not.  But it’s looking like The New Devil should wrap itself up in one or two more novellas.

So if you’ve been understandably a little frustrated with my slow and erratic release schedule…rest assured, the end is nigh.  Just bear with me a little longer!

This was an interesting and unusual ride through an interesting and unusual fantasy world.  The story itself—and the way the story is presented—is odd enough that I think I’m still kind of processing how I feel about it.  The Chronicles of Otherworld by A. S. Aramiru is decidedly unique, however, and that could give it an enviable ability to stand out among the largely indistinguishable hordes of self-published fantasy books.

The Concept:  B

The premise here is something that a casual fan of fantasy (like me, for example) has probably seen before.  There’s another world that inhabitants of our reality can travel to.  This world has all the best trappings and staples of fantastical fiction:  a mostly medieval setting, sword fights, sorcery, monsters, powerful gods, richly violent histories of the kingdoms in play, and so forth.  It reminded me a little bit of Everworld, a series I loved to pieces when I was a teenager.

But what sets Otherworld apart from similarly-conceived stories is the way it’s dressed up. For example, when a native of our world travels into Otherworld, his hand is adorned with a stamp-like wound.  The wound fills with color as its owner kills people and a fully-filled stamp can grant him superhuman strength and ability.  If it sounds strange, that’s probably because it is strange, but it helps keep Otherworld from becoming bland and forgettable fantasy fare.

There’s also a bit of a horror angle to the story, especially in the chapter during which Camilla is held captive by a hideous, pig-like man.  There’s a visceral atmosphere of dread and a shocking level of unabashed gore that should give this novella some serious genre crossover appeal.

The Execution:  D

I feel bad giving the execution of the concept such a low grade because it’s clearly ambitious and I admire the attempt.  But Otherworld is a little confusing and needs to be read extremely carefully.

Each chapter (or episode) focuses on a different narrator than the last, but it also focuses on a completely different story than the last.  I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to be reading this as a collection of short stories that all happen to take place in the same fantasy world or if it was a collection of plotlines that would eventually converge.  I think it’s neither.  Or maybe it’s both.  The emergence of recurring characters and plot devices helped slowly tie things together, but for presenting itself as a “season,” this novella doesn’t feel as cohesive and as tautly helmed as a season of a typical television show.  I get the sense that there were a lot of mysteries about Otherworld that the reader is supposed to wonder about for a while until the author chooses to answer the burning questions, but for me it was a bit too heavy on the mystery and a bit too light on the exposition.

I’m also not sure I understand the rules of this new world well enough to grasp all the implications of the exciting finale, although it’s obvious that the ending is of major significance to the characters involved.

My other issue with the execution is that there are a lot of grammatical errors.  They’re not the clumsiest of mistakes because in almost every case it’s quite easy to tell what the author meant to say, but another careful pass with an editor’s pen would do wonders for the book’s presentation.

The Writer’s Voice:  A+

I love Aramiru’s voice.  His style seems to rely a lot on the dry observational humor of his first-person narrators and on short, meaningful sentences that aren’t technically complete sentences (although that’s not what I counted against him when I was whining about grammar because in these cases it was clearly done intentionally to achieve a specific effect).  Otherworld also contains plentiful profanity, but it’s not done in a way that makes it sound like the author crammed as many cuss words in as possible in an attempt to seem edgy.  It’s very organic swearing, and that’s honestly the best way to do it (if you ask me).

The other thing I like about the writer’s voice is that, on occasion, A. S. Aramiru sneaks in some slyly profound lines:

We rarely get what we deserve.  But there’s a comfort in the idea that what happens to us has nothing to do with what we deserve.

The X-Factor:  A

The special ingredient here is the plot.  It can be obtuse and difficult to pin down, but when Aramiru throws a curveball, he throws one hell of a curveball.  As ambivalent as I felt while reading parts of this book, there were a couple of surprises that, when I stumbled across them, demanded that I read on.  The overarching plot of the series is still emerging, but it’s emerging as one with some killer twists.

The Season Wrap-up:  B

For all of its rough edges, this novella is a promising start to what could be an epic fantasy series.  The world seems detailed, with its complexity merely hinted at in this first installment.  The characters are varied.  The initially unrelated plot threads started to come together slowly over the course of the book, and it gives a final sense of unity heading into what I assume will be referred to as Season 2.  And the presentation is unusual enough to inspire enough curiosity to keep me reading.

It’s not a platitude to say that I’m really interested to see where this series is going.

With this short story, I discovered a tale with what seemed to be an overused premise erupt into something far creepier than I’d ever expected.

The Concept:  C+

A sweet young couple and their adorable little cat move into a new home, which the husband becomes convinced is being watched by swarms of creepy, telepathic crows.

It’s not the most original horror premise out there, but the author’s blurb made it sound just eerie enough that I figured it was worth a shot.  I didn’t know this when I started reading, of course, but it’s not the beginning that makes this story special—it’s the deliciousness of the ending.

The Execution:  B+

How exactly does one go about trying to make a horde of crows give a reader chills in a world in which Hitchcock’s The Birds is so well-known?  Huston gives it a surprising amount of justice, buffeting the reader expertly back and forth between scenes of cute banter between Danny and Rebecca and scenes of bewildering avian menace.  The tonal whiplash from the idyllic romance and the inexplicable dread serves to emphasize the crescendo of sinister elements in the story.

The Writer’s Voice:  B

Huston can certainly turn a phrase, and he clearly has a knack for spookiness.  There were a few little things that bothered me—a few overused words and a lack of delineation between official narration and direct thoughts of the narrator, for example.  But the first-person narration helped smooth over a lot of those minor quibbles, allowing me to get into Danny Jackson’s head and feel his dread.

The simplistic, sometimes awkward phrasing to represent the telepathic communication of the crows was a nice touch, as well, adding to the confusion and the creepiness.

The X-Factor:  A

The ending, the ending, the ending.  The ending!  It’s all about the ending!  I was interested as I read, and my interest grew steadily as the situation escalated, but during those last few pages I was reading so fast I kept accidentally skipping lines.

It’s not a perfect ending, I suppose, but it was so messed up and so unexpected that it hit me pretty hard.  It has to take a good amount of skill to pull off such a great twist in the conclusion of such a brief story, but Huston demonstrates that he’s up to the task.

The Sentence for Murder:  B+

This is a quick sample of tautly wound horror.  It starts off as nothing earth-shattering, but I’d be surprised if A Murder of Crows doesn’t surprise you in a few ways by the time you finish it.

Don’t let the difficult, ornate font on the cover of this book deceive you—it’s actually a pretty easy read.  This is Part I of the first novel in an ongoing series centered on Frotwoot, an amnesiac teenager from a magical realm who mysteriously falls from the sky in the American Midwest.  He reconnects with a faerie girl who remembers him from their childhood and soon he’s off on a wild adventure in a place very far from and very different from his home.

The Concept:  B+

A lovable teenager of strange origins meets a remarkable girl who can help him discover the secrets of his past…it’s not the most original concept, but it’s dressed up with enough extra stuff to make it a lot more fun than meets the eye.  There’s magic that seems to be fueled by amber.  Frotwoot’s forgotten backstory seems to involve being held captive with a young faerie princess.  There’s the wizard/demi-god in the form of an ancient tree.  And while on his adventures in this bizarre, magical kingdom, Frotwoot also stumbles across a plot for a political assassination.  The Unseelie Court is pretty busy and packed full of quirkiness, but it manages not to be prohibitively confusing.

The Execution: C+

I almost gave up reading after the first few pages.  After the opening scene in which young Frotwoot falls from the sky and is immediately struck by a car, there’s paragraph after paragraph of summary.  An attention-grabbing opening scene is followed by a discussion of ten years of Frotwoot’s life in about as many pages, and it wasn’t until the next chapter that I realized it was all essentially a prologue to where the real story begins.

I’m not really a fan of prologues, but I think renaming the first chapter as “Prologue” would have done wonders to adequately shape my expectations for the story.  Chapter Two begins in the present day and follows a linear, non-summarized plot through to the end of the book.  The information in the first chapter is pretty important, but perhaps there could have been a better way to share that with the reader than a kind of outline of Frotwoot’s personal history among the humans.

Other than that, I have few complaints about the execution.  Frotwoot is pulled into a world of magic with a genuine sense of reluctance and disbelief.  The places he visits are interestingly rendered.  The characters he meets are drawn with a skillful humanity (despite many of them not actually being human), a vivid imagination, and a healthy dose of comedy (and this book is funny).

But that first chapter though…I mean, I’m really glad I kept reading, but I almost didn’t.

The Writer’s Voice:   A

This may sound weird and perhaps egocentric, but Ward’s style reminds me a lot of my own.  So, obviously, I kind of like his approach.  There’s just this pervasive tongue-in-cheek quality to the whole thing—coupled with some syntactically-unusual humor and a heavy reliance on italics—that make me feel like I’m reading the work of some kind of twin separated at birth or something.  Lines like these, in particular, remind me of myself (and remind me of things I later pat myself on the back for coming up with):

And with that, the Dryad said a word to him that wasn’t made of sound or letters, but of emotions, and elements, and…power.  Combined together, they made something that sounded like a word when you said it, as Frotwoot was saying it now, but you got the sense that it was just doing that so you wouldn’t go crazy.

Even Ward’s weaknesses feel similar to my own—every now and then, there’s a line that makes too much of an attempt at wittiness for its own good.  I’d have to go back a reread it a few times, emphasizing different parts, until I figured out how it made sense.  I know I’m guilty of this.

The X-Factor:  B

The wonder is the X-Factor.  It’s not as thrilling as the first time we learned about The Force or entered the gates of Hogwarts, but as we follow Frotwoot into a new world where magic is so real that it’s basically one of the sciences, it’s a wondrous experience.  The different species and the different cultures, the government that seems to be some kind of blend of democracy and enlightened feudalism, the backstory of the realm, and the protagonist’s own murky past kept making me murmur, “Hmm…iiiiinteresting” to myself every couple of pages.

The Ruling on The Unseelie Court:  B

The Unseelie Court (Part 1) is a quirky, refreshing take on magic and magical mythology.  Once you get past the first chapter, you’ll be reading straight through to the end, which delivers a twist that’s sure to keep you reading into Part 2.

Well, there’s a clickbait book title if I’ve ever seen one!  Especially for me, who suddenly sits up and pays attention whenever the word Mormon appears onscreen—in particular when paired with the prefixes ex- or non-.  I just happened to find this novella while lazily perusing Amazon’s humor category, and once I saw the title and weighed in the fact that it was free, there was no going back.  I had to download it.  So, obviously, I did.

Concept:  B-

The premise here is pretty straightforward.  Janet is slowly turning into a zombie and her strict Mormon father has, due to her self-identification as a secular humanist, decided to ship her off to a Minnesota camp for troubled youth.  There, she meets a surprising number of Swedes, including the handsome if lunkheaded Sven, with whom she falls in love.

As far as plot goes, that might not sound that interesting.  But it’s all in the delivery.  See, this is basically the written version of a Jason Friedberg/Aaron Seltzer spoof, except it’s a little cleaner, a little cleverer, and seems to have no particular target in mind.  It’s a very nonspecific parody.

The Execution:  C+

There’s plenty of goofiness to be found here, but there isn’t a whole lot of depth to the characters and the plot isn’t particularly engaging.  Of course, the plot really isn’t intended to be the focal point, as it merely serves as a setup for more jabs at melodramatic teenage whirlwind romances and more mockery of tired storytelling.  There are several solid running gags that never fail to elicit a chuckle and there are a few running gags that run their courses too soon and tend to elicit a rolling of the eyes.

Every time Janet mentions St. George, Utah, though…prepare for a laugh.  Every time.

The book’s saving grace is that it very obviously doesn’t take itself too seriously:

It had been sunny all morning, but suddenly the skies changed to overcast as the clouds moved in from the North.  If clouds could talk, they would have said, “Hey, we’re clouds from the North, eh?  It’s aboot time we got here.  Good day, eh?”

(They were Canadian clouds, get it?)

It’s all quite clearly tongue-in-cheek.  So when the narrator spends a surprising amount of time discussing whether Janet is better at ambling, meandering, or walking, it comes across as endearing instead of just plain weird.

The Writer’s Voice:  A

I’d be willing to bet that Erickson had a blast writing this, cackling with glee to himself as he inserted a mostly irrelevant commentary on a classic film or an amusing and unnecessarily detailed description of a high-quality fishing rod.  The fun shines through and it makes Seventeen and Turning into a Non-Mormon Secular Humanist Zombie a light, breezy read.  The self-aware jokes and the intentionally cheesy dialogue and the general absurdity of it all make for an engaging narrative, even if the actual events on the page aren’t particularly riveting.

The X-Factor:  D

I was kind of disappointed.  There wasn’t a whole lot of talk about the zombie thing.  It came up a few times, but it was kind of an everpresent but unaddressed plot point for the majority of the story.  There wasn’t a whole lot about secular humanism, either—in fact, there might have been more Buddhism involved.  And there was next to nothing about Mormonism.

The Mormonism thing bothered me because it was cursory and not well-researched.  The rare bit of Mormon dialogue is inauthentic.  There’s also a mention early on of someone’s Mormon parents attending a weekend prayer conference in Las Vegas.  As someone who spent 20 years as a Mormon and has never heard the term prayer conference thrown around in Mormon circles, I found that to be somewhat inaccurate.  And I realize that this is just one line in a whole book and not even an important aspect of the story, but considering that the word non-Mormon in the title is what drew me to this in the first place, it was kind of annoying to find such little treatment of the religion and such a poor depiction of it.  Although, at one point, someone says that Joseph Smith “got horny so he decided God told him it was cool to have multiple wives.”  So there’s that.

I suppose it’s not really fair to call a title that poorly represents the content of the book the X-Factor, but without it, there isn’t much of an X-Factor.  There’s some good stuff and a little bad stuff, but there isn’t one aspect of the book that really stands out to me as the distinctive wild card…other than the fact that its name led me to expect something quite different from what I got.

The Epiphany:  C+

Seventeen and Turning into a Non-Mormon Secular Humanist Zombie is certainly a hilarious novella.  I feel like I’ve had a lot of negative things to say about it and I think maybe those negatives have been given a disproportionate representation in my review.  But I think that might all stem from the fact that what I read wasn’t what I’d expected based on the title.

It helps not to take the book seriously and it probably helps a lot if you’re going into it with the intent to find some solid humor instead of fascinating characters or a complex plot.  Not every piece of fiction has the same aspirations.  This one aspires merely to make its audience laugh, and I think it accomplishes exactly that.

I’m excited to announce the release of my fourth novel, Alph Beta!

Upon hearing the news that his younger sister is going to be married, struggling  self-published writer Alphonse Walczynski begins to contemplate how comparatively little he’s made of his life.  He’s working on a novel about Alfred, another self-published writer trying to cope with the possibility that he may have Huntington’s Disease.  And Alfred, in turn, is writing a story about a futuristic world facing a widespread trend of mysterious deaths.

Full of tongue-in-cheek self-insertions, sharp dialogue, bitterness, gloom, and an extra helping of faith in humanity, Alph Beta embraces sunshine and shadow as Alph sets out to improve his writing and accidentally learns to improve himself.

It’s one of the quirkier things I’ve written in a while, I think.  I’ve had some trouble nailing down a genre for it.  It’s definitely metafictional, but beyond that things get a little murky.  One of the three plotlines is a soft dystopian sci-fi story, but the other two aren’t.  There’s a lot of humor, but I’m not sure it qualifies as a straight-up comedy.  Perhaps it’s just a hybrid.

But regardless of how it’s categorized, I’m pretty pleased with it and I hope you’ll check it out!

Bears of Glass, the opener of a new series called Nightmares in the Dark, is the first young adult book I’ve read in a while.  And though I’m not exactly in the target demographic here, it’s not hard for me to see that I would have gobbled this thing up when I was in seventh grade or so.

The Concept:  B

At first glance, this book might be standard horror-for-children fare.  Young Ryan Jacobs, plagued by eerie and increasingly vivid nightmares, takes an unexpected family vacation to a remote location.  There, his nightmares worsen and become indistinguishable from reality until he’s eventually fighting for his life against a group of huge grizzlies.

I mean, it’s a solid concept. It’s scary, and the bear angle probably makes it a little outside of the ordinary.  Most of the story is driven by the mystery surrounding the dreams and a strange figurine of a bear.  The reader is as confused and as curious about what’s happening as the narrator.  The story doesn’t have to rely on frightening imagery to keep you interested, although there’s plenty of that too.

The Execution:  A

I’ve personally never seen a bear outside of a zoo, so while I’m sure bears are terrifying, I don’t think I was white-knuckling it through these pages quite as much as anyone with an actual bear phobia.  Nonetheless, the story is woven skillfully, without much extra fat to trim.  What I really liked about the execution was the atmosphere and the somewhat realistic depictions of the familial relationships.

Ryan’s nightmares are appropriately chilling and foreboding, but the atmosphere really kicks into high gear in the second half of the book as the visions of the monstrous bears start to become real.  Shoemaker makes excellent use of his cabin-in-the-woods setting, allowing the trees and the bears and the fog to curl around the reader as much as they curl around poor hapless Ryan.  Then the lightning.  The sounds.  The destruction.  The blood pumping.  There’s a few solid chapters in a row with such a tautly horrifying narrative climate that you can’t really stop reading at least until that particular section is over with.

And while I’m by no means an expert on young adult literature, I felt that Ryan’s nuanced feelings for his family members were a breath of fresh air.  I think there’s too much Ugh, Dad is such a loser and Ugh, my little sister is soooo annoying in kids’ books, and it was encouraging to see that, while Ryan does find his little sister annoying, he also tries to help her stand up to a bully at school.  He clearly cares for his sister even though they often don’t get along, and I’d hope that this kind of complicated relationship is both more realistic and more rewarding for younger readers.  I think Ryan exhibits a similarly complex relationship with his parents and his uncle, but it’s more pronounced in his dealings with his sister Riley.

And the ending…well, that certainly keeps things complicated, just in a whole different way.

My only major criticism of the execution is the somewhat frequent errors in grammar, spelling, and punctuation.  There were many of them, but most of them were pretty minor, so they didn’t really pull me out of the story much.  And considering that this is Shoemaker’s first self-published work, it’s probably a relatively low-budget affair with no room for a professional editor.  I’m almost four novels into my self-publishing, and it still remains a low-budget affair for me.  So, you know…people in glass cabins shouldn’t throw grizzly bear figurines.  Or something like that.

The Writer’s Voice:  B+

Bears of Glass is narrated in first person by Ryan, which makes it easy to quickly identify with the character.  It also helps draw us into his fears, thereby intensifying the terror and the suspense.

What I particularly enjoyed about the writing itself was the frequent use of italics to signify a more closely guarded thought or more deeply held distress.  It was as if every time the narration switched into italics I knew I was getting the full story instead of merely whatever Ryan was comfortable sharing.   It was a nice touch, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen that technique used quite so liberally or quite so effectively.

There were, however, a few descriptive sections that got a little repetitive, reusing key words like bears and fog and lightning.  But that was mostly during the parts that would defy any attempts at interruption.

It’s also worth noting that Bears of Glass is clean—there’s no swearing, no oblique references to anything sexual or drug-related or anything like that.  And while there is some violence, there’s not much gore and there’s nothing gratuitous.  Parents should have no qualms about letting their middle school kids read this.

The X-Factor:  A-

The glass figurine of the bear is the X-Factor.

This is what kept me reading.  The visions of rampaging grizzlies were scary and all, and the confusion over how much of it was real and how much of it was Ryan’s crazed imagination was interesting, but what was the deal with that figurine?

It seemed to possess some paranormal power and every time it appeared on the page I was paying close attention for any hint as to its significance or its purpose.  The ending was wild enough that I’m still not sure I have any idea, but that little thing was enigmatic enough to keep me wanting more.

The Waking-Up-in-a-Cold-Sweat:  A-

Bears of Glass is an excellent offering from a new and promising writer for young adults.  Mysterious, ominous, twisting, and frightening, it hits all the notes you’d expect or demand from a horror story.  It’s enjoyable enough to read as an adult—but fifteen years ago, I’d have read this thing cover to cover twice in the same day.