Lee Robinson

A good collection with ups and downs.

Reviewed: 08-13-20

A good collection of shorts I haven't seen or heard in other collections. Most trend towards Tales from the Cryptkeeper style pulp, but that's not a bad thing. There are also a couple of pieces here which unfortunately assume that chaingunning the listener with shock imagery is a substitute for a plot, and I found these nearly unlistenable, but these are in the minority.

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Much stronger than the previous volumes.

Reviewed: 06-17-20

I was given this free review copy audiobook at my request and have voluntarily left this review.

This review is really hard to write without contrasting the previous volumes. In the past, this series has had minor pacing problems due to its juxtaposition of strong stories with similar story beats degrading the original stories due to them 'spoiling' eachother by setting the reader up to anticipate the twist based on the previous story. This problem is completely solved here and there's a great variety of good horror on offer with very little thematic repetition. The stories themselves have matured too - you still get your smattering of gore, but it's not constant and overwhelming and other definitions of 'hardcore' get their time to shine. Excellent work from both the editors and writers. Highly recommended.

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Feels like watching a modern Simpsons episode.

Reviewed: 02-21-20

That's probably the most cutting criticism and sincere praise I can give the book wrapped up into a single line. Don't go into this expecting an in-depth look at The Simpsons itself in the style of Masters of Doom since it's much more of an examination of Mike's career than the show itself - which isn't a terrible thing at all because Mike is very good at writing longform narratives and then shotgunning jokes into them, many of which would never work on TV due to runtime or content restrictions. There's a bunch of interesting stuff here, especially involving The Critic. As one of the kids mentioned in the book who grew up with an odd attachment to that show it amused me greatly to learn the backstory behind it (and to learn that Jay's cadence and delivery are apparently just Jon Lovitz attempting to imitate Mike's standard style of speaking). I really hope he gets another show, preferably on somewhere like Netflix where most of the standard TV requirements are relaxed. Perhaps it would lead to a Critic revival as well so the show could have a chance to fail again.

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Small fragments of something larger

Reviewed: 02-21-20

A really weird and overall unsatisfying collection of shorts and miscellaneous writing; I'd summarize this collection as slice-of-life more than anything else. Lots of the stories here feel like they were written in response to writing prompts and give just enough information to satisfy what the prompt was asking for before ending abruptly. If you're looking for stories following the standard structure of introduction, conflict and resolution you may be very disappointed as many of them don't get past the introduction before ending abruptly, which is a shame due to some of them feeling like they'd work excellently as the first act of a longer novella. Others feel like diary excerpts where the characters are meant to be already known and come off as really weird due to the lack of context for some of their behaviors.

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The high-school history class you always wanted

Reviewed: 02-16-20

Nothing to critique here, really. This is an excellent survey of mythological stories across a couple different mythologies with good comparison and contrast between them. It's a bit drier than the D'alaures myth books but that's probably due to the presentation focusing more on comparing and contrasting similar myths from various sources and assembling canonical accounts of the stories rather than presenting them as exciting narratives. I really like this and can't complain. I just wish the book was longer which is still the strongest recommendation I can really give for a book that can be classified as nonfiction. I can only hope for an extended edition that covers more of the Norse myths and their crossover with the presented Greek material.

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A solid collection with a lot of variety

Reviewed: 02-07-20 Listener received this title free

I was given this free review copy audiobook at my request and have voluntarily left this review.

The concept of 'addiction horror' seems like an odd theme for a collection, especially due to the volume's low story count. I went in expecting a couple thematic repeats and at least one story retreading the same territory another in the volume had already explored, but surprisingly there's none of that here - the selection is excellent and each piece explores the theme in a completely different way. There aren't really any bad stories here but several shine far brighter than others, particularly 'Monsters', which has some of the strongest character writing I can recall in a short.

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Love conquers all, including the narrative

Reviewed: 01-24-20

Contains minor spoilers and a fact which may be enough for some readers to guess a major spoiler.

More than any other subgenre I feel that high fantasy lives and dies by its worldbuilding, and one of my biggest irritations is when said worldbuilding starts out strong but then is discarded midway through when the book decides to shift direction towards another genre. The accursed second genre here is romance. We start off with an interesting setting and stories of a city whose name has been cursed to be forgotten with some tension between a protagonist and deuterantagonist who wind up part of a caravan headed to said forgotten city, but said tension falls off sharply when the protagonist meets his love interest and the book begins to orbit solely around their relationship to the point where all other events seem secondary. An early instance of Checkhov's Gun is restated often enough throughout the book that you know it's going to be important, and, surprise, it comes out of left field in the third act to disrupt the romance and provide the finale by virtue of what seems to be a rather major plot hole. This leads to the invocation of one of the most irritating writing tropes of all time in order to resolve the conflict which is left hanging in a cliffhanger with little denoument - something that personally leaves a massively sour taste in my mouth and in the last decade has made me come to hate fiction designed to be published as a series.

On a positive note, some of the ideas early on in the book are really clever, although most of them aren't explored in anywhere near the depth they could be due to them not being relevant to the plot. A book of short stories in this setting would be fantastic and it saddens me that all the potential there was swept away in the name of romance.

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A blinking pink screen in audio format

Reviewed: 01-13-20 Listener received this title free

I was given this free review copy audiobook at my request and have voluntarily left this review.

This review contains a minor setting-related spoiler.

Bias upfront: I should be the target audience for this book. I grew up in exactly the same timeframe that the protagonist supposedly did and know the references, but.. I just wish there was more to this series than said references. The book I want to compare this most directly to is Ready Player One - both follow a similar narrative structure involving a digital world where the protagonist spends the majority of his time and both are absolutely riddled with digressions in which the protagonist.. gets high on his own supply reminiscing about old video games, to put it mildly. While RP1 describes the interactions between the real and digital worlds and how they influence eachother, 8BB is concerned almost entirely with the 'bitworld' - a zone in the virtual world styled after 8-bit videogames where everything is rendered in low-resolution voxels which the protagonist and his cohorts dutifully mention every five minutes. This gets irritating in short order as it's a decent premise and is a good setup for taking pot-shots at the visual cliches present in older games, but aside from repeatedly mentioning that some objects only have a couple frames of animation nothing much is done with the setup and the adventure proceeds somewhat like a dramatization of an average improvised D&D session peppered with 'hey do you remember that?' references to NES and SNES games which, while accurate, still come off as incredibly pandering.

The narration would be fine if it wasn't for the fact that it contains sound effects, all of which are incredibly loud comparative to the voice track, and it would be remiss of me to point out they're almost entirely squarewaves - the hallmark of sound design trying to evoke the 'old videogame' aesthetic without understanding why people grew attached to it in the first place.

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An unfortunate case of sequelitis

Reviewed: 01-05-20 Listener received this title free

I was given this free review copy audiobook at my request and have voluntarily left this review.

I really wanted to like this book, but it's impossible not to contrast it vs its predecessor, The King of Pain. If you're somehow considering reading this and haven't read KoP, I suggest picking up KoP and forgetting that Nuns exists.

KoP works because it orbits around the central theme of imprisonment and the reader and protagonist are both exposed to a bunch of different views of it, yet the protagonist never really seems to be able to connect the dots and relate the short stories he's reading or show he's reminiscing about to his current situation. He never really 'gets' the joke that the book runs on, and this makes the narrative hilarious. KoP is also written with a sort of Roald Dahl-ish approach to characters by casting them into stereotype roles and only fleshing them out enough to set up funny situations. Given a third of the narrative is about a TV reality show in which the majority of the contestants are participating, this works well.

Nuns, for better or worse, is a direct sequel to KoP and attempts to bring back and flesh out several characters from it who were much more effective as simple stereotypes. There's no real central theme unless you count the overly weightly drumbeat of 'Guns are bad' which reoccurs chapter after chapter. Worst of all, the protagonist is acutely aware of it and never lets you forget about it - why be amusingly neurotic when you can worry about your show for a sentence or two and then gloat about its success for a page? All in all, the book feels like an oddly structured morality play instead of a comic narrative, and the level of panic and introspection present in KoP is sadly absent.

Overall, this is book is ultimately forgettable and lacks any of the standout funny moments that made KoP shine.

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My favorite book of the year

Reviewed: 12-28-19 Listener received this title free

I was given this free review copy audiobook at my request and have voluntarily left this review.

To put it bluntly, this is very close to the experience of reading Infinite Jest condensed down into a fifth of the page count, which is to say it's incredibly funny and remorseful in sublime, subtle ways that can only be expressed via a high word count through an introspective narrator, only this book doesn't completely flood you with footnotes and infinitely nested digressions, instead opting to oscillate between the plight of the protagonist trapped under his fallen entertainment center, the book of short stories he reads pass the time (presented in their entirety with commentary) and his retelling of the events of a popular and controversial reality show he created. I'm a huge fan of metatextual prose and this is wonderfully done as each of the three (or more, if you count the individual shorts) contributes the same range of emotions in very different ways while the protagonist muses over them. This is one of the rare instances of a novel that's exactly as long as it needs to be and leaves you wanting more of the same, although any more would probably degrade the construction of what's there already - a fitting mood for the book in general.

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2 people found this helpful