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They had fed him up, given him the toughest fibres for armour, and even gave him a metal spear. They honoured him, until it was time. The tribe hid in the furthest corners, leaving him to face the monster alone. It swallowed him instantly, the clatter of his weapon drowned out by its incessant roar. However, a moment later that roar changed, and the monster withdrew. Even if it hadn’t been killed, his sacrifice had bought the other some time.
The dustbunnies had a new hero, and someone had to replace a vacuum cleaner bag ripped open by a nail.

On one of his walks through the park to take photos, Frank had come across something odd. First he thought he was hallucinating, but even after several attempts, one couple appeared in several photos, event hough he hadn’t seen them in the viewfinder of his digital SLR camera. He managed to track them through the review of the last photo taken, growing more and more bewildered.
When they noticed him eventually, he decided to ask them directly. They invited him to a chat over coffee, and he accepted.
The two things he found out before his death were these: Sunlight does not bother vampires all that much, but they really don’t show up in mirrors.

Gabriel had had no luck tonight picking up someone for dinner, but since he wasn’t particularly hungry yet, he just treated himself to a cappuchino to unwind. It would have been better without one of the few other guests wearing penetrant after shave, but you couldn’t have everything.
What he could have, after all, was company. The young woman making a beeline to his table did not look familar, but the feel of her presence told him what she was, and a quirk of her smile tipped him off as to who she was. Not that he knew that many nymphs, anyway. Her current guise was new to him, petite, white-blonde, decidedly elfin.
“Ah, Gabriel. On the prowl, too?”
“Taking a break, actually.”
“No luck, either, eh?” She leaned back and sighed.
Gabriel decided she’d laid on the self-depreciation in her tone thickly enough so he didn’t have to take offense. Considering that she was probably the least idiotic person who knew him, she deserved a bit of help. “Do you follow the news? I didn’t think so. Some guy getting locked up up for raping a 13yearold girl was all over the papers. I’d think the kind of people attracted by your looks are a bit… inhibited just now. Unless you start prowling schoolyards earlier in the day, that is.”
After a thoughtful pause and look around, she whispered, “All right, then.”
Her her body wavered like a mirage, and flowed into a somewhat bigger shape. Her hair grew from a pixie cut to well over shoulder length, and turned auburn, her clothes changing to match it. None of the other guests took notice. Gabriel envied the ease with which fae could mess with other people’s minds, all without biting them first.
When she was finished, he would have estimated her age closer to thirty than thirteen.
“Much better.” Particularly the curves.
“You sure it’s not just your taste you’re pushing here?” she teased. When he only shrugged, she suggested, “Well, if we find no-one else, the two of us could hook up.”
Gabriel gave a sort of dismissive chuckle. “Neither of us would get anything out of it.”
“Maybe you just don’t value fun enough.”
“Maybe some people don’t have as much time as you do.”
He found that he could waste a surprising amount of time on chatting.

His first impression was that of being hungover. Headache, nausea, and a marked gap in his memories… He was cold an in an awkward position, so he tried to fix that and discovered the handcuffs. As he tried to orient himself, he found that he lay on uneven ground, rocks and pebbles, slick with moisture. The staticky sound he had thought were part of the headaches actually came from outside his head. He was in a dimly lit half-dome, dark rock in his back, arced, white walls that seemed to be moving slightly in themselves in front, as well as another huddled figure who seemed to be watching him. He got a vague impression of a teenage girl in too big men’s clothes, barefoot.

Pushing himself up a little, awkwardly, he croacked, “What… Where?”

“About ten metres downriver from the start of the rapids,” came the reply, matter-of-factly.

It took him a few seconds until he fully understood she meant on the ground of the river. When the realisation hit him, it brought with it some shreds of the day before. There had been a metahuman emergence, some elemental cluster, and things had gone terribly wrong when trying to make contact, and –

“I shot you.” He remembered her face when she was hit. Should have been dead. Then her body had turned to water and, carried by momentum, splattered all over him.

“Yes.” Her cold tone peeled away away some of his shock. He understood an unspoken “you should keep that in mind” in the pause following. “You can make up for that. Tell me where my friends are now.”

He did not even know.

Denise never had taken to reading, much to her father’s chargrin. His claims that books were magic that could take you anywhere did nit impressed her, and she only read fiction when she could not avoid it.
When she inherited her father’s estate, she did not know what to do with the books, but the smell of paper and dust awoke nostalgia, accompanied by curiosity. She unlocked the one bookcase with doors and ran a finger tentatively over the spines, cracked leather with gold lettering on most. She pulled out a small volume, opened it in a patch of sunlight, and started reading.
When she suddenly stood in ankle-deep snow, wind cutting through her summer shirt, she realised the “magic” part had not been a figure of speech.

Pixies look cute, all right.
They’re not so cute anymore when they decide to redecorate your garden, replacing tomatoes with nightshade, the plastic chairs with toadstools, and apples with dead fish – something about pretty glittering scales, my neighbour thinks. Or when they cut holes into your tyres to turn them into pixie nest boxes.
That’s more than annoying, but then they ate my cat.
I’d been trying to get rid of the gluttonous fleabag for years, but it kept coming back. The pixies hadn’t pissed into my briefcase, so it might turn out a good trade. Maybe even cheaper.

*points at title* That’s a children’s book (9+) by Derek Landy, a sequel of one I liked a lot, so I picked it up when I spotted it on the shelf in a local bookshop.

The backcover blurb reads, “You know how it is – you think you’ve saved the world, and then ANOTHER evil villain turns up with an unbeatable monster and starts breaking things. Oh, yes, and you’ve got a skull for a head. A thirteen-year-old girl for a sidekick. And no clue what to do…”

Now, while the weird prevalence of very nearly every damn book dealing with saving the world is getting on my nerves a bit, the first book’s writing style made up for that. That blurb also suggests that Skulduggery Pleasant is the protagonist, which would have been nice. Unfortunately, he wasn’t.

Playing with Fire takes place about one year after its prequel, and Stephanie is a mage in training and the skeleton detective’s junior partner. She is the protagonist, and the title character of the series is a supporting character only.

As to the plot, some evil mage was sprung from prison and now tries to revive some kind of Frankenstein Monster which in turn will call Lovecraft-style elder gods back to our world.

In short, this book lacks everything that made the first one interesting.

The great dialogue that was the reason why I liked the prequel was nearly entirely absent, being genuinely funny in maybe two or three places, and otherwise coming across like annoying bickering rather than amusing banter. Unless dialogue was outright dropped and replaced by action scenes with far, far too many “and”s in them. Top it off with over-the-top gore I thought I didn’t have to endure in children’s books.

Neither was there a mystery, or any surprising plot twists. It was pretty clear what was going on from the start, and when information was needed, it was only a question of going to a particular person who had it, all very linear.

On top of that the more interesting plot threads (I’m thinking particularly of Stephanie’s reflection, a double summoned out of a mirror to take her place at home and school while she’s off adventuring, possibly growing into more than a mere reflection) are left dangling for the sequel(s?). I do not like books that cannot stand on their own, and I really dislike obviously deliberate sequel hooks.

Well, that was money wasted, and I definitely won’t buy the next part.

Skulduggery Pleasant is a fantasy/horror/adventure children’s book.

The setting is modern day, with sorcerers and at least some magic creatures hidden in the corners, and the main characters are Stephanie and Skulduggery Pleasant. She a twelve year old girl who inherits a house and strange business. He is a skeletal-undead, sixgun-toting sorcerer detective. They fight crime. More precisely, they try to find out who murdered Stephanie’s uncle. Occasionally they commit crime, too, but who cares?

The real action starts when Stephanie is almost killed by someone breaking into her late uncle’s house in search for something. Mr Pleasant saves her, and what with him having blown the door off the hinges, she attaches herself to him for protection and curiosity. The case develops from “let’s try to solve a murder” to “we gotta save the world!”, including, super-powerful magic items, ancient evil cultists and whatnot.

It takes some suspension of disbelief, particularly when it comes to “wait, who in their right mind would drag a 12 year old girld into a break-in when the guards are vampires who definitely are NOT pacifist and sparkly?!”, or that one big point in favour of paper-golems may be that they are easily destroyed. On the plus side, at least the book addresses the question of what the parents think of their daughter going off adventuring, by providing a double.

The plot has some nice twists and there are interesting characters to be met – and some of them besides Stephanie are female, too.

What really makes the book enjoyable for me is the dialogue – quite a bit of banter. I forgive a lot of shortcomings, including the few tropes this one employs, if a book is fun to read.

Well, I posted my favourite bit, with the missing front door, already, so have another little sample.

“They’re vampires,” Skulduggery said. “The Vault has vampire security guards.”
Stephanie made a show of poking her head out of the window and looking up at the sky. “The sun’s still out, Skulduggery. It’s still bright.”
“Doesn’t matter to them.”
She frowned. “Doesn’t sunlight kill them? Doesn’t it turn them to dust, or make them burst into flames or something?”
“Nope. Vampires tan, just like you and me. Well, just like you. I tend to bleach.”

Maybe not the best, but pretty short.

All in all, enjoyable entertainment I’ve re-read already.