My next novel is out now! Nightmare City (Co-written with Anthony Trevino) shipping now!

 

 My next solo novel "The Last Night to Kill Nazis" is up for Pre-order (Add to  your Goodreads shelf!) but it doesn't ship until next summer. Don't worry I have another book available now!

Buy it here! 

Nightmare City by David Agranoff and Anthony Trevino.

Anthony and I originally created and wrote this story as a TV pilot, and basically outlined the novel by writing four episodes of teleplays. This novel is based on the first two episodes. Greatly expanded. We are happy with the third voice we found, as writers we both have different strengths. 

“Nightmare City combines police procedural, conspiracy thriller, science fiction, and horror into a tightly plotted page-turner. More importantly, it creates a distinctive world in genre fiction.” – Desmond Reddick host of the Dread Media podcast

 

“Agranoff and Trevino have concocted an alternate version of Seattle you’ll be begging to visit, but only from the safety of the printed page. This is a place where no one who dwells there is particularly affable, yet you’ll still want to get to know them intimately. If you’re fiending for some bizarre noir with flourishes of horror and science fiction, take a cautious step into the Nightmare City limits.” – Chad Stroup author of Secrets of the Weird

 

"A terrifying intersection of climate-based horror and science fiction set in a futuristic Seattle full of body modification, corruption, missing kids, and dreams. Like a lost episode of Black Mirror meets True Detective. Trevino and Agranoff are a dope duo who have cooked up something unnerving yet special with Nightmare City."--Grant Wamack, author of God's Leftovers

 

Back cover:

 

After being nationally humiliated and earning himself a death sentence from every gangster in Seattle, FBI agent Nate Washington is ready to call it quits. His days are spent courting a whiskey bottle and reliving the past. That is until a series of child kidnappings in the local projects drag him back into the world of his undercover days and into the hands of his old crew leader, Marcus Morris, whose son is one of the missing.

Morris gives Nate an ultimatum: Find his son and redeem himself or die disgraced in an unknown basement. Without any love for Morris, but a desire to bring the kids to safety, Nate accepts, starting a journey that will pit Nate against genetically modified monsters, sociopathic tech-gurus, a militant police force, and an unstoppable death cult eager to plunge the waking world into a very real nightmare.

 

Book Review: Blood Music by Greg Bear

 

 Blood Music by Greg Bear

247 pages, Paperback

Published March, 1986 by Ace

 Hugo Award Nominee for Best Novel (1986),
 Nebula Award Nominee for Best Novel (1985),
 British Science Fiction Association Award Nominee for Best Novel (1986),
 John W. Campbell Memorial Award Nominee for Best Science Fiction Novel (1986),
Prix Tour-Apollo Award (1986),
Tähtivaeltaja Award (1988)

In 2005 or so author Cody Goodfellow mentioned Blood  Music to me assuming I had read it. I had read Greg Bear. Eon, I think Darwin’s Radio. All before I tracked my reading, so it is fuzzy. Somehow despite all the award nominations and the nature of being a classic Science Fiction horror crossover I had not read it. Feeling like a poser I went the next day to the 5th ave books in San Diego, the bookstore we affectionately referred to as “the annoying guy bookstore,” and found a paperback copy of Blood Music. Good thing I rushed down there as it sat unread on my shelf for 17 years. Two weeks ago, Greg Bear’s wife Astrid announced that the award-winning author had died.  

Suddenly I felt guilty that I never took Cody’s advice, and with the passing of Greg Bear thought it was time. Bear is from here in San Diego, and even if he ended up in Seattle I think we can claim him. David Brin and Kim Stanley Robinson are connected to  UCSD but Bear has a degree across town as an Aztec at SDSU. Well I have for sure read his Star Trek and Star Wars novels, they were notable for being more SF than many of the similar books attached to the franchises. Eon is the book I have the strongest memory reading.

Now Blood Music. Is the hype real? I mean the awards are one thing, but Cody Goodfellow's recommendations are normally golden. There is only one time I can think of a book he urged me to read that I hated. Blood Music I am happy to say lives up to the hype and is all that. Bear is known for hard science so I assume that is the case with this novel which was an expansion of a novella. 

Expansions can be a mixed bag. Often the original novella or story remains the core genius, in this case, I don’t have the shorter work to compare it to. I think the novel is a masterpiece as is, but as I said I have nothing to compare it to. Blood Music is the perfect hybrid of Science Fiction and horror, mind-bending and thought-inducing creep-out that starts like a mad-scientist story and morphs into Andromeda Strain-ish end of the world…wait end of the universe tale. The world doesn’t begin to describe it.

The thinking plague was an unintentional theme back to back as I just read David Koepp’s Cold Storage. Scientific hubris is not the point of Blood Music, even though it seeds that idea with the actions of Vergil who certainly looks like a main character at the start. As he drops out of the story you might be thinking this is a case of an SF author focused on ideas that sacrifice characters.
Blood Music comes close to doing that in the sense the ideas as grand as they are will run over your memories of this book. At the moment however Bear does give attention to several characters, although no one is a true POV character. For good reason the narrative shifts often. However, even characters like the journalist introduced only in the words of his report as he flies over America has little details that give the definition to that character.
 
The thing is the ideas of this novel, the concept is just so strong no matter what Bear does to make Suzy, Virgil, or Michael Bernard live and breathe you’ll close the book and think about the nature of the universe. That is the mission of science fiction when at its best. Horror at its best does that and makes you uncomfortable about it. The thing is if you are really getting into Blood Music on a cosmic horror scale this makes you feel puny like the best of Lovecraft.

“Almost every living cell there was already a functioning computer with a huge memory? A mammalian cell had a DNA complement of several billion base pairs, each acting as a piece of information. What was reproduction, after all, but a computerized biological process of enormous complexity and reliability?”

Blood Music is about a lab scientist who is experimenting with getting the cells in living bodies to think for themselves. And when he thinks he is getting fired and cut off from his experiments he injects himself. The side effects are not that different from Brundle's in The FLY. In a typical novel this would set up an arc for Vergil, but he is catalyst and not the point. His cells, his living cells come alive in a series of creepy moments.

“Are you Stoned?”
He shook his head, then nodded once, very slowly “listening.”
“To what?”
“I don’t know. Sounds. Not sounds. Like music. The heart, all the blood vessels, the friction of the blood along the arteries, veins. Activity. Music in the blood.”

The hint of the title, normally when a character speaks the title of a story it can be corny but in this case it works. It is also a hint of the mission statement of Bear’s musing with this concept. The notion should creep out any reader. The idea is that the cells in our body could awaken and become a universe in their own right. Much has been made of how the MCU and popular media popularized the idea of multiverses but also quantum universes. Blood music expands the idea that these cells in Virgil’s body become a universe themselves.

Fantasy has often taken place in these micro-universes, my favorite being Clive Barker's Weaveworld. It is something special for a hard Science Fiction novel. Mostly Blood music hints at these huge and heady issues.

“They’re trying to understand what space is. That’s tough for them. They break distances down into concentrations of chemicals. For them, space is a range of taste intensities.”
“Maybe that’s what your machine calls infection—all the new information in my blood. Chatter. Tastes of other individuals. Peers. Superiors. Subordinates.”

Once the cells become aware they want to spread and grow. That is when the horror elements begin, the thinking plague that starts by changing and manipulating of its environment or space. Just as we have changed the earth they change Virgil. Eventually, his friend Michael isolates himself and tries to learn to communicate with the cells in his body.

“You say they are a civilization—”
“Like a thousand civilizations.”
“What am I to you?
Father/Mother/Universe
World-Challenge
Source of all
Ancient slow
*Mountain-galaxy*”

This is when the multiple points of view really help in the narrative. While we learn about the nature of the virus, we see the effects through the eyes of Suzy and April back in California. there is one outlier chapter that is really smart in the context of explaining the scale of the apocalyptic events. As told in a transcript of a news report, a European reporter flies over America. Complete to a shout-out to my homeland of Indiana.

“How do I describe the landscape beneath us. A new vocabulary, a new language, may be necessary.”  “Indianapolis is below us, and as indecipherable, as mysterious and…beautiful and alien as the other megaplexes.”

The changing landscape is the surface effect, but the reality of the universe and the cosmic issues are what really moves me. Blood Music is a classic and nominated with good reason. This book is a fantastic place to start if you want to honor the writer we just lost. I don't think it is similar to his other works but that is why it stands out. It is a fun, thought-provoking genre hybrid that questions the nature of reality. Yeah - that good.

“The human race hasn’t generated nearly the density or amount of information processing – computing, thinking, what have you – to manifest any truly obvious effects on space-time.”
 

Book Review: Cold Storage by David Koepp

 

Cold Storage by David Koepp

308 pages, Hardcover 

Published by Harper  September 2019

I just read and reviewed Koepp’s second novel Aurora a month ago so I apologize for repeating much of my David Koepp thoughts and history. I read these two books out of order and I think that was a bit of a mistake as I think there was a natural increase in ability between freshman and sophomore efforts. David Koepp is a respected screenwriter, and one of my favorites but somehow remains underrated.  How can a writer who is responsible for some of the high-grossest movies of all time be underrated? The thing is when you write scripts for Spielberg (Jurassic Park & War of the Worlds), David Fincher (Panic Room), Brian Depalma (Snake Eyes), Steven Soderberg (Kimi), and Rami (Spider-man) the writer is not really the one who gets the credit or is remembered.

That said David Koepp is a favorite of mine not because of those scripts, although I am a huge fan of Panic Room which is a masterclass in building suspense and tension. It is the underrated movies that Koepp has written and directed. Stir of Echoes is a masterpiece full stop.

What makes Koepp great are dozens of tiny details that build suspense. As I said in my Aurora review and is worth repeating …Koepp is always thinking about how character moments can build out the story and keep the audience/reader nervous. Koepp keeps you just slightly ahead of the character, like that moment when you are about to stub your toe but it is too late to avoid it. The Koepp story exists in a gasp before impact.

It is exciting that Koepp, after writing some of the highest-grossest movies ever, chose to write a novel. When I first saw this announced I was excited but I wondered why Koepp choose to write a novel instead of writing a screenplay. Having read it, now I see this would be a complicated story to write as spec. Koepp’s films, while done well are limited in scope probably for budget and production reasons.

I get the sense that Koepp wanted to tell this story and not think about those realities. You will see lots of comparisons to Andromeda Strain and I think that influence is clear. More accidentally, the thinking plague is something of a theme in Blood Music by Greg Bear a novella that was expanded into a novel in the 80s. I am reading that book (right now) in part because Bear died this week and I wanted to read that novel that many consider a masterpiece.

The comparisons between Blood Music and Cold Storage are largely thematic but very different stories. Both involve an aware virus, one of the creepiest things about Cold Storage is a fungus that thinks about spreading, and once it is in a host it tries to spread. It is a killer concept for a Science Fiction horror, techno-thriller…all things this could be marketed as.

I don’t know if this book sold well or not. I didn’t hear much buzz, I found it and read it because I am a Koepp fan who will follow him to any project. It was oddly marketed without any thought to the genre. I think they missed out on genre readers. The blurbs mention it being a thriller, and a couple focuses on humor, something I didn't feel much of. It was marketed to readers of Andy Weir and Noah Hawley when honestly it feels more solidly horror.

OK…the deer taking the elevator. We will come back to that…

Cold Storage’s comparison to Andromeda Strain starts with the inciting events of the novel. I believe Skylab really did crash in Australia in 1979, but in this novel Cordyceps Novus, a fungus sent into space on Skylab mutates into a cosmic bacteria that has more in common with the alien in The Thing than a pizza topping. It has an astonishing growth rate because it thinks and wants to grow. The fungus later takes out an Outback town, before being contained. For a few decades, it remains that way until it accidently unearths and sets events in motion that combine The Crazies with  The Thing. The main character Roberto Diaz has had a plan for this for decades, hoped he would never have to deal with this ultimate plague. That said much of the action involves Storage unit security guard  Teacake and Naomi, they are fun characters and have an interesting dynamic.

The narrative is strange, and it might have to do with his position but Koepp breaks a few rules most editors don’t allow writers to get away with. The POV changes at a whim sometimes from one paragraph to the next. It is the one thing I didn’t like and that took me out of the story and confused me a couple of times. That said the prose is fine-tuned as you expect from Koepp to build the horror elements.  I was surprised at how horror it was. Honestly, this novel is as horror as anything by Brian Keene. Once the virus is out exposure would be enough to make things suspenseful but this virus wants to grow, to infect. There are plenty of moments when the characters, the humans lose control and their thoughts are controlled by the fungus but smartly Koepp slowly releases that information.

The infected deer acting unlike a deer created some of the freaky weird moments… being murdered, resurrection, and riding an elevator—also some interesting commentary.

“...and that dumbass deer—sorry, that beautiful creature of God—that thing’s character was drawn within the limitations of a non-sentient brain. It stood there, unmoving, as the car closed the last fifty feet on it; it just hunched there, watching Death come hurtling at it, staring at the car like, well, like exactly what it was, there’s a goddamn good reason for that cliché, so maybe it was fitting that the first thing that hit the deer was the headlight.”  

Koepp always uses tools, or environmental factors to increase dread, one of my favorite moments involved the use of night vision goggles.

“He was still wearing the thermal imaging goggles, and he could see the dense thick amount of fungus on the dead man’s body was very much alive and quite industrious. The churning ooze was already moving off the corpse to explore the environment.”

Cold Storage is a great and very effective horror novel. I am a little more impressed by Koepp's second novel Aurora, but this is a solid effort. There is nothing revolutionary, or mind bending but it is super entertaining. I recommend this novel for horror fans looking for a great disaster novel and stuff that evolves the zombie genre like the Hissers novels or Skipp and Spector’s The Bridge. Overall Big thumbs up.

Book and Stories Review: Axle-Bust Creek by John Shirley (plus 2 new Sci-Fi stories)

 

Axle-Bust Creek  by John Shirley (plus two NEW short stories)
352 pages, Paperback
Published by Pinnacle Books September 2022

Sacrificial Drones (short story) in the Nov/Dec Issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and SF.
The Lost City of Los Angeles (short story) in the 2022 issue of Startling Stories   

So this is a three-in-one interview featuring the latest releases from John Shirley who anyone following my reviews is one of my favorite authors. I am reviewing his Western novel and two Science fiction stories that appeared in classic magazines.

Starting with the Western, Axle Bust Creek. I was surprised as I started to read a couple of the reviews of this novel that most of the readers of this book are Western readers who are new to John Shirley. I follow authors more than genre, and that is why I was here. This is not Shirley’s first Western he wrote an excellent historical novel Wyatt in Wichita, about the famous gunslinger Wyatt Earp. Seems like a history lesson might help here. With more than 80 books across genres ranging from Science Fiction, and horror to media tie-ins Shirley is a legend in more than one genre disciple. While William Gibson is normally the writer most associated with cyberpunk it is John Shirley that Gibson labeled patient zero of the genre. Check out his groundbreaking decades ahead of its time SF classic City Come A’Walkin’ if you don’t believe Willie.

While John Shirley also has many screenwriting credits from Star Trek Deep Space Nine to the Real Ghostbusters he is most famous for putting a Guitar in The Crow’s hands. As the initial screenwriter of The Crow, it was John Shirley that sold the goth, rock and roll vigilante to the industry when no one had heard of the IP. He has written Alien, Predator, John Constantine, and Batman novels. The years and experience of storytelling brought to this western novel is evident on the page.  

Authors known for genre fiction have a history of writing historical novels that they consider some of their best work, and often they end up pleading with their readers to pay attention to these books. David Morrell a thriller writer known as the father of Rambo (First Blood) had this experience with the Last Reveille and F.Paul Wilson with Black Wind (However The Wilson novel fits into his mythos and doesn't feel like a departure to me). Joe Lansdale Crossed horror and western over with his Dead in the West early in his career but his Paradise Sky was a powerful intense historical western. John Shirley’s first historical Western has more in common with that Lansdale book. Both are excellent reads. Forget genre and fall into the hands of a master storyteller.

Axle-Bust Creek is John Shirley’s first totally invented Western and in a good way it has a pulp western feeling. Shirley is a pioneer of punk rock and the most extreme of music and fiction. As hardcore as songs like his band Sado-nation got with songs like Johnny Paranoid his horror did the same. Novels like Cellars and Wetbones are fiction with teeth. His fiction however always has a sense of justice, perhaps the best examples are Demons (an environmental horror novel) or his Song called Youth trilogy which predicted the rise of the Tea party and MAGA in the 80s.

Given all that John is from the generation that had constant Westerns on TV, who read Western pulp novels and he always had a western story or two in his heart. Axle-Bust Creek is the first of a series this novel serves to set the table for his hero Cleve Trewe. A vet of the union comes west to Nevada to make a claim on a gold mine founded by his Uncle.

When he gets to the west he finds he is still dealing with trauma and has to deal with the corruption and violence that is common on the edge of civilization. Of course, various forces claim the mine, and Cleve finds various forms of injustice. It only makes sense when he starts to make things right in the western tradition he is made Sheriff.

Early in the novel, Shirley does a good job establishing the characters. Not just Cleve, but the seeds for a sidekick have well planted Leon a former confederate soldier who had been his prisoner. There are plenty of moments that feel traditional, like gun fights, and verbal stand-offs. Shirley plays with the language and tropes in a way that makes the novel feel comfy for fans of the genre.
The best example of this is a fantastic scene halfway through the book when Cleve is offered the job of Sheriff. The give and take is very traditional Western. It is a fantastic give-and-go of dialogue.

“You let me do it and I’ll do my damnedest for you. I’ll chase runaway pigs if you want me to. I’ll chase badmen into hell.”

It is later in the novel when Shirley brings in elements that are unique to his talents and a sense of justice comes into play. Outside of official law, the miners take one of Cleve’s prisoners nicknamed Scrap who they accused as a thief. This brings up Cleve’s haunted memories from the war when he saw a deserter hung. “Legally hung, according to military law, but it had never felt like Justice to Cleve.”

The description of the hangings are the moments when you most clearly show Shirley’s genre roots. The anger Cleve feels at seeing Scrap hung sets off the motion of the final act.  It is where the novel really feels like a work by John Shirley. Also, the novel explores sexism and Racism towards Chinese immigrants and the women who end up in the brothels.

  That is where the sense of Justice drives the narrative.  I have a feeling that the next two books will go even deeper as Shirley has the set-up out of the way.  

Speaking of activist themes in fiction the last two short stories by John Shirley have appeared in two of the all-time classic venues for science fiction. I am a subscriber to The Magazine of Fantasy and SF so a new John Shirley story in the mailbox was as welcome as the same magazine gave us a Norman Spinrad cover story earlier in the year. I admit I didn’t know that Wildside Press had breathed life back into Startling Stories with an annual issue. Glad that I know now.

  Sacrificial Drones is a powerful story with a global feel. The tone of the story reminded me of a Gattaca-style Science Fiction. At the heart is a very interesting relationship between Kayla who is a young person in this future and a charming, young seeming man named Jacob. The reality is an old man who has been able to deage himself. The story is about tiny nano-drones, little medical droids. Of course, Shirley has been exploring this type of prediction SF for decades, there are reasons why masters are identified as such.

I read all the stories by younger authors and many of them are great but there is something to this generation. Spinrad’s story a couple months ago had the same top-notch skill.

Of the three things Shirley has released lately, the Starling Stories was the pulpy tongue-in-cheek best. The Lost City of Los Angeles is a great SF story. A first-person narrative of a man named Ryan who is frozen on UCLA campus as he dies from disease and wakes up the only survivor of the anthro-ark thousands of years in the future.

This story is both CLI-FI and satire as Shirley projects a post-ecological collapse in LA where primitive survivors in the ashes of LA rebuild new culture based on the bits and pieces of the past they find. Wait til you meet the Botoxians.

The Startling Stories is really good for any SF reader but Shirley fans will want this because it has a great interview with Shirley as well. The fictional activism and angry storyteller is in perfect form so pick it up.