James Nicoll Reviews

1975’s The Dracula Tape is the first volume in Fred Saberhagen’s Dracula Chronicles.

How did the guardian of Wallachia, Romania’s great hero, Vlad Dracula, come to be painted as a monster in popular fiction? Dracula, having snuck into the back seat of Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Harker’s car, is more than happy to explain. To ensure his account is not lost, he records it on a handy portable tape recorder.

In this account, Dracula claims that his unfortunate modern-day reputation was set in motion by an ill-fated holiday, his lamentable choice of solicitor, and the most extraordinary run of regrettable coincidences.

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2019’s The Dawnhounds is the first volume of Sascha Stronach’s Endsong secondary universe fantasy series.

Jyn Yat-Lorn — Yat for short — was once a street urchin in the port city of Hainak. Grown up, she has joined the Hainak police, hoping to reform the unjust system that had oppressed her. Success is elusive. She has been rebuked and demoted after her superiors discovered that her sexual orientation was of a sort not officially approved. It gets worse. While on on patrol, she is shot right between the eyes.

Yat’s story is not over.

But first! Local history.

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2004’s Covenants is the first volume in Lorna Freeman’s Borderlands secondary-universe fantasy series. Covenants is not a mystery, but on researching its author, I discovered that the author is a bit of a mystery.

Freston is the border outpost to which the Royal Army of Iversterre dispatches all those soldiers who do not fit the army mold, but who cannot be summarily dismissed or executed. Rabbit is one such, raised in the Borderlands by Iversterre expats, a man who dresses as well as he can under the circumstances and is considered finicky, who nevertheless has considerable woodcraft skills.

Or so everyone, including Rabbit, assumes. But currently Rabbit and the routine patrol for whom he scouts are hopelessly lost. Help arrives in an unwelcome form.

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Pan Tokunaga’s Twilight Star Sui and Neri (Tasogare-boshi no Sui to Neri) is a science fiction manga. Serialized in Comic Cune from May 27, 2020, to September 27, 2021, its fifteen chapters were compiled into two tankōbon.

Inexpensive faster-than-light travel combined with the existence of many pristine garden interstellar planets allowed the majority of the human population to flee Earth. By 2531, Earth is a quieter, much emptier world.

For young Sui and her talking sloth sibling Neri, Earth is home.

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John Brunner’s 1988 Days of March is a stand-alone mainstream novel.

There are many goals that Micky Daws would like to accomplish in 1962. However, to accomplish them Micky needs not to get incinerated in a nuclear exchange. Thus, Micky’s dedication to Liberty, an organization campaigning for nuclear disarmament.

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1976’s Interview With the Vampire is the first volume of at least thirteen more books in Anne Rice’s gothic-horror Vampire Chronicles.

Armed with a tape-recorder and a stack of cassette tapes, the boy sits down with his subject, Louis. Louis is a vampire and the boy is eager to learn all the gory details.

In 1791 Louis was an unremarkable member of Louisiana’s slave-owning aristocracy. The death of his beloved brother sends Louis into a spiral of self-destructive debauchery. This, and the fact Louis owns the Pointe du Lac¹ plantation, makes Louis of considerable interest to the vampire Lestat.

Louis is all too easily seduced into vampirism.

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Rivers Solomon’s 2024 Model Home is an upcoming (barely — it’s out on October 1) haunted house novel.

Sisters Ezri, Emmanuelle, and Eve Maxwell fled Oak Creek Estates as soon as they could, each finding their own path: Ezri raising their child alone despite considerable challenges, Eve striving to be a flawless paragon of womanhood, and Emmanuelle operating as a social media maven.

Their parents Eudora Washington and Edward Maxwell remained where they were. Ms. Maxwell was too stubborn to leave and Mr. Maxwell too loyal to his wife.

The news calls Eudora Washington and Edward Maxwell’s deaths murder-suicide. Perhaps the true killer is the house at 677 Acacia Drive.

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Gavin Dady’s 2022 Project Bayern is a campaign for Mongoose Publishing’s TTRPG 2300 AD¹. Project Bayern details a nearly five-year mission to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no person has gone before survey the Pleiades open star cluster, far beyond the edge of human-explored space.

But first! A word about William W. Connors’ 1988 Bayern, which was an adventure for Game Designers Workshop’s 2300 AD, which also detailed a nearly five-year mission to survey the Pleiades open star cluster, far beyond the edge of human-explored space.

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Hiromi Kawakami’s 2016 Under the Eye of the Big Bird is a stand-alone science fiction novel. The 2024 translation is by Asa Yoneda.

Mother lives a perfectly conventional life, raising legions of animal-derived children created in the very factory where the latest of her short-lived husbands works. Mother sometimes has questions, but nothing truly upends her placid life. A life sometime in our future.

How did the world get to this state? Consider the first law of history: people are the problem.

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Spider Robinson’s 1985 Night of Power is a mercifully stand-alone near-future race war novel.

Aging dancer Dene Grant can hardly turn down an offer to dance at the Joyce Theatre. She, her husband Russell, and Russell’s their thirteen-year-old mixed-race daughter from a previous marriage Jennifer make the trip from Halifax, Nova Scotia¹ to New York City, center of American publishing, finance, and simmering interracial conflict about to boil over.

Scarcely has the family entered New York City when a gang of African American youth criminals descends on them with robbery, murder, and worse in mind.

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