Let’s take a quick look to see what’s arrived in the mail here at the Geek Compound.
Heaveworld by Cullen Bunn
Promo copy:
Welcome to Heaveworld!
We hope you brought a bucket.
Cullen Bunn entered the World Horror Convention’s Gross-Out Contest four times, and won first place with each. And here they are, collected for the first time in print, uncut and sure to get your bile rising.
But that’s not all…
The Midway County Testicle Festival is underway!
In Cullen’s vomit-inducing novella, Blue has reason to be superstitious of the event’s thirteenth year.
The morning kicks off with a dead body in the field, and the issues escalate from there.
As a new recipe for barbeque testicles is introduced with horrifying results, Blue realizes that there is more afoot than mere food poisoning. With an ancient evil rising from the nearby woods and chaos all around him, will he have the balls to save not only the festival, but the entire world?
A few years back, I interviewed Cullen Bunn (along with artist Brian Hurtt) about The Damned.
Flight into Darkness by Sarah Ash
Promo copy:
As an impulsive young man, Rieuk Mordiern accidentally freed Azilis, a guardian spirit charged with keeping the balance between the kingdoms of the living and the dead. Now Rieuk’s sole purpose is to bring Azilis back—only she doesn’t want to return. Instead she has attached herself to a very talented mortal, the renowned singer Celestine—becoming, as Celestine believes, her personal guardian.
Celestine has never needed a guardian more. Her desire for revenge against the people who consigned her magician father to the flames is leading her down a dangerous path. And chaos is growing. Seven daemons from another realm are now threatening to lay siege to the mortal world. Now both Rieuk and Celestine must discover what it means to truly be a hero.
Star Wars: Crosscurrent by Paul S. Kemp
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An ancient Sith ship hurtles into the future carrying a lethal cargo that could forever destroy Luke Skywalker’s hopes for peace.
The Civil War is almost over when Jedi Knight Jaden Korr experiences a Force vision so intense he must act. Enlisting two salvage jocks and their ship, Jaden sets out into space. Someone—or something—appears to be in distress.
But what Jaden and his crew find confounds them. A five-thousand-year-old dreadnaught—bringing with it a full force of Sith and one lone Jedi—has inadvertently catapulted eons from the past into the present. The ship’s weapons may not be cutting-edge, but its cargo, a special ore that makes those who use the dark side nearly invincible, is unsurpassed. The ancient Jedi on board is determined to destroy the Sith. But for Jaden, even more is at stake: for his vision has led him to uncover a potentially indestructible threat to everything the Jedi Order stands for.
Blackout by Connie Willis
Promo copy:
In her first novel since 2002, Nebula and Hugo award-winning author Connie Willis returns with a stunning, enormously entertaining novel of time travel, war, and the deeds—great and small—of ordinary people who shape history. In the hands of this acclaimed storyteller, the past and future collide—and the result is at once intriguing, elusive, and frightening.
Oxford in 2060 is a chaotic place. Scores of time-traveling historians are being sent into the past, to destinations including the American Civil War and the attack on the World Trade Center. Michael Davies is prepping to go to Pearl Harbor. Merope Ward is coping with a bunch of bratty 1940 evacuees and trying to talk her thesis adviser, Mr. Dunworthy, into letting her go to VE Day. Polly Churchill’s next assignment will be as a shopgirl in the middle of London’s Blitz. And seventeen-year-old Colin Templer, who has a major crush on Polly, is determined to go to the Crusades so that he can “catch up” to her in age.
But now the time-travel lab is suddenly canceling assignments for no apparent reason and switching around everyone’s schedules. And when Michael, Merope, and Polly finally get to World War II, things just get worse. For there they face air raids, blackouts, unexploded bombs, dive-bombing Stukas, rationing, shrapnel, V-1s, and two of the most incorrigible children in all of history—to say nothing of a growing feeling that not only their assignments but the war and history itself are spiraling out of control. Because suddenly the once-reliable mechanisms of time travel are showing significant glitches, and our heroes are beginning to question their most firmly held belief: that no historian can possibly change the past.
From the people sheltering in the tube stations of London to the retired sailors who set off across the Channel to rescue the stranded British Army from Dunkirk, from shopgirls to ambulance drivers, from spies to hospital nurses to Shakespearean actors, Blackout reveals a side of World War II seldom seen before: a dangerous, desperate world in which there are no civilians and in which everybody—from the Queen down to the lowliest barmaid—is determined to do their bit to help a beleaguered nation survive.