“No-Hope-Shitty: the name says it all really.” Francis Knight’s debut earlier last year, Fade to Black, was one of those heavily anticipated novels for me. Besides labeling it as Fantasy Noir and boasting a painful magic system, the cover and general pleasantness of the author is what really hyped the novel for me. I found…
“’Stay with me,’ he said. ‘I bled for you. Least you could do is survive.’” I regret to say that Grimdark is beginning to lose its luster. I have nothing wrong with delving into the familiar territory of gritty, medieval fantasy, but if the strain continues like David Dalglish’s Shadowdance series, I might have to…
“’It is supposed that power corrupts,’ the caterpillar said in a voice as untroubled as time itself. ‘Yet the powerful are often corrupt before they are powerful. In fact, I find that they too often become powerful by being corrupt. Whether real or perceived, a lack of power can also corrupt.’” Imagine if Alice in…
Anybody who’s anybody in the field of speculative fiction knows the name of China Mieville. He’s only the winner of three Arthur C. Clarke awards, two British Fantasy Awards, three Locus Awards, one Hugo, and one World Fantasy Award. His work in 2010 was The City and the City, a noir novel that has received…
“You’re broke, eh?” “I been shaking two nickels together for a month, trying to get them to mate.” This is the novel that penned the hardboiled genre, giving greatness to short, snappy sentences and tough anti-heroes. What this is not, however, is a noir novel. One is defined by the terse sentence structure, the tarter…
Acerbic Writing 