Review: Long John Silver by Xavier Dorison and Mathieu Laufray

I must admit to not being a big fan of the Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. The plot was perhaps a bit too simplistic - I found coming-of-age stories dull even as a child - and the characters uninteresting. The only potential character in the bunch was always the pirate Long John Silver and that potential has been over-used ever since then by many other authors and script-writers, either adapting the original story or revisiting the characters in some other way. Xavier Dorison and Mathieu Laufray's take in the four part graphic novel, Long John Silver, is unique enough, however, to make their story stand out from the rest.

Christmas Drabbles

I took part in a Christmas Drabble competition organised by The Cult of Me blog. I've never considered drabbles - stories of 100 words, no less, no more - my forte, but Christmas was a topic that drew me in to try what I could do. One of my drabbles, Memories, was chosen as one of the 12 Drabbles of Christmas, but I thought it might be a fun idea to share all my entries with you - especially since the winning entry is related to one of the focus areas of this blog and all of them could be seen as historical fiction.

How to turn a great fantasy series into an exercise in boredom?

There are great works of fantasy, mediocre works of fantasy and bad works of fantasy. The great naturally include authors like J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert Howard and Guy Gavriel Kay, while the mediocre include worthwhile authors the likes of Dave Duncan and Raymond E. Feist. The bad (but still published) authors are many and I will not name them here for fear of detracting the reader from the topic of this short article. But even worse than being bad are the authors who start well, but drop the ball somewhere along the way, just like Robert Jordan did with "The Wheel of Fire" series that came to a screeching halt after about the third novel and only recovered after the death of the author when another author finished the story for him (from about novel ten onwards).