Rima Jean's The Noble Pirates is a tale of a woman participating on a booze cruise with her friends when a sudden storm removes her from her own time of 2011 and throws her through time in to the year of 1719 and into the hands of pirates. I did not expect much from a time travel pirate novel, which sounded suspiciously too much like a romance novel to boot, but I was very pleasantly surprised by what it turned out to be.
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.
Alexandre Dumas' d’Artagnan Romances consist of three novels: The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After and The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later. The last of these is a problematic novel because it has been published in several vastly different editions that divide to novel into separate books in different ways. I recently started reading the Project Gutenberg version, which cuts the novel up into four parts. I reviewed the first part, The Vicomte de Bragelonne, some time ago, so it is now the high time to move on to the next instalment: Ten Years Later.
The Musketeers is a BBC series based on the characters of Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers, but taking the story to new directions and re-imagining the characters and history itself with relatively free hand. But, what could have been a confused mess and as uncomfortable to watch as the similarly envisioned Young Blades from ten years ago, actually turns out to be rather a decent adventure series. For a history enthusiast, it has quite a few problems, of course, but - then again - every film and TV series set in historical era usually does.
Werewolves have been somewhat out of fashion in the movies for a long while, but they have howled their howl every now and then from the chorus of zombie screeches and vampire... snarls. David Hayter's Wolves is the latest attempt to bring back the weres and while its early minutes are somewhat unpromising with the Twilight overtones, the story has a bit more up its sleeve than your average teen romance.
Since I've been using this blog to review several werewolf-related novels and short stories, I hope the readers will excuse me for tooting my own horn when it comes to my very own werewolf short story. Last summer, I saw an advertisement about the biggest scifi and fantasy short story competition in Finland, one that was organised for the 29th time by Tampere Science Fiction Seura (~ Tampere Society of Science Fiction). I hesitated only for a moment before I started translating my unpublished werewolf story into Finnish in order to enter the competition.
Robert E. Howard is best known for his Conan Cimmerian and Solomon Kane stories, but he was an astoundingly prolific writer and visited many genres from Westerns to... pirates! Black Vulmea's vengeance & Other Tales of Pirates is a collection of three pirate stories: "Swords of the Red Brotherhood", "Black Vulmea's Vengeance" and "The Isle of Pirates' Doom".
Stephen King's Cycle of the Werewolf is a very traditional werewolf story: a small town suffers from monthly attacks by a blood-thirsty monster that the police are unable to identify or catch. Told in twelve chapters - one for each full moon in a year - the story introduces an extensive cast of characters, but shows kindness to the reader by cutting their numbers down in splashes of blood and intestines.
Sadan miekan mies (‘The man of a hundred swords’) is a Finnish adventure comedy from 1951, set in the year 1634, two years after the death of Gustavus Adolphus in the battle of Lützen. It tells a story of a captain who is conducting a never-explicitly-stated mission for the King as he roams the countryside of Eastern Sweden (i.e. Finland). Even though it has its weaknesses, it also has its fun moments.
Giles Kristian's The Bleeding Land delves into an interesting period in history: the England's Civil War in the 17th century where the Parliament rebelled against the King and the land was torn apart - and sometimes even families - as everyone took sides in the following battles. The novel explores the effects of the war on a family of landed gentry: the Rivers. Two sons are separated by a tragedy and find themselves on the opposing sides of the war.