Review: Burden of the Monarch: Blade of Rails by Josh Perry
Burden of the Monarch: Blade of Rails by Josh Perry is a steampunkesque novel with a soldier that doesn’t consider himself a soldier any longer, mysterious demons living in a distressed town mine, a train that carries a community within its belly, and plenty of intrigue and action.
Readers are introduced to Bell in the first chapter as he sits on the edge of The Tristram – a three car, red and gold war-train which hovers above the prairie. His demeanor is calm and one wouldn’t know at first that he and his comrades are on their way to a […]
The Serpent and The Wolf opens to a rather amusing bait and switch. When the reader thinks they are in a distant Viking land, a bloody battlefield in full swing, the director yells ‘Cut!’ and the modern world of the story takes shape. The opening sets the tone for the rest of the novel: a sometimes-slapstick mixing together of worlds and genres.
If the paranoia surrounding mind control and global-scale governmental conspiracies was ever shown to be true, this world could tear itself apart at the seams. In Raging Falcon, the debut novel of author Stephen C. Perkins, it just might happen. For readers who enjoy genre-bending fiction, this story makes for an adventurous and sometimes exhausting read for a premise that is at once fantastical and plausible.