ARC Reviews – Baskerville Book Reviews

Review: The Return of the Knights

The Palace of the Dawn will soon be stormed. The most ruthless man of all time is one step away from assailing on Iovbridge and dethroning Sophie Delamere. The Queen of Knightdorn is now alone, with neither allies nor an army capable of rebuffing the enemy which is approaching her city. Everything appears to be over, until a mysterious young man, Elliot, makes his appearance.

Entangled in a web of lies and politics, Elliot will try to draw Walter away from Iovbridge and face him in the stronghold of Wirskworth. He will attempt to rekindle relations and revive the old alliance between the Queen of Knightdorn and Syrella Endor, the Governor of Wirskworth. Elliot’s mission will take every fibre of his will and if he fails, so shall the kingdom.

Game Of Thrones meets Greek mythology in this explosive epic fantasy story, packed with war, medieval lore, magic, loyalty and bravery. The first book in the series, The Dance of Light, will take you on an epic journey to a fantasy world of men and mythical creatures which will keep you spellbound till the very end.

Review: A Contract In Sol Forne

A contained fantasy adventure featuring djinns, dangerous wishes, political factions, and militias.

A djinn.
A boy.
A terrible contract.

“I wouldn’t have asked for that if I knew I could ask for anything.”

Vaelin is an ancient djinn on a quest to seek the artifact to which she is enslaved. Her centuries-long journey lands her in the southern port city-state of Sol Forne, where she is certain the artifact is held.

There, she meets Dorovan, a disaffected youth from a dissolved noble house. Though their initial connection is cursory, their bond becomes one that may endanger the entire Cycle of Nature.

Review: SHREDDED

Reader beware! This sports and fitness body horror anthology is dangerous. Side effects include monstrous steroid transformation, concussion-induced madness, possession by jock ghost, death by yoga cult, and more. Read with caution!

Featuring seventeen reps of terror by Nikki R. Leigh, Tim Meyer, Brandon Applegate, Red Lagoe, Caias Ward, RW DeFaoite, Mae Murray, D. Matthew Urban, Charles Austin Muir, Joe Koch, Michael Tichy, Rien Gray, Robbie Burkhart, Eric Raglin, Matthew Pritt, Madeleine Sardina, Alexis DuBon, and J.A.W. McCarthy.

Review: EVERYTHING WILL BE ALL RIGHT IN THE END

What happens…after?

In Everything Will Be All Right in the End: Apocalypse Songs, you’ll see the lengths a father will go in order to protect his child, the emptiness that revenge can harness, gods compelled to act after being forgotten, a boy carrying the weight of decisions he didn’t make, and monsters both within and without. You’ll meet people who have lost everything, faced everything, lived through the worst that could happen, attempted to pick up the pieces of their shattered realities, and you will hear their apocalypse songs.

Listen closely.

Review: The Battle That Was Lost

When there is something you can’t do or won’t do yourself, you get a bastard to do it for you. They are thieves, cheats, and murderers, loyal to nothing but the coin. Everyone knows that,

Yet in war, payment in blood is more likely than payment in coin.

Staegrim knows coins better than he knows people, and he isn’t giving his life away for free. Not to the rebels, not for the lords, and not for all of the bloody coins in Rengas.

But then… Everyone has a price.

Review: Where Black Stars Rise (Sampler)

Dr. Amal Robardin, a Lebanese immigrant and a therapist in training, finds herself out of her depth when her first client, Yasmin, a schizophrenic, is visited by a nightly malevolent presence that seems all too real.

Yasmin becomes obsessed with Robert Chambers’ classic horror story collection The King in Yellow. Messages she finds in the book lead Yasmin to disappear, seeking answers she can’t find in therapy.

Amal attempts to retrace her patient’s last steps—and accidentally slips through dimensions, ending up in Carcosa, realm of the King in Yellow. Determined to find her way out, Amal enlists the help of a mysterious guide.

Can Amal save Yasmin? Or are they both trapped forever?

Review: A Man in Winter

Arthur, whose life was devastated by the brutal murder of his wife, must come to terms with his
diagnosis of dementia. He moves into a new home at a retirement community, and shortly after,
has his life turned upside down again when his wife’s ghost visits him and sends him on a quest
to find her killer so her spirit can move on. With his family and his doctor concerned that his
dementia is advancing, will he be able to solve the murder before his independence is
permanently restricted? A Man in Winter examines the horrors of isolation, dementia, loss, and the ghosts that come back to haunt us.

Review: Dearest Death: A Collection

Humans are, so far as we know, the only creatures on this planet who mark the passage of time. As such, we are keenly aware from an early age that time is tick, tick, ticking away.

In the end, for all of us, is Death. We fear it. We are intoxicated by it. We run from it and somehow find ourselves wrapped in its dark-robed arms.

A small village suffering through a terrifying plague seek a solution from a prophet. A “pig” crawls on his hands and knees through the dark labyrinth of a BDSM dungeon in search of the only thing that can satiate his hunger. Two young men find themselves chased through the woods by a real-life urban legend. A lonely young man finds a boon companion in Death.

These stories and more fill Darkest Death, a collection of short horror fiction by W. Dale Jordan, author of The Stop.

Review: The Wonderful World of Scary Ass Shit

Your parents are lying bags of dicks, everything you ever had a nightmare about is real, and probably was hiding under your bed.

Parallel dimensions exist, let’s get that out of the way right now. What matters more is that something is causing them to merge. A process, to put it bluntly, that can only be described as slamming one’s tit in the proverbial plane of existence’s door… or simply put, maximum unpleasantness in all the wrong places.
Monsters, creatures, anything really that can trigger that burning fear sensation that makes you wish you were already dead, they are real. Like real-real, like really-really real. Trust me, but also no one… see what I did there? The Aurora Wasteland seems to be the epicenter of it all. A focal point for the strange and weird. It’s an area that lives beyond man-made borders. A place made up of people you wouldn’t want to meet. People you wouldn’t want to be, because escaping from the nightmare that is the Aurora Wasteland, well, that’s just not possible.

Logan, Gabe, Monahan, and Jeff are and have been best friends since childhood, only they’ve never met, except they have and know everything and nothing about each other. Perfect stranger and the tightest of friends. Makes sense? Because it shouldn’t, it doesn’t to them.

Not that any of that matters, because as their dimension merges with another, they seem to be the only ones that remember anything about it… the old dimension that is. Even then, only their memories remain, while their lives have been swapped out like a saggy bag of gold. Merged with the them from the new dimension. It’s ok to be confused, none of it makes sense to them either, even if it should.

Then there is Patty, the fifth friend they didn’t even know they had, except they did. Patty knew it was coming and tried to stop it, The Merge that is. Only he failed and died graphically for it. Dragging the knowledge he had about everything to his grave. Now the four friends have to figure out how to try to pry themselves out of this dimension and to get home if it’s even possible. All while navigating their new lives, relationships, and the strange and weird known as The Aurora Wasteland, that just keeps pulling them in deeper.

Lost and with little to go on, a book by the title of TETHERED is found to be left specifically for them. A book written by the so-called discoverer of The Aurora Wasteland. A book whose contents may seemingly be more important to them than they know.

It’s ok to be confused and scared, but I should warn you, if you’re reading this, then it’s already too late. The Aurora Wasteland has you. It knows you. There is no escape. Trust me, because well… it’s better you just figure out what’s going on, for your own sake and sanity. Read, watch, listen, do that you have to do, consume it all. Because you’ll need it.

Review: Edge Case

When her husband suddenly disappears, a young woman must uncover where he went—and who she might be without him—in this striking debut of immigration, identity, and marriage.

After another taxing day as the sole female employee at her New York City tech startup, Edwina comes home to find that her husband, Marlin, has packed up a suitcase and left. The only question now is why. Did he give up on their increasingly hopeless quest to secure their green cards and decide to return to Malaysia? Was it the death of his father that sent him into a tailspin? Or has his strange, sudden change in personality finally made Marlin and Edwina strangers to each other?

As Edwina searches the city for traces of her husband, she simultaneously sifts through memories of their relationship, hoping to discover the moment when something went wrong. All the while, a coworker is making increasingly uncomfortable advances toward her. And she can’t hide the truth about Marlin’s disappearance from her overbearing, eccentric mother for much longer. Soon Edwina will have to decide how much she is willing to sacrifice in order to stay in her marriage and in America.

Poignant and darkly funny, Edge Case is a searing meditation on intimacy, estrangement, and the fractured nature of identity. In this moving debut, YZ Chin explores the imperfect yet enduring relationships we hold to country and family.