Meyers’s intro-monologue was very good. I’m not surprised. One of my favourite late-night comics, I thought I’d share the clip, in case you missed it:
It was a great night for wins, actually. Sterling K. Brown won Best Actor in a TV Series, Drama, for his role in This Is Us — a truly deserving win. The show is spectacular, but by far his is the standout performance: Continue reading
Yesterday, during one of my many YouTube music-video binges, I stumbled across the new video for Five Finger Death Punch’s “Gone Away” (above). I had missed its release entirely (despite 5FDP being one of my favourite bands), and quickly realized it was a (very faithful) cover of The Offspring’s song of the same name. It’s been a long time since I last listened to anything by Offspring (which is strange, because I love their earlier albums), but it was amazing how quickly the lyrics came flooding back. So, naturally, I sang along. It was a welcome trip down memory lane.
5FDP’s cover appears on their greatest hits (so far) collection, A Decade of Destruction. The original song (video below) appeared on Offspring’s Ixnay on the Hombre album (1996) — the follow up to the appropriately-named Smash (1994).
One of my favourite fantasy/horror characters returns in the Age of Sigmar
Since the dark days of the Great Awakening, the scattered remnants of humanity have clung to a bleak existence, surviving howsoever they can, no matter what the cost. Tamra, a voivode of the Rictus clans, fights one last, desperate battle for the survival of her tribe, the Drak. Now her people face their most relentless enemy ever – the lumbering minions of the Plague God. Where is their lord Nagash, the Undying King, when his people need him most? As the gods and their servants vie for power in the Mortal Realms, Tamra is drawn into a deadly game between life and death, as beings long thought gone start to exert their powers once again.
This is Reynolds’s second book to feature Nagash set in the Age of Sigmar — the lord of the undead appeared in Mortarch of Night, and the author previously wrote about the character in the first End Times novel, The Return of Nagash. Nagash has long been one of my favourite Warhammer characters, so I’ve always been interested in reading fiction with him at its centre. The Undying King did not disappoint. Continue reading
So, this novel may have my favourite fantasy title ever. I can’t actually think of one that amused me as much before — although, Magic Kingdom For Sale, Sold and many Pratchett titles have been favourites for a long while. I hadn’t heard about Kill the Farm Boy until a few moments ago, when B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Tweeted about it. Written by Delilah S. Dawson and Kevin Hearne, here’s the synopsis:
Once upon a time, in a faraway kingdom, a hero, the Chosen One, was born… and so begins every fairy tale ever told.
This is not that fairy tale.
There is a Chosen One, but he is unlike any One who has ever been Chosened.
And there is a faraway kingdom, but you have never been to a magical world quite like the land of Pell.
There, a plucky farm boy will find more than he’s bargained for on his quest to awaken the sleeping princess in her cursed tower. First there’s the Dark Lord who wishes for the boy’s untimely death… and also very fine cheese. Then there’s a bard without a song in her heart but with a very adorable and fuzzy tail, an assassin who fears not the night but is terrified of chickens, and a mighty fighter more frightened of her sword than of her chain-mail bikini. This journey will lead to sinister umlauts, a trash-talking goat, the Dread Necromancer Steve, and a strange and wondrous journey to the most peculiar “happily ever after” that ever once-upon-a-timed.
Kill the Farm Boy is due to be published by Del Rey in North America, in July 2018. (At the time of writing this, I couldn’t find any information about a UK release.)
Also on CR: Interview with Lila Bowen (2016); Interview with Kevin Hearne (2011); Reviews of Kevin Hearne’s Hounded and Hexed
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