Author Dean Koontz is known for scaring the crap out of people, and freaking them out.
But he can also be a weirdly humorous guy, something that’s evident in his new comic suspense novel Going Home In The Dark (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook) — and in the following email interview he and I did about it.
I used to know someone who loved to play Grand Theft Auto by running around and causing all kinds of mayhem so he could see how long he could avoid being arrested.
He’s now doing 30 years to life in state prison. Seriously.
Now, I’m not saying, implying, or suggesting there’s a connection, but I am now worried about my future after playing MANIAC, a ridiculously over-the-top, top down, arcade action game that’s like the first Grand Theft Auto if you played it like a certain someone I know in the slammer.
Given how it uses the same fixed camera and controls as the original, you might expect the new edition of 2002’s Onimusha 2: Samurai’s Destiny (PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch, PC) would be as frustrating to play as, well, every other recent remaster of a game from that era with the same kind of restricted motion.
You’d be wrong.
While it doesn’t feel like a modern game, the new version of Onimusha 2: Samurai’s Destiny does have solid controls, and in doing so, will delight people who fondly remember this game, and this series, while also possibly engaging those who’ve never played it but don’t mind when a good game is somewhat retro.
Detective Philip Marlowe is one of the most iconic noir characters in both film and literature, the former of which has seen him played by everyone from Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum to Liam Neeson.
Now Marlow is coming to a different visual medium in Raymond Chandler’s Trouble Is My Business (hardcover, Kindle), a graphic novel adaptation of Chandler’s 1950 novella.
In the following email interview, writer Arvind Ethan David — who worked with illustrator Ilias Kyriazis and colorist Cris Peters to adapt Business — talks about how this adaptation came to be, how its structure differs slightly from Chandler’s original novella, as well plans to adapt some of Marlowe’s other iconic cases.
Here’s a tip: If the castle you live in is under siege, and there’s no way to defend it, get out however you can, even if it means working with people you dislike.
Don’t believe me? Just ask the ladies at the center of author Caitlin Starling’s medieval fantasy horror novel The Starving Saints (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook), who hate each other but must collaborate if they want to live another day.
In the following email interview, Starling talks about what inspired and influenced this story, as well as how this story was originally going to be told interactively.
Though it started a bit slow, Star Wars Outlaws (PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, PC) was one of last year’s better games.
And now the third-person action / adventure game is getting even better (though only slightly) thanks to A Pirate’s Fortune, an add-on for Outlaws that gives our gal Kay Vess more to do.
Five years ago, author Matt Dinniman launched his science fiction / fantasy / LitRPG series Dungeon Crawler Carl when he self-published the titular first novel…and quickly caught the attention of fans of LitRPG stories. Which, in turn, caught the attention of Ace Books, who started reprinting these novels in 2024.
With the sixth book, The Eye Of The Bedlam Bride, newly available from Ace in hardcover — just weeks after reissuing the fourth [The Gate Of The Feral Gods] and fifth [The Butcher’s Masquerade] — I spoke to Dinniman via email to talk about both this series and Bedlam Bride.
While some writers hate equating their stories with specific genres, author Valkyrie Loughcrewe is taking a different approach by classifying their new novella Puppet’s Banquet (paperback, Kindle) with their own genre: “diseased Gothic.”
To find out what they mean, and what inspired and influenced this story, check out the following email interview.
In the first Avengers movie, Nick Fury asks a member of the Security Council, “You ever been in a war, councilman? In a fire fight? Did you feel an overabundance of control?” It’s a line that kept repeating in my head as I played — or maybe survived is a better word — DOOM: The Dark Ages (PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, PC), a ridiculously frantic but also ridiculously fun horror- and fantasy-infused science fiction first-person shooter.
And while yes, you can say the same about 2016’s DOOM and 2020’s DOOM Eternal (and the best Call Of Duty games, the Gears Of War series, the Halo games…), there are things about DOOM: The Dark Ages that make it especially unhinged and, well, out of control.