Book Review: HELLCRAFTER by Eve Harms

HELLCRAFTER is the sequel to 2018’s THE SECRET NAME by horror writer Eve Harms. As a result, this review contains spoilers for the first book. You’ve been warned. I did receive an ARC of this book for free for the purpose of giving an honest review.

HELLCRAFTER picks up where THE SECRET NAME leaves off, as Kendra Temples finds herself jobless and near broke after she inadvertently let an evil spirit named Mhaqal out in to the world, but at least she has her boyfriend Carlos, so something is going right. She takes a job at a float spa, which is comprised of sensory deprivation tanks that people can rent to get away from the world. One of the perks of her job is she can use the tank so long as it’s not taking time away from her other work and it’s not interfering with a client.

There’s a slight hitch, though, in that she tends to psychically project into a hellscape when she goes into the tank. There, she discovers that her former boyfriend (now deceased) is trapped there, skinless, with only a goat headed humanoid for a companion. What follows is Kendra’s quest to save her ex-boyfriend while trying to balance work and her relationship with her new boyfriend. It involves her going back to the house where all the trouble originated and digging deeper into the occult. Eve Harms does a fair amount of work detailing the djinn that inhabit the prison, and there are enough twists to keep the reader going.

Like the first book, HELLCRAFTER is constructed of a series of blog posts, so Kendra fully takes advantage of breaking the fourth wall to address the audience directly. While the more relaxed and casual tone works for the most part, it makes some of the action set pieces more questionable. Plus, the reader has to determine if the action is really what is happening or if Kendra is deliberately exaggerating her life and fabricating the more exotic details. Finally, since it is a series of posts, unless they suddenly cease (or another narrator somehow takes over) some of the narrative tension is lost because you know she has to survive to write the story.

All that said, HELLCRAFTER is a quick and enjoyable horror romp with a nice splatter of gore.

It is currently available for preorder at Amazon and is releasing February 12.

4 out of 5 stars.

New Fiction Up at The Dark City

A new noir piece of mine is up at The Dark City Crime and Mystery Magazine and is also available at Amazon in print and kindle. This is the second piece of mine they’ve published. The first can be found here.

I’d say its a departure for me, but well, my writing has been a bit all over the map recently. As for what I’m working on now, I’m part way through a short story featuring Ariadna. This would be the third story featuring her, the first two having appeared in Pulp Modern. It’s a no magic sword slinging adventure. I’ve also been chipping away at the Liam the Black novel. Hopefully I’ll be able to give progress updates as those happen.

The Way Forward in 2020

So Broadswords and Blasters is dead. At least for the foreseeable future. Why? A lot of reasons, but the amount of time and money Cameron and I were pouring into it, and the relative lack of return we were seeing on it was draining. From most objective standards, our experiment to launch a New Pulp magazine was a glorious failure. Even with our shoestring budget, we didn’t quite break even. We didn’t win any awards[1]. Hell, we weren’t even nominated for any to the best of my knowledge.

And yet.

This past month, with the announcement of our closing, showed that what we did mattered to a number of people. We were the first paid publication (hey, you could buy a burrito at least) for a number of writers. For others, we gave them a confidence boost when they needed it. I’m sure a few people stuck around for our social media feeds (okay, by that I mean Twitter, because I ignored Facebook for the most part), including our allegedly legendary Follow Fridays where I tried to highlight our contributing writers, fellow publications, and friends of the mag. We worked hard to be apolitical in a time where everything is political (how much we upheld the status quo is probably up for debate, but it isn’t one we’re all that interested in having).

We did succeed in one aspect. Our goal, from day one, was to publish action-adventure stories. We weren’t interested in avant-garde structures or allegories or Big Idea stories. We still managed to get stories featuring morally complex characters, plots that tended toward shades of gray as opposed to black and white, and damn if we didn’t get some stories that made us laugh and others that brought a tear to the eye. If there was one big failing, it was that we didn’t get enough readers exposed to the great writing going on in the indie scene and that will be my biggest regret.

So what’s next? For me, at least, it is chipping away at a fantasy novel featuring Liam the Black (a short story featuring Liam is set to be published some time this year by Kzine). I’ve already got stories in upcoming issues of The Dark City Crime & Mystery Magazine, Econoclash Review[2], and Cirsova.

It’s working on more short stories for more markets. It’s reading more. Reviewing more. It’s submitting more places than I did the year before. I should also finish this[3].

Anyway, that’s my year set out now that we’re one half of one twelfth through the year.

None of us getting younger, you know?

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[1] We did come in 3^rd place among Fiction Magazines in the Critter Poll of 2019.

[2] Now an imprint of Down & Out Books

[3] Seriously, me? 2017? I know at least one person was enjoying it.

With a Bang: Issue 12 Release

Broadswords and Blasters

Cover Image of Issue 12

Issue 12 will be the final issue of Broadswords and Blasters for the foreseeable future. Both editors are old enough to know that never is a really long time, so we aren’t permanently closing the door on it ever coming back, but we both acknowledged earlier this year that we were starting to get burnt out on the endeavor. We wanted to end while it was still fun and entertaining instead of trying to drive it down into dust. When will we be back? We can say with all honesty: We don’t know.

That said, we decided to go out in style with a tremendous double issue to celebrate three years of awesome New Pulp fiction. Because why go out with a whimper when you can go out with a bang?

J. Rohr returns to Broadswords and Blasters (he was last seen in issue 5)…

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Pulp Consumption: The Mandalorian

Broadswords and Blasters

I’ve been a fan of Star Wars for as long as I can remember, but I’ve actually never been a fan of the Expanded Universe books and shows. Maybe it’s my character flaw, but nothing outside of the self-contained movie series has ever really captured my attention. I mean, I’ve read the Admiral Thrawn books and some of the New Jedi Order. The book Kenobi was decent enough, as have been some of the short story collections, but even those didn’t excite me the way the original trilogy did. People kept telling me to watch the CGI cartoons like Clone Wars and Rebels, but I can’t stand that kind of animation outside of video games. And, yes, I’ve played a lot of the games, but again they are sort of stored in a separate vault in my brain, alongside the tabletop RPG versions. They’re fun, but if they didn’t…

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