Read Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews for Free Online

hasn't happened yet, although much of it is beginning to coalesce. Similarly, Atom offers us, presumably not unintentionally, what can be interpreted as a cameo view of the coalescing process – a soup of motifs swirling towards an integration that has not yet been and may never be, for inherent reasons, attained. To both extend and mix the metaphor, it is consequently hard to establish whether what's being served up is a hearty nutritious broth or a thin consommé.
    —Infinity Plus

Black Projects, White Knights
    by Kage Baker
    Golden Gryphon, 297 pages, hardback, 2002
    Before I talk about the book, a few words about the publisher. If I had to vote for which is the best publisher currently operating within the genres, I'd almost certainly opt for Golden Gryphon. Their books are produced with such care and love – not just for the subject matter but for production standards – that it gives a genuine thrill just to hold a Golden Gryphon book in one's hands. And, almost always, the contents live up to the rest, so I had high hopes of this collection by Kage Baker, an author with whose work I am (to my shame) otherwise unfamiliar.
    Most of the stories are in her series about Dr Zeus Inc., otherwise known as The Company – a shadowy super-technology organization that could be thought of as lying at the heart of most of the relevant conspiracy theories. There are also some stories in another, slightly linked series, concerning a prodigy known as Alec Checkerfield.
    The newly penned opener to this volume, introducing Dr Zeus Inc. to the unacquainted reader, is a firecracker piece of writing; surely no appetite could be left unwhetted by this piece. But thereafter, while each of the stories is a highly competent piece of magazine fiction, none of them seems outstanding; always I was left with that exasperated "nicely done, but so what?" feeling.
    But it's a lovely, lovely book, from its splendid J.K. Potter cover all the way on through.
    —Crescent Blues

Coldheart Canyon
    by Clive Barker
    HarperCollins, 676 pages, hardback, 2001
    Since the industry of Hollywood is dreams, it's hard to understand why there have been so very few good stories of the fantastic centred on, or based in, the movie business. Even Thomas Tryon, the ex-movie star turned fantasy novelist, stayed strictly within the bounds of the real in his one movie novel/fixup, Crowned Heads (1976). The single novel that this reviewer has come across that mixes the movies with fantasy with any real measure of success is Theodore Roszak's exquisite 1991 novel Flicker , and even it is likely to offend genre fans in the delicious subtlety, rather than the wham-bam foregrounding, of its fantasticated underpinning. Within the movies themselves there have been a few successful attempts at this marriage, the most notable probably being Last Action Hero (1993), much maligned on release but now generally well regarded, and Woody Allen's 1984 excursion The Purple Rose of Cairo . One could add Maurizio Nichetti's delirious 1989 piece The Icicle Thief , although there the movie-within-a-movie is being screened on television, and it is the fantasies created by tv that are the real subject.
    So the strapline on the cover of Coldheart Canyon is enough to set the pulse a-tingling and the jaws a-salivating: "A Hollywood Ghost Story." Barker is one of the most elegant writers and exciting imaginers in the horror business: almost as good a writer as Peter Straub, almost as good an imaginer as Ramsey Campbell "A pity he should waste that writing ability and those powers of imagination on such garbage" is a common enough reaction, and perhaps an unfair one, although it does tend to be the ugly schlock moments rather than the wonderful flights of fancy that stick in one's mind after reading a Barker novel. But give him a ghost story and the results should be pretty stupendous – after all, remember what a fine novel Stephen King crafted from the form of the traditional ghost story with