Author: Ben

December 17, 2023

Ben Reviews – The Stupidest Angel by Christopher Moore

When I was a teenager I read a lot of Christopher Moore books. I liked them quite a bit, but upon revisiting A Dirty Job this year I was honestly shocked by how lame, unfunny, and desperate I found a lot of the jokes. I’m pleased to say that I didn’t have that experience with The Stupidest Angel. Though, I...

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November 26, 2023

Ben Reviews – Garth Marenghi’s TerrorTome by Garth Marenghi

Garth Marenghi’s Terror Tome is a book spin-off of a character created by Matthew Holness. As near as I can tell, the character was created for the sitcom Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place, which ran for only 6 episodes but garnered a cult following. The show was co-written and directed by Richard Ayoade. It was a parody of 80s paranormal soap...

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November 26, 2023

Ben Reviews – Halo Cryptum by Greg Bear

I’m not much of a Halo fan. This is not something I would have read by choice and I won’t bore you with the details of how I was made to read it. The point is, I don’t care about Halo and I read this book, so my perspective is going to be a bit weird. To me, Master Chief...

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November 26, 2023

Ben Reviews – Goosebumps: Night of the Living Dummy by R.L. Stine

I have a lot of nostalgia for the Goosebumps series. As a kid who was into horror, but whose parents weren’t entirely irresponsible, my choices were somewhat limited. I’m genuinely glad that R.L. Stine achieved the success that he did. It’s a fine line to walk creating horror stories that aren’t too scary or explicit to be read by kids....

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November 7, 2023

Ben Reviews: The Hellbound Heart by Clive Barker

It’s hard to talk about this novella without talking about Hellraiser, and that’s really its biggest weakness. Most people picking up this book will know that it is the story that the original Hellraiser film was based on. While the plot is very close to the plot of the movie, its also very obvious that Clive Barker put a lot...

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October 4, 2023

Ben’s Thoughts on Brave New World and School Literature

Recently we covered Brave New World on the podcast. This book was voted on by our patrons. The theme of the poll was “school books”. By that we mean: books that we were assigned to read during high school. Around the time we did this episode, I happened to read this article in The Atlantic entitled Why Kids Aren’t Falling...

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September 3, 2023

Ben Reviews: The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

The Fifth Season is a book that his been on my radar for quite a while. But whenever it came time to choose a new book, I always found something that I thought I would like more. The Fifth Season sounded a little boring and a little depressing. Most “back of the book” synopses you’ll find are very light on...

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August 19, 2023

Ben Reviews: Ogres by Adrian Tchaikovsky

I’ve never read a book by Adrian Tchaikovsky before. I didn’t know anything about him or Ogres before sitting down to read this book. I will admit that the cover did not give me much hope. The version I read had a cover that looked like a giant, poorly-cropped, orc character model from World of Warcraft wearing a top hat...

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August 8, 2023

Ben Reviews: God Emperor of Dune by Frank Herbert

I’m going to do something a little different with this post. I’m going to share my original Goodreads review of God Emperor of Dune from my first reading of the book. This review predates Words About Books. Then I’ll give a short update to that review based on my second reading and I’ll do the rubric evaluation. I’m planning to...

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July 31, 2023

Some Final Thoughts Regarding Hunt for the Skinwalker…

We needed a filler episode on the podcast, and I thought it would be fun to cover Hunt for the Skinwalker. It was fun, but little did I know how perfectly timed the episode would be (or did I? How deep does this go?). One short week after the episode came out the “news” was filled with headlines like the...

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