I'm Steve, author of the Interloper Trilogy, a shamanic/SciFi post-apoc trilogy: books2read.com/u/38PQqw And dark fantasy mystery/thriller series The Blind Age: books2read.com/u/boyRev I read and review indie/selfpub books and Im always looking for new favourite authors ☺️

Now it's one of those YouTube comedy over-dubs

Im thinking about how I read, come on a tangent with me and tell me how it works for you. See. There's a pretty good cinema screen in my brain, and it comes with optional audio and great performances by any actor you like. That means I get to do fun stuff like decide that your character is played by Gary Oldman when he did Leon: The Professional, and score it with Hans Zimmer, and if you're good at writing then you'll have framed the shot with description. I'll try a few different attempts, often, to find what suits the book I'm reading. I've started books thinking "oh this is The Dark Knight kinda style" and by the end we've turned it into the Adam West Batman series. The reason I tell you this is so that you understand when I say: my current read requires that I visualise it as an extremely cringe anime with bad animation and no concept of choreography, bad (dub) voice acting, and somehow, the soundtrack from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure (Giorno's one, if you know you know). It's an absolute car crash but I can't look away.

120 books remain on my TBR, 45 down since I started this effort, with 15 that I really enjoyed. My next batch includes a couple iv had since my first ever first chapter sampling threads, and one that's on there out of morbid curiosity 👀

Now this is podracing Candle Children, by Michael Baker (@Baker_Bakertron) Dishonoured X JoJo X Oliver Twist I absolutely loved this. Moody, atmospheric, flintlock fantasy with orphans, spirits, genocide and revolution. Exceptional world-building. Pleasant prose, good action, a great and memorable cast, and several moments that absolutely devastated me and also gave me chills. It's bleak and yet hopeful, spiritually heroic in the face of very real, human evils. Several times I had those OH WOW moments where it pulled the rug from under me. Candle Children does a great job of stacking up thematic gunpowder through it's first third, then starts detonating it in the second, and then the third act reveals that actually these innocuous barrels to the side here are ALSO gunpowder and then everything starts exploding. Couple that with some of the worst fates Iv seen characters meet in fiction and it comes together in a very adult story about children. A lot of people did. A LOT. And it never feels cheap. It manages to pull off a story about the genocide of a marginalised people without ever making me roll my eyes or getting preachy, and it has a lot to say about it's subject matter. If I have any complaints, it's that there's a couple of repetitive phrases. Lots of chills running down spines. And some of the scenes with spirits are very exposition dumpy - but the lore is really really cool and so I didn't mind that much. The last third is also just a series of absolute home-runs where everything ties together. It thematically complete, beautiful when it needs to be, and spends a lot of time rubbing your face in man's inhumanity to man. The real villain is apathy, indifference in the face of other people's suffering. If I may, I thought there was one really well telegraphed home-run in the last few pages that was a total miss and I'll be sad about that until a sequel probably uses it. I do hope there'll be a sequel. Phenomenal work and - hold up WAS THIS A DEBUT? EXCUSE ME? 5 STARS. This only has a handful of ratings which is absolutely criminal

Make a book title edible: Icing Breaker