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The borg.com Best of 2017–The Best in Print

Filed under: Backstage Pass, Comics & Books, Con Culture, Fantasy Realms, Movies, Retro Fix, Sci-Fi Café, Superheroes — Leave a comment

December 29, 2017

Our borg.com Best of 2017 list continues today with the Best in Print. If you missed them, check out our review of the Best Movies of 2017 here, the Kick-Ass Heroines of 2017 here, and the Best in Television here.

So let’s get going. Here are our selections for this year’s Best in Print:

Best New Edition of Previous Published Work – The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame, David Petersen (IDW Publishing). David Petersen’s artwork was the perfect excuse to get Kenneth Grahame’s wonderful classic The Wind in the Willows into the hands of new readers. The new edition from IDW Publishing was the perfect storybook, and Petersen, known best for his Mouse Guard series, showed his understanding of these characters and their natural world full of wonder through his fantasy images.

Best Read, Best Retro Read – Forever and a Death, Donald E. Westlake (Hard Case Crime). Not every good idea comes to fruition. Not every excellent project gets off the ground. Not every great book gets published. The Hard Case Crime imprint of Titan Books came through again, seizing the opportunity to take a lost, never before published work of Donald E. Westlake--Forever and a Death--and brought it to life. And what a great adventure! Originally the story commissioned to be the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies, the projected was shelved, and only now do we get fantastic characters (like environmental activist and diver Kim Baldur) in a very Bondian situation–destroying Hong Kong as payback for China taking it back from Great Britain. Honorable mention for Best Retro Read: Turn on the Heat, Erle Stanley Gardner, and Dragon Teeth, Michael Crichton.

Best Sci-Fi Read – Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom: A Novel of Retropolis, Bradley W. Schenck (Tor Books). Imaginative, new, and fun, Schenck took us into a timeless world full of nostalgia and classic science fiction. Great tech, and a sprawling story. Interesting characters and great world-building, this novel will be a great surprise for sci-fi readers. Honorable mention: War for the Planet of the Apes: Revelations, Greg Keyes.

Best Fantasy Read – An Alchemy of Masques and Mirrors, Curtis Craddock (Tor Books). The plot of this debut novel is labyrinthine and action-packed, full of assassination attempts from all quarters, courtly intrigue galore, grandiose philosophies, and a cast of characters anchored by the strong, smart, resourceful, and eminently likeable heroes. Supporting everything is Craddock’s strong, confident, often-funny, and sharply observant writing that goes from heart-wrenching to hilarious on a single page without missing a beat. A dazzling debut.

Best Genre Non-fiction – Middle-Earth: From Script to Screen, Daniel Falconer (Harper Design). We wish every genre franchise had such a magnificent, thorough, monumental guide. Falconer’s guide to Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies is full of interviews at all levels of the creative process, and supported by concept art, photographs, maps, and so much more. Worthy of the six films it covers, it’s the ultimate fan book and a model for any franchise attempting to put everything fans could want into a single volume.

There’s much more of our selections for 2017’s Best in Print and more, after the jump…

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Tags: Abbie Bernstein, Abrams Books, Alex Ross, An Alchemy of Masques and Mirrors, Archie Horror, Batman/Elmer Fudd, Best in Print 2017, Best of 2017, Best of the Best, borg.com Best of 2017, Bradley W. Schenck, Byron Vaughns, Caseen Gaines, Curtis Craddock, Daniel Falconer, David Petersen, David Tipton, DC Comics, Donald E. Westlake, Dragon Teeth, Erle Stanley Gardner, Forever and a Death, Hard Case Crime, Harper Design, IDW Publishing, Insight Editions, J.K. Woodward, Joe Nazarro, Jughead: The Hunger, Kenneth Grahame, Lee Weeks, Looney Tunes, Mark Brooks, Michael Crichton, Middle-Earth: From Script to Screen, Mike Mayhew, Phil Szostak, Robert Hack, Scott Tipton, Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom: A Novel of Retropolis, Star Trek Beyond: The Make-up Artistry of Joel Harlow, Star Trek: The Next Generation Mirror Broken!, Star Wars: The Last Jedi -- The Storms of Crait, The Art of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, The Dark Crystal: The Ultimate Visual History, The Great Wall: The Art of the Film, The Wind in the Willows, Titan Books, Tom King, Tor Books, Turn On the Heat

Book review–The paranormal collides with the Old West in The Curse of Jacob Tracy

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June 4, 2017

Review by Elizabeth C. Bunce

Here at borg.com, we’re fans of Westerns. And ghost stories. But we haven’t truly appreciated just how much fun they can be together—until Holly Messinger’s lively debut, The Curse of Jacob Tracy, and a prequel novella, The Romance of Certain Old Bones.

Messinger’s books fit in nicely alongside Dead Man’s Hand (reviewed here), Bone Tomahawk (reviewed here), and Dragon Teeth, reviewed recently here, and will appeal especially to fans of All-Star Western’s hero Jonah Hex. Set several years after the Civil War, The Curse of Jacob Tracy follows the title character, a Confederate veteran cursed with the ability to see the dead. A former seminarian, Trace is lying low as a cowhand and trail boss, and doing his level best to stay away from hauntings. He’s joined in his adventures with longtime working partner Boz, his indispensible, skeptical right-hand-man. But the curse keeps cropping up, in a series of fun, episodic adventures strung together by a strong throughline. You’ll encounter Werewolves on a Train, haunted printing presses, gruesome Bordenesque axe-murders, and men possessed by dinosaurs. Yes, really.

Trace is a strong, sympathetic, multi-layered lead, with a frank, level-headed, and sometimes downright funny voice. Messinger’s supporting cast is just as strong. Female lead Sabine Fairweather, a mysterious, learned gentlewoman who has hired Trace for odd jobs—really odd jobs—is hiding eerie secrets of her own, deep inside her esoteric steampunk laboratory. As Trace becomes more deeply entwined in Miss Fairweather’s curious work, he begins to tentatively embrace, rather than recoil from, his strange powers. But the partnership comes at a cost, and as Trace learns more about the supernatural, he realizes his newfound skills are jeopardizing everyone he cares about. He can’t hide from the curse, but can he learn to control it?

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Tags: All Star Western, Bone Tomahawk, Dead Man's Hand An Anthology of the Old West, Dragon Teeth, ghost stories, Holly Messinger, paranormal Western, weird Westerns, Western horror, Western novels

Book review–Michael Crichton’s Dragon Teeth, an adventurous stagecoach ride back to the Old West

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May 21, 2017

Review by C.J. Bunce

After reading Michael Crichton’s groundbreaking science fiction novel Jurassic Park, I was hooked, and set out to read everything else he had written before and awaited each subsequent work with excitement. I quickly learned that you can identify his work through his character choices and his storytelling, and not only were his ideas fresh and new (Crichton passed away in 2008), he knew how to spin a good yarn. Yet, except for the Jurassic Park sequel The Lost World, each of his books is completely different from one another. In common the books follow intelligent people who set about accomplishing something unprecedented. Crichton’s latest (and perhaps final?) posthumous novel is Dragon Teeth, and in true form it is both a brilliant Crichton work, and also unlike anything he’d written before. It arrives at bookstores later this week.

Shelf Dragon Teeth alongside Jurassic Park as the very best of Crichton.

Here at borg.com I’ve so far reviewed three of Crichton’s eight “lost” novels penned under pseudonyms. In the early days of borg.com I reviewed Crichton’s Micro, a posthumously published novel Crichton hadn’t quite finished when he died, which included the technology that could shrink humans to half-an-inch tall beings. With Dragon Teeth, there is no suspension of disbelief required as with many of his works. This story is historical fiction, and a Western–easily one of the best Westerns I’ve read. We meet a college student in 1876 named William Johnson. He is an arrogant, self-absorbed son of a shipping magnate who takes on a dare and ends up accompanying a professor on a journey across the Old West in an early search for dinosaur bones–then newly-discovered proof that the planet is much older than previously thought. The professor, one of the early paleontologists, is in a lifelong battle with another, competing paleontologist and their squabble becomes deadly as Johnson finds himself a pawn in repeated attempts at oneupsmanship. Based on the feud of real-life 19th century professors, Dragon Teeth sucks the reader into every black and white Western movie where the heroes weren’t all that heroic, the dust was thick, the path was treacherous, and each new day could very well be your last.

Crichton stitched together all the Western spots you didn’t want to find yourself in as an outsider in 1876–Cheyenne, across the Badlands, into Montana and Wyoming territory, and the end of the line in murky Deadwood. Dragon Teeth has all the atmosphere of Silverado, and reads with both the folklore of a Louis L’Amour novel and the peril and adventure of a Jon Krakauer true-life account. You’ll find deceit and friendship as they existed beyond the frontier, Native American friends and enemies, and a look inside political and religious clashes that exist to this day.

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