Four Summoner's Tales

July 29, 2013
Powered by adept story-crafting skills, this anthology of novellas delivers limited thrills, but it does successfully showcase four prominent authors’ inventive takes on a central theme: “A strange visitor comes to town, offering to raise the townsfolk’s dearly departed from the dead—for a price.” The worthy, if not terribly satisfying, “Suffer the Children” from Armstrong (the Otherworld series) follows the prompt most literally, with actual strangers, and an actual town. “Pipers” from Golden (The Graves of Saints), about the victims of a Mexican drug cartel becoming a vengeful undead army, has a jarringly sepia-hued evocation of Texas border life. Maberry recruits his own series lead, Joe Ledger, for “Alive Day,” perhaps the most ambitious of the quartet, and, unfortunately, the least effective. Confusing point-of-view changes and a nonsequential narrative turn his depiction of a death cult in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan into a muddle of feverish hallucinations, dismembered bodies, and blustering dialogue. Liss (The Twelfth Enchantment) rescues the project from mediocrity with “A Bad Season for Necromancy,” a witty account of a necromancer who blackmails rich widows in 18th-century London.

April 1, 2013

Four New York Times best-selling authors bring back the dead. In Armstrong's "Suffer the Children," a stranger promises to revive children lost to diphtheria in a 19th-century Ontario village--but one villager must willingly die for each child revived. In Christopher Golden's "Pipers," an army of the risen dead enter the fray as Texas Border Volunteers challenge drug smugglers. David Liss's "The Good-Natured Man" features an 18th-century British con man who gets people to pay him not to resurrect their less-than-loved ones. And in Jonathan Maberry's "Alive Day," a U.S. Army sergeant in Afghanistan has a shock when trying to arrange for the return of his team. Not as big as a novel by any one of these writers, but great for die-hard fans.

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2013
What happens when four genre writers are given the same premise as a jumping-off point? In this case, you get a book that's sure to appeal to genre fans. The premise is simple: a stranger comes to town and offers to raise the town's dead, but the visitor wants something in return. Unleashing their imaginations, the authors give us stories about a preacher who's skeptical about men who claim they can restore the recently deceased to life (Kelley Armstrong); a man who will do anything to avenge his daughter's murder (Christopher Golden); a con artist who discovers a new way to keep himself living in the lap of luxury (David Liss); and a military mission to find out what happened to a special-ops team that seems to have disappeared in Afghanistan (Jonathan Maberry, in a new Joe Ledger novella). Not only does the book offer a fascinating look at how a single premise can lead to four extremely different stories, it also offers some fine writing by a quartet of very popular authors.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)