Book Bites: Wild Love

Wild Love by Elsie Silver
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Gave this one twenty percent of its wordcount before throwing in the towel. Yes, romance novels often deal heavily in tropes, but Wild Love's opening chapters read like cardboard cutouts being puppeted across a bland backdrop. Tropes like the hunky, brooding billionaire and the type-A woman moving from the big city to the country work well if an author does them well or puts an interesting spin on them; Wild Love did neither, content to be a patched-together quilt of familiar plots and characters.

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Game Bites: Elementallis

 Elementallis

Developer: AnKae Games
Publisher: Top Hat Studios, Inc.

Rating 2 out of 5 stars

Elementallis should really be called 'A Wink to the Past.' The game wears its retro gaming bona fides on every screen. The player sprite and map layout and combat feel like they're ripped from Link's Awakening. The elemental magic system (complete with ring menus!) screams Secret of Mana.

The problem in comparing your game to Secret of Mana or A Link to the Past is that very few games are as good as Secret of Mana or A Link to the Past.

Book Bites: Cave Mountain

Cave Mountain: A Disappearance and a Reckoning in the Ozarks by Benjamin Hale
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Cave Mountain spins a true crime tale connecting the brief disappearance of a young girl in the Arkansas Ozarks and a murderous doomsday cult arrested nearby some 30 years prior. Hale's book began life as a piece for Harper's and often reads like a padded-out essay. The text attempts to interweave the 2001 disappearance of Hale's cousin Haley, a doomsday cult that in 1978 murdered a young child, Ozark religious extremism, and an atheists' questioning approach to Christianity; only the weft and warp never quite mesh. Cave Mountain works reasonably as a true crime book, but its nonlinear storytelling and wide thematic net make for a text that often feels jumbled.

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Book Bites: Spread Me

Spread Me by Sarah Gailey
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Spread Me is a wry, winking spin on John Carpenter's "The Thing" centering on a desolate desert outpost, its virus-obsessed captain (is there a term for those sexually attracted to viruses?), her motley crew, and a strange new lifeform attempting to seduce its way into host bodies during a sandstorm. Our limited cast of characters are vibrantly drawn. The text is a hard R bordering on NC-17; Gailey excels at writing erotica that doesn't feel smutty. The sex is natural to the story and the science feels believable. The only downside here, especially given Spread Me's slim wordcount, are problems with pacing and tension. Middle chapters feel like a plateau rather than a ratcheting up. Those game for body horror and sex should tear through this in no time.

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