The Darker Mask Heroes From The Shadows Edited by Gary Phillips and Christopher Chambers-- Review

The Darker Mask Heroes From The Shadows Edited by Gary Phillips and Christopher Chambers-- Review

This book is an anthology of eighteen short stories about heroes. They are not just superheros. The short story, Strega's Last Dance is about a witch who gets her revenge on the local crimelord. Avatar is about a man who sweeps away evil and is the next incarnation of the buddha or other religious figures.

There are of course many superheroes, but these heroes are often not what you expect. Walter Mosley's Picket is a young thief who acquires his powers in a most unusual way. The Henchman becomes a villain to feed his family and pay child support.

A number of these heroes come from the poor quarters and the ghetto, Dred is a heroin addict, The Remover is fighting urban blight, and Flow is found by accident by a crew of thieves. There is a strong urban component to this anthology.

My favorite story in this collection is The Whores of Onyx City by Michael A. Gonzales. Sage Steel is a young girl who watches her mother die and is taken in by Dr. Sax who trains her to become a superhero. She must fight Kidd Babylon and his Wild Bunch who are selling drugs and pimping women.

My second favorite story is In Vino Veritas. Veritas is a hero who can smell lies. He must drink to avoid being overwhelmed by the people around him. I won't give away anymore.

The mix of authors is excellent; the husband and wife team of Steven Barnes and Tannarive Due, Walter Mosley, Gar Anthony Haywood, Ann Nocenti, L.A. Banks, Naomi Hirahara, and many others. There is a very diverse ethnic background among the different writers.

At the end of the book, they give one paragraph biographies of the editors, writers, and artists in the book. There are four artists who do black and white illustrations throughout this book. I especially like the illustration of the hero, The Alienist on P.334. are Brian Hurtt, Jeff Fisher, Shawn Martinbrough, and Sean Wang.

This is a very entertaining anthology with a different take on what it means to be a hero. I did not find any stories in this anthology which were not readable. This is a real accomplishment for the editors.

Good Afternoon, Going Home

Rosie The Riveter. Maybe we can do something to put this country back to work.

Good Afternoon

This morning I did a training on a new interlibrary loan system for books outside of our library system. I managed to slip in a couple of orders for books that are not in our library system.

A Safe and Sustainable World: the Promise of Ecological Design by John Todd and Nancy Jack Todd and Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creatitivity, Copyright and the Future of the Future by Cory Doctorow. I really admire both John Todd and Cory Doctorow. They offer a different viewpoint on the future.

The interlibrary loan system is replacing the paper slips with an electronic order form which should speed up the process considerably. It should make at least a week of difference.

I have to go to a Bridges Out of Poverty Workshop on Friday. I did the first part of the workshop, but not the second. I will have to see it goes on this one.

I also put the film, V for Vendetta on hold. There were several books waiting for me to pick up, Every Last Drop by Charlie Huston, Reading the OED by Ammon Shea, and Killing Sacred Cows by Garrett B. Gunderson.

My desk was piled high with various papers, law books, and annual reports. I gave my library aide about twenty annual reports to file, then sorted through my mail, and replaced some old Code of Federal Regulations with new new ones. There were a lot of little details to take care of today, mostly sorting and organizing. I did spend a little bit of time updating the current events display. This financial crisis has shown me the unending supply of financial corruption, crime, and misery that this country is currently going through.

I also spent some time ordering industrial books; machining, lathes, welding, engineering, locksmithing, concrete, and similar titles.

Going Home

On the train home, I finished reading The Darker Mask. The superhero and heroic figures names in many of the stories had a nice ring to them Dr. Sax, Sage Steel, The Henchman, The Alienist, Veritas, and others. A wonderful collection. The book was also nicely illustrated with black and white illustrators. One of the illustrators is the comic book artist for The Tick, http://www.seanwang.com

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I also started a second book, Reading the OED One Man, One Year, 21, 730 Pages by Ammon Shea. You immediately get a sense of the authors obsession with words and his compulsive collecting of dictionaries. He says it perfectly "I am reading the OED so you don't have to."-- Ammon Shea.

Good Morning, Good Afternoon

Poster for the "War of Wealth" by Charles Turner Dazey, a play that opened February 10, 1896. Reminds me a bit of what is happening now. We never learn.

Good Morning.

A link to the Obama read poster. I wish they had these posters available through the American Library Association. Posters of both McCain and Obama would be a nice boost.
http://newpagesblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/obama-reads.html

A. Lee Martinez has a new paperback of The Nameless Witch. I am looking forward to reading it. Cory Doctorow's Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now is available for free as a web download here. You Can also purchase it in print if you want. It should be fun to read. http://www.archive.org/details/CoryDoctorowsFuturisticTalesOfTheHereAndNow

Good Afternoon

If you feel like wasting a bit of time on a game, Soldak is running an open beta for Kivi's world. It is a 40 megabyte download. If you like the game Diablo, you will probably like this.

http://www.soldak.com/Kivis-Underworld/Demo.html

I am sitting in the library right now, having looked at diet and exercise books. The thought scares me, but I have to do it. I walked up to the library today. I am finally getting over a week and a half of acute bronchitis. My doctor told me lose weight and start exercising or else I am in serious trouble. I don't know if I will get a pair of light weights and do high repetition exercises every day, or simply walk a lot more to start.

I picked up another superhero anthology of short stories, The Darker Mask Heros From The Shadows, Edited by Gary Phillips and Christopher Chambers. It has stories by Tannarive Due, Steven Barnes, Jerry Rodriguez, and others. Tannarive Due and and Steven Barnes are African Amerucan authors. It should be an interesting anthology to read.

Right now, I am reading E. E. Knight, Valentines's Exile A Novel of The Vampire Earth. It is your typical the good guys are the underdogs fighting off the evil extradimensional vampire hordes. At this point our hero, Valentine is fighting the evil Kurians on the border of the Texas Republic. It is an entertaining slightly ridiculous romp.

It remained an entertaining slightly ridiculous romp throughout the novel to the point where it became something unexceptional. It is the kind of book which is there if you want some very light reading. I did not find that it is a book worth reviewing. The concepts of vampires who treat humanity like cattle is not a new one. If you want a story along these lines you are better off reading the Vampire Hunt D novels by Hideyuki Kikuchi.