AOTW #10: SJ Hollis

Welcome to Author of the Week! Every week on my book group, an author member is chosen to be Author of the Week and will be featured here, tweeted on Twitter, shared on Google Plus and Pinterest and generally treated like royalty! Group members are asked to do features and talk about our AOTW to help each one to promote his/her work to the book community. 
https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/114319-my-big-fat-indie-book-gang 

This Week: SJ Hollis!

Writer. Torturer of fictional teenagers. Author of Bounty Hunter, a YA apocalyptic fantasy with ... erm, funny bits.

Short, unreliable, slightly odd thirty-seven-year-old. Pizza fiend. Suspicious of the human race. Watches the crime channel instead of the morning news. Fan of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Batman. Morning person. Lover of Game of Thrones and Hollyoaks. Skyrim player. Shakespeare admirer. Forty quid a month comics habit. Thinks frost giants are cuddly and Loki needs a hug. Feels sick at the thought of sharing the remote control. Is learning to cook (can fry bacon like the devil fries souls, but spaghetti more of a challenge). Currently obsessed with fish finger sandwiches. Very short attention sp...


S J Hollis lives in Surrey, England with her two houseplants and a cuddly seagull. Bounty Hunter is her debut novel and she is currently working on the next book in the series

Where can I find SJ?
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7213842.S_J_Hollis 
http://shelleyjanehollis.wix.com/sjhollis
https://twitter.com/SJHollis_
https://www.facebook.com/hollissj
http://shelleyjanehollis.wix.com/sjhollis#!tumblr-feed/c1dq1

What do you do when your magic makes you a target? Run. Fight. Die.

14-year-old Kai Koson had nothing to do with the apocalypse, thank you very much. He was just a baby the day a coven of blood witches ripped a hole in the universe and the demons fell screaming from the sky. Earth and its magic perished. Witchkind was hunted and annihilated.

Now, because he was born a witch, Kai must spend his life running and fighting for survival. Even his own uncle seems determined to abandon him.

With nothing left to lose, Kai runs away and joins a team of galactic bounty hunters. But instead of providing an escape, it sets Kai on a path that will destroy everything he believes about himself and the apocalypse, transforming him into the most wanted teenager in the galaxy.


Written with humour, imagination and darkness, Bounty Hunter and its protagonist Kai Koson stand confidently beside Percy Jackson, Artemis Fowl, Alex Rider, Young Bond, Mortal Engines and Harry Potter

Where can I buy this book?
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Bounty-Hunter-S-J-Hollis/dp/0992645905/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1390051410&sr=1-1&keywords=SJ+Hollis 

http://www.amazon.com/Bounty-Hunter-S-J-Hollis-ebook/dp/B00EBU6A04/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1390051465&sr=1-3&keywords=SJ+Hollis 

 

Film Review: Shark Night(2011)

When 7 college friends head for Sara's vacation house on an island, it should be fun and sun all round. But a run in with local rednecks and a shocking shark attack leaves them with an injured man and no way to get help. Things take a sinister turn when they discover that the sharks have been put in the local waters just to kill people so that local crooks can make money showing live deaths on the internet. And these men are hunting them down to feed to the sharks...

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1633356/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2
 Filmography links and data courtesy of IMDb.

When the film started, it was the cliche' teen monster movie with the geeky guy drooling after hot Miss Popular and his idiot friend being annoying and chatting up everything in a skirt. Add in the bikini moments and the obligatory run in with the redneck locals and I thought that this film was going to be a waste of time. But it did get into the shark story quite quickly with a couple of nice attacks.

This is not a great film. The acting is not the best though you see a lot worse on the SciFi Channel monster films. The cast were chosen more for their looks than acting ability for the most part. The redneck locals who cause some trouble for the newly arrived college kids are predictable and a bit like over-the-top comic James Bond bad guys. It is obvious who is causing the shark attacks and who all the bad guys are so the 'big reveal' was far from unexpected. There is nothing really new about the film or plot, the script isn't the greatest and you could drive a truck through the plot holes, and the unrealistic events unfolding onscreen have you going 'hmmm, right'. Don't expect a film with the tension and quality of Deep Blue Sea or Bait or you will be disappointed.

However, if you go into this expecting a typical cheapish shark romp with death, blood, teenagers and a silly storyline, you will find this to be perfectly watchable and enjoyable. It is a decent enough film to pass 90 minutes and I liked it enough to watch it through to the end, even if I wouldn't watch it again in a hurry. So if you like your sharks and monster B movies, you might well like this film.

2.5 stars out of 5

Stacking the Shelves #19

 

Stacking the Shelves is a meme hosted by Tynga’s Reviews

Stacking The Shelves is all about sharing the books you are adding to your shelves, may it be physical or virtual. This means you can include books you buy in physical store or online, books you borrow from friends or the library, review books, gifts and of course ebooks!

This was a quiet week at The Book Cave though I am waiting on a few books to arrive from Amazon! I had to get a new mattress delivered this week so I've been trying to get the bedroom into some kind of order, plus I still have the remains of this annoying head cold that won't go away. I have managed to read, get some TV and a few films watched so the reviews will be up shortly I hope! I read 'Max and the Gatekeeper' this summer as a read and review and enjoyed it so I've just bought the series to read at leisure. If you like action packed YA urban fantasy then you'll like this series.

BOOKS BOUGHT:

 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12956180-depraved

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12861094-castaways

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2801440-max-and-the-gatekeeper 

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6388676-the-hourglass-of-souls 

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11680265-the-descendant-and-the-demon-s-fork 

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18325406-the-dark-society 

Book Review:Oceans of Blood by Darren Shan(Saga of Larten Crepsley #2)

The epic tale of the vampire Larten Crepsley continues. The question is – how far can Larten go… alone?

Free from their mentor Seba Nile, Larten Crepsley and Wester Flack join the Cubs – wild young vampires with little respect for human life, and a taste for mindless enjoyment.

For the Cubs, everything is easy. But nothing has ever been easy for Larten, and soon fate throws his life into another spin. With dark paths to travel, Larten finds himself far from the Vampire Mountain and its rules. A long way from home, sick and alone, he must decide what kind of vampire he will be. Whether he will stand firm, be true to his master and his princples – or whether he will lose himself in blood…

My Review: 
Larten and Wester decide to go out on their own to sample the hard drinking playboy lifestyles of Cubs until they are ready to settle back down to the Vampire life. When it is time to test themselves at Vampire Mountain and find their calling, Larten has a crisis of confidence and decides to strike out on his own.

Book 2 starts with the look at the Cub lifestyle of drinking, gambling and whoring, which I really had no interest in reading about. Had the whole book been about this kind of vampire lifestyle, I would have abandoned the book. Thankfully, it didn't last too long and our heroes head back to Seba and their Vampire Mountain experience. I always like the bits at Vampire Mountain and this time we see the confident Larten taking a battering and starting to feel like a failure as a vampire. He is so far removed from the vampire we see in the SODS series, which I found interesting.

We meet a few more old friends in this book. Evanna(don't call me a witch!), Arrow with his human wife and Arra as a grumpy servant of Evanna. This is what I like best in this series, seeing the earlier exploits of some of the characters we know all about from the other books. I also liked the blending of the war into the vampires lives. I did find it a bit amusing to imagine men trying to kill each other while watching a group of weird pale guys hiding under umbrellas on the edge of the battlefield! That just appealed to my strange sense of humour! I also liked the 'Interview with a vampire' scene at the Inn between Larten and Bram Stoker, which was good. The humour in this book is just as good as the previous one.

There is also a lot of good action scenes especially when Larten is out of his mind with vampire flu on the boat. I really liked seeing the crazed vampire followed by the guilt ridden suicidal vampire that he was after the boat journey turns tragic. I like the twists and turns of Larten's character as he continually develops through this series. There is certainly a lot to like about this series though I do agree that it does jump forward in big leaps leaving a few gaps that you would have liked to have been a bit more fleshed out. Still, if the author gave you all of Larten's story, the saga would be about 20 books long!

So a decent read for fans of Larten and it will be interesting to see what happens next. 

Film Review: Bait(2012)

During a general store robbery which goes badly wrong, a freak tsunami hits a coastal Australian town and floods it. The survivors in the store are concerned with how they are going to get out before it floods completely...until they notice that the wave has brought a great white shark into the aisles to complicate matters. Now they must race against the clock as well as the shark to get out alive.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1438173/?ref_=nv_sr_1
Filmography links and data courtesy of IMDb.

For a big film fan, last year was a complete bust as I barely had time to watch anything. This year I was determined to do better and this was the first one that I chose to watch. I LOVE shark films and this one was pretty enjoyable overall.

The concept was certainly different from normal. Who expects to get eaten by a great white shark while browsing for cheese in the grocery store or supermarket? That will give you more nightmares than the cheese ever will! The first part of the film gives you the background story to a love affair that was destroyed by a shark attack and the couple come face to face again just before this new shark crisis develops. The film could probably have done well enough without this element but unlike some films, the love sub-plot doesn't actually spoil it. The robbery sub-plot has the element of farce in it, but it is used to introduce all the characters that are about to be stranded so it was ok as well. Surprisingly for these monster movies, it does get into the story pretty quickly.

You have the usual mix of characters-the bank robber, the obnoxious store boss, the cop and his rebel daughter, the estranged love couple, the bimbo, the annoying boyfriend etc but at least all the cast can act which makes a change and you'll recognise a few from other Australian films. You do warm to the majority of characters once the disaster gets underway. And you have the added advantage of the gorgeous Julian McMahon swimming around! (Home and Away, Nip/Tuck) There are gory death scenes, the tension filled moments when somebody falls into the water or has to do something dangerous, the worry over whether the dog will survive...all things that make for an entertaining and enjoyable film for shark fans. 

There were inventive scenes in this film that I hadn't seen in shark films before ie the guy who goes to switch off the power using a home made shark cage to protect him. I liked that originality and the scene was very well executed. The film score was good and helped build up the tension though you had to supply the Jaws theme for yourself when someone gets in the water! (da-dum, da-dum...) There is plenty of action as the film moves along at good pace and the sharks are damn scary looking. The version I watched was filmed as 3D so on a normal TV, a few special effects looked pretty fake but nothing to spoil my viewing. I imagine watching on a 3D TV would be pretty effective.

These films are never going to be cinema masterpieces but it you like your shark films with death, blood and tension, give this one a try.