Brian Rush has been writing compulsively in one form or another for many years. He has been a student (one is always a student) of the occult for just as long, and has published articles and taught classes on the subject. He has lived on both coasts of the U.S., never far from the sea, and currently resides in northern California.

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1700s    99 percent vs 1 percent    america    astral plane    capitalism    conspiracy    contemporary fantasy    corsica    democracy    direct democracy    dreams    dystopia    economic democracy    economy    faerie    fairytale    fantasy    fantasy magic contemporary    goddess    gods    hero    history    immortality    intrigue    love    love and power    magic    magical order    modern    music    mysteries    new constitution    occult    other worlds    passion    politics intrigue    revolution    robin hood    romance    science fiction    secret society    socialism    sorcerer    sorceress    star mage    transformation    utopia   

Diane Duane
Latest book: The Tale of the Five Omnibus. Published on September 27, 2010. (5.00 from 2 reviews)
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• The Door Into Fire on Jan. 29, 2010
  
  I first read The Door Into Fire many years ago. It's as wonderful now as it was then. The characters are deeply real and engaging, the world is rich with fully-developed traditions and history, and the style conveys profundity while at the same time bubbling with laughter and whimsy, as only one who has felt great pain or sorrow and overcome it can combine the two. The best advice I can give anyone who thinks of diving into the world of the Middle Kingdoms and of Herewiss and Freelorn is to divest himself of all expectations and preconceptions before taking the plunge. Let the world and its people enchant you in their own terms. You won't regret it.
  
• A Bear Tale on June 24, 2012
  
  This novella is full of very human characters, many of them not human. Diana, the MC, comes across initially as a somewhat shallow young woman almost exclusively focused on getting a guy, but we come to understand her better through her relationship with her dog and a bear and find that she is a very earthy and instinctive person, tied in to nature without consciously acknowledging it, full of intuitive depths that she doesn't articulate but that show up strongly in her actions. Along the way, issues of humanity's relationship with the wilderness and wild animals emerge in a sharply-defined way, as they do when fear is a part of the picture. The story can be a little slow going in, but as it unfolds along with our understanding of Diana, it becomes clear it couldn't be told another way.
  
• x0 on July 29, 2012
  
  This book is really creative and unusual. That up front. I'm interested in seeing the sequel, which is always high praise. The voice is good, the characters are interesting, and so is the plot. There are a couple of experiments that the book makes and I'm still trying to decide if they work, which probably means they do. I'll get to that in a moment. In synopsis, this is about two women living on opposite sides of the world, geographically and culturally, who are bound together by a telepathic tie even though they are total strangers. The main plot line involves a nefarious political scheme, with the sister of one of the two women as its intended victim. It's a good story, and the way the telepathy contributes to the story development held my interest. A word about the experiments. There are two of them. One is that the point of view shifts often and abruptly, creating the sense of identify being a fluid and shifting thing, and the isolation of the individual being an illusion. That violates a basic convention of fiction writing which holds that point-of-view changes should be done not too often and clearly delineated by (for example) chapter headings (although other ways of making the shift clear and unconfusing can work, too). I found that jarring to begin with, and you may, too, but my suggestion is to get past it and get used to it -- I think it works. The defiance of the convention is deliberate here, I understand why it was done, and the story still flows well. The other experiment is to embed links in the story to music, articles, and so on where these occur in the story. That I don't think works as well, but it's by no means a killer. If you click on those links, you'll disrupt the flow of the tale badly and lose immersion, but I didn't find it hard to ignore them, and of course they're still there if I want to go back and check it out. I did feel that the pace of the story could have been a bit faster and livelier. Some of the passages of description and technical detail could have been shortened, the necessary information conveyed more economically, and the story would have been more gripping; as it was, some of the plot's potential (and it has a lot) was lost, I felt. Still, good story, and a worthy read. Oh, and also: if you, yourself, are a telepath, you'll especially love this. I won't explain that. You'll understand if it applies.
  
• Red Desert Rain on Sep. 16, 2012
  
  I'm going to give this book some kudos for potential. Unfortunately, the potential has not yet been achieved. But I think a few steps could take care of that. The good stuff first. The story line is solid, with lots of conflict and character development. The characters themselves are engaging. The author has an ability to evoke gritty, nasty circumstances and scenarios that could be developed into something very good, and I predict in the future she may go far. What Earth Angel very badly needs, though, is editing. Not only editing but proofreading. I found a number of places where mistakes occurred that said to me the book had not been carefully gone over even by Ms. Parlour herself, because they were the kind of spelling and grammatical mistakes that would not be caught by a spell checker (i.e., the words were real words spelled correctly, but the word obviously intended by the context was not spelled that way), but would easily be seen by a human being carefully going over the manuscript before publication. Besides the spelling and grammatical errors, the book was full of places where the language could have been tighter, where it was unclear, where it needed someone other than the author going over it and saying, "This needs to be stronger" or "This wording doesn't really work here." The story has a lot of potential, but my feeling is that it was published before it was ready. This is, happily, a very easy problem to correct and to avoid in the future. Here are two good rules for any author who wants to self-publish. These are things that a publishing company does routinely, if not always very well. As indie authors, we don't have a publishing company taking care of these things, and therefore the responsibility is ours. And it is a responsibility: a responsibility to our readers. 1) Always proof your work manually, and go over it for revisions repeatedly. Spell checkers and grammar checkers are great, but there are things they can't catch and those things show up in every manuscript. Also, there's no such thing as polishing a book too much (unless it means you never publish it). Go over and over your work. If you're too familiar with it and can't really see it, take a week or two away from it, or away from a given section of it, and then go back and read through it again. Polish, polish, polish! 2) Before you publish your book, always have at least one (and preferably more) people go over it and look for problems that need to be fixed. Get someone to tell you if the pacing is too slow or too fast, if you've done something with a character that doesn't make any sense given the other things the character has done, if a plot line is implausible, or if the message the book is conveying is appropriate only to a lunatic. Ideally, have the book professionally edited; short of that, get another writer to look it over (perhaps trading with the writer by editing his or her work) -- but always have someone's eyes other than your own check it out and give you feedback. I believe that Earth Angel can be very good if the author will go back and do these two things retroactively. One nice thing about indie publishing is that it is easy to make changes like this, as one is not committed to a massive print run. The potential is there.
  
• Trinity on Sep. 29, 2012
  
  Clare Davidson’s Trinity could have been about half again as long as it is. In reading this story, which held my interest well, I felt there was a lot of potential that didn’t quite manage to be developed. The framework of the world and its difficulties caused by the death (more or less) of two-thirds of its pantheon is clever and original. I felt that a lot more could have been done in terms of covering the way in which the society was impacted by the theological disaster. We learn the gist of it, but the way in which the effective absence of the two goddesses has sent the land and people into a kind of simmering madness, that periodically becomes complete madness, could have been dealt with better, especially in some of the later scenes which presented a perfect opportunity. The characters, I feel, are another area that deserved and should have had more development. In concept, and in what development occurred, these are great, complex, strong characters. Each of the five main characters has complicated layers of motivation that are the stuff of great immersion in a story, and much more could have been added that would have shown their personalities in all their depths. Instead, I felt the story was rushed and that the author was in too great a hurry to get to the conclusion of the tale. This is especially true of Kiana, the incarnation of the goddess Miale. Kiana is actually a very strong woman, but one has to stop oneself, look back on her actions, and figure this out. The impression one gains while reading the story is of a weak, ignorant, cowardly, rather pathetic little bimbo, because those are the emotions she is always expressing. Since that isn’t really what she’s like — I could present actions on her part aplenty to prove this, but they would be spoilers — I don’t feel it worked to present her as if she were. I found that this evidence of strength and stubbornness had to power a rational understanding that she really is a stronger character than the impression I was getting. On a visceral level, she comes across as weak, whining, and somewhat empty-headed. A little of that, especially in the beginning, might have been very good, but she should have hardened in her behavior over time as the group faced their difficulties and she developed a determination to save the world. The other characters — the Guardian with healing powers, the renegade Wolf who was enemy-turned-ally, the Wolf battle leader pursuing the renegade with motives of personal vengeance as well as justice, and the far-sighted magician who accompanies the battle leader — don’t display the same sort of disconnect between visceral impressions and their actions, but each of them could have been better developed. There was so much in concept to each of them that I felt they deserved more of their own stories told. The writing style of Trinity is solid. I felt it could have benefited from another round of editing but on the whole, it’s well written, with few wasted words and a nice, crisp style. The concept is good and original, the characters are interesting and complex, and the conclusion handled reasonably well. If it were half again as long to develop both plot and characters in more depth, it would be great. It’s still worth reading even so.
  
• City of Masks on Jan. 13, 2013
  
  Mike Reeves called City of Masks a “magicless fantasy.” I wondered what that could be until I read the book. Having done so, I can say that it isn’t a fantasy (there are no fantasy elements in the story), but it is a wonderful, tightly-crafted tale with richly-developed characters and an intricate plot in a highly imaginative setting. I believe the reason Reeves calls it a fantasy is because it takes place in an alternate world, but of course that isn’t a defining characteristic of fantasy; many fantasies don’t take place in alternate worlds, but all fantasies include fantastic elements, which City of Masks does not. But enough on categories and genres. The alternate world of this story is a city, Bonvidaeo, where everyone wears a mask at all times. Not only does everyone wear a mask but everyone is supposed to behave in a manner appropriate to the mask being worn, and there are restriction on who can wear what masks when. In fact, the city has adopted (and enforced) a religious doctrine called “characterism” which asserts that the person wearing the mask is the mask and must be treated accordingly. Opposing this is an underground which preaches the heretical doctrine of “personalism,” the idea that the mask and the person are two separate entities. The story centers around this religious dispute and a series of grisly murders that touches upon it. The book is told in first-person via the memoirs and journals of several characters. Most of it is from the point of view of a foreign envoy who is there to represent his nation and the immigrants from it into the city of Bonvidaeo, one of whom is the first known victim of the killer. In the course of tracking down the murderer, a twisted political plot is uncovered, love is found, surprises arise behind the masks, there is swordplay, an assassination plot, a beautiful and devious and powerful woman, and, of course, quite a bit of disguise and impersonation. This sort of first-person writing is hard to bring off successfully but Reeves does succeed in giving each perspective its own voice. I am going to give this book five stars for superior characterization, plot, and writing style, all three, although none of them stood out enough to justify five stars by itself. The pace may be a little slow for readers accustomed to books packed with action, but there is plenty of action in this story.