Category: Reviews

On Dungeon Crawler Carl

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Wow, that’s bigger than I thought it was going to be.

Oh well. Scrolling’s free.

I finished the seventh and most recent book in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series last night, staying up too late to do it. The eighth book comes out in June; I pre-ordered it the literal first day it became available to do so. Dinniman has an unrelated book, Operation Bounce House, coming out in February, and I’ve preordered that as well. The series is currently expected to be ten books, and apparently might be eleven.

I don’t think I’ve reviewed any of the books as I’ve read them, and I don’t really intend for this to be a review yet either, as a multi-book review really ought to be for the whole series and even as fast as Dinniman seems to write, we’re at least two or three years away from that. I will say this, though: I started this series mostly out of FOMO, something that y’all know good and well catches me on books all the time. I don’t like not reading good books, even if their premise– aliens invade Earth and a guy and his cat get thrown into an intergalactic competition that somehow mimics the genre tropes of role-playing video games– is completely ridiculous. “LitRPG” is its own entire genre; having read and enjoyed eight books in it, other than reading more of Dinniman’s work in the future I have no plans at all to dip my toe into any other examples of it.

I’ve been reading about a book a month in this series since picking up Dungeon Crawler Carl in May. The first one was at least a little bit against my will; I wasn’t expecting to like what I was reading all that much, but again, FOMO.

I plan to restart the series in December so that I can have read it twice by the time A Parade of Horribles comes out. My wife picked up the first book on a whim a couple of months ago and is currently reading book five, and she’s read them back to back to back to back to back. Which means the same as “back to back” but sounds like more of a feat. This is not a thing she does, guys.

These books have no fucking right to be this good. They’re too ridiculous and too raunchy to be as good as they are. And yet somehow this series is the best new thing I’ve encountered in a long time, and having read four thousand pages of this series this year I am about to start over and do it again.

Plus Bounce House and the first book of another series of his called Kaiju Battlefield Surgeon, because right now Dinniman is tied with BrandoSando for the author I’ve read the most books from in 2025, and I can’t let Sanderson win that contest.

Just do it. Trust me. Put aside your reservations and pick up the first book. The whole series is on Kindle Unlimited if you happen to have Amazon Prime, so you don’t even have to pay for it. Get them from the library. I know, I know, this feels like it has to be dumb as hell. Go give them a shot anyway.

#REVIEW: A House of Dynamite (2025)

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Two movies? In two days? Madness!

You may recall that last year I read a book called Nuclear War: A Scenario. I called it the scariest book I had ever read, and while I absolutely cannot say that I enjoyed it, it ended up at a pretty high position on my Best Books of the Year list at the end of the year.

Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite is, technically, not a film adaptation of Nuclear War: A Scenario, or at least, if it is, it never claims it. That said, it may as well be: a single nuclear missile is launched from an unknown source (in NWAS, it’s immediately attributed to North Korea) toward what is eventually determined to be Chicago. The movie tells the story of the seventeen minutes between the detection of the launch and the impact of the missile three times from the perspective of three different groups of characters in the American government, all ending as the president makes his decision about what the US’s plan of retaliation will be. That decision is described by one character as “surrender or suicide,” and it’s not clear that there is really a whole lot of daylight between those two scenarios.

You might think that watching the same twenty minutes three times (the film’s runtime is just under two hours, so there’s not exactly a clock ticking in the corner for the entire movie) might be repetitive enough to drain some of the tension out of the film. For me, at least, it absolutely wasn’t, and the fact that you hear some of the same conversations three times over the course of the movie didn’t cut the drama at all. This might be partially attributable to my age– I think us ’80s kids are going to get hit harder by this movie than the generations before or after us, as the threat of dying by nuclear annihilation was something that was hanging over our heads for our entire childhood and we’ve internalized that very differently than people who didn’t go through that. But I had to go outside and mow the lawn after watching this movie just to burn off excess nervous energy, and I think it’s gonna have me fucked up for the rest of the day if not for longer than that.

I don’t have a ton to say about the technical aspects of the movie. The music is very effective, quietly echoing Jaws in the worst imaginable way and again plucking at the strings of the ’80s kids. The acting is as good as it needs to be with no really standout performances; the only actor in the film I was previously familiar with was Idris Elba, who plays the President as someone who never really thought he’d have to make the decisions he is faced with and allows just a trace of “Why me?” to come through his performance. Angel Reese has a cameo; I guess I’ve heard of her, but the movie’s not going to live or die on her playing herself for a couple of minutes.

Much like Nuclear War: A Scenario, I can’t really recommend this movie so much as say it’s very effective at what it wants to do and it’s up to you whether you want that in your brain or not. I wouldn’t spend a lot of time reading reviews; they’re very mixed, and I’m guessing that the film’s ending is primarily responsible for that. I’m not spoiling anything; for me, it ended in the best way it could, but clearly a whole lot of other people disagreed.

I think I’ll go mow the lawn again.

(ALSO: If you’re a Movie Person, please follow me on Letterboxd. I need people over there.)

#REVIEW: The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)

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In case it hasn’t been clear, or, like a normal person, you aren’t obsessed with my media consumption, I decided recently that I was tired of complaining about how I don’t watch movies any more, and instead I was going to watch more movies. And because nothing in my life can’t be mined for blog content, I might as well review them too. I missed last week, but this weekend’s movie (or today’s, at least; maybe I’ll make up for last week tomorrow) was The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, written and directed by the Coens.

I only know this movie exists because of TikTok, which has served up numerous snippets of Tim Blake Nelson’s titular Buster Scruggs, a white-garbed, polysyllabic desperado with a penchant for murderous improvisation and bursting into song at the slightest provocation. What I didn’t realize was that this movie is actually six unrelated vignettes, all set in the Old West, with the framing device of a book of short stories called The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.

Sadly, the book itself is fictional; each vignette begins and ends with a slow pan into the first or last page of the story, and what text that’s there aroused my attention and would surely have acquired my money had the book actually existed to be bought.

The stories themselves range from the comic and musical (Scruggs) to what really feels like supernatural horror (The Mortal Remains) to a couple that are more firmly reality-based and tend toward the dark and depressing. The second, Near Algodones, is the only near-miss of the bunch; James Franco’s bank robber character is not terribly interesting, and while the visual of a deranged bank teller protecting himself from gunshots with armor made from cast-iron pans is hilarious, the story is slight enough that I couldn’t remember it just now and had to look for a list of the vignettes to get myself to six.

As it turned out, I had already unknowingly seen Scruggs nearly in its entirety on TikTok, and I was a little worried after Algodones, but the last four vignettes are uniformly fascinating and well worth the cost of a subscription to Netflix and two hours out of my Saturday. If you like Westerns or the Coens’ previous output, it’s well worth your time.

Some quick book reviews

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In April of last year, I reviewed Laura R. Samotin’s The Sins on their Bones, which I was sent an eArc of by a publicist. I liked it enough that I finished it in six hours and immediately ordered a physical copy of it, and while it’s been sitting on my shelves for a minute or two, I got the sequel on release day as well.

And … well, I could literally rewrite the previous review more or less word for word for this book. I finished The Lure of their Graves in an hour before going to sleep last night and a few hours across this morning and afternoon– less than a day, easily– and if I talk about it much it’s going to seem like I hated it. My gripes about the first book still apply to the sequel; everyone’s obviously Jewish but the word “Jewish” never appears; Russian only exists for the phrase moy tzar, the main character is kind of a lot, the characters in the book are supposed to be the main figures of a government but come off more like a grad school polycule, etc, etc. I’m slightly revising my initial “holy shit, this book is gay as hell” assessment; it’s gay as hell, but what it actually is is a world where literally everyone is bisexual. Sexual orientation and possibly even sexual preference effectively doesn’t exist. Dmitri Alexeyev, the Tzar from the first book (and still the tzar of the second, although he’s never going to feel like a ruler of anything at all) spends most of the book trying to decide who he should marry to keep his country and the surrounding lands stable, and the three main candidates are a man, a woman, and a nonbinary person who makes it abundantly and repeatedly clear that they are willing to swing any direction the vine can get to.

Also, I genuinely don’t get the title. It’s possible that I’m dumb, but I don’t get it.

That said, once again I enjoyed the hell out of this book and I will be reading more from Laura Samotin in the future. Yes, I know I just did nothing but complain. I contain multitudes. Deal with it.

I apparently didn’t review K.M. Enright’s Mistress of Lies when I read it back in July, but I liked it quite a lot, and I finished the sequel, Lord of Ruin, yesterday, and because any time I read a Laura Samotin book I have to have weird synchronicity with the book before it, it’s also super gay and involves a spymaster and a king and an attempt at a rebellion and a fair amount of explicit sex, although this one also involves the scariest vampires I’ve ever encountered in a book (Oh, and the book before this, Coffin Moon, also involved vampires, so we’re all about the themes recently) and a Polynesian monstrosity called a manananggal that is not something that your nightmares need to be aware of in Donald Trump’s America.

Oh, and magical trans people. I’m deliberately withholding details. But transitioning at least can involve magic– it’s not clear if it has to– and you’re going to be confused at a couple of points in this book by who has what body parts, because being trans in these books does not work like it does in the real world. Just a heads-up. The Cursed Crown books are a duology that is now finished, and Enright’s series still has one more coming. I’m definitely in.

Some Sunday odds and ends

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews2 Comments

Had an enormous traffic spike the last couple of days– yesterday was the highest traffic day in years, possibly since the Syrian refugees post hit a couple hundred thousand views ten years ago. And other than the fact that most of them were from America (with a much smaller but still weird four-day pop from Chile, of all places) I don’t know anything about any of the visitors.

It was probably a bot– I’ve also been getting a lot of traffic from China lately– but I thought bot visits didn’t count? I wish I could get more detail on my views.

Today? Dead quiet.

We are finally, after fourteen years of living in this house, replacing the hideous curtains in our bedroom and the gross miniblinds in our living room. I found this behind the hardware for the curtains and I would like a word with whoever built this place. I just wanna talk.

I’m not doing a full review of it, but this is a really good book. My only problem is that Hastings has a weird habit of drawing attention to the race of any American who isn’t white when it isn’t necessary– there was an actual chapter about race relations among American troops, and I’ll cut some slack on that one, but just for example, referring to the youngest soldier to die in Vietnam as “a black kid” in a weirdly flippant way really stuck out. My only problem is that now I want to read twelve other books on Vietnam that he mentioned (sidenote: are there any histories of the war written in English by Vietnamese scholars?) and my backlog is bad enough already.

This image from my email is not exactly inaccurate, but I feel like maybe Amazon is still having some tech problems.

After over a year of threatening to watch it, my wife and I finally sat down to watch John Wick 4 last night, and I will forever refer to it as The Dumb John Wick. I’ve seen all of them now, and I never really loved the series, but this one takes everything that was sorta ridiculous about the first three movies and turns those up to 12, while also not adding anything of real value to the series, ignoring the cliffhanger ending of 3, and being way, way, way too long. Is there a lore reason why there are literally no cops at all in the John Wick universe, for example? Blech.

You might not be able to tell, but this picture was taken outside the window as I was removing the curtains earlier today. At 6:30. I fucking hate daylight savings time. Hate. Can we please be a society just for a little while and get rid of this bullshit? Please?

And finally, as of tonight I’ve read just over 2600 pages on my new Kindle, which means that I’ve managed to adopt the thing into my lifestyle successfully … and the battery is still at 16%, which is bloody impressive.

#REVIEW: Mark Twain (1835-1910)

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews3 Comments

No, no, not a review of Ron Chernow’s book that happens to be called “Mark Twain.” I’m reviewing Mark Twain. And reading Book Mark Twain has caused me to lose a surprising amount of respect for Person Mark Twain. He gets three stars out of five.

Y’all, this dude was weird.

The person Twain is pictured with up there is Dorothy Quick. She is eleven years old in that picture. She and Twain were not related, and they literally met on an ocean voyage in 1907 and Twain, a man in his seventies, just decided to treat her like she was his best friend. They exchanged letters until he died, and he occasionally arranged for her parents to bring her for visits at his home. Multi-day visits.

And she wasn’t the only one. At two different points in his life Twain started a club for girls between ten and sixteen years old, and both times he was the only male member. He called the second group of girls his “angelfish.” They had membership pins. Chernow is quick to point out that there was never any kind of contemporary accusation that Twain’s relationships with these girls were sexual or predatory, but it becomes clear after a while that he recognizes how Goddamn weird the whole thing is and genuinely isn’t sure what to do about it. There’s lots of talk about substitute granddaughters– only one of Twain’s four children survived past her twenties, and his only grandchild was born after he died– but do you really need enough substitute grandchildren to call it a club? And do you stop talking to your substitute grandchildren after they get to be too old for you? Because that happened too. Once his angelfish got into their late teens he lost interest in them. This is not a joke.

Don’t even ask me about Lewis Carroll. Chernow talks about him in a throwaway sentence at one point (literally something like “at least he wasn’t drawing naked pictures of his preadolescent girlfriends, like Carroll was”) and oh my god I hate to talk about falling down a rabbit hole when literally discussing Lewis Carroll, but … yeah.

Twain was terrible at business, prone to falling for outrageous scams, deeply in debt for most of his adult life despite his royalties and his wife being ultra-rich, and held onto a grudge like Kate Winslet on a floating door. There was something vaguely Trumpian about him, where all his friends and business associates were brilliant, salt-of-the-earth, wonderful people until the moment they were no longer useful or Twain felt the need to blame them for something and then they were the worst poltroons and scofflaws in the history of poltroonery and scofflawism.

Like, I’ve read dude’s books. The fact that he was a sarcastic, irascible motherfucker is one of the things I like about him. But I feel like Chernow would have been a lot happier had he just had a chapter called “Look, this guy was a prick,” and gotten everything off of his chest.

There’s nothing genuinely damning in there. I’m never reading anything by any number of authors ever again because of their assorted bastardries and nothing Chernow reveals about Twain rises to that level. Even the angelfish thing is more of a massive ongoing WTF than something that was immoral or should have been illegal. But the last time I came out of a biography or autobiography feeling like I had less respect for its subject than I did going in was Ralph Abernathy’s And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, which I read nine years ago. The only other example I can think of is Jefferson Davis’ memoirs, and I didn’t exactly have warm feelings about that guy going into those books. It doesn’t happen all that often.

Chernow’s book is still a five-star read. Twain still has a ton of five-star books out there for you to read. Twain himself? Three. At best.

#REVIEW: Legend (2015)

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There’s a clip from this movie that I used to see on TikTok all the time, where Tom Hardy, playing 1960’s London crime boss Reggie Kray, talks shit to a bunch of rival gangsters who plan on “knocking the granny out of him” while Tom Hardy, playing 1960’s London crime boss Ronnie Kray, throws a fit that he’s not about to be involved in a gunfight, storms out, then sneaks back into the room behind everyone with a hammer in each hand. That’s where the clip ends. It’s a good clip.

I have planned to spend two hours of my weekend watching this movie for approximately nineteen straight weekends. I finally watched it this morning.

Let’s get this out of the way real quick:

Legend is the story of the Kray twins, notorious and apparently real Cockney gangsters from 1960’s London who worked out of the East End. Reggie is the levelheaded one; Ronnie is literally a dangerous psychopath who spends most of the movie off of his meds. Reggie falls in love with Emily Browning’s Frances early in the movie; Frances provides narration throughout the film, and their love story, such as it is, is the driving force behind the actual plot. She knows who she’s dating (and, eventually, marrying) and wants Reggie to go straight; Ronnie very much does not want that.

This is one of those movies that’s more about the actors than it is the plot, and … God damn, I had never really gotten Tom Hardy before, but he’s absolutely amazing in this. Ten years of development in movie effects means that Michael B. Jordan’s Smokestack twins look a little more seamless when they’re both facing the camera and talking to each other– you can tell some compositing is happening when both of their faces are in the same shot– but the distinction between the two characters is tremendous. Hardy’s wearing some prosthetics as Ronnie; his nose is broken, he’s a little heavier, and there’s something going on with his lips that I was never able to quite nail down, but what really distinguishes the two is the aura of utter malice that Ronnie radiates every single second he’s on screen. Neither of these men are nice guys, mind you, which the movie goes to great pains to remind you a few times– you are pushed away from identifying with either of them– but Reg is a scorpion and Ronnie is a pissed-off pit bull with a frayed piece of twine holding him back. Their voices are also slightly different– I have no idea what Hardy’s natural accent actually sounds like, but there’s a point in the movie where Reg does an imitation of his brother for a sentence or two and it feels like an impersonation rather than Hardy just briefly switching accents. It’s a tremendous, understated bit of acting and it was one of my favorite moments in the film.

But let’s talk about Emily Browning for a moment. I think this is the only thing I’ve ever seen her in, and she’s meant to be the stand-in for the audience– and, again, is also the narrator throughout the movie. You know from the jump that things aren’t going to end well, but unless you’re already familiar with the Krays you won’t know exactly how. Browning’s chemistry with Hardy as Reg is absolutely off the charts; their first scene together, where Reg asks Frankie out for the first time, is one of the sexiest things I’ve ever seen on-screen, and the two of them barely touch each other. The tension is crackling between the two of them; I was surprised there weren’t literal sparks. Similarly, she and Ronnie never trust each other at all; during their first encounter, he explains that he’s a homosexual but that he doesn’t “receive,” and that’s about as comfortable conversation as they’re going to have at any point in the movie.

I mean, stuff happens in the movie, but it’s ultimately about the relationships between these three characters, and how Reggie is torn between loyalty to his brother and loyalty to his wife. That’s what drives all of the conflicts in the movie; there’s a subplot about a cop chasing the two of them that doesn’t amount to much and a couple of court scenes, but everything revolves around them. Frankie’s brother works for Reggie. Frankie’s mom loathes Reggie, showing up in black to their wedding and prompting one of Ronnie’s most terrifying moments, and Reggie’s mom, who dotes on Ronnie throughout the film, doesn’t like Frankie much either. There’s a scene between the two of them where Frankie makes her a cup of tea and Violet rejects it, which is apparently the British equivalent of killing someone’s dog.

I know it came out ten years ago, but if you haven’t seen it, definitely check it out.

On rare books, Mark Twain, and penises

On By Luther M. SilerIn art, Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

I am not quite halfway through with Ron Chernow’s 1200-page biography of Mark Twain, so it would be unfair to call this a “review” per se, but … c’mon. It’s a book by one of America’s preeminent historians about very likely the most important writer ever born on American soil. I’ve already read and loved his biographies of Hamilton and Washington, and I’ll get to the Grant and Rockefeller books sooner or later. There’s no universe where this isn’t a magnificent book, and it’s not like there’s going to be any plot twists in the last five hundred pages. This is a great biography already and it’s enormously unlikely I’m going to encounter anything that will change my mind– and if I do, it’ll change my mind about Mark Twain, and not about Chernow’s book about him.

All that said, I learned something today, and I fell down a rabbit hole looking for more information about it, and I need to share this information with you.

If you buy one of the approximately one billion available editions of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that include the original engravings, you will encounter at some point this image of Huck, his Uncle Silas, and his Aunt Sally:

You will note the arrow pointing just underneath Uncle Silas’ crotch, and you will note the straight line of his pants. You may also note the look on Aunt Sally’s face, which I feel deserves more attention in general.

This is not the image that was in the first printing of the book. That image looked like this, known as the “curved fly” engraving:

See that curved line? That’s the original engraving by E.W. Kemble, whose name you’ll note in the lower right. Twain selected Kemble himself, and presumably did not vet this image of Uncle Silas for a single slightly, barely bulgey line in his pants.

After a few hundred copies of the first edition were printed, a salesman noticed that someone had somehow changed the engraving to … well, this:

That right there, folks, is Uncle Silas’ cock, although it appears to be growing out of his leg rather than in the usual location. Maybe that has something to do with the look on Aunt Sally’s face, I dunno. Maybe dicks were different in 1884. You’ll note that said penis is pointed directly at Huck, which isn’t relevant to the story but adds an extra little twist of creepy to it.

Anyway, the edition was very speedily recalled, and the offending pages destroyed, although an unknown number of copies remained in the wild. A book with the offending penis in it has never made it to auction or been sold publicly, and it’s not known how many might be out there. (Check out this absolutely amazing contemporary article about the controversy from New York World. The euphemisms. My God, the nineteenth-century euphemisms.)

The University of Virginia has at least one copy of the edition with the penis, which is where the image came from. They had to redo the engraving for the rest of the no-longer-“first” edition, and the new version of the engraving had a straight fly.

Copies of the “curved fly” edition (without the penis) go for lots and lots of money. My favorite detail about that $15,000 listing? Shipping is $4.00 and they accept returns within thirty days.

The person who altered the engraving was never identified.