And David Weber’s Honor Harrington universe marches on with Echoes of Honor, like an army of undead, unstoppable and thirsting for brains. This time, we get to follow several distinct story segments as Honor and her team struggle to take over Hades and ultimately escape. The action this time around is almost unrelenting, and probably more importantly, relevant to the current story and future engagements. Weber has a thing for political intrigue, and of course it’s no stranger here.

When I’m reading multiple books simultaneously, it’s usually because I’ve relegated one to my “before bed” pile. Absolution Gap, the conclusion of Alastair Reynolds’s Revelation Space series, was one of those. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the longer books I’ve attacked in a couple months, and half an hour per night hardly pays quick dividends. Even worse, Reynolds’ writing style is copious and unrelenting; I felt every single one of those pages.

I took a break from the Honorverse for a while and dove into John Ringo again with the third book in his Posleen War series, When the Devil Dances. All in all, it was much different from the previous entry, and an enjoyable one, at that. Part of the issue I had with Gust Front came primarily from the author’s propensity for excessively detailed military maneuvers. Given a map of the United States and an Axes and Allies game centered on US territory, one could easily plot out each action and counteraction for hours.

Lord, what have they done to poor Freddy Krueger? A reboot of this particular franchise had roughly unlimited potential. No more would they need to rely on self-referential humor and sight gags. It could finally be a gritty and disturbing jaunt into the human psyche, or at least a slasher leagues more engaging than Saw and its ilk. The choice of Jackie Earle Haley couldn’t have been more perfect for the role.

Read: part 1, and part 2. " ‘Fight the good fight,’ he said," mumbled Ben, almost incoherently, to nobody in particular. The silence became a living thing. Everyone knew about the Chicago explosion. By then, everyone in the bar stared at Ben in complete shock, not even breathing to disrupt his narrative. “I dunno if the man knew his plan or not, but those wasn’t water pumps we blew. That bullshit about the river flowin’ backwards is fer the tourists,” Ben said unevenly, “an’ gullible bastards like me.