Pony Short Stories

Been a little lax on my resolution to write down what I thought about the stuff I’ve been reading. Doing pretty good on the reading new stuff, but starting to slide on the writing about it part. Several of the My Little Pony short stories I haven’t written anything about because there just wasn’t much to write about. I read them, I liked them, but they didn’t really leave any impression on me even right after finishing them. However, I’m trying to be better at keeping up with what I set out to do and late is better than never. So here is a post where I sum up what I think about the half-dozen or so short ponyfics I have on my have read list but haven’t posted about.

 

Book: Impossible Object

The Impossible Object by David Conyers is a collection of shorts stories about his character Harrison Peel. First stories of this author or that series that I have read. He claims they are spy-type Lovecraft mythos stories in the intro. The mythos thing I can see but I never really got the spy vibe during any of the four stories in the book.

Was good, but not really much to say about it. Only two of the four stories really gave me the Lovecraftian vibe and even those it was kind of borderline. They really struck me more as just monster stories. I’d say he understands more of what makes a Lovecraft story than some of the authors in the Book Of Cthulhu I read a while back, but just doesn’t have quite the level of writing skill for writing that type of story himself. Which isn’t a bad thing. They were good stories and interesting stuff in them. I think what was missing was the horror. Even the story that involved a multi-dimensional flesh absorbing monster didn’t really have any tension. There was a time-travel aspect and everyone was confident everything would turn out okay, so there was no real worry or tension.

The Impossible Object by David Conyers

 

Book: Extinction Machine

Extinction Machine by Jonathan Maberry is almost a urban fantasy, without the fantasy bits. It is what I believe is known as a techno-thriller. Think urban fantasy with the magic replaced with high tech scifi stuff. Like alien technology and plasma pistols. It was pretty good but not entirely what I was hoping for.

The book description hinted at secrets and aliens, but the book really failed to deliver. The viewpoint jumped around so many people, most of them the bad guys, that there was never really any mystery in what was going on. We usually got before and after viewpoints with the bad guys around anything that happened to the good guys.

Recommended if you like techno-thrillers, but I don’t intend to read the other books of the series. It has been frustrating me that a lot of the stories I run across on amazon and elsewhere that look cool turn out to have writing styles I’m not a fan of. As mentioned in previous posts I look for books with cool ideas in them. Interesting characters and situations are also cool. I don’t really read books for action scenes or to see our awesome-cool main character defending freedom from the bad guys. Those things can be nice spices on a story I otherwise like, but I’ll take cool ideas and shallow characters over the reverse.

Extinction Machine by Jonathan Maberry

 

 

Book: Glass Blower

The Glass Blower by Cold in Gardez is yet another My Little Pony fanfic. Just a short story this time, but it is another romance like the previous story. This one doesn’t end as well as that one did. I read the two back to back during a recent vacation, but both were good enough and had enough thoughts during each of them that I figured they would get their own posts here.

 

Book: Yours Truly

Yours Truly by Thanqol is another My Little Pony fan fiction written by the same author of The Old Stories, which I enjoyed immensely. This story is done entirely as letters written between various characters, referring to various events without describing them directly. For the most part anyway. It does go into a little more detail than you’d put into letters to someone who knows what you are talking about, but it is still pulled off beautifully. This was a story I read while on a trip away from my computer, but wrote up this just after reading it so it should be fairly accurate about what the story put into my head.