Babylon Twins is a Young Adult novel featuring a kind of apocalypse that is a little bit different than most of the other “end of the world” stories that I’ve been exposed to over the years. The story is told through the eyes of twin sisters, Clo and El. The author, M.F. Gibson, uses a unique, dual first-person perspective, where both of them are telling the story from the first-person, but switches seamlessly between each of them as the story is told. It is quite an interesting technique and one of the most intriguing narrative tools that the author uses to tell the story.

Ultimately, it is a story about the end of the world and how the twins’ unique relationship and language saves them, and the rest of humanity, from ultimate extinction. I won’t go into too much detail here, because that would just spoil the story. The story starts off as one about a family learning to survive in the wild. In the city, a super-addictive drug is released to the masses essentially turning everyone into mindless zombies…but not the aggressive “eat your brains” kind of zombies. The mother of the titular twins takes them and their younger brother away from the city where they find refuge in the wild. They spend the next decade there, living off of the land in a very secluded place, until their sanctuary is discovered and their mother leaves. Eventually, with their mother gone and things only getting worse, it forces them to leave the safety of their self-made home and return to the city in search of answers.

The adventure style of the story is engaging and told in such a way that I found myself feeling excited or curious about what was going to happen next. However, I also felt that the overall writing style was disjointed. There were times when the vocabulary used by the twin narrators was plain or simple, as if they were immature and inexperienced. But then there would be shifts in the narrative style at times that would use much more expressive, much more flowery language that changed the tone and feel of the storytelling. I don’t know if this was unintended, or if it was a choice made by the author, but it took me out of the story at times and made me wonder who was actually telling me the story.

The world that was created for the story is quite interesting and makes you, as the reader, think about the world that we live in and how close we could be to something somewhat similar happening to us. Some corporation that decides that it is in the best interest of the world to dope everyone up and make them mindless slaves. But, again, there are parts of the story where it feels like the initial problem, or adversity that is implied by the book suddenly shifts. I’m not saying that it’s against the rules to shift course in a story, in fact that is often a great method of surprising your audience. However, some of these shifts were so sudden and seemingly convenient that they seemed to stand out as obvious tricks rather than a natural progression of the story. Character motivations seemed to shift and waver at the drop of a hat. Even the main characters, the twins, are frustratingly fickle at certain points in the story, going from having deep, emotion convictions, to flip-flopping on them without warning, or having seemingly terrible or amazing or powerful things happen to them that they seem to forget about or disregard completely a few pages later.

So, in the end, I felt myself struggling to push forward in the story. I found it hard to want to finish reading the story, because by the end of it I had found that I had lost interest in what would happen. Perhaps this was due to the fact that the “bad guy” had changed so many times that there didn’t seem to be one anymore. Or perhaps it was because the main characters themselves never seemed to feel like they were in any true danger. Or if they did, they handled the stresses of those dangers in odd and irrational ways. Truly devastating things that happened to them were shrugged off as if it were just another day in the park, and lifelong rules and hatreds that they had been raised to never forget were thrown by the wayside at the first opportunity. And, even then, it didn’t matter, because the things that they’d been taught were seemingly lies all along, anyway.

The book ends with a cliffhanger, wide open for a sequel. There is a tiny part of me that would be interested in reading it just to see what ends up happening to the world that the sisters discovered when they came back from the woods, but that is a very small part. Ultimately, the story was interesting, but not great. I think that it was a concept that had great potential, but missed the mark on some important levels.

There was a part of me that wanted to excuse some of the mistakes that this novel made because of its Young Adult tag. Perhaps it was being written for a less mature demographic. But then I remembered that books like Hunger Games and Harry Potter are also in the Young Adult category and I don’t think that you can use that excuse. I just think that the book fell short of its goal. There are better books out there that explore post-apocalypse life, even in the Young Adult category.

Babylon Twins is available online at Amazon or you can get the e-book version.  You can also learn more about the author, M.F. Gibson and see some cool fan-art at the author’s homepage.

The Ice Merchant, is a historical fiction that takes place in late 1800’s America. Its main character is Nicolas Van Horne, a man who harvests ice in his home in upstate New York, and ships it down the Mississippi River to places like St. Louis, New Orleans, and Galveston. Van Horne also hides a secret business within his ice. Through dealings with an undertaker in his home town, he takes possession of corpses, various unfortunates who befall untimely deaths and are destined for pauper’s graves. Instead of ending up in these unmarked plots, Van Horne purchases them and then packs them in his ice and transports them downriver to medical colleges in the south, where they are sold at a fair profit in order to be dissected and studied by the students and doctors at the colleges for educational and research purposes.

The story of Nicolas Van Horne and his ice goes beyond even this. There is a darker, more sinister story that is waiting for Nicolas to unearth; a story of evil and murder. Beyond that, nestled amidst the morbid cadaver trade and the horrific mystery of murder, lies a narrative of complex relationships. Questions of faithfulness, true love, family, and morality are at the root of the main character’s struggles. His path, though marked by profoundly difficult moral and ethical questions, is pointed toward a decidedly humanitarian goal. He understands that by providing these otherwise castaway corpses, he is furthering medical studies by leaps and bounds. But when he begins to suspect that some of the bodies, bodies of young boys, are linked to a sinister underground world that no one knows about, his purpose shifts.

To me, the best heroes in literature are always the ones who are imperfect; the ones who must sacrifice so much in order to succeed. At first, I had my doubts about the main character of this novel, because he seemed to be too well-set, too lofty, and too ambivalent, to even consider taking on anything challenging enough to be considered heroic. He is described as being notably handsome, he his well-off, he is dealing in ice and bodies. This conveys to us that he is a cold man in more ways than one. He is detached, aloof, almost uncaring.

But as we read, we find that he is haunted by the things he does, the things he has seen. We come to understand that, though his reasons for trading in bodies are altruistic, he still wrestles with the ethics of it. He constantly justifies it to himself and others, almost defensively, and is repulsed by many of the other people who he is forced to deal with in the business of obtaining these bodies. He seems to have an almost instinctual understanding or intuition that there is something not right about some of the things he is involved with.

We see him struggle in many ways. Like many stories of truly heroic people, the struggle is a constant dilemma between personal desire and the “greater good”. A true hero will always tend toward the greater good, but the stories that, to me, resonate the loudest are the ones where the path isn’t quite so clear, or so easy. In order to try and make one thing right, the main character often finds himself confusing or destroying another path to rightness. Each step he takes seems to bring him closer in one direction to a good outcome, but in another, toward utter disaster.

I found myself sympathizing with this character after the first troubles in the story begin to set in. Once he is brought down from his seeming aloofness and perfection and revealed to be a flawed, conflicted, and uncertain man, he begins to struggle. He struggles to maintain his reputation, his relationships; he even begins to struggle to maintain even his own sanity. It is always frustrating to read a book where the main character makes decisions that seem so far removed from logic that the only explanation seems to be that they did it because that’s what needed to happen in order to further the plot. I never got this feeling from this book. I felt like the decisions that were made were very natural ones. I felt like the resolutions that were come to weren’t forced, or heavy handed.

I won’t spoil the book by saying if it has a happy ending, if the boy gets the girl, if the mystery is solved, but I will say that I left it very satisfied. Endings are hard. As one who has read his fair share of poor endings and has faced the difficulty of forging a proper ending first-hand, I will say that I felt this one was good. I think my only real complaint about the book is that, though the ending in satisfactory, I felt that a few leaps of faith were made that allowed for certain things to happen that may have otherwise seemed unlikely or improbable. But, to be fair, if it had ended in any other way, it would probably not have been nearly as satisfying.

On top of an intricately woven plot, I found that I was repeatedly impressed by the precisely and vividly painted settings and environments. As the author is, himself, a resident of the city of Galveston, and a doctor at the very same medical college which features heavily in the book, I was not surprised at how intimately familiar the narrator seemed to be to the city. But then, I had to remind myself, this was the world of over a century ago, and I was again impressed at how beautifully crafted each little detail of the world was. It really conveyed to me that the story took place in a different time, when people saw the world in a different way, when medicine and its various instruments were very rudimentary compared to the modern day, and when society and customs were more formal in many regards, but also much more brutal in others.

Overall, I was unexpectedly pleased with this novel. I had no idea what to expect when I began reading the story, being completely unfamiliar with the subjects of either ice harvesting or cadaver trading in the late 1800’s. But the author does such an exceptional job of placing us in the footsteps of the characters that we can’t help but come to an understanding of the difficulties of that time. The fascinating moral and ethical gray area that medical professionals were forced into because of the lack of legitimate, legal avenues to obtain cadavers for study. The fortitude and strength of will, of character, and of body that the people of that time had to have in order to merely survive, let alone attain happiness. This is a book that puts things into a new perspective. It makes you realize the hardships that previous generations had to endure and how lucky we are today because of the people that pushed for progress. But it also points out that human nature is a constant. That people back then were faced with many of the same trials and dilemmas that we face today.

I would easily recommend The Ice Merchant to anyone looking for a good story to read, regardless of your interest in the time period or knowledge of the subjects it tackles, because it goes beyond a mere history lesson. I look forward to reading more works by Dr. Boor in the future.

Between the Oculus Rift and the PSVR I’ve logged more than 30 hours of flight time with Ubisoft’s first VR experience, Eagle Flight, a majestic new game that has you soaring above and through the futuristic ruins of a long-abandoned Paris. Humans have vanished and the animals rule the city. This interesting premise is matched not only with astounding open-world exploration, but one of the most engaging soundtracks I’ve heard in any game this year; VR or otherwise.

Composed by three-time BAFTA-nominated composer Inon Zur, Eagle Flight captures the pure majesty of flight through music, and even as I played I was looking forward to the possibility of this becoming available as a standalone soundtrack; a sentiment shared by numerous people in my chatroom watching my live streams of Eagle Flight. Sadly, there does come a point in the game where you are indirectly encouraged to turn off the music, and I can tell you that the entire experience diminishes greatly without the score, especially in a game with minimal sound effects and no dialogue outside some brief narration.

If I had to summarize the Eagle Flight soundtrack in a single word it would be “Triumphant”. The choices of instruments and the perfect blend of percussion fused with the ethereal voices of Mimi Page and Aeralie Brighton make it impossible to choose a favorite track. Honestly, if it weren’t for the moments of silence between, all 13 tracks could easily be merged into one. The rise and fall pacing of the music keeps you guessing on where this ride is going and makes this score anything but boring, which makes it perfect for a game such as this that I regularly play for 3-5 hour stretches at a time. Conversely, I can pretty much put this CD on a loop and listen to it all day.

Perhaps the saddest thing about Eagle Flight is that it is a VR-only experience, so the game won’t be reaching as many people, but thankfully you can at least enjoy what has become some of my favorite game music of 2016 and easily one of my top three soundtracks of the year. The music from the Eagle Flight Original Soundtrack works exceptionally well in almost any listening situation; especially while driving. The score is so soothing it’s like musical therapy and turns any commute into an adventure.

The Eagle Flight soundtrack is now available for digital download from http://www.sumthing.com and the CD is now available in stores.   I can’t recommend it highly enough.

When you’re playing a video game set in 10,000 B.C. there is a certain level of expectation when it comes to presentation; both visually and audible. Far Cry Primal is arguably thin on story and dialogue, which in some way almost gives the game a silent movie quality, allowing the score to move front and center.   Aside from those rare moments of subtitled caveman speak, the only thing you are hearing in Primal is the environment and whatever composer, Jason Graves deems thematically correct.

I’ve been a big fan of Jason’s video game OST works over the years, and Far Cry Primal is no exception, but as I listened to the 33 tracks spanning nearly two hours there wasn’t that same level of musical discovery that I normally get with other soundtracks. Then I realized, you are basically already listening to the soundtrack, uninterrupted, while playing the game.  This was merely consuming that music in a different format – without the visual stimuli.

Another thing that struck me was how all the songs blended together thematically. That’s not to say they all sound the same, but I did find it much more difficult to associate bits of the score with specific gameplay moments – one of my favorite reasons to listen to soundtracks.  I think a big reason for this is the dominance of percussion in nearly every track.  If you love a good tribal beat then look no further than Far Cry Primal, and the selection of instruments used to create some of the more primitive sounds is pure genius.

As I mentioned in my game review for Far Cry Primal, music plays a major part of the overall experience; setting the mood such as the majestic theme that plays when you light a bonfire and the hawk swoops in, or the dangerous themes that creep in when the sun goes down and predators come out to play. Grave’s score has the uncanny ability to seamlessly shift from one track to the next based on real-time events creating a totally immersive experience.

Far Cry Primal is one of my favorite games in the franchise and Jason Grave’s brilliant score is a big part of that. If you enjoy primitive percussive music then the Far Cry Primal Original Game Soundtrack will effortlessly transport you back to the dawn of man and fuel the caveman DNA inside all of us.