Emma Types Stuff

A game post? On my book blog? It's more likely than you think!  I've read a lot of fun books recently, but none that I've had the urge to write about. So instead, take this essay on the most important choices in Season One of The Walking Dead Game. Spoilers ahead, but hopefully entertaining ones... The first Walking Dead Game came out in 2012 so this is some real up-to-the-minute, zeitgeisty gaming chit-chat here. Nevertheless the first season of this game is something of an obsession of mine. I humbly boast that there are  few people out there who know the inner mechanics of the characters and choices as well as I do (and even fewer with encyclopaedic knowledge of the larger Walking Dead universe). One of my hobbies is watching new players having a go at it, because the nature of this decision-based game turns it into an incredibly revealing psychological experiment. It's like watching people take a crack at the Milgram Experiment over a period of ten hours. Someone w

I enjoyed both of my recent reading challenges, but I bit off more than I could chew. December is famously a rather busy month, and for Fantasy February I tried to read one of the traditionally longer genres in the shortest possible month. So I wanted less pressure this time around.  History Girl Summer will take place from June through August, and will cover ten different prompts. These will be historical fiction and cannot be contemporary to their setting (i.e a Victorian book wouldn't count if it was written in the Victorian era.)  You can check out the original challenge here and follow my progress below... The Prompts: 1. A Book Set During Your Favourite Historical Period Sherlock Holmes and the Highgate Horrors by James Lovegrove Not, perhaps, the most historically accurate book but nevertheless full of comforting Victoriana!  2. A Book Set in a Historical Period from Your Own Country Hen Fever  by  Olivia Waite This Sapphic romance focuses heavily on the effects of the

Oof. That's what I have to say about this book. Oof. With a capital ' O ' and a big groan of agony at the end.  How High We Go in the Dark [Sequoia Nagamatsu] is about a plague, but not about Covid, being written just before. In it, a strange virus is released from the melting permafrost and attacks the world, mutating vital organs one-by-one. No one is untouched, and as the science gets better, the disease only gets stranger.  Death is something no-one is squeamish about anymore - the whole world talks and trades in it. Where capitalism can no longer make money from entertainment and industry, it makes it from euthanasia packages and death rituals.  This isn't really a linear story but a collection of loosely interconnected short stories over the course of a couple of thousand years. It focuses primarily on Japanese-American and Japanese viewpoints, and each story is, in it's own way, about grief. Though often bleak, each one shows humans at their best, as we bimbl

My last Grady Hendrix review was somewhat scathing. A combination of personal taste, weaker characters, and confusing promotion made How to Sell a Haunted House a disappointment. When I finished it, I was still seeking a proper Grady Hendrix high, so I turned to his other release - The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires. I'd put it off for a few reasons: it was understandably expensive on first release, and vampires aren't a big draw for me anyway. By the time it drifted down to a more manageable price, I was more excited about How to Sell a Haunted House  and figured I'd get them together. I knew at once that this book was what I was looking for.  In the opening, Hendrix discusses how it's a spiritual successor to the brilliant My Best Friend's Exorcism . It's not a sequel, but it's in roughly the same community a few years later, The 80s Satanic Panic has given way to 90s Prozac yuppiedom; but the women are still trapped in an old-South sub