Lightning’s Call is what you’d get if Tolkien and Lovecraft co-wrote Gangs of New York and Ivan Reitman directed it as though it were Ghostbusters–while Reitman was channelling John Carpenter. Or F.W. Murnau. Nah, Carpenter, definitely–except instead of the Dead Rabbits versus the Bowery Boys, the plot spins around an agitated Civil War veteran named …

I went back and forth on whether to write up an actual review on this one. Not because it’s not a good book, but because I couldn’t decide right away what kind of book it is. PunchRiot is a literary(tm) platform after all. Must keep hands and feet inside our stated vertical. The gods of …

When searching by title on Amazon for The Night No One Slept, TJ Martinell’s prequel to his previously (2018) published Prohibition-era novel The Men Who Walk Alone, it appears at the top of a page of books with advice for ensuring they and their newborn infants all get a a good night’s sleep. “One of …

One of the best things about the internet in general and self-publishing in particular is the resurgence and proliferation of the short novel, or novella. Nowhere is this better realized than in all of the genre fiction being written at less than forty-thousand words, give or take, or somewhere under two-hundred pages. I have always …

We’re closing out obscure disaster and dystopian novel week with what may be the least obscure title. I was torn between this and Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, but I covered nuclear holocaust already war with the Alas, Babylon spot and had yet to include a book representing one of my favorite sub-genres:  the “cometpocalypse”. Nominated for a Hugo …

Imagine Chevy Chase’s Vacation where Clark W. Griswold isn’t a dumbass, and he and the fam are being chased across the country by hijackers, murderers, and rapists. In England. Initially published in the UK as The Death of Grass, John Christopher’s 1956 novel tells the story about how a catastrophic food shortage caused by a plant virus plays …

Republished in the 1908s as Defiance, Oliver Lange’s Vandenberg is a lot like Red Dawn but occurs in a far more feminized, post-invasion America. And keep in mind: this was written in 1971. The Soviets were enemy-one then and this novel portrays how easily they invade America due to a general lack of values amongst its population and a specific …

Imagine Don Quixote as an overweight, unemployed thirty-year-old who lives on soda and Doris Day movies–and who lives off of his mother–running around The Big Easy quoting Boethius while vocally condemning the city and its citizens for their “lack of theology and geometry.” A Confederacy of Dunces is an American picaresque, a comic masterpiece by the …