The holiday season is upon us, and even BSC is not immune from its effects! We have the last few new television episodes before our favorite shows go into their winter-season hiatus, along with a slew of book reviews and interviews that our contributors have finished up in their newly expanded free time. If you were too busy wrangling a Christmas tree or tromping through the 50-degree rain to visit your local Renaissance Festival on its closing weekend to check in every day, have no fear! I’ve got your cheat sheet, my weekly run-down of original content so that you can be sure you didn’t miss something awesome.
Interviews
Walter Greatshell, author of Xombies: Apocalypse Blues, lets Professor Crazy grill him on his inspirations, work backgrounds, and more
From BSC Kids: Damon got an interview with Derek Richardson of ABC’s holiday special Prep and Landing
Keith Rawson scored a video interview with one of the fathers of the police procedural, Joseph Wambaugh
Book Reviews
Professor Crazy tears through the latest book by Walter Greatshell (interviewed above), Xombies: Apocalypse Blues, and comes out looking forward to more post-apocalyptic undead havoc in the sequel
Aaron Teiser takes tea in an alternate-universe, “urban fantasy” Victorian London and leaves the morning visit with a smile thanks to Gail Carriger’s absurd humor in Soulless
Brian takes a look at Sweets by Andre Williams, The Creed of Violence by Boston Teran, and The Water’s Edge by Karin Fossum in this week’s first installment of The Electric Mayhem
Lexie C cuts her BSC Review teeth with The Adoration of Jenna Fox, a YA novel “as unsettling as it is thought-provoking” from Mary E. Pearson
In The Electric Mayhem part deux, Brian offers a few thoughts on Shadow Season by Tom Piccirilli, Jump by Tim Maleeny, and Revolver by Marcus Sedgwick
Bitter Night by Diana Pharaoh Francis, the first in her new Horngate Witches series, was a paranormal/UF world with a unique mythology, according to amberdrake
I give two thumbs up to the first four books of Melissa de la Cruz’s Blue Bloods series, an excellent bridge between last year’s big paranormal thing (vampires) and next year’s (fallen angels)
In The Electric Mayhem a trois, Brian looks at This Wicked World by Richard Lange, Ravens by George Dawes Green, and Almost Gone by Stan Richards
Lexie C revisits a lesser-known fairy tale in Zoe Marriott’s retelling of “The Wild Swans” entitled The Swan Kingdom
We finish up (at least for now) our re-running of some of Jay’s old reviews with his take on the 1980s classic SF novel A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr.
Professor Crazy took a chance on a paranormal romance with D.D. Barant’s Dying Bites and came away pleasantly surprised with its appeal
At the Movies
As any good Southern girl should, I took in Disney’s NOLA-based The Princess and the Frog opening weekend and came away utterly charmed–and reminded of how much I prefer good, old-fashioned hand-drawn animation to CG
The Week in Television
Desperate Housewives had a desperate cliffhanger in “Boom Crunch” this week for Katelin, who can’t wait for January to find out who survived the plane crash
Gerald So thought The Big Bang Theory was half good, half overly repetitive in its two plotlines in this week’s “The Gorilla Experiment”
CSI: Miami‘s “Count Me Out” was a great episode for Scott Parker, one that was both a game-changer for one character and a nice departure from the usual police procedural formula
“The Fifth Bullet” was an excellent episode of Castle and one that handled the subject of amnesia with unusual sensitivity and depth for a crime drama
To Matt Cibula, Glee seemed to be thumbing its nose at critics in the winning season (or mid-season) finale, “Sectionals”
Zooey Deschanel guest starred on this week’s Christmas-themed Bones, “The Goop on the Girl,” which Gerald So thought showcased the cast’s excellent chemistry
Gaming
B.T. Robertson follows up on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 with his Final Review of the PS3 version
Webcomic
We are up to Page 7 with BSC’s exclusive webcomic, Finder Incorporated, and the action of the story has finally gotten started!
