Steve Rasnic Tem's The Mask Shop of Doctor Blaack

(My apologies to Steve Rasnic Tem. I had originally planned to have this out much earlier in the Halloween season but life got away from me. Oh, and that's not a typo. It really is Dr. Blaack with two "a"s.)

Everyone loves a good Halloween tale and that includes your loving blogger, slaving away over a hot keyboard to bring you his latest review. This is a time of year that I look forward too starting on November first, and I was really looking forward to reading Steve Resnic Tem's The Mask Shop of Dr. Blaack. And I'm happy, because I was really impressed. Tem did a good job with this one.

I haven't read much YA Horror. I'm aware of the whole Goosebumps thing and I read the first three books from the Series of Unfortunate Events series, but it's not something I'm well versed in. That might have to change though, because I really got a hoot out of this one. It was creepy enough that it made me feel a little apprehensive, but not bad enough that I would hesitate to let my twelve-year-old daughter read it.

I'm going to mention something here that's kind of a spoiler. I don't generally do spoilers and, generally speaking, anything that I absolutely HAVE TO include to make a review usually show up in the first few pages and don't ruin anything, but this time it's a bit different. The fact is that The Mask Shop of Doctor Blaack is a good to great story. The caveat is that this thing takes a long time to get started. I was just having a conversation with a friend. I mentioned to him that it took me longer to get through the first fifty pages than it did for me to get through the remaining two-hundred fortyish pages after that. Once it gets moving though, it rocks.

Our heroine is a girl named Lauren. She's twelve years old and too mature for trick or treating. She could give some of the kids in my neighborhood a lecture here. Maybe she should. Err... well if she existed anyway. At any rate, she's got a problem. Her parents want her to take her little brother Trevor out trick or treating and she's kind of stuck. The first part of the story deals with mainly this issue. It's not until after she accepts it and heads off to the Mask Shop to get costumes for both herself and her brother that things really get started, but once they do...

The Mask Shop of Doctor Blaack really gets going when Trevor's mask gets stuck to his face. And I don't mean stuck as in "pour some hot water in to dissolve the glue." I mean stuck as in "this thing is magical and isn't coming off until Halloween and then only if you're lucky." The even bigger problem is that Halloween isn't for a couple of days and she has to keep the world from discovering the problem. It's a lot of fun.

I won't go too far into Lauren's character arc except to say that it's pretty amazeballs. She does a lot of maturing over the course of a single novel and it makes sense in the context of the story. It builds slowly but it's nice to see. I grew up in an era where a lot of children's books (there was no such thing as a YA genre in the long ago era of the Eighties) dealt with minor problems and the protagonists didn't change much. Tem puts his heroine through a situation that not every adult would be equipped to deal with and she takes it head on. If things don't always go as planned, well, that's life. She finds a way through and that's what's impressive. There is one specific issue that I don't seem to agree with her on, but she makes her own decision and at twelve, that's pretty impressive.

Lauren shows more leadership than a lot of the adults I've known too. There are times when she has to take the blame for things she didn't do.  There are times when she has to deal with problems she has no way to anticipate. There are times when she has to keep Trevor encouraged. She can't take credit for any of it or the secret of the stuck mask will be out. None of it would be easy, but she does what needs to be done and doesn't complain about it. This is a young lady with chutzpah.

Trevor, for his part, is a little trooper too. There are times when I'd expect a child that age (like my daughter) to break down and cry. The fact of the matter is that he does whine a bit but in his case, so would I and I'm a grown man. He gets through things though, even when they're not easy. I like this kid.

The thing that makes The Mask Shop of Doctor Blaack work so well is that everyone else acts the way you would expect them to if everything was normal. Tem has built his world so well that it's almost seamless with our own. There's just that one tiny little exception about weird masks that stick on faces and do crazy stuff and nobody knows about that. It's close enough to be familiar and just far out enough to be weird. It works perfectly.

I know I got into this a bit already, but it really did take this book a long time to get started. I spent the first fifty pages or so wandering off to do laundry, or checking my Facebook or checking to see how many hits my last post had, etc. Once it took off, it really took off, but if you're going to read this one you need to be patient. The thing is, I do kind of wonder how much of the lead in to this book was really necessary. It really feels like the first fifty pages could have been condensed down to one or two. I think the book would honestly have worked a lot better that way. All in all though, it's still an enjoyable read and, if you're into the Bella character from Twilight, it does kind of work I guess.

Bottom Line: 4.25 out of 5 Dangling Straps

The Mask Shop of Doctor Blaack
Steve Rasnic Tem
Hex Publishers, 2018


The Mask Shop of Doctor Blaack is available for purchase at the following link:

Thoughts on the Twenty Year Anniversary of Harry Potter

Long, long ago (circa 2002) in a galaxy far, far away (better known as Clinton Township, Michigan) I received a book for Christmas. It was Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J. K. Rowling. (Yeah. I'm an American. We're not smart enough to know what a Philosopher's Stone is.) It was a book I had sworn to never read. I mean, it was kid stuff, right? What adult was going to read it? There was only one problem: I was dating my ex-wife at the time and she loved it. She wanted me to read it so she gave it to me. I wasn't working at the time so I couldn't tell her I was too busy, so I read it.

I loved it. I had stayed over at her place one night and started reading it the next day while she was at work. By the time she got home that night I was halfway through Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. I was hooked. It was that good. At the time, only books one through four were out. I read them all in a matter of days. I saw the first movie at the second run movie theater that only charged a dollar fifty that weekend. I saw the second movie a week later and paid full price. I attended the release parties for the next three novels sans children. I got a few weird looks but I got all three books on release night so it was worth it.

I have since read every HP book at least twice and watched the movies with my kids more time than I would care to count.  I'm actually pretty upset with myself that I didn't read these sooner. When I split with the ex one of the things I made sure to take were the HP books. I could live without that woman but I needed those books.  Yeah,  they're that good.

I've heard a lot of literati types hate on the Harry Potter series. Apparently the fact that the books are popular means that they're not true literature. You know what? Fuck that attitude. I mean that.

Rowling's works have popularized an entire genre of fiction. Before Harry Potter,  Young Adult fiction was a joke.  Now it's one of the fastest growing areas in all of publishing and every YA author that gets published owes a debt to Mrs.  Rowling.  She wrote the works that opened the way.

J.K. Rowling is literally the mist influential English language author of the last century. Only Tolkien comes close and for the same reason.  Tolkien revitalized the fantasy genre. What separates Rowling from Tolkien is that Rowling popularized a genre that had never been big where Tolkien brought back an old genre.

She did it not by kissing liberal ass with message fiction but by telling an awesome story with awesome characters. Rowling's characters are quirky and strange but they are believable in their actions and motivations. The conflicts escalate continuously. Every time Harry and friends win their enemy gets tougher. It's not till the end of the final book that a final victory occurs.

Let's talk about some compelling characters:

Harry Potter: He's an orphan. He's been, at the very least, mentally and emotionally abused by the Dursleys. He has to feel at least partially responsible for the deaths of his parents, who lost their lives defending him but he never gives up. Harry fights against a force that is bigger than him. No one would be able to blame him if he decided to pack it in and go home but he doesn't.

Looked at another way, he is the chosen one. He could easily let that go to his head and turn in to an arrogant snob but he doesn't. He's smart enough to know he needs help and brave enough to get the job done.

Hermione Granger: Raised by Muggles and starting off in a world like nothing she's ever seen before, Hermione thrives. Her amazing intellect and drive to excel push her toward greatness. Without Hermione, Harry fails. It's that simple. She even saves the day while petrified. But there's more to Hermione than just that.

Hermione is everything I teach my daughters to be. She is also a lot like my girlfriend. She is strong, proud, smart, tough and brave. I spend as much time rooting for Hermione as I do Harry. Plus she starts off the series as a nerd and that's something I can identify with. Oh and her drive to free the house elves amazes me. No one else even cared.

I'm intentionally omitting Ron as I see him as a cross between Samwise Gamgee and Carrot Top with a little bit of that fat kid from that one episode of Little House on the Prairie thrown in. He's a necessary character but not one of my favorites.

Speaking of Weasleys though, how about Molly? I love that Rowling cast her not just as the helpless housewife but as the mama bear. Molly is sweet as sugar until you endanger her family and then LOOK OUT. Her worst fear is something happening to her family as we see when she faces down a boggart. All this and she still manages to keep her whacky husband moving forward.

Even Tom Riddle, AKA Lord Voldemort, is a compelling character. He's a man who was mistreated as a child and now hates everybody like those who hurt him. He's mad for the power he needs to get back at them. No one likes this guy but his motivations make sense even if his methods are too extreme. He's sick and twisted yet we can see how he ended up that way. And despite all of that, Rowling makes us hate him enough that his death is a crowning achievement. I could go on for days.

It's also obvious to anyone that pays attention that Rowling has done her research. Almost all of the monsters come straight from mythology. The parallels between Nazi Germany and some of the actions taken by the Death Eaters are legion. I have a sneaking suspicion that the Triwizard Tournament was somehow inspired by the Labors of Hercules.

All of this adds up to one of the most amazing stories ever told. Rowling amazes me with what she managed to pack into those books. There are ups and downs. Nothing is ever quite what it seems. The books start off fairly laid back but by Deathly Hallows they're dark as all get out. No one and nothing is safe, even if we wish they were. It's a crazy world but it's entertaining. How entertaining you ask?

Rowling's books have sold hundred of millions of copies. She is considered to be the world's first billionaire author. All this because she created a story about a boy and his friends and refused to give up on it or herself. She submitted book one dozens of times before it was accepted and maybe that's
the biggest lesson of Harry Potter: The odds may be against you, but you should never give up. J.K. Rowling didn't. Harry Potter didn't. You shouldn't either and neither shall I.

Some Harry Potter related products are listed below:

Writing From a Different Perspective - Guest Post by Jon Del Arroz

A question I get asked a lot from reviewers of For Steam And Country is: Is it weird to write from a first person perspective of a sixteen year old girl?

The answer is yes. It took me several passes to actually dial in what Zaira Von Monocle’s perspective would be, and I had to work extremely hard to get her to the point where she’s the fun character in For Steam And Country that my advance readers tell me they love.

I’m going to give a little peek behind the curtain as to my learning as a writer, and my process as I came up with all of this, in hopes that it is both interesting to readers, and potentially helpful to newer writers.

When I first conceived the novel, I knew that I wanted to write a Steampunk fantasy, to create a fantasy world of kingdoms and airships, alchemy and swashbuckling, high adventure that most books in the steampunk genre had shied away from. Most books in the genre either went going something darker and grittier, or dipping further into romance. I also wanted to make it somewhat YA (I consider the finished product a tweener between YA and regular fantasy, though it’s perfectly suitable for all ages), which I thought would allow me to take a lighter tone.

YA fantasy novels take the first person perspective more often than not, allowing for a real sense of feeling like you’re inside the head of the protagonist, or at the very least sitting across from them while you take high tea. A recent trend has them in first person present, which makes people really feel in the action, but I didn’t want to go that far, as it’s very few and far between I read a book in the present tense that doesn’t annoy me.

I actually had this plan to write in the first person perspective from the onset, getting to worldbuilding and character creating. In keeping with YA, I wanted to keep the protagonist young, and also to the market, having a female perspective seemed the way to go. I looked at the idea and thought, “wow, do I really want to write a 16 year old girl in the first person?” It sounded pretty daunting, and like it required a lot of work to keep realistic. Once I looked at the job from that perspective, I viewed it as a writing challenge to myself.

Very little gets me motivated like a challenge, competition, even if it’s something as small as posing the question to myself if I could pull something off. In fact, a lot of my best work comes out of such challenges. It sounds silly, but in writing, self-motivation is about the most important skill you can learn. It’s hard to go through scenes, especially some of the heavier ones, and it’s much harder to edit. If you have other goals that trick yourself into feeling like a game, then you’ll more often than not breeze through something that seemed at first like a chore.

And this turned out hard to do, not in the sense of it took me a long time to write--I actually had so much fun with this world and with these characters that I breezed through my first draft-- but when I went through it the first time, the character didn’t come across as a good protagonist at all.

In my figuring this out, I observed teenagers, and tried to remember what it was like to be a teenager myself. Frankly, I found teenagers to be a bit rambunctious, acting without thinking, and extremely low in self-confidence (for the most part, there’s always exceptions). And I wrote my character as such. In my early submissions drafts that I sent out to agents and editors, the character whined a LOT. She was combative, teasing her love interest a bit too hard. Honestly, it felt very realistic to me from what I’ve seen of a lot of teenagers, but those behaviors grate on a reader if they’re too pronounced, and I found that many of the editors didn’t connect with the character because of that.

I later learned the value of connection over realism in writing, something I wish I would have learned a lot easier and sooner. Readers want to see some flaws, some mistakes, but they don’t want that to be overwhelming, don’t want to find a person annoying. And in a heroic adventure, some of those life quirks need to be toned down rather than be presented as too realistic.

I let the book sit for awhile, wrote Star Realms: Rescue Run, and released that to quite a bit of fanfare. When I looked at this novel again, I saw it was close, but I needed to push that perspective character to the next level. I thought of who this character was, and how it would have shaped her so she’s different than just a normal teenager. Zaira’s lived mostly abandoned, on her own except when the neighbors checked in on her. She’s had to work for herself, farm for herself, wash her own clothes, cook her own meals for a couple of years now. That’s a pretty hard life to have 14-16, and one that requires a lot of work. As such, she’d be tougher. The whining had to go. She’d also have a very strong sense that she could do anything herself, including going in and doing things like flying an airship (minor spoiler, but I think you probably figured out that airship flying occurs by this point!). That has negative effects like stubbornness, which provide for some good conflict that a reader can relate to more. With those major facets of her personality in mind, I rewrote the book. And this time, everything clicked.

Even though there were heavy rewrites, I flew through this last pass because I made a character that was compelling and fun for me. And that’s what it takes to make something compelling and fun for a reader.

Authors often strive too hard for realism, to the point where it makes a lot of works bland and boring. Something that we can’t connect with because we’re not wishing we were in that person’s movie. And that’s what the author has to create. We as readers want people to rise up and be heroes, to meet challenges, to exceed expectations. That’s why we escape into fantasy in the first place. Realizing that changed my world, making Zaira Von Monocle into the farm girl-turned-hero that she ended up being in For Steam And Country. She’s still got her inexperience, but her wide-eyed sense of wonder and being willing to take on big challenges makes her a fun protagonist. I hope you enjoy reading about her as much as I enjoyed writing her.

Jon Del Arroz is the author of the Alliance Award nominated and top-10 Amazon bestselling Space Opera, "Star Realms: Rescue Run." His second novel, "For Steam And Country," is just out. He hails from the San Francisco Bay Area, is a guest contributor to the Hugo Award-nominated Castalia House blog, and regularly posts to http://delarroz.com. Twitter: @jondelarroz Gab.ai: @otomo

Amazon: http://bit.ly/forsteamandcountry

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35378932-for-steam-and-country

ITunes - https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/id1245930112 

B&N - http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/2940154751312

KOBO - http://store.kobobooks.com/Search/Query?fcmedia=Book&query=9781925645026

Debbie Manber Kupfer's P.A.W.S.

I've always said that good Young Adult literature can -and should- be enjoyed by adults. Once again, I was proven right *buffs fingernails on shirt* by Debbie Manber Kupfer's P.A.W.S. a coming of age/finding one's self story starring a young girl named Miri who inherits a charm from her Omama (grandmother) that allows her to transform herself into a cat. Along the way she faces many and massive changes to her life as well as threats from an outside force and the sudden reappearance of a family member she had never thought she'd see again.  Oh, and this is just the first book in the series. I'd bet the rest of them are going to be crazy.

 Manber Kupfer treats us to a story of a hidden world, one where shapeshifting is common and functioning magic is not unusual. One where werewolves exist and have the choice to be good or evil. It is a milieu where some inherit their shape-shifting ability in the form of charms passed down since time immemorial and others have to study and work to learn the magic necessary to change forms. Nothing is as it seems to outsiders - and not always to insiders either.

Miri receives her charm from her Omama but she does not at first realize that her powers actually exist. Even upon realizing that she can shift forms into a cat she does not realize that other powers come along with the gift. She suffers through trying to learn about her power and thence herself throughout the book. This, along with the struggle against an evil werewolf named Alistair, forms the two main problems of the book, but the desire of Miri to learn more about herself is where this book really shines.

P.A.W.S. is a story about a teen aged girl trying to find her place in the world. It feels real mainly because it's a struggle we can all identify with. At some point in time pretty much every human being has to figure out who they are and what they want. Miri is no exception. She flounders a bit but that's okay because we all do. She has to deal with some problems with bullying as well. That's something that many of us, including myself, have dealt with as as well. Miri finds herself in many situations that hit hard, not because of their unusual nature but because I've been there and done that. This is a little girl that I have a lot in common with.

The flip side of that is that she gets to do things that those of us who actually exist can only dream about. What would it be like to change into a cat, to be able to change into a cat and scamper away from trouble? If I could sense and project the emotions of others what would/could I use that for? If I could have chuck my humdrum existence and enter into a magical world, I'd do it in a minute. Miri is a bit more hesitant but it's easier to say that I'd change my whole life in a minute than it would be to actually do it.

Miri is, in some ways, the kind of person we all wish we could be. When one of her former classmates shows up at P.A.W.S. Miri manages to get along with the girl and try to get along with her. When a long lost relative show up, one that Miri feels abandoned by, she does her best to comfort them as they are recovering from their wounds and get to know them. I got the feeling that Miri could very easily have been a very bitter young girl. It's not hard to picture her rejecting people and crawling into a shell. The fact that she does not do so is a credit to her. The fact that this works in the story is a credit to Manber Kupfer. Forgiveness is something I've been struggling with. I could take a lesson here.

P.A.W.S.'s main antagonist is also easy to understand. Alistair is a flat out criminal who covets power for its own sake. He surrounds himself with others who wish to serve him to gain power themselves. Added to that is the power of mind-control. He can literally force people to do things against their will or prevent them from doing things that they want to simply by telling them not to. This isn't just a form of intimidation. They are completely unable to resist. This adds a bit of a horror element to what is otherwise a work of urban fantasy but the more the merrier... and it adds to the story which is important. If you don't hate Alistair by the time you've finished the book then don't ask me why because I can't help you.

 He treats the titular organization with hostility because they are a threat to expose and defeat him. He is every inch the conniving, manipulative bastard that men like Hitler, Lenin and Stalin were. He's just not as successful. Then again, he spends the entire story trying to gather more power to himself.  He may be on his way. If you want to know how successful he is, I guess you'll have to read the book. It's worth your time.

All that being said, this is not a perfect book. A bit more description would go a long way. The majority of the book takes place in the P.A.W.S. compound but I never really got a good grasp on what it was supposed to look like. This is a story that is very similar in some ways to the Harry Potter saga but it doesn't quite rise to that level and one of the reasons is a lack of imagery. Harry's first view of Hogwarts was epic. Miri's first view of P.A.W.S. is kind of ho hum. This doesn't ruin the story but it does keep it from reaching its full potential. That much being said, this is still a solid story and well worth the time I took to read it. I'll be contacting Mrs. Manber Kupfer shortly and inquiring as to how I can get hold of the sequel.

Bottom Line: 4.5 out of 5 Charms

P.A.W.S.
Debbie Manber Kupfer
Self Published, 2013

P.A.W.S. is available for purchase here: