I don't know who Nancy A. Collins is, but this was an interesting book. The FF were never my favorite (let's all sit around and complain about ourselves), but this book at least makes them likable, unlike most of the comics I read of them when I was a kid. Honestly, this book focuses more on Namor than the FF, maybe that's why I like it more. Everybody pretty knows what there is to know about the FF, and this book does nothing to bulid on that. Namor, on the other hand, is fleshed out more than I have ever seen (although, I only had 2 of his solo comics, and both were boring). This book really focuses on Namor and Atlantis's pasts, presents, and futures. The Atlantean palace coup is actually quite entertaining. This book was more ambitious than it needed to be as it feels rushed and not fleshed out enough (Reed Richards/Mr. Fantastic's address to the U.N. comes to mind), but the book is exciting enough to allow you to overlook that. For Namor fans (or anyone wanting more information on this, suprisingly, deep character) should definately pick this book up. FF fans might be dissapointed as the FF's and Doom's involvment are paper-thin at best. I've heard that their other 2 books are even better though, but I have yet to read them.
If you're keeping track, here are my Top 5 Marvel novels so far:
1. Hulk: What Savage Beast; Peter David
2. Fantastic Four: To Free Atlantis; Nancy A. Collins
3. Ultimate Spider-Man; Stan Lee, editor
4. Spider-Man: Carnage in New York; David Micheline & Dean Wesley Smith
5. due to the extreme suckage of the other 3 books, none of them deserve to grace the top 5 with these other four, and to even mention them in the same breath as the Hulk and FF books is an extreme act of blasphemy and you should kick yourself in the shin for even thinking that!

This was a good book to start the Fantastic Four in the novel series.Nancy Collins did her research with all the characters in this book as Reed, Sue, Johnny, and Ben join forces with Prince Namor to save Atlantis from Dr. Doom. The charcters act like themselves and they all play important roles in the development of the story. It;s a tribute to the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby FF stories.

I have to hand it to Nancy Collins, this book really took me back
to my old comic book days. All I can say is please please write more of them. I know this book is hard to find, fact is i got it at a yard sale. but if you can get a hold of one you wont be sorry.

An "Insiders Guide to Understanding Your Hospital Bill" ought to be on your bookshelf if you sincerely want to reduce your hospital bill. You may not need it now, but odds are you or a family member will need it in the future. It's easy to read, easy to understand, and easy to use. The authors know their business. In fact, the title of the book IS their business. The easy-to-read, non-technical style makes the book work for anybody who wants to have some control over their own hospital costs. If I sold medical insurance, I'd see that every policyholder had a copy of this book. If I administered a hospital, I'd give one to every single patient who came there. At last somebody has given us a weapon with which we can fight high medical costs. It's terrific!

This book warns you to check your hospital bill because it often contains billing errors -- and, since most of us have to pay something (after the insurance pays), it's good to know where to look for the errors to save money! The book is filled with detailed examples and suggests you keep a diary of your hospital stay so you can compare your entries to the final bill. Some are human errors, but most are not -- and this book lists the common areas where hospitals overcharge. More importantly, Chapter 6 tells you how to go about getting the hospital to correct your bill. And, if you don't want to do it yourself (or are too ill to do it yourself), the authors will (for a small fee). Overall, this is an excellent "How to..." book that gives you the option of letting the authors help you... when was the last time you had an author use their expertise for you? Most "How to..." books tell you what to do, but leave you hanging when you get in trouble. Not these authors!

The authors of this book simplify and explain how the complexities and frustrations of medical billing can be easily prevented and/or corrected. It is an easy read that can used by the everyday consumer. I highly recommend it. We all have or will have medical bills to pay and the book addresses some interesting points that need to be known and remembered before and after medical care is received.

First off I want to say that I'm a Nancy Collins fan. The other Sonja Blue books are excellent. But this one just sucks. The characters are all lame and flat, the plot is cliche, the writing is spotty, the motivations weak, the organization poor. It's VERY obvious that she just slapped it together due to the crossover deal with White Wolf. She deals poorly with the various White Wolf clans and terminology, and her "personal" vampire mythos doesn't square at all with the White Wolf world. There are lots of glaring inconsistencies.

Don't waste your money on this garbage. Read the other Sonja Blue books.

Sonya Blue, Nancy Collins's unforgettable vampire slaying heroine returns in this very violent and gripping adventure.This time Sonya who is only known as The Stranger enters the sinister
city of Deadtown.Deadtown is the bloody battleground of two competing vampire lords, Sinjon who has ruled the city for almost two centuries and Esher the utterly ruthless younger vampire who wants the city for himself.They both traffic in drugs and use psychotic gangbangers as their armies.Sonya befriends Cloudy, a aging hippy and Ryan a young boy who's mother is controlled by Esher. Sonya decides to detroy both vampires, who are called Kindred in the novel.This short novel is filled with scenes of very graphic violence and visceral action sequences.The characters like the brave boy, Ryan are also very well drawn and the villians such as Esher and his sadistic vampire henchwoman, Decima also are memorable.My own complain of this book is that is really is a dark fantasy remake of two films: Yojimbo and Clint Eastwood's spaghatti western fistful of dollars.Once I knew the similarities between the book and those movies I guessed what would happen next in the plot and I was right all of the time.If u seen these movies you will remember what does happen in the novel as well.But other than that be prepared as Sonya Blue puts you under her spell as she puts the vampires dead under for good!

Great book, I rate it at the top of all the books written by Nancy Collins (with Sunglasses after dark and Angles on Fire). I enjoyed the story line revolving around the battle for "Dead Town" and the gang/vampire warfare. The construction of the characters was very well conceived and excitiong to read. Again, a great book....

Many of these stories push the envelope of Nasty, and this anthology is not recommended for those with weak stomachs. Some of them are absolutely gut-wrenching, like John Shirley's "You Hear What Buddy and Ray Did?" and Mike Lee's "High Heels from Hell", while others are just disappointing (Rex Miller's "Brainchild"). Very few are particularly distinguished, and I guess my favorite has to be Howard (The Turtles, Flo & Eddie) Kaylan's "The Energy Pals", which hilariously lampoons the Power Rangers/Ninja Turtles territory. If you're looking for a few good nasty thrills, okay, but if you're looking for a great read, perhaps you might want to look elsewhere.

Though not all the stories are as taboo-shattering as the cover hype implies, a good bit of them are still excellent. Danielle Willis shows us the decidedly unromantic and unglamourous life of a vampire and her lover; Lucy Taylor gives us deadly autoeroticism and shows us what lies on the other side; Don Webb turns torment into art and Steve Rasnic Tem twists the family ties. An incident in a junior high school locker room destines one teacher for revenge in a story from Edward E. Kramer. There's also great work from Rob Hardin, Mike Lee and Howard Kaylan. A collection with far more hits than misses.

Take heed, this is NOT a book to show your parents... Take eroticism and mix it with horror, and you've got something you just can't put down, but you wonder why the heck you're reading such material...

I won't review the story, except to say I've never read anything by Nancy Collins that I didn't like. I would like to point out the typographical errors though, which averaged around two to three per page. If I pay extra for a limited edition, I would like to get something extra, like having a proof reader go over the manuscript before publication. Words were left out, misspelled, etc. An example - "Tony tied to scream..." One or two mistakes I can tolerate, but this book has them to the point of absurdity. The only book, ironically enough, that had more typos, was another by Collins, AVENUE X.

In the 1970s, Alex Rossiter was a rock and roll icon on a par with Hendrix and Joplin. Thanks to drugs, Alex crashed and burned, fading into oblivion unable to get a gig or a recording contract anywhere. He recently resurfaced in New Orleans where he has developed an interest in voodoo and is initiated into a local hanfou by Papa Belovded. Not long afterward, Alex obtains a gig at the Gris-Gris Club.

Alex meets an old friend Jere Sloan and the woman he loves Charlotte "Charlie: Calder. Charlie instantly wants to share sex with the musician. They go home, leaving Jere behind. Alex's brief elation dissipated once he reads "The Aegrisomnia" and becomes involved with the One-Who-Tempts, a shade residing between the living and the dead. The malevolent spirit tempts Alex to surrender his soul and destroy everyone he cherishes.

Nancy A Collins does for voodoo what Anne Rice has done for vampires. The characters are fully developed making them seem authentic though pawns in a cosmic chess game played by essences much older than mankind. TEMPTER is a temptation that horror fans will want to repeatedly reread.

Harriet Klausner

I really wanted to like this book -- I mean what's not to like about a Native American werewolf story set in the 19th century American West? Well, I did like it some. The hero, Billy Skillet, is likeable and pretty well drawn. The horror elements are not too graphic yet still a bit out-there. There's a lot of quirky humor in the book. On the other hand, the book should have been about 50 pages longer. It seems short, and I wanted more detail on some of the other characters and a little more suspense in the conflict between Billy and the hunter who is after him. There's also one stretch where the author describes some of the historical detail leading up to the Wounded Knee massacre in 1890, and the novel's voice shifts from folksy to more academic. That was a bit jarring. The text could have used a little more editing, because there were a few typos that never should have seen the light of day. Overall, I enjoyed the book with some reservations. Readers who like alternative takes on the werewolf theme may well like Walking Wolf.

A surprisingly great book with very few downfalls. The life of Bill Skillet (Vargr) is one adventure after another... It hard to believe all he has went through in his short pretender life. I enjoyed this book a great deal more that Wild Blood. The charters and descriptions of the events around the storyline were much more interesting and entertaining. The two downfall of the book: 1. Might of had a little to much Indian history in it. 2. Book was to short.(only 181 pages). I could of read 300 pages or another book on Walking Wolf. Would highly suggest this to any fan on Horror, Werewolves, or Vampires. Give it a 5......

"When you keep the hours that I do, you often find yourself in other people's stories."

-Sonja Blue

With the exception of "Knifepoint," which takes place before she was "born," and "Cold Turkey," which provides telling insight into her "otherness," the words above perfectly capture the tenor of the remaining stories in this collection, which feature Nancy Collins' vampiric vampire killer, Sonja Blue, as a cynical, world weary adventurer, who, when she's not hunting her own kind, is cleaning up her little corner of the world, a la Clint Eastwood's "Man with No Name." In "Tender Tigers," she rescues a child from her abusive stepmother, an ogre; In "Vampire King of the Goth Chicks," she gives a vampire wannabe his comeuppance; "Variations on a Theme" finds her in James O'Barr's "Crow" universe; "Some Velvet Morning" features her in her "angel of vengeance" mode, hunting down one of the oldest of her kind; finally, in "The Nonesuch Horror," she teams up with the werewolf sheriff of a remote western town to rid the hamlet of an unwelcome visitor.

Always the pro, Collins makes each of these pieces work, milking her themes and situations for all they're worth. Doing so, she delivers a handful of solid entertainments that should inspire longstanding fans to revisit her worthy Sonja Blue novels, and those new to her work to sample them for the first time.

After reading other books by Nancy Collins, this book fell short of my expectations. The story had a stong beginning but slowed down and became a little far fetched even for a Werewolf story. It seemed like the main charter was directed throughout the entire story. From how he found the band of werewolf's/to the great meeting/to the final battle. Just to many unrelated occurrences needed to happen for this story to work. I would recommednd this book for any Nancy Collins fan (I am a big fan of her work) but this would not be on my must read list.

this book is a bit inconsistent but its Collins and for fans of Sonja it will be a decent book. For non Sonja Blue readers: read those, you will be much happier with them in general. Werewolf fans: Anita Blake has much more realized lyncanthropes.

This book was wonderful and refreshing after running into countless boring werewolf stories. I really enjoyed this new take on werewolves. The characters are fascinating, the plot is fast-paced and enjoyable, and the writing is high quality. Some scenes may not be for the faint-of-stomach, but then again, such people should perhaps not read modern horror in the first place.

Very very disappointing. Didn't go anywhere except in circles. Waste of my time and money. Note that I think Sunglasses After Dark is a super book.

As a huge fan of the Sonja Blue series, and Collins as a writer, I must say that I was very dissapointed with this book. While it is ok, it does not live up to her previously fantastic style. It lacks that something that only Nancy A. Collins can give it. It reads alright, but at times feels like she was rushed. If you like Sonja Blue get it, but don't look for something of Paint it Black, Sunglasses after Dark, A Dozen Black Roses, or even Angels on Fire's calibur.

I thought this story was very compelling. I enjoyed the characters and the flow of the entire read was right up my alley.

Some good stories, some truly bad, but nothing really stands out. There's nothing really to say more than that, since it's an anthology--read the ones you like, skip the others. Some of the good ones--"White Lady's Grave" and the one about the Church and the dying businessman (can't remember title). The others were either okay or completely a waste of time, but having just read "The Earth Strikes Back", even the worst ones looked okay. I'm not sure if you'd want to spend your money on this--it's not that good, so why not borrow it from a library?

I don't read too many anthologies. Certainly, this one will only inspire a moderate amount of enthusiasm for me to go buy more.

It's published by White Wolf, which also is responsible for highly successful and intricately detailed RPGs such as Vampire: The Masquerade and Werewolf: The Apocalypse. (One of the weaker stories in the collection is by Steward von Allmen, who appears to be a key White Wolf founder.) I believe I picked this book up at GenCon; it's now out of print.

The anthology starts off very unpromisingly, with an embarrassing little number from beloved sci-fi/fantasy/horror fan Forrest J. Ackerman. This is the lowest point of the book, but luckily it rebounds from there. Ben Bova offers a story that has a perfect "Twilight Zone" twist, and Michael Moorcock tosses in an excursion to his Eternal Champion milieu in a tale that has a bit of an "English Patient" flavor to it. Ian McDonald in "The Time Garden" gives us an enchanting and lyrical exploration along the border of Faerie in a story that is reminiscent of the works of Robert Holdstock. (I believe, in fact, this may be why the basic Amazon review shown above claims that Holdstock is a contributor to the anthology, when in fact he is not.)

Jeremy Dyson's "City Deep" is another macabre tale with a dark cinematic flair such as would be found in one of the TV anthology shows. Two other stories are almost poetically elegant yet starkly simple: Charles de Lint's "Heartfires", about wandering Native American spirits losing their way in the present-day U.S., and Stephen Gallagher's "God's Bright Little Engine", with its beautiful and haunting ending. The story provided by Storm Constantine, "Blue Flame of a Candle", while not entirely successful, is nonetheless packed with intricate detail and manages to create a rich history with merely a few suggestions.

Other stories are much less powerful. The joint effort by Kathe Koja and Barry Malzberg is frankly unreadable, while that of Larry Bond and Chris Carlson is at best workmanlike and much more suited for a military-themed collection. Other stories are plain silly or sadly bland. The one by William F. Buckley (!) can only be considered an interesting experiment. Ian Watson's "The Amber Room" never comes together, and Christopher Fowler's "Tales of Britannica Castle" reads like a pointless pastiche of "Gormenghast".

While there is indeed good material to be found here, the lesser works really drag down the overall level of quality. A few of them should just have been jettisoned to save the rest.

Still, this is a suitable sampler for some authors who are rarely seen, and it definitely shows that some, such as Gallagher and McDonald, are worth following.