A Darker Magic (1987)

Author: Michael Bedard | Page Count: 184

He sat up on the bed and suddenly caught sight of his reflection in the dresser mirror in front of him.
And then an incredible thing happened. It was as if the image rippled suddenly, like a piece of painted scenery in a play. And when it settled again he found himself staring at a totally different room. It was barren and devastated. Hunks of plaster dangled from the wall, leaving the lathing gaping through like bone. The walls were covered in crayon scrawl.
He swung around... The room was as it had been before.

A horror story about an odd teenage boy with an affinity for magic tricks and the 3 protagonists who cross paths with him and investigate his mysterious nature like why no one can seem to ever find him and what his possible connections are to an incident in an abandoned train depot decades earlier that has haunted the older schoolteacher ever since.

The tale is pretty standard stuff and really just a step above a cruddy campfire scary story, but Bedard is at least competent in his writing and does a decent job of giving world building detail to make the stock story interesting and the characters fleshed out enough to at least see it through to the end. If you are inclined to like such horror stories this might be up your alley. There are better options surely, but genuinely decent passages like the quote above put it above lesser choices. Plus it was clearly written for  a younger audience so I can't bash it for not being to my taste and it is pretty decent for being his first novel.

2½ stabbing disembodied heads magic tricks... for kids! out of 5

Does Anything Eat Wasps? And 101 Other Unsettling, Witty Answers to Questions You Never Thought You Wanted to Ask (2005)

Author: New Scientist | Page Count: 211  

“Living in a universe where antimatter predominates would be akin to living in our mirror image.” - Mike Follows

There's no single author for the book, nor does the editor get his or her name on the cover.  It’s attributed simply to New Scientist, the magazine from which the information within its pages is culled.  It’s a book of questions posed by New Scientist readers and subsequently answered by New Scientist readers.  As such, the quality dips and rises, as do the facts we’re given.  Some of the answers are even contradictory.  I love to read stupid facts while dropping a turd in the white chair but the book was put to better use wiping my ass after the final pinch.

1 question they didn’t answer was why it deserved to be printed? out of 5

Babylon 5 : To Dream in the City of Sorrows (1997)

Author: Kathryn M. Drennan | Page Count: 278

"Maybe," said Sinclair, "but I sometimes think the Vorlons just make up nonsense to amuse themselves at our expense."

The only Babylon 5 book that is 100% part of the five year canon. It's fully sanctioned by creator J. Michael Straczynski and is penned by his then wife, Kathryn M. Drennan. It's the untold story of what happened to Commander Jeffrey Sinclair after he left the station. It relies heavily on your knowledge of the TV series and as such it’s stuck between having to remain faithfully tied to it and trying to present something exciting and independently new.

Unfortunately, sandwiched between the potential of the beginning and the very average ending is a middle made up of lots of meh. The dialogue is clunky, the story lacks any real sense of urgency or danger and most of the people are uninteresting. It focuses on my least favourite characters (Catherine Sakai… give me a break!), so unless you found Jeff and his partner to be charismatic and exciting (if you did, you need to get out more) then you may feel similarly.

Marcus Cole's back-story was what kept me reading because I really liked him in the series. (Mentioning him isn't spoiler, he's on the cover.)

If you've read and enjoyed this kind of pulp tie-in novel before, for any of the sci-fi franchises, then you can probably estimate before even opening whether or not the content will satisfy your needs; it's not taxing or overly engaging but it has a huge audience, so if that's you then pick it up to complete your B5 experience.

1 because I’m not a total monster out of 5