Neil – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

June 14, 2020

Escape from Heaven (Review)

uj Pepperman is a talk radio host working the LA market. He’s dealing with his usual wide range of crazy callers when, suddenly, God’s on the line. This comes as a shock to Duj, of course. He blows off the call but later he’s abducted by two beautiful angels, goes for a nice drive, and ends the evening duct taped in his car, abandoned by the angels, and sailing off a pier. And he dies. And reawakens in Heaven. Turns out God wants a word. It turns out Lucifer wants to turn the end of the world into a populist […]

August 13, 2023

Norse Mythology (Review)

he missus and I have been watching a NetFlix series, Ragnarok – It’s a series about a high school kid in Norway who has come to realize that he is a reborn Thor, that there are ice giants living in his town, and that Ragnarok, the final battle between gods and giants, is coming. Great little series which I highly recommend. Which is why, when nosing around my local bookstore, I found Norse Mythology, which might sound stuffy until you realize that writer and humorist Neil Gaiman wrote it. Thought about it – for about a second – and picked […]

May 5, 2024

Trigger Warning (Review)

rigger Warning is a collection of Neil Gaiman short stories, perfect for the long plane trip to Amsterdam. They all are stories which the main character is surprised (sometimes fatally) by a turn of events. Often they are close calls, or cautionary notes, or just death. But they were all fun. My favorite of the bunch was Adventure Story, a cute little story where a man asks his mom about an item on his late-father’s desk, an tiny figuring, and in denying and pooh-poohing it, his mother hints of some sort of crazy Indian Jones adventure his father went through. […]

May 12, 2024

American Gods (Review)

eil Gaiman can always be counted on to provide interesting and clever fiction. And this one, his massive tome of American Gods, shows this ability to the utmost. So figure that gods need people to make them exist. They exist through belief. Belief is what makes gods live, and brings them power. So of course, American has no gods before there are people (the rest of the world is lousy with them). And as humans arrive, across the Barents Strait, grind their longboat prows into Newfoundland, settle in Plymouth, arrive to build railroads, to escape a potato famine, or are […]