Reviewing the Mail: Week of 5/9

The mail was light this week, with some things I've mentioned before and some things that I have less to say about, so this post may be shorter than usual.

(As I say every week: I do these posts so I at least take notice of everything that come in for review, since I know I won't get to review everything, for various reasons. I haven't read any of this stuff yet, and I'm generally looking it over as I type here, so these posts are often unalloyed first impressions.)

First this week is the paperback edition of P.Craig Russell's comics adaptation of Neil Gaiman's young adult novel Coraline (you know, the one that was also made into a movie recently?) I read this just a couple of months ago -- reviewing it towards the end of this long post -- and didn't like it as much as the novel and the movie, despite being a long-time Russell fan. (I generally thought his art wasn't the best choice for the material.) This paperback edition was published by HarperTrophy on May 5th.

I also got an unusual number of tie-in books this week; possibly because the summer (with its freight of big dumb movies) is coming up. The first two are both about the same property and by the same writer, so they'll get combined into this one paragraph: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and Transformers: The Veiled Threat. Both are by Alan Dean Foster and published by Del Rey; the former is the novelization of the movie coming along in a month or so, and the latter is a prequel to the movie. Veiled Threat is in stores in May, but you'll have to wait until June for Revenge of the Fallen.

Along the same lines, I also have here a book called G.I. Joe: Above & Beyond by Max Allan Collins, which is a prequel to that summer movie. (The one with "G.I. Joe" in the title, for the slower among you.) It's also coming in May from Del Rey, and has an impressively muscled and black-clad ninja (do I remember right that this would be "Snake-Eyes"?) with very silly headgear on the cover.

Yet another tie-in! Star Wars: The Clone Wars: No Prisoners is based on the animated TV show with the title that's the same up to the second colon, and written by Karen Traviss, who's written quite a bit about those clone dudes by this point. It's also from Del Rey, and will be in stores on May 19th. Unlike the last three tie-ins, this one is a trade paperback, which means it's bigger, more expensive, and on nicer paper. But you clones can afford it.

Last this week is a book that isn't the extension of something in a different medium, for a change: The Best of Michael Moorcock, which was edited by John Davey with Ann & Jeff VanderMeer and published this month by Tachyon Publications. I mentioned it a couple of months ago when I saw a bound galley, but it's a real book now, available in stores for purchase and everything.