Reviewing the Mail: Week of 8/30

This post will go live on a US national holiday, so it's appropriate that I only have two books to write about: I don't expect many people will be here in the first place. As always, these two books arrived semi-unexpectedly; they're both new publications from the Great American Machine, and I haven't read either of them yet.

Blood Lad, Vol. 5 is the latest in the supernatural adventure manga series by Yuuki Kodama; I reviewed the first volume last year in a round-up, but haven't kept up with it since then. It's a Yen Press paperback that hit stores in July.

And Charles Stross's The Bloodline Feud is the remixed and revised combination of the first two books in his Merchant Princes series, The Family Trade and The Hidden Family. Long-time Stross fans will remember that he plotted those out as a single novel, back several publishing upheavals ago, and this edition has already been out in the UK for a while, getting good notices there. This is possibly Stross's darkest series -- and I say that measuredly, since he has several other novels where mankind is already extinct -- set in something like Roger Zelazny's Amber if the Amberites were gangsters with nuclear weapons rather than medievaloid sword-wielders. This new edition, with two novels for the price of one, is a Tor trade paperback hitting stores on September 9th.