BOOK REVIEW: The Gypsy Morph by Terry Brooks

 

Hawk, a young man imbued with magic more powerful than has ever been seen before, leads a ragtag group of orphans and their caretakers in search of a place where they will be safe from the last devastation that will annihilate what is left of the world. Joining them is a young Elf who carries the responsibility for the entirety of his race, and two Knights of the Word, people drawn from the race of men to protect the ones who will make a difference in the battle between light and darkness. Against them stands a demon so powerful that it will take all their combined abilities to defeat him and the army of monsters that he has amassed.

This is the last book in the trilogy of the Genesis of Shannara, the prelude to the world Terry Brooks first created in his sensational first novel, The Sword of Shannara. Now we learn how the world of Shannara came to be, the forces that shaped it, and the world that it was born from. This brings all the main characters from the first two books in this trilogy together for one last battle to see who will survive and who will be destroyed. A battle that will be decided, not by armies, but by the power of one boy who is not even sure what he is or is meant to be. One of Brooks’s best, this is a great read.

MOVIE REVIEW: The Black Demon

A man named Paul Sturges, who works for an oil company, takes his family on a weekend in Baja California where he has been assigned to inspect an oil rig. When they get there, they find that the oil rig has been leaking for months, polluting the waters offshore and devastating the town there that relied on the fishing industry. It has also apparently attracted a monster shark that the locals believe is a demon come to exact revenge on the humans who have destroyed the environment. Sturges soon finds himself and his family trapped on the oil rig itself where, along with the only two survivors of the crew, they enter a fight to get back to shore before the whole thing collapses or the shark can make them its prey.

This combines South American folklore with the current megalodon craze to create a movie about survival and the consequences of past choices. Due to its setting and plot, this is necessarily pro-environmentalism and anti-oil. Starring Josh Lucas as Sturges, Fernanda Urrejola as his wife Ines, and Julio Cesar Cedillo as one of the crew survivors, the acting in this is excellent. The script is sometimes a little choppy and the special effects are almost non-existent (the shark only has one out of the water appearance), but the performances keep it on track. Made by Amazon Studios for streaming on that platform, this was released before the writers’ and actors’ strikes that all but crippled the industry in 2023. As a result, it was never marketed to a wider audience than on the streaming service itself. However, it is worth seeing, if for nothing more than the effort that the actors put into it.