Tag: Jensen Ackles

Book Review: Supernatural: Coyote’s Kiss by Christa Faust

Hi all…

When the Wichester boys, Sam (Jared Padalecki) and Dean (Jensen Ackles), began slaying monsters back in the Fall of 2009 on television, we were hooked right away. Each week they’d fight demons or monsters from folklore and urban legends to save the lives of people who didn’t believe in such things. And as the battle raged between good and evil, Heaven and Hell, they kept my interest for a long time. Five seasons. More than 100 episodes. When they put the Devil back in his box, I was ready for the journey to end.

So when season six started in 2010, I watched a few episodes but after a while it started to flounder a bit in a world without God or the Devil calling the plays on the sidelines. Eventually I stopped watching. And when the seventh season starts this month, I’ll probably catch an episode or two to see if the show got its mojo back, but I’m not holding my breath.

Why did I tell you all this? What does it have to do with a Supernatural novel? Well, late last year I read Supernatural: War of the Sons by Rebecca Dessertine and David Reed. The boys (sometime during the season five timeline) traveled back in time to 1954 to stop a demon from finding a weapon that would unbalance the battle between demons and angels. I don’t usually like reading tie-in novels, but Dessertine and Reed managed to capture the snarky banter between the brothers and the atmosphere of monster hunters winging it on the run. I enjoyed it, much to my own surprise.

This time, with Supernatural: Coyote’s Kiss by Christina Faust, the Winchester boys are going to the southern border of the United States. Set sometime in the timeline of season six, they are investigating the deaths of illegal immigrants slaughtered while trying to cross the border and the border patrolmen unlucky enough to find them. And this is definitely a whole new world for the Winchesters.

But they’re not fighting evil alone. A small, beautiful, but feisty Mexican monster hunter by the name of Xochi rides into the picture on a hot motorcycle. Will Sam and Dean survive working with her? She has her own secrets and comes from a whole different world – at one point the angel Castiel even pops to say he can’t help them. Who knew that there was an agreement between the deities of different pantheons around the world to not interfere with the mortal realms under their power?

Instead of the Christian concept of the hosts of Heaven and Hell holding sway over Mexico, it’s the old gods – the Aztec gods like Huehuecoyotl – a god of music, luck, and storytelling. Will the fickle Huehuecoyotl help Xochi and the Winchesters stop the Borderwalker before she kills more innocent people? Will Xochi’s family squabbles get in the way? Only time and a few trips back and forth across the Mexican border will tell.

Again, Faust managed to recreate the witty banter, the sarcasm, and the sharp wit of the Supernatural universe for me, making this a fun read. At nearly 350 pages, it went quickly and felt more like an extended episode of the series than anything else. I would have liked to have seen an episode or two made out of this story arc during the season, possibly even a made-for-DVD movie since it easily can stand on its own.

If you like the world of Supernatural and want more adventures with Sam and Dean Winchester, I’d definitely encourage you to pick up Supernatural: Coyote’s Kiss by Christa Faust.

This article first appeared at BlogCritics.org http://blogcritics.org/books/article/book-review-supernatural-coyotes-kiss-by/.

–Fitz

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Book Review: Supernatural: War of the Sons by Rebecca Dessertine & David Reed

Hi again!

Supernatural is regular viewing at my house. My two daughters can probably tell you more about Sam and Dean Winchester than I can. And we’ve enjoyed watching the storyline develop since the series began in 2005. I have to admit that Season 5 got a little dark for my tastes as the battle between Heaven and Hell waged on Earth, but Season 6 has found the spark again. (The episode “Clap Your Hands If You Believe…” about the faerie invasion had some great moments!)

If you’re not familiar with the series, Supernatural focuses on the lives of the Winchester brothers – Sam (Jared Padalecki) and Dean (Jensen Ackles) – and their quest to save good people from bad things. Though it started with the monster of the week format, over the last few seasons it developed its own world where Angels, Demons, and various things that go bump in the dark try to find their own niche in the world by taking out a few mortals along the way. But it’s really the relationship between the brothers – the dialog dripping with sarcasm and sharp wit – that keeps us tuning in season after season.

That said, I tend to avoid books associated with movies and television for the most part. Yes, occasionally I’ll pick up an art book or a behind the scenes book here and there, but not regularly. And fiction associated with such properties I usually ignore. That started for me back in the 1980s when I read the novelizations of a few movies like Star Wars and found them lacking the magic of the original form.

So how did I end up reading Supernatural: War of the Sons? I honestly don’t know. But my daughters probably had something to do with it.

The book takes place before the end of Season 5 when Sam and Dean are frantically trying to find a way to put Lucifer back in his cage. Desperate to avoid becoming “meat suits” for the Archangel Michael (Dean’s “destiny”) and Lucifer (Sam’s “destiny”), the pair hunt all over trying to find something – anything to help them out. This quest leads them to a small town in South Dakota where they meat Don, an angel with a possible solution to get out of the mess they’re in. Though angels usually try to screw them over, Sam gives in to his desperation and the boys find themselves on a mission through time…

Yes, you read that right. Time travel. It’s not the first time it’s come up in Supernatural. Dean’s made a few trips back in time to when his parents were just starting out. But this trip is more than a few years – Don sends them back to 1954 on a quest to find the last few pages of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Scrolls may offer a battle plan to defeat the Devil. All they had to do was get them and return back to 2010.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Of course it’s not. Along the way they run into some friends – Walter and Julie – who alternate between wanting to kill them or help them. They also run into the demon who wanted to be the wife of Lucifer instead of Lilith – Eisheth. She’s a real treat with a few secrets of her own concerning Don, the angel who put everything into motion.

Really this was a fun tale in true Supernatural fashion. Not only do you get the usual sarcasm, wit, and hunting with the Winchesters, but you learn a bit about the Dead Sea Scrolls and take a deeper dive into the world of angels and demons.

Included in the fiction were a few comments on life today from the boys’ perspective in 1954. When Sam is forced to visit a library instead of surfing the net for his research, he notes: “Rows of shelves lined every inch of the room; thousands upon thousands of books, and not an Internet connection in sight. Sam didn’t mind doing the research, but Google had become his crutch, and he felt handicapped without it.” I wonder how many of us would want to give up some of today’s nicer benefits in favor of heading to a technologically-simpler time in America?

Maybe I’ve been wrong to skip TV-and-movie tie-in fiction this long, because Supernatural: War of the Sons was a fun read. If you want to learn a bit more about the world of Supernatural and take a tour of the 1950s with the Winchesters, I highly recommend you give it a whirl!

This article first appeared at BlogCritics.org here.

–Fitz

p.s. Check out these Supernatural books!

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Book Review: Supernatural: The Official Companion, Season 4 by Nicholas Knight

Hi there…

Now entering its sixth season, Supernatural was a favorite at our house from the beginning. There was something about Sam (Jared Padalecki) and Dean (Jensen Ackles) Winchester and their quest to save good people from bad things… The monster of the week format, plus the quest to find the “Yellow Eyed Demon”, and the continuing battle against demons big and small all was part of the appeal. But it’s really the relationship between the brothers – the dialog dripping with sarcasm and sharp wit – that keeps us tuning in season after season.

When Dean died at the end of season 3, we thought that would be it for the show. Instead, the writers managed to pull a new rabbit out of their hats and introduce a new story line. This one involved the angels! And Castiel (Misha Collins) pulls Dean out of Hell to get things started with a bang…

If you missed anything, the Supernatural: The Official Companion, Season 4 book by Nicholas Knight provides detailed synopses of each episode, plus some great additional material on the characters, monsters, and production. Though I’d seen this type of “series companion” in the past, I’d never actually looked at one before and I have to say that I was impressed. Knight provides an amazing amount of depth.

The book starts with a foreward from producer Ben Edlund that takes us into the dark world of Supernatural with humor. As he says, “the angels are coming” and we shouldn’t look at them… “They’ll melt your eyes into blind, salty s’mores!” This of course refers to the scene in “Lazarus Rising” where Bobby’s (Jim Beaver) psychic friend Pamela (Traci Dinwiddie) gets her eyes burned out by peering into angel business. Definitely one of the more memorable scenes from the season.

From there, we go right into how the angels came into things. Creator Eric Kripke had an epiphany – “angels are the other side of the demon coin.” And they were going more for the Christopher Walken in The Prophecy kind of angels, not the Touched by an Angel variety. When you met one of the Supernatural angels, you understood these beings to be God’s soldiers. Scary, less than kind folk who mostly think we’re about at the same levels of cockroaches.

This concept of “angels as dicks” as Kripke put it made this really work. When the big demons such as Alastair (Mark Rolston) or Lilith (Katherine Boecher) are involved in a story, you know things are going to go poorly for the Winchesters. And as the season progresses, you know that when Castiel, Zachariah (Kurt Fuller), or Anna (Julie McNiven) appear, the boys are in just as much trouble. This give and take between God’s army and Satan’s minions provides many great chances for Sam and Dean to get into and out of trouble.

But what really kicked the show into high gear for me was when Chuck Shurley (Rob Benedict) makes an appearance in “The Monster at the End of this Book.” Shurley has been writing books about Sam & Dean’s adventures that the boys never even heard of. And they’re popular. VERY popular. It turns out that Chuck is a prophet and every time the boys go on an adventure, he starts writing. This has to be one of my favorite Supernatural episodes ever, because it reminded me of the scene in Spaceballs where they’re fastforwarding through the tape of the movie during the movie…

In addition to providing details on every episode and major character for the season, Knight also includes several “A Closer Look” sections that describe different monsters or concepts from the show and where the ideas came from. These are one or two pages covering “Angels” or “Samhain” or “Magic Wishes.” With Halloween coming up next month, it was interesting to hear how the practice originated as a Celtic harvest festival at the end of summer. As Knight puts it, this is the halfway point between the light and dark parts of the year. “At this junction between light and dark, it was believed that the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead was at its thinnest…” So we wear masks and light candles in hallowed out gourds to make these spirits feel more at home. Somehow I doubt the spirits feel at home in the Disney character-dominated world of a modern Halloween.

Long story short, Supernatural: The Official Companion, Season 4 is a great addition to the bookshelf of any Supernatural fan who wants a good reference for prior seasons and a bit of the background behind the spooky stories told week after week!

This article first appeared at BlogCritics.org here.

–Fitz

p.s. Pick up Supernatural books and DVDs below!

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