Battle of the 2012 Books, Bracket Eight

Announcing Bracket Eight of the Fantastic Reviews Battle of the 2012 Books!

We started the Battle of the Books at the Fantastic Reviews Blog as a fun way to try to keep up with the great volume of review copies we were receiving. (For more about why we started the Battle of the Books, click here. For all the rules, click here.)

The good news is we've done eight brackets of books so far, seven 2012 brackets and one 2014 bracket, discussing over 125 books. We've had a lot of fun and gotten some great feedback from the authors both here and at Twitter and other social media.

The bad news is we have definitely not kept up with all the review copies flowing in. But we're taking on the mountain of books we've accumulated.

In a valiant (please don't say hopeless) attempt to catch up, we're alternating between brackets of the new books we're receiving and brackets of the 2012 and 2013 books that we didn't already cover.

Bracket Eight of the Battle of the 2012 Books will feature 16 contenders first published in 2012. Aaron selected four "seeded" books he is especially looking forward to (marked with asterisks), and we've placed one in each quarter of the bracket, then filled out the rest of the bracket randomly. Here are your matchups:

First Quarter of Bracket:


Stefan Kiesbye
Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone
(Penguin)
vs.
Karen Thompson Walker
The Age of Miracles***
(Random House)



Libba Bray
The Diviners
(Little, Brown)
vs.
A. J. Kirby
Sharkways
(Damnation)

Second Quarter of Bracket


Lavie Tidhar
Osama***
(Solaris)
vs.
Dave Freer
The Steam Mole
(Pyr)


Gary McMahon
Beyond Here Lies Nothing
(Solaris)
vs.
Mark Hodder
A Red Sun Also Rises
(Pyr)

Third Quarter of Bracket:


Andy Gavin
Untimed
(Mascherato)
vs.
Kristi Petersen Schoonover
Bad Apple
(Vagabondage)


David Beers
Dead Religion
(CreateSpace)
vs.
Jim C. Hines
Libriomancer***
(DAW)

Fourth Quarter of Bracket:


Linda Harley
Destiny's Flower
(Infinity)
vs.
Molly Tanzer
A Pretty Mouth***
(Lazy Fascist)


Joseph Spencer
Grim
(Damnation)
vs.
Lou Morgan
Blood and Feathers
(Solaris)

To see the whole bracket, click here.

Some notes on the field:

-- Classifying books before you read them is tricky, but this bracket seems to have turned out heavy on horror. We'd guess it features 7 horror novels or dark fantasies, 4 adult fantasies, 3 YA fantasies, and 2 science fiction novels.

-- 11 books are by men and 5 by women.

-- It looks like 11 of the books are stand-alones, 3 begin a new series, and 2 continue an existing series.

-- As far as publishers, 3 books came to us from Solaris, 2 from Pyr, 2 from Damnation and 1 each from Penguin; Random House; Little, Brown; DAW; Mascherato; Vagabondage; CreateSpace; Infinity; and Lazy Fascist.

Good luck to all our contenders! Let the new bracket of book battles begin!