Haunting the Dead

Rating:
Summary: Pleasant way to pass your time
Review: Haunting the Dead is a collection of four novellas - all telling tales of the Orpheus Group, an organization (set in White Wolf's World of Darkness, presumably) that deals with ghosts, and employs agents who can either project themselves to the other side or are ghost themselves. "The Grass is Always Greener" by Stefan Petrucha deals with a haunted dormitory and a group of students assembled to take drugs and listen to a mysterious TV broadcast. Or...are they? This one only indirectly deals with Orpheus and from an outsider's viewpoint. "Eurydice" deals with Orpheus full bore, the only one of the four stories to do so, and exposes its corporate bureaucratic underbelly. One agent, Anders, with suicidal tendencies, loses his living girlfriend and has to wonder if life is worth living...when he knows his dead girlfriend's spirit is waiting for him to join him. "Dia de Los Muertos" has an agent and her ghost-partner investigating a haunted construction site and finds an Aztec cult tied into the overall menace threatening Orpheus. (Several Kolchak: Night Stalker in-jokes can be found in this one.) And "Corridors" mixes different times and places within a hotel as a new Orpheus agent/experiment wakes up to find the "big threat" and its minions overrunning the place. All four stories are tied together by the common thread of some big supernatural menace on the other side taking out Orpheus and its agents. As noted above, all four of the stories are a bit open-ended and there's no real resolution at the end. Still, all four of the stories are entertaining and I'd recommend them to those interested in stories of the supernatural guaranteed to keep you flipping the pages.

Rating:
Summary: A good read for Orpheus fans
Review: I enjoyed all four of the stories in this book. Some of the things in it did seem to go against certain things in the core rulebook, however. Still, the stories are great, and I strongly recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: A good read for Orpheus fans
Review: I enjoyed all four of the stories in this book. Some of the things in it did seem to go against certain things in the core rulebook, however. Still, the stories are great, and I strongly recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: Back off man, I'm an agent...
Review: Interesting, I have to say, though the stories seem to end with little overall resolution. Obviously, the fiction here needs to set up a situation and break it down, leave some loose ends (it is marketing for a product, after all), and some story threads are quite interesting... However, each of the stories only achieves a minor resolution -- though in terms of individual characters, some resolutions resolve character arcs. There is so much left open and unanswered, however, possibly too much.

To back up, apparently, there is a Ghostbusters style organization (they even have computer servers named Spengler, Stanz, Zeddemore, etc) dedicated to investigation and resolution of ghostly phenomenon, for a profit. Its agents can -- either through psychic power or scientific motivation -- detach their souls from their bodies. These four novellas explore several aspects of this organization -- both as a threat and a victim.

The first novella (Greener on the Other Side) is the story of several youths who get together to drop a new drug and watch a strange, pirate broadcast... A situation that gets pretty ugly after a couple of twists.

The second novella (Euridice) involves a widowed agent who discovers that his wife (a psychic Orpheus agent) may have been killed by the very organization they are working for...

The third novella (Dia de Los Muertos) finds a rookie and experienced agent answering the highest level of distress call in the newly opened Orpheus branch in Guadalahara.

The fourth novella (Corridors) finds a man, who volunteered for a spiritual experiment with the Orpheus group, trapped inside a strange hotel, with its equally strange inhabitants -- both dead and alive.

Interesting premises, interesting stories, but they would have been stronger with a more definitive resolutions...

Rating:
Summary: Back off man, I'm an agent...
Review: Interesting, I have to say, though the stories seem to end with little overall resolution. Obviously, the fiction here needs to set up a situation and break it down, leave some loose ends (it is marketing for a product, after all), and some story threads are quite interesting... However, each of the stories only achieves a minor resolution -- though in terms of individual characters, some resolutions resolve character arcs. There is so much left open and unanswered, however, possibly too much.

To back up, apparently, there is a Ghostbusters style organization (they even have computer servers named Spengler, Stanz, Zeddemore, etc) dedicated to investigation and resolution of ghostly phenomenon, for a profit. Its agents can -- either through psychic power or scientific motivation -- detach their souls from their bodies. These four novellas explore several aspects of this organization -- both as a threat and a victim.

The first novella (Greener on the Other Side) is the story of several youths who get together to drop a new drug and watch a strange, pirate broadcast... A situation that gets pretty ugly after a couple of twists.

The second novella (Euridice) involves a widowed agent who discovers that his wife (a psychic Orpheus agent) may have been killed by the very organization they are working for...

The third novella (Dia de Los Muertos) finds a rookie and experienced agent answering the highest level of distress call in the newly opened Orpheus branch in Guadalahara.

The fourth novella (Corridors) finds a man, who volunteered for a spiritual experiment with the Orpheus group, trapped inside a strange hotel, with its equally strange inhabitants -- both dead and alive.

Interesting premises, interesting stories, but they would have been stronger with a more definitive resolutions...