This book felt like an advertisement for Goodkind’s self-published prequel The First Confessor, as Goodkind ties those characters into the entire narrative for this book, which when you cut out the needless overhashing and repetition, comes to about four chapters of action.  This should have been split between this book and the next, not stretched for an entire goddamn book.  But it worked.  I’m now reading The First Confessor.  Sigh.

After Winter’s Bone, I went on a steady diet of what I call Midwestern Gothic.  Just brutal jaw-cracking asskickery set in the flyover states hugging the Mississippi River.  This is the first of the Bayou Trilogy, featuring former boxer/police detective Rene Shade and the shady denizens of St. Bruno.  This story is about those small town big fish pulling strings and popping heads with shotguns.

Guess the bookamajigger wants me to kick out some Stephen King! And lo and behold, Uncle Stevie wrote himself a detective procedural!   Which works.  JK Rowling did it, and probably a little better, but it’s still an interesting diversion.  Half the book deals with Bill Hodges, a retired detective who has gone fat on a diet of daytime television and the possible injection of his service revolver.  He’s reenergized when he gets a letter from Brady Hartsfield, the Mercedes Killer who mercilessly ran down folks […]

Jonathan Lethem has become the Avril Lavigne of hipster fiction.  This book is a confusing pastiche of disparate elements that take place in a New York that’s slightly askew from our world.  I do this in my own fiction — BUY MY BOOK — but the delineation is confusing.  It sort of peters out around 1985.  So Marlon Brando did Apocalypse Now, but then he also did The Gnuppet Movie with Florian Ib, before making a mob movie where he haranged the director as a puppeteer. […]

I thought I quit you, Terry Goodkind.  But he created cheap DLC, a tacked on extra adventure for his mammoth sprawling Ayn Randian fantasy realm.  Richard has to fight off a new evil, because his grandfather did something bad many years ago and pissed off an evil monk and now A Song of Ice and Fire is happening.  I love reading the Goodreads reviews for Goodkind, because it’s either five star praise or one star, “Why the fuck am I still reading this shit?”  I […]

I cut my teeth on Stephen King.  But I started late eighties, so I missed his start.  I can never remember which of his books I have read and I haven’t.  And while familiar with Christine — the killer car who comes to life to smite a nerdy teen’s enemies — I never actually delved into it.  It’s fascinating in conjunction with King’s prediliction for killer autos, especially when considering his old man’s perspective in From a Buick 8.