When I was a kid, one of my favorite things to do on a summer day was to go with my mom to the New England Mobile Book Fair. The Book Fair was an amazing, enormous wholesaler Book warehouse in my town (Newton, MA), where you could look up books in an enormous database (or when I was really young, a HUGE book) that told you who the publisher was. The warehouse was set up by publisher, and all of the books cost less than […]
You Got Me Readin’ Hell’s Bells
Dave Eggers has written that his mother read a horror novel every night. “I couldn’t look at her books,” he wrote. “[I] would turn them over so their covers wouldn’t show, the raised lettering and splotches of blood–especially the V.C. Andrews oeuvre, those turgid pictures of those terrible kids, standing so still, all lit in blue.” If that was ever true of Grady Hendrix, great enthusiast of and advocate for grim books, it’s not now. The author of Horrorstor has put out a celebration of the kind […]
The first half of this book is excellent, the second half a little less so.
So I did the audio on this one, and I definitely think that affected my reading, for the better. Will Patton is a good narrator (he’s the same one who narrated the Bill Hodges trilogy). Sometimes books are significantly affected by a good or bad audiobook narrator, so I just wanted to say up front that I think that is going on here for me, and I think you should know that going in. I probably would have been less forgiving without the audio. Some slight […]
The Way Out Is Through
An under-remarked facet of Stephen King’s genius is his eye. Like John Updike or Joseph Conrad, he sees more than we do, then carefully sets down what he sees, until a bright yellow bra strap or red lips moving in a black goatee become sharp, silvery hooks. Try and free yourself. The Outsider, in which that eye sees quite a bit, is at least two novels, imperfectly grafted. The first–and best–centers on a Little League baseball coach arrested for a terrible violation: the rape and murder […]
Monstrously creepy and I loved it
I read Shibuyama’s review of The Merry Spinster before I got into the book and braced myself for horror. I don’t like horror (I get nightmares easily, apparently) but I’d heard good things and still wanted to read it. This was a case of bracing myself and then it really not being as bad as I was thinking so yay! Played the expectations game and won. It helped that the book opens with a retelling of Hans Christian Anderson’s Little Mermaid, the OG little mermaid which is […]
Murky and Dim
This Fritz Leiber novel, published in 1977, seems both of and outside of its time. It appeared after The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, and Carrie, three books that reinvigorated the genre, but it reaches back to earlier traditions. The slim but still overly long novel tells of Franz Westen, a San Francisco resident who catches sight, through his binoculars, of a strange form. After some scene-setting, he sets off to track the creature down. Looking back at his apartment through those same binoculars, he’s startled to […]
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