"Reality is a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there." -John Barth
by Dan Simmons “Nothing was as simple as stupid people assumed it to be.” When it’s all stripped away, are there stories more instantly likeable than coming-of-age? Some of the great books of all time use the structure, and it works perfectly because the required growth of the character is built in. Additionally these stories,... Continue Reading →
by Stephen King (as Richard Bachman) The fear I’m sure he expects. The anger… that may be a surprise. Billy, a significantly overweight lawyer, is driving while his wife spontaneously pleasures him. An old Gypsy woman steps into the street directly in front of the car and is killed, but since Billy is an upstanding... Continue Reading →
by William Peter Blatty More rooted in logic was the silence of God. Chris, successful Hollywood leading lady, lives with a couple of servants and her 12-year-old daughter, Regan. When Regan starts acting in wildly inappropriate ways, medical doctors and psychologists put her through batteries of tests to no avail. Regan’s condition worsens, to the... Continue Reading →
by Michael Talbot "You are confronting a reality you do not have the powers of conceptualization to understand." Dr. Gladstone, a Victorian gentleman deeply engaged in his study of the flu virus after losing his wife to it, discovers a strain that prohibits antigens—a virus which disallows the human body any form of self-defense. The... Continue Reading →
by Bernard Taylor "When it began there was no way of knowing that anything had begun." With a sad, despairing look back at the untold events of the last few years, we almost instantly know something went horribly wrong at the book’s opening. Then there’s the abrupt shift to a sweet, idealistic family existence where we are... Continue Reading →
by Various Authors, Michael Bailey (Ed.) I prefer it this way, on nights such as this, when it is just the ashes, the rain, and I ... and the tales the ashes tell. -Gary A. Braunbeck Winner of the 2015 Bram Stoker award for Best Anthology, The Library of the Dead is a themed anthology... Continue Reading →
by Cormac McCarthy Are you okay? he said. The boy nodded. Then they set out along the blacktop in the gun-metal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other’s world entire. Any review of this book should start with a long, slow whistle. One whose tone crawls down to the low frequencies, realizes it’s trapped... Continue Reading →
by Alexander Laing The best way to make life bearable, in such a case, certainly would be to withdraw into the imagination and to notice nothing outside. Here is the extraordinary murder mystery as narrated by a witness to most of the true events, with the names of the characters, the school, and even the... Continue Reading →
by Fritz Leiber What was the whole literature of supernatural horror but an essay to make death itself exciting?—wonder and strangeness to life’s very end. The Pale Brown Thing, a tale containing autobiographical elements, is the story of a horror writer in San Francisco, Franz Westen (Fritz Leiber?), who has a supernatural experience and attempts... Continue Reading →
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