Lowly’s Book Blog

The editor wants 5 reviews this month. I have one day left to start and finish a book. From the dozens that are waiting, what do I pick? Well Charlaine Harris is never going to challenge the intellect and make me work hard, so that was the choice. And a good choice too. It only took an hour!

This is a collection of short stories based on the Sookie Stackhouse character now made famous by the TV series True Blood. The stories use all the favourite characters from the books, and the action takes place between the events in the various books. This is blatantly a book for the Sookie fans.

And why was it so quick to read? The book is less than 200 pages long, with illustrations and large print. There is literally nothing to it. Five short stories. If you are looking for a Christmas present for the diehard Sookie Stackhouse fan, then this is a must for the Christmas list, but be warned that it isn’t worth the money.

My suggestion – hold off until after Christmas when there will be hundreds of copies on sale as remainders.

One book, two authors. Yeah right, tell me that works. It can be done if the plot involves telling a story from two different points of view, but a murder mystery? Not likely.

When a New York Times reporter is brutally murdered in his apartment, NYPD is under pressure to solve the crime. Vincent D’Agosta thinks that he has everything under control, when FBI Special Agent Pendergast shows up to ‘help’. But is his help only a distraction into voodoo and black magic? Quickly the investigation leads to a hidden cult deep in the heart of Manhattan.

This book is an interesting mix of crime thriller and horror. There are zombies mixed right in with the forensic police work. Most surprising, it works. The plot is convincing and the characters ring true. The two authors successfully blend their writing style to tell one story. OK so it isn’t totally realistic. That is very obvious from the entrance of the first zombie. But the story is engaging and generally an entertaining read, just switch off the logic functions and go along for the ride.

I very rarely get the chance to read a book in one sitting, but once I started this one, there was no choice.

Jasmyn is a young woman whose life is in chaos. She has recently been married, but one day her husband Liam suddenly dies. In her grief, Jasmyn isolates herself from everyone and everything. But there seems to be some mystery involving his twin brother Ben. As she begins to restore order to her life, Jasmyn starts to investigate this undefined strangeness. The investigation leads her to Europe, and the land of fairy tales and enchantments. She uncovers a tale of murder, stolen love and deception. But who can be trusted?

Bell is very skilled at interweaving myth and reality. In his previous novel, he mingled the mythology of angels with the reality of life in a city. Here he is mixing the cultural icons of magic and mythology with the reality of modern life and love. His craftsmanship is superb. The characters remain true and yet when the end is revealed, the reader wonders how on earth they missed all the clues. Probably they were missed because the story itself is so engaging that there isn’t time to stop and wonder about the meaning of all the little inconsistencies of life.

Jasmyn is simply one of the best books that I have read in a very long time.

The last time I was brave (or silly) enough to review a book by this author, it was only hours before her legion of fans from the States raised an outcry. Well, the mailbox is empty and here I go again.

Remember that Sookie is, or was, a lonely girl from Louisiana who had a special talent – the ability to read minds. This talent made it very difficult for her to be friends with anyone until the vampire Bill entered her life.

Dead and Gone is the ninth book in the series, and so the story has moved on. Bill is out, Eric is in. Sam is a Were, and apparently Sookie is part ‘faerie’. Got that? Well, in this book life gets a little more complicated when the Weres ‘come out’. Suddenly the humans in town are feeling very threatened and react in that good ol’ Southern style – kill them all. And then of course Sookie gets caught in the faerie wars!

I am sorry, but the Charlaine Harris fan club is going to be up in arms again. By book 9, Harris has lost all credibility with this reviewer. The plot is silly and contrived. It is not an imitation of the Twilight series, because Meyer knew when to stop. Harris is milking her series for all it is worth. She has dragged in so many different magical and mythical beings now that there are no humans left! Gee, even Buffy knew that the audience needs someone remotely normal to share their point of view.

How many more books are in this series? Too many more and I will be cheering for Katrina to come again.

It is always so hard to review a collection of short stories. It is almost impossible to maintain the reader’s interest every time. And many modern authors depend on literary symbolism and other conventions to help them tell the story while reducing the word count.

But Stephen King is unashamedly a popular author. He will never win a literature prize. He is happy to write for his readers, meeting them at their own level and carrying them away in the story. This he does very successfully in this collection of 12 stories.

Picking my favourite from this collection is hard. I actually rationed my reading in this book. Only 1 story a day. And as a result, I thoroughly enjoyed every single story. Each one is very different, but all delicious.

Probably it would be best to compare this book to The Twilight Zone, not the silly 70s remake, but the original Rod Serling series. Each week a strange tale would be revealed, some scifi, some horror, and some just spooky. But each week you lined up for more.

This book is very much like that series. King’s tribute to 9/11, The Things They Left Behind, was warm and personal, but with generous lashings of the supernatural. Willa is really a love story, but with a twist that verges on the macabre. 

I am very glad that King has returned to writing short stories. I just hope he continues.

Interesting read. A little horror, a little romance, a whole lot of police procedural, well kind of, and simply a good read. I think I like this new series of books from Saintcrow.

But I should begin at the beginning. Jill Kismet is a special assistant to the police. She is a Hunter, specially trained to deal with demons, and all forms of hellbreeds. She has been trained by the best, and a good thing too, because her city keeps her very busy, fighting at night and investigating by day. As this story opens, something strange is loose and cops are dying. Jill is determined to stop it, them, whatever it is. What follows is an action adventure that is refreshingly different from many of the other gothic horrors that I have read in the last 12 months.

Saintcrow doesn’t waste a lot of time clearly identifying her evil creatures, vampire, demon, and everything evil is simply hellbreed. Weres can be any animal, not just a wolf, and generally they have established rules and move freely around human society. This provides her with a simple platform to simply get into the action and the adventure. Mostly the good guys and the bad guys are nice and obvious. But our Hunter is definitely a shade of grey.

I really enjoyed reading this book. It never took itself too seriously. Unfortunately however, I doubt very much that I will ever have the time to continue with the series. However, if you are interested, I believe book two is available.

Until I started this book reviewing stuff, I never actually read much horror. But publishers seem to be sending me significant amounts, and I am discovering the variety of work within the genre fascinating.

Alex Scarrow is an established author of thrillers. Biographical information is very sketchy, but he does have a blog that he sporadically expands that reveals an interesting mind behind the publicist description of a man with a ‘nomadic lifestyle with his wife and son.’

But first the book. The year is 1856 and two small groups of Americans are heading west across the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains in search of adventure and a new life. The two groups decide to travel together only to reduce the chance of Indian trouble. Together the party numbers about 130. But one group is made up of religious fanatics, almost a breakaway cult of the Mormon church. The others are a general gathering of settlers seeking a better life among them an Arabic migrant family, a southern gentleman traveling with his Negro wife and a single young Brit from the wealthy middle classes out to see the world before returning home to a medical career. By the time they leave the safety of the eastern states it is late spring, and many predict that they will never get across the mountains before winter.

But their guide knows a shortcut, not very wagon friendly, but these remote mountain passes should make it possible to get to Oregon before winter takes hold. But weeks into the journey one of the Mormon wagons breaks down and since the religious party refuses to leave anyone behind, the whole group is forced to wait until a temporary repair is accomplished. And you know it, the temporary repair cannot stand up to the rough country involved in the ’shortcut’. But finally, late September, and the whole group is finally over the high pass when it begins to snow and snow and snow. Winter arrives early. And none of them are ever heard from again. Until Julian Cooke stumbles across a rotting wagon wheel in 2008. Further searching locates a diary, and suddenly he decides to shelve the boring documentary he was filming in favour of this mysterious disappearance. Putting together all the resources he can muster, he begins what he hopes will become a feature length docudrama. That is until people start dying.

This is a real page turner. Scarrow moves back and forth between the 1856 story behind the diary and Cooke’s investigations and their fatal consequences. The fatalities mount, possibly more rapidly in 1856, but then are they linked? Maybe the 2008 deaths are just more of the same.

I do have one objection. I think the revelation of the murderer is just a little to convenient and the links to modern times are tenuous, but believe me as you are caught up in the book, it doesn’t matter.

I met Neil Gaiman at a conference a couple months ago and I have been eager to read this book ever since. Finally I managed to get my hands on it.

On the surface the story seems very typical. A family has recently moved house. Mother and Father are too busy with their own projects to spend any time with their only daughter, and so she finds her own amusement. She considers herself an explorer, and spends her time exploring every nook and cranny of the house and immediate neighborhood. She meets the sisters next door and the man upstairs with the mouse circus. But mostly she is fascinated by the locked cupboard. And then she finds the key …

This is a very interesting book. It is certainly a horror for children, but the age of the children intended as audience is a little hard to pick. Coraline is only in primary school behaves accordingly. But I am a little uncomfortable about the level of violence and horror for primary children. The Victorian Premier’s Reading Challenge has graded it for years 7 and 8, and I think that is about right. Certainly the book’s popularity is at that level.

Horror. Not everyone’s favourite genre. This first novel from young author Joe Hill should certainly establish him within the genre.

The storyline is simple. Jude Coyne is an aging heavy metal rock star. He keeps a collection of the macabre, a snuff movie, a cannibal cookbook and all kinds of other goodies. When he sees a ghost for sale on the Internet, he knows that he has to have it.

The ghost arrives attached to an old suit. Then the trouble begins. Jude’s PA suicides, his goth girlfriend gets blood poisoning and the dogs are going crazy. But there is a strict no returns policy because it appears the ghost is the father of an old girlfriend who committed suicide after Jude broke off the relationship. This ghost will not rest until Jude and everyone near him is dead.

I decided early on in the book that I really didn’t like it. There was no subtlety to the plot, no layers of meaning. Had the author been well known, I would say that he had some urgent bills, and this book was meant to pay them and then sink into oblivion. But even though I wasn’t enjoying the read, I couldn’t stop. The pace of the story was like a runaway train, you know that you are charging towards disaster, but there is no getting off.

I didn’t discover that Joe Hill was Stephen King’s son until after I finished the book. Hmmm…the fathers in this story are all evil old men. It makes you think.

Be warned this book should certainly have an MA rating. There is lots of violence and the language is colourful.

When I selected this from the review list, I was looking for something different. I have read enough of the historical mystery/adventures in the past few weeks. I thought I was getting into a modern thriller. I was kind of right.

This is a book that tells three different stories, gently interwoven, all linked by a single evil. The modern tale is of a small group of ethics students challenging themselves with a visit to a ‘haunted house’. Upon their return all descend into madness and suicide. The brother of one of the girls is determined to save her. He seeks the assistance of the one man who has been in that house and survived. And there the second story begins. Why did Paul Seaton go to the Fischer House? But to explain that the reader has to understand what happened in 1927.

At times I felt the book lost focus. So much of it is dedicated to Paul Seaton’s backstory and then the huge blocks of Pandora’s diary from 1927. The modern story and the military hero is limited virtually to the first and last chapters. I would suggest that the reader be brought back to current times in order to develop a relationship with Sarah and Nick. Alternatively, if the book was to be about Pandora and Paul, leave it in 1927 or 1983.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not really disappointed. As a horror novel it was far more involving than others I have read recently. Cottam based his tale on the historical fascination with the supernatural that was common in the English gentry during the 1920s. All these scenes read very convincingly.

Just be warned, this book will make no sense unless you dedicate large blocks of time to it.