Blog: Sleeping Beauties

Stephen and Owen King's Sleeping Beauties begins with with a strange sleeping sickness occurring across the globe, women are falling asleep and not waking up, in fact, if disturbed in any way they get murderous and then immediately fall back asleep. With no end in sight society begins to shift, falling apart in some places and pulling together in others.

Much of the novel takes places in one small town affected by the sleeping epidemic, and the nearby women's prison. Following law enforcement we begin on night one and therefore a large part of the early chapters follow women attempting to not fall asleep.

The novel builds at a really nice pace and even the crazy things that occur later in the book (this is co-written by Stephen King after all), feel like they come from a logical (sometimes deranged logic) position.

A thrilling story that merges fairy tales with pulse pounding thrills - well worth a look.

Movie Review: IT

So anytime I decide to see the film adaptation of a book I particularly like, here are my fears:

1) The movie will be so faithful to the book that there was no point in seeing it
2) The movie is so different from the book that there was no point in calling it the same title
3) They won't have my favourite parts
4) The won't have cast whoever I think should have got the role
5) The producer/writer/director will have simply missed the point

Having just seen the previous Stephen King adaption - The Dark Tower (and it fulfilled worries 2, 3, and 5) I was really nervous going into IT, a long-time favourite of mine, and one that has already been adapted (and that I saw as a kid when it originally aired), luckily, I didn't need to be worried.

IT was pretty darn great, the story was well-told, the scares were incredible, and I was really impressed by all of the performances. A Horror film focusing on the value of friendship has a difficult road to walk, but this one did it incredibly well.

I could get into spoilers, but instead I'll simply state that I was simply shocked the whole way through with how much I liked the film as a movie, not just a horror movie, but a movie overall. This may end up being the first Horror movie I'll decide to own since It Follows back in 2014.

Well worth the watch!

Movie Review: The Dark Tower

So let's begin with the fact that I'm a pretty big fan of The Dark Tower series.

1) I referred to the series in one of my very first posts on this blog
2) I've read my way through the series and its connected books twice
3) I've led my wife, my kids, and my sci-fi loving best friend to read their own ways through the series
4) I read my way through Peter David's excellent adaptation for Marvel Comics and get overly excited every time the Dark Tower is referred to in any of Stephen King's other books.
5) Even though the first book was basically a modified Western and I hated westerns as a kid (because my Mom liked them - read more here) I could not stop reading it and HAD to see what happened in the sequel.

So yeah, I think it's fair to say I was looking forward to the movie every time I head it was going to be made and especially this year when it finally got a release date.

I saw the film yesterday with my wife and kids and here are my first impressions:

1) Why did they make this film version a YA adaptation of the source material?
2) Why is one of the secondary characters now the main character?
3) Why did they have to front load a ton of exposition for a story that really needs to build slowly?
4) Why have you taken two talented actors and given them such a muddled script to work with?
5) Why, having given up on the idea of a faithful adaptation, did you have to slip in the first line of the first book both in the middle of the film and with no connection in any way to the narrative?
6) a;ds lkfj;aldf (sorry, I just face-planted into my keyboard)...

Okay - I liked the performances by both leads, the production values was pretty great and the Easter Eggs were a fun diversion, but in the end - why? Why did they take such an interesting story and turn it into a 95 minute shoot-em-up which ignored almost every aspect of the first three books in the series?

In conclusion the film doesn't make me less of a fan of The Dark Tower series, but will likely make it much harder for me to sell others on this great book series in future.

Book Review: The Onion Girl

When reading any series, in any genre, you eventually come across a book that works to put everything you've read together, showing you a perspective on the world you haven't seen before, sometimes this happens quite early (like Stephen King's The Drawing of the Three - book two of his Dark Tower series, or Louis L'Amour's The Sackett Brand - book five of his series focusing on the Sackett family).

For me, Charles de Lint does this in his tenth book focusing on his fiction city of Newford The Onion Girl, which focuses finally and specifically on artist/waitress/fierce woman Jilly Coppercorn, and finally grants her the wish she's had in all of his books, to see the world of magic; of course, seeing the larger world has it's own costs as well...

The book begins with Jilly awakening after a hit-and-run car accident, stuck in a hospital bed and in significant pain, and as she is now the person who needs support, all of her friends (and many of the leads from previous de Lint novels and short stories), rally around her in her time of need. But the accident, which seems to have put a complete stop to her life in Newford, seems to have awoken something else in her, as she now begins to travel in the realm of the spirits while sleeping, letting her see true magic, but also potentially stopping her from focusing on her life in Newford.

As a parallel story, the book introduces Raylene Carter, a woman with a history similar to Jilly's and who took a decidedly different path. Raylene is fun, brash, and more than a little dangerous, and her story was a really nice counterpoint to Jilly's.

The novel does include a previously released short story "In the House of my enemy" (1993), which fits nicely in the narrative and gives necessary backstory to readers new to de Lint's work.

A great book

Book Review: End of Watch

Following up his books Mr. Mercedes (2014) and Finders Keepers (2015), Stephen King's End of Watch is his third to feature retired detective (William) Bill Hodges and although the first two in the series skewed towards Mystery and Thriller rather than Supernatural Horror, the latest book could easily been seen as a gateway novel for his new mystery fans to see some of the dark fantasy elements that can be found through a large part of his fiction overall.

As with Cell (2006), End of Watch does touch on fears of new technology and specifically the ubiquitous nature of a type of technology in our modern world, but the book focuses quite nicely on character and a mystery for the main plot, both of which work quite well, and build to an exciting game of cat and mouse between Bill and the books antagonist.

A lot of fun as well as a good gateway read for mystery and thriller fans.

Bookmonkey x Penguin Horror Day 30: American Supernatural Tales

The final book in the collection, American Supernatural Tales, edited by S.T. Joshi, is a really fun way to round out the collection.  Using short stories involving the supernatural from as far back as the early 1800s with Washington Irving (the fellow who wrote both Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow) and moving right up to recent Bram Stoker ward winners like Stephen King and Caitlin R. Kiernan, the title works to introduce reads to some really great stuff as well as showing how the form has changed over the last nearly 200 years.

For me, horror has always worked best as a short story, pulling off terror and horror over the extended form of the novel can be trickily at best and tedious at worst.  This doesn't mean I'm not a fan of horror novels, it just means tat if you grabbed a bunch of horror short stories and a bunch of horror novels at random, I think you would find a high count of great ones in the short story collection.

The book obtains a lot of stories by personal favourite authors, like Fritz Lieber, Richard Matheson, and Caitlin R. Kiernan.  A great introduction to some really scary stuff and a fine way to round out the imprint.

Book Review: Mr. Mercedes

Late last week I read the new Stephen King novel Mr. Mercedes and really enjoyed it.  The novel, more a thriller than a horror (although to be fair the opening chapter is pretty horrific), focused on a retired police detective named Bill Hodges who finds himself being literally taunted by the perpetrator of an unsolved crime from years ago.

The novel quickly introduces the criminal and alternating chapters show the cat and mouse game being played between retired detective Hodges and Mr. Mercedes (the name given to the criminal by the press due to his use of a mercedes in a spree killing he committed years ago).

What I liked best about the novel was both the fast pace at which it moved (I read the book in little over a day and a half), and the great characters introduced throughout.  Hodges comes across as a really interesting character and the villain is one of the most disturbed individuals I've read about in a long time (and I tend to average at least one horror novel a month, so that's saying something).

Definitely worth the read, and on June 10 the Author mentioned on his twitter feed that this is intended to be the first book in a trilogy.

Catching up on the genre classics: Necroscope

I've been seeing them since I started getting into horror fiction back in Junior High, while looking through the horror section at bookstore for the newest Stephen King or Clive Barker, they've always been patiently sitting on the shelf, knowing that at some point I would inevitably get around to trying them out.  Well, today is that day (or yesterday, to be more precise).  I've finally started reading Brian Lumley's horror series, Necroscope.

I'll happily admit that a big part of what has kept me away but interested all these years is the bizarre cover art by George Underwood (see left), which shows both a skull with tendrils moving through it and a man lit in blue in the background with his eyes closed.  As a kid, the cover images for the series (almost twenty titles), were both fascinating and horrifying, so much so that I could never quite give the series a chance, even while I was picking my way back and froth through some other pretty horrific stuff as the mood took me.

Last year while on a used-bookstore trip with my BFF Mike I finally picked up the first book as a trade for some titles I was getting rid of, and it's sat on my "to be read" shelf ever since.  Until yesterday when I decided to finally give the book a shot.

So I'm now about 200 pages into the title and it's pretty great - the whole thing is a strange Cold War era battle between agencies in Britain and the USSR between psychics - kind of a proto-Nightwatch if you will, and follows two psychics with some pretty disturbing abilities as they make their way through life.

Oh yeah and those skull tendrils on the cover the unnerved me so much as a kid?  Yup, that's actually a pretty good representation of something one of the psychics in the book can do - Yikes!

I'm not finished book one yet, but so far it's a pretty fast and fun read, so there you go.

Book Review: Doctor Sleep, by Stephen King

The Shining was one of the first adult horror novels I ever read – coming before it were Carrie (I chose it because it was really short), Salem’s Lot (Vampires!), and Firestarter (because how can you beat a title like that?), but the more of these books I read the more I needed to read. I read The Shining for the first time in grade eight, and I’ve got to say, the book really stuck with me.

I don’t know if it was the idea of this creepy hotel, or the claustrophobic feel the whole novel quickly began to build, but at the time it really unnerved me, especially as the lead was a five-year-old boy with some telepathic powers (called The Shining in the novel), desperate to save his family from the horrors of The Overlook Hotel.

By the way, if you’ve never read The Shining, you should definitely pick it up. Although the 1980 film has a lot in common with the original novel, the book is much, much scarier.

So decades later and in my late 30s, I pick up Stephen King’s newest book, Doctor Sleep, which follows Dan Torrence, the now grown five-year-old from the original novel, and his involvement with a deranged family that hunt for other kids with The Shining – and not to help them out.

I really don’t want to give away plot points for the book (It’s been on shelves for a few weeks at the point I’m writing this post), but it is well worth the cost and not just to see how things worked out for Dan. The new villains in the book are some of the more terrifying I’ve come across in recent fiction – except for Charlie Manx from Joe Hill’s NOS4A2 (which also has connections with this book), and it was incredibly hard for me to put down when I needed to be working or visiting with friends and family.

R.I.P. Richard Matheson

For those of you who have reading my blog for a while now, you know that I've actually spent the last few years reading the works of Richard Matheson at the rate of one book a month since July of 2011 - I finished earlier this year and one of my favourite aspects of his work was just how varied it was - everything from Science Fiction to Westerns, Mysteries and Crime Fiction to Horror and his own views on the afterlife, Matheson's work always impressed me, from both the basic ways in which his stories worked, to the incredible ideas he came up with.

I couldn't possibly give a list of my favourite novels written by the author as they are so different from each other it's virtually impossible to compare and contrast them.

The stories are great - whether you like WWII stories, straight up Horror or romance, he has stuff that would appeal to you, (My BFF Mike will happily point out that he wrote the original series Star Trek episode The Enemy Within), and I've barely even mentioned his work in television.

In my adult life I've worked my way through the complete fiction of maybe a dozen authors; everyone from Robert B. Parker (Thrillers), to Pierre Berton (Canadian Non-Fiction and History), to Elmore Leonard (pretty much everything), but I can honestly say that Matheson is one of my favourites of the whole bunch - his work was massively influential (Stephen King is quoted as calling Matheson "...the author who influenced me most as a writer"), filled with interesting and intriguing ideas and great characters, and most importantly, a whole lot of great reads.

Genre Character of the Week: Margaret Leigh

As a soon-to-be librarian myself, I’ve always been a sucker for librarians in fiction.  Whether the love interested of a time traveler on a mission in Stephen King’s 11/22/63 or the supportive mentor for a young girl in trouble in Jo Walton’s Among Others, I simply start to smile when any book I’m reading introduces a librarian as a character, rather than simply a stereotype.

In Joe Hill’s NOS4A2, that librarian is Margaret Leigh, and unlike a lot of fictional librarians I can think of, she has a pretty unique ability.

The problem is, I really don’t want to spoil any of the story of NOS4A2 – which went on sale yesterday, as the book is just so darn good. In simplest terms, I like Margaret because she comes across as a three-dimensional character, and even though there are shades of the mythical Cassandra in her, she seems very much a person with her own identity.

The novel follows a young woman, Victoria McQueen, through an incredibly dark experience in her childhood and then races forward to her own parenting years and puts her in an even darker spot, as this time her child is at risk.

The novel is definitely Dark Fantasy, is clearly influenced by the works of Stephen King (in a great way), and had me putting an immediate hold on the only Joe Hill book I haven’t read so far, his 2010 Novel, Horns.

Things I've noticed: It's time to start hunting for new comics

When it comes to comic books I’m mostly a trade paperback kind of guy, where a collection of 4-10 issues are bound together, sometimes have a nice introduction written and often include notes by the author after the final issue.  But I’ve got to admit there is something nice about a continuing monthly story.

For the last few years I’ve been collecting one or two comic book series issue-by-issue: The Dark Tower, and The Stand, both published through Marvel comics, both adaptations of Stephen King novels I love.  With the adaptation of the The Stand wrapping up a few months back, and The Dark Tower series, catching up to the stories I’ve read in the original novels, I’m feeling it’s time for me to start looking for a new series to follow, issue-by-issue.

Right now I don’t really know where to start – my youngest daughter likes Batman, so if I get those I’ll probably get two readings out of each issue I purchase, but at the same time there are a heck of a lot of Batman and Batman-related titles out there.

Anyway, I don’t really have an idea of which series I’ll be going for, but I’m going to make sure to list whatever ends up gracing my (very small) single-issue comic book space at home.  For the record, the last time I went mainstream was back in 2000 when I collected Brian K. Vaughn’s run on Swamp Thing, featuring the original swamp things daughter, Tefe Holland. (who, come to think of it, would be a great Genre Character of the Week), so I’ve set the bar pretty high for myself there.

Book Review: The Wind Through the Keyhole

Long-time readers of my blog will know I've got a soft spot for Stephen King, and specifically for this Dark Tower series, which happens to be one of my favourite fantasy series of all time (actually I suppose it might be my favourite Fantasy/Horror/Science Fiction series of all time, but I reserve the right to change that as I go along).  So when the book The Wind Through the Keyhole came out a few months back, I was cautious, but excited.


Cautious because the book is one of those "in-between" novels, which would fit between books four and five of the main series, and those are always a bit of a harder sell for me - I mean, I already know how everything worked out, why exactly do I care about an event that happened between the books I read five and six books back (the series overlaps with almost eighteen other books by the author, so to read the entire story you are looking at about a 22-book commitment).


Excited because these are some of my favourite characters in genre fiction and I was really excited to revisit them.


So in a nutshell - the book is great - it tells a story within a story within a story, and then brings you out again, sort of like Cloud Atlas, but with much more Dark Tower-y goodness.


The story is packed with action, thrills and enough robotics that I think my BFF Mike would like it (I got him to read the whole Dark Tower series, tie-ins and all a few years back and he liked that too!), and if you are a fan you should totally check it out.


If you haven't read any Dark Tower stories yet, go back to The Gunslinger.  It's totally worth your time and leads to an amazing series.

Book Review: Book of the Dead

One of my favourite things about reading any kind of story is the fact that it came from somewhere, and not just the mind of the author, but often something the author read, saw or experienced led to the creation of the story.

In zombie apocalypse literature, that story is Night of the Living Dead (1968), the George Romero black and white classic that really changed popular cultures perception of zombies from people under a voodoo curse to the reanimated corpses risen from the grave we all know now.

In 1989 Editors John Skipp and Craig Spector put together The Book of the Dead, a collection of zombie apocalypse stories inspired by the classic George Romero film.  Contributors included Stephen King, Robert R. McCammon, Richard Laymon and more.  In terms of zombie apocalypse literature, this short story collection is really where it all started.

It is important to say that these stories are incredibly graphic, stomach-turning and filled with sex and violence.  Honestly a large number of these stories were incredibly hard for me to get through and I'm a big fan of zombie stories - without going into too much detail, lets just say there are more than a few zombies that do stuff you'd rather not think about in these stories.

The stand out for me, and the reason I'm glad my wife got me the book (It had been sitting on my used-bookstore watch-list for five years before I gave up the hope of finding it and asked for her help) is the Robert R. McCammon story Eat Me.  It won the 1989 Bram Stoker award for best short fiction and honestly, after reading a number of nihilistic stories about the undead taking over the earth, it was a surprisingly beautiful tale that really blew me away.

The book (again not for the faint of heart) is really something anyone who likes to claim loves zombie stories should read - I know from personal experience that it's hard to find, but trust me, it is totally worth the effort.

Book Review: 11/22/763

A quick one this week as I've had a lot of school work (all right and Dead Space work (SORRY!)) on my plate.

Stephen King's 11/22/63 is a pretty cool book - rather than his usual horror fare, this is more of a time travel fantasy story, like Richard Matheson's Somewhere in Time, or Replay by Ken Grimwood (both of which are also excellent time travel stories). In a way, it reminded me most of Diana Gabaldon's Outlander, in that the time travel aspect isn't science-driven and the story focuses more on romance and character than on concept.

The story in a nutshell, High School English teacher Jake Epping is introduced to a hole in time where he can travel to 1958, allowing him to change history. The catch, every trip resets the history changed from the previous trip, and it always begins in 1958 - so when Jake decides to save Kennedy in Dallas he has to live for five years in the late fifties and early sixties to get his shot.

The story is fun, clever and was a huge demmand on my time (well, the book and some space zombies). The book is relatively new, so it may be a while before you can get it from your libraries or in paperback, but it is a lot of fun and definitely worth the read.

Book Review: A Dark Matter

The 2010 winner of the Bram Stoker Award for best novel was A Dark Matter, by Peter Straub. Having been a huge fan of the author from my first exposure to his works (The Talisman, which he co-authored with Stephen King in 1984) I can’t promise you an unbiased review, but hopefully a good one.

The book is kind of a mix of Rashamon (a Japanese film where an event was told and re-told from various points of view) and a faustian tale where someone makes a deal and ends up getting much more than they initially hoped.

The narrator is a novelist named Lee Hayward, who has been affected by an event he didn’t participate in from his childhood that involved each of his best friends (including the girl who would end up being his wife). The novel follows Lee as he attempts to put together exactly what happened on a day in 1966 when four of his friends accompanied some college kids and a sort of cult leader-type to try and perform some sort of ritual which ended up causing the death of one of the college kids and the disappearance of another.

The story works by describing the events from the point of views of each of the people involved and although they all describe the same event, there are some significantly telling differences between the versions we read. In the end the novel definitely spooked me, gave me some chills and then actually left me with a strange sense of hope. Totally worth the read.

Book Review: The Gunslinger

For one of my book clubs this week we chose The Gunslinger, by Stephen King. Friends of mine from Junior High (when I went through my first Stephen King mania) will remember me going on and on about how cool this book was, even though it was sort of a western. Friends from five years ago (when I read The Dark Tower series as well as all connected books over the course of a year) will recall me going on and on about the mythic feel of the book and the impressive structure of the story - for instance the fact that the first part of the first story in The Gunslinger is actually told backwards; While chasing the man in black across the desert, Roland recalls his last meeting with another person, and while there he discussed his actions in his last town, etc.

But today I'm just going to talk about how much I love this book.

First of all - until I saw Firefly years later, this was the first time I can remember a cross-genre book wherein one of the genres was a western.

Secondly, the mythic and dream-like qualities of the book are pretty amazing, the world inhabited by the gunslinger has modern day (well, 1981) references, high tech machinery (and robots if you read the 2003 revision), as well as a connection to King Arthur and Merlin.

Finally, This bizarre fantasy/Horror/SF/Western series is so good I got my SF loving BFF Mike to read it and he really liked it!

Genre Character of the week: Jimmy Blackburn

While looking through my old horror novels for this week's genre character, I came across the 1993 novel Blackburn by Bradley Denton. For those of you out there who have never read the book, it is pretty freakin' awesome. This week, we're looking at the main character, Jimmy Blackburn.

The novel is basically a character study. We look into what exactly creates a serial killer, from the killers point of view. Jimmy grows up in a small town in Kansas, is abused by his father and at an early age and as a result gets one of the strongest moral codes I have ever seen. He simply holds on to what is fair, and punishes what is unfair.

As Jimmy travels the country, he meets some really awful people and by the end of the book you (the reader) begin to appreciate his simple, black and white version of the world and how he goes about making things right.

The book is a very fast read (I think it took me an afternoon), but definitely stays with you, as the book also includes a significant amount of humour. Kind of like Stephen King did in his book The Dead Zone with the character Johnny Smith (wherein the author attempted to get the reader to understand the point of view of an assassin), Bradley Denton does a great job getting the reader to understand the simple and straightforward values of his main character.

In a horror sub-genre (Serial killer as main character) filled with a lot of crude and vicious people, Jimmy stands out as someone you can sympathize with and (almost) relate to; a fact that makes the book pretty chilling.

Keeping on top of Genre, the Weeklies

Last Friday I began looking at my process of keeping up-to-date with Genre news, focusing on my daily schedule. When it comes to keeping on top of genre news each week, there are a few websites I stop at and a bit of housekeeping to do.

The Websites:

Mania.com

Mania.com actually used to be Cinescape - the websites connected to the genre magazine of the same name. The focus is largely on SF, but they do give some space to comics, horror, fantasy and manga. The site itself breaks news down into different categories - lets users add scoops they've found elsewhere and (thankfully) allows you to search past articles. I probably could spend a lot more than just a weekly visit there - but as I try to balance my obsessiveness with my regular life, I just visit the site at lunch of Fridays.

Author Sites

One of my favourite things about Web 2.0 is that many authors not only have websites, but also have conversations with fans on those sites. I follow a number of Author sites (my favourite two are NeilGaiaman.com and StephenKing.com), which allow me to keep up with news about upcoming books or even short stories appearing in other books, but following these sites also point me to other authors and films I really dig (It was a mention by both Stephen King and Peter David in the same week that first sent me over to Robert B. Parker).

The Process:

Throughout the week I take notes on upcoming stories or movies I'm interested in (usually on whatever I'm using for a bookmark at the moment), and at the end of the week I've got to put it all together (pictured left). Basically it breaks down as follows:

Books:

Any upcoming book I've noted down gets checked out at fantastic fiction, as they usually have the relsease date noted - then I'll email the titles and dates to myself.

Comics:

As there is so much going on in the world of Comics - I do my best to follow bloggers and word of mouth (at one of my book clubs last week, the titles Unwritten and Chew were mentioned so I'll follow them up this weekend). Basically I start by seeing if my library has a copy (why pay if you can get it for free) and if not I'll look for online reviews. Any comics that I can find through friends or at the library get requested, the rest get emailed to myself.

Movies:

I use an online movie rental service called zip.ca - it's similar to Netflix in the States. You create a queue of movies you'd like to see and as they become available you are mailed them. Zip allows you to put movies on hold as soon as they get into the theatre. This allows me to keep a list of all the movies I'd like to see on someone elses site and ensures I don't miss out on as many as I did before we started using zip.

Whew - that's a lot of compiling I do each week - it never seems that big until you start explaining it. Next Friday we'll look at my monthly regime.

Things I've Noticed #7: The 5 Reasons Horror Fiction Rocks

A couple weeks ago I spent almost an entire post explaining why I hated Scott Smith's The Ruins. As we have now entered October, I figured it might be a good idea to explain some things I love about Horror Fiction.

1. It's pretty much the only genre that allows you to kill off your main character - yes, I know, people die tearfully in dramas and often in action and mystery books, but for the most part, your main character is a guaranteed survivor - unless you're reading horror and then all bets are off.

2. Shorter is often better - Short Stories seem to be a natural place for Horror, I think it's easier to ramp up the tension and really get the fear going when the story is less than 50 pages. Even when I think of my favourite horror novelists, Stephen King and Richard Matheson, both of them excel at the short story.

3. It can even work when you know how it will end - case in point, I read Psycho by Robert Bloch two years ago - and even though I had seen the movie and knew the entire story, the book seriously gave me a case of the heebie jeebies.

4. Horror is not often considered literature - and sometimes that suits me just fine - I read a lot of books that are good for me, but every once in a while it is nice to just read something that has an incredibly high "Cool" factor. Also, since it is not considered literature, more people are willing to talk to you about it.

5. Horror is an emotion - so it can show up in any genre. I've read horror westerns (Track of the Cat), Horror Fantasy (Night's Master), Horror SF (The Sheep Look Up) and tonnes more. Unlike other genres, horror can easily sneak up on you anywhere - and when it mixes with comedy (my personal favourite), you get something very cool!

I think the reason I love horror is simple; I like getting an emotional reaction from the stuff I read, and really good horror can leave you a little scared for a long time.