Perry

HOW DID I FORGET TO PUT THIS ON MY LIST? I LOVED THIS BOOK!! GAH!!

This had all sorts of things I loved about it. The art grew on me, and it fit the subject matter. But this is cannibalism done right. I'm glad I decided to give it a try, because now I'm pumped about it.

Flyers, Justin, your book sucks!

Don't read this if you liked this book. Because I did NOT.

So, this was popular. And I wanted to know why everyone had a hard-on for it.

I have no clue.

I...debated last night what I would give it.

I think I actually despised it.

It really should be two books, first of all. You spend over 200 pages with the first batch of characters only to have them mostly dumped in the second half, which has almost an entirely NEW batch of characters. That was a bit jarring. In a better book, I could probably have handled it. This is not a better book.

It's actually quite deceptive, really. His writing doesn't totally suck, although I do believe his word choices now and then leave something to be desired. Sometimes, they make no sense. Sometimes, they repeat in the same paragraph. Fine.

But the plot, you say? The characters?

Really, if you've read one apocalyptic novel, you've read most of them. And this one has all the tropes, as far as I'm concerned. The group of adventurers, the bad group they meet in league with the bad guys or as BAD as the bad guys, the romances, the dialogue–all of it I've read before, and by better authors. There are little details that could have been interesting, if only the plot weren't so bloody TRITE.

And the characters. They start OUT interesting. Until they all die, and you get the new ones. The apocalyptic characters are completely bland, trite, and rather dull. The hero, Peter, who should be cool, is, frankly, rather milquetoast. His lady love is your typical B.A. gal who almost dies, but magically DOESN'T. The other characters are mostly without personality. The magical girl, Amy–kill me now. Ugh. I'm sick of magical chosen children.

And frankly–I'm sorry. A good work of literature like this is SUPPOSED to be doesn't randomly have a boss fight in which the boss is killed right away–ONLY to come back for five seconds to kill another character, who, as far as I'm concerned, the author apparently doesn't understand. Caleb the Cut-Up? There isn't any INSTANCE of that character being a cut-up at all. He's actually one of the smarter characters. AND THEN he randomly dies, just so Alicia can have her emotional mourning scene. The author just throws death out there to yank the characters–and the reader–around.

Except his characters aren't good enough to mourn. And to resort to the bad action movie trope of THE VILLAIN ISN'T DEAD YET BECAUSE HE HAS TO KILL SOMEONE, EVEN THOUGH HE GOT SHOT IN THE FACE is just mindbogglingly bad writing.

And all the poignant moments between characters? SO trite. I've read all these discussions a million times.

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Let us not neglect the completely, pointlessly arbitrary FATE in the book, that is merely a pathetic attempt to make the plot work. Some characters just get crapped on period. Others die after having this psychic thought that something ‘bad' is coming. And some characters SHOULD be dead, only to come back and make the plot work. I'm looking at YOU, Lacey. AND Jude. Some characters magically realize they have something to do, only to die pointlessly after a few pages of managing some contrived action. The fate in this book is just that–contrived. Sometimes, it's foreshadowed, such as the obsession that Richards feels for Babcock. But then Richards apparently dies, and not at the hands of Babcock? So Babcock was just Richards' red herring? Seriously? UGH.

There will surely be a sequel. It has room the size of Texas for a sequel. Yay. Another 766 pages. What the devil was the editor doing? There was so much needless BLOAT in this book. And there seemed to be rather a few loose ends, besides the obvious need to continue against the other vampire leaders.

And WTF? The ending in Roswell? Are the vampires suffering from an alien virus? Because the Latin America connection was lost in the book. And then ROSWELL? They're ALIENS? Spare me. This book sucked. It only gets two stars because he managed to deceive everyone into thinking he wrote something amazing, when it was merely meh.

I hope this doesn't determine how my reading goes this year.

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And WHHHYYYY am I not surprised Hollywood snatched it up. It was written expressly for that purpose, surely. I thought the entire time he was basically writing a ready-made crap movie. And I was right. That is the purpose of these books. And now I find also it's a sequel. Help me.

Say whatever you want. I loved it. I loved the theological ideas, as a recovering ex-Conservative Christian; I loved the tragedy. I loved the (perhaps unintentional) ideas of a woman's own sexual agency, about how men view women; in particular, our protagonist and our antagonist. Neither are perfect–the antagonist is a racist, sexist, nasty, evil, cruel, psychopathic freak, and he terrified me. I found him to be fairly realistic, if a bit extreme in his case. But I digress. The two main males suffer from viewing Merrin in the virgin/whore dichotomy, and the book seems to be aware of this. And even though the reader never gets HER p.o.v. (which seems to be part of the point), she is a fleshed-out character whose personality comes through despite the male view of her.

Also, I grew up in NH, and this...was a little too close to home, perhaps?

My main problem–fewer animal deaths, please. Sniffle.

Now, I am so ready for the movie.

I seldom read poetry. It's not that I don't like it. I simply require a context in which to put myself to properly read it. So sitting at home on my couch isn't that context. But it's what I had, so I made due. Sadly, that means I didn't give Mr Williams HIS proper due, because it would have been better had I taken him to a cemetery or the lake or something.

I discovered him totally by accident on Pandora. And I liked what I heard. And then friends recommended him to me. So I hunted down this book. And it's a lovely little book.

The poems vary in length. Some are a few pages (never very many), and some are a line or two. The shorter ones reminded me of the Waukegan Pepsodent Conundrum, by a certain G.V.–interesting, pointed, a bit obscure–but it's poetry, so you can usually infer the emotional intent.

And the emotional intent behind most, if not all, these poems, is melancholic, tragic, a bit lovelorn. One, I do believe, is about molestation, and utterly heartbreaking.

I will continue to hunt down Mr Williams' writings.

I was quite excited about this book. I waited a while to plunk down money for it. But, sadly, it wasn't really what I thought it would be, nor was it as engaging as I hoped. It was not slyly and cleverly written, as reviews on the back intimated. It was not a feast. It was difficult to slog through, actually. It was uneven and unfocused. And whilst he decided to summarize Beowulf and Blade Runner and make inaccurate assessments of certain aspects of horror, he neglected to dissect certain elements of his psychological and philosophical lingo. There are parts where one feels as though one is reading around in circles. Tell me more of what I DON'T know; don't tell me the plot of something that is a complete no-brainer.

That being said, since my education lacks in certain sciences (due to a highly conservative Christian education), I was interested in information with which I was not familiar. It gave me a brief introduction to things I didn't know I wanted to know. And so, I don't really regret reading it, problematic as it is.

Also awkward. He talks about things that he, as a white male, doesn't necessarily understand. That's almost always awkward.

That feeling you get when you're zipping through an enjoyable collection of short stories by an author you've never read and– even though there are so many awful people in the collection, not everyone is–you come across a story that WOULD be good if it weren't so horribly, offensively fat-shaming.

Sigh.

Mostly a light read, an enjoyable read of little fairy tales and grim vignettes. The time period reads like ‘Cabin Boy,' by which I mean you might just as well be reading something from nearly a hundred years ago, until she says something about cellphones, and then you might be confused.

Honestly, I was pretty bored still on the whole. But the election stuff was timely, and I appreciated that. I even chuckled a little bit in this one, so that's something. I'll wait a bit before delving into volume four though.

A little different from the previous two books, this focuses mainly on the titular character, an OCD Nebraska girl with a rough past and insane mother. It's about her life, her problems, and her creepy new apartment building filled with creepy old crazy folks. The building is also evil and part of the Chaotic Naturalist movement, which I'm not dying to read more about. There was a slow patch in the middle, but, all in all, I quite liked it. Like always, a central theme is mother/daughter relationships, and Audrey herself has trouble relating to people, even the man she loves. But it's delightful, sad, personal, and nicely creepy.

Really? If I ever read the words ‘non-zero-sum game' or ‘zero-sum' or ‘carrot and stick (what does this even mean?),' I will hunt down every copy of this book and send it through a shredder. Vague, limp, no true explanation, even of the big three monotheisms (forget about other religions, except for brief, brief references, even though he being the book discussing various polytheistic belief systems). I found this difficult to read only because I was getting bored and entirely sick of reading about zero-sum games. Honestly, he spends most of the book lecturing about zero-sumness, more than any actual evolution of religious though. And, frankly, dude needs an editor like none other. Bleah.

Review to come.

Review here now.

So, this was fun enough. It wasn't great. But it wasn't boring. I was expecting supernatural, and it's more thriller. So there's lots of overthinking and paranoia and strange deductions because of the paranoia and overthinking. In the Rockies. In the winter. So major isolation thriller. Winter isolation horror is my catnip. This, again, was more thriller, but it was still fun and had some nice grue. I approve of the violent, horrible murders–fictionally speaking, I mean. Exactly what I wanted.

Basically, our hero Christa is traumatized and dragged on a winter trip by her boyfriend, whom she adores. There are 11 people plus the tour guide on the bus as it chugs through the Rockies. In the winter. In the snow. A tour bus. The Rockies. Yep. The road to their lodge ends up blocked by a big tree, so they all get out of the bus to see if there's anything to do about it. Whilst the tour guide is pondering the tree, Christa's boyfriend drags her on a walk. Along ledges. In the Rockies. In the winter. In a snowstorm. In enough feet of snow that when she falls, she's not broken to bits, just a bit sore and frost-bitten.

When she climbs out of the snow, her bf has disappeared. She manages to bungle to a cabin, where she finds the other passengers–but no boyfriend. And then people start dying. And decorating the big old pine outside like so many Christmas ornament glass orbs. Who is doing this? Why? And how can the survivors trust each other?

Christa, gods love her, just isn't that smart. She fits the traumatized thriller heroine to a T. She's not that interesting, but she's an all right person. The characters all feel fairly tropey, but they aren't cardboard cutouts. But there were a couple characters I could have told her from the very beginning she should trust. Her judge of character is lacking. Sure, maybe it's the circumstances, but I'd argue that she just isn't good judging people at all for her whole life.

Still, that sounds like I hate her. I don't. I was just frustrated by her thought processes. I quite liked some of the characters, like nice guy Hutch. He's actually pretty decent and datable. I also liked Denny, to an extent.

But adding to Christa's distress is not only the murders and murder displays, but the fact that her boyfriend has disappeared in the storm. Then...spoiler...they find his body, with an engagement ring in the pocket. Poor Christa cannot catch a break.

There's mistaken identity, gore, murder, improbabilities found only in thrillers, and some fun frozen isolation distress. No matter the flaws, this was a grand time. If you actually LIKE thrillers, you'll probably like this quite a bit. It goes down very easily, although some might balk at the Christmas ornament heads–but I'm a horror girl, so I like that.

Even for me, who reads thrillers and almost always hates them–with a few rare exceptions–enjoyed reading this. Probably because Ms. Coates can write horror too. My main issues are mostly because of the genre itself, not because of Ms. Coates. I think she succeeded with the expectations of the thriller genre. The horror elements I loved. The thriller elements will never be my favorite, but again, that's not her fault. She succeeded in characterization, mystery, and action. She succeeded in improbably thriller plot whilst juggling multiple characters.

There were a couple grammatical errors that would just need to be corrected. Nothing major. The main issue would be actual travel through the Rockies in winter. There are places where it's impassable. I'm guessing wherever this takes place would also be impassable. Even in New England, there were places growing up in the White Mountains where the roads would be closed for the winter, because travelling was too dangerous. You would legit need a Snowcat, just like in The Shining. Which is not what they had. I'm guessing they would never have made it as far as they did in the winter in a bus. So logistically, this doesn't work. Nor is it that easy to decapitate someone, drag their carcass through feet of snow to a whole new place, and shove their decapitated head onto a tree branch. But I like the visual.

So good for thriller fans. For this not-fan of thrillers, still incredibly entertaining. Goes down easy, provides some grue, reads fast.

Thank you to the publisher and author for providing a digital ARC in exchange for a fair review.

3.5 stars

Thank you to the publisher for making this available on line.

Adorable. The art is so pretty, and the girls are just trying so hard to figure life out.

Grace and Lola are bffs who are confounded by love. They decide to interview people and take notes to try to figure love out. Meanwhile, Grace has things going on at home she doesn't tell Lola about; Lola likes a boy who avoids her. Until he doesn't. And then he does again.

This is basically an adorable story of female friendship and learning to see beyond what everyone else believes is true. It's about girls learning to be themselves and to be confident and going to each other for love and support.

It was just. Adorable. I'll certainly happily read the second volume.

It's been ages since I've read Nick Cutter, and I especially loved The Troop. So I was looking forward to some grotty, gooey, gore. There is some of that. TW: There is a turtle in peril, which is upsetting.

Basically, Trent and Rita–along with their small son Milo and his aforementioned turtle Morty–move to a new housing development. It's so new, there's only, like, one house, and there is no lawn. Trent is annoyed at this. There is also a giant crack in his bedroom closet. So he does what any man with something to prove to himself does–he looks it up on Youtube, buys his supplies, and follows the instructions of Handyman Hank.

Naturally (supernaturally), strange things start to occur. Trent finds weird baubles and pink worms. Milo starts building weird creations from junk around the house. There are weird convex nests on the property, and weird voices coming from Milo's weird creations. Milo also seems to have his own Handyman Hank helping him create his little inventions. Meanwhile, Rita doesn't necessarily explicitly experience too many of the incidences, unless she's with her son. But she knows something is lurking there, something dark and awful, something that makes her fear for her son.

Cuz, let's face it. There's some backstory here, and Trent and Rita don't have the greatest relationship. And the house is making it worse and worse.

There was definitely some good grue. You can rely on our authors for that. There were a few things I didn't expect, which made me very happy also. This is easily a bit of a critique on toxic masculinity. A solid, fun read.

Thank you to the authors and publisher for giving me an ARC in a giveaway on line for an honest review.

Brutal, tragic, and so good. Like, don't go into this without knowing what you're getting into. I knew what I was getting into, but there was a part that I ended up reading in a coffee shop, and I sort of wish I'd been at home, because it was hard not to start crying. If something makes me want to start crying whilst I'm on Zoloft and Focalin, that's a good sign. For the book, I mean. Not for the poor, precious character or my mental state.

My favorite character too. sobs

Fun gothic melodrama, no surprises but still fun. Enjoyed the narrators on the audiobook.

The art. Yes, it is difficult to interpret sometimes, because it is hazy and dark and sketchy. But it is also really impressive, sometimes lovely, and there are a couple grotesque panels that I thought were amazing and want on my wall.

The storytelling and dialogue are scant and rough, just enough to give you a hint of the zombie apocalypse unfolding. And we all know zombies terrify me only slightly less than Deliverance storylines. There is also a talking, gun-toting bear who guards a young girl who apparently might hold the key to humanity surviving the zombie apocalypse.

I'd forgotten about this manga. I hadn't wanted to read it long ago. Now is the right time.

This book. My gf loved it, so I thought I'd give it a go, since she'd been on a roll lately. So I read it. This man can write.

The novel begins as our main character, David Lurie, a professor, is having a meeting with his favoured escort. He feels great affection for her. When he sees her around town with her sons, things become awkward, and she leaves the escort service and refuses to see him. So then he turns to one of his students. This ends up costing him his job, so he goes to stay with his lesbian daughter in the country. Horrible things ensue–rape, animal butchery, strained relations with his child. Even the ending isn't exactly what one would call happy.

Coetzee is South African, and this book came out in 1999, I believe. It deals with racism, sexual politics, sexism, and animal welfare issues. Quite a heady mix for a little book just over 300 pages (a very fast-paced 300 pages too). I'm always pleased and a little surprised when a man is sensitive to these issues, particularly in regards to sexism. Tough and angering things happen in this book, and I don't find the answers satisfactory; but that is perhaps a good thing.

Lurie is actually a dynamic character, even if he doesn't necessarily realize it about himself. He begins having seriously horrible expectations of women. That doesn't miraculously change, and part of why he does is that he beings to feel mortatlity creeping in. But he starts becoming more open, more aware of the humanity of the normal women, the woman who is not a nubile young thing. He becomes more aware of the need for mercy and concern for animals. He becomes aware of the racial tension that exists in every day life. He becomes a little less of a douche. Although, that being said, Coetzee is such a good writer that I didn't hate David even when he was being a tool. Because, like most tools, he's not JUST a tool. He's a complex human being who resists change and yet somehow finds himself changing, even if he doesn't realize it or admit to it.

Terrifyingly, however, one of the characters reminded me of my boss's father. shudder

Fun and Fast

I bought this on sale on Amazon, because i didn't feel like waiting for the library. It's self-aware for the most part regarding its thriller absurdities. There were a couple twists I didn't see coming, and I started to second guess myself a couple times, but I did figure out something major early on. That's not too say this is predictable, not at all. It probably would have gotten a higher score, were it not for using the old mental illness trope–always a very thriller thing to do–and unnecessary fatphobia. Same character. Can we please get past the constant treatment of fat being a moral failing? And mental illness as murderous? This book was fun, until we got to those parts, and then I was frustrated and annoyed. On the whole though, this was, for me, the rare truly enjoyable thriller.

And the dog does not die.

I'm really beginning to like this series a lot. The art is not my favorite, but I love Joe Hill, and he is not disappointing me here.

Whatever, past me. The art is kickass.

A very unpleasant college student captures a dragon for her emotional-support animal, and she has to learn a hard lesson.

Good gods, rip my heart out, why don't you, Si?

I find that I just really love Skottie Young. And Kyle's art is vibrant, gorgeous, and so cute. I cannot wait to see where this little fantasy takes us.

Cathartic and touching.

This one has potential. I enjoyed it so far. I like our dirtbag anti-hero so far.

Is he a redhead? He looks like it? Why do I want him to be played by Domhnall Gleeson?

3.5 stars. I really enjoyed the first issue. We'll see how it goes. I mean, cats. I love cats. And the art is so great.