Nick

First and foremost: Dan Ozzi is an incredible writer. I recommend reading anything the guy touches.

For some, this book chronicles a small blip in music history. For others like myself, this book is life. Ozzi starts this book where they all start off: Green Day. From there, he hits up all the classics from the poppy and moody Jawbreaker and Jimmy Eat World to harder rocking The Distillers and Rise Against and concluding with Against Me and many more in between. There are 11 chapters in total and 11 bands.

So, what is the book about? For those in the know, the word "sellout" comes with a negative connotation that might be hard to explain to an outsider. Ozzi does it well here by chronicling each band's early years and growth from large independent stars and their stories of jumping to major labels. With many from the punk scene shunning the idea of moving from a small, independent music label to a corporate-run label, the bands all struggle with the crossroads they've encountered. Do they stick to their ideals and do everything themselves but limit exposure, or do they compromise a little (or a lot sometimes) and ask for help?

What's amazing with these stories is that every band's story is so different but so similar. Some bands cared more about their punk credentials than others. Some bands wanted to take over the world and others just maybe wanted to pay rent. Some bands exploded into mega stars while others imploded. The overall arc is clear though. Each one of these bands had to build their own following and major labels wanted to make money off of that. As opposed to manufactured vocalists and pop groups, these bands all had to work their asses off to get where they got. They had to make a choice: do they stay stagnant or do they see how far they can go?

Obviously, Ozzi couldn't fit every single band here but he does mention quite a few bands who fit the bill such as Bad Religion, The Offspring, Anti-Flag, The Muffs, and others. I would personally love to see a part 2.

So, I'm going to rant a little bit. This book is like 146 pages or something like that. The price tag new for the paperback version is $9.99. If that seems like a stretch for as mass market edition of a 146 page story, please consider that this is edited like an 8th grader's 3 page essay. There's a loooooot of blank paper, let's say. The margins are ridiculously big, the font is a tad larger than King's short story collections, there are illustrations, the whole gamut. If this went by word count there would be 5 extra pages of whited out words. It's glaringly obvious that this book was only released as a cash grab. I can't imagine King needs the money, so I'm assuming this was done by the publisher.

Having said all of that, this "novella" (short story is what it really is) should have been released in a collection. It isn't strong by any means. In fact, it's pretty weak. As others have said, it's just such a Boomer story. Ugh. If anyone wants to read an exceptional story with a similar vibe, please do yourself a favor and check out King's son Joe Hill's story "Pop Art."

Even though it wasn’t his first published, this was apparently the first book Stephen King wrote, and I gotta say: I’m pretty damn impressed by that!

The premise here is somewhere between the Hunger Games saga and King’s (or Bachman’s) own The Running Man. Although the reader isn’t given much story behind the dystopian society, it’s apparently some sort of military dictatorship where young men sacrificing themselves is the main source of entertainment each year.

I really liked the premise and I really liked the cast of characters, but the story fell flat in a few ways for me. For one, the book was very uneven. About 75% of the book tells of the first 1/3 or so of the Walk. The last quarter rushes things. My other gripe is that, even though my suspension of disbelief allowed me to buy the premise, I didn’t feel that the walkers’ stamina was very realistic. Even with extensive vetting, I can’t believe that more people weren’t out within the first 25 miles nor can I believe how long the Walk went on. The stories for why people decided to join were mostly silly too.

A few tweaks and the book could be perfect imo. I see that they’re making a movie. Maybe they can smooth over some of those things.

There really isn't a ton to say about this one. The reader essentially gets thrown directly into a dystopian religious convent. Everyone is ordered by class like a goth Handmaid's Tale. Bazterrica treats us with beautiful and sometimes scary imagery instead of a heavy plot.

To be honest, this book did get confusing at times but it was very enjoyable.

Was this book terribly original? No. Was it entertaining? Hell yeah.

At face value, we have your standard possession story. A woman starts feeling different, find a book about possessions, starts questioning things...

But then everything goes to shit. This story is exactly as it needs to be. There is no long-winded, convoluted plot labyrinth here. The main character's life starts falling apart as she fights back and/or doesn't. Highly recommended.

I'll be honest: my review is partially about Moreno-Garcia and partially about the genre as a whole. Vampires are scary. Who wants to be fed upon by undead humanoids, right? Eww. And then the 70s came...

Oh, Anne Rice. No longer are vampires scary. They're *gasp* just like us! And then about 15 years later comes the Vampire: The Masquerade RPG. Now we have factions that a there constantly at war with one another as well as humans.

This leads directly to Certain Dark Things. I did like this a tad more than Mexican Gothic, but I guess I just don't get Moreno-Garcia's writing. There were some cool mythological parts and some really intense action scenes, but I found myself rolling my eyes a few times. The hot goth chick vampire stereotype seemed a little <i>too</i>, I dunno, corny? And the vampire after her? Yikes.

Anyway, file as YA schlock.

This book reminded me a lot of The Loop by Jeremy Robert Johnson. On one hand, it comes off as YA, but it is also a gore fest. I'm not sure where the target audience is. I'm guessing it's somewhere around the same high school kids that flocked to I Know What You Did Last Summer and Scream.

My suspension of disbelief just did not hold on for the ride. I found myself constantly questioning the motives of the main characters and townspeople and wasn't really sure their actions echoed their desires.

Not very well written, but hey, it was fun I guess. I wouldn't recommend this for serious horror readers over high school age unless you're in the mood for some literary fast food.

Some of the stories I breezed through, and some of them seemed to take forever, so I’m giving his three stars. Nothing was exceptionally amazing or terrible. One thing I will say is that Gingerbread Girl and A Very Tight Place were essentially the same story except GG was an excuse to call a woman “bitch” a million times and Tight Place was an excuse to use a bunch of homophobic slurs.

This book had a lot of hype behind it, and for good reason. It was very well written and very charming. However, that's about it for me. I did enjoy the beginning and the ending, but the entire meat of the book was very bland. Like The Goonies meets Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls, we have a bunch of old folks who don't want to move and then a shapeshifting mer-person comes to save the day (and have sex with the old lady).

I get that one of the biggest themes of the book is holding onto the past, but the romance stuff was just weird.

The book ends in a very satisfying way. If you're in the same boat as me, please do yourself a favor and finish the dang book!

I know I’m not the target audience, but I thoroughly enjoyed this story.

It had everything I could possibly want: black humor, body horror, Lovecraftian darkness, shame, guilt, love, sex, death…

One of my favorite things was how chronically online the main character was. That cracked me up so much.

This book wasn’t exceptionally bad, but I find myself struggling to come up with a single positive

I really love Hailey Piper's writing. This is my second book of hers and won't be the last. With this one, there were a few parts that lost me, but I loved it overall. The ending was incredibly beautiful.

In the first story, a character says of the genre, “In horror, it’s often what you leave out that gives a story its power.” This phrase does a lot of heavy lifting for some of the stories contained in this collection. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Most of the horror in the book is super unsettling and leaves the reader wanting more.

Just one more thing I’d like to add before I jump into the individual stories: I don’t know what it is with Joe Hill or his dad but my goodness, each story of the first half of the collection has a jab at a disgusting fat person. What is the obsession?

Best New Horror - A story about a story. Both scary and unsettling. Good opening.

20th Century Ghost - A story about the love of cinema and nostalgia as much as it is a ghost story. Excellent.

Pop Art - Super unique tale of an inflatable best friend. Great from start to finish.

You Will Hear the Locust Sing - Like a Rated R Goosebumps story

Abraham’s Boys - The next Van Helsing generation. Not a great story, but good take and twist at the end.

Better Than Home - Fatherly love and baseball. No horror or suspense.

The Black Phone - It blows my mind that a 20 page story can get expanded into two films. Mediocre compared to some of the others, but probably the most adaptable, I guess.

In the Rundown - Feels incomplete but the ending was pretty crazy.

The Cape - Probably my least favorite of the bunch. Kid has a homemade cape that helps him fly, doesn’t understand.

Last Breath - One of the shortest stories but one of the best. It didn’t need to carry on for 100 pages. Self-aware with a crazy ending.

Dead-Wood - short poem about tree ghosts

The Widow’s Breakfast - Not really sure what to think about this one. Kinda rambled on.

Bobby Conroy Comes Back From the Dead - A man and woman are nostalgic for one another on the set of Dawn of the Dead

My Father’s Mask - One of the craziest things I’ve ever read. This story creeped me the hell out. Would love to get a short sequel or full story expansion.

Voluntary Committal - Very good concept and well done. Didn’t love the beginning or ending but the middle was very good.

Scheherazade’s Typewriter - very short story jammed into the acknowledgements. Very similar to something his dad would have written.

I quite enjoyed reading this. It was a little slow to start and a bit confusing until a few chapters in and then really took off. One thing I love about this type of story is that the message is in the forefront moreso than the actual writing itself. It has no need to be overly wordy or descriptive and still manages to nail all the key points. Taichi Yamada hits the reader directly over the head with a man whose parents have died and the joy and anguish of having to deal with grieving all over again.

I didn’t love the last couple chapters, but I do think that the ending sort of leaves to interpretation whether or not he could have still gone to see his parents had he not (insert spoiler here).

What a fucking shitty book. I’m not even going to bother writing a review.

Started off great and went bad past the first act. If it had kept the momentum, it could've easily been a 4 star book.

Obviously, this book has been out for some years and been adapted several times, so I won't bore anyone with details you already know. I mainly wanted to touch on two points:
1) As good as the story was, I could have been longer. Details were iffy at times. The movies try to expand the back story a bit, but not always effectively. Can't blame them for trying. I liked the ending, but I'm not entirely sure that the novel really gave the reader enough of a reason why everything turned out the way it did.
2) No one I've seen really talks about this, but this book is freakin' hilarious. I found myself laughing out loud quite a few times.

This book was so much fun! When I first saw Trevor's name pop up in my recommendations I was immediately sold.

When it comes to nostalgia, Scarewaves hit all the right notes for me. Although this book was written for kids, it's prime 90s teen horror. For fans of Goosebumps, Fear Street, Ernest Scared Stupid, and Are You Afraid of the Dark?

I had so much fun reading this. It's kind of hard to review because there were some head-scratchingly confusing things that happened but also some truly creepy things too. I guess it's sort of somewhere between B Horror and early 2000s PG-13 horror.

Anyway, this could've been a single-session type read. It's short and mostly to the point.

And, to be extremely honest, finding out that Malerman released a sequel after I had already finished kind of ruined the ending for me. Not that that spoils anything, just that I felt like this should have been a single book.

I wanted to give this book 5 stars but I really feel like he trolled the reader with that ending.

In all seriousness, if you haven’t had a chance to check out Victor LaValle’s writings, I highly recommend him. He really knows how to tell a story.

Here we have the classic American romance story that brings a baby into this world. All is well until the father mysteriously vanishes one day without a trace. The boy grows up wondering what happened to him and there’s this eerie feeling that the dad is still trying to communicate with him from beyond. Dreams, appearances, a box full of things dropped off at the door. The boy grows up in a similar situation. He meets the girl of his dreams. They fall in love, get married, and have a baby of their own.

This is where the story starts to really pick up. Without spoiling anything, the man is drawn into a world he didn’t know existed online, real, and fantastical.

The final 10-15% of the book didn’t do it for me, but it was overall great. I loved the themes of family, what parents will do (or won’t) for their children, and tradition. I highly recommend.

Lmao like half of this book is 5 stars but half of this book is 1 star. You “I was paid to write an honest review” folks need to start writing honest reviews.

There are some interesting ideas, sure. But let’s be honest here. What makes this a 5 star book? Is it original? No. Is it written exceptionally well? No. Are plot points followed completely? No. Are metaphors clear and explicit? No.

First and foremost: is the overall point of this book original in any way? Not in the slightest.

I’m just gonna skip the nitpicking and go straight into the meat. People are bad? Let’s corrupt a child because that’s how humans are. Oh wait, let’s go deeper…and then just…not? The whole book is a misogynistic exploration into wives and Malerman doesn’t even have the cojones to bring up the “b*tch wife’s” cheating when she’s “being honest”? Come on, bro…

A good 80% of the characters were antitheses of Chekov’s guns and most everything ended up going nowhere. Without spoiling, the ending was completely botched. Just like Tik Tok political discourse, I’m getting super jaded on reading reviews on here.

TL;dr turns out Josh Malerman just isn’t a very good writer

There were things I absolutely loved. There were things I absolutely hated.

Like Sideways Stories from Wayside School meets Lovecraft, we're given short vignettes regarding horrors involving an apartment building with a life of its own. I rather enjoyed Pauley's style and storytelling, but I felt the overall collection underwhelming. Each story on its own was a lot of fun, but the way they were tied into one another was a little weak in my opinion. Also, with only three stories, and only one that had much of a plot, the book seemed lacking. I could've easily given this 4 or even 5 stars if there was more here. Maybe we'll get a Tower 2 and 3 or beyond and even a collection. I'd be beyond excited for that. I'd definitely recommend reading this for fun, but don't expect much more than a quick tease of what could (and should!) be part of a much larger collection.

Edit: after reading another of his collections, I'm giving this one 5 stars

This is my second trip to the twisted mind of William Pauley III and it won't be my last. This particular collection was a bit hit and miss, but the highs are always high. It's hard to put into words his style but he'll always keep the reader on their toes. I don't want to spoil anything but I especially loved the Spin Doctors story. What a wild ride; what goddamn electric nights.

William Pauley III is one of the most unique writers I have ever come across. His stories aren't to be read; they are to be experienced.

The Brothers Crunk is no exception. Written like a really weird episode of Ren & Stimpy (eg Space Madness) meets the Heavy Metal movie, this novella is chock full of surreal landscapes, gallows humor, blood & guts, and everything else that's fun.

On a side note, please check out the audiobook versions of WPIII's stories to get the full experience. Pauley is a great writer, and Connor Brannigan is an all-time great reader. I can't stress enough how much magic happens when these two collaborate.