Genre Fiction Books - Page 12

Dead Until Dark (Southern Vampire Mysteries, Book 1)

Charlaine Harris

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 422 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

True Blood Addict! 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I love HBO for introducing me to the world of Sookie Stackhouse. I find the book series very entertaining with the same dark humor. The HBO series has done great staying with the original story line & its portrayal of the characters, and although the book series in only from Sookie's point of view, I'm finding that I enjoy the books much better than the show (and I'm a huge fan of the show!).

If you are considering getting "sucked" into the book series after becoming addicted to the HBO series, I recommended it, you won't be let down.

Editorial Review:

Sookie Stackhouse is just a small-time cocktail waitress in small-town Louisiana. Until the vampire of her dreams walks into her life-and one of her coworkers checks out....

Maybe having a vampire for a boyfriend isn't such a bright idea.

A fun, fast, funny, and wonderfully intriguing blend of vampire and mystery that's hard to put down, and should not be missed. (Susan Sizemore)

Praise for Charlaine Harris:

Harris writes neatly and with assurance. (New York Times Book Review)

An author of rare talents. (Publishers Weekly)

The Walking Dead, Book 4 (v. 4)

Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, Cliff Rathburn

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Compelling and devestating 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Collecting the "The Calm Before" and "Made to Suffer" storyarcs, this fourth hardcover volume of Robert Kirkman's ongoing apocalyptic zombie masterpiece The Walking Dead is by far the most compelling, and brutally devestating, part of the series yet. "The Calm Before" is just that, as Rick's wife Lori begins going into labor while the rest of the crew enjoy what time they have left, preparing themselves for the onslaught they know is coming. And it does in "Made to Suffer", as the mutilated, revenge driven Governor comes attacking in full force. This is where Kirkman really pulls no punches, as we witness characters who have been in these pages since the beginning of the series meet some shocking, and grisly, demises. Not to mention the surprisingly emotional impact that echoes throughout these pages, as the book comes to a close and a new direction is set. All in all, Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead continues to be a spectacular story of survival horror, and like the best zombie flicks before it, is worth going back to again and again.

Editorial Review:

The hardcover features another 12 issues of the hit series along with the covers for the issues all in one oversized hardcover volume. Perfect for long-time fans, new readers, and anyone interested in reading a zombie movie on paper that never ends.

Redeeming Love

Francine Rivers

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 574 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In this splendid retelling of the biblical story of Hosea, bestselling author Francine Rivers pens a heartbreaking romance between a prostitute and the upright and kind farmer who marries her; the story also functions as a reminder of God's unconditional love for his people. Redeeming Love opens with the Gold Rush of 1850 and its rough-and-tumble atmosphere of greed and desire. Angel, who was sold into prostitution as a child, has learned to distrust all men, who see her only as a way to satisfy their lust. When the virtuous and spiritual-minded Michael Hosea is told by God to marry this "soiled dove," he obeys, despite his misgivings. As Angel learns to love him, she begins to hope again but is soon overwhelmed by fear and returns to her old life. Rivers shines in her ability to weave together spiritual themes and sexual tension in a well-told story, a talent that has propelled her into the spotlight as one of the most popular novelists in the genre of Christian fiction. This is one of her best. --Cindy Crosby

For Whom the Bell Tolls

Ernest Hemingway

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 273 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

For Whom the Bell Tolls begins and ends in a pine-scented forest, somewhere in Spain. The year is 1937 and the Spanish Civil War is in full swing. Robert Jordan, a demolitions expert attached to the International Brigades, lies "flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees." The sylvan setting, however, is at sharp odds with the reason Jordan is there: he has come to blow up a bridge on behalf of the antifascist guerrilla forces. He hopes he'll be able to rely on their local leader, Pablo, to help carry out the mission, but upon meeting him, Jordan has his doubts: "I don't like that sadness, he thought. That sadness is bad. That's the sadness they get before they quit or before they betray. That is the sadness that comes before the sell-out." For Pablo, it seems, has had enough of the war. He has amassed for himself a small herd of horses and wants only to stay quietly in the hills and attract as little attention as possible. Jordan's arrival--and his mission--have seriously alarmed him.

"I am tired of being hunted. Here we are all right. Now if you blow a bridge here, we will be hunted. If they know we are here and hunt for us with planes, they will find us. If they send Moors to hunt us out, they will find us and we must go. I am tired of all this. You hear?" He turned to Robert Jordan. "What right have you, a foreigner, to come to me and tell me what I must do?"

In one short chapter Hemingway lays out the blueprint for what is to come: Jordan's sense of duty versus Pablo's dangerous self-interest and weariness with the war. Complicating matters even more are two members of the guerrilla leader's small band: his "woman" Pilar, and Maria, a young woman whom Pablo rescued from a Republican prison train. Unlike her man, Pilar is still fiercely devoted to the cause and as Pablo's loyalty wanes, she becomes the moral center of the group. Soon Jordan finds himself caught between the two, even as his own resolve is tested by his growing feelings for Maria.

For Whom the Bell Tolls combines two of the author's recurring obsessions: war and personal honor. The pivotal battle scene involving El Sordo's last stand is a showcase for Hemingway's narrative powers, but the quieter, ongoing conflict within Robert Jordan as he struggles to fulfill his mission perhaps at the cost of his own life is a testament to his creator's psychological acuity. By turns brutal and compassionate, it is arguably Hemingway's most mature work and one of the best war novels of the 20th century. --Alix Wilber

Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West

Cormac McCarthy

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 318 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A Difficult and Troubling Masterpiece 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Blood Meridian is a masterpiece, which like Moby Dick and Ulysses requires considerable effort from the reader. On the other hand, McCarthy is an easier read than Melville or Joyce, and his book is more accessible emotionally. The elaborate symbolism and language of the book is a PhD's wet dream, but for the more casual reader the important thing is whether after all the effort that goes into slogging through a book like this, the author can connect on a gut emotional level. McCarthy succeeds in this most important respect.

"Blood Meridian" refers to the red, north-south meridian defined by the Western sunset, as McCarthy's rather obvious subtitle reveals. But in a larger sense it refers to the geographic and temporal frontier of the old West. One crosses the north/south meridian that runs through Texas of 1848 and in the process crosses into the bloody frontier of our historical memory -- including, as McCarthy's epigraph reveals, a history of indiscriminate bloodshed and scalping that defined human civilization for the past 300,000 years. For McCarthy, the recent "civilization" brought to the frontier over the past 150 years is a paper-thin moment in time. We are not really far removed from the blood meridian, and much of our seeming civilization is sheer hypocrisy and self-deception.

As the body count piles up in chapter after vivid chapter, the reader strips away the veneer of civilization and overcomes the cultural taboos that prevent us from seeing humans as road kill. Our skull and brains really are only marginally less fragile than a watermelon, and human civilization and action hangs on the ridiculously thin threads that run down the central nervous system. The ethical codes against killing and violence are also paper thin, and in the frontier, the killing is as indiscriminate as the practices of army ants and wolf packs. The species kills and is killed, and is distinguished only by the imaginativeness of the act.

The most striking character of the book is not the nominal protagonist, the "Kid" who helps to pile up the body count, but the figure of the "Judge" who is second in command of the paramilitary band of scalpers the Kid joins. The Judge says he is the legal representative of Glanton, the band's leader. But his procilivity for blowing brains out, molesting children, and his ridiculous denials of Glanton's atrocities combine to make him a distinctly different kind of jurist. But then, the Judge can deliver speeches and cite precedents in a mesmerizing way. For me, the Judge captures all the hypocrisies and self-deceptions of our current civilization.

It is not at all clear whether McCarthy sees some redemption for the species. Is there some redemption at the end of all this violence? The Kid stops killing. The maniacal fear-flight defense and blood lust that motivate the violence is put on hold when the Kid declines to kill the Judge or the Judge's "Fool" companion. The Kid comes in from the frontier, and for the next 20 years obeys the rules of civilization, with the exception of one justified act of self defense. But the ambiguous end of the novel seems to indicate that the Judge has killed or perhaps even raped the Kid -- and he ends by dancing and exclaiming "I can never die."

I find the ending of the book to be one of its important flaws. It is simply not clear what the Judge does at the end, nor is it clear just what McCarthy is trying to convey. Nor is the one-page epilogue helpful. Perhaps he has not worked out for himself the fundamental question of whether there is any hope of redemption for the species. I'm of a more optimistic bent, and find some promise in how the Kid seems to come to terms with himself after returning from the Blood Meridian.

This is one of a handful of truly great American novels.

Editorial Review:

"The men as they rode turned black in the sun from the blood on their clothes and their faces and then paled slowly in the rising dust until they assumed once more the color of the land through which they passed." If what we call "horror" can be seen as including any literature that has dark, horrific subject matter, then Blood Meridian is, in this reviewer's estimation, the best horror novel ever written. It's a perverse, picaresque Western about bounty hunters for Indian scalps near the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s--a ragged caravan of indiscriminate killers led by an unforgettable human monster called "The Judge." Imagine the imagery of Sam Peckinpah and Heironymus Bosch as written by William Faulkner, and you'll have just an inkling of this novel's power. From the opening scenes about a 14-year-old Tennessee boy who joins the band of hunters to the extraordinary, mythic ending, this is an American classic about extreme violence.

The Screwtape Letters

C. S. Lewis

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Total reviews: 372 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Who among us has never wondered if there might not really be a tempter sitting on our shoulders or dogging our steps? C.S. Lewis dispels all doubts. In The Screwtape Letters, one of his bestselling works, we are made privy to the instructional correspondence between a senior demon, Screwtape, and his wannabe diabolical nephew Wormwood. As mentor, Screwtape coaches Wormwood in the finer points, tempting his "patient" away from God.

Each letter is a masterpiece of reverse theology, giving the reader an inside look at the thinking and means of temptation. Tempters, according to Lewis, have two motives: the first is fear of punishment, the second a hunger to consume or dominate other beings. On the other hand, the goal of the Creator is to woo us unto himself or to transform us through his love from "tools into servants and servants into sons." It is the dichotomy between being consumed and subsumed completely into another's identity or being liberated to be utterly ourselves that Lewis explores with his razor-sharp insight and wit.

The most brilliant feature of The Screwtape Letters may be likening hell to a bureaucracy in which "everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment." We all understand bureaucracies, be it the Department of Motor Vehicles, the IRS, or one of our own making. So we each understand the temptations that slowly lure us into hell. If you've never read Lewis, The Screwtape Letters is a great place to start. And if you know Lewis, but haven't read this, you've missed one of his core writings. --Patricia Klein

Corsair (Oregon Files)

Clive Cussler, Jack DuBrul

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Editorial Review:

For five novels, Clive Cussler has brought readers into the world of the Oregon, a seemingly dilapidated ship packed with sophisticated equipment, and captained by the rakish, one-legged Juan Cabrillo. And now the Oregon and its crew face their biggest challenge yet.

Corsairs are pirates, and pirates come in many different varieties. There are the pirates who fought off the Barbary Coast in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the contemporary pirates who infest the waters of Africa and Asia, and the pirates . . . who look like something else.

When the U.S. secretary of state’s plane crashes while bringing her to a summit meeting in Libya, the CIA, distrusting the Libyans, hire Juan Cabrillo to search for her, and their misgivings are well founded. The crew locates the plane, but the secretary of state has vanished. It turns out Libya’s new foreign minister has other plans for the conference, plans that Cabrillo cannot let happen. But what does it all have to do with a two- hundred- year-old naval battle and the centuries-old Islamic scrolls that the Libyans seem so determined to find? The answers will lead him full circle into history, and into another pitched battle on the sea, this time against Islamic terrorists, and with the fate of nations resting on its outcome.

“Readers will burn up the pages following the blazing action and daring exploits of these men and women and their amazing machines,” writes Publishers Weekly of the Oregon Files series. And they’ll do it once again, with Corsair.