( B ) Books

The Living Dead

Stephen King, Joe Hill, George R. R. Martin, Clive Barker, Neil Gaiman, Laurell K. Hamilton, Joe R. Lansdale, Poppy Z. Brite, Harlan Ellison

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

An Amazing Compendium 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 5 people found this review helpful.

There are a bunch of good compendiums of short stories that have to do with horror topics, and even a few dedicated to zombies (the editor of The Living Dead even goes out of his way to list a few). But The Living Dead is probably one of the best rounded 'theme' anthologies I've ever come across. Each of the stories are solid and contribute to a rich tapestry of diverse zombie stories. No two are really alike and each one is well-chosen to really get to the reading audience. No matter what your taste, you will find something in this book that you'll like, I think, even if you're not a zombie fan. The author also takes the time to recognize that zombie stories are a wonderful way to address issues of a particularly sensitive nature and chose stories that have solid messages without being preachy, and are well-written in the process. There is no way to describe how much I enjoyed this book and I recommended it to many of my friends. Check it out, even if you're not much of a short story writer, each separate story is another chance to find something you might enjoy.

Editorial Review:

"When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth!" From White Zombie to Dawn of the Dead, Resident Evil to World War Z, zombies have invaded popular culture, becoming the monsters that best express the fears and anxieties of the modern west. Gathering together the best zombie literature of the last three decades from many of today's most renowned authors of fantasy, speculative fiction, and horror, including Stephen King, Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg, George R. R. Martin, Clive Barker, Poppy Z. Brite, Neil Gaiman, Joe Hill, Laurell K. Hamilton, and Joe R. Lansdale, The Living Dead covers the broad spectrum of zombie fiction.

Nothing to Be Frightened Of

Julian Barnes

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Two years after the best-selling Arthur & George, Julian Barnes gives us a memoir on mortality that touches on faith and science and family as well as a rich array of exemplary figures who over the centuries have confronted the same questions he now poses about the most basic fact of life: its inevitable extinction.

If the fear of death is “the most rational thing in the world,” how does one contend with it? An atheist at twenty, an agnostic at sixty, Barnes looks into the various arguments for and against and with God, and at the bloodline whose archivist, following his parents’ death, he has become—another realm of mystery, wherein a drawer of mementos and his own memories (not to mention those of his philosopher brother) often fail to connect. There are other ancestors, too: the writers—“most of them dead, and quite a few of them French”—who are his daily companions, supplemented by composers and theologians and scientists whose similar explorations are woven into this account with an exhilarating breadth of intellect and felicity of spirit.

Deadly serious, masterfully playful, and surprisingly hilarious, Nothing to Be Frightened Of is a riveting display of how this supremely gifted writer goes about his business and a highly personal tour of the human condition and what might follow the final diagnosis.

A Clockwork Orange

Anthony Burgess

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 619 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Good but have to work to get into 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

This book is very good. It hass undertones as to the situations that are presented in society now even though it was written so long ago. The disregard of youth for the laws that are put in place to protect them and ourselves leads to their inability to function in society and their eventual decomposition to vagrants that put weight on the already weighted prison system. Upon finding a seemingly just punishment and solution the spin doctors find a way not only to persecute the "afflicted" youth but also use it to defeat their own enemies. Very good book however the slang that he was praised for using and developing was very difficult to get into. It actually made me not want to read it at first but getting into it and eventually learning it allowed me to really enjoy the read.

A Clockwork Orange 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

In response to one of other reviewers,

That, what you call "made-up slang" is a language called dsat which is more or less Russian words written using the English alphabet. "Horror Show" for example translates to "good", because if you say horrorshow in one word really fast, someone who understands Russian will likely think you are saying the word "good" in Russian. This language idiosyncrasy alone makes a good point of good vs. evil, which is one of the focuses of the book, where horror show actually means good.

I don't like to believe that this is a study, the author is obviously a genius.

I'm glad you enjoyed the book, and hopefully the film. A must read for anyone, especially those interested to be philosophically stimulated.

Don't forget, many of the ideas in this book are influenced by Nietzsche.

Editorial Review:

Anthony Burgess's modern classic of youthful violence and social redemption, reissued to include the controversial last chapter not previously published in this country, with a new introduction by the author.

And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks

William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

More than sixty years ago, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac sat down inNew York City to write a novel about the summer of 1944, when one of their friends killed another in a moment of brutal and tragic bloodshed. The two authors were then at the dawn of their careers, having yet to write anything of note. Alternating chapters and narrators, Burroughs and Kerouac pieced together a hard-boiled tale of bohemian New York during World War II, full of drugs and obsession, art and violence. The manuscript, called And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks after a line from a news story about a fire at a circus, was submitted to publishers but rejected and confined to a filing cabinet for decades. This legendary collaboration between two of the twentieth centuries most influential writers is set to be published for the first time in the fall of 2008. A remarkable, fascinating piece of American literary history, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks is also an engrossing, atmospheric novel that brings to life a shocking murder at the dawn of the Beat Generation.

The Tortilla Curtain

T. Coraghessan Boyle

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 240 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Powerful - Page Turner 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Delaney Mossbacher is a wealthy yuppie-liberal who lives in the suburbs of Los Angeles. One day on his way to the recycling center, he hits a pedestrian with his car. The man hit is Candido Rincon, a poor, illegal immigrant from Mexico. Feeling guilty, Delaney gives Candido twenty dollars to compensate for his injuries, and the two men go their separate ways. Yet with the accident, Delaney and Candido's lives become woven together for the rest of the book.

This story is so relevant to anyone who lives near the Mexican/US border. It is written from two different points of view; an illegal immigrant and his pregnant wife, who are struggling to better their life, and that of and a wealthy couple living in a gated community.

This book hooked me from the very first page, and I NEVER lost interest for a minute. EXCELLENT.

Editorial Review:

While leading their lives in their gated hilltop community in Los Angeles, Delaney and Kyra Mossbacher accidently meet Mexican illegal aliens Ca+a7ndido and Ame+a7rica Rinco+a7n, and their encounter brings them together in a relationship of error and misunderstanding. Reprint.

Naked Lunch: The Restored Text

William S. Burroughs

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 239 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

"He was," as Salon's Gary Kamyia notes, "20th-century drug culture's Poe, its Artaud, its Baudelaire. He was the prophet of the literature of pure experience, a phenomenologist of dread.... Burroughs had the scary genius to turn the junk wasteland into a parallel universe, one as thoroughly and obsessively rendered as Blake's."

Why has this homosexual ex-junkie, whose claim to fame rests entirely on one book--the hallucinogenic ravings of a heroin addict--so seized the collective imagination? Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch in a Tangier, Morocco, hotel room between 1954 and 1957. Allen Ginsberg and his beatnik cronies burst onto the scene, rescued the manuscript from the food-encrusted floor, and introduced some order to the pages. It was published in Paris in 1959 by the notorious Olympia Press and in the U.S. in 1962; the landmark obscenity trial that ensued served to end literary censorship in America.

Burroughs's literary experiment--the much-touted "cut-up" technique--mirrored the workings of a junkie's brain. But it was junk coupled with vision: Burroughs makes teeming amalgam of allegory, sci-fi, and non-linear narration, all wrapped in a blend of humor--slapstick, Swiftian, slang-infested humor. What is Naked Lunch about? People turn into blobs amidst the sort of evil that R. Crumb, in the decades to come, would inimitably flesh out with his dark and creepy cartoon images. Perhaps the most easily grasped part of Naked Lunch is its America-bashing, replete with slang and vitriol. Read it and see for yourself.

Wuthering Heights (Signet Classics)

Emily Brontë

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Worthy of its place in the canon 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 3 people found this review helpful.

How odd that Amazon does not consolidate the comments on the various editions of this book from different publishers.

I read this book out of a certain sense of obligation -- I'd been reading other 19th century English literature and, with some trepidation, picked up Wuthering Heights to complete the set. The book was wonderful, with fully developed if sometimes quixotic characters, and rapid and often unexpected plot twists. The prose is denser than, say, Jane Austen, but not as bad as the stereotypical gothic novel. The main character, Heathcliff, is famously attractive to women but, as a male reader, I thought he was a thoroughly bad egg. Worthy of discussion, though, especially with women who have read it and are likely to have a different opinion.

Editorial Review:

There are few more convincing, less sentimental accounts of love than Wuthering Heights. This is the story of a tormented foundling who falls in love with the daughter of his benefactor, and of the violence and misery that result from their thwarted longing for each other.

post office: A Novel

Charles Bukowski

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 133 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Not the Best 2 out of 5 stars.
1 of 3 people found this review helpful.

I'm not giving this book two stars because I'm one of those Bukowski-haters. I love his writing. But this isn't the best book of his that I've read. I believe it was published fairly early in his career, which might indicate better was to come from Bukowski. If you don't own any Bukowski books, I'd advise you to buy "Run with the Hunted" rather than this one.

Editorial Review:

"It began as a mistake." By middle age, Henry Chinaski has lost more than twelve years of his life to the U.S. Postal Service. In a world where his three true, bitter pleasures are women, booze, and racetrack betting, he somehow drags his hangover out of bed every dawn to lug waterlogged mailbags up mud-soaked mountains, outsmart vicious guard dogs, and pray to survive the day-to-day trials of sadistic bosses and certifiable coworkers. This classic 1971 novel—the one that catapulted its author to national fame—is the perfect introduction to the grimly hysterical world of legendary writer, poet, and Dirty Old Man Charles Bukowski and his fictional alter ego, Chinaski.

The Best of H. P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre

H.P. Lovecraft, Robert Bloch

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 136 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

I was hoping for something actually....scary 2 out of 5 stars.
2 of 17 people found this review helpful.

I have been a fan of horror movies and video games for quite some time, but reading was not typically my thing, however, I decided to check out a horror story or two and Lovecraft was recommended. This was my first and last Lovecraft purchase and I will explain why.
I have read 11 of the 16 stories and at the end of most of them I was fairly irritated that I had spent the time reading such a story. Some of the plot lines are ridiculously laughable: an invisible monster, an unseen force that is afraid of the light, fish people, a "rat-like being" named Brown Jenkin (weird name for a lame creature), and many many more. I was never scared while reading these stories and whenever I thought something horrifying would happen there was only sheer disappointment.
"The Shadow Over Innsmouth" was my favorite of the stories, however, it fell flat on its face in the last pages. There were some creepy happenings like when the hotel door was being tried with a key and the like, but the climax, the immortal terror of the deep that was so incredibly horrifying was....FISH PEOPLE. You read it right, how can anyone be afraid of fish people? It's absurd. Finally, just when you think things would get interesting, the main character faints in the middle of the night, thereby cutting the story short as if Lovecraft simply got too tired of writing it. This brings me to my next point.
Lovecraft is creative, yet uncreative at the same time. To be sure some of his descriptions are very intricate, but there are times when it is SO detailed that I cannot comprehend what he is trying to describe ("dreams in the witch house" for example, the starfish headed things, I couldn't put it together). On the other hand, sometimes he leaves out so much detail that the subject cannot possibly be found scary, a strong example of this is "Pickman's Model". The creatures said to make the main character scream are only described as being hunched over, canine like, and having half-hoven feet. A lot of the descriptions he uses constantly are that creatures of settings are made up of geometry not of this world, or they would not possibly be comprehended, or some other adjective that makes it utterly impossible to recreate the story in your head. This is irritating because how can you be scarred of something that you can't even picture like a gas (Colour from outer space), and invisible monster (Dunwich Horror), or so many of the others. The plots also have lapses in logical thought, for example, in the "Dream in the Witch House" the main character kicks Brown Jenkin down a cliff, yet in the next page the creature is right behind him, and on the NEXT page it is down at the bottom of the cliff again, it doesn't add up. Most of Lovecraft's stories spend most of the time building up to a climax, however, said climax is only a sentence or two long and you are left feeling cheated. A strong example of this is in "Call of Cthulu" where the sailors discover the tomb of the elder god and awaken it. Cthulu is obviously an important Lovecraft "character" so you would expect it would be a large part of this story, but you would be wrong. Cthulu kills around 4 sailors in one sentence with flabby claws and it is unexplained how it does so. I waited the entire story to read about how it ate them or ripped them apart or something, but when it really counted Lovecraft was devoid of description. Finally the creature chases the remaining two sailors on their ship and, get this, gets sealed back in the tomb because they run into its head with the boat. The one story where Cthulu actually appears and it is only for half a page, how ridiculous.
Please heed this warning and look past the majority of 5 star rating, Lovecraftian fanatics.

Editorial Review:

Lovecraft is "the American writer of the twentieth century most frequently compared with Poe, in the quality of his art ... [and] its thematic preoccupations (the obsessive depiction of psychic disintegration in the face of cosmic horror)," writes Joyce Carol Oates in the New York Review of Books. Del Rey has reprinted Lovecraft's stories in three handsome paperbacks. This first volume collects 16 classic tales, including "The Rats in the Walls," "The Call of Cthulhu," "The Dunwich Horror," and "The Colour Out of Space." Introduction by Robert Bloch. Wraparound cover art by Michael Whelan.

Jane Eyre (Penguin Classics)

Charlotte Brontë

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 32 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

One of the Greatest Books in all of English Literature!! 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

Jane Eyre is one of my favorite books! It is not at all like other great novels -- it is great in it's own way. I was introduced to Jane Eyre by my best friend. I had read the adapted version first, and then my best friend gave me the unadapted Jane Eyre for a birthday present.

The book is about Jane Eyre, and the story is told "by her". Jane is orphaned, and her father's brother (Uncle Reed) takes her into his house, "Gateshead". Jane's uncle dies, and her mean and cruel Aunt Reed keeps Jane only because of a promise Aunt Reed had made to her husband while he was on his deathbed. Aunt Reed treats Jane lower than a servant. Jane's aunt eventually sends her to Lowood Institution, a charity school for girls. At the school, Mr. Brocklehurst, a so-called "good Christian clergyman", skimps on food and clothing, and lots of girls fall sick with Typhus because of it. Jane's best friend, Helen Burns, gets Consumption and dies from the loathsome disease.

Jane is at Lowood Institution for eight years -- two of which are spent as a teacher. Jane soon leaves the school and goes to be a governess at "Thornfield Hall" to Adele Varens, a little French girl. Adele is sweet-tempered and is a bit spoiled. Jane meets the master of the house, Mr. Edward Rochester, but she can't figue out why he is so cold and distant. After being there for a bit, Jane realizes that she is falling in love with him. Jane tells herself that it is absurd, her a mere governess and him so rich and fine a man. Lady Ingram, a rich high-society girl who speaks French fluently and has grace and manners, plus great beauty, seems to be Mr. Rochester's true love.

But there is a mystery in "Thornfield Hall" -- sometimes there is an unearthly laugh that rings through the mansion -- a demonic laugh. It belongs to a lunatic, a person that acts like an animal, and her name is Bertha Mason. Jane believes it comes from a strange servant, Grace Poole. One night, Mr. Rochester's curtains are set aflame in the middle of the night, and when Mr. Richard Mason comes to visit, he is bit and stabbed in the night.

Mr. Rochester tells Jane of his love for her, and Jane accepts him after finding out that he flirted with Lady Ingram only to make her jealous. Just when Jane is standing at the altar, ready to pledge her life to Mr. Rochester, Jane finds out that he is married, his wife is the one to whom the demonic laugh belongs. Jane is faced with the hardest decision that she will ever have to make -- stay and be Mr. Rochester's mistress, or leave "Thornfield Hall". Jane leaves.

Jane finds herself in a place she doesn't know, nearly starving to death.
She stumbles across a nice house, and the kind people take her in. Mr. St. John Rivers and his sisters, Diana and Mary, and a housekeeper named Hannah reside at "Moor House". Jane then goes to teach at a nearby school, where she learns that she and St. John and his sisters are cousins! Jane, though happy with her cousins, misses Mr. Rochester immensly. One night......
(Read the book and you will find out what happens! :-)

Jane Eyre is a wondeful story -- filled with romance, mystery, friendship, kindness and love. The author, Charlotte Bronte, wrote it in five months. Charlotte Bronte once said to a critic, "To you I am neither man nor woman. I come before you as an author only. It is the sole standard by which you have a right to judge me -- the sole ground on which I accept your judgement."
If you have not read this book yet, I encourage you to do so. I hope that my review has been helpful to you. - P. Charles

Editorial Review:

A new edition of one of Penguin’s top ten Classics—the novel that has been "teaching true strength of character for generations"
(The Guardian)

A novel of intense power and intrigue, Jane Eyre has dazzled generations of readers with its depiction of a woman’s quest for freedom. This updated edition features a new introduction discussing the novel’s political and magical dimensions.

Having grown up an orphan in the home of her cruel aunt and at a harsh charity school, Jane Eyre becomes an independent and spirited survivor—qualities that serve her well as governess at Thornfield Hall. But when she finds love with her sardonic employer, Rochester, the discovery of his terrible secret forces her to make a choice. Should she stay with him whatever the consequences or follow her convictions, even if it means leaving her beloved?