Nope, it's not just an Alfred Hitchcock movie.  Psycho, by Robert Block, was just as creepy and weird before Hitchcock got ahold of it.  Actually, the movie follows the book very tightly.  Block gives us more insight into Norman's head than the movie does (though some of the info in the novel appears in the... Continue Reading →

Wave-Swept Shore by Mimi Koehl is one of those books that people flip through, looking at pictures and maybe reading a few captions.  You should sit down and read the whole thing.  This book takes a very up-close look at an environment that most people may not know even exists.  Of those that do know it... Continue Reading →

Burying a loved one is never easy.  William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying is a study on that statement. Addie's burial begins before she is even dead, with her approving each plank that is used to make her coffin.  She also demands to be buried in the town she came from, several days journey away.  When she... Continue Reading →

All is not well in Kingdom Come.  Tom Piccirilli's A Choir of Ill Children is just as strange as November Mourns.  But I'm starting to figure out the lay of the land.  There are several similar features in these two novels: voodoo, cults or other interpretations of religion, offspring who fall outside the normal range, and a man haunted... Continue Reading →

I finished reading My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult over 24 hours ago.  I had to sit and stew on this one for a while, because I couldn't say what I wanted to say. What I really want to talk about is the ending.  But, I can't talk about the ending, because I want people to read... Continue Reading →

Anne Rice wrote Exit to Eden under the name Anne Rampling.  My guess is that she used the pseudonym to differentiate this work from her other novels.  There are no supernatural beings in Eden.But the themes are still the same.  An individual living on the edges of society.  Having a clear grasp of the fact that they... Continue Reading →

Terminal by Brian Keene asks a simple question:  What do you do when you have nothing left to lose?Tommy has been diagnosed with cancer and given at most a month to live.  Worried about what his family will do when he's gone (they aren't quite making ends meet to begin with) he decides to the risk of robbing... Continue Reading →

Texas! Sage  is the final book in the Texas trilogy by Sandra Brown.  Even before I started reading the book, I expected it to be more mature than its predecessors.  What did I base that on?  The size of the book.Still definitely a romance story, this installment is just a little more fleshed out than the... Continue Reading →

Ruby by Francesca Lia Block and Carmen Staton is a book about magic.  A girl who just knows things and has a way with spells falls in love with a boy of the wilds.  And she sets out to get him.  The trouble is, her past keeps getting in the way. So she uses magic and spells to... Continue Reading →

Infection: The Uninvited Universe by Gerald N. Callahan is about the human ecosystem.  I don't mean the ecosystem humans inhabit.  I mean the ecosystem that is the human body.  The human body contains more microbial cells than it does human cells.  A wide variety of bacteria call us home.  The usual inhabitants of the human... Continue Reading →