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 →

The reading of Stephen King continues.  This time we visit a small northeastern town that becomes infested with vampires.The premise of the book is simple.  What would happen if a single vampire moved into a small town?  Who be the first infected?  How would the infection spread?  Who would recognize what was happening and choose to stand... Continue Reading →

November Mourns by Tom Piccirilli is one of the stranger books I've ever read.  It will probably percolate in my dreams for many nights to come.Shad has just been released from prison (incarcerated for defending his sister's honor) to find that his sister has died under mysterious circumstances.  Shad believes she was murdered and wants to... Continue Reading →

China Syndrome by Karl Taro Greenfeld is one of the scariest books I've ever read.  It's a nonfiction chronicle of SARS in China.  The disease is scary enough.  Out of nowhere, people become dangerously ill and around 10% of those infected die.  But that's not the scary part.  The scary part is the government's response to... Continue Reading →

I'm not really sure what to say about A Handful of Dust  by Evelyn Waugh.  This was a very odd novel.  Set in England in the very early 20th century, it seemed a commentary on a society that I didn't fully understand.  The story centers on a couple, Tony and Brenda.  Brenda sets off on... Continue Reading →

Between XX and XY by Gerald N. Callahan is a non-fiction book about sex.  It made me realize that I have been unintentionally perpetuating a myth.  Most people know a little about the X and Y chromosomes.  If you have two X chromosomes, you are a female.  If you have one X and one Y,... Continue Reading →