Dead in the Water by Nancy Holder is about a ghost ship and the horror that befalls shipwreck survivors who board her. The setup isn’t new but what elevates Dead in the Water is the pitch black execution. Dead in the Water is a harrowing story about trading your soul for what you desire most. It’s a riff on Faust but these characters don’t know they are even making a deal with the devil. It’s about obsession, desire, pain of loss, and being unable to […]
“Winner: Everyone who isn’t my editor.”
A review is really unnecessary here. Just go buy/check out/borrow/steal Furiously Happy and get to reading. It is incredibly funny, incredibly moving, and really, really, REALLY funny. Did I mention it was funny? Because it’s really funny. This isn’t enough to make word quota is it? Do we have a word quota on the CBR blog? I should probably check in to that. No, I’m not just typing to fill out word space. How dare you, good sir or madam. If I had a white […]
Silly Merricat.
Shirley Jackson’s last full length novel is a startling and unsettling peek behind the curtains of the house at the end of the street that is always dark. The one the neighbor children taunt each other to approach after sunset. It begins with the following: “My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all, I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers […]
The story of the Coughlin family begun in The Given Day continues …
Live by Night is a crime saga focused on the characters, portraying them as more than one dimensional thugs. Most of them do what they do for a reason. Taking place in 1927, 8 years after the Boston Police strike, Live By Night shifts focus from Danny Coughlin to his youngest brother, Joe. Now 20 and an accomplished small time criminal, Joe falls for the wrong woman and it changes the trajectory of his life. Along the way he rubs elbows with real and fictional […]