All we remember of Cujo is that it’s about a rabid dog that torments a New England town.  But it’s so much more that that.  It’s about two very different marriages falling apart: one because of infidelity, and one because of abuse.  And yet we actually don’t get depictions of either.  There’s the taste, the threat, but never the graphic explanation.  And that’s what makes this so much more horrifying. No psychics, no killer demon cars, no telekinetic girls who like fire.  Here, we have something […]

Alas, our time has ended.  And what a beautiful and heartbreaking way.  This was an ending and a beginning.  It was almost as tear-inducing as the final tweet for Pratchett:  ALAS, SIR TERRY, WE MUST WALK TOGETHER, writ all in caps in the voice of Death.  The most devastating part — aside from the one I dare not spoil — was the afterword detailing the four or five stories Pratchett had planned that will never see the light of the Disc.  I’m sad that it’s […]

Just the other day I was commending one author on keeping his twenty-some-odd series book fresh, and here we’ve got another long series with a great lead character — the enigmatic FBI agent Aloysius Pendergast — with the opposite problem.  They simply don’t seem to know what to do anymore.  They’ve got this mishmash of Edgar Allan Poe and Sherlock Holmes and Relic that just sort of studders around, making poor choices and landing on a cliffhanger so cheesy, I suspect Pendergast bungeed to the bottom […]

Something wonderful finally came out of George R.R. Martin’s house of goddamn lies.  I was promised more Dunk and Egg, and did not get it.  Instead, I got a sampler platter of some amazing genre scattered tales of badass womenfolk.  As with all collections, it bulged my to-read pile significantly as I became aware of the glory that is Megan Abbott and Joe R. Lansdale (well, he I knew, but this was the straw that f–king broke the f–king camel’s back, c–ksucker.)  I also fell […]