Out on a lonely stretch of desert highway, there’s a cop. This cop is not the sort you’d ever want to meet, let alone so far from civilisation, but a bunch of unrelated travellers – a family, a couple, a writer and his road trip manager – are about to do so anyway, and find themselves entering a living nightmare in the aptly named town of Desperation. A lot of this book feels incredibly cinematic, with the images of the open door of the abandoned […]
Murky and Dim
This Fritz Leiber novel, published in 1977, seems both of and outside of its time. It appeared after The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, and Carrie, three books that reinvigorated the genre, but it reaches back to earlier traditions. The slim but still overly long novel tells of Franz Westen, a San Francisco resident who catches sight, through his binoculars, of a strange form. After some scene-setting, he sets off to track the creature down. Looking back at his apartment through those same binoculars, he’s startled to […]
Killer Queen
I honest to the heavens thought I’d reviewed this one. The short version is: True crime fans/Murderinos will probably enjoy this one. I’m not sure anyone else will; the subject matter is pretty grim and the person in question warped like HH Holmes. Lizzie Borden may have killed her father and stepmother with an axe, but Belle Gunness killed a hell of a lot more, including her own children.
Well, this was a book.
I’ve owned this book in hardcover since it was first published in 2006. Every once in a while over the last twelve years or so, I’ve looked at it and thought, oh I should read that, and then proceeded to not do that. This was in my college years, when I bought books a) Just because they were pretty, b) When I couldn’t afford them, and c) Indiscriminately, without doing any research about them. I had not read any Stephen King yet, at all, either, so yeah, let’s buy this […]