WARNING! This review will contain spoilers for some stuff in the earlier Kate Daniels books because it’s pretty much impossible to write a review for the SEVENTH book in a series without revealing any of what’s gone before. If you’ve not read this series before, this book is not where you want to start (even though the authors kindly included a handy guide to all the major players in the book and a very concise and informative guide to the fictional universe this series is set in). The […]
Horns and Snakes, Somewhere in there is a Sir Mix-a-Lot Joke
Joe Hill’s Horns begins the morning Ig wakes up hung over and with horns growing out of his forehead. It’s about a year after his girlfriend was gruesomely killed in a “sex murder” and the whole community believes it was Ig who did it to her. Soon after discovering the growth of his horns, Ig also discovers that people can’t help but tell him their deepest, darkest secrets and desires and then listen to his suggestions to act or not on those impulses. Intrigued? To […]
Reasonably Inept Romance, Reasonably Ept Erotica
I don’t really know where the rumple in the sheet lies between romance and erotica, but these books are billed as the latter. I would have thought that the main difference was in courtship by coitus and the point at which emotions become involved, but there are plenty of romances where sex precedes love, so it really just comes down to the level of detail. The Beautiful series love scenes were not much more explicit than a fairly typical romance other than greater frequency and […]
Artists + Ghosts = Good Story
This is a place where people aren’t so much haunted by their pasts as they are unknowingly hurtled toward specific and inexorable destinations. And perhaps it feels like a haunting. But it’s a pull, not a push. The Hundred-Year House is the fictional story of an artists’ colony called Laurelfield, just outside Chicago near Lake Michigan. In the afterward, Makkai writes that one theme is the need artists have for community. Other themes would be the masks that people wear, hiding themselves from even those […]