Tanith Lee is something of a guilty pleasure for me. I started with her – well I guess “sinful” is a pretty good description – vampire novel “Dark Dance”, and every now and then I just have to find another one of her books for more trashy fun. A couple, like Storm Lord and Days of Grass have
In her career, Anne Rice has recreated the mythology of vampires, witches, ghosts, mummies, and whatever the main character was in Servant of the Bones. It was probably only a matter of time before she wrote a werewolf story. Rice’s books are usually categorized as horror, and there are certainly a lot of horror elements in The
Humankind first ventured into space in 1961. More than twenty years earlier C.S. Lewis, author of The Chronicles of Narnia, wrote Out of the Silent Planet, the first book in a trilogy of stories linking space travel, alien minds, and a war within the solar system, to Lewis’s overarching view of a benevolent God. The
Post-apocalyptic fiction is about worlds that have already burned. Apocalyptic fiction is about worlds that are burning. The End is Nigh is about the match. I love short story collections – eat them up like candy, actually, so expect to see me review one every few weeks – but sometimes it’s hard to find one with
The date doesn’t cause the instant recall for me that it does for my parents’ generation, but the Kennedy assassination (and an idea of how to stop it) has obviously been on Stephen King’s mind for a long while. King started researching this book back in the 1970’s, but had to put the project on
Imagine that there are thousands of worlds in many different realities, and every time a person dies they wake up as themselves to live a new life, but on a different world. This is repeated over and over until the person eventually wakes in the City Unspoken, the only place where True Death can be
The Night Circus is the debut book by Erin Morgenstern; at this point it’s also the only book by Erin Morgenstern. She has some poetry and several smaller essays on her website, but for now this is her only novel. And while I’d like to see another book by this author, at this point I can’t
What had once been rafters holding up a roof were now floor joists in Palmer’s house. Someone else’s house stood below theirs, long abandoned and unclaimed. Soon, his own home would be someone’s basement and this a sand-filled cellar. And so it went, sand piling up to the heavens and homes sinking toward hell. My
We’ve all run into it at one time or another. As a literary genre it’s pretty much inescapable. There are a few gems here and there, but the quality is generally middling-to-poor: words churned out by writers who might not excel at anything else. Sometimes we find one that appeals to us, or that we’ve