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Showing posts from June, 2025

SOUTH OF NOWHERE

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SOUTH OF NOWHERE . Jeffery Deaver. Putnam's; 2025.  The fifth Colter Shaw novel by Deaver has our hero coming to Hinowah California where a levee has collapsed and the entire town is in danger. Colter's sister, Dorian, a professional who deals with disasters for a living, is on the scene as well. When Colter is attacked by a violent suspect he nicknames Bear, it becomes clear that what happened to the levee may be sabotage, and there could be more bad stuff to come. If that weren't enough, Colter has to use all of his considerable skill to rescue a family of four who were caught in the river when the levee collapsed, as well as a man's fiancee who is now lost in the woods. As the suspenseful story proceeds, it develops that some of the characters are not quite who they claim to be, and Colter must learn who's behind the scheme to flood the town along with his or her motive. An added ingredient is that Colter and Dorion learn they may have a half-sister who could rep...

HIDDEN WORLD

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HIDDEN WORLD . William Schoell. Raven Tale; 2025. I first became aware of William Schoell through his books on comics -- and one he did on 20th century opera -- but I also knew he wrote several horror novels back in the days of the horror boom. He also wrote a more recent novel entitled  Monster World  in which scientists use a time machine to bring dinosaurs to the 21st century, and it was excellent.  Hidden World  is a short, fast-paced novel in which a group of people, led by a determined and desperate woman, descend into a huge cavern under a Greek island to find an ancient city and in particular a certain mystical artifact. Schoell peoples the book with a host of interesting characters, some of whom meet dire fates, not unexpected when you consider the creatures -- huge lizards, rapacious rats, and even giant cannibals -- that he throws at them at regular intervals. You might be surprised at who survives and who doesn't. Written with Schoell's customary verve an...
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THE INVISIBLE MAN . H. G. Wells. First published in 1897. Although written over a hundred years ago,   The Invisible Man   is written in a very accessible style and fast pace. The inn he stumbles into at the opening is not the Lion's Head as in the film, but the Coach and Horses. There is some humor in the book, but certainly not as much as in   Whale's film version. There is no love interest to speak of, and the protagonist, Frank Griffin, winds up in the home of Professor Kemp, whom he knows, by accident. In the film Griffin is driven crazy by an ingredient in the invisibility formula, but in the novel he's pretty much a self-absorbed sociopath from the beginning. He doesn't derail any trains -- although he does plan to embark upon a "reign of terror" -- but he does murder one man and attack many others. This is certainly not   Wells's   best novel, but it is fascinating, highly influential, and a good read to boot.

BLOOD MONEY: A History of the First Teen Slasher Film Cycle

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BLOOD MONEY: A History of the First Teen Slasher Film Cycle . Richard Nowell. Continuum; 2011. This book reads like a college thesis, which is probably how it originated. An editor would probably have been wise to cut out the passages where Nowell writes about what he's   going   to be saying in the rest of the chapter, which we can actually read for ourselves on the next pages. His constantly spelling out and summing up -- making the same points over and over -- gets annoying. That being said, it must also be said that this is   not   a critical study of the slasher genre, at least not of individual movies, although Nowell does make some interesting points about them as a by-product. Instead the book looks more at the business end of the teen slasher cycle, how it came about from a commercial stand-point, and which films actually influenced the cycle in both the financial and creative sense. Nowell argues that the first teen slasher pic was actually the Canadian ...