Horror fan favorite about the awful things that happen to a young girl sent to live with her aunt after her parents are killed in an accident. Based on real events -- or "inspired by," if you prefer, since Ketchum lowers the girl's age, sets the story a decade earlier (in the 50's, though there's very little sense of period), and introduces as narrator a boy who may or may not be the girl's deliverance. Definitely a page-turner, but it's as if Ketchum studied the real life case -- in which a woman, her children, and some neighbor kids torture a 16-year-old girl for months until she succumbs to her injuries and mercifully dies -- and came away with little more than the idea that torture is exciting. Certainly the author has no interest in making any of this comprehensible: the characters are sketchy and facile and his only point of view seems to be that cowards do cowardly things. In some sense, much of this really happened -- but that doesn't make any of it believable. Torture porn, pure and simple. Made into a movie in 2007.
++1/2
Horror fan favorite about the awful things that happen to a young girl sent to live with her aunt after her parents are killed in an accident. Based on real events -- or "inspired by," if you prefer, since Ketchum lowers the girl's age, sets the story a decade earlier (in the 50's, though there's very little sense of period), and introduces as narrator a boy who may or may not be the girl's deliverance. Definitely a page-turner, but it's as if Ketchum studied the real life case -- in which a woman, her children, and some neighbor kids torture a 16-year-old girl for months until she succumbs to her injuries and mercifully dies -- and came away with little more than the idea that torture is exciting. Certainly the author has no interest in making any of this comprehensible: the characters are sketchy and facile and his only point of view seems to be that cowards do cowardly things. In some sense, much of this really happened -- but that doesn't make any of it believable. Torture porn, pure and simple. Made into a movie in 2007.
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+++ The basis for the action thriller Die Hard, a movie that, however tongue in cheek, consistently makes media lists of the top Christmas films of all time. This, it's fair to say, because in spite of getting the core of the story right, it doesn't end quite the same way, and that makes all the difference in the world. The book, Thorp's sequel to his own 1966 novel The Detective (which was also made into a film, starring Frank Sinatra), is the story of Joe Leland, a retired New York cop, who flies to California on Christmas Eve to be with his daughter and ends up trapped inside her skyscraper office building during a terrorist attack. It, too, is an action thriller -- Leland, who begins with one gun and no shoes, must outmaneuver and kill his opponents, all while trying to keep the hostages, including his daughter, alive -- but it is also filled with Leland's ruminations on a life not always well lived, particularly in terms of his failed marriage and the mistakes he made raising his child. (Knowledge of the previous book or at least the Sinatra film is not required, but certainly doesn't hurt.) Late in the story, it also becomes vaguely political. No wonder the prose is occasionally a bit choppy. Still, it's the action and the suspense that carry the day, and that make this book an entertaining read. Until the end, anyway, which hits a note so jarringly off-key that, if it doesn't spoil the book, probably will leave you content to revisit it at the movies. ++ Set in 2025, when white men are still called "honkeys" and people still ask if you can "dig it," this story follows Ben Richards, an out of work revolutionary whose wife is a prostitute and whose 18-month-old baby is dying from pneumonia. Desperately needing money to buy medicine for the little tyke, Richards applies as a contestant for a popular game show called "The Running Man." The show is a way of ridding society of some of its more undesirable elements. Contestants are given a 12-hour head start, then pursued by merciless Hunters. Every hour they stay alive nets them a hundred bucks, which in this society is a lot of dough. It's unclear how or why "The Running Man" is a popular show. Though frowned upon, it isn't against the rules for the runner to take out innocent bystanders. Killing a cop is worth another hundred bucks. King, mired in the late sixties/early seventies, takes the hippie hatred of cops to a new level: everyone hates them, deriving entertainment from their deaths. Why anyone would want to be a cop in this society is another matter. The whole milieu is contradictory and self-serving. This is a race for Ben's life (and the life of his daughter); it should be exciting. However, like Rage, his first Bachman book, King substitutes an amorphous anger for anything truly stirring. That might work for teenagers, but adults can see through it all too easily. It all leads to a comic book ending, with lots of blood and wet, hanging entrails. If that's your thing, you may get a kick out of it. Made into a much more entertaining movie in 1987, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Richard Dawson. ++ Proto-paranormal romance more than a horror novel, focused on the troubled (and troubling) relationship of Mina Harker and Dracula. Set 7 years after the events of Bram Stoker's book. When the Harkers, Van Helsing, John Seward, and Lord Godalming return to Castle Dracula to put their painful memories to rest once and for all, the lethargic yet still-existing spirit of Dracula is revived, now animated by a need for love and revenge, primarily the former. Seward and Godalming appear in little more than name only, while Van Helsing and Jonathan, though much more active, really only get in the way as Mina tries unsuccessfully to resist the charms of an undead psychopath. Warrington even uses Mina's son, Quincey, to stick another stake into the heart of all that is good and decent. Another contradictory post-religious take on Dracula: it is one thing for a woman of faith alone to question her beliefs, but quite another for a woman who knows damn well that both God and Satan are real. ("I could abide no clerical judgements upon my state of mind," Jonathan tells us at once point. "I would rather entrust myself to science." Interesting -- given that since vampires are subject to the scientific method -- killing them in a specific way produces identical and repeatable results -- not even a scientist would adopt this absurd position.) Told, like Stoker's book, in the form of journal entries and letters from the various characters, but much less skillfully as each dovetails with the next much too conveniently. And yet, for all this, Warrington's book is light-years ahead of Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt's own horrendous "sequel," Dracula: the Un-dead. +++ Competent if uninspired thriller about a young mother whose two children are kidnapped -- on the seventh anniversary of the kidnapping and murder of her two previous children. Made the Mystery Writers of America's list of the top 100 mystery novels of all time, probably due to the remembered effect on its members of the book's then-novel theme of child molestation (though, to be fair, it should be noted that the bad guy, even today, remains a compelling character). Clark's first suspense novel. Based in part on the real life Alice Crimmins case, of a young wife and mother accused of killing her two children. Made into a movie in 1986, starring Jill Clayburgh. +1/2 Less ubiquitous than the 1925 abridgement, this original and uncut version of Stoker's last novel is no less surreal and just as shocking for having been written by the same man who penned Dracula, one of the greatest horror novels of all time. It's inane, self-contradictory, badly plotted, and poorly written; it is so bizarre, in fact, that it becomes, in its own way, weirdly fascinating. Lady Arabella March is the White Worm, a legendary antediluvian snake of enormous size; the last of her kind, she has existed for millenia in England where, as the story begins, she can be seen in her tight-fitting white dresses openly angling for a profitable marriage with the psychopathic owner of a neighboring estate. This madman, however, is more interested in much more delicate Lilla Watford, with whom he periodically engages in hypnotic battles of will -- that is, when he isn't monomanically transfixed by the huge kite he has set flying above his castle. Meanwhile, a couple of fellows from another nearby estate -- one an old diplomatist, the other a young buck from Australia -- having stumbled onto Lady Arabella's secret spend their days plotting her long overdue death. The impetus for the abridgement appears to have been Stoker's use of racial epithets for an ugly and mean-spirited (yet pathetically amorous) African character. That, and perhaps a simple desire to shorten the book, for not much of consequence is removed; rather, the hack job is confined mostly to removing paragraphs here and there throughout. The oddest edit is one involving the monster: an entire sequence is cut in which the monster pursues our intrepid heroes into a river, where it is mistaken for a white whale. As director Ken Russell used little more than the idea of a woman who could transform herself into a giant snake for his 1988 adaptation, it is impossible to know whether his inspiration was this book or the abridgement. Read at your own risk. +++ Reasonably good, fast-paced crime thriller about a diver who is hired to salvage a ship which, he discovers, hasn't sunk yet. Nominated at the time for an Edgar Award in the Paperback Original category, and it delivers on that level. Before it's all over John Lange (i.e., Michael Crichton) has mixed in money laundering, the Mafia, and missing World War II treasure. And a couple of vicious ocelots. Our hero doesn't say much, but that's probably because the plot is so breathless. ++++ Quite possibly King's best book -- despite the fact that it is King all over, which isn't always a good thing. It's wordy, it's got a kid much too advanced for his age, and it ends with that Mythbuster mentality that isn't satisfied until everything gets blown to hell. But this book, more than the others, is the one that was built for King's style. It's about Jack Torrance, an alcoholic man who carts his family along when he takes a job as the winter caretaker of a posh hotel in the Colorado mountains that just happens to be haunted. He doesn't know this going in, of course, nor does Wendy, his wife. But his son, Danny, does; his "shining" -- psychic talent -- clues him in real fast that the Overlook is one Bad Place. In the Overlook, King has a boogeyman just big enough for all those words and yet small enough to keep things focused. In other words, it isn't like Pet Semetary, which is the same length as The Shining, but all about that little place in the woods where Sparky was buried. And it's not like 11/22/63 either, which might have merited its 800-plus pages if were really about what happened on that date, but instead is split into three different stories rudely rammed together. King, you see, is a character guy. He said somewhere that his ideas tend to start with, Wouldn't it be funny if -- which makes him sound like a plot guy. But it's obvious that plot doesn't interest him nearly so much as his characters. His books don't run as long as they do because his plots are intricate or complex; they balloon because he can't stop riffing on the characters. Every once in awhile, he reaches a happy confluence of both. Most of King's characters, if they went looking for a house to contain their egos and their histories, would end up buying the Overlook Hotel. But only Jack Torrance gets to do that. He gets to do it because he's a haunted man who needs a haunted house to feel at home. Jack isn't a deep man, but he skates a wide surface. There's the time he broke his son's arm, the time when he and a friend nearly killed a kid, the time when his father attacked his mother, and so on. It's not without reason he thinks the Overlook is hot for him. But the Overlook has more than a quick roll in mind. For that, it needs Danny -- and for Jack, not being the favorite threatens to turn him into a living pun: a man overlooked. And that he can't abide. So this book is all about what happens when an insecure man with violent tendencies gets backed into a corner, when inner demons meet real demons. If they were serial killers, Jack would be Ottis Toole to the Overlook's Henry Lee Lucas. (Toole, in fact, lived for awhile in Boulder.) It's a match made in Hell, a Molotov cocktail. That's probably why King's explosive ending works much better here than in other novels. Usually it's not much more than an afterthought. Here, it's an inevitability. ++1/2 A man convicted of his wife's murder must enlist a friend to help him find his only alibi witness, the woman he randomly picked up in a bar that night after a fight with his wife. Problem is, he never got her name and no one, starting with the bartender, remembers seeing her with him. The stakes in this race-against-time story are made plain at the starting gate: Chapter 1 is titled, "The Hundred and Fiftieth Day Before the Execution." Not made plain is Woolrich's willingness to fiddle with our perspective in order to preserve the mystery, nor the extent to which he will strain our credulity in solving it -- to say his plot is far-fetched is to assume that it is within throwing distance in the first place. But there are other reasons to read a Woolrich novel, even a pseudononymous one. His penchant for the bizarre, for one, most evident here in a vignette about a man being tortured simply by being looked at, constantly, hour after hour. Also his hard-driving prose, though that is muted somewhat for being too thinly spread. Turns out the friend isn't his only helper, he's got another woman on his side, as well, and a cop who isn't sorry he busted him but who has come to believe he's innocent just the same. The shifts back and forth between them break the tension. Made into a movie in 1944. ++++ Martians invade Earth one ship at a time for ten straight nights, build titanic tripedal fighting machines armed with heat-rays and chemical weapons, and set out to kill or consume mankind, beginning with the English. While it is interesting to note that had these Martians invaded only a few decades later, their technological superiority would have been eliminated and men would have made short work of them, this remains a compelling novel of survival in a world turned upside down almost overnight. Realistic and believable, thanks in no small part to Wells' choice of narrator, a hearty philosopher whose interest in his own harrowing story is augmented by a wider historical viewpoint, and whose moral sense (thankfully) rejects any notion of the innate preeminence of humankind. A thoughtful story, but also an exciting one, with enough apocalyptic destruction to satisfy all but the most jaded readers. Adapted twice to film, once in 1953, then again in 2005. Also famous for inspiring Orson Welles' "realistic" radio broadcast in 1938, which fooled a few people into believing Martians had indeed invaded. |
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