The Death of Bunny Munro Nick Cave Canongate Books (UK) Faber & Faber (US) 2009 Bunny Munro has been out there for over 10 years, and was always high on my ‘to read’ list. After all, I like Nick Cave’s music (The Bad Seeds) and I like his movies (The Proposition). He’s got 17 albums, …
Polemical Judo David Brin November 20th 2019 This is the same David Brin who is widely known as a futurist and award-winning science fiction author. He’s always been an outspoken voice for accountability from authority, strong reliance by society on the knowledge to be gained from science, openness of knowledge and data, and deprecation of …
Wanderers Chuck Wendig 782 Pages, July 2019 | Del Rey Books “It’s got a ‘The Stand’ thing going on,” my friend explained. So I downloaded a copy. King’s The Stand is one of my favourite apocalyptic novels, and holds up well after 40 years. Wanderers by Chuck Wendig starts out as a variant ‘zombie apocalypse’ …
The Institute by Stephen King Scribner, an imprint of Simon and Schuster (c) 2019 In the wordcloud that surrounds the career of Stephen Edwin King, one of the biggest has to be “supernatural.” Most of his works have at least some supernatural in them, and they tend to be both his most popular and most …
Cyberhell: a review of Fall; or, Dodge in Hell Author Neal Stephenson Illustrator Nick Springer / Springer Cartographics LLC Cover artist Fritz Metsch Publisher William Morrow an imprint of HarperCollins Publication June 4, 2019 Pages 883 All fiction involves, to one degree or another, ‘world building.’ No matter how hyper-realistic the story wants to be, …
Against the Fall of Night: a review of American Carnage. Copyright © 2019 by Tim Alberta HarperCollins “[Sarah Palin] was the early embodiment of some of the problems that would plague the party; mediocrity, anger, resentment, populism, proudly anti-intellectual, and increasingly bitter. And she was a rock star for it.” – Peter Wehner, veteran of …
Cari Mora Thomas Harris Copyright © Thomas Harris 2019 William Heinemann & Grand Central Publishing You read quickly through the first three chapters of Thomas Harris’ Cari Mora with a slight sense that, gripping and strange as the story begins, it’s a bit pedestrian, not quite on the level of Silence of the Lambs. Then …
Maggots in the Cantaloupe: A review of Outsider Stephen King, Scribner books copyright 2018, 560 pages. Terry Maitland, a teacher and little league coach in Oklahoma, is accused of raping, mutilating and killing an eleven year old boy. There are eyewitnesses, there are fingerprints, there is DNA evidence. The local cops are so sure he …
When I got my copy of La Belle Sauvage, I misread it as “La Belle Sausage.” The sad thing is the French word for sausage is saucisse. The words “La Belle” should have tipped me off that the title wasn’t in English. I’m from Canada. I’ve studied these things. I even lived right next door …
Elevation, a novel[la] Copyright © 2018 by Stephen King Illustrations © Mark Edward Geyer Scribner Readers will be irresistibly reminded of Thinner, a 1984 novel by Richard Bachman, in which the central character begins mysteriously losing weight. Bachman, of course, was the nom de slumming of Stephen King, and Thinner was a not-bad effort, one …