Welcome to Lovecraft, the first volume in Joe Hill’s Locke & Key graphic novel series, focuses on siblings Bode, Tyler, and Kinsey Locke relocating from California to the Keyhouse on the fictional island of Lovecraft, Massachusetts after Tyler’s classmate Sam Lesser murders their father. The murdered Mr. Locke was a high school counselor who met with Sam, […]
“The Call of Cthulhu” is probably H.P. Lovecraft’s most enduring and influential story. It’s been reprinted and borrowed from and adapted in thousands of ways since its publication in Weird Tales in 1928. Lovecraft, a movie fan, would probably approve of the faithfully retro black-and-white film of his tale released by H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society in 2005; he might be horrified by […]
Early on The Waste Lands (the third book in The Dark Tower series by Stephen King), protagonists Roland, Eddie, and Susannah encounter Shardik, a gigantic bear who is at first portrayed as a kind of ancient wilderness deity: Once, the Old People had lived in the West Woods (it was their leavings which Roland had found from […]
The Drawing of the Three by Stephen King is the second volume in The Dark Tower, his epic, cross-genre novel series. I enjoyed the first novel, The Gunslinger, but for me, this is where The Dark Tower really starts to get interesting. One of the aspects of the novel that I found particularly interesting was King’s narrative technique of having Roland (the main […]
The Gunslinger is the first novel in The Dark Tower, Stephen King’s classic, epic cross-genre series. It introduces the reader to the last gunslinger, Roland of Gilead, as he pursues The Man in Black across a vast land laid to waste. The setting is part Wild West, part medieval fantasy, and part far-future dystopia. King started writing the novel […]
Choke Hold is the 2011 sequel to Christa Faust’s Money Shot. It offers the first-person narrative of former porn actress Angel Dare as she tries to save the mixed martial artist son of a former lover from being murdered by gangsters. Faust offers a fast-paced, gritty, action-packed narrative that offers a more critical, more aware view of violence […]
(Spoilers follow!) The Graveyard Book is a children’s novel by popular author Neil Gaiman. It’s constructed as a set of linked stories — Gaiman loosely modeled the structure after Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book — that tell the childhood adventures of Nobody Owens, a boy who grows up in an English graveyard. Nobody first arrives at the graveyard […]
Zombie is a 1995 novel by Joyce Carol Oates. It’s the epistolary story of Quentin P., the under-achieving son of a college professor who is out on parole after being put on trial for sexually molesting a teenager. Quentin is under the supervision of his worried parents and his court-appointed psychiatrist, but none of them have […]
