The writer’s imagination never ceases to amaze me. How even the smallest bit of news can catch their eye and be alchemized into stories far beyond the wildest imaginings of the rest of us. For Daniel Kraus, it was a small newspaper article about a diver who’d been caught in the mouth of a whale for mere moments before being pushed back out. This tidbit led him to wonder what ... Read More...
The Angel Maker by Alex North
Anyone else dealing with blah reading recently? I don’t know whether it’s the joy (not!) of dealing with tax prep, but I’ve DNFed two of the last 3 books I started. So, I thought it necessary to wrap up the week with the one book I could not turn away from. If you need reading that will pull you out of your head and onto the page then look no further than The Angel Maker by ... Read More...
Into the Drowning Deep
I’ve officially reached the point in the year that my reading is what I call free range. I still have two books left to read that release in 2021, but by-and-large I’m reading whatever catches my eye at the library or catching up on older books that have been recommended to me by readers I trust. It was in this mindset that I stumbled across Into the Drowning Deep by Mira ... Read More...
Mexican Gothic: A Novel
Sometimes it requires a bit of effort to tease out a book’s theme or premise based on the title. That’s not the case in Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s debut novel, Mexican Gothic. It is exactly that, a noir horror novel set in 1950s Mexico. Noemi is the pampered daughter of a wealthy family whose her father asks her to go to a remote town to visit her newly married cousin, Catalina. ... Read More...
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget. A man and his young son are walking on a desolate road surrounded by burnt trees and ashes. In the distance fires still burn. They are headed…where? To safety would seem to be the answer, but in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road there is no safe place. The world as we know it has gone up in flames. ... Read More...
In the House in the Dark of the Woods
Halloween may be over but the advancing winter weather still makes a perfect backdrop for creepy reading. Last week I wrote about Killing Commendatore, a Japanese novel that was oddly unsettling, but today I have another book that has truly left me flummoxed. It’s Laird Hunt’s In the House in the Dark of the Woods and the title is almost longer than the book. It’s the story of ... Read More...
