books
I guess this batch of book reviews is all about the spooks, so get ready to wet your pants.
Full Throttle - Joe Hill (2019)
A collection of short stories, involving things such as: a librarian who delivers books to ghosts; a trucker guy who has a violent battle with nasty motorcycle dudes; a couple of kids who find a plesiosaur; scary grass; robots; and much more.
For my money, the best story is "Faun." Imagine if, rather than a bunch of innocent children discovering the wardrobe that leads to Narnia, an iniquitous old geezer found it instead. Why, such an unscrupulous man might profit by it, enslaving magical creatures and offering expensive hunting expeditions to men tired of shooting lions and elephants. Imagine the thrill of shooting a faun, or a nymph, or whatever!
...But then imagine the magical inhabitants of this Narnia stand-in had had enough. Dear god, was this one chilling.
I think the theme of this book is believe in yourself.
One word: good
Rating: 8
Strange Weather - Joe Hill (2017)
In this collection of four novellas, readers will quake with terror as they read about an evil camera, a downpour of evil nails, and a skydiver who gets stranded on an evil cloud--this last might be my favorite concept of the bunch. The fourth and most gripping tale in the collection is "Loaded," in which a bad man sets out to murder someone but, in the process, inadvertently thwarts a mass shooting.
I don't really have anything else to say about this book. All four stories are pretty good.
I think the theme of this book is believe in yourself.
One word: good
Rating: 8
Vampire Breath - R.L. Stine (1996)
In addition to working my way through Animorphs, I am whittling away at the original Goosebumps series. When that's done, I may branch out into the HorrorLand and SlappyWorld spinoffs, and whatever else there might be, but I consider those extra-canonical and not required to get the Goosebumps punch on your Nineties Kid card.
R.L. Stine has written an extraordinary quantity of low-effort trash, which makes it difficult to decide whether he's a marketing genius, a lazy writer, or both. Some years ago, I read my first handful of Goosebumps books and found them uniformly bland, almost vicariously insulting. Yes, these books were made for children, and children are stupid, but come on: they're not that stupid. They deserve better.
And yet, in recent weeks I've given Goosebumps a second chance, and I'm feeling more charitable about the books now. Maybe it's the rapid-fire way in which I've consumed them, shotgunning a book a day. Speed is the key. If you have to spread a Goosebumps book over a few days (which you might, maybe you're busy), you're going to resent it. You'll see it sitting on the couch for days, and you'll wonder: why is that book still there? Am I really backtracking in a fucking Goosebumps book to recall the details I've forgotten since I last picked it up? Why is it taking me more time to read this book than the author spent writing it? If you down it in a day, it feels like you're watching a TV episode, a bite-sized story that demands little of your time or focus. (For the record, I have yet to watch any of the Goosebumps TV series.) Some of the books are worse than others, but I think you can plot a pretty standard distribution showing a majority of the books somewhere in the middle and a few at the extremes of "unusually bad" or "actually kind of good." Gobbled up like so many handfuls of potato chips, you can easily find yourself reaching for just one more Goosebumps book before you get back to serious literature, like Dog Man.
Anyway, I have nothing much to say about Vampire Breath in particular. I just wanted to mention the Goosebumps podcast I discovered. It's called "Welcome to Deadcast" and features gay twin brothers who break down every title in the series. Their style is manic, flamboyant, and irreverent, and yet their love of the books is genuine. The episode about Vampire Breath had me CUH-RYING with laughter. I couldn't mount a good defense if you challenged its humor, but I'll be gosh-darned if it didn't have me red-faced and clutching my sides. I listened to it during parent-teacher conferences, the day I was dead tired from shoveling snow and couldn't muster the energy to do much of anything. If the idea of a couple of overcaffeinated queers (can I use that word?) screaming about Goosebumps sounds funny to you, look it up. If you're too lazy to do that, then I'm certainly too lazy to provide a link.
I think the theme of this book is if you find a vampire coffin in your basement, maybe leave it alone, yeah?
One word: dumb
Rating: 7
We Used To Live Here - Marcus Kliewer (2024)
Two young ladies named Eve and Charlie have just moved into a house together, a grand old house in the middle of the woods that they intend to flip or, perhaps, demolish. One night, a wholesome-looking but weird family shows up in the middle of a storm. The dad is like, "Hey, this is random, but I grew up in this house, can I show my family around?" And right now, it's just Eve at home, and she's too nice to say no, so she's like, "All right." That's when weird stuff starts happening, like evil-seeming ants crawling all over the place, one of the kids disappearing, a shadow creature hanging out in the basement, et cetera.
Well, Charlie comes home a few hours into this, and she's a real no-nonsense bitch. She's all like: what the fuck? Why is this family in our house, and what the hell is going on? But it just gets weirder and weirder, and the family keeps finding excuses not to leave, and then Charlie disappears!
The situation steadily worsens until Eve can no longer keep track of what's real and what's not, or who she is, or who lives in the house, or anything! Boy, does it get confusing and stressful! Plus, you, the reader, have to read some Morse code, and there's another code in the book that I'm pretty sure I wasn't smart enough to decipher, and before you know it the book's over and you're not even quite sure what happened, just that it was bad and scary.
This book seems to have been inspired by another book that's been sitting unread on my shelf for a while, House of Leaves (in fact it is directly referenced at least once). I guess I should tackle that one someday soon.
I think the theme of this book is don't talk to strangers.
One word: eerie
Rating: 8
This Thing Between Us - Gus Moreno (2021)
This book was a bit of a bait-and-switch, where the description oversimplifies or misrepresents what the story is about, but by the time you realize that, you're already halfway through the book.
The elevator pitch? A young couple buys a haunted Alexa, and it starts playing odd music and ordering bizarre products without their permission. It sounds for all the world like one of those Paranormal Activity movies with an evil smart speaker instead of an invisible demon. I thought that's what this was going to be about.
That stuff does happen, but it's a minor prelude to what turns out to be less a plot-driven spookfest than an eerie meditation on grief and guilt and loneliness. When the girlfriend dies in a highly-publicized accident, the boyfriend takes his dog and moves to the middle of nowhere to escape all the attention. Unfortunately, the ghostly presence that once inhabited the Alexa seems to have followed him, and increasingly terrifying things begin happening.
Deceptive hook or not, this wasn't bad. Not great, but not bad. It was creepy and well-written, but it was also a bit forgettable, with a frustratingly ambiguous ending.
I think the theme of this book is I do believe in spooks, I do I do I do.
One word: creepy
Rating: 6
Night Shift - Stephen King (1978)
A strong collection of twenty short stories--I'm not sure there's a stinker in the whole bunch. Some of my favorites? "Trucks," in which maniacal big rigs come to life and terrorize some people holed up in a diner. "Battleground," in which a hitman who's just offed a toy company exec is besieged by vengeful green army men. And "The Ledge," in which a cuckolded mob boss forces his wife's lover to circumnavigate the inches-wide ledge around the outside of his sky-high penthouse apartment. I won't tell you how any of these or the seventeen other stories in the collection end. You will just have to borrow the book from your local public library and find out for yourself.
I think the theme of this book is believe in yourself.
One word: yikes
Rating: 8
Full Throttle - Joe Hill (2019)
A collection of short stories, involving things such as: a librarian who delivers books to ghosts; a trucker guy who has a violent battle with nasty motorcycle dudes; a couple of kids who find a plesiosaur; scary grass; robots; and much more.
For my money, the best story is "Faun." Imagine if, rather than a bunch of innocent children discovering the wardrobe that leads to Narnia, an iniquitous old geezer found it instead. Why, such an unscrupulous man might profit by it, enslaving magical creatures and offering expensive hunting expeditions to men tired of shooting lions and elephants. Imagine the thrill of shooting a faun, or a nymph, or whatever!
...But then imagine the magical inhabitants of this Narnia stand-in had had enough. Dear god, was this one chilling.
I think the theme of this book is believe in yourself.
One word: good
Rating: 8
Strange Weather - Joe Hill (2017)
In this collection of four novellas, readers will quake with terror as they read about an evil camera, a downpour of evil nails, and a skydiver who gets stranded on an evil cloud--this last might be my favorite concept of the bunch. The fourth and most gripping tale in the collection is "Loaded," in which a bad man sets out to murder someone but, in the process, inadvertently thwarts a mass shooting.
I don't really have anything else to say about this book. All four stories are pretty good.
I think the theme of this book is believe in yourself.
One word: good
Rating: 8
Vampire Breath - R.L. Stine (1996)
In addition to working my way through Animorphs, I am whittling away at the original Goosebumps series. When that's done, I may branch out into the HorrorLand and SlappyWorld spinoffs, and whatever else there might be, but I consider those extra-canonical and not required to get the Goosebumps punch on your Nineties Kid card.
R.L. Stine has written an extraordinary quantity of low-effort trash, which makes it difficult to decide whether he's a marketing genius, a lazy writer, or both. Some years ago, I read my first handful of Goosebumps books and found them uniformly bland, almost vicariously insulting. Yes, these books were made for children, and children are stupid, but come on: they're not that stupid. They deserve better.
And yet, in recent weeks I've given Goosebumps a second chance, and I'm feeling more charitable about the books now. Maybe it's the rapid-fire way in which I've consumed them, shotgunning a book a day. Speed is the key. If you have to spread a Goosebumps book over a few days (which you might, maybe you're busy), you're going to resent it. You'll see it sitting on the couch for days, and you'll wonder: why is that book still there? Am I really backtracking in a fucking Goosebumps book to recall the details I've forgotten since I last picked it up? Why is it taking me more time to read this book than the author spent writing it? If you down it in a day, it feels like you're watching a TV episode, a bite-sized story that demands little of your time or focus. (For the record, I have yet to watch any of the Goosebumps TV series.) Some of the books are worse than others, but I think you can plot a pretty standard distribution showing a majority of the books somewhere in the middle and a few at the extremes of "unusually bad" or "actually kind of good." Gobbled up like so many handfuls of potato chips, you can easily find yourself reaching for just one more Goosebumps book before you get back to serious literature, like Dog Man.
Anyway, I have nothing much to say about Vampire Breath in particular. I just wanted to mention the Goosebumps podcast I discovered. It's called "Welcome to Deadcast" and features gay twin brothers who break down every title in the series. Their style is manic, flamboyant, and irreverent, and yet their love of the books is genuine. The episode about Vampire Breath had me CUH-RYING with laughter. I couldn't mount a good defense if you challenged its humor, but I'll be gosh-darned if it didn't have me red-faced and clutching my sides. I listened to it during parent-teacher conferences, the day I was dead tired from shoveling snow and couldn't muster the energy to do much of anything. If the idea of a couple of overcaffeinated queers (can I use that word?) screaming about Goosebumps sounds funny to you, look it up. If you're too lazy to do that, then I'm certainly too lazy to provide a link.
I think the theme of this book is if you find a vampire coffin in your basement, maybe leave it alone, yeah?
One word: dumb
Rating: 7
We Used To Live Here - Marcus Kliewer (2024)
Two young ladies named Eve and Charlie have just moved into a house together, a grand old house in the middle of the woods that they intend to flip or, perhaps, demolish. One night, a wholesome-looking but weird family shows up in the middle of a storm. The dad is like, "Hey, this is random, but I grew up in this house, can I show my family around?" And right now, it's just Eve at home, and she's too nice to say no, so she's like, "All right." That's when weird stuff starts happening, like evil-seeming ants crawling all over the place, one of the kids disappearing, a shadow creature hanging out in the basement, et cetera.
Well, Charlie comes home a few hours into this, and she's a real no-nonsense bitch. She's all like: what the fuck? Why is this family in our house, and what the hell is going on? But it just gets weirder and weirder, and the family keeps finding excuses not to leave, and then Charlie disappears!
The situation steadily worsens until Eve can no longer keep track of what's real and what's not, or who she is, or who lives in the house, or anything! Boy, does it get confusing and stressful! Plus, you, the reader, have to read some Morse code, and there's another code in the book that I'm pretty sure I wasn't smart enough to decipher, and before you know it the book's over and you're not even quite sure what happened, just that it was bad and scary.
This book seems to have been inspired by another book that's been sitting unread on my shelf for a while, House of Leaves (in fact it is directly referenced at least once). I guess I should tackle that one someday soon.
I think the theme of this book is don't talk to strangers.
One word: eerie
Rating: 8
This Thing Between Us - Gus Moreno (2021)
This book was a bit of a bait-and-switch, where the description oversimplifies or misrepresents what the story is about, but by the time you realize that, you're already halfway through the book.
The elevator pitch? A young couple buys a haunted Alexa, and it starts playing odd music and ordering bizarre products without their permission. It sounds for all the world like one of those Paranormal Activity movies with an evil smart speaker instead of an invisible demon. I thought that's what this was going to be about.
That stuff does happen, but it's a minor prelude to what turns out to be less a plot-driven spookfest than an eerie meditation on grief and guilt and loneliness. When the girlfriend dies in a highly-publicized accident, the boyfriend takes his dog and moves to the middle of nowhere to escape all the attention. Unfortunately, the ghostly presence that once inhabited the Alexa seems to have followed him, and increasingly terrifying things begin happening.
Deceptive hook or not, this wasn't bad. Not great, but not bad. It was creepy and well-written, but it was also a bit forgettable, with a frustratingly ambiguous ending.
I think the theme of this book is I do believe in spooks, I do I do I do.
One word: creepy
Rating: 6
Night Shift - Stephen King (1978)
A strong collection of twenty short stories--I'm not sure there's a stinker in the whole bunch. Some of my favorites? "Trucks," in which maniacal big rigs come to life and terrorize some people holed up in a diner. "Battleground," in which a hitman who's just offed a toy company exec is besieged by vengeful green army men. And "The Ledge," in which a cuckolded mob boss forces his wife's lover to circumnavigate the inches-wide ledge around the outside of his sky-high penthouse apartment. I won't tell you how any of these or the seventeen other stories in the collection end. You will just have to borrow the book from your local public library and find out for yourself.
I think the theme of this book is believe in yourself.
One word: yikes
Rating: 8