Looking for Your Next Book

  I'm often on the look-out for a good horror novel to read, and when I saw this, with a couple of author names I recognized, I thought this would be a good read and satisfy my hunger for something dark. But I was wrong. The horror genre can come in different forms and my least favorite is one that relies on a lot of blood and sinew and human body parts being torn or ripped off and described in explicit detail.  It's horrific but the effect is numbing after a little bit.  How many times can you describe blood or the sound of a limb being torn off, or the appearance of everything under a person's skin, now exposed, and still make it interesting?  This is nothing more than splatterpunk at its extreme and I would agree with Robert Bloch who said of the genre, "there is a distinction to be made between that which inspires terror and that which inspires nausea" ( Wikipedia ). To make matters even worse, from a story-telling perspective, the entire book takes place in o...

  According to a 2003 article on the NASA website, "NASA-funded scientists have recently learned that cloud-to-ground lightning frequently strikes the ground in two or more places ..." and that the third and fourth strokes of a lightning flash will follow the same path as the second stroke.  In other words, lightning DOES strike the same place twice.  But you don't need to search the web for this information.  If you want proof that lightning strikes twice, just read Andy Weir's newest book, Project Hail Mary , and you'll see that Weir has created a giant sci-fi bestseller, in the same electric path as The Martian . Ryland Grace has a puzzle on his hands.  He wakes up without a clue as to where he is, but he seems to be alone except for a computer AI that was keeping him alive. Unfortunately it didn't seem to be doing the same for two others in his ... wherever he is ... as he notes the decayed corpses in their creches on the ... well, it's a ship.  A spac...

  Back sometime in the late 1980' or early 1990's, when I was working in a bookstore, I remember publishers trying out a 'new' trend, releasing very thin paperback books - novelettes and novellas really - usually older works by noted authors.  The idea was that with the quickly rising costs of printing books, this was an affordable way for readers to connect with their favorite authors. The idea did not catch on. (Some of those books were so thin it was hard to understand how they could get a perfect binding.) But as almost any self-published author today will tell you, selling a novelette or novella in digital format is not only easy, it makes a lot of sense.  People will often shell out a dollar or two for a quick read.  And now that the publishers are getting back on board with this, publishing a recognizable and renowned author's short works for a $1, I suspect that the market might just explode. The only problem here, however, is that publishers are taking old ...

 Jacob Greene is a child of cultists - extremists with a deep connection to powerful gods.  To stay in good favor and receive great powers from these gods Jacob's family (both biological family and cult group family) must occasion a sacrifice now then. Jacob doesn't seem to question this (it's how he's been raised, after all) until the time he brings his best friend home to be brutally sacrificed. Jacob believes that his friend is a willing participant, honored to be chosen, informed of what was about to take place by Jacob's father.   Of course nothing could be further from the truth and the friend does NOT go willingly. This shatters Jacob's belief and has him question his faith and he leaves his family and cult in order to think things through. But it's not easy to escape powerful gods, and despite being in the city of New York, all signs point to the fact that the gods know where he is and that something big is about to go down. Although the description ...

  A small town is rocked by a bank robbery when the robber runs to a nearby apartment viewing and holds the group of people gathered hostage and then disappears in thin air even as the police and media vans surround the apartment.  The local police department brings all those who had been in the apartment at the time in for questioning to try and understand how the bank robber escaped. But as the leading police investigators meet with the former hostages they run into a little problem - the witnesses are no help. Some seem to have a grudge with the police.  Some are more concerned with appearances. And some border on being absolute idiots. Slowly, these people come to realize that their lives have intersected in an unusual way and they begin to open up to one another. And the police leading the investigation, who happen to be father and son, come to realize a few things - not just about the bank robber or the lives of these anxious, ordinary people, but about one another ...