Bird Box

by Josh Malerman

293 pgs  (Bird Box series #1)

Most of the time, having really high expectations for a book means I'm going to be disappointed, at some level, with it when I read it. But sometimes a book comes along that is able to meet and even exceed my high expectations. Josh Malerman's Bird Box was one of those books. 

I haven't seen the Netflix movie based on the book, but I had definitely heard about it. So I had a pretty good idea of what the premise of the story was before I even read the cover flap. And the premise is what had me so excited to read the book. 

Malorie is a young mother in a post-apocalyptic future in which creatures exist that drive everyone who sees them to go violently insane and kill themselves. Malerman never makes it known where these creatures came from, what they look like, or what it is about them that causes such a deadly reaction.

It takes everything Malorie has just to survive every day and keep the two children alive. And the only way she's able to do that, is to black out all of their windows and wear a blindfold anytime she has to venture outside the house.

Bird Box the type of story that should be experienced for oneself and not spoiled by a review, so I won't say much more about it. Suffice it to say, it's intense and scary, in a way that will make the soles of your feet sweat. 

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre

by Max Brooks
282 pgs

Fourteen years after publishing World War Z, in which he gives a brilliant account of the war between the human race and the zombies, Max Brooks releases another cautionary tale. This time, he uses interviews and the found journal of a survivor as his source materials to provide an account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre. That's right, this time around, it's Bigfoot. Need I say More?

Greenloop is a small affluent community near Mount Rainier consisting of wealthy and (not surprisingly) ill-prepared people, who have chosen the isolated, but comfortable lifestyle Greenloop provides. It's only 90 minutes away from Seattle, but its residents are far enough away from civilization that their weekly groceries arrive via drones. Kate Holland is the newest person to move to Greenloop, and it's her journal through which most of the story is told.

Within days of Kate's arrival, Mount Rainier erupts, and the eruption severs the few remaining ties Greenloop has with the rest of the world completely. But Kate and her new neighbors have little to no time to consider how they'll survive the weeks or potentially months before they're rescued before even bigger problems arrive. The eruption has also displaced the creatures, which for years have been rumored to be living in the forests of the Pacific Northwest and sent them right into Greenloop.

For anyone who has ever thought, "Enough with the vampires and zombies. Give us a new threat to humanity," Devolution is a welcome response. It's not without its flaws (halfway through the book you'll be asking yourself when Kate has the time to write in her journal when she's spending all of her time trying to avoid having her skull crushed in by a sasquatch), but it's still a very enjoyable book. Hopefully, it will get the same cinematic treatment World War Z did one day, and we'll finally have a Bigfoot movie that will help us forget Harry and the Hendersons.

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

The Cabin at the End of the World

by Paul Tremblay
270 pgs

Wen, who is about to turn eight years old, and her two adoptive fathers, Andre and Eric, are staying at a rented cabin near a lake in New Hampshire. It's a remote cabin, without cell reception and a mile or so from its nearest neighbor. The perfect place for an extended vacation, where they can be alone as a family.

As the book begins, Wen is out capturing grasshoppers and delicately placing them inside a mason jar with a ventilated lid, when a large and friendly man jogs up the dirt road to the cabin and introduces himself as Leonard. Wen knows she's not supposed to talk to strangers, but Leonard is so friendly--even helping her catch a few more grasshoppers for her collection--and since Andrew and Eric are just on the other side of the cabin, Wen quickly relaxes and enjoys talking to her new friend for a few minutes.

But soon, when three more people--two women and another man all carrying strange, home-made weapons and dressed oddly similar to Leonard--appear at the bottom of the road and begin walking up to the cabin, Leonard's behavior changes and he tells Wen he and his friends need to talk to her and her dads about something very important.

Wen and her two dads try to barricade themselves inside the cabin, but Leonard and his friends are soon able to break in. Once inside, in an eerily calm and reasonable manner, they explain to the family of three that the world is going to end very soon, and the only way to stop it, is for Andrew, Eric, and Wen to voluntarily make a gut-wrenching sacrifice.

The Cabin at the End of the World is the type of book that will stick to your brain long after you finish the last page. It's a psychological horror story that keeps you off balance and uncertain of what you think you, and to say much more than that only risks ruining the experience for the next person. So that will have to do. It will not be long before I pick up another of Tremblay's books. I'm guessing it'll be around this coming Halloween.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

John Dies at the End

by David Wong
456 pgs

Every once in a while, I read a book that doesn't lend itself to an easy or concise description. To adequately describe it would probably take half as long as it would take to read the book itself. John Dies at the End by David Wong (pseudonym) is one of those books.

Somewhere in a small undisclosed town, somewhere in the heart of the country, a new drug has hit the streets. It's known as Soy Sauce, and it promises users an experience unlike any they've had before. John and Dave are friends who live in this undisclosed town and both are perpetual underachievers. John plays in a similarly underachieving band, and one night, at a party after a gig, John is introduced to Soy Sauce by a strange man pretending to be Jamaican. John calls Dave in the middle of the night while experiencing a "bad trip" from the drug. Dave picks up John at his apartment and the two end up at the local Denny's. While there, Dave gets another call from his friend John, whose sitting in the booth across from him eating and not calling him. John asks Dave whether he (John) has died yet, and from that point on, things only get more and more absurd.

John Dies at the End is a book with a cult following. It was originally published as an independent web series by David Wong (again, pseudonym) who was working as a a copy editor at a law firm. It became so popular that he eventually decided to turn the online chapters he had been releasing into novel and through word of mouth, the book became so popular it was turned into a movie starring Paul Giamatti.

While the book isn't fantastic, I enjoyed it enough that I'm interested in reading its sequels: This Book is Full of Spiders, and What the Hell Did I Just Read. I'm interested to see if the things I liked about this one improve in those books, and if the things I wasn't crazy about improve.

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

A Short Stay in Hell

by Steven L. Peck
104 pgs

Soren Johansson, a faithful member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, dies at a relatively young age from cancer. Upon dying, he's sent to hell, but not the hell he learned about in church, or from reading the bible, or even the Book of Mormon. Instead, he's sent to a seemingly infinite library with the promise that if he can find the book that contains the story of his life, he will be free to leave.

Peck uses this simple idea to craft a disturbing story, a story which, at the very least, will leave you unsettled about the concept of hell and an infinite afterlife.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

The Institute

by Stephen King
557 pgs

Luke Ellis is an extremely gifted 12-year-old, who lives in Minneapolis with his parents. Luke plans to attend MIT soon, but that will never happen. Because Luke also happens to possess minor telekinetic abilities. Abilities which have placed him on the radar of a secret organization, an organization that is monitoring kids like Luke all over the world.

One night, Luke's parents are killed in their sleep and Luke is taken to The Institute, a non-descript campus somewhere in the woods of Maine. Very few people know that The Institute exists, and none, except for the children who have been taken there and the small group of men and women who work there, know what has been going on there for decades.

At The Institute, Luke and the other children are given injections and subjected to extreme conditions, which all have the affect of heightening and enhancing their telekinetic or telepathic abilities. And once they've reached a certain level, the children are exploited, drained, and discarded.

The Institute is classic Stephen King. It bears similarities with some of his earlier works, like Firestarter and It, with children having to face extraordinary circumstances, but does so in a wholly original way. And the fear and horror King taps into is the very real fear and horror that can take place when otherwise normal adults do horrible things because they believe what they're doing is ultimately for the best.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

Full Throttle

by Joe Hill
480 pgs

Full Throttle, the most recent offering from Joe Hill, is a collection of twisted, unsettling, and sometimes shocking stories from a writer who is obviously following in his father's footprints, but is doing so with his own style and voice.

A couple of the stories: Throttle and In the Tall Grass, were coauthored with his father, Stephen King. But as big a fan as I am of King, and as good as those two stories are, they weren't my favorite ones in the collection. Throttle was inspired by the story Duel by Richard Matheson, which was adapted into a movie by an up-and-coming Steven Spielberg many years ago. Into the Tall Grass is about two siblings who wander into a field of grass too high to see over and quickly learn they've entered a strange and savage world none have ever escaped from. You are Released (my favorite), is about the passengers on a commercial airplane who find out mid-flight that nuclear war has broken out while they've been in the air.

There are ten other noteworthy stories in the book that I'm not going to say anything about, but that are each well worth the hour or so it takes to read them. They're not the kind of stories that can be forgotten soon after reading.

I became a fan of Stephen King's shorter stories very early on in my discovery of his writing, and I still get a little extra excited when he publishes another collection of them. So, I'm happy to see a similar pattern with Hill, and I hope he follows the example he's been given and continues to write them and compile them every time he has enough.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

Imaginary Friend

by Stephen Chbosky
705 pgs

Christopher's mother, fleeing an abusive relationship, takes her seven-year-old son and moves to the small ton of Mill Grove, Pennsylvania. She has no money and no possessions, but she's determined to start a new life for the to of them, safe from the violence and threats she's endured.

But shortly after arriving, Christopher begins hearing voices. They speak to him from the clouds and from a white plastic bag, warning him of the dangers of a "hissing lady." Following the voices, Christopher enters the woods near town one day and disappears. Six days later, when he walks back out of the woods, Christopher has changed. The changes aren't immediately obvious, even to his mother, but they begin to manifest over the coming days and weeks.

Before he went missing, Christopher struggled in school. Numbers and letters always seemed to be jumbled up when he'd see them. But when he returns, they all seem to fall into place, and he quickly begins outperforming all the other students in his class. Christopher is also obsessed with building a tree house in a specific tree back in the woods, a tree house that for some reason, he knows he must finish before Christmas, or something terrible will happen.

Imaginary Friend is a horror story that seems inspired by Stephen King and Stranger Things. It's a fantastical and epic story. It's Chbosky's first book in twenty years, and based on it, even if it takes twenty years to write his next one, I bet it'l be worth the wait.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

They Thirst

by Robert McCammon
616 pgs

They Thirst is the third vampire book I've read in the last month, which wasn't a coincidence. I had been saving all three to read around Halloween, because I figured, if any of them were terrible, I could rationalize wasting time reading them because they're the types of books that should be read at this time of year. Fortunately, Robert McCammon delivers, once again.

Andy Palatazin grew up in Hungary, where, as a boy, he learned first hand that vampires exist. His father, who had gone out with a group of men during a winter storm to hunt down a vampire who had been hunting in their village, returned in the middle of the night, having been "turned." Andy and his mother fled and eventually ended up in California, but he never forgot the terror and violence he witnessed that night. Now, decades later, Andy is a cop in L.A.. trying to protect its citizens from more mundane threats.

But a powerful vampire, Prince Vulkan, has decided to make L.A. his home as well, with plans to turn the whole city into an army of vampires before spreading to the rest of the country, and eventually, the world. It's Andy who is first to recognize the work of Prince Vulkan for what it is, and with the eventual help of a small group of people, sets out to find and stop him.

They Thirst is one of McCammon's earlier books (1981), and it reads like a book from that period. It's a little cheesy at times, but it shows the progression he was making as a writer and storyteller. I found myself both smiling as I read it and not wanting to put it down.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

Wanderers

by Chuck Wendig
782 pgs

When I hear a book is being compared to The Stand, and favorably no less, I have to check it out. In the case of Chuck Wendig's new book Wanderers, I'm really glad I did. There's just something about a good post-apocalyptic, dystopian story that makes me happy for some reason. So, I'm always excited when a good one comes around.

The story begins when Shanna, a 17-year-old girl, wakes up to find her young sister Nessie is missing from her bed. That in and of itself isn't unusual or alarming, but when she finds Nessie a few minutes later, just how unusual and alarming the situation is, quickly becomes apparent. She finds Nessie walking alongside the road outside the house, barefoot adn unresponsive. At first, she thinks Nessie is merely sleepwalking, but when nothing she does will wake her, and when her attempts to physically stop her and take her back to the house cause Nessie to scream, shake violently, and act as if she's about to explode--literally, Shanna quickly realized something serious is going on.

By the time she goes back, wakes her father, adn the two of them catch back up to Nessie, she's wandered even further away from the house, and still shows no sign of waking nor stopping. Within a few minutes, Mr. Blamire, Shanna's math teacher, walks out of the morning mist along side of the road and approaches Nessie. Shanna can tell he's in the same state Nessie's in, adn when he gets to her, he turns direction and begins slowly walking right behind her. Gradually others join the group one by one, usually being followed by frantic family members or friends trying to "wake" them with the same results Shanna had. It doesn't take long for the local news to get word of the strange phenomena, and very soon, the "sleepwalkers" become a national headline.

Right around this same time, the CDC identifies a strange and deadly new fungal disease. The disease infects the host's brain, initially causing cold-like symptoms, but within weeks, the person begins experiencing hallucinations, often leading to suicide. Eventually the person dies and his or her whole body releases millions of spores into the air, potentially infecting thousands more.

As the story goes on and the group of sleepwalkers and their shepherds continues to grow mile after mile, Wendig gradually and expertly lays out the scope and magnitude of the story he's telling. Government agencies become involved, along with religious zealots and white supremacists. All trying to figure out what's going on, whether it's the apocalypse, and what ethnic group is to blame for it, respectively.

I had never heard of Chuck Wendig before seeing this book at the bookstore, so I didn't know what to expect, but I was very impressed. The story is fantastic, and his characters are well developed. A lot of books this big take a few hundred pages to build up and set the stage before they set their hook. That's not the case with Wanderers. The story grabbed me right from page one, and it didn't let up until the end.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Dracul

by Dacre Stoker & J.D. Barker
493 pgs

I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed reading Dracul, Dacre Stoker and J.D. Barker's prequel to the iconic book Dracula., written by Dacre's great-granduncle Bram Stoker. But before I say anything about the story, I think it's worth mentioning that the backstory of how the book came to be, which is outlined in the Authors' Note at the end, is fascinating and should not be neglected. It adds significantly to the story and explains ho anyone could have the audacity to try to add anything to Uncle Stoker's tale.

The backstory outlines Stoker and Barker's research of Dracula, which included the discovery of a lost journal of Bram Stoker's and the rare opportunity to review the book's original annotated manuscript. The manuscript interestingly begins on page 102, a fact Stoker and Barker deftly use in explaining the origins of their prequel. The story they were able to piece together from the journal and the notes is a great addition to the book and the vampire genre in general.

In the story, Bram Stoker himself plays the role of one of the main characters, and it begins in 1868, with a then 21-year old Bram hiding in the tower of a castle one night trying to ward off Dracul with nothing but holy water and some crucifixes. He's frantically trying to write down and record the events of his life, which led to this point, hoping that even if he dies, or something worse, his story will have a chance to be told.

From there the story goes back in time to Bram's early childhood and the mysterious woman named Ellen Crone who tended to him and his sister Matilda. Ellen took particular care of young Bram, who from birth had been a sickly child who spent almost all of his early childhood confined to his bed. IT wasn't until Ellen arrived and mysteriously healed him that he was able to begin living a full life. Ellen mysteriously disappeared from their lives ad Matilda made it her life's mission to find out what Ellen did to change Bram like she did.

Numerous times in her search for Ellen over the years, she would catch a fleeting glimpse of a woman in a crowd she was sure was Ellen because she looked like she hadn't aged a day since she left, but as soon as she was seen, she'd disappear again.

The story sunk its teeth into me (sorry, I tried to resist) and didn't let go. It's a vampire story that stays truer to the original character than probably any of the hundreds of other vampires stories that it inspired, and it's well worth the time it takes to read it.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

Inspection

by Josh Malerman
387 pgs

Deep in the northern woods of Michigan, there's a tower, which serves as the home for 26 gifted 12-year-old boys, all of whom have been raised there since they were babies by a man they know only as D.A.D. The boys, whose names are simply the letters of the alphabet, have been raised their entire lives with no knowledge of the world outside their tower and beyond the grounds immediately surrounding it. Unbeknownst to them, they are the subjects of a bizarre and unsettling experiment. D.A.D. believes that "genius is distracted by the opposite sex," and so is raising these boys without any knowledge that females exist, believing that by doing so, he will help them to unlock their full potential.

While these boys have been growing up in their tower, being taught by special teachers, and reading books and watching movies made specifically for them to reinforce the idea of a one-gender world, a similar experiment has been going on in a separate tower a few miles away. Only in this tower, there are 26 girls, being raised by M.O.M. with no knowledge of the male gender.

But these children are all extremely gifted, and for M.O.M. and D.A.D. to assume they will never figure out something is wrong with the world they've been raised in is naive. In fact, a boy named J has recently begun to suspect that D.A.D. has been hiding something from them, and a girl named K has been bothered by something she thinks she's seen off in the distance, something that doesn't seem right.

Inspection is the second book by Josh Malerman that I've read, and they've both made me excited about him as an author. I've yet to read his breakout book Bird Box. But with its sequel scheduled to be coming out in October, I plan to read it soon. I'm looking forward to both books and I'm pretty confident I'm going to enjoy them even more than I have these first two.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

The Hunger

by Alma Katsu
373 pgs

In The Hunger, Alma Katsu takes the story of the Donner Party, and adds an element of the supernatural to it. The result is an eerie, captivating story that will likely alter the way you think about that ill-fated group of pioneers going forward.

The book starts at the end of their story, when the small group of survivors is found, emaciated and near death, and then it jumps back to the start of their journey from Independence, Missouri in the late spring of 1846. It's clear Katsu tried to stay as true to the actual people in the Donner Party, and to the myriad of misfortunes they encountered, as she could, while simultaneously injecting the supernatural elements she devised into the narration. And it's the combination of both the fiction and the non-fiction that had me so entertained.

Everyone knows what the story of the Donner Party is all about, and to say anything specific about what Katsu added to it would only ruin it for others. So, I think it's best to leave it at that. It's definitely worth the read.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

Alice Isn't Dead

by Joseph Fink
322 pgs

Alice Isn't Deadis another book based on a podcast by Joseph Fink. A few months ago, I read Welcome to Night Vale, which has based on the podcast by Fink and Jeffrey Cranor of the same name. This book is based on a different podcast and is solely Fink's. Like Night Vale, Alice Isn't Dead is a horror story, but while the former is a little more tongue-in-cheek and is based on conspiracy theories and the absurd, this one is a little more traditional and is based on fear and anxiety.

The book and podcast tell the story of Keisha Taylor, a woman whose wife, Alice, a big-rig-driver, disappeared months ago without a trace and is presumed dead. But Keisha knows Alice is still alive, otherwise, how is it possible that she keeps seeing Alice in the background of news reports of every major tragedy across the country? So, Keisha, who goes to work for the same trucking company Alice worked for, now spends all of her time driving around the country searching for her wife, who isn't dead.

Alice Isn't Dead is a fun and entertaining horror story Fink, who has been public with his constant battle with anxiety, gives Keisha the same issue to deal with, and it's prevalent throughout the story. Her feelings of anxiety are justified though. Because as she searches for her wife, she becomes swallowed up by the same world of secret societies and strange creatures that took her wife away from her.

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

On This, the Day of the Pig

by Josh Malerman
286 pgs

I have not watched Bird Box, nor have I read Josh Malerman's book, which it was based on. But unless you've been living under a rock for the past few months, it's impossible not to know the basic premise of the story, or to be aware of the hype it generated. That being said, when I came across Malerman's On This, the Day of the Pig, I initially didn't give it much consideration. It wasn't until I made the connection and realized who Malerman was, that I decided to give it a try.

In a nutshell, consider how Animal Farm would have been different had Stephen King written it instead of George Orwell. That gives you a general idea of what you're in for with this one.

Pearl is a pig. He's an old and slightly deformed pig, and he's avoided farmer Kopple's slaughtering axe longer than any pig that's ever been on the farm before. But that's not just a coincidence. There's something different about Pearl, something not quite right. And anyone who has ever been around him has sensed it. It's not just that one of his eyes is so dark it looks like he has a gaping hole where the eye should be. It's the thoughts that come into your mind when you're around Pearl...almost as if the pig could communicate directly with and control your mind.

On This, the Day of the Pig feels a little bit like a throwback to the horror books written in the 80s, and on the surface, it sounds a little campy. But Malerman does a great job of infusing real creepiness into the story, and I found myself struggling to put it down.

I'll definitely be reading more by him, and sooner rather than later.

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

Carrion Comfort

by Dan Simmons
636 pgs

Each year, around Halloween, I like to read a good horror story. This year I decided on Carrion Comfort by Dan Simmons, which had been sitting on my bookshelf for the past few years waiting to be picked up. It's a sizable book. Which is a good thing. Simmons is a fantastic writer and he gives himself a lot of room to work in with this story.

Carrion Comfort is a vampire story, but his vampires don't have much in common with Bram Stoker's, Stephen King's, Guillermo del Toro's, and thank fully, Stephenie Meyer's versions of the creatures. Dan Simmons creatures are a select group of humans who possess "The Ability," a psychic power which allows them to control people with their minds. Using their powers rejuvenates them and allows them to live indefinitely. They use the Ability to entertain themselves and take pleasure in taking control of people's minds and using their bodies remotely to murder, rape, and anything else they choose.

Melanie Fuller, Nina Drayton, and Willi Borden are three of these creatures. Every year they meet together to boast of the assassinations and murders they've committed. It's become a game between them to see which of them has been responsible for the most notorious and creative deaths over the past year.

Saul Laski is a psychiatrist and concentration camp survivor. He has spent his entire adult life searching for the SS Officer who took control of his mind all those years ago when he was a prisoner, and from whom Saul was barely able to escape. The man's name was Oberst Wilhelm von Borchert, but Saul believes he now goes by the name Willi Borden.

Natalie Preston is a photographer in Philadelphia whose father was killed in a string of inexplicable murders which took place in one night, and she's searching for answers. She meets Saul, who traveled to Philadelphia after hearing about the murders in his search for Willi Borden, and after hearing his story and becoming convinced it's true, joins him in his search.

I mentioned at the start that this is a sizable book. (The version I read is an oversized hardcover edition with relatively small font size, and the paperback version is around 800 pages.) But it didn't seem like a long book. It could have been another 400 pages long and I'd gladly still be reading it. I've said in other reviews of his books that Dan Simmons knows how to write good books in any genre he chooses. Carrion Comfort and Summer of Night are proof that he has the horror genre down pat.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

The Listener

by Robert McCammon
332 pgs

Robert McCammon's latest book The Listener takes place in New Orleans in 1934. John "Pearly" Partner and Ginger LaFrance are both lifetime con artists who, separately, have been running their own cons for many years. They arrive in a town or city, scam a modest amount of money out of as many locals as they can, and then move on to the next place on the map. When they both end up in New Orleans at the same time and recognize each other for what they are, they decide to work together on a scheme far more dangerous than anything either of them has done before, with the potential for a huge payoff.

Taking inspiration from the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh's baby boy a couple years earlier, they decide to kidnap the two children of one of the wealthiest business men in the city and ransom them for $100,000 each.

Curtis Mayhew is a young black man who works as a red cap baggage handler at the New Orleans train station. Curtis has a special gift that only his widowed mother knows he possesses: he can communicate with others who share his same gift in his mind. When he "listens" he can connect with someone who is broadcasting his or her thoughts to him and they can carry on a conversation telepathically.

For the past little while he has been periodically communicating with a young girl who has recently discovered her own gift and is trying to understand it. He doesn't know who she is or where she lives until one day when she reaches out to him panicked and tells him she and her brother were just kidnapped.

What unfolds is a fantastic genre-bending story told by an author in the prime of his career. Every time I've reviewed one of McCammon's books, I'm sure I've said he's one of my favorite authors writing today, and The Listener is a great example of why. His stories are captivating, his characters are well written (Curtis is one of his best), and while I'm never happy to get to the end of one of his books, I'm always happy about the way it ends.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

The Outsider

by Stephen King
561 pgs

In his latest book The Outsider, Stephen King creates a seemingly impossible murder mystery. A teenage boy is savagely killed and the police quickly have no question about who killed him. Multiple reliable witnesses saw Terry Maitland, a local English teacher an popular Little League coach, with the boy right before the time of death. They saw him get into a van with the boy, the same van that soon turns up filled with the boy's blood and covered with Terry's fingerprints. DNA evidence matching Terry is found at the crime scene as well. There's so much evidence against Terry, and so much outrage over the nature of the murder, that Detective Ralph Anderson makes a public spectacle out of arresting Terry during the middle of one of his Little League games, in front of the whole town.

But Terry is adamant in proclaiming his innocence. He's a well-loved family man and an admired member of the community, and he claims he wasn't even in town the day of the murder. he was at a teachers' convention hundreds of miles away with a group of his colleagues at the school. All of them can attest to him being with them the night of the murder. There's even video proof of him being at the convention. In fact, there's just as much evidence of him being at the convention as there is of him being at the crime scene.

Who else but Stephen King could begin a story with a premise like that and then ride it to such a satisfying conclusion? No one.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

Sleeping Beauties

by Stephen King & Owen King
702 pgs

The end result of Stephen King’s collaboration with his son, and fellow writer Owen King, is an entertaining and eerily timely story centered around the question, “What would happen if all the women in the world were gone?”

Nobody knows what caused it. They don’t know if it was a virus, or some sort of spell. But it affected half the planet’s population seemingly all at once. It’s dubbed the Aurora virus, and it affects only females. Any female who falls asleep quickly becomes sealed up in a fibrous cocoon-type shell and doesn’t wake up again. They don’t die, but if anyone disturbs their cocoon, the woman wakes up as a zombie-like creature and kills the person who touched them.

Women begin taking caffeine and more powerful drugs, as they try to stay awake as long as they can, but eventually the inevitable happens and they succumb to sleep. Only one woman, Evie Black seems immune to the effects of the Aurora virus.

Evie arrives in Drooling, a small town somewhere in Appalachia that the Kings set their story in, shortly after the Aurora pandemic begins. She’s incarcerated in the local prison for committing a murder, but she, unlike every other woman on the planet, continues to wake up anytime she falls asleep. As attention begins to focus on her, it quickly becomes apparent that she’s the key to unlocking what’s happening to all the other women on earth.

I read an interview with Stephen and Owen King, in which they discussed the process they utilized in writing the book together, and I have no doubt King Jr. was just as instrumental in writing the book as King Sr. was. But it reads heavily like a Stephen King book, which is certainly not a criticism from me. It’s reminiscent of the types of books he was writing many years ago, books like Insomnia, Under the Dome, and The Stand.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

Strange Weather

by Joe Hill
432 pgs

In Strange Weather Joe Hill takes a break from the longer novels he’s been writing recently to write four novella-length stories, which he describes in the Afterword as “all killer, no filler.” It’s a bold claim, but he backs it up with each of the stories included here.

The book begins with Snapshot. A story about a teenage boy who discovers the polaroid pictures being taken by a mysterious man in town are slowly sucking away bits and pieces of peoples’ memories and lives one picture at a time.

Loaded is probably my favorite of the four, but not surprisingly, it’s also the one that will be hardest to forget. It’s a very timely story of a shooting at a mall, and the security guard who took things too far in his attempt to take out the shooter.

Next is Aloft, the story of an insecure college student who agrees to go skydiving in order to impress the girl he has a crush on. The jump takes a bizarre, but wonderful turn when he lands (yes lands) on a cloud that isn’t a cloud. He’s all alone thousands of feet above ground, with no way to get down, and a story no one would believe, even if he does.

Last is Rain, a story set in Boulder, Colorado, where the term “deadly thunderstorm” takes on a whole new meaning, when one strikes the city and lets loose a downpour of razor-sharp nails.

All four of these stories show why Joe Hill has so quickly become one of the more popular writers in the genre today. If you haven’t read any of his books yet, it would be easy to assume his success is due to his lineage. But that assumption would be wrong. He’ll probably never be as successful as his father has been (it’s doubtful anyone ever could be), but books like this one show why he doesn’t need the name “King” on the cover.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆