A book with a punch equal to its publicity hype! Journalist Carcaterra tells with gripping force of his days growing up in the tough New York City neighborhood of Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s (the names have been changed to protect the innocent and the guilty). He and his three closest buddies engaged in petty crime until the day their tricks got out of hand and escalated into a major offense, for which they were sent to a juvenile home in upstate New York. They were tormented during their months there, not by other young inmates but by their adult guards, who brutalized them relentlessly in a program of horror and torture that included rape. Once out, once grown up, one of the boys became a lawyer, and through a bizarre twist of events worthy of being turned into a movie (in fact, the movie rights have been sold, with Barry Levinson lined up as director), he, Carcaterra, and the other two friends expose the horrible wrongs they suffered in that detention home. Both difficult to read and difficult to put down, this book will garner lots of attention, and as a result, readership demand will be high.
No book in recent history has excited such enthusiasm as Truman Capote's IN COLD BLOOD, his riveting re-creation of the brutal slaying of the Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas...the police investigation that followed...the caputre, trial and execution of the two young murderers Richard Hickock and Perry Smith.
Currently Reading, My Library #56, and current works in progress.
12/17/2011 9:04:04 AM
Let's get up to speed. I recently started reading:
On November 22, 1963, three shots rang out in Dallas, President Kennedy died, and the world changed. What if you could change it back?
In this brilliantly conceived tour de force, Stephen King--who has absorbed the social, political, and popular culture of his generation more imaginatively and thorooughly than any other writer--takes readers on an incredible journey into the past and the possibility of altering it.
It begins with Jake Epping, a thirty-five-year-old English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching GED classes. He asks his students to write about an event that changed their lives, and one essay blows him away--a gruesome, harrowing story about the night more than fifty years ago when Harry Dunning's father came home and killed his mother, his sister, and his brother with a sledgehammer.
Reading the essay is a watershed moment for Jake, his life--like Harry's, like America's in 1963--turning on a dime. Not much later his friend Al, who owns the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to the past, a particular day in 11958. And al enlists Jake to take over the mission that has become his obsession--to prevent the Kennedy assassination.
So begins Jake's new life as George Amberson, in a different world of Ike and JFK and Elvis, of big American cars and sock hops and cigarette smoke everywhere. From the dank little city of Derry, Maine (where there's Dunning business to conduct), to the warmhearted small town of Jodie, Texas, where Jake falls dangerously in love, every turn is leading eventually, of course, to a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and to Dallas, where the past becomes heart-stoppingly suspenseful, and where history might not be history anymore.
Time-travel has never been so believable. Or so terrifying
My library #56:
A terrifying collection of tortured souls doomed to roam the earth in search of redemption:
The Headless Mistress of Wellington Barracks
The Lurking Horror of Berkeley Square
The Love Maidens of China
The Spectral Cavalry Platoon
The Savage Head of the Hanged Man
And many, many more.
In the writing area, my novel REVELATIONS will soon be published by Necro Publications. For more info and a look at the cover, click here.
I've also been given the chance to edit a pretty damn awesome anthology coming up soon, a chance at which I jumped eagerly.
And finally, I'm co-writing a story with David Bain called "Band of Gypsys" for a 3-story e-collection we're putting together of stories based on the works of Jimi Hendrix. No timeframe on that one, just whenever we finish it, I guess. The work is slow.
Geoff is happily married with a young son who is the delight of his life. A famous, successful investigative journalist, he is in the middle of a publicity tour when a voice on the phone plunges him into the darkest part of his past, and into a deadly present.
The voice is that of Geoff's long-missing brother, Ben. When they were children, Ben was blamed for every trouble, large or small. And Ben was not always innocent -- he performed acts of vandalism; he stole; sometimes he seemed, even as a child, to be a borderline sociopath. He was also abused, emotionally and physically, by their father. Without that abuse, what might Ben have become? With it, what has Ben become?
When they were small, Ben devised tortured puzzles for his brother to solve. Now Ben offers Geoff a new set of clues with a terrible secret at their core. Someone is killing happily married couples. Ben challenges Geoff to solve the murders...and warns him that his own family may be in danger if he does not. If Geoff fails, his son may pay the price -- but if he succeeds, will he find that his brother has become a killer?
"I devoured INCARNATE as soon as I got it, thinking all along that it was Campbell's best novel yet, the widest-ranging and the most controlled; but eventually I began to think that it was even better than that. By my lights, INCARNATE tackles the central issue and metaphor in serious horror writing...INCARNATE will delight and unsettle all those already fortunate enough to know Ramsey Campbell's work, but I think it should also reach out to many new readers."
--Peter Straub
On a hunch you cancel a music festival date. The car in which you planned to drive there becomes involved in a serious accident!
You dream you see your teacher writing three questions on the board. Next day these questions turn up in a surprise test!
You walk to the phone to call a friend. Before you take the receiver off the hook, the phone rings. It's your friend, calling you!
Coincidence? ESP? Or something else?
Far-out stories about real people up against. strange and spooky happenings: an ancient wrong revealed by a ghost; a long-unsolved crime cleared up through automatic writing; a family treasure found through memory of a past life; and many more. Weird stories that will astound and delight you. And they are all true!
This classic novel of our time, the book that spawned the unforgettable Stanley Kubrick film, has never before appeared in its entirety in America. The original US edition--and the movie--lacked the ending Anthony Burgess intended for it. Now, at least, American readers can read the version the rest of the world has always known.
It's all here, then. Alex and his three "droogs": Pete, Georgie and Dim ("Dim being really dim")...."Ultraviolence" set to the strains of Beethoven's Ninth.... The cruelty...the capture...the "treatment"...the strange and beautiful redemption. And the ending you never imagined.
It began August 9 and 10, 1969, when seven people were shot, stabbed and blundgeoned to death in Los Angeles. In ended when a nation watched in fascinated horror as the killers were tried and convicted. But the real questions went unanswered. How did Manson make his "family" kill for him? How could these young men and women kill again and again withiout human feelings of any kind? Did the murders go on even after Manson was in jail?
My Library #50: The Spellstone of Shaltus, and Currently Reading
11/30/2011 5:37:42 AM
She weilded sorcery's most deadly power against the evil wraith of Shaltus!
In the days of the Great War between the Eastern Kingdoms and S'Shegan, the evil wizard Shaltus had been brutallt punished for an unspeakable crime. Now he had returned, seeking vengeance from the void of hell. The black soul of Shaltus lived again!
Battling for survival, cast out by her own people, the sorceress Leah had to marshall the forces of might and magic. For she alone could banish the barbarous evil that had invaded thr castle of the S'Carltons and had sworn not to rest until the house of S'Carlton had been annihilated.
An adventure of the Eastern Kingdoms--magical fantasy in the tradition of Andrew Norton and Marion Zimmer Bradley.
Also, last night I started reading:
IT IS THE DC UNIVERSE'S DARKEST DAY...
OMAC robots are rampaging, magic is dying, villains are uniting, and a war is raging in space. And in the middle of it all, a critical moment has divided Earth's three greatest heroes: Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. But long-lost heroes from the past have returned to make things right in the universe...at ANY cost. Heroes will live, heroes will die, and the DCU will ever be the same again!
My Library #49: Agyar--plus Currently Reading, and my crappy 4-day weekend.
11/28/2011 5:27:02 AM
Agyar, a suave and mysterious drifter who shares an abandoned house with a compassionate African-American ghost, spends his nights seducing various inhabitants of an Ohio college town. Few can resist him, but he eventually finds himself obsessed with two women, one a beautiful young dancer, the other a harsh taskmistress of indeterminate age. One offers him salvation, the second seeks to destroy him...
Also, much to my dismay, I've decided to try to read
I friggin' loathe Scott Lobdell and what he did to The X-Men, but, to be fair it was 20 years ago, so maybe he's gotten better. Either way, the one-sheet ads in all the other DC monthlies, dammit they looked good. So I'll give it a shot.
Meanwhile, anyone who's been paying attention to my ongoing nerve cluster struggles over the past four years, well they just got more complicated. I just had 4 days off work and had planned on taking full advantage, catching up on reviews, reading a ton, and even trying to do some actual fiction writing. However. Wednesday after work I went to the doctor for a steroid shot to reduce the nerve cluster. But by Wednesday night the pain in the muscle was gone, however my right arm from the shoulder on town was still sore, the fingertips of my thumb and forefinger tingling. I spent most of Thanksgiving day on the floor just trying to find a position that didn't hurt.
Friday morning I went to see a chiropractor, thinking maybe it was a pinched nerve and he could help me get it fixed. Great guy, I liked him immediately and plan to keep seeing him. He popped and cracked so many things I didn't even know I had. And I did feel a little better.
Cut to 6:00 that night when I announced, "Children, dinner's ready," and the next thing I knew I was on the floor in agonizing friggin' pain as every muscle in my right arm from the shoulder down seized up like rock. I iced it, I tried heating pads, I tried pain pills, I tried a shower, I tried a bath, and before I knew it it was 10:00 and I said "Forget it, I have to go to the ER."
$150 co-pay later, I had two injections and a ton more prescriptions. We're waiting on the results of Wednesday's X-rays, which I should be getting today, but for now we still don't know just what the hell is going on with my right arm. Whatever it is, it's not good stuff and I'd almost prefer another kidney stone over it. My right arm is in a sling. Luckily I'm left-handed, but still I use the right for the mouse at work, so today is going to be a learning experience for me.
The meds help, but I only have a 5-day supply and today is day 3, so hopefully someone figures something out soon. If nothing else, I've got two more movie reviews I'd REALLY like to get written, but it's touch and go when it comes to how long I can sit at the computer at one time. So hopefully today's call to the doctor brings SOME kind of news so at least I know what's going on.
What you did I will not forgive.
What I do you will never escape...
Elizabeth Prudin knows too much. That's why she fled Portland and moved 1,200 miles away to begin a new life in Phoenix, Arizona.
But she left something behind. A chilling secret shred by a small circle of friends. And now that circle is closing, tightening around her like a noose as, one by one, her friends begin to die.
Someone is stalking Elizabeth. Sending her clippings of murdered women. Calling her up late at night.
Elizabeth knows she is next.
Because she knows the terrifying truth: One of her oldest, dearest friends is her worst enemy, someone who lives for only one thing...Elizabeth's death.
Lost in love, Grady Bowman and Julia Elkins cannot guess that their fates are entwined with the lives and deaths of two Japanese pearl divers. But when they make a journey from San Franciso to the Far East to get Grady back into the gem business, they are pulled into a maze of strange coincidence, rare priceless jewels, and murderous violence on Bangkok's canals.
Running for their lives, Grady and Julia are led to the majestic oceanside mansion of the world's richest pearl dealer. In the waters off his estate two women had been murdered for what they found. And in those same azure waters Grady and Julia will unravel an extraordinary mystery about one man's incredible obsession, another man's unforgivable crime, and the world's most precious and mysterious pearls: 18 milimeter blues...
Landover was a genuine magic kingdom, with fairy folk and wizardry, just as the advertisement had promised. But after he purchased it, Ben Holidy learned that there were a few details the ad had failed to mention.
The kingdom was in ruin. The Barons refused to recognize a king, and the peasants were without hope. A dragon was laying waste the countryside, while an evil witch plotted to destroy everything.
Ben's only followers were the incompetent Court Magician; Abernathy, the talking dog who served as Court Scribe; and the lovely Willow--but she had a habit of putting down roots in the moonlight and turning into a tree. The Paladin, legendary champion of the Kings of Landover, seemed to be only a myth and an empty suit of armor.
To put the final touch on the whole affair, Ben soon learned that the Iron Mark, terrible lord of the demons, had challeneged all prospective Kings of Landover to a duel to the death--a duel which no human could hope to win.
The task of proving his right to be King seemed hopeless. But Ben Holiday was stubborn . . .
Long ago, the wars of the ancient Evil ruined the world. In peaceful Shady Vale, half-elfin Shea Ohmsford knows little of such troubles. But the supposedly dead Warlock Lord is plotting to destroy everything in his wake. The sole weapon against this Power of Darkness is the Sword of Shannara, which can be used only by a true heir of Shannara. On Shea, last of the bloodline, rests the hope of all the races.
Thus begins the enthralling Shannara epic, a spellbinding tale of adventure, magic, and myth...
This bestselling novel takes you behind the convent walls to witness a sin so shameful, so taboo, that no one wants to even whisper about it. UNHOLY CHILD is the shocking story of sister Angela, whose heart and mind and soul became a fascinating puzzle to be put together piece by horrifying piece....
In this book you will meet...A Hollywood monster-maker whose Tyrannosaurus Rex suddenly becomes alarmingly lifelike. A boy who raises giant mushrooms in his cellar--until the mushrooms begin to raise him. A corpse who supports his wife and family. A circus fat lady whose midget husband has tattooed every inch of her mammoth body with fantastically intricate designs. Plus seventeen other amazing tales by the author of THE ILLUSTRATED MAN.
Have you ever wondered how your favorite writers got their start? I don't mean that first publication, but the first story. The one that got to them on so deep a level they had no choice but to stop thinking about writing and start being a writer? The first thing they ever wrote.
For me it was a story called "The Man in the Window", which I started writing in January 1991. Every night for a week, when I went to bed, I was haunted by these images, and every night more of this story would form in my head, keeping me awake until finally, one day, I sat down and started writing. I haven't stopped since.
I re-wrote that story at least a dozen times over the years, always getting it close but never getting it right. Until the final re-write in 2007 when it was accepted for publication. Time passed with no contract and no book until eventually I pulled it from the publisher, who very soon after that closed down. Now the story is just like I always wanted it to be, and the nice people at Crossroads Press seem to be pretty fond of it too because they've published it.
The Man in the Window is now available as a downloadable e-book for your Kindle, Nook, Sony reader, Kobo, or whatever e-book reader it is you use. Don't have any of them? You can download and print the PDF. This has always been one of my favorite stories, and not just because it was the first, but because of the story itself. I think it's an incredibly creepy story, one I hope you'll remember long after you reach the end.
So if you've always wondered just how I got my start, what was that one story so powerful and compelling that I had to stop thinking and start doing, this is it. Click the cover below to take you to the Smashwords page where you can purchase this story for a mere $2.99.
Synopsis: When Todd Morgan finally moved out on his own, the last thing he expected was the feeling of isolation that came with breaking his leg in a new town, far from his home. That feeling only got worse when the man in the window showed up, a small somehow familiar man who did nothing, just stood there and stared. The worst part is Todd’s the only one who can see him. But this is no imaginary playmate. The man in the window brings with him memories Todd buried years ago, and once they’re woken, he’ll have to make a trip back home to revisit the worst day of his life.
And finally, My Library #42: R is for Rocket
The Spellbinding power of Ray Bradbury.
He can make you see things that have never been seen by human eyes...feel things that no flesh-and-blood creature has ever felt. He can create visions so compelling that they literally seem to dance before your eyes. He can push you back to the beginnings of time and then suddenly, without warning, thrust you forward to the outmost limits of the future. He can make you so much a part of his strange worlds that you literally scream to get out. Only a handful of writers in the past have possessed this magical power. Few if any have ever possessed such breathtaking imagination.
Seventeen stories by the master of the weird and the wonderful, including the space-age classic, FROST AND FIRE.
The summer of '28 was a vintage summer for a growing boy. A summer of green apple trees, mowed lawns and new sneakers. Of half-burnt firecrackers, of gathering dandelions, of Grandma's belly-bursting dinner. It was a summer of sorrows and marvels and gold-fuzzed bees. A magical timeless summer in the life of a twelve-year-old boy named Douglas Spaulding.
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