The Girl Next Door
By Jack Ketchum
As children, I’d be willing to bet that nearly every person commits one or more minor crimes. Whether you lift a candy bar from the supermarket on a dare, sneak a look at your Dad’s Playboy Magazines or write graffiti on a school wall, the act can make your heart race. There’s fear, but also a sense of exhilaration that you might get caught.
If you’re like me, after the exhilaration came the guilt, guilt that someone somewhere was hurt by your actions. When I got older and got into a few punch-ups, whether I was on the winning or losing side, I still felt guilty. This guilt could last for quite some time and leave me pretty depressed.
Whatever guilt I felt is nothing compared to what the main character of Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door feels. But then again, the crimes committed by David and the other kids in his neighborhood are way….way…way worse then anything I and 99.9 percent of children ever do.
Sure, they are goaded on by a woman slowly going insane but even the usually kind David, who knows what’s taking place is wrong, participates in the crimes. It’s freaking awful but oh, so well captured by the author. David’s guilt is palpable and unnerving and sits over the book like an anvil.
Guilt isn’t the only feeling Ketchum expertly captures in this novel. The tension is thick and sits heavy over the proceedings. It’s suffocating and as the violence ramps up it just gets worse and worse. Just when you can’t take it anymore the tension breaks, but…it breaks for a morbid scene of horror!
This novel is a runaway train, you can’t stop it and it will not stop for you. Ketchum’s writing is excellent this time around. He captures the mentality of children and the horror of insanity in gruesome reality. The “on screen” violence isn’t as gory and over the top as something like Ketchum’s Off Season, but that is what makes it so awful. It’s realistic and therefore horrifying and evil.
Read it!
(I assume every fan of horror literature knows this story but if not, here is a quick synopsis: girl goes to live with aunt after parents die, nutty aunt tortures girl and gets the neighborhood kids to join in. It’s based on a true story.)
Showing posts with label reading. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reading. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Reading Rainbow
Hollywood Monster
By Robert Englund and Alan Goldsher
One, two Freddy’s coming for you…
This autobiography skips along like a nursery rhyme singing school girl. It begins with young Krueger…I mean Englund…joining an acting group for the sole purpose of picking up on girls and ends with him holding his current title of horror movie icon.
It’s a fun journey that sees Englund as a joker, husband, college student, stage snob, divorcee, struggling character actor, television star and movie star. Each section in his life is briefly described and a short story or two is shared from that period of time. The stories are light and easy and I found it disappointing that he never dips more than a gloved knife finger into waters that could run very, very deep. For example, you won’t find out how Englund feels about violence, the role he feels horror plays in society or what if any memory he channels to play a vicious child killer.
You will however discover the he loves women. It seems that not a page goes by where he isn’t mentioning the assets of a nubile young co-star or the biker chick who had him autograph her breasts.
Another thing you take away from the book is how appreciative Englund is of all those who have participated in his journey. He praises just about everyone from Henry Fonda to Jan-Michael Vincent and never has a bad word for anyone.
All in all, it’s an enjoyably quick read but too shallow to have any lasting effect.
-------------------
Recently, I’ve been a reading machine.
I don’t know if it’s my vow of celibacy or my reduced alcohol consumption but I just can’t stop reading.
Since Christmas I’ve read:
Jack Ketchum’s Off Season – see my earlier review.
Robert E. Howards’s The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane – Howard is the king of high adventure! His stories about the puritan Kane are exciting, bloody and always a welcome punch to the imagination.
Robert Englund’s Hollywood Monster: A Walk Down Elm Street with the Man of Your Dreams - see above.
Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s Good Omen’s: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch – a very funny tale about a demon and an angel who unite to stop the end of the world from taking place. Why? Because they’ll miss the food, wine, music and other creature comforts the world currently offers.
Louis Sachar’s Holes – an award-winning children’s book about a kid who is sent to a prison camp where they do nothing but dig holes. The background story is magical.
I’m currently a little less than halfway through Edward Lee’s Black Train – oh, lordy. This book is disgustingly wrong in so many ways but I can’t wait to see what happens.
By Robert Englund and Alan Goldsher
One, two Freddy’s coming for you…
This autobiography skips along like a nursery rhyme singing school girl. It begins with young Krueger…I mean Englund…joining an acting group for the sole purpose of picking up on girls and ends with him holding his current title of horror movie icon.
It’s a fun journey that sees Englund as a joker, husband, college student, stage snob, divorcee, struggling character actor, television star and movie star. Each section in his life is briefly described and a short story or two is shared from that period of time. The stories are light and easy and I found it disappointing that he never dips more than a gloved knife finger into waters that could run very, very deep. For example, you won’t find out how Englund feels about violence, the role he feels horror plays in society or what if any memory he channels to play a vicious child killer.
You will however discover the he loves women. It seems that not a page goes by where he isn’t mentioning the assets of a nubile young co-star or the biker chick who had him autograph her breasts.
Another thing you take away from the book is how appreciative Englund is of all those who have participated in his journey. He praises just about everyone from Henry Fonda to Jan-Michael Vincent and never has a bad word for anyone.
All in all, it’s an enjoyably quick read but too shallow to have any lasting effect.
-------------------
Recently, I’ve been a reading machine.
I don’t know if it’s my vow of celibacy or my reduced alcohol consumption but I just can’t stop reading.
Since Christmas I’ve read:
Jack Ketchum’s Off Season – see my earlier review.
Robert E. Howards’s The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane – Howard is the king of high adventure! His stories about the puritan Kane are exciting, bloody and always a welcome punch to the imagination.
Robert Englund’s Hollywood Monster: A Walk Down Elm Street with the Man of Your Dreams - see above.
Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s Good Omen’s: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch – a very funny tale about a demon and an angel who unite to stop the end of the world from taking place. Why? Because they’ll miss the food, wine, music and other creature comforts the world currently offers.
Louis Sachar’s Holes – an award-winning children’s book about a kid who is sent to a prison camp where they do nothing but dig holes. The background story is magical.
I’m currently a little less than halfway through Edward Lee’s Black Train – oh, lordy. This book is disgustingly wrong in so many ways but I can’t wait to see what happens.
Brutally Off Season
Off Season
By Jack Ketchum
This book is filled with cannibal children, incest, torture, blood, death, mutilation, inbreeds, sex, throat slashing, woman-on-a-spit nastiness and I read it in the span of a few hours.
I’ll spare you a long synopsis on story and character development because there is none. All you really need to know is this: Cannibal Hillbillies versus Yuppies. It’s the Scottish legend of Sawney Bean and the remake of “The Hills Have Eyes” rolled up in “Straw Dogs.” Story not required. Too bad it is needed to create a truly terrifying book.
Don’t get me wrong, I believe this is Ketchum’s first novel but he already seemed a veteran at pacing action scenes and in describing blood drenched horrors in nauseating detail. What he wasn’t so good at was all that other stuff that normally goes into a novel: dialogue, character and all that.
Because these basic concepts are poorly constructed or nonexistent you never feel for the characters. Neither are you ever able to put yourself in their place or feel connected to their surroundings.
Still, even with these failings the book is not bad. It’s a slasher setup, pure and simple. If that is what you’re after, you’ll love it. I look forward to reading more of Ketchum’s stuff when I need a break from other weighty tomes I might be consuming.
By Jack Ketchum
This book is filled with cannibal children, incest, torture, blood, death, mutilation, inbreeds, sex, throat slashing, woman-on-a-spit nastiness and I read it in the span of a few hours.
I’ll spare you a long synopsis on story and character development because there is none. All you really need to know is this: Cannibal Hillbillies versus Yuppies. It’s the Scottish legend of Sawney Bean and the remake of “The Hills Have Eyes” rolled up in “Straw Dogs.” Story not required. Too bad it is needed to create a truly terrifying book.
Don’t get me wrong, I believe this is Ketchum’s first novel but he already seemed a veteran at pacing action scenes and in describing blood drenched horrors in nauseating detail. What he wasn’t so good at was all that other stuff that normally goes into a novel: dialogue, character and all that.
Because these basic concepts are poorly constructed or nonexistent you never feel for the characters. Neither are you ever able to put yourself in their place or feel connected to their surroundings.
Still, even with these failings the book is not bad. It’s a slasher setup, pure and simple. If that is what you’re after, you’ll love it. I look forward to reading more of Ketchum’s stuff when I need a break from other weighty tomes I might be consuming.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Books are Hell
Hellboy: Odd Jobs by multiple authors including Michael Golden and Poppie Z. Brite – I wish that these stories held the magic and fascination of Mike Mignola’s comics or of Guillermo Del Toro’s Hellboy II: The Golden Army. Instead, you get some pretty rote stories with not much humor, action or horror.
As in nearly every compilation there are a few exceptions. In this book that exception is Stephen Bissette’s Jigsaw. It captures Hellboy’s personality perfectly and draws the reader into an eerie story with its tentacles slithering around the painful topic of addiction. Very good and highly recommended for those that like their Hellboy stories intense and disturbing.
Currently reading: E=mc2 by David Bodanis
Who would have thought that a lowbrow mathematical Neanderthal like myself would find reading about mathematics, physics and theory so interesting.
As in nearly every compilation there are a few exceptions. In this book that exception is Stephen Bissette’s Jigsaw. It captures Hellboy’s personality perfectly and draws the reader into an eerie story with its tentacles slithering around the painful topic of addiction. Very good and highly recommended for those that like their Hellboy stories intense and disturbing.
Currently reading: E=mc2 by David Bodanis
Who would have thought that a lowbrow mathematical Neanderthal like myself would find reading about mathematics, physics and theory so interesting.
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