If It Bleeds is a collection of four “short” stories by Stephen King. The cover of the book has a gold background with the words STEPHEN KING at the top in large font. Below it is a blurb from The Washington Post that reads “Filled with startling, sometimes unsettling pleasures… compulsively readable”.
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World War Z is the oral history of the Zombie War, written by Max Brooks. It is also was a New York Times Bestseller. It is my understanding that this book was turned into a movie (or maybe two movies), but I haven’t seen those yet.
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Wit’ch Fire, by James Clemens, is Book One of “The Banned and the Banished” series. This book is clearly in the horror genre. It starts off with an unknown person talking directly to the reader, who strongly advises that you do not talk about this “tome” with anyone else.
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Cuts You Up, by David Blackwood, is a book that is hard to put down. The Prelude gave me just enough to get to know a little bit about the characters, written from the viewpoint of the main character, Cassandra. They were driving to a metal show, but never made it there.
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A Flame of Song, by T.R. Thompson, is Book 3 of the Wraith Cycle. I highly recommend that you read The Blood Within the Stone (Book 1) and The Forked Path (Book 2) before reading the A Flame of Song.
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The Forked Path, by T.R. Thompson, is Book 2 of the Wraith Cycle. I highly recommend that you read Book 1, The Blood Within the Stone, before jumping into Book 2. This second book picks up not long after the first one ends, and there is an assumption that readers will already be familiar with (most) of the characters.
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Despite the title, The Care and Feeding of Exotic Pets, is not a book about how to provide care and comfort to an unorthodox choice of pet. You won’t find this one in your local pet store!
Instead, it is an intense, creepy, novel about a woman who is kidnapped by a man who owns a gigantic iguana. Diana Wagman does an excellent job of getting into her characters heads, frightening the reader, and building the intensity of the story as it goes on.
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Slim MacKenzie (known by some as Carl Stanfeuss) has a gift that can also be viewed as a curse. His strangely colored “Twilight Eyes” are a sign of psychic ability. They allow him to see through the human disguises of hideous creates that he calls Goblins. He is in a self-imposed mission to kill them all. There are times when he wishes that he had a different gift – such as the gift of healing that his mother has.
Slim, who is only 17, has run away from home after killing an uncle (who was really a Goblin). His adventure leads him to join the Sombra Brothers carnival, which travels from place to place. Oddly enough, Slim notices that many Goblins are among the patrons.
Blaze is a book that holds more than one story. That is not to say it is a book of short stories (because it isn’t). Allow me to clarify: one story is the novel itself; another story is how the novel went from draft to published; and there is another, unrelated, story after the novel portion ends. This may sound confusing, but it’s actually quite simple. I’ll explain.
It is good to begin at the beginning. The cover of the book says that Blaze was written by Richard Bachman, and that it contains a Forward by Stephen King. Most, if not all, Stephen King fans know that Bachman and King are actually the same person. King was writing under the pen name Bachman for a while, and eventually got discovered.
The full title of this book is Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls. It is, of course, the prequel to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which was written by Seth Grahame-Smith. This is an original story, using some of Jane Austen’s characters from Pride and Prejudice.
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