Wednesday, December 13, 2006

I usually enjoy Iles’ books and this one does start fast and hard and for the first few hundred pages you don’t want to put it down.  Somehow Iles gets away from himself and decides to jump the shark by finding a highly improbable way of skipping over the whole trial - not that I wanted to read a couple hundred pages of a trial, but the way the trial happens without the reader experiencing it is more than slightly ridiculous.  A great beginning, but in the long run Iles’ story takes the reader to a pretty trite ending. 
Thursday, December 7, 2006

My Black Books Series 2 DVD came from Amazon this week.  I know, I know, it’s the holiday season and I should b buying things for other people, not for myself.  But when I want something, I want it NOW, and HMV did not receive their order, so my new friend Amazon.ca was kind enough to send one along within just a few days.
If you want to laugh, watch this show.
British people are really fucking funny.

I am an avid F. Paul Wilson fan, particularly the Repairman Jack books, but somehow I missed the release of this book - which combines 2 of my favourite things - vampires and the apocalypse (alas in this particular world there is no Repairman Jack to save the day).  As a vampire book it’s kind of boring, though I keep finding reviews comparing it to “I am Legend”, which I also found boring, considering all the hype.  Wilson’s attempt to get back to the bare bones of vampires by leaving out the extravagances and eccentricities of the vampires of Rice (who I do not read) and Hamilton (who I do) et al, is too bare.  The vampires are definitely the bad guys here, there’s no pining over the cute ones cause even the cute ones are pure cold evil.  Unfortunately these stripped down vampires are just dull, and Wilson didn’t make them frightening enough, as far am I’m concerned you know from page one how it’s inevitably going to end (though I am put up against yet another book without a true proper ending, there could possibly be more vampire novels in Wilson’s future).  Either give me pure cold evil with blood and guts strewn about, or give me the hot French vampires who dress nice and know how to treat a lady - this book is neither.
Tuesday, December 5, 2006

Apparently there is no book that can satisfy me right now.
I had high hopes for this one (mainly cause Stephen King said it was good), and I even bought it in hardcover (with a coupon) for lack of anything else to read.
First off, there aren’t actually any ruins to be seen.  Or read.  Whatever.
I am always in for a  rehash of the old, “group of friends gets lost/stranded in the forest/jungle and choas/murder ensues”, Richard Laymon used the same plot time and time again, and usually keeps my attention held and sometimes even my heart racing.  However, Scott Smith fails miserably at his attempt to rehash an old plot.  His female characters are completely annoying bitches who whine and fight and jack off their boyfriends in the face of danger.  I mean, it’s so totally realistic to assume that in a group of 6 people (2 couples and two male foreign strangers), the two girls are of course the most useless morons and not in any way helpful or intelligent.  God forbid that one of the women might actually come up with an original thought or solution to the problem.
If anything, this book seems like it was written as a bad B-movie screenplay that might star Tori Spelling and Paris Hilton as the 2 twits.  At least if it was a movie I could accept the ending, which is not a true ending at all - but I HATE books that do not explain anything and that have no resolution (I can accept this in a short story, but not in a novel).
Read Smith’s other book, A Simple Plan instead (which also created a fantastic movie).