Simon & Schuster have been delivering a lot of great summer reads my way and Stephen Graham Jones’ latest tale, I Was a Teenage Slasher is wonderful fun. Tolly and Amber are best of friends in high school. It’s the 80s, with the best music, best movies, and best clothes, and they are content to…
Category: The Book Shelf
Die Another Day (2002) – Raymond Benson
James Bond and Raymond Benson are back. For Benson, this is his last novel with the character, an adaptation of the 2002 film starring Pierce Brosnan, and the last movie adaptation of a Bond film, though a number of moments and ideas from the Daniel Craig series had their origin in Ian Fleming novels. The…
Star Trek: Spectre (1998) – William Shatner with Garfield and Judith Reeves-Stevens
William Shatner doles out another ‘Kirk is the best captain ever’ tale with the Reeves-Stevens helping him out. I make it sound like I didn’t like the book, I did, but I hate how even now, Shatner, goes out of the way to make sure that Kirk is portrayed as the smartest, strongest, most attractive…
Bad Tourists (2024) – Caro Carver
Simon & Schuster delivers the perfect beach read for your summer enjoyment. Bad Tourists by Caro Carver is a compulsive page-turner whose last third is a non-stop rush, and whose first two-thirds are filled with twists, turns and keeps you guessing the whole way through. Darcy, Kate and Camilla are close friends, united by a…
How to Make a Horror Movie and Survive (2024) – Craig DiLouie
I greatly enjoyed Craig DiLouie’s Episode Thirteen, and liked how he converted the found footage genre into a novel. So when I heard that he had a new one coming out I had to get my hands on a copy. How to Make a Horror Movie and Survive came out this week, released through Orbit…
The Bass Reeves Trilogy: Follow the Angels Follow the Doves (2020), Hell on the Border (2021), and The Forsaken and the Dead (2023) – Sidney Thompson
After watching Paramount’s Lawmen: Bass Reeves and seeing in the opening credits that it was based on two books in a historical fiction trilogy written by Sidney Thompson, I had to hunt them down and dig into this historical personage that no one seems to know about. Over the course of three novels, Thompson documents…
The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece (2023) – Tom Hanks
Somehow this one got by me, but I was delighted to dig into it, as I quite enjoyed Hanks short story collection, Uncommon Type. For his first novel, Hanks delivers a tale that takes us behind the scenes of a big superhero movie and walks us through all the steps of its production, exploring the…
Mister Magic (2023) – Kiersten White
Kiersten White’s Mister Magic is an unnerving and spooky tale that definitely has a commentary on religion and those who believe. Mister Magic was a radio program, and later a television show that ran until the 90s when the final episode ended in tragedy. It seems a number of people remember the show, and remember…
The Andromeda Strain (1969) – Micheal Crichton
I’ve read lots of horror novels, and enjoy Stephen King’s stories but nothing I’ve read in the genre has ever gotten under my skin and unnerve me. Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain got me. I think the story got wrapped up too quickly, but the essence of the story really got to me, and seemed…
The Mind Reels 