I Was a Teenage Slasher (2024) – Stephen Graham Jones

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…

Magnum P.I. (2022) – Dead Man Walking, and Evil Walks Softly

While everyone is practicing for an island tug of war contest to raise money for their favourite charities, Magnum (Jay Hernandez) finds himself hired by a crime boss, Shima (Eijiro Ozaki) to find his kidnapped son. Magnum refuses, but when he discovers he’s been poisoned and has eight hours to find Shima’s son and the…

Easy Go (1968) – Micheal Crichton

Easy Go should have been my favourite of Micheal Crichton’s early novels. Written under his John Lange pseudonym while Crichton was still in med-school, the book includes some archaeology, some Egyptology, and the idea of a heist. Barnaby has discovered the possibility of a lost tomb, an undiscovered cache of wealth and a forgotten king….

Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid (1969) – George Roy Hill

The next stop in the recommendations from the Great Movies – 100 Years of Film book following my screening of The Wild Bunch, is yet another one of my all time favourite westerns, Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid. From it’s opening shots, made to look like an early silent film, this movie took me…

Fear (2017) – Dirk Kurbjuweit

Hitting trade paperback on Canadian book shelves this week is this engrossing thriller penned by German author Dirk Kurbjuweit. A captivating tale the novel explores themes of love, family, perceptions of masculinity, and the rule of law. The novel opens with a murder. And a confession. For months Randolph Tiefenthaler and his wife, Rebecca and…

Zero de Conduite (1933) – Jean Vigo

The next stop in DK Canada’s brilliant, and highly enjoyable, The Movie Book is a collection of films by French auteur Jean Vigo. The first one highlighted and serving as gateway to the rest of his work is the short, Zero de Conduite, or Zero for Conduct. Running at a brisk forty-one minutes the film…