Club Dead

I am completely hooked with Charlaine Harris's novels about Sookie Stackhouse. Having recently finished Dead Until Dark, and Living Dead in Dallas, I started reading Club Dead. It is the third in the Sookie series, also called the Southern Vampire Mysteries.

This book introduces us to many new characters, and takes place in Mississipi. Bill, Sookie's vampire boyfriend, is kidnapped, and Eric demands for her to go to Mississipi to learn what she can about his disappearance. Eric arranges for a local werewolf to accompany her, named Alcede, who helps her circumnavigate the supernatural underworld to help find Bill and save his life. As Sookie investigates Bill's wherabouts, she learns that he had left of his own free will, and she realizes there is more to Bill and his history than she knew about, and she learns new things about him that shake their relationship to it's foundation.

I really love the Sookie books, if it isn't obvious with how quickly I'm reading the series. I am almost done with the fourth, Dead to the World. As I said with Living Dead in Dallas, Harris doesn't waste copy giving more backstory than what's needed, and only fills you in on the past stories enough to follow along with the new information. The characters are starting to become more and more involved, and people are starting to show their true colors.

I give this book a 5/5. Once I'm done with the series I'll give an overall score.

Living Dead in Dallas

The second book I finished this week was the sequel to Charliane Harris's Sookie Stackhouse series, Living Dead in Dallas. I had read the first book, Dead Until Dark, a few books past and really fell in love with the series. I managed to pick up the rest of the books at Barnes & Noble, so I have a feeling I will be sweeping through the series before reading anything else.

Living Dead in Dallas tells the story of Sookie's travel to Dallas, after she is loaned out by Eric the vampire. Sookie is supposed to use her telepathy to find a vampire, Farrel, who has gone missing.

I really enjoyed the lengthened character development of Living Dead in Dallas. Eric is much more involved in the second story, and there is an interesting and complex love trial forming between Eric, Sookie and Bill. Harris also doesn't waste half the book explaining things from the previous novel, and only does gentle reminders.

I give this book a 5 out of 5. I am very excited to read the next in the series, Club Dead.

Dead Until Dark

I was a big fan of the HBO show True Blood, and I knew they were based on a series by Charlaine Harris. I picked the first book up on a whim, and I am really glad I did. The first in the series is Dead Until Dark.

Dead Until Dark follows the story of Sookie Stackhouse, a telepathic waitress in Louisiana. The vampires in the world have recently "come out of the coffin" and are starting to mainstream into society. Sookie meets Bill, one of the mainstreaming vampires, and after finding her vampire, strange things start happening. There are multiple murders in the town of Bon Temps, and Sookie needs to find out who is behind it so she can clear Bill's name, and the name of her brother Jason. Jason, a local lethario, is implicated because of his relationships with most of the murdered women.

I really enjoyed reading Dead Until Dark. I had watched the season of True Blood before reading it, and I was unsure as to how they'd be translated. The show is so close to the book, down to the dialogue. The biggest discrepency is the addition of a character in the show that is not in the book, but that's not a big issue for me.

I know there are a few other books in this series, and I'm very tempted to pick the rest of them up. I enjoyed Harris' storytelling, and her character development is amazing.

I give this book a 5 out of 5.

The Third Angel

I followed up the disappointment that was Handle With Care with a new book by my other favorite author, Alice Hoffman, which I had borrowed from a good friend who also loves this author. This book, called The Third Angel, does not take place in her usual setting (New Hampshire or Connecticut) but instead in London. More specifically at the Lion Park hotel.

The story centers on the inhabitants of the Lion Park hotel during three different periods of time; modern day, 1952 and 1966. As the stories unfold, you realize that everyone from the modern day story are involved in the hotel in some way, and their lives entwine in the most intricate of ways. There is also the story of the ghost of the Lion Park hotel, and how he touches each and every life of the characters in The Third Angel. Hoffman's writing is so intricate and precise, and you never feel that the connections between the characters are forced.

The name comes from the idea that when a doctor visits a patient, there are three angels in the car with him. One is the angel of life, and one is the angel of death. Then there is the third angel, and he is the one that is harder to spot. He could be anywhere, from the people you see on your way to the suffering, or the person suffering themselves. The idea of the third angel is interwoven with all the characters of the novel.

After finishing Handle With Care and being so disappointed, I am really glad that I read The Third Angel. I think if I would have read just anything I probably would have put it down and stopped reading for a while. Instead I started The Third Angel and finished it in just days.

I give The Third Angel a 5 out of 5, for a rich complex story line that isn't forced, and restoring my faith in prolific writers.

Duma Key

I finished this book a few days ago, but I have been wrapped up in work and the next book to post. Sorry!

I haven't read Stephen King in a long time, not since Dream Catcher. I really loved his older books, like Carrie and Salem's Lot, but I just hated the weird alien stories he was writing. I heard good things about Duma Key from a few different people, and my interest was piqued. My mom sent me the book, so after I finished Nocturnes, I picked it up.

The story is about a man named Edgar Freemantle who moves to the island of Duma Key, off the coast of Florida, after a construction site accident that left him missing and arm and severely impaired. There he meets Jerome Wireman, and the woman he cares for, Elizabeth Eastlake. Edgar falls into a painting frenzy, and starts prophecising the future in his art, as well as Elizabeth's past. He soon realizes that there is a dark and evil force behind his artwork that can, and will, reach out and hurt the ones that he loves.

I have a saying about Stephen King novels, "I suffer through the first half of the book to be rewarded in the second half." That wasn't true in Duma Key. I was invested in the characters immediately, but the story was slow. There was a bit of paranormal freakiness here, then 50 or 60 pages of just random story, so I forgot about the freaky stuff that had happened before. It was like that until the last 1/3 of the book, when the paranormal shit hit the fan. It seemed to end too easily, though...

Ultimately, I liked Duma Key, but I give it a 3 out of 5.

Nocturnes

It's been a long time since I've read a book of short stories. I used to love the Stephen King short story collections in High School, but haven't read another collection since. After finishing Connolly's The Book of Lost Things, I went and picked up his book of short stories, called Nocturnes. I toyed with the idea of having each short story count as a separate book on my list, but I decided against it. :)

Nocturnes has short stories that are previously unpublished, as well as a novella featuring a character from Connolly's mystery novels (Charlie Parker), and finished with a section titled Nocturnes: Coda that had 5 five stories that had been published elsewhere. The stories are all dark, twisted, and slightly horrific. They become progressively darker and darker as the stories unfold, starting with The Cancer Cowboy Rides. A few of the stories are very short, taking up less than 10 pages of the overall 471 pages, while others take up a lot more. The Charlie Parker Novella, The Reflecting Eye, comes in at over 100 pages.

There is no horror that is left out of Nocturnes. As someone who is both afraid of clowns and spiders, I found myself totally horrified at two stories (Some Children Wander By Mistake and The Wakeford Abyss) and unable to read for a day or two. Other stories are horrifying for different reasons, not having a twinge of the paranormal and instead relying on the horror of human beings themselves and the things they do to each other.

The horror of the book is never cliche, and is always completely believable. That is a fine line when writing dark short stories, you can either make them really cliche and transparent, or you can make them just believable enough that they haunt your thoughts for hours after finishing the story. For Nocturnes, the second half of that is true. I never thought "oh, that's so unbelievable" after any story.

I give this book a 5 out of 5. I will now go to all the used book stores in my area and grab up Connolly's other stories.

Second Glance

I took a detour from what I called the "let's re-read all the novels in your library" spree to read book 7, The Commitment. After I finished the book, I immediately started the spree back up again! I was organizing my bookshelves, and had put my Picoult books in order. As I was doing so, I realized that after The Tenth Circle, Second Glance was my next favorite.

Second Glance tells the story of a number of characters, so it is hard to summarize. The story is about love that is timeless, about ghosts who are so tied to the world that they cannot leave, and the sacrifices that everyone makes for the people that they are tied to. It also spans across decades, taking place in the 1930's, and the current days of the 2000's. There is romance, there is death, there is life, and there is hope. On top of that, there is an unsolved mystery of a murder, a missing baby, the sordid history of eugenics, and the study of the paranormal. I know it sounds like she's grasping at plot-straws and trying too hard, but it all works and comes together.

This is Picoult at her finest. There are so many characters in this story that I worried, the first time I read it, that I would get certain people lost with others, or that there wouldn't be enough character development. Within just a few pages I knew that I had been wrong, and that the story needs all of these characters, and Picoult does not let one of them fall through the cracks and get lost. By the end of the book, you know exactly why each and every character was there, and what their lives and actions mean to all the other characters.

I give this book a 5 out of 5.