A Librarian on Elm Street

       Reading or watching older horror books and movies often feels like an historical exercise to me. Some hold up well, still are scary or disturbing and give insight into fright and the disquiet of the human condition. Others......well others not so much. Some require us to strain against the constraints of time and project our minds back and attempt to understand why a book or movie was scary or frightening at the time it was published. Thusly do we turn our wandering eye towards the consideration of a classic; Hell House by Richard Matheson.      Often described in numerous online lists as the haunted house book that ends all haunted house books, personally I will be staying with Haunting of Hill House as my exemplar of the genre. In many ways, the two books are almost parallels of each other like pieces of music with a similar chord but proceeding in a different progression or arrangement. The setup is the classic "Stay in the Haunted House for ...

 I didn't plan it on purpose, but somehow I accidentally stumbled into reading one Grady Hendrix book a year for the last three years.  My Best Friend's Exorcism was a solid read. Hendrix spent a lot longer setting up the friendship between the two main characters, Abbie and Gretchen, before the spooky stuff started. Later, as a potential possession escalated tensions and strained the bonds of friendship between the two, the time we spent really getting to see the girls grow up and grow together did pay off nicely and make the pain Abbie went through feel real. Although, as a father myself, every time Abbie's Mom gave her advice I found myself nodding along and telling Abbie to listen to her mother.  But, that's a big part of the book. This is about two teenage girls trying to make it through life and figure things out for themselves in a time of social change. The 80s saw a dramatic change and fight back and forth in American culture with the pendulum swings from Madon...

 I didn't look at who the author was when I started reading this digital advance copy I received from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. The art looked familiar....the occasional blurry disjointed images bordering on Impressionism reminded me of something....then after I finished the book in one sitting I Googled and sure enough "Tatsuki Fujimoto, author of Chainsaw Man."  Tatsuki does the weirdest, craziest stuff I've ever read in Manga and still somehow like. He's surprising and disturbing and pulls you along with characters that you sometimes dislike and sometimes break your heart. And don't even get me started on whatever the hell Fire Punch was, I still haven't got a damn clue.  But his work has a life to it, a complexity and greyness that defies expectations. Pages of images without text work in Goodbye, Eri because the story is immersive and pulls you down into it. Pages of abject blackness beg you to ask....Is this the end? Is this all the...

When the line between fiction and truth become blurred....whose to say if there ever was a line to begin with? Richard Chizmar's fantastic book Chasing the Boogeyman kicks a big fat hole straight through that theoretical line on its way to chasing the reader around the house as we check to make sure all of our windows and doors are locked tight. This is the first book in a really long time that's actually got me looking behind my shoulder in my everyday life.  This is a fictionalized story about a hunt for a serial killer in the author's Suburban Maryland hometown. The weaving of his real life childhood and early adulthood into the fictionalized parts of the story are so seamless and mesh so well that I'd find myself on several occasions trying to figure out which parts and characters are real or not. The only other occasion I've had the same feeling of reality confusion in a book is with Michael Crichton's Eaters of the Dead (republished as The 13th Warrior aft...

 I liked this book a lot more than I liked Horrorstor, let me start with that right off of the bat. It's kind of a weird experience reading a person's first book and then their newest book with almost ten years of development in between. Compound that weirdness with the very peculiarity of having read Riley Sager's Final Girls recently as well, which was similar yet vastly different, and I had a very multi-faceted reading experience with The Final Girl Support Group.  This book breaks down very nicely into a four-act structure, at least in my head. The third act dragged a bit for me, but that's because the rest of the book was absolutely fantastic and I burned through it as fast as I could to find out what happened next. The main character is interesting, although like any good slasher movie/book you do find yourself screaming at her a couple times to not do the dumb thing, but you still always want her to survive and can't help but feel for her. I've seen some ...

 I was reading a blurb about Mao Volume 1 in the December 2021 edition of School Library Journal in an article by Brigid Alverson and Robin Brenner reviewing their best picks for school age kids of manga from 2021......and the summary of the plot left me shaking my head....."This is a damn Inuyasha rip-off....wait what was the author's na......ooooooh!" So the fabled Rumiko Takahashi returns, she of living legend status, writer and illustrator of Inuyahsa, Ranma 1/2 and many other works. Most authors of a manga series I like don't really catch fire with me with any other series, so the fact that Takahashi-Sama already has had two series I've enjoyed made me really hopeful she'll pull off a hat trick....which no other Mangaka has been able to achieve in my personal estimation.  So; having read the first volume of Mao, I'm definitely going to keep going with it. The story is interesting enough, and the sense of mystery surrounding the main character's fa...