blackdogbooks Unleashed 2025

Hello 75'ers - Im a bit late to the party, but late is better than never. I'll catch up a month at a time until I get concurrent with the reading. You'll notice a bit of a theme with January's reading - reading my anxiety, frustration, fear, and anger - trying to understand. But also, I started my series for the year - the Dave Robicheaux books by James Lee Burke. Here you go -



1. Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism by Rachel Maddow

Maddow highlights a relatively unknown and particularly dark corner of United States history. That there were fascist elements at work in the underbelly of America between the two world wars is known, but that they reached into the highest government institutions and were paid directly by Hitler and his goons has been laundered out of the country’s consciousness. So, too, the breadth and size of these movements, their popularity and influence. 2021 is not the first time that armed fascist components descended on the United States Capital. Nor is the first time that fascists thought it a good idea to challenge the counting of electoral votes in Congress. The book is a corollary to her podcast Ultra, but the book allows her the space to more carefully detail the events of history, as well as focus on some of the heroic individuals who stood against the evil tide.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended, especially if you’re trying to understand this current peculiar time in our country, because it’s not the first time.



2. Living Faith by Jimmy Carter

Just after viewing the late president’s funeral, I began and quickly finished this slim volume. Carter focuses on the expression of his faith, how it drove him in particularly difficult time and in moments when he faced particularly difficult decisions. His view on faith and spirituality is much more expansive than the fundamental voices of today, voices he specifically takes to task. And it’s more focused on how faith and spirituality should fit into today’s world, how it should influence our choices and our interactions and our drive for justice in the social and cultural aspects of life, not just the religious.

As an eight-year-old boy, I scrawled a congratulatory note to the peanut farmer and maverick upon his election. He’s been a favorite ever since. And a more astute rendering of his presidency places him where he belongs in the line of those who’ve resided in the White House.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly recommended



3. Neon Rain James Lee Burke

The film “Heaven’s Prisoners” introduced me to Dave Robicheaux, or Streak. Alec Baldwin played Streak sweaty, as though the very act of breathing was a burden, and on a slow-burn that promises an extremely high yield upon explosion. Hiding in the nearly opaque swamps of Louisiana, Baldwin’s Robicheaux oozes the tension of a person expecting the next fall from the wagon or the next onslaught of violence. The movie was not particularly successful and was not particularly popular with the critics, but I was captivated by a unique character living out a perilous life in a riot of culture. I waited nearly twenty years before visiting Streak again, this time through the source material, James Lee Burke’s The Neon Rain.

I don’t know whether Baldwin read any of the Robicheaux novels, but his portrayal of the character was definitely tapped into Burke’s vision. Deeply conflicted and self-destructive, Burke’s Streak is capable of almost anything. Take for instance his beating of a morbidly obese crook with a sack of ball bearings and wrenches. But his choices, even the violent ones, are always motivated by a puritanical, almost primitive since of right and wrong, and they are usually accompanied by a sense of guilt that would choke a horse.

The Neon Rain was Burke’s first Robicheaux novel, and just his fifth published work of fiction, a fact that is evident in the book’s rawness. There are sections of the book that seem undercooked, shrimp pulled from the fryer too early. And Burke relies too heavily on stereotypes, sprinkling hot sauce onto the po’ boy sandwich to cover the absence of good seafood. But the atmosphere of the book drips so with the heavily with the smell and texture of Louisiana that you forget all of that. Burke has published nineteen Robicheaux novels since The Neon Rain, winning an Edgar Award for Black Cherry Blues in 1990, and created two other fiction series, winning a second Edgar Award for Cimarron Rose in 1998, all a testament to his ability. The Neon Rain might be a little raw, but I’m comin’ back for seconds because Burke created such an interesting character in Streak and is so adept at drawing me into the swamps and dark alleys where Streak hides.

Bottom Line: The first in a series, and a little raw, but grounded with a deeply interesting main character and an evocative sense of place.

Highly Recommended
5 bones!!!!!



4. The January 6th Report by the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capital

Even if you watched large portions of the public hearings that ground this report, you should read the report. There is so much more detail here, and it is all referenced with supporting documentary evidence. The attack on the Capital was more coordinated, more dangerous, and far more connected to the evil influences of the then administration and it’s morally bankrupt figurehead. If you don’t read anything else from the report, the forward and the afterword are jewels of American and Constitutional thought. Representative Jamie Raskin is a rare intellect and vicious proponent and protector of the United States Constitution. If only our populace was still receiving Social and Government Studies education like those of us who attended schools in the days before No Child Left Behind – which has left everyone far behind in critical thinking skills.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended



5. Ready Player One Ernest Cline

Late to the party on this one, but glad I finally decided to forget the movie and read the book. Spielberg probably did the best he could in trying to herd this one into a visual experience, especially given all the copyright landmines he must’ve faced. But the book is a far better experience, more than anything for those who lived through the decade this book to which this book pays homage. I can’t say that I was quite as much of a D&D or gaming nerd as others, but I still loved how the pages dripped with nostalgia for the ‘80s. Maybe a few times, that nostalgia got laid on a little thick and maybe the narrative slipped into a juvenile romance a little, but those are forgivable sins because the book is terribly readable and a ton of fun – post-apocalypse driven by corporate greed; gaming nerd saves the world; MacGuffin quest through the inside of multiple gaming worlds.

4 bones!!!!
Recommended for those few of you who haven’t reached the party yet.



6. Heaven’s Prisoners by James Lee Burke

Dave Robicheaux doesn’t exactly look for trouble, but he sure walks right into it when he sees it. This is probably the Burke book most familiar because of the film treatment, and the movie was extremely faithful to the written material.

A drug and people smuggling plane crashes into a lake and Dave saves a little girl from the watery wreckage. But Dave can’t leave well enough alone. Before long he is locking horns with organized crime and an old rival from his young days. The history, both Dave’s and the place’s, always play a critical role in the narratives. And Burke embraces the eerie and murky world of Louisiana, leaving Dave on the phone with is dead wife as the rain pounds the tin roof of his home.

There are few writers with a more literary voice penning mysteries and thrillers today.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended



7. Walking with Sam: A Father, a Son, and Five Hundred Miles Across Spain by Andrew McCarthy

This is the third book I’ve read by McCarthy, and I’ve loved them all. Here, McCarthy embarks on a trek across Spain along the Camino de Santiago, a trip McCarthy took alone when he was the same age as his son. He sees it as an opportunity to connect with his boy who is at the precipice of adulthood. It’s also an opportunity to once more try to compose himself as a better, more loving father than his own. He fails at the task as often as he succeeds, but the trying is the point.

Once again, McCarthy exposes himself to the world, in all his complications and faults. But, again like the previous books, the writing is never self-indulgent navel-gazing. It’s sincere and evocative, relatable in ways these kinds of books rarely are. And this time, he’s exposing his son along the way, showing us how the young man grows up in fits and starts over a very short time.

Along the way, there is some wonderful travel prose, for which McCarthy was first known in the world of writing. Every opportunity, he relates some bit of history or landscape to the moment as he slogs along The Way.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended

Mac’s back!

I took a bit of a hiatus, Doc, from inauguration to my retirement.

Here's the February books -



8. The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells

Second reading of the classic Science Fiction tale of alien invasion and war. The first reading didn’t impress me much beyond the creative account of alien forms and weapons, since most sci-fi authors tend to fashion these beings after human forms, a sort of ethno- or xeno-centric itch. But this time, the narrators first person account settled over me more comfortably.

The upside for this edition is the artwork from Edward Gorey. As you can tell from the book cover, Gorey is right at home drawing the oddities in Wells’ narrative. Perhaps the artwork freshened up the story enough to leave an overall much better opinion of the book.

4 bones!!!!!



9. Black Cherry Blues by James Lee Burke

Dave Robicheaux just can’t help himself, especially where his friends or family are concerned – and Dave’s definition for those terms extend well beyond any normal person’s. In this case, an old classmate, Dixie Lee, and Clete Purcell, Dave’s old partner, have themselves mixed up with a group of mobster-types who’ve embarked on a land and white-collar scheme up in Montana. Dixie is also battling some demons all too familiar to Dave, so he wades in with his typical blunt force. By the end, a plane full of Italians comes tumbling out of the sky and Dixie is easing on up the road, sober – at least for now. The book also sees at least half of the action in Montana, which is a breath of fresh air and hints at Burke’s eventual Western novel itch.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended



10. Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth by Rachel Maddow

Having recently finished Prequel by Maddow, I was eager for more. Her history of the oil industry’s corruption and how it tilled the American soil for our current political mess was wonderful, in the writing and research, and awful in the resulting mess. The country and the world has grown into a numbed resignation at the oil industry’s antics, and the effects of our consumption. ‘Sure, it’s bad, and all, but what can I do about it. And it’s not really that bad, anyway. Won’t hurt me.’ But to see it played out in the lives of real people and communities is heart rending. To see how black gold is so intimately tied to corruption and scandal, especially when Russia is folded into the mix, is sickening. There’s a fair bit of expose on Russia’s dark deeds, both with respect to oil and to politics.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly recommended



11. Chasing Darkness by Robert Crais

Dipping into this series mid-stream to see if I’d like to collect up more of the books for more of a completist read at some point.

A fire in the Los Angeles canyons reveals what looks like a suicide, but Elvis Cole suspects not. It’s particularly important for him because his work exonerated the suicide victim from a particularly brutal murder some years back and the crime scene around the suicide suggest he got it wrong.

Good, solid noir book with some characters that feel like they may have some legs. I may come back for more at some point.

4 bones!!!!



12. The Cipher Kathe Koje

This is a mean, mean little book. Nicholas and Nakota find a black hole in a janitorial closet in their apartment complex. There’s no rhyme or reason for the thing, no apparent meaning or purpose. But when they began to put things into the hole, it expresses an extreme malevolence. Nicholas maintains a certain proprietary feeling for the hole while Nakota develops a near religious perspective, dark religion mind you, as she is the mad experimenter.

Interestingly, the set-up for the book – the black hole – harkens back to Stephen King’s story The Raft first published in 1982 and then collected in Skeleton Crew in 1985, with Koje’s book first arriving in 1991.

3 bones!!!



13. 1968 in America: Music, Politics, Chaos, Counterculture, and the Shaping of a Generation by Charles Kaiser

While it may seem like things have never been worse in America, I like to read accounts of other tumultuous times – like 1968. This book is a nice overview of all of the factors that led up to the election in 1968, and all the chaos, as the book’s title suggests. These were the McCarthy days – the other McCarthy days, not hateful Joe but innocuous Eugene. The largest thread through the narrative of that year relates to McCarthy’s rise and fall through the election year, and all the adjacent political heavings. Along the way, there’s music and culture galore. It may do you well to look at some history to put the current moment into perspective – it did me.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended



14. A Morning for Flamingos by James Lee Burke

Robicheaux nearly dies when a prisoner transport goes south, but he’s to ornery to die, right? Then, Dave goes undercover as a bent cop to get to a mafia-run drug operation. The only thing that saves his bacon and maintains his cover is the fact that the crooks know that Dave always plays a little too close to the lines – they assume he doesn’t have any moral line he won’t cross. But Dave has his own moral code, sometimes it matches up with the law’s and sometimes it doesn’t. When it doesn’t match up, Robicheaux finds creative ways to balance things. Honestly, one of the most endearing traits for this hard-boiled cop is his ability to still find sympathy, even empathy, with some of the guys he’s working.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly recommended



15. Eternity Road by Jack McDevitt

This one is a seamless combination of post-apocalyptic fiction with Tokeinesque quest fantasy. A community several generations past whatever broke the earth have an enduring myth about a quest to find some great knowledge that will help rebuild things. The myth is tied inextricably with books from the old world, as books have taken on a totem status in their cultural and spiritual life. One of the elders of the community dies, one with a fair bit of mystery surrounding him from a previous attempt to find the lost books, and he leaves one of those old, precious books – I only wish it had been something other than Twain – to someone unexpected. The heiress uses the book and the whispered rumors of the previous quest to put together her own party. The quest is wonderful, as it requires them to noodle through things left behind in order to survive – like, how do you break a malfunctioning and deadly sentry robot with logic rather than firepower. There’s even a hot-air balloon ride at the end of their quest.

The only criticism is that the ending feels rushed and a little anti-climactic. I would have liked this one to stretch out and have more meaning in the end. Sadly, McDevitt rushed through the final pieces of the quest and has never written about this world again apparently. Indeed, this book seems altogether unique, as the other books I’ve found by him seem much more of the space opera ilk.

4 ½ bones!!!!!
Highly recommended

Now, here's the March reading



16. A Stained White Radiance by James Lee Burke

Dave Robicheaux’ history is deep; impossible to plumb the final sygian chasms. And, so the figures who’ve shaped him resurface with each new narrative, carrying all the muck and detritus of his early years with them. Not to mention, he seems to have catted around quite a bit, especially when fueled by that mystic amber that held him spellbound for so long. Here, a trio of siblings, tragically abused in their childhood, emerge and the girl in the triad is someone with whom Dave has a history, of course. Things kick off when one of the siblings survives a strange assassination attempt – it could have been their presumed dead father or someone whom the man owes money or the CIA. But the man won’t fill Dave in – another recurring theme; these people would do well to just tell the story the first time Dave asks because it would mean less bloodshed.

Another Highly Recommend – they just get better with each new book. Burke is a master with words.
5 bones!!!!!



17. The Litigators by John Grisham

Taken as a body of work, Grisham’s novels are uneven, but this one stands out among his later work. Sure, there’s an attorney who’s fed up with the corporate rat-race but, instead of concocting a scheme to steal a bunch of money and destroy the firm, this guy goes on an epic bender. At the end of that bender, the attorney has hitched his legal wagon to a couple of ambulance chasers, who actually chase ambulances. Characterizing themselves as a boutique law firm, they also chase some class action litigation.

The humor and characterizations harken back to Grisham’s roots in his earlier work. This one doesn’t feel like he had a deadline to get a book out for the year but that he took a little more time and told a better story.

4 ½ bones!!!!!



18. The One Tree by Stephen R. Donaldson

First of all, at the end of The Wounded Land, the Giants returned to the quest – that’s a big deal, because Covenant’s darkness and weakness need some balancing; the Giants are the heart and soul of these stories, to my mind. Also in the preceding book came Vain, an automaton of indeterminate origins. Vain acts of his own mind and of his own motivations, often doing things that don’t seem to make sense. Through this book, Linden starts to become more of the hero she’s hesitated to become, and Vain appears to have a loyalty to her that surpasses his concern for Covenant, even though he was presented to Covenant.

The only downside for me is that the quest has periods on the water, and I’m not a seafaring reader. Nonetheless, when they strike land, there are new cultures who straddle the line between malevolent and helpful.

I agree with the reviews here that complain about Covenant’s complaining and reticence. But in this book, both he and Linden start to take the reins of their own destiny a little more.

4 ½ bones!!!!!
Recommended



19. The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer by Isaac Bashevis Singer

These stories are a revelation and a joy to read. Set firmly in the Jewish world, both in Europe and in America, over the years of World War II, Singer infuses every story with endless lessons in Jewish mythology and folk tales. Some of the stories are frightening, some spooky, and some downright melancholy. But every one was interesting. Among the many stories collected here is the tale of Yentl, the Yeshiva boy – a story that was adapted for film. I had seen the film long ago and had no idea I’d trip over the original story in the pages here.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly recommended, and thanks to Uncle Stevie for recommending this author.



20. In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead James Lee Burke

This is probably my favorite of the Robicheaux books so far, at least the most memorable. There are several supernatural tones to the Robicheaux books, but this one embraces the misty, blood-stained nature of the Louisiana swamplands. A film crew is in town making a civil war movie, and Dave is visited by the ghost of Confederate General John Bell Hood. Hood becomes a bit of a seer and sage for Dave as he hunts for a murderer who is preying on victims from the underworld streets. Of course, most everyone discounts Dave’s visions as drunken fugues, but they are real, and they read as real.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended



21. Strength to Love by Martin Luther King, Jr.

Coretta Scott King says of this collection of sermons that it is the most requested and read of the books produced from King’s life. Interesting, that King himself was reluctant to put the collection together, worrying that the reading of the sermons would lose something. But they are powerful essays on social justice and how religious faith should inspire the best in us, not the worst. And they read as important to the chaotic and mean-spirited world of today as they were when he preached them as sermons during the Civil Rights Movement. In reading them, it feels that we haven’t come very far, but King would quibble with that conclusion, and actually does in one of the sermons, even then. As he often said, the arc of the moral universe may be long – sometimes painfully long – but it tends toward justice.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly recommended, especially for today.

>4 blackdogbooks: "The Cipher" definitely was a creepy book.

>6 ocgreg34: and how. Seemed like a book that didn’t want you to like it.

Going out to protest today!

>8 blackdogbooks: Support All Around!

Edited after the latest horror: Stay Safe!

>8 blackdogbooks: Great! Hope it was a good experience.

Wonderful to be there with likeminded people. Good people. Good trouble.

Here's April's update, catching up!



22. The Whistler by John Grisham

This one is a typical Grisham, one to add to the somewhat uneven side of the ledger – a judicial commission investigator receives a “deep throat” type of tip, sufficiently ominous to trigger an investigation into a potentially corrupt state judge with ties to a dark hillbilly criminal organization that has infiltrated a native tribe in Florida, and their casino. There’s the intrepid investigator, ala The Pelican Brief, and the well-oiled corrupt organization, ala take your pick. The narrative twists stretch the boundaries of reason just a little too far with all of the ills that befall the investigator that would trigger more help, yet she battles on like only a Grisham heroine. Readable on a flight, where you can leave the book somewhere in the airport for the next traveler, but nothing too memorable.

2 ½ bones!!!



23. Dixie City Jam by James Lee Burke

Another ghost from Dave’s past, a World War II Nazi submarine, rattles its way to the surface briefly, just as it did during a youthful dive with his father. The thing is little more than a curiosity for Dave, as all things historical in the bayou is for him. But it turns out that a neo-Nazi hate group is angling to bring the thing up for some reason, and there’s some interest in it from an activist with ties to one of the local mafia organizations, too. Everyone thinks Dave knows where the submarine is located, and he sort of does, but he’s not playing ball with anyone.

5 bones!!!!!
Recommended



24. Gray Mountain by John Grisham

This one by Grisham goes on the keep side of the ledger, memorable in addition to being readable. Part of the reason this one is so much better is because the heroine is less sure of herself, which makes for more interesting reading. Sure, she’s an orphan from a large corporate law firm that has downsized with the Covid pandemic. But it puts her in a position to have to question more than just the morals and ethics of the firm, it leaves her questioning herself – this is a departure for Grisham’s protagonists and the bettern of his recent work has the characters telling their story from this perspective. Also different here, the heroine ends up in coal country – while it sounds a little like The Pelican Brief, and it spawned negative reviews for sounding to eco-lit, the passages detailing the coal industry and its effects on the local communities made for interesting reading.

4 ½ bones!!!!!



25. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin

I come to this amazing book late in the game, after having read Doris Kearns Goodwin’s memoir Wait Till Next Year. But there are very few current historians writing such well-researched yet accessible books. Honestly, while the text is littered with quotation marks and footnotes, it reads like a novel of political intrigue. For Republicans these days to invoke Lincoln as the father of their party is the worst kind of misdirection. Lincoln was, above all, a kind man, engaged in thoughtful governance and willing to do absolutely anything to keep the peace, save the union, and abolish slavery. Some historians pull certain events out of context to shame him for coming to the cause late, but Goodwin makes clear that he was always part of the cause but had his eyes open about how quickly to move the cause. While it wasn’t fast enough or strident enough for some, both at the time and in hindsight, he moved as quickly as he could. And his uncanny sense of timing turns out to be the product of many late nights filled with agonizing work.

Best, most prescient quote for our time from Lincoln, on the nature of his struggle, which is our struggle today –

”I consider the central idea pervading this struggle is the necessity that is upon us, of proving that popular government is not an absurdity. We must settle this question now, whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose. If we fail it will go far to prove the incapability of the people to govern themselves.”

5 bones!!!!!
Highly recommended



26. Burning Angel by James Lee Burke

The seemingly inexhaustible imagination of Burke is on display yet again, as he highlights yet more characters from Dave’s past. The Fontenots, long part of Dave’s life, are being put off their sharecropping land. And a petty criminal that Dave has had dealings with reaches out to him when the criminal’s girlfriend is murdered. There appears to be a connection between the two separate things but, as usual, no one will tell Dave the whole story.

4 ½ bones!!!!!
Recommended

Now that June is almost done, I need to at least get caught up to May:



27. The Stand by Stephen King

There's too much to say, too many things already said about this one, especially because it's one of my favorites. This is a re-read, but it's been quite some time in between readings, and a real pandemic. What struck me this time were the early references that Uncle Stevie eventually returns to with The Dark Tower series - keys and doors and centenarian spiritual leaders and epic treks and good vs. evil. It's terribly interesting how much of this was already swirling in his mind. He wrote The Gunslinger early in his writing career but it wasn't published, and this book seems to have helped germinate a lot of what ended up in the series. It stands the test of time in re-reading (pun intended). M-O-O-N, that spells read this. {This review is from my second reading in 2021}

By the way, the cover and famous art here is a reimagining of Goya's Fight with Cudgels. Also, Uncle Stevie initially started with an idea about Patty Hearst and the SLA, but it morphed into this epic. And, by all accounts, Flagg (with all his attendant aliases) is based on Charles Starkweather.

This reading in 2025 was in honor of my retirement, as I began my career as I was reading the book for the first time and thought I'd wrap it up by reading it as I sailed into the sunset.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended for reading and re-reading!
An all-time favorite.



28. Gandhi: A Memoir by William Shirer

The title of the book is somewhat misleading, though that doesn't take anything away from it, because it's really both a memoir of Gandhi through a particular time and a memoir of the journalist who covered him at the time. I wanted to learn more about Gandhi because he's a hero of a couple of my own heroes, most notably the late John Lewis. Gandhi's persistent resistance, underestimated by British leaders, changed the face of his nation eventually but also changed the face of international struggles for freedom and social justice. The book makes clear that he was a complicated fellow, with his own scandals, but also a giant intellect and keen judge of the character of individuals, as well as groups.

Though not always succeeding in his own struggle for moral and spiritual purity, he followed his satyagraha, or soul-force, to bring behemoths to their knees - civil disobedience; passive resistance; non-cooperation; non-violence; search for truth; search for the essence of the spirit; and search for decency in human interaction.

Though not an exhaustive biography, this book hit just the right note in detail and explanation of the effect Gandhi had on those around him

4 1/2 bones!!!!!
Highly recommended



29. Cadillac Jukebox by James Lee Burke

Dave is nothing if not the unexpected champion of the underdog and the accused, no matter how many he's put away himself. This time, he beings to suspect that an otherwise distasteful man who was convicted of killing a civil rights leader may not have done the deed. Since the sitting governor reached that position largely on the back of the prosecution, the politics of overturning the conviction are not to his liking. And the pressure on Dave to quit digging up bones from the past starts - these folks don't seem to know the person they're dealing with here; Dave is always digging up bones, if not his own then someone else's.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly recommended



30. Camino Island by John Grisham

This Grisham is the keystone for a series that the author has started with a struggling author, rich of promise but poor of publication opportunities, as the heroine. There's a ne'er-do-well independent bookstore owner, a self-made man though how that making occurred is somewhat murky. There are more authors on the small island per capita than should be true, some interesting characters amongst this bunch. And, of course, there's an investigator - this time a champagne infused, high-flying insurance investigator. The investigator is on the trail of stolen Fitzgerald manuscripts, and she convinces the struggling author to go undercover to get to the bookstore owner.

Alas, though the some of the supporting characters are fun to read, the main characters are just not believable. The bookstore owner ends up coming off as some kind of a Bond-villain mastermind. And the struggling author hops in the sack with him like a Bond girl.

3 bones!!!



31. Stephen King: The Art of Darkness by Douglas E. Winter

As much as is known about Uncle Stevie and his work, there are actually quite few straight up biographies of the man. Winter convinced the author that he should let someone write about him who he trusted, and he trusted Winter. So, Winter dove deeply into the early life and work of Uncle Stevie, and conducted several no-holds-barred interviews. Those enlightening interviews make up the best bits of the book. This account only covers up through about 1986, before the publication of It. But each of the books get their own chapter, with tons of background material. For the constant reader who is constantly thirsting for a preface or foreword or afterword from Uncle Stevie to tell us he rest of the story, this book serves as a book length version of that.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly recommended



32. Grateful American: A Journey from Self to Service by Gary Sinise

Known by most as Lieutenant Dan for his famous role Forest Gump, Since translated that fame into a service oriented life focused on veterans and military members. His non-profit does an amazing amount of work to help veterans, especially wounded ones. This memoir goes back to his early flunking-out-of-school days, to his founding of the award winning Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago, eventually culminating in how his acting career left him feeling like he needed to give something back. When several veteran's organizations honor him for his most well-known role, the path is laid out for him, and he never stops moving. There is a ton of behind the scenes stuff here, and the book never reads like one of those Hollywood, ghost-written ego pieces. Sinise's politics don't match mine exactly but his service sets him apart.

5 bones!!!!!
Recommended



33. Wastelands 2: More Stories of the Apocalypse ed. by John Joseph Adams

As a big fan of the original Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse, this was a no-brainer. This time, most of the stories are from the year 2000 and onward. That meant that I learned about some new authors. Favorites in the collection, though, also came from authors already known to me, like Jack McDevitt, Nancy Kress, and David Brin. The Brin, of course, was The Postman, an exception on the publication date for the collection. I remember reading that book and loving the first 2/3 of the book while really despising the conclusion. This collection re-prints just the opening bits of the book, and it reminded me how much I loved the early part of the book - it's really quite exceptional, with a somewhat overly introspective and not so confident hero.

I also particularly liked Animal Husbandry from Seanan McGuire because it featured something of an anti-hero, a sort of serial killer former veterinarian.

Not all of the stories are great but the overall book is well worth the time for the sci-fi/fantasy/apocaliptic lover.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly recommended



34. Sunset Limited by James Lee Burke

Most of the Robicheaux books pick at Dave's mother and father, both having left him some complicated demons. His mother abandoned her husband and a young Dave more than one time. This installment digs a little deeper, telling more about his mother's first flight, to California and Hollywood, only to need money for a return trip only to leave again sometime later.

The set-up for the book is another nightmare memory for Dave - he and his father find a labor leader nailed, crucified really, to a barn door. The case was never solved, and it starts Dave working when the man's daughter and son return home, she now a famous photo-journalist and he a movie producer. Dave works them as he works the case, and eventually violence erupts from those trying to keep the past buried.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended

June, on time:



35. Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan

Something niggled at me as I read this one, though I couldn't put my finger on it until the ending revealed the artifice constructed by both the author and, as it turns out, the author within the narrative.

The book is titularly a story of a young woman freed from the provincial and oppressive bonds of her family to land at the fledgling British Secret Service. She is then recruited for a somewhat covert mission to foster an author who will, hopefully, produce writings supportive of the 'right' perspectives. It goes horribly wrong, of course.

But in the waning pages, the narrative is revealed to be that bamboozled author's own 'perspective' on the girl and the scheme. Yes, that might be a spoiler, but I was perturbed at conceit that everything I'd been reading was all penned by someone other than the heroine - reflections of what actually happened to J.R. Ewing. And that's when it occurred to me what had been niggling at me - the heroine and her narrative always felt detached, and with a far too stereotypical penchant in describing the female. Indeed, it felt like the naughty and bewildered scratchings of a lonely 16-year-old boy, which doesn't say much for the voice of the author who is meant to be some wunderkind.

I've liked McEwan before, and probably will again, but this felt to forced.

2 1/2 bones!!!



36. The Long Home by William Gay

As a huge William Gay fan, expectations were high for this one, and they mostly met the mark. His take on the Southern Gothic with a mix of Denis Johnson's love of the outsider is pitch perfect.

In this one, Hardin {the bad man} kills a neighbor. Eventually, the murder victim's son, Nathan, gets tangled up with him, first working construction and then falling for a young woman in whose home Hardin has invaded. The only ally Nathan has is William Tell Oliver, another neighbor. Oliver tries to look out for Nathan but once the blood letting begins a dark end is inevitable.

There is, as usual with Gay, an eerie and supernatural element to the story - a cavernous hole opens up in front the home Hardin steals into, and there are Lovecraftian implications. But of all the Gay work I've read so far, this is the most straightforwardly realistic. And, also as usual, Gay's prose is simply poetry stretched out on the page.

Not my favorite Gay so far, but the bar is so high.

4 bones!!!!!
Recommended



37. The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcom X, as told two Arthur Hailey

Most people have probably seen the film made from this source material, but there's a lot more to X and his story than what a film can contain. This memoir covers Malcolm's young life, and particularly how his family life shaped his views on the world. Indeed, the first line of the book details the arrival of the KKK to his family's house while his mother was pregnant with him.

One of the things not well documented in the film is Malcolm's education and intelligence. The film makes it appear he learned everything during his prison stint, but he was a gifted student before he fell into hustling. But the hustling did lead to prison, and his conversion to The Nation of Islam, a particularly virulent and reportedly racist version of the Islamic faith as set out by a huckster turned prophet. The cult-like origin story of that religion stretches the imagination to breaking.

The film, while detailing the break with the religion, doesn't do enough to highlight Malcolm's pilgrimage and how it again altered his perspective - altered it to be imminently more inclusive and far-seeing.

One caveat, Malcolm's idea of gender politics and women in general is bad and never improves much - so fair warning. Always a surprise to me that people who fight oppression have a blind spot for the oppression of women.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended!!!!!



38. The Mind of Adolf Hitler (The Secret Wartime Report) by Walter C. Longer

A quite unknown but wildly interesting little book. The idea was that the folks who ran the earliest versions of America's intelligence organizations wanted a psychologist to conduct an arms-length assessment of Hitler, in hopes it would come in handy predicting his behavior or in negotiating with him. It's a tall task, and one not many folks in the psychology profession would undertake because you don't have the target's cooperation and input. But this is essentially an early work of behavioral analysis, and it's chilling how accurate the end product ends up being. Indeed, upon its publication many years later, another psychologist analyzes the report to see how it bears up with the historical record - the original report essentially predicted almost all of the characteristics of Hitler's suicide years before it happened.

The author puts a diagnosis to Hitler, with some added neuroses, and they bear out over time, even though the professions has morphed some of the diagnostic terms. Most interestingly, it's amazing how similar Hitler's pathologies are to a certain someone trying to resurrect a similar political ideology these days. The main difference, Hitler had one testicle, which is one more than the other guy.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly recommended!!!!!



39. Never Flinch by Stephen King

The newest out from Uncle Stevie, and a continuation for Holly Gibney's story, a very satisfying entry into the canon.

Holly tries on personal security for a controversial female author and pundit. The need for Holly's bodyguard services arise from a religious zealot stalker who begins a violent campaign against the author. Holly holds her own through the attacks, displaying her quick action and her well of courage.

But Holly is distracted by a serial murder going on back home - a guy who is killing innocent people to highlight the wrongful conviction and eventual prison murder of an innocent man. Along the way, Holly's cohorts, Jerome and Barb, get mixed up in the violence, of course. And, of course, Holly saves the day in her unassuming way.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly recommended!!!!!



40. Valley of Lights by Stephen Gallagher

It's amazing how many truly gifted writers were part of the 1980s horror blitz - this is great example of a new-to-me author from that time.

A patrol sergeant in Phoenix comes across three bodies in a motel room - all three are barely alive and completely catatonic. As the copper chases down leads he begins to suspect that a Lovecraft-type body-hopping entity keeps the bodies around to merge into at will. As there is also a serial rapist and murderer of children at work, he also realizes that the same creature is committing those horrific crimes. The difficulty in dealing with the monster is that if you kill one of the host bodies, it simply flies away into one of the other ready hosts - not to mention the number of host bodies it preserves means that you're never sure you're interacting with a real person.

The end the copper concocts for the creature is truly unique, and dastardly enough to fit the crimes its committed.

A bonus for this anniversary edition is a lot of extra material, including a film treatment worked up when the story was in line for a movie and a long interview with the author about his work and process.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly recommended!!!!!



41. Purple Cane Road by James Lee Burke

Robicheaux' history is the thing, right? Everything that happens to him is an outgrowth of some ghost or sack of bones or memory from his earlier life. But there's history and then there's history.

There are numerous short references throughout the previous books about Dave's mother - the most straight on treatment coming from Sunset Limited, describing her flight from Louisiana and family to Hollywood, only to need money to return. But most of this story is about what happened to Dave's mother after she finally lit out for good. As a link to another set of violent acts, Dave trips onto a story about his mother's murder. Once that happens, he's on a direct line to uncover the truth and, of course, it's complicated like everything else about Dave. But he finally puts his mother's memory to a peaceful rest - at least, once he's cooked the culprits' bacon.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly recommended - my favorite so far along with In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead



42. The Green Mile: The Screenplay by Frank Darabont and Stephen King

Few people would quibble with the quality of the film version of Uncle Stevie's second prison story - but before I reread the book, I wanted to see the differences between the film material up against the source material.

Bonus material here includes introductions from both Darabont and Uncle Stevie, detailing how the book and the movie came to be. Good stuff. If you've never read a screenplay, it's quite different in form. But the material shines through. The major difference from the source is that the film takes a much more chronological path to the story than does than the book. Not better or worse, just different, and probably easier to film. All the best stuff is in here.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended



43. The Stephen King Illustrated Companion by Bev Vincent

With a successful professional career that spans some 45 years, a lot of stuff accumulates. The Stephen King Illustrated Companion, essentially a scrapbook gift for all of King’s ‘constant reader’ fans, collects and displays both the visual and written ephemera that chronicle King’s life and career. From King’s youthful foray into publishing and literary marketing to his first success as a novelist with Carrie to his most recent publications, the book lays out the personal events that fueled King. There are reproductions of King’s earliest writings, handwritten drafts, and recently copyedited manuscript pages. There are personal photographs of King and of locations that inspired King. There is even an illustrated romance book cover, released with one edition of Misery, depicting the master of horror, in a shirt and bodice ripping clench with a breathless vixen. Much of the material featured has never published before. And the text of the book translates thousands of pages of material into a narrative describing much of the behind-the-scenes events that colored King’s stories.

Several other companion books and fan-books are on the market for the dedicated King fan. None of them are offer such a coherent narrative as this work, and none of them display such a rare collection of ephemera as this work. Even though I have been a constant reader for a over three decades, I was surprised and by the degree to which this book lifts the veil on King’s personal life and writing.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended - a reread.



44. Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver

After having watched a PBS documentary about The Black Panthers, I was curious about Cleaver's writings.

Unlike Malcolm X, though they bear a lot of similarities, it appears from this collection of essays that Cleaver educated himself largely during his prison stays. He, too, was a member of the Nation of Islam, but quit the religion at the same time that Malcolm did in favor of more inclusive, if more radical, perspectives. Cleaver's essays run the gamut from boxing to slavery, but each is a deep dive into how a topic ties back to an underlying and deep racist bent in the culture and politics of the nation.

Sadly, he is also like Malcolm in his view on women, though Cleaver's essays go further into sexual politics - a particularly oppressive and hateful sexual politics. These sections of the book dropped the rating for it.

On the plus side, his essay The Christ and His Teachings is one of the best meditations on how religion has been used down through the ages to divide and support hate.

4 bones!!!!!
Recommended, with the earlier caveat



45. The Select by F. Paul Wilson

This is a stand alone from Wilson, not part of The Secret History of the World or Repairman Jack series. Our heroine is intent upon becoming a doctor, and on going to the most prestigious and selective medical school in the country. But the oddities about how the school selects its candidates, and how it runs the school, pile up the longer she stays there. Ultimately, there is a little Manchurian Candidate scam going on among the school administrators and funders, highjacking the students beliefs before they go out into the world in an effort to further line their pockets.

For an older thriller with a female heroine, I was very glad to see this one not have the cardboard characteristics like the Ludlum or Le Carre books. She's independent and strong, able to go toe-to-toe with the baddies.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly recommended!!!!!



46. Jolie Blon’s Bounce by James Lee Burke

Following the brutal rape and murder of a teenage girl, Dave runs across an otherworldly malevolent person named Legion. Legion is the epitome of evil, sometimes mumbling what sound like an unutterable language. Dave tangles with him and takes a beating that lays him up in the hospital and puts him into a relapse with anything he can lay his hands on, short of liquor - pills and powder. Robicheaux can sometimes pitch holier than thou with the twelve steps and recovery when talking to another addict, but he learns in the midst of the relapse that his own problem runs far deeper than any of the substances he reaches for - a vital realization for him. It's heartening to find Dave struggling so deeply with his demons - he's always struggling but this time he gets down a little closer to the roots.

Even though Legion meets his fate - a lightning bolt no less - it is not hard to see him coming back in some way.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended



47. Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation by Joseph J. Ellis

These are not the founding fathers of The Federalist Papers or from you gilt-edged, aura-infused history books. This is the more complicated version, and it doesn't require hundreds or thousands of pages to get to the core of these complicated men. Ellis has written those books, but he wanted something reduced down for easier swallowing. There's coverage of the duel between Burr and Hamilton - honestly, can't think a a worse person to focus a musical puff piece on than Hamilton - and coverage of Jefferson and Adams' friendship - and the decade or more virulent rift between them. But the best section covers the issue of slavery, put on the table in 1790 by a petition from Quakers to abolish it. These guys throw up their hands at the problem, identifying it as a union-busting insoluble issue. If they'd only foreseen how right they were about the union-busting part, but they were wrong about the insoluble piece. It's just that they didn't have any will left after mounting a revolution and would rather rest on the laurels of their accomplishment than to focus the revolutionary impetus on the very people who needed it the most.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended

July update - Someone noted how most of my updates these days have high bones ratings and recommendations - it's a function of how I'm not suffering bad reads for too long and focusing on reading things I know I'm going to enjoy. But it made me think I should highlight the stuff I abandon, as well, for context. So.....

This month I started and abandoned reading the following:

Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen -
There's a fair bit of uproar over this one, some scholars thinking that the author is a little too simple with his analysis. I didn't find out about that until I'd read the first chapter and suspected something was off.

Brother by Ania Ahlborn - a fairly new horror title, but the opening chapter seems like setting up shock or gore porn.

Blue Shoe by Anne Lamott - I love Lamott's non-fiction but her fiction feels a little too unfocused for me.

Now the good stuff....



48. Yarrow by Charles de Lint

Charles de Lint is a favorite; his urban fantasy arrived before anyone else even knew what that might look like. He is a master builder of worlds and characters, always with a unique story, if connected to his larger world. This one was no different. The book, overall, had the feel of Winesburg, Ohio, especially in the early chapters when he is laying out the cast. The heroine is an author who believes that she writes only from her exquisitely vivid dreams. But those dreams abandon her and she develops writer's block. Turns out the dreams are more real than she believed, and a vampire type monster is feeding on her and the other residents of the town.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended



49. O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

This was part of a 100 best list I've been working through for ages, but Willa Cather is a favorite anyway.

Life on the prairie is rarely evoked as well as with Cather. The Bergson's, Swedish immigrants, grub at the landscape trying to establish a life. When the patriarch dies, the oldest, Alexandra, can see the land's potential and takes over running the farm. Through her educated risks, she makes the farm more successful than any other on the prairie, but it comes at a personal cost - endless petty disagreements with her brothers, loss of love, and the loneliness of her responsibilities. All of it, she bears in hopes that her youngest brother will have a different life. But a violent encounter in the community changes everything, some for good and some for bad. A beautifully rendered portrait of life and communities that are lost to history, but that Cather knew like the back of her hand.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended



50. The Door into Summer {A Heinlein Trio} by Robert Heinlein

As always, Heinlein cannot be contained by the tropes and peculiarities of Science Fiction, but infuses each otherworldly story with something more. This one is a noirish tale, about an inventor. Interestingly, though published in 1957, Heinlein saw the advent of robotic vacuum cleaners, you know, Rhumbas, and other robotic advances. The inventor is swindled and sees his salvation in taking 'The Big Sleep' - animated suspension - and waking up a few decades down the road. But it takes multiple trips back and forth in time to set things aright. The noir tone is pitch perfect, and often funny in that sarcastic noirish way.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended



51. We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Most people are more familiar with Coates Between the World and Me, but I wanted to read some of his more foundational writing from his days at The Atlantic. The essays are more raw, and he leads into each one with some context about his life as he was writing the piece, as well as what he didn't like about the finished product. The essays run through a rogue's gallery of topics, including reparations, modern-day incarceration, the backlash to a black president (one who tried to govern in a post-racial way), and the racist overtones behind the 2016 election. The history he uncovers is vital to understanding race and politics as we experience them now, and as experienced by others. For example, everyone universally praises FDR's New Deal for having turned the country around. But there are some extremely racist provisions in much of the labor and tax policies, which FDR allowed to remain in the oil to curry favor with Southern legislators whose votes he needed. Did you know that black people didn't have access to the G.I. Bill until well into its existence. Or did you know about FHA policies supporting redlining neighborhoods to keep segregation practices in place? As proud as I am to live in this country, I am always ashamed of the history that's repeatedly swept under the rug.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended



52. The Green Mile by Stephen King

Originally published in six serial installments, Uncle Stevie held multiple places on the New York Times Best Seller List in 1996. I didn't read them then, but this is a re-read for me. What most people know about the story, because it's in the cultural consciousness, is about the main narrative, with John Coffey on death row. But the book details a good deal of Paul Edgecomb's further life in an 'old-age home' long after the events of the summer of John Coffey. The mirror of Edgecomb's later life to those events is an important counter-weight was he details the long-ago summer.

Fun to re-read this one and look for Dickens references, as Uncle Stevie paid a good deal of homage to the man who helped inspire him to try serial publication.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended



53. White Gold Wielder by Stephen R. Donaldson

Thus ends the Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, and maybe the end of Covenant himself, though there is another set of chronicles, so probably not.

Covenant doesn't himself succeed in doing what is necessary to save the land, but he finally finds a way to let someone share his burden. Honestly, the thing that weighs this narrative down is Donaldson's constant return to Covenant's refrain of self-loathing and hopelessness. Having added Linden to the plucky group of questers, I thought, would give us some relief from that down beat. But Donaldson curses Linden with nearly the same afflictions. There are moments when the two work together, finally, where things pick up. But then the story descends again. The most intriguing portion of the story, and this group of questers, was the eldritch Vain. Since he was the only one to touch The One Tree, it seemed he would have a role to play in saving everyone's bacon - and he did. But the way in which it played out was quite unique. So, all in all, another good installment, even if Covenant gets on my nerves sometimes.

4 bones!!!!
Recommended



54. Killer on the Road/The Babysitter Lives by Stephen Graham Jones

Probably the best 'new' horror writer going these days - though he's not new because he's been clicking away for quite sometime until someone in the publishing world took notice beyond journals and specialty publishing houses.

In this weird and bloody tale, a babysitter goes to the wrong house, one where there's been a brutal set of murders in years past. She has the sense that something is off, and the sense is confirmed when one of the kids takes her through a portal/wormhole/door in the house that leads her to another spot in the house. The babysitter loses time when she makes the trip and then realizes that she is sometimes in a parallel location where the killer has been hiding and waiting for someone to venture there as a way to escape.

While SGJ pays tribute to The Haunting of HIlle House and Hell House and The Shining in the acknowledgements, I felt the distinct presence of Philip K. Dick in the narrative, as well. SGJ's work, in general, is unfused with that weirdness that only PKD can bring to a story.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended



55. Lions and Tigers and Crocs, Oh My! by Stephan Pastes

I got hooked on Pearls Before Swine in the daily comics pages and didn't know that such collections existed. This was great because it gave me a chance to read the comics I missed before I knew about them. This was a much needed brain break with frequent chortling - especially with Rats' antics, because I'm totally Rat. I want to be Pig, but I'm totally Rat. Nice to find the commentaries and bonus behind the scenes information/strips. This guy is in my head!

5 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended



56. Last Car to Elysian Fields by James Lee Burke

The start of the book is a shaker, because Burke casually mentions Robicheaux' wife, Bootsie, is now dead and buried. There is little explanation, and we all knew she was facing death sooner than later, but Burke just shoves us into a post-tootsie world. Added to the fact that Robicheaux has sold his home to Batist and sent Alafair to college, it's jarring.

The story starts with the beating of a parish priest and the DUI caused traffic fatality of three teenaged girls. But Dave also gets obsessed, as he does, with the disappearance of a blues musician in the Louisiana prison system some decades before. There's a connection to all these disparate threads, and Dave eventually pulls the right one to unravel it all.

4 bones!!!!
Recommended, but I'm a little perplexed by the jarring off-page occurrences.



57. John Lewis, A Life by David Greenberg

Walking With the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement focused primarily on Lewis' days in the Civil Rights Era, when he made his bones on the Pettus bridge and in a bus. But Greenberg's biography digs down much deeper in his roots and in his days following the movement. Few other biographies of the man detail his principled stand against the nominations of John Roberts and Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court - he testified at their hearings, against them, and he was dead right about what it would mean if they were confirmed to the court. The biography also details Lewis' accomplishments and projects through the three presidential terms during which he served, not the least of which was the creation and funding of National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Greenberg details a lot more of the ways in which Lewis became the moral backbone of Congress - we miss his presence in these dangerous and confusing times.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended



58. Firestarter by Stephen King

I love reading reviews of Uncle Stevie's books from other readers here because there's always a qualification to their praise - "I love him but he's too long" "He's the best but this is the same book as Carrie" blah, blah, blah.

Look, a lot of King's work is a take on something that has gone before, like Salem's Lot or The Shining. He likes to try to imagine some of the classic horror and sci-fi tropes from a different angle. So, when I re-read Firestarter I realized that this is basically a reimagining of Frankenstein, with a little girl as the monster. Sure, there's a little Koontzian mix with The Shop and the testing, but she's the monster trying to deal with being the monster. And, sure, there's a lot of narrative trapped in Charlie's brain or her dad's brain, but we are talking about a story in which the brain is the thing, after all.

This is not horror-King but more thriller-King. I think a lot of people would be hard pressed to identify this one as a King book at all if they didn't know it going into the read from the movie or cultural knowledge. Ultimately, I think too many readers just want to find a way to criticize Uncle Stevie, like all the critics have done for years.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly recommended - don't pay attention to the other low rating, it's sour grapes

You’ve got some really great ones in this batch!

Tremendous review of your reading. I don't know how you manage to cram so much into a single post!

Thanks, guys. Hope you pick some of them up!

>18 blackdogbooks: I have read and loved O' Pioneers but must look for the biography of John Lewis.

>19 PaulCranswick: you will not be disappointed.

August reading update -

Abandoned books for the month:

In Search of J. D. Salinger: A Biography by Ian Hamilton - too cute by several strokes; this guy wanted to write about writing about Salinger, whom I have decided is not as interesting as I once thought.

Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger - nor is Salinger's writing as interesting as I once thought.

Welcome, Chaos by Kate Wilhelm - took a little too long to move, felt like I was in quicksand.

Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (Annals of Communism) by John Earl Haynes - too many conclusions that are both vague and ill-supported bandied about, and a graduate level class in cryptography.



59. Crusader’s Cross by James Lee Burke

As always, we are diving through Robicheaux' past - it honestly feels like Dave is in some kind of purgatory where he is required to right all his wrongs, he certainly thinks that. This time we have an event featuring his half-brother, Jimmie. I'm glad to see Jimmie back since he took a powder in one of the first books and hasn't been back again. Anyway, Dave and Jimmie are saved from drowning by a young prostitute, though neither of the boys initially trigs to her profession. Jimmie falls in love and tries to buy her out of the pickle she's in, and then tries to runaway with her - it doesn't go well. Fast forward to Dave's journey through purgatory - an old con gives Dave a death-bed confession that suggests the girl was murdered. Dave, who lost his badge in the last book, gets it back, of course, because of a serial killer at work int he area, and goes on the hunt for the serial and whoever murdered the girl, pulling Jimmie into the fray. Oh, and Dave marries a lapsed nun along the way - now he has confession opportunities right at home.

This one feels like Burke got himself back on track after losing that old rhythm with the last book a bit.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended!



60. The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Absurd enough; meta enough; post-modern enough to have a distinct David Foster Wallace flavor. Yet, still more rooted in traditional narrative to read like a thriller.

A South Vietnamese soldier in the secret police is also a spy for the North. At Saigon's fall, he and his SVA general are saved by a dark CIA officer and shipped to America. There, the soldier continues spying on SVA expat activities, including what will become a failed attempt to spark a revolution again in Vietnam. The soldier is a man of two, maybe more minds, which is the foundation for the narrative.

My only quibble is that the torture scene in the last part of the book became a little too surreal with the soldiers internal, drug and pain-filled dialog - it dragged the book down a bit.

4 1/2 bones!!!!!
Recommended!



61. The Final Girl Support Group Grady Hendrix

Somewhat ambivalent about this one, but maybe my expectations were too high going in after all the good stuff said about Hendrix' Paperbacks from Hell.

It seems like the idea was to turn the misogyny of 80s slasher films on its head and feature the girl survivors for a change - and the book does nip at a feminist streak. But it still sometimes feels rooted in what it's trying to deconstruct - maybe that was the point??? The plot is overly predictable - again, was that the point???

The set-up was a good idea - female survivors of dark serial murderers band together to go through therapy. And there's some fairly good homage to those films, as the survivors are barely disguised from the films that inspired them.

Perhaps what bothers me is that the horror here seems altogether infused by the visual of those 80s movies, as though 80s horror existed only there rather than in the rich literary tradition that fueled the film inferno. Perhaps I was expecting a broader look at horror give that Hendrix spent so much time looking at the literary side and he just focused on the visual for this one.

I'm not done reading Hendrix but I'm not yet ready to recommend him.

3 1/2 bones!!!!



62. Motel Chronicles by Sam Shepard

This is like a rich scrapbook or journal unearthed from the glove box of an old pickup in Shepard's yard. Few of the entries are longer than a couple of pages, but they each pack a punch. Then, there is the head-scratching effort to figure how much each one is auto-biographical - like was the starlet in the story from 1981, whom the narrator got drunk and toned with while they were making a movie, is that Jessica Lange?? Regardless of the quotient of autobiography, the stories and poems, however short or long, are gilded with an air of absolute authenticity - Shepard's super-power. Sure his plays are great and they won awards, but I wish there was so much more of this.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended!



63. Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul by Eddie Glaude Jr.

While a great program, the Early Reviewer program here at LT suffers from too many books not getting to the right readers, which fuels less than accurate or fair reviews. This book suffered, I believe.

One reviewer whined that, "Yeah, I agree with the author but he doesn't tell us what to do." First of all, that reviewer didn't read closely or well enough. Cracking the book open you can find arguments for living wage, and de-privatization of schools and prisons. Oh, what can you do about that, you say - well, every section is layered with encouragement to organize, protest, and engage with the political system. It doesn't work, you say - he makes that point also, that our engagement needs to shake off the bindings and terms of political debate as they exist. His whole point, from black liberalism to black conservatism to pretty much all of white politics is that the people who make up those groups need to start thinking and acting differently. If you missed that point, or threw up your hands in hopelessness at the end of the book, you were the person he was writing for.

There are also a fair number of complaints about his suggestion of a 'blank out' in the election that followed the book's publication. Fine, you don't think that would work, so what ideas are you offering as an alternative? Would such an effort have worked, or changed things? I don't know either, but doing something is better than sitting on your couch pouting about the state of the country.

This is an important and thought-provoking book. It's a shame that so many of the reviewers didn't meditate on the message more and find fault less.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended!



64. Citizen of the Galaxy Robert Heinlein

This is one of the books that's characterized as one of Heinlein's 'Juveniles' - intended for a younger audience. Maybe he intended that, I don't know, but it seems more of a publisher's or marketer's or seller's characterization than an apt description of the book.

The book follows Thorby, a boy slave who is bought by a man who turns out to be a spy. His new master gives him more and more freedom while educating him. Eventually, thorny is fully emancipated and ends up on a galaxy-wide quest to fulfill the man's last wishes, which turn out to be more about Thorby than the man himself.

The book takes on the issue of slavery, through an anthropological exegesis of the different intergalactic cultures Thorby is exposed to. There is never a moment that the writing seems targeted at a particular age group or reading comprehension. The writing is rich and provocative; the difficult concepts of identity and worth are addressed without pulling any punches.

Heinlein is a chameleon, dropping his science fiction into other genres seamlessly.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended!



65. The City of Falling Angels by John Berendt

This one was not as good as Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, by a stretch. Berendt follows Venetian doings after one of the most revered opera houses burns down. The problem is, that unlike his previous book, the crime, if it is one, doesn't take center stage. Rather, it's shoved out of the way by the mindless intrigues and spats of the rich and famous who live in Venice. Honestly, the glorification of these people, even in sending them up sometimes, was just tiresome. The previous book, while highlighting the eccentricities of the locals, was still focused on real people. It was a bit of a bore to read about the endless squabbles of the well-to-do over esoteric matters.

2 bones!!!



66. The Cunning Man by Robertson Davies

It's been so long since I read The Fifth Business that I forgot what a wonderful writer Robertson Davies can be. So, I went into this one suspecting I might not finish it, but was hooked with the first line, which is pretty good one.

The story is narrated by Dr. Hullah, written in his notebooks as he reminisces over his life to prepare to joust with a journalist. The journalist is an in-law of sorts, a young whipper-snapper, who wants the beyond the curtain on Toronto life. And wants to frame it around the unexpected death of a priest. But Dr. Hullah doesn't want to give the goods, and suspects there was more than meets the eye with the priest's death.

Overall, the book is a meditation on a particular life lived, and all the multitudes of interactions and relationships that entails. Davies slips the mystery by you without notice and then yanks the rug from you at the ending revealing it all. Good ol' fashioned literature at its best.

4 bones!!!!
Recommended



67. Leaving the Fold: A Guide for Former Fundamentalists and Others Leaving Their Religion by Marlene Winell

This one is not for everyone. Indeed, the last half or so of the book suggests methods and strategies that don't appeal to me in the least - some of it seemed akin to self-hypnosis.

That said, the early part of the book was quite good, identifying the structures and methods of fundamentalism. So, if you're interested in how fundamentalist religion does what it does, or mildly interested in behavioral analysis, I'd suggest reading the first half of the book up through the part where the suggested healing methods begins.

3 bones!!!



68. The Moccasin Telegraph and Other Stories by W. P. Kinsella

I'm a fan of the baseball stories, but these Native-centric stories feel a little too mired in stereo-type for my taste. I'll stick to the baseball stuff.

2 bones!!



69. Pegasus Descending by James Lee Burke

The past sin Robicheaux has to tackle in this circle of purgatory finds him drunk almost to stupor and watching a friend gunned down during an armored car robbery. Dave can't sober himself up enough to save his friend. He knows the people behind the robbery and murder but nobody listens to a drunk, especially not a drunk cop. Years later, the daughter of that friend shows up in New Iberia. It may be that the daughter wants revenge, but she's going about it in less than legal means, and that puts her in Dave's sights.

While that's one plot avenue, Dave is also working the unsolved hit-and-run death of an unidentified man, and the senseless suicide of a young college girl - the same family keeps turning up in those two cases. Burke is in a groove!

5 bones!!!!!
Highly recommended!

September Reading update - hit and passed the 75 mark!

Abandoned books:

A Charmed Life: Growing Up in Macbeth’s Castle by Liza Campbell - this was just a little too whiny, especially given that the author really had no place to whine. About 100 pages in, it was still unclear how her young life was dysfunctional, but there was no end of listing all the properties and titles her and her family held.

Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson - like the Scandi film version a bunch but the book just had a hard time getting off the ground, I thought.



70. The Spy Who Got Away by David Wise

Fascinating tale of Soviet espionage and how one of our own was fairly easily compromised to divulge all the CIA jewels. A classic case of a fragile ego who never got enough praise and recognition, even though his skills didn't match the picture he had in his own mind. Also a fascinating tale of all the many breakdowns of the CIA and the FBI in identifying and bringing this guy to justice before he defected to the Soviet Union. The guy beat FBI surveillance rather easily and fled while under investigation.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended



71. Greenmantle by Charles de Lint

Charles de Lint seems to always be on point with his urban fantasy, and this is no exception. He folds a mafia hit man on the run into the mix, living in the same neighborhood where a woman on the run from her abusive and criminal boyfriend lives. The rural area also is home to a group of villagers living off-the-grid and hidden from the larger world save for a haunting sound of a flute that echoes through the forest to have varying effects on those who hear it. The mafia comes for their man and the boyfriend comes for his daughter but they are overshadowed by a larger mystery in the forest.

The book loses a half bone for some anachronistic handling of the main female character who accepts some rare stupid explanations about the happenings. The daughter is a fairly strong female character but the mom and some of the other female characters are wanting.

4 1/2 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended!



72. Tar Baby by Toni Morrison

An uncharacteristically modern tale from Morrison, set in the Caribbean. A drifter becomes entangled with a wealthy family on the island and the weak seams of the family come unravelled. The drifter takes up with the daughter of the wealthy family's servants, a woman who has lived almost as their own daughter. Their ill-fated love is the rock that the entire family is broken against.

Because the tale is so modern for Morrison, she turns her eye on much more micro-racism and the identity crises of those mixed blood people. The focus can be jarring, seeing the white characters take up so much of her narrative time, but it's worth it in the end to see her perspective on racial injustice from that angel.

The lyrical prose Morrison always brings is here in full, and it's easy to get lost in certain passages so much so that the narrative fades away almost altogether - it's a strength for her where it might not be for another author.

4 bones!!!!
Recommended.



73. Nightwing by Martin Cruz Smith

While Smith's Russian mysteries felt disconnected to me, this one felt like the narrative came from within him. Youngman leaves the Rez, only to come back to it - he's a half-blood and shunned from both sides but he is tied to the place and people to whom he returns. When one of his friends, a disreputable shaman, is killed in an inexplicably brutal way, Youngman suspects something unusual. Eventually, the culprits are identified as vampire bats, a rather large colony, that is preying on the people around the Rez, and also spreading the plague.

Though the story reads more like a thriller, any time the bats entire the narrative the horror quotient is bloody high.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended!



74. Serpico: The Cop Who Defied the System by Peter Maas

I'm guessing most people, if familiar at all, are more familiar with the fictionalized film with Pacino. But this book is probably more in line with the more recent, and wonderful, documentary on the man. The author, the grizzled investigative crime journalist Peter Maas, punches well above his weight both in the narrative construction and the writing. The story starts with Serpico shot and near death and then alternates between the aftermath of that violent confrontation and what led Serpico to the moment. More of the details of the corruption in NYPD is exposed here than in either of the film versions, providing a better explanation of the difficulties and danger he faced in standing as an honest cop. Without this context, Serpico might just seem like a renegade - but he's way more than that.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended!



75. I’ve Got Questions: The Spiritual Practice of Having it Out with God by Erin Hicks Moon

For folks who were raised or spent much time in a fundamentalist religious group, leaving can mean groping for faith that once anchored their lives. Moon does a wonderful job of working through the process of cleaning out the old and re-anchoring faith in a healthy place. Not a book for everyone, but there are a lot of people in the circumstances that she found herself and which she tries to recreate as guideposts.

The writing is often too cute by half, falling into the type of writing you might find in a social media post or too familiar, conversational structures. But when she allows herself to ignore that itch to be cute, she can write very well and exposes a level of research nd thought that belie the cutesy stuff.

4 bones!!!!
Recommended for folks who need something like this.



76. The Tin Roof Blowdown by James Lee Burke

A New Orleans or Louisiana writer with a contemporary character there would be amiss to ignore Hurricane Katrina - Burke embraces Katrina and the forgotten Rita that helped to scour away much of the land and people of the state. The crime Dave focuses on is born of the looting that broke out in the midst of the storm, but also leads to a series of rapes. Honestly, the crime and Dave's investigation in this one take a back seat to Burke's description of the storm and its aftermath - and the book is worth it just for that.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended!



77. Demon Seed by Dean Koontz

Originally published in 1973 under a pseudonym, Koontz went back in 1997 for a reissue and tweaked the details in the story. The conceit used here is that the story is told primarily from the perspective of an AI entity running a home begins an obsessive campaign to enter a human body so that it can consummate what it thinks is love for the woman of the house. But the coolest thing is that Koontz originally wrote this story in 1973, far ahead of its time but terribly prescient for these times.

There's a pretty good X-files episode from the most recent set that mirrors this 'machines take over' story set in principally in Scully's smart-home. And there's always Maximum Overdrive, if you need your sentient machines to smell of oil and pump smoke as they growl.

The conceit of telling the story from the AI's perspective is pretty cool at first, but the AI thing can get a little annoying, though I imagine that was the point.

4 bones!!!!
Recommended!



78. Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney

I have a sense that I tried this book once before and gave up on it, annoyed by the second-person narrative. But I stuck with it this time, and it makes more sense to me now, works after all. The narrator stumbles through NYC, his nose dusted in white and his veins pumping more alcohol than blood, seeming adrift and soulless. But if you stay with it, you start to see what's going on, probably most of all when he sees his brother on his stoop and runs away. In the end, it is revealed what's broken this man to the point that he's seeking oblivion - a sort of 1980s Under the Volcano maybe, but with an explanation where the latter had none. I suppose it's also a companion to American Psycho sending up the Reagan 80s in all their soullessness.

4 bones!!!!



79. The Wild Truth by Carine McCandless

After reading Krakauer's Into the Wild, I couldn't help but feel like there was something missing - not because Chris McCandless' journey and death seemed so inexplicable but because it seemed like Krakauer was hinting at something that he purposely held back. Maybe I just wasn't smart enough to get it, but this book tells the rest of the story, or maybe tells the real story.

Chris' sister asked Krakauer not to include what she told him about her family and how their young lives put Chris on his journey. Now, she tells their family's story in full, and it is painful. They suffered a great deal of emotional and physical abuse, occasionally for her straying into sexual abuse - this was at the hands of both parents. Even their family history was a lie propounded by ego-filled and mean parents to hide the darker underbelly of who they were and maintain their appearance as a perfect and wildly successful family. Carine eventually comes to the same conclusion that Chris did, that disassociating from her parents was the only way to a healthy life - but it took her much longer.

Carine is a great writer, even though her story is hard to read. But it is worth the read to see her full journey.

4 bones!!!!



80. Learning to Walk in the Dark by Barbara Frown Taylor

A mystical exploration of darkness, both as metaphor and as a state. Taylor's purpose in examining darkness in such a mystical way is to highlight the mystery of God and faith, and to make it more palatable, less frightening to exist without all of the answers.

4 bones!!!!



81. Swan Peak by James Lee Burke

Robicheaux and his wife take Cletus Purcell to cool down and recover in Montana, fish and relax. No one thinks that is going to happen and Clete immediately runs afoul of the wealthiest land owner in the area, though it becomes clear that some of Clete's past is about to catch up with him. There's a murder, a couple college kids, out back of the ranch house where they're staying, as well. Dave ends up working for the local sheriff to help solve it and that leads to corruption, serial murder, and a bad religious man. Dave can't escape his life, his history, or his pet peeves by going to Montana, neither can Clete.

Honestly, though, Mr. Burke, can we just keep Dave in Louisiana, please.

4 1/2 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended!



82. The Glass Rainbow by James Lee Burke

This is probably the first of the Robicheaux novels to feature his daughter, Alafair, as an adult so prominently - and I'm glad to see her back with a big role to play. She's dating a rather unseemly character who promises to get her novel to an agent. And this unseemly character is potentially involved in some way with a rash of unsolved murders of women. You can guess the rest, Alafair ends up in the middle. Clete also features prominently because he is suspected of killing a pimp who is also tied to the unsolved murders. At the end, Burke gives us a rare cliffhanger, as Dave has been dreaming of his impending death throughout the book, and now faces it at the end.

5 bones!!!!!

Interesting list as always, Mac! I've Got Questions and Learning to Walk in the Dark made my list.

>23 drneutron: Hope they're helpful.

Anyone who joined us on the Halloween in the Graveyard Read for 75'ers won't need this, but here's my October update:



83. Cold Moon Over Babylon by Michael McDowell

Great Southern Gothic feel to a pretty solidly ghost story. There's some murders early on, but McDowell takes his time getting to the supernatural horror, and it's worth every minute. When the ghosts finally appear, you know everything there is to know about a sleepy, backward little town with a ruling family who owns everything and everyone. The real horrors, the townspeople and all their sugary mendaciousness, runs through the whole book, and I think that was the author's point. Because, by the time the bad people get theirs, the town's lack of innocence is exposed and the good people have paid the price.

The basic premise of the book follows a young girl's murder and the town's reaction to it; the town's refusal to look at where the guilt for the murder and much more should lay. It's Southern Gothic for its setting in a small Florida town along a fictional river, named Styx.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended!!!!!



84. After the Eclipse by Sarah Perry

The author's mother was viciously murdered in the house while she listened in her bedroom - she was just 12-years-old. She had to run down the street to several houses before someone opened up to help her. Over the years, the police did not catch the killer and the author had to live with various family members - which seemed to make things worse on the whole because the family is filled with abuse and violence. At one point, the young girl was even considered a suspect in her mother's murder. Eventually, a decade plus later, the killer is revealed, and the cops could have caught him long before if they'd done their jobs properly. The author also eventually finds her voice and it's a wonderful voice, one we could use more of to highlight violence against women. Sounds like a down book, but I found it inspiring and hopeful that the author found her way through and managed to make her awful circumstances a positive.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended!!!!!



85. The Wolfen by Whitley Strieber

Though Strieber is now more well-known for his abduction account books, he established himself as a fantasy/horror writer with unique twists on the old narratives. This one reexamines the werewolf myth, proposing that the ancient folk tales were based on a species of uber-intelligent and powerful wolfs that preyed primarily on humans, even using other cannibalistic humans to lure humans out of their hovels, thus sparking the vampire myths. Now, the wolves have taken up residence in human cities to prey on the fringe homeless and poor who won't be missed. But when some overzealous members of the pack kill and consume a couple of NYPD cops, their presence becomes known to some detectives. The battle is on for the pack to destroy the humans cognizant of their presence and protect packs throughout the world from notice.

There's some old fashioned sexism and misogyny based on the time of the book's publication but the book holds up to a modern reading, especially given the unique twist on the werewolf and vampire myth. Great fun and great read. Strieber deserves more attention beyond the abduction stuff.

4 1/2 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended!!!!!



86. The 5th Wave by Rick Yancey

Quick read; had some good ideas, but felt like it was written down to market as a YA book. That's my biggest complaint about the YA market in the modern times. Heinlein didn't write down when with the books that were ultimately characterized as 'juveniles' to be palatable for a younger audience. He might have featured younger characters and heroes but he didn't dumb it down or use vernacular in the dialog to cozy up to a particular audience - he expected more of his audience and, thus, got a bigger one than just the young adult.

The good ideas here - how the alien invasion worked. But when the author started pinning bodice ripping narratives - even going so far as to populate a bodice ripper book in the setting of some of the scenes - he lost me. Also, there's too much of an inclination in these sci-fi YAs to have kid soldiers in training, of which there are endless examples of book and movie franchises. Not a keeper for me, could have been so much better.

3 bones!!!



87. The Fog by James Herbert

Here's what Uncle Stevie had to say about James Herbert -

'Herbert does not just write. . .he puts on his combat boots and goes out to assault the reader with horror.'

'James Herbert comes at us with both hands, not willing to simply engage our attention, he seizes us by the lapels and begins to scream in our faces.'

These are apt descriptions, as The Fog is a barreling train without any mercy, demanding both attention, and obedience in turning page after page. The set-up is that a mysterious earthquake rips through the bucolic English countryside, and a yellowed fog snakes up from the depths. A civil servant on a mission in the area goes into the rip with his car but manages to climb out with another victim. Then, he turns around and tries to jump back into oblivion. He stays mad for several days, trying to slash his own neck at one point, and then comes out of it. The rest of the countryside is enveloped in the fog and everyone goes stark raving and violently mad. The follow on for the story is a bit Koontzian, in his modern bad government phase, and our hero, now immune, mostly, to the fog has to save the day while evading throngs of the mad intent on killing. There's a King feel to the narrative along the way with many interludes of the folk in their everyday lives before the fog tips them into grueling psychosis.

5 bones!!!!!
My Highest Recommendation on this one - but steel yourself.



88. Red Moon by Benjamin Percy

I highly recommend Red Moon, especially for lovers of post-apocalyptic stories. It's that and an alternative history book, as Lycans have been always with us in this one but more known as a sub-species or race of its own, created by a communicable virus. They have their own Republic in a frozen location between Russia and Finland. The book is also obviously a comment on racial justice, I think, with the Lycans substituting for any other of many different minorities in this country - the idea that hateful people make monsters of those they hate, especially the conservative/nationalist bent, so here we have monsters made of monsters.

Good story, with multiple major characters and POVs on both sides of the Lycan line, to make the complicated nature of the human experience clear. A young man whose father is a soldier in the occupying force in the Lycan Republic, forced to live with his estranged mother. A young woman whose family is murdered because they are Lycans previously involved in the resistance. A former Lycan resistance fighter who has quit the fight but won't be left alone. And, of course, an alt-right politician bent on power at the expense of the Lycan population.

My only quibble - what tarnished an otherwise 5 bone rating - are some little nits that just really bothered me. The author is always talking about the 'safety' being 'on' with Glock pistols - there is no manual safety mechanism like that on any Glock pistol; the safety is all tied up in the trigger mechanism. Also, some vagueness on the transition to Lycan form - whether they maintain their clothing and the like - that sets up some inconsistencies in the narrative, like when the young girl transitions in a flash but manages to still retain a letter her father wrote her somehow. Little things that don't really detract from the overall very well written book.

4 1/2 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended!!!!!



89. American Predator: The Hunt for the most Meticulous Serial Killer of the 21st Century by Maureen Callahan

American Predator: The Hunt for the most Meticulous Serial Killer of the 21st Century is amply horrific to include in any Halloween reading list. An 18-year-old girl goes missing from her Alaskan coffee kiosk just before closing. A ransom note turns up some weeks later, but it's not clear if it's an attempt to throw investigators off or a real demand. Eventually, the FBI and local investigators develop a suspect - that turns the whole thing on its head, as he may be a serial predator. It's a good read, fueled by unusual access to records and the investigation, including the agents.

I have a possible differing theory to the one provided in the book about the suspect, but don't want to spoil anything for potential readers.

4 bones!!!!
Recommended - but read analytically and you may come to different conclusions.



90. The Haunted by Bentley Little

This is one of the better modern horror books I've read in some time, since the last Stephen Graham Jones probably. It owes quite a bit to Anne River Siddons' The House Next Door, and, I suppose, to Lovecraft and Shirley Jackson in the end. A family moves house to escape a declining neighborhood in a small New Mexico town. Quickly, the house reveals itself to each of the members of the family as ill-intentioned and malevolent.

Two nits to pick: first, each of the family members suffers in utter silence, never daring to share with the others what's happening to them individually. It strains believability just a bit, though the author puts it down to the house itself, threatening and mind-controlling. Second, though the author is from the southwest, the setting never gets much billing. Neither the small town nor the desert get much play at all. That felt like a missed opportunity. There's some flashbacks to the history of the place, but it features only on the malevolent presence rather than the character of the larger setting. And there's never any attempt to identify the origins of the bad thing at all - given the culture of the setting, that also seemed like a missed opportunity.

So, a good book, that could have been a really good one. On balance, though, I'd recommend the book and the author.

4 bones!!!!
Recommended!!!!



91. Four Past Midnight by Stephen King

This is a re-read for me, as almost all Uncle Stevie is now.

The Langoliers holds up better than I recalled from my earlier reading. Perhaps the written version has suffered from the somewhat lackluster film version that appeared as a mini-series on television about 5 years after the publication. Like much of the King's work, there's some difficulty translating to the screen. I'd say that's especially true here as the story is what I'd call more of an existential terror. Many of us have had dreams of waking up to an abandoned world, the only person left alive to wander among the detritus of the waking world. Here, a handful of folks awaken on an abandoned airplane, in flight. Luckily, there's a pilot deadheading on the flight so they don't crash, but there are bigger worries than that, as it appears that the group is lost in a space or time where the rest of the world has left them behind with the articles of the world but none of the people. It's less horror and more sci-fi or spec-fi, but there are monsters nonetheless - both the supernatural kind and the everyday human kind, the latter more frightening than the former.

The basic story recalls an earlier one from Uncle Stevie, The Mist, which has a darker tone and ending. This one ends somewhat more hopefully than The Mist. But it's similar in its notion of people as the real monsters.

Interesting side note: in listening to one of my favorite podcasts recently, The KingCast, Willem Dafoe says that reading the text for the audio book on this one was one of the most challenging tasks he ever faced because of the wide cast of characters. That audio version is still available.

On balance, a gripping story even if it could have used a little more fleshing out in the character's arcs.

Secret Window, Secret Garden is an almost altogether internal horror. A writer is confronted by an odd, insistent man claiming that the writer plagiarized a story. The accuser torments the writer in a Jobian narrative, until the writer worries he's losing his mind - or has he already lost it. The ending is creepily ambiguous about the origins of the accuser; really, the whole thing is quite creepy, in a very quiet horror sort of way. There's no monsters here - except the human ones.

The Library Policeman is the one that I was most looking forward to reading, as I remembered it as one of the most frightening stories of Uncle Stevie's that I ever read. And it held up well to a re-read - while maybe not the most frightening of all his work, there's a section in it that is the most frighteningly real of anything he's ever written. Trigger warning here for anyone who is set off by reading narratives about sexual violence against children, as that is the substance of the section to which I am referring as the most frighteningly real. And it's told from the child's perspective, which ain't easy to pull off. Anyway, the story focuses on an entity/monster who feeds on children's fear - a theme familiar to Uncle Stevie's readers. There are some similarities to It and The Outsider. But the story is focused around a small town library and an AA group in the town. Very realistic in character and tone of a small town and its inhabitants, as typical - not many get it so right beyond Uncle Stevie - maybe Bradbury and Sherwood Anderson. The key is for the hero of our story to remember what changed him, what in his childhood made him the person he is, and to turn his childhood response to the event into something different in defeating the thing that continues preying on his fear.

The Sun Dog - this one had escaped my memory altogether from my previous reading. It is a Castle Rock story, set just before Needful Things. A young man receives a Polaroid camera for his birthday, but it only produces photos of a gnarly looking mutt. He goes to a local, Pop Merrill, who is the town's junkyard king, fix-it man, and shylock - all around ne'er do well. Turns out the mutt is bent on clawing his way into this world for blood.

You can't get a sense of these stories and their small-town settings or characters from a blurb about the plot - so much more is going on besides the monster or ghost, and that's where the good stuff is. I could read a whole series of books about Pop Merrill and his exploits, whether from his perspective or the townspeople's perspective. It's just darn good writing about people and the human condition. Scott Turow once wrote that mysteries were the perfect vehicle to examine that stuff, but I've grown to think horror is equally good at it in the right person's hands.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended!!!!!



92. Mulengro by Charles de Lint

I don't understand some of the reviews here from otherwise admitted de Lint fans who say that this one started slow or was too hard to get into because of the Romany stuff.

The book is about a malevolent gypsy who is murdering other gypsies to 'cleanse the race' in some way. He carries a large bit of magic. There are epic battles and esoteric discussions of identity along the way. But I felt like this was solidly part of de Lint's universe, simply casting a more inquisitive eye on a portion of his inhabitants who don't get much attention. There were also some reviews that said this one was too dark - baffling to me. This is no darker than his other works, slightly more explicit, but by only a slight degree. I highly recommend this and any other de Lint - I've never read a bad one.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended!!!!!



93. Irish Tales of Terror ed. by Peter Haining

Finished off Irish Tales of Terror yesterday, and it was a wonderful collection, covering banshees and curses and merpeople. And the introduction by Bradbury is a priceless take on the Irish.

My favorites from the read were:

The Man-Wolf by Giraldus Cambrensis - an interesting early take on Lycanthropy as a curse overcome by the blessings of a traveling priest.

The Parricide's Tale by Charles Maturin - an excerpt of Melmoth, the Wanderer.

The Banshee's Warning by Charlotte Riddell - banshee's are terrifying, this one afflicts a doctor in his work.

The Dead Smile by Francis Marion Crawford - a dark, gothic tale, creepy beyond words.

The House Among the Laurels by William Hope Hodgson - a ghost hunting tale with the author's famous ghost hunter, Carnacki.

The Moon-Bog by H. P. Lovecraft - very Lovecraftian with a haunted bog.

Highly recommended collection of classic horror.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended!!!!!



94. Psycho by Robert Bloch

At this point, pretty much everyone alive knows that Norman Bates is a mad murderer because of Hitchcock's brilliant film (though I admit I only watched for the first time this year). But if you can suppress your knowledge enough, the book is a grimly fun read. There are multiple POVs, with Norman himself as a Nabakovian unreliable narrator. And the structure of the book helps to build a lot of suspense, as well as stand apart from the film's structure enough to be fresh. For those worried about gore, because of Hitchcock's vision, there is actually very little. The shower scene is almost a hiccup in just one paragraph, and not explicit at all. What stands out is the dark, deteriorating mind of Bates.

And no matter how much you try, you can't entirely suppress your knowledge of Norman as the baddie, so it's fun to read for the clues in the book left by Bloch for the unsuspecting reader as to truth. Very fun!

5 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended!!!!!



95. The Girl in a Swing by Richard Adams

This was quite a surprise, especially since I've read Watership Down and this is nothing like that one. I believe you can see the latter as a horror book of sorts; even if the horror is felt within a community of rabbits, it's nonetheless frightening. I've alway looked at the bunny story as like Orwell's Animal Farm.

Anyway, The Girl in a Swing is much more obviously a ghost story, and a supernatural story, very gothic in nature, and slow to the point of terror. There is a lot of classical illusions, most of which were lost on me. What wasn't lost on me is the very lengthy and carefully crafted narrative of Alan Desland's life. His life is upended when he meets and quickly falls in love with a German girl in Copenhagen. Alan sees her, and Adams purposely writes her, as the perfect woman. But then he tosses in, like a grenade, these events around the woman that make your teeth itch - something is definitely wrong with her. Without giving away the ending, what's interesting to me is that the main character struggles with his responsibility for the final results without ever realizing he is absolutely responsible, based on an offhanded remark to the woman early in the book - but he never is able to see through his glorification of the woman to see what he did.

4 1/2 bones!!!!!
Highly recommended, but forewarned, it's not hit you over the head horror, it's long-building and subtle.

Didn't get November's reading out in a timely manner, but here it is:



96. Steel and Other Stories by Richard Matheson

These Matheson short stories are not the very best he ever produced, but a middling Matheson is better than 99% of the best offerings from other authors. The title story was adapted into a film, which produced this movie-tie-in edition. But there's quite a few interesting others collected here. The most memorable, The Traveller, is one about a group of scientists testing time travel by visiting the crucifixion - they end up altering the course of history without realizing it and creating a time loop that echoes through the centuries. The title story is also a good one, a sort of futuristic noir about battle robots.

4 bones!!!!
Recommended, like anything else Matheson wrote.



97. Uncultured by Daniella Mestyanek Young

The author was born and raised in the Children of God cult, a particularly nasty world-wide sex cult. (Interesting side note: One of the founders of Fleetwood Mac was one of the early leaders, and one of the worst offenders against the children in the cult.) The book is her story of surviving innumerable traumas and finally escaping the cult as a teenager. She manages to graduate high school, living mostly on her own, and then attend college. Then, she joins the US Army and becomes one of the first females to serve in combat. The narrative is extremely well-written, and deeply affecting. If there's any quibble, it's that she sees the world through the lens of cults, but who wouldn't after all the many things that happened to her. She is now a scholar on the topic of cults and has presence on many digital platforms, illuminating cults and cult/group thinking. There are simply not enough powerful women voices who've broken through in our time - Daniella is the tip of the spear.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended!!!!!



98. Creole Belle by James Lee Burke

I'm afraid to say that Mr. Burke may have jumped the shark at this point in the Dave Robicheaux series. The ending of the previous book, The Glass Rainbow, left the fates of both Dave and Cletus in serious doubt. And, perhaps, that is where he might have wanted to leave things, or should have left things.

With this one, Dave is recovering from his serious wounds and has an encounter with a woman who everyone else believes is missing, or dead. No one particularly believes Dave, but that's par for the course, and Dave gets on his white horse to find her. There are the typical rich bad guys, and Clete behaving badly. But the worst turn in the book is the entrance of a long-lost daughter for Clete. This entrance essentially rewrites some history, as neither Clete nor Dave have ever spoken about the woman with whom Clete has an affair producing the child. They've never spoken of Clete's searches for the girl, or his feelings about the girl. And when she arrives, she's a hitter for the mob, a sort of Mickey Spillane femme fatale. Everything about their interactions and behavior, all three, is just a bridge too far. Worse still, Alafair ends up developing a bit of a sisterly, our worse, relationship with the girl.

I'm still rating the book as a middling entry in the series, because Burke's prose style is still quite lush and poetic. But this marks a concern for me with the last books in the series ahead.

3 bones!!!



99. Elling by Ingvar Ambjorsen

This was an unexpected pleasure - Elling is a middle-aged man on the fringe, awkward with every person, every social situation, every walk down the street. And yet he is unabashedly the hero of his own story. He is living with another man with whom he was released from a psychiatric half-way house, and the two get into the maddest adventures. Elling decides he's a poet, but wants to be the Zorro version of poetry, slipping his one poem into packaged food at the grocery store to be discovered by customers upon opening their groceries. His roommate ends up as some sort of virgin knight errant, taking an upstairs neighbor under his damaged wing until a romance that neither he nor Elling are prepared to handle.

4 bones!!!!
Recommended!!!!



100. In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin by Erik Larson

Erik Larsen is a favorite, for his ability to illuminate forgotten bits of history by highlighting the darker, more esoteric corners of the story. So, I wondered how he would find a fresh angle on World War II and Nazi Germany, given the breadth already written on the subjects.

The catalyst for the narrative is the appointment of William Dodd to be ambassador to Germany in 1933, as Hitler was consolidating power. He takes his family with him, which includes his daughter Martha. Dodd's instructions from FDR were to find out what all the hubbub was about regarding this Hitler fellow. While I've read a bit about anti-Semitism, pro-fascism, and isolationist sentiment in the United States, it was still shocking to read about this family's endless attempts to sane-wash Hitler and his goons. Dodd ends up landing a few jabs at the Nazis, but ultimately comes off, with his daughter, as lacking the imagination that would be required to understand how power hungry Hitler and his inner circle were, even as they watched the Night of the Long Knives from the front row in 1934.

Larsen also spends some time talking about many of the bit players in the pro- and anti-Nazi camps who are little discussed today. My favorite was Mildred Fish-Harnack, a little-known Wisconsin-born American who would go on to be a vital part of the resistance, and ultimately guillotined for her bravery.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended!!!!!



101. Misquoting Jesus : The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why by Bart D. Ehrman

Reading this book was a long time in the works, as I've owned for many years but hadn't ginned up the courage to read it. I grew up in a Fundamentalist Christian family and church, where the Bible was taught as the all inspired inerrant word of God. I remember thinking as a young boy: maybe the original writers were inspired but the belief in the Bible's utter inerrancy would require every person over thousands of years to have been directly inspired, as well. Ehrman picked up on that same thread, and it led him to become a scholar in textual criticism.

He spends the early part of the book laying out the details of textual criticism and the latter half using the method to discuss several passages from the Bible and how they were altered by scribes over the millennia. This was an eye-opening read. And, while it didn't destroy my faith, it changed it in a fundamental way. I'm left, not with any disbelief in the Bible's message, but an understanding of how it's been shaped. It's a good place to start in looking more closely at the context of the Bible writing, as opposed to the Fundamentalist urge to use the writing as a weapon.

Ehrman haș his own critics, but that's part of the adventure in learning. You've got to be open to the information before you can sift through it toward an understanding.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended!!!!!



102. Light of the World by James Lee Burke

Thus Burke continues the weakening of his canon. With this one, Robicheaux and crew return to Montana - never my favorite stories. Somehow several violent criminals descend on a Montana backwater. Somehow we have to continue to deal with Clete's long-lost, killer-for-hire daughter. Somehow Alafair and the vicious progeny of Clete grow as close as sisters, and there's a subtle hint of a potential love affair between the two. It's all just too far from the origins of the series. Not to mention, Burke's math on how old Dave must be at this point is starting to stretch the boundaries of believability. I'm saddened by what the Robicheaux series is becoming.

2 bones!!



103. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi

I came to this book by way of the wonderful Netflix documentary adapted from the book. If you want a taste of the book, watch the documentary.

Kendi takes on the very history of racism by examining Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd Garrison, W.E.B. DuBois, and Angela Davis as representative characters in the development of racial theory down through the ages. No one, regardless of ethnicity or racial background, is free from criticism. The comprehensiveness of the text is jaw-dropping, starting with the Portuguese slave trade and running up through modern times. This is a good companion book for readers of Eddie Glaude's Democracy in Black and Isabel Wilkerson's Caste. What the reader is left with is a sense that we have nestled into a false conception of the origin's of our country, and of its exceptionalism. This one should be required reading in our schools.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended!!!!!



104. The Unwanted by John Saul

I love horror, especially horror from the heyday of the 1980s. But this is the second time John Saul has disappointed. I won't make the mistake again. The writing is, honestly, something that reads like an AI generated text - simplistic and trite. This is what someone who isn't really a writer would write if they decided they were a writer on their own judgement. It's just bad.

1 bone!
Not Recommended!



105. Robicheaux by James Lee Burke

An all too brief reprieve for the series. This one feels like a return to the roots of Robidheaux, a thoughtful and well-written story about a haunted man. Dave loses another wife, this is the 4th, to a traffic accident. As Dave looks into it, the man who was driving the offending car turns up Dave - and Dave's just had a relapse, so he doesn't know if he's responsible.

There's no mention of Clete's ridiculous daughter, except maybe in passing. Clete is not a large focus of the book. It feels like Burke has gotten it back together......?????

5 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended!!!!!



106. The Little Country by Charles de Lint

As per usual, an absolute delight to read - de Lint is just the best urban fantasy writer going.

This one is less an urban fantasy than some of his, but it still has its foot firmly planted in that oeuvre. There are essentially two stories, parallel and tracking together. In one, a young girl is transformed into a tiny person by a witch - in the other, a long-lost book from a fantasy writer is being protected by a family because it has unknown but certain power. de Lint favors us with a complete cast of well-drawn and complicated characters for each story. In the end, the narrative of the young girl's quest to regain her size is influenced by the world in the narrative of the book, and vice versa. For the girl's quest is the subject of the book, at least in one reader's mind. As per usual, there is also a shadowy conspiracy to grab the book for its power, and the good guys win out, though just.

de Lint's tightrope walk here weaving the stories together is worth the read alone.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended!!!!!

Gonna go ahead and take care of December while I'm at it:

Started but didn't finish Ash Wednesday by Ethan Hawke - I still have another of his that I'll try but this just didn't connect for me.



107. The New Iberia Blues by James Lee Burke

After having some hope that Burke had gotten things back in order, this book brought back the disappointment.

In this one, a young man for whom Dave had high hopes comes back to make a movie. In tow, he has an unusual friend who gives everyone the heebie-jeebies, and a movie producer that is too smooth for Dave's liking - worse the movie producer starts up a relationship with Alafair. There's also a terribly creepy, and altogether unbelievable, hit-man circling the area.

There's just not enough of the old-fashioned Robicheaux here - he always tended to be an instinctive investigator, ut the leaps he makes here go mostly unexplained, as does much of how the plot points fit together. And whatever confidence Robicheaux had in himself and his work seems missing. I'd be okay with a crisis of faith or confidence, but Dave just seems and acts bewildered.

2 bones!!



108. A Private Cathedral by James Lee Burke

Whatever hope I had that Burke would rescue the end of the Robicheaux series sets sail with this book.

Honestly, this book felt like reading scraps Burke edited from other books and threw together to get a book published in the pandemic year of 2020. The plot, if you can call it that, doesn't make sense beyond a Romeo and Juliet story between two mob families. And Burke seems genuinely confused as to how this book fits into the chronology of the Robicheaux series. I saw another review that tried to give him the benefit of the doubt by speculating that the book was meant to be an earlier episode in Dave's life - but there's no clue to the reader that such is he case. Burke is talking about Dave having the wrong number of wives, Alafair in college, the wrong pets, and Clete's weird daughter discovery doesn't appear to have happened. If it was meant to be a recall, then say something. Otherwise, you have us all scratching our heads. This on top of lots of repetitive and redundant passages, calling back passages from other books - hence, my speculation that this was a book found on the editing room floor in the midst of a pandemic.

1 bone!



109. The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage by Paul Elie

This is a delightful, if jam-packed, book, detailing the careers and lives of Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Merton, Walker Percy, and Dorothy Day - all from the perspective of their Catholic faith. I can't say that I completely understood every bit of Catholic and religious philosophy, especially during the stretches where the author took on Percy's essay work. But I enjoyed the exposure to it a great deal. Day was a complete unknown to me, and her life sounds so interesting and inspiring. O'Connor and Merton are favorites, but there was much information on both that was new to me. If you've read O'Connor's Mystery and Manners or Merton and Waugh, you'll love this book, as this author does the same thing those books did - expressing the intersection of faith and fiction.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended!!!!



110. Clete by James Lee Burke

This is the end - I've completed my year-long read through of all the Dave Robicheaux books at this point. While I'm glad to have finished the books and enjoyed everything up to the last few books, I won't be buying any further Burke books - there is one planned for publication next year.

This was a small bit of hope left that getting into Clete's head for a book would bring back the magic of the series, while also offering some explanations to Clete's behavior and Dave's blind loyalty. Sadly, neither ops those things happened. Being in Clete's head for a whole book, to take a Robicheaux line, is like driving a nail into your forehead. Clete's behavior is just inexplicable.

Also, this book was again like reading scraps from the editing room floor. I constantly felt like I was rereading passages from a previous book. And there are again continuity problems. This time Burke tries to telegraph, staring with Clete saying that he's writing about something that happened some years before. So, the first reference to the number of Dave's wives and Alafair's place in Reed for an undergraduate degree makes sense. But then there's later reference to Dave's 4 wives, and we're back to the current time breaking the continuity.

It's sad that Burke's last books in the series read like this. Where was the editor?

1 bone!



111. Aftershock & Others: 19 Oddities by F. Paul Wilson

A great collection of F. Paul Wilson's short form work from over the last couple of decades before he stopped writing short fiction - a a couple of Repairman Jack stories to boot.

The stories are great - horror and thriller and suspense and weirdity. They all demonstrate a master of those forms at the top of his game. The bonus material, interludes where Wilson describes the origins of the story, interactions with the film industry on the possibility of adapting them, and his life as context, are worth the price of admission alone. Any Repairman Jack fan should have this in their collection since Wilson is at the peak of the writing for the series during these interludes and there's lots of behind-the-scenes nuggets.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended!!!!!



112. Nightmare Journey by Dean R. Koontz

There's talk that Koontz has repudiated this novel, and it's published under his name with a middle initial, unlike most of his other work. But it's a fun little novel and shouldn't be shamed either by the author or his readers. Is it perfect - nah. But it's good.

We are millennia into the earth's future after things have gone seriously awry. Some humans have been mutated, others consider themselves pure, though the pure ones aren't in very good shape with anything but their vanity. They are seriously underwhelming in their abilities. One impurity that arises in the mutants, and some pure humans, are ESP like abilities. Those abilities allow a ragtag group of mutants and one pure to go on a quest to find an alien presence that is believed to be behind both the origins and the destruction of the world.

4 bones!!!!
Recommended!!!!



113. The End of the World as We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand ed. by Christopher Golden and Brian Keene

Constant Readers - get this one!!! If you can't get enough of The Stand, this book is a great place to find refuge, though refuge is a poor term considering the substance of the stories.

A couple fan-boy authors asked Uncle Stevie if they could put together an anthology of stories to pair with The Stand, and Uncle Stevie agreed - thankfully. There are a ton of great stories. The best are the ones that successfully mimic the tone and rhythm of The Stand, and most of them do just that. There are several direct tie-ins when one or another of the characters from the canon briefly appear on the page. The Dark Man, Randall Flagg, is all over the book. In fact, if I have a quibble, and it's a little one, it's that the overall feeling of the book yaws too closely to the Dark Man's side of the equation. I would have liked a few more of those dreaming of Mother Abigail - though she is one character who gets a whole story to more fully flesh out her backstory.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended!!!!!



114. A Book of Days by Patti Smith

Recommend reading this one like it's meant to be read, a day at a time over the course of the year. The surprise each day of the next photograph and missive from Smith is worth savoring one per day. Smith's not voluble with the prose attached to each of the photographs, but each is poetic in its own way. And her calling back to friends and inspirations with these unique little monuments is just wonderful. Some, like the ones featuring her friend Sam Shepard, quickened tears in this old cynic.