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greggC:

now that would make for a frightening T.V. movie special.

well, there you go. i am oh-for-two on the literary prophecy stats chart. first Tanya Huff's Blood novels and now one of Stephen King's Richard Bachman stories. i should buy lottery tickets. :)

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Thanks, but I don't need any help getting into trouble since I seem to manage quite well on my own.

mR_BuNgLe:

'The Long Walk' - Stephen King

Now there's a story with staying power. Must have been at least 10 years since I read that one.

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11 chapters (including the afterword) left for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. meanwhile i have begun reading the first chill-packed novel of that pulp-era humanitarian madman...Dr. Death: 12 Must Die by Zorro (yeah, i didn't believe that pseudonym either when i first saw it.)

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Thanks, but I don't need any help getting into trouble since I seem to manage quite well on my own.

Currently re-reading St. Urbain's Horseman by Mordecai Richler. Caught the mini-series based on the novel, a couple of weeks ago. Decided to re-read the work.

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"... The night was filled with magic as they bid the sea goodbye. They swam into the heavens-they stayed up in the sky and all the island people when they wish upon a star, see the Dolphin and the Jolly Mon, who tell them where they are..." - Jimmy Buffett

finished Dr. Death: 12 Must Die. now begun Skin Folk, Nalo Hopkinson's short-fiction collection.

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Thanks, but I don't need any help getting into trouble since I seem to manage quite well on my own.

In addition to the book I mentioned above, I'm also re-reading The Bram Stoker Bedside Companion, a collection of 10 short stories.

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"... The night was filled with magic as they bid the sea goodbye. They swam into the heavens-they stayed up in the sky and all the island people when they wish upon a star, see the Dolphin and the Jolly Mon, who tell them where they are..." - Jimmy Buffett

i think i have an old hardcover copy of that. mine includes the excised chapter from Dracula.

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Thanks, but I don't need any help getting into trouble since I seem to manage quite well on my own.

I have a paperback copy dating to 1974, the picture on the cover features a hand holding a bunch of eyeballs with fleshy strands oozing between the fingers. Yup, second story in this copy is "Dracula's Guest".

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"... The night was filled with magic as they bid the sea goodbye. They swam into the heavens-they stayed up in the sky and all the island people when they wish upon a star, see the Dolphin and the Jolly Mon, who tell them where they are..." - Jimmy Buffett

finished, as of Oct. 13, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. one chapter a day as i planned. satisfying read, very satisfying. now, i wonder if maybe Ms. Rowling might be willing to indulge her short-story talent by composing the rest of the entries in Tales of Beedle the Bard to satisfy the Potter legions?

anyway, now rounding out my Potter predilection with Quidditch Through The Ages and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the two Comic Relief fundraisers that Ms. Rowling composed somewhere in between books three and four (i think) of the Harry Potter series.

other reading at moment includes just starting Emperor, Swords, Pentacles by Phyllis Gotlieb, Canada's queen and godmother of sf (and, hey, Mark, any chance that Hypaspace might do an interview with Gotlieb, since i believe she still lives in the Toronto area?).

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Thanks, but I don't need any help getting into trouble since I seem to manage quite well on my own.

finished all the Potter books now.

begun re-reading Dracula (Bram Stoker's original novel). haven't read this one since high school many, many, MANY moons ago!

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Thanks, but I don't need any help getting into trouble since I seem to manage quite well on my own.

Pulled a couple of Cold War/espionage thrillers out of a box. Should be interesting re-reading these some 20 - 25 years later. The one I'm currently reading is The Spike (1980) by Arnaud de Borchgrave and Robert Moss. It deals with Soviets feeding disinformation to western journalists, turning the media into a Soviet pawn. The timeframe of the novel goes from May 1967 - The near future.

The other one is The 13th Directorate (1988) by Barry Chubin. This one deals with an assassin attached to some secret agency in Washington. His job is to take out a Presidential candidate. It just so happens that the candidate is a KGB mole.

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"... The night was filled with magic as they bid the sea goodbye. They swam into the heavens-they stayed up in the sky and all the island people when they wish upon a star, see the Dolphin and the Jolly Mon, who tell them where they are..." - Jimmy Buffett

I'm currently reading Max Brooks' "World War Z: an oral history of the zombie war"

It's pretty good, actually, but you need to be prepared for a non-standard narrative, as the book is told as a series of interviews... nearest comparison I could offer is actually Brahm Stoker's "Dracula" (the book, not any of the movies).

Oh, and parts of it are a thinly vailed tarring of the US government and the war in Iraq... all about how human stupidity and greed almost got the human race wiped out by a bunch of walking corpses.

As a companion, Max's other book "The Zombie Survival Guide" is fun too...
 

i have heard of these books but not seen them yet. what is their publishing year? as for the "political criticism" content, well, not much different from that one episode in the first season of Masters of Horror.

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Thanks, but I don't need any help getting into trouble since I seem to manage quite well on my own.

"World War Z" was 2006, through Three Rivers Press/ Crown Publishing (sub-imprints of Random House).  I think "Zombie Survival Guide" is same year and press.

The political criticism isn't as blatant as that Joe Dante "Masters of Horror" episode, the zombies aren't the returning corpses of disgruntled soldiers (well, I'm sure some of them were disgruntled soldiers at some point, but these aren't really thinking zombies with a political plan, they just want to eat... um, anything, actually).  The criticism is more in the portrayal of supposedly important administration or military people as hopelessly naive, ill prepared, and generally greedy morons more interested in their own position (power, wealth, whatever) than any sort of high ideals like protecting the population.  Important decisions are made badly for political reasons, disasters exacerbated by thumb twiddling and spite.

Picked up both books during October.  The Chapters nearby had a sale table of spooky themed stuff.  And zombies, much like monkeys, can sell just about anything (no, it's true... put a monkey on the cover and any book or magazine will become an instant best seller).