Peng Shepherd's Book of M--a review

In a world where people are suddenly losing their shadows, the lives of a group of unrelated people are bound up in a hope for building a new world on the memory of the old.

This is an epic, apocalyptic quest along the lines of Stephen King’s THE STAND or Robert McCammon’s SWAN SONG, with a large dose of INCEPTION thrown in. It’s also a zombie story of sorts, particularly in scenes where the “shadowless” surround those who are still tethered to their ‘dark twins.” The story unfolds in a somewhat nonlinear fashion where events being recounted by various characters overlap, but there’s a good mix of adventure and intimate contact.

The unraveling of reality is incredibly visual, and no one will much quibble with the premise that memories are stored in our shadows (and not in a certain part of our brains). The writer tells the story from multiple points of view, with both first and third person being used. The author does a very good job of “opening out” the story with flashbacks to “before” and even to multiple events after the Forgetting hits.

Peng Shepherd's debut novel is a multi-faceted apocalyptic quest story told from multiple points of view. She plays with pov in a way that I haven't seen since Kevin Brooks' iBoy, and it's astonishing that this is her first book. 

Happy Birthday Stephen King!

The first writer I sought out because I loved her books and wanted to read everything she wrote was Beverly Cleary, who just turned 100 in April. (Live long and prosper Bev!)  And then it was Carolyn Keene "who" wrote the Nancy Drew books but she wasn't really one person, so "she" doesn't count. And then it was Stephen King.
I didn't start with Carrie; my gateway to the Kingdom was a collection of his short stories. Back then, he wasn't writing six or seven books a year like an indie author, but he'd been writing for a couple of years by the time I discovered him and so it took me a while to work through the backlog. (Well, it probably took me a week. I read fast and back then, I still had a lot of free time.)
I was moved by The Dead Zone and scared by Pet Sematary and blown away by The Stand. To this day, the only epic apocalyptic novel that even comes close to it in terms of Dickensian breadth of characters is Robert McCammon's Swan Song.
So I've been reading along all these years and love that he's writing like his life depends on it.

Wait, maybe it does? Maybe the reason he's so prolific is that in the terrible accident that nearly killed him, he did die? And he made a bargain with the devil to come back. But if he doesn't write 10 books a year, he has to return.
Happy Birthday Stephen King.
Thank you for the books!

A Vampire a Day: They Thirst by Robert McCammon

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a huge Stephen King fan. I think The Stand is a monumental book. I first read it while home sick from school with a horrible case of the flu and believe me, the chapters covering the spread of the plague scared the bejesus out of me.
But as much as I love The Stand, I think Robert McCammon's post-apocalyptic novel Swan Song is even better. I first read that while staying in a series of really awful motels during my first cross-country drive. I'd drive for 10-12 hours and then read until I couldn't read any more. I pulled into L.A. with a bad sunburn on my left arm--I didn't have air conditioning in my car--and about 100 pages left of the book.
They Thirst was the first of McCammon's books I ever read. Then I read Wolf's Hour, which is a Nazi/werewolf thing. I liked both of them. They were pulpy fun, the sort of horror novels you could read in a single sitting.
Like King, McCammon defies categorization. He writes horror, yes, but other things as well. I'm a big fan of his short stories, particularly one called "Night Calls the Green Falcon," which Birdman reminded me of a bit.
McCammon disappeared from publishing for nearly 20 years, and that's a shame. He has a new novel out as of last year and it's on the ever-growing TBR pile. 

Halloween Movie Marathon--Fright Night

I liked the reboot of Fright Night with Anton Yelchin and Colin Farrell but I liked the original, 1985 version with Chris Sarandon, William Ragsdale and Roddy McDowall even more. In the remake, Peter Vincent is kind of a rock star/Mind Freak kind of guy (and that's a really interesting idea) but in the original, as played by Roddy McDowall, he was a beloved local monster movie host of the sort beloved of movie geeks everywhere.
Fright Night was written and directed by Tom Holland, who has also worked as an actor in a lot of genre movies, including Stephen King's The Stand and Langoliers. He's got a movie called The Ten O'Clock People coming out in 2013.
William Ragsdale, the young male lead, was kind of the Shia LeBeouf of his day. Fright Night was only his second movie (in his first, his character was called "the kid") and he's since gone on to a career that mixes television and feature films. He's also got a film coming out next year, the noir-ish Broken City.
Chris Sarandon as the vampire Ragsdale's character runs across, is smooth and seductive and quite scary. He doesn't have quite the feral ferocity of Colin Farrell's vampire, but you would not want to run into him in a dark alley. (Or maybe you would if you're inclined to fantasize about tall, dark and handsome vampires.)
I liked he way Fright Night played with the vampire mythos. This is another movie that's suitable for family viewing but still scary.