What are you reading?

[Gary Banks Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Gary Banks]

Recent reads:
Fuzz/Let's Hear It For The Deaf Man-Ed McBain
Diamonds Are Forever/The Man With The Golden Gun/For Your Eyes Only-Ian Fleming
The Galton Case-Ross MacDonald
The Dark-Max Franklin

Currently reading:
The Forever War-Joe Haldeman

[Mark Tolch Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Mark Tolch]

Lobotomy is pretty good. About a third of the way into it. Just got to the point when the Ramones are about to get a record deal.

Don't read Dee Dee's next book, Rock Star. It's fucking garbage.

I just bought Monte Melnick's Life on The Road With The Ramones. Looking forward to it.

[Dom D Spoon! Find all posts View Profile Close Dom D]

Private Eye Action As You Like It. Big Joe Lansdale fan here and also a big fan of Mike Shayne magazine. I never knew the two crossed paths.... Gathered here are a bunch of Joe's first published short stories which featured in the magazine. Apparently at one time he was on the verge of taking over as the psudenous writer of tthe title stories.

Anyway these are pretty good fun. Lansdale has his own Marlowe called Jack Slater. The only difference is Slater's tougher and even more unloved than Marlowe. Deriviative and a bit bog standard? Sure. Lansdale's talent for entertaining prose though elevates it all to being definitely readable.

It's a shame Mike Shayne Magazine folded shortly after. I would have liked to read stories where Lansdale tackled Shayne's character.

[Paul L Scholar of Sleaze Find all posts View Profile Close Paul L]

The new Ian Rankin paperback, A SONG FOR THE DARK TIMES. Pretty, pretty good.

[Newt Cox Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Newt Cox]

Don't read Dee Dee's next book, Rock Star. It's fucking garbage.

I just bought Monte Melnick's Life on The Road With The Ramones. Looking forward to it.

Finished Lobotomy earlier. Not bad but really not much in it I hadn't heard before. But hey it was a gift from my fave Aunt.

Up next I think is 42nd Street Pete's Bio. Got a copy not that long ago.

[agent999 Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close agent999]

Angora Fever by Ed Wood. 450 pages of his short stories from 70s mens magazines.

Can you prove it didn't happen?

[Newt Cox Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Newt Cox]

Well ended up starting that Roger Corman bio. Found it at the local thrift for cheap. Just got to the part on Little Shop of Horrors. Really good so far.

[Lorne Marshall Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Lorne Marshall]

By sheer coincidence, Newt, I was getting ready to add to this thread today...

Finished the Dean Koontz novel I'd been reading (COLD FIRE). It had been terrific up until the last 90 pages or so, at which point almost everything that came before was ditched (or at least made far less significant). I was really caught up in wondering how and why the main character was being sent on missions to save seemingly arbitrary people by mysterious impulses, but then the plot went in a completely different direction, and the explanation seemed pretty lame to me. Disappointing. (What's interesting is that Koontz himself reveals in an afterword that movie producers needed him to change the plot in a major way before they would green light a film adaptation, but I don't think what they wanted would have made it any better.) I haven't decided which of the novels on my "to read" shelf that I'll pick next.

Also finished a couple more volumes of THE YEAR'S BEST HORROR STORIES. In #5, I enjoyed "The Service" by Jerry Sohl, "A Most Unusual Murder" by Robert Bloch, and most enthusiastically the classic "Shatterday" by Harlan Ellison. Honorable mention goes to Glen Singer's "Harold's Blues," which plays like "Judas Story" from volume #3, but instead of bargaining with the devil for musical talent, the ill-fated titular character makes a pact with Cthulhu! (Speaking of that, I've noticed the books from early in the series have featured a lot of tributes to HPL - one even has an essay about Lovecraft biographies - as well as tales that rely heavily on fantasy elements.)

Volume #6 (which I've probably owned since it was released in 1978) is when this series really kicks into gear, starting right out of the gate with possibly the best back-to-back offerings yet, David Campton's "At the Bottom of the Garden" and Janet Fox's "Screaming to Get Out." I also very much liked "Ever the Faith Endures" (Manly Wade Wellman), "The Horse Lord" (Lisa Tuttle), "Best of Luck" (David Drake, again placing familiar monsters in a Vietnam War setting), and "There's a Long, Long Trail A-Winding" (an award-winning story by Russell Kirk that might only lightly fit in the horror genre). Stephen King makes his first appearance in the series with "Children of the Corn" (I believe everyone knows that one). I also want to give honorable mention to "Within the Walls of Tyre" (Michael Bishop); it concerns a fascinating subject (lithopedions, or "stone babies") that for me wasn't developed as fully as I would have liked. The weirdest offering is the wonderfully-named "A Cobweb of Pulsing Veins" by the eccentric William Scott Home, a rather obtuse writer who seems to have gained almost a cult reputation.

So far in THE YEAR'S BEST FANTASY & HORROR #17, my favorite story is Neil Gaiman's "A Study in Emerald," another one about Cthulhu, but this time set in an alternate reality in which entities of that mythos rule dictatorially over mankind, and that's presented as human liberation! The centerpiece of the tale is an investigation by a character who is clearly Sherlock Holmes (but never explicitly stated) into the murder of one of the Old Ones' nobility. Each scene is introduced by a flier for some medicinal product relating to other famous literary monsters. Another award winner, and very clever stuff.

[Newt Cox Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Newt Cox]

I read Cold Fire back when I was in high school. Was the first Koontz book for me and it was odd but good.

I got a stack of those Years Best Horror collections. Need to dig them out and add them to the read pile.

[Gary Banks Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Gary Banks]

Almost halfway through 11/22/63 by King.

[Mark Tolch Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Mark Tolch]

Almost halfway through 11/22/63 by King.

I really enjoy this one and read it every few years. It's definitely his most coherent longer book (in my opinion, of course)

[Mark Tolch Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Mark Tolch]

I just finished reading the Lunachicks book, Fallopian Rhapsody, and Glen Matlock's, "I was a Teenage Sex Pistol", which was quite an easy read and had some good stuff in it. I also have Steve Jones' book Lonely Boy and Lydon's Anger Is An Energy on the shelf to read. I've read both of them before, but that's what I love about autobiographies, I don't mind re-reading them.

[Gary Banks Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Gary Banks]

I really enjoy this one and read it every few years. It's definitely his most coherent longer book (in my opinion, of course)

I finished it....and read it again. I like the love story more than the main story.

[Mark Tolch Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Mark Tolch]

I finished it....and read it again. I like the love story more than the main story.

It's got its annoying King-isms, but yeah, that love story is great. And the perfect ending.

[Newt Cox Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Newt Cox]

11/22/63 is one of the few King books I haven't read. After so many of his novels having shit endings I just stopped readng him. I got a hardback copy of Duma Key that I was given when it came out and still haven't read it.