GHOSTS AND GRISLY THINGS

Name: GHOSTS AND GRISLY THINGS
Author: Ramsey Campbell
ISBN: 0-312-86758-1

by Ramsey Campbell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2000

This is Campbell at his best, always intimate with characters who talk and carry on much as you and I, until the ground...

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Twenty “fragments from a flaking brain,” as Liverpudlian horror novelist Campbell calls these ghoulies and ghastlies, which join his earlier story collections (Strange Things and Stranger Places, 1993, etc.). Some of these pieces are set in Liverpool, and some here see print for the first time. In Campbell’s introduction, telling us where each was published, he describes himself as an old-guard horror writer who admires bright young new talents like Poppy Z. Brite and Kim Newman, although he too hopes still to stir some fresh ingredients into the cauldron. Perhaps some eyebulbs and a few chopped off fingers and toes? “See How They Run” does not derive from the Beatles’ lyric but tells rather of Fishwick, a fiendish psychopath, who bites himself to death in jail (that bit of info does not give away the story). In “Ra*e,” a woman’s daughter is murdered in a sandpit on her birthday and the mother takes vengeance on the murderer. Or she thinks she has. Campbell calls “The Change” his darkest story, and dark it is, about a young married horror author suffering writer’s block about the change—or shapeshifting—in a werewolf he’s writing about. Then he notices that at night the bluish vapor of streetlamps is having a deep affect on him.

This is Campbell at his best, always intimate with characters who talk and carry on much as you and I, until the ground gives way under them and fate scribbles them a new address.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000

ISBN: 0-312-86758-1

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Tor

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE OVERNIGHT
by Ramsey Campbell

- BOOK REVIEW
THE DARKEST PART OF THE WOODS
by Ramsey Campbell

- BOOK REVIEW
GATHERING THE BONES
edited by Dennis Etchison ; Ramsey Campbell & Jack Dann

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TELL ME LIES

by Carola Lovering ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 12, 2018

There are unforgettable beauties in this very sexy story.

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Passion, friendship, heartbreak, and forgiveness ring true in Lovering's debut, the tale of a young woman's obsession with a man who's "good at being charming."

Long Island native Lucy Albright, starts her freshman year at Baird College in Southern California, intending to study English and journalism and become a travel writer. Stephen DeMarco, an upperclassman, is a political science major who plans to become a lawyer. Soon after they meet, Lucy tells Stephen an intensely personal story about the Unforgivable Thing, a betrayal that turned Lucy against her mother. Stephen pretends to listen to Lucy's painful disclosure, but all his thoughts are about her exposed black bra strap and her nipples pressing against her thin cotton T-shirt. It doesn't take Lucy long to realize Stephen's a "manipulative jerk" and she is "beyond pathetic" in her desire for him, but their lives are now intertwined. Their story takes seven years to unfold, but it's a fast-paced ride through hookups, breakups, and infidelities fueled by alcohol and cocaine and with oodles of sizzling sexual tension. "Lucy was an itch, a song stuck in your head or a movie you need to rewatch or a food you suddenly crave," Stephen says in one of his point-of-view chapters, which alternate with Lucy's. The ending is perfect, as Lucy figures out the dark secret Stephen has kept hidden and learns the difference between lustful addiction and mature love.

There are unforgettable beauties in this very sexy story.

Pub Date: June 12, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-5011-6964-9

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
CAN'T LOOK AWAY
by Carola Lovering

- BOOK REVIEW
TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE
by Carola Lovering

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CARAMELO

by Sandra Cisneros ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 30, 2002

Readers here get both: “Life was cruel. And hilarious all at once.”

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A sprawling family saga with a zesty Mexican-American accent from Cisneros, author of, most recently, Woman Hollering Creek (1991).

Every summer, all three Reyes brothers drive with their wives and children from Chicago to Mexico City to visit their parents. Narrator Lala begins with a particularly dreadful trip during which “the Awful Grandmother” reveals a shameful secret from her favorite son’s past to humiliate her detested daughter-in-law. These are Lala’s parents, and Lala then rolls the narrative back, goaded by a scolding second voice whose identity we learn later, to tell us how a desolate, abandoned girl named Soledad became the Awful Grandmother. Soledad comes from a family of shawl-makers, and her most significant possession is a rebozo caramelo, a silk shawl whose striped design, when she unfurls it after her husband’s death, evokes “the past . . . the days to come. All swirling together like the stripes.” Wearing it years later to her parents’ 30th anniversary, Lala brings the fringe to her lips and tastes “cooked pumpkin familiar and comforting and good, reminding me I’m connected to so many people, so many.” Cisneros’ keen eye enlivens descriptions of everything from Chicago’s famed Maxwell Street flea market to Soledad’s sun-stroked house on Destiny Street. (The author riffs playfully throughout on the double meaning of destino, as either “destiny” or “destination”; it’s hard to imagine that the simultaneous Spanish-language edition will be as stylistically original as this casually bilingual text.) Melodrama abounds, and the narrator doesn’t disdain her tale’s links to Mexico’s famed telenovelas. In one of many entertaining footnotes, vehicles for historical and biographical background as well as the author’s opinions, she insists that those TV soap operas merely “[emulat] Mexican life.” The only way to cope is with a robust sense of humor. As Lala’s friend Viva says, “You’re the author of the telenovela of your life. Comedy or tragedy? Choose.”

Readers here get both: “Life was cruel. And hilarious all at once.”