Joyland

Another one by Stephen King. God, I love his writing! I've read almost anything that man ever wrote and he is my number one author by far. My husband asked me if I liked this book and I had to tell him that I did. I don't know why exactly, but I liked it. Once I was past half of the book I couldn't put it down. He hypnotizes you with words, no kidding. The next question my husband asked was if there was any book of Stephen King I didn't like. Believe it or not, I couldn't think of a single one. They all have this same quality to them. He weaves a story and you get stuck in it. With dozens of books written already you'd think he's get it wrong some day, maybe that's why I waited so long before reading this because of the HARD CASE CRIME series it was published for. That doesn't interest me one bit, and I thought King had gone off the deep end, but he managed to make me like, no love it!

Alright, that's enough praise shoved down your throat.
Joyland is a novella, about a young man going through a heartbreak and trying to work through it by volunteering at a carnivale. A kind of eighties Disneyland, before Disneyland began swallowing up the little places of fun. The places you adored when you were a kid, but when you see pictures you laugh at having been so silly and gullible. Still, almost everyone loves to go to a themepark. It's getting in touch with our inner little self and just having fun.
Well, Devin, the main character, is selling fun all summer long. During his time there he hears a story about the horror attraction being haunted. He never sees the ghost of a girl murdered there, but you still get goosebumps how King describes the setting. A paranormal crime novel. Kuddo's!
I know, again with the praise.
As he decides to take leave of school for a while and keep working at the entertainment park he digs deeper into the mystery with a little help from his friends. He also get to know a local woman and her son whose got a serious illness. Everyone plays a definite part in this novel and I liked it how King kept me on the edge of my seat.

Joyland is quickly read, and maybe that's it's only fault. I loved it and can't wait for the next King to be released!

I give it an 8 out of 10.

Review of The Girl Next Door

Suburbia. Shady, tree-lined streets, well-tended lawns and cozy homes. A nice, quiet place to grow up. Unless you are teenage Meg or her crippled sister, Susan. On a dead-end street, in the dark, damp basement of the Chandler house, Meg and Susan are left captive to the savage whims and rages of a distant aunt who is rapidly descending into madness. It is a madness that infects all three of her sons and finally the entire neighborhood. Only one troubled boy stands hesitantly between Meg and Susan and their cruel, torturous deaths. A boy with a very adult decision to make. (www.goodreads.com)

This novel had been lying on my shelf for a long time. If you've read some of my other reviews you know that since I have a daughter I'm especially vulnerable for cruelty towards children, more than I used to have since I can't stop thinking how I'd feel if it was being done to my little one.
I've bought this book before I was pregnant, I think about 4 or 5 years ago, and hadn't read it yet. Then after my princess I ignored it, knowing it would be too horrific.
Why did I choose to read it now? Maybe it's because my girl is going through her 'terrible two's' stage? No, I'm just kidding. I'm just a little bit tougher again, you have to be with the girl I'm raising.

I'm glad and sad I read it though. Glad because this is a story so horrific most would turn away and ignore it, but since it has been taken from real life you need to know it, so it won't happen again. People need to see instead of being blind.
I'm sad I read it, because it's something you can't unknow. This contradicts with what I said just a few sentences ago, but my stomach barely could handle what happened in this book. It makes me afraid what would happen if I couldn't care for my daughter and she was left in the care of someone as cruel. Luckily I have a great family I can rely on, but not everyone does.

Despite the subject it's a very well-written novel. I've read more of Jack Ketchum before, Off-Season being one of those novels, and I didn't like it that much. A little too farfetched maybe. The Girl Next Door is horrible due to it's closeness. He depicts a very true scene of life in the late fifties and how children and adults lived in two separate worlds. Transferring the story to a third person seeing the abuse, but not entering into it, makes you as reader a passive viewer of the horror going on. You'll hate it, and at times you'll be glad you haven't seen it all.

I'm rating this 7 out of 10. 

Review of Carrion Comfort

First of all, I didn't finish this book. It's over 800 pages long and I read as much as 500+ but I gave it up all together. For a while I thought I might stick with it and get through it, but one night I just got fed up with it.
I've been reading this novel for almost 6 weeks and I was tired of it. I'm a huge fan of Stephen King and I especially like his novels from the 70's and 80's and I thought I'd like this too being horror from the 80's, but it's not so. I've yet to encounter a writer who writes as well and consistent as the forementioned King, and Dan Simmons isn't coming close. Not with Carrion Comfort at least, maybe other works of his do fit the bill. But enough chitchat, I'll tell you why I didn't like it after a brief summary...

THE PAST... Caught behind the lines of Hitler’s Final Solution, Saul Laski is one of the multitudes destined to die in the notorious Chelmno extermination camp. Until he rises to meet his fate and finds himself face to face with an evil far older, and far greater, than the Nazi’s themselves…

THE PRESENT... Compelled by the encounter to survive at all costs, so begins a journey that for Saul will span decades and cross continents, plunging into the darkest corners of 20th century history to reveal a secret society of beings who may often exist behind the world's most horrible and violent events. Killing from a distance, and by darkly manipulative proxy, they are people with the psychic ability to 'use' humans: read their minds, subjugate them to their wills, experience through their senses, feed off their emotions, force them to acts of unspeakable aggression. Each year, three of the most powerful of this hidden order meet to discuss their ongoing campaign of induced bloodshed and deliberate destruction. But this reunion, something will go terribly wrong. Saul’s quest is about to reach its elusive object, drawing hunter and hunted alike into a struggle that will plumb the depths of mankind’s attraction to violence, and determine the future of the world itself…(www.goodreads.com)

All in all, it starts out well. You have quite some bonechilling action right at the beginning, which later on enfolds into a larger story as more people get involved.
We get to know the bad guys... the brain vampires sort of speak, as being evil. They lust for power and status and they don't flinch from using other for their gain or pleasure. Not a single good attribute is been handed out to them. Of course they have a picking order, with an absolutely powerful man at the top who can control most of the others and the cockroaches at the bottom who have to do the dirty work. In between there are those who don't want to walk the same line and cause trouble for their kind, which of course ends in a thrive to eliminate these 'bad eggs'.
At the other side we have the good guys, mere humans of course, which die in mass and you never get to know them as far as the story needs you to know them. Only exception to the rule is Saul and Natalie. He's a jew, formerly being held at a concentration camp where he encounters such a brain vampire but lives to tell and Natalie is introduced as her father is a victim on the battlefield between two brain vampires and she seeks revenge. There was also a deputy from the town where the first battle was held, but he dies quickly and is being thrown aside.

I read over half of the novel and still it wasn't getting to the action. All you get in those 500 pages is a lot of talk about them, a little showdown and most of all people getting eliminated all over the place because not only can these 'vampires' control minds, they seem also to detect whenever someone is investigating them. How 'bout that? And as more and more humans die with no explanation what so ever, you have another story parallel to it, of a old female brain vampire who has no moral obligation, going 'round killing kids and whatnot when they are in her way.
This book mainly bored me, and if it caused an emotion it was mainly being disgusted by the emotionless killing done by the 'vampires'. I don't like people dying as fodder to fill the pages, please give me a little background, just a snip, I don't ask for much more.

Well, since I didn't finish, I'm going to give a rating of the pages I did read. Maybe it would've gotten better near the end, but I guess I'll never know..

Score: 4 out of 10.

Review of A Fool and his Honey (An Aurora Teagarden Mystery)

I'm on a roll here. Reviewing two bad books in one sitting. Although I'm being harsh. 'A Fool and his Honey' was actually not quite bad compared to the others. The plot outline was really farfetched, but the way to the end seemed more straightforward instead of all the daily life encounters I really am bored with. I'm getting to know Roe's life way better than some of my friends.

In this novel, Roe gets a visit from a cousin of her husband. This cousin, Regina, has a baby who no one knew she expected, so everyone is a little confused in the beginning. Then, as Roe and her husband come back from a dinner party, they find their cousin gone, her husband murdered and her child lying hidden under the bed. These are the ingredients for yet another exiting mystery (I say with a deep sigh).

For as the previous novels tended to be a bit tedious, this one gets down to the point really fast and you get answers quicker than you'd expect. Of course it's something plucked out of the blue, with as much possibility of it really happening as you would see a pig fly. So definitely points for originality. Of course this is still Roe we're talking about. Her life hasn't become any interesting as of yet, although the writer seems to have gained confidence in writing the sex scenes between Roe and Martin. Nothing explicit, but very translucent and completely unnecessary.
Being infertile and having to take care of a baby, I know I would react differently. Roe is reacting to this baby as I am reacting to the novels. Tedious but unavoidable.
Even in the end as Martin disappears from the stage you don't get the emotional pit fall you'd expect. A very emotionless book, I might say.

Rating: 6 out of 10.

Review of Dead over Heels (An Aurora Teagarden Mystery)

I know I've said I wouldn't read more of Aurora Teagarden, but this is just one aspect of the OCD I'm suffering from. I just have to continue. I have read too many of them already, so I just have to read them all. It's really sad, but I can't help my compulsive need.

On the upside, I'm almost through with them. I'm lucky they aren't thick books, (why do you think I held off so long beginning to read the game of thrones series, If that had been a disappointment I was in for a long stretch).
Also, I usually mix two books, so when I'm fed up with this southern lady I just dig a little deeper into a southern vampire novel (and no, not the Sookie Stackhouse series!, although I did like those)

I won't bother with a summary from Goodreads. It's pretty straightforward. While Roe and Angel are working in the yard a body falls down from the sky. It isn't just anybody, but the feared police detective Jack Burns. Why has Burns been dropped there? Who killed him? Soon Roe finds out he hasn't been dropped in her yard randomly. 

While you get to plow through every southern convention there is, and let me tell you, they don't differ from the ones in the previous installments. We get to know Roe's daily routine, up until the clothes she wears, what color rims she has on (not really noteworthy) and how many times she has passionate sex with her husband, all the while she stumbles through the novel thinking someone else is the key to the story, while all this time she herself seems to be the reason for every hickup in this novel. I would like to see this Roe in real life, because from a timid librarian she must be magically transformed into some kind of vamp. See how money can make you pretty!
I didn't like it much this novel, but it's finished, it's in the past.. I got through it and that's a positive thing.

Rating: 5 out of 10