When that Waldenbooks was closing down, I cleaned up and vowed to post my haul in here. I got lazy, however, and now I don't feel like playing catch-up. So I'll post recent purchases as they occur to me.
One weird thing about
The Ruins that I forgot to mention: It hasn't got any chapters. It's got little breaks here and there to indicate the passage of time, but no numbered chapters. I think that had something to do with how hard it seemed to put it down.
I enjoyed
Heart-Shaped Box. It was more sentimental than I had expected, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Not all of these things have to give you a shiver when you close the cover.
A few weeks back, I posted
this thread looking for werewolf books. I wound up reading
Shapeshifter by J. F. Gonzalez, and man, was it bad. It was the worst book I've read in recent memory. I could almost appreciate that the author was going for a pretty straightforward werewolf story, but between the repetitive prose and the fact that he seems to think his audience has a maturity level of about thirteen, it was pretty much a waste of time. The best thing about it is that it's not very long.
A couple of good things came out of that thread, though. I picked up a copy of
Dog Soldiers, and despite their being out of print, I managed to get decent copies of
The Wolf's Hour by Robert McCammon and
The Return of the Wolf Man by Jeff Rovin.
I'm looking forward to both, but I couldn't resist looking at the Wolf Man one to see how long before the beast shows up. I had to laugh, because the first sentence turned out to be "The autumn night was thick with clouds as the Wolf Man pushed on the half-open door."
I think it might be next on my list. Since it sounds like most of the Universal monsters are in it, I'm hoping it'll make up for the lackluster ones from DH Press.
Currently, I'm reading
Ghost Road Blues by Jonathan Maberry, and I'm enjoying it quite a bit. It's the best modern one I've read since Simmons's
Summer of Night (buy that one, dammit,
RJD), and better still, it's the first in a trilogy that supposedly gets better with each book (
Dead Man's Song and the recent
Bad Moon Rising). Maberry got a "First Novel" Stoker for
Ghost Road Blues.
Actually, Joe Hill just got one for
Heart-Shaped Box, come to think of it. It's good to have decent books to cushion the badness of
Shapeshifter.