I liked Airframe because he did well on the aviation tech and corporate atmosphere, and the portrayal of the news media fit my prejudices, but all the characters were pretty flat.

Oh, no, the one I read was Night Shift.

Really bummed about the fact that our stupid cable won't get TNT for some reason (at least not clearly) and so we missed the new Salem's Lot that just ran.

I read the book for my Gothic class at Rice, but I didn't check out the miniseries cause Dalton Ross didn't think much of it, and Rob Lowe's hair was too laughable.

That book initiated me into the wonderful world of all-nighters when I was 13.

I don't remember whether a book initiated me into all-nighters, but my story is in junior high or high school, and it involved Dean Koontz's Cold Fire, and my hitting the turning point of the book and staying up till at least four or something until I finished the section.

I couldn't get through the first paragraph of The Bad Place without throwing the book against the wall in rage at the unbelievably poor grammar and fifth-grade writing level.

I also love The Bad Place. I'm a big Koontz fan. My favorite might be Dragon Tears.

Thanks to the ABC miniseries, to this day I cannot bear to have the shower curtain closed unless someone is actually showering in it.

Letter to Hitchcock: "Sir, After seeing Diabolique, my daughter was afraid to take a bath. Now she has seen your Psycho and is afraid to take a shower. What should I do with her?"
Hitchcock: "Send her to the dry cleaners."

Liked Eon by Greg Bear a lot. Read The Heart of the Comet by David Brin ... I liked it; it was kinda trippy, and I think it had a lot of originality to it. Gregory Benford's Timescape was one of my faves. Haven't read it in a while, though. I, too, liked The Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park, but that's about it for Crichton and me. I'm really rather random and sporadic in my reading. And I have a bad memory for authors. Well, and titles, too, sometimes.

Whatshisname in the ABC The Shining was really quite scary. I hadn't planned to watch, but I got sucked in.

(Edited for spelling. Twice now.)

Whathisname

Steven Weber, of Wings fame.

I actually have a shitload of cheap paperbacks of Dean Koontz stored on a closet shelf just about 18 inches from where I'm sitting typing right now, but I cheerfully concede that he's a horrid writer. He's generally a good gruesome twisty conspiracy-theory-ridden nutbag of a storyteller, and a big guilty pleasure, but there are whole chapters in each of his novels that I have to read with one eye closed or my brain turned off. When he decides to write like a real Writer and Ahh-tist, he's absolutely unbearable.

Stephen King will always have my utter hopeless loyalty for Insomnia, in which he quoted heavily from Stephen Dobyns's Cemetery Nights, one of my favorite books of poetry ever. I love him like mad for that.

Liked Crichton when I was a seventh grader.

King has so far failed to impress me, either with The Green Mile or The Gunslinger , and I thought both of them had interesting stories - just hated the way he told them.

Dean Koontz looks too bad for me to try it.

I've never gotten more than halfway through a Greg Bear novel without giving up - his ideas are cool, his writing drives me insane. Which is a shame, as he seems to have a lock on airport newsstands Sci-fi selections.

He's generally a good gruesome twisty conspiracy-theory-ridden nutbag of a storyteller, and a big guilty pleasure

Hee. Right there with you. I've read and liked a couple of his stories (no idea which ones; see above re: memory issues). And I remember picking up at least one that was unreadable. But, you know, I just didn't read it, and all was well.

(no idea which ones; see above re: memory issues).

Give me anything you remember, and I might be able to come up with titles.

OK, lemme see. I think there was one where the characters end up trapped in a building. I think that's one of the ones I liked. But I'm not sure. Then, did he write one about someone trying to track a serial killer, and the serial killer was somehow gaining ... I dunno, access? ... to the protaganist's mind ... or the other way around. (ETA: admittedly, both of the plot points described have no doubt been reproduced many times, so probably not all that helpful). And there was something about birds in the serial killer one. I think it all fell apart in the end, plot-wise. And I have no idea if it was actually Koontz.

But, then, I wouldn't put Koontz in the sci-fi category. (Random comment)

Thanks to the ABC miniseries, to this day I cannot bear to have the shower curtain closed unless someone is actually showering in it. If it's not in use, the curtain has to be all scrunched up at one end so that there's no possibility of anything lurking in the tub.

I found that you can buy clear plastic shower curtains at Wal-Mart and Kmart, and they usually have metal grommits to keep them from pulling through.