'Just Rewards (2)'
There's more to life than watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer! No. Really, there is! Honestly! Here's a place for Buffistas to come and discuss what it is they're reading, their favorite authors and poets. "Geez. Crack a book sometime."
I'm reading Dean Kontz's "False Memory".
I will never read another haiku ever ever ever.
I knew DK was fucked up, but damn.
It's like he and Anne Rice and Stephen King sit around comparing fucked up-ness like those guys in Jaws comparing scars.
"I can totally beat that! In MY book, blah blah blah SO FUCKED UP blah ablah blah supernatural blah."
I knew DK was fucked up, but damn.
Heh, and heh to the Jaws scar-showing imagery.
Though DK is still a distant second in my mind to Clive Barker. I've read one single Clive Barker book ever, a very very long and twisted thing I can barely remember anymore except for a vague impression of something like a cross between Gaiman's Neverwhere and the first King/Straub Huck Finn pastiche collaboration, only approximately 90 billion times more fucked up. It's the only book I've ever read that I finished and thought, "Whoever wrote that has got to have some major neurochemical disorder; there's just no way a normal human brain would not only think that up, but go there and stay there for upwards of 500 pages."
It did, however, serve the salutary purpose of making every Koontz and King book I've read since then seem kind of playful and kittenish by comparison.
The thing that bugs me about Koontz is his tendancy towards the Amazing Psychic Dog novels.
I like dogs. They can be wonderful pets. Dogs good. But we get that after 18 zillion books about supernatural psychic AmazoDogs.
This one's no different.
The only two Koontz books I've read are Watchers and Lightning, and I loved them both. Watchers is one of the Amazing Psychic Dog books, but it's just too much fun, and Einstein is quite the personality.
I've read one single Clive Barker book ever, a very very long and twisted thing I can barely remember anymore except for a vague impression of something like a cross between Gaiman's Neverwhere and the first King/Straub Huck Finn pastiche collaboration, only approximately 90 billion times more fucked up.
The Great and Secret Show?
I have to confess I loved that book. The stuff about the war across the secret face of America and Fletcher just wanting to become sky gave me chills.
That might have been it, though the title doesn't quite ping me. I really can't remember much of anything specific, except multiple dimensions. And possibly sentient spiders. And a general atmosphere of nearly incalculable bentness.
Hmmm, may have been Weaveworld then.
I'd recommend reading "The Hellbound Heart" and "The Forbidden" (the latter being the story Candyman was adapted from) as finer examples of Barker's writing. I really think he handles horror in short story and novella form better than anyone alive.
I like Barker but sometimes he's confusing. I skim a bit when he goes off on his tangents.
I like Koontz to a certain degree. I enjoy the characters and the dialogue but then he seems (to me) to have this HUGE build-up with a corny reveal. I lovingly think of some of his books as being similar to the Big Bad Snake episode of Buffy.
I love King but I admit to skimming when he describes a field for three entire pages. All in all, though, I enjoy King the most. His voice and his characters ping me in (mostly) all of the right ways.
I still can't forgive Koontz for the phrase "his well-oiled piston of lovemaking."