The Renegades Release Party Invite

My latest novel, The Renegades, is coming to the major internet retailers on December 3rd. The paper copy will be available in early 2014, but you can win an advance copy at the release party. You can also win ebooks and swag, as well as paper copies of the first two books in The Superiors series.

I'm excited about this! Doing a bit of last-minute editing and then it's good to go.

Please stop by in a few weeks for the release day!

Halloween Special: Book Review: The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Maybe I should wait to review this book, as I've just finished and I'm not yet sure what to make of it. But I'll try to write something comprehensible.

First of all, I was told this was the quintessential haunted house book, and I hadn't read any horror fiction for a while, so I thought I'd check it out. Plus, it's a bit of a genre-classic. I read the introduction to this book, which may have been a mistake. It gave away the ending, and also gave a lot of spoilers and analysis that I probably shouldn't have thought about until after the book. I really wish they'd made it an afterward instead of a foreward.

So, let me try to review the book as I would have if I hadn't read the intro.

I enjoyed this book a lot. The protagonist, Eleanor, was very simple and fanciful, almost like a child. She never really grew up, and we assume this is due to her long imprisonment as the caretakeer of her mother. She never grew up or even lived, but spent most of her adult life caring for her mother. When her mother dies, she is left with a sister she doesn't like (who is not developed, but what we see of her through Eleanor's eyes is not a flattering picture). Eleanor is invited to Hill House and goes there, although we're not really sure why. She repeatedly says "journeys end in lovers meeting" so we have to assume she's looking for a bit of human contact or even love.

What she finds is, well...a haunted house. At first she, like the others, feels the evil of the house and fears it. We're never really sure if the house is haunted, or who it's haunted by, but we assume it's a family who previously lived in the house.

Somewhere along the way I came to realize that Eleanor was not a reliable narrator. It's hard to separate from the first-person narrative--we're inside Eleanor's mind, so we want to believe what she believes. At one point I got paranoid that the others were playing tricks on her because she thinks they are. Shirley Jackson does a great job drawing the reader into Eleanor's mind and not letting go. I began to think she was going crazy, and eventually she really seems to lose it. But it doesn't seem like it while reading, because we are inside the crazy person's head.

Eleanor at first fits in, but eventually she begins to separate herself (or the house does?) by her constant need for attention. She claims that the others (or Theo, in particular) only want attention all the time, to be center stage. While in fact it is Eleanor who always wants to be the center of attention, although we only know this through her actions, as she herself never consciously craves or seeks attention.

Her relationships are painted in a vague, shadowy way, which leaves the reader to guess what happens. Is she in love with Theo? Is Theo a lesbian, or just friendly? And I still am not sure if Eleanor had sex with Luke, although I believe she did. Whether Jackson didn't want to be explicit in saying this, or if she wanted us to have to guess, I'm not sure. I also thought that Theo and Luke had a short affair, although that was also left unsaid. Eleanor really seemed to fall apart after her hour spent with Luke doing whatever, so I am assuming they had a brief encounter and then, since he's described as a 'cad' and a 'scoundrel' afterwards, that he wanted nothing more to do with her. Theo seems jealous about this, but she never admits it to Eleanor. Instead, she goes after Luke herself (we think, but maybe it's only Eleanor's jealousy?). Eleanor falls apart then, losing her friend and whatever Luke was to her. She never comes out and says it, but we guess from the risk Luke takes to save her that it's his guilt driving him.

The house seems to possess Eleanor, rather than a ghost or spirit. It absorbs her, and I'd have thought it preyed on her because she was the weak one, living half the time in her fantasy world. She was most impressionable, so the entity that possessed the house went for her. Then she sacrifices herself to it, so to speak, so she can remain forever a part of the house. Or that's how I would have read it if I'd never read the introduction. After reading it, I guess I'm supposed to think that it was actually Eleanor and not a ghost haunting the house. That she conjured all the events from her subconscious or psychic abilities, drawing attention to herself with the messages from 'ghosts,' ruining the possessions of someone who angered her. But still I wondered if the house wasn't trying to gain her trust so that she would surrender to it. Although I know I'm supposed to believe Eleanor created all the phenomena in the house, I'm still not sure I believe it. I still suspect that the house engulfed and infiltrated her to drive her mad so that she'd join whatever spirit walked there alone.

I know I usually give less summary in reviews, but that's my review of this. It was a great book, although confusing, and I will be thinking about it for a while and trying to figure it out. The book is very well-written, the dialogue is snappy, witty, and surprising. I did think that they should have been nicer to Eleanor and explained things better when they sent her away. But overall, I'd recommend this book to anyone who likes to have a deep thought about literature and not just read it and forget it. If you like thought-provoking, ambiguous books, this one's for you.



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Cover Reveal Wednesday: The Renegades, Book 3 in The Superiors Series

In honor of my favorite holiday (Halloween, of course) here's a bit of shameless self-promotion for my new vamp/horror novel, coming soon. As everyone knows, self-promotion gets old really fast, so I've tried to stay away from that as much as possible. But I'm a writer, so of course I'm going to get excited and want to share my AWESOME NEW BOOK COVER! I just got it back from my cover designer, the brilliant Casey Siegel, and couldn't wait to share it. It still needs a few more tweaks, but here is the preliminary:

I'm super excited about it, and I love it already. The book, The Renegades, is tentatively scheduled for release on December 3.

Now On Sale! Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense

Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense by Sarah Weinman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


4.5 stars


Let me just say, I love this book. I can’t say it’s my usual genre. I’ve read exactly one female-oriented murder mystery since junior high, and I didn’t like it. But, being a supporter of women writers everywhere, I felt obliged to read this one. I could not have been more delightfully rewarded.
The book grabbed me from the first story, which was so deliciously twisted I could not stop reading. The collection’s editor, Sarah Weinman, could not have chosen a more gripping start to the anthology. “The Heroine” by Patricia Highsmith starts us off with a bang. In it, psychologically disturbed Lucille gets a job as a nanny in an idyllic home and sets about to prove her devotion to the children no matter what it takes. The short story is concise and compulsively readable. I couldn’t put it down, and luckily for me, and other busy readers, it’s short enough at 22 pages to breeze through in one short sitting, so I didn’t have to. The ending isn’t unpredictable, but so exactly right that you’re not sure the author will go there. And then she does.
Most of the stories continue in this vein. They are quick reads, they are suspenseful, they are daring, and above all they are shockingly, breathtakingly, savagely honest. (Excuse the adjective overload, I tend to pile a lot of them on when I’m deep in the squee of book love). Like most books, this one is not without flaw. Some of the stories have little holes, but I found myself not even caring. The stories were too damn good. And trust me, I never say that. I find all the little holes and loose threads and I pull at them and obsess about them until they unravel the credibility of the story. But this time, I really didn’t care. It was too good to care about any nit-picky flaws. And there weren’t many.
I’ll admit, I’m not usually a short story fan. That is, I didn’t know I was until I read this book. I haven’t read short stories since college, and I usually like to lose myself in the world of a novel, the tension and plot development and depth of character that can only come with a full-length novel, or at least a novella. But I may have to rethink that. This collection was delightfully twisted fun from start to finish. Each story had something new to think about, something to offer, some new twist that had me grinning from ear to ear while I read, hardly stopping to breathe. Most of the women who wrote these shorts also wrote novels, which I am going to have to check out very soon. They are some talented, incredibly clever writers. It’s a shame, nearly a sin, that these authors have been swept so far under the rug and ignored so thoroughly that I’ve never heard of thirteen of the fourteen featured in this book.
I was going to do a giveaway, but I’m going to be greedy and hang on to this one. I can’t bear to let it go so soon. I am going to do a more thorough read when I’m not under pressure to finish by deadline. But go get yourself a copy. This book is a hit, from the cover to every single page within. Recommended for everyone! (Over 12).


Disclaimer: I received this book for review from the publisher.





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Read an Ebook Week--Final Day!

It's the final day of Read an e-Book Week!

If you haven't entered to win a free copy of The Vigilantes, this is the last day to do it!

You can earn entries by sharing my books and pages all over the web.

Leave a comment letting me know what you did this week to celebrate. Did you read an ebook? If so, which one? Did you go to smashwords.com to find free books? What did you get?

If you're a writer, did you participate? Did you give stuff away? Join the smashwords promo? Read an ebook yourself?

If you helped me or another author out this week, let me know what you did. Any other ideas to help make indie books more visible? Share that too!

I look forward to hearing from readers, writers, and followers about what you did this week.

Look for the winner of the ARC copy of The Vigilantes coming soon...I still have to tally up entries!

Hope everyone had a great, successful week of e-reading.

Read an Ebook Week (Day 6)

It's almost over! Congrats to the five winner so far!

If you want to win a free ARC hardcopy of The Vigilantes, make sure you check out all my "Read an Ebook Week" posts to see how you can get extra entries! And don't forget to leave links to what you've done so I can give you credit. To enter to win an ebook copy of The Vigilantes, keep reading.

Today is Friday...Follow Friday! Make sure you've followed my blog, Twitter, and liked my Facebook pages (writer and book).

Here's what you can also do: enlist your friends to follow my blog (+3 entries each) and leave a comment telling me you sent them.

Get your friends to like my FB pages and leave a comment telling me you sent them.

Tweet a #FF post with my name in it: @lenahillbrand....every time you post a #FF tweet with my name, +1 entry. Every time you get someone to retweet it, +1 entry. Every time you get one of your followers to follow me, +2 entries (have them let me know who sent them, of course!) Also, share this post on Twitter, the same retweet rule applies!

Additional ways to enter on this next-to-last day of the contest:

Like, share, or add me as a favorite author on Amazon (+3). If you like The Superiors and The Vigilantes, make sure you let me know on amazon (+2 for each).

Pin one of my books on Pinterest (+3).

Add me as a favorite author on Barnes&Noble. FB like The Vigilantes and The Superiors on Barnes&Noble.


The Superiors is free for 2 more days on Smashwords! Pick it up while you can! Add me as a favorite author on Smashwords. FB like The Vigilantes and The Superiors on Smashwords. Share my books on all the social media sites on the right-hand side of the page a few inches below the FB like button.

If you have a Goodreads account: Follow the link to The Superiors and The Vigilantes. Scroll down to the bottom of the righthand column and you'll see where you can share via FB, Twitter, Pinterest and Google. Do that stuff!
Add me as a favorite author.

(For +10 bonus points, take The Superiors quiz if you've already read the book...you don't even have to get the questions right! Post a comment on the quiz letting me know your score).

As always, bonus entries for sharing this post all over the place! Share buttons below!

Read an Ebook Week Day 3 and 4 Giveaway

Have you picked an ebook to read yet?

If you're looking for free books, check out Smashwords.com and find some free books on promotion this week for free or cheap!

If you want to win a free e-copy of The Vigilantes, I'm giving away one every day. If you haven't won yet, try again. I'm also giving away an ARC hardcopy at the end of this week to the person with most entries for the whole week, so keep trying!

If you haven't entered the contest yet, find tons of ways to get extra entries in yesterday's post.

Here are some new ways today: get somoeone to follow my blog (have them leave a comment with your name on this post so I know who sent them) +5 entries.

Go follow me or get someone to follow me on twitter (again, have them send me a tweet with your twitter name) +1.

Like or get someone to like my FB writer page or book page, and get +2 for every like (have them leave a comment so I know who sent them).

Get someone to pin one of my books on Pinterest (+5 each).

Tomorrow I will post a poetry blog as usual. Share it via FB, blog, twitter, Google+1 for additional entries (as always, post a comment letting me know you did those things so I can add your entries to my random drawing).

Read an Ebook Week (#Giveaway) Day 2

Want to win a free copy of The Vigilantes?

Well, you can. I'm giving away one every day this week. Congrats to yesterday's winner!

You can find the first book in the series for free on Smashwords this week: The Superiors.

ALSO, at the end of the week I will be picking the person with the most entries for the whole week (not random selection like the daily winners) to receive a paperback copy of The Vigilantes. So keep coming back and helping me promote this great event to get people reading Ebooks and independent authors!

Today, to win a copy of The Vigilantes, I've added extra chances to win. Here's how:

Like yesterday, share this post via Twitter, FB, Blog, Google+1. One entry per post, +5 for blogging this. Please leave links in the comments section to your posts. Also, if you ask people to retweet, I will check your twitter post and give you an additional two entries for every person who retweets your post or reposts your FB link!

Additional chances to win if you do these things: Add me as a favorite author on Smashwords (under my picture, it will have a list of people who added me as a favorite author. Below that, there's a link that says "add author as favorite." Also, there's a button on the top left that says the same thing. Click on either one to add me (+2 entries).

While you're on my page, click on, The Vigilantes (or follow these links). On the lefthand side of the book page, there are tons of ways to share that book: Twitter, FB like, Stumbledupon, Reddit, Digg, or bookmark on Delicious. If you have one of these, it's a +1 each time. Tomorrow do the same for my other book, The Superiors. And download it for free while you're there!

Happy ereading!

Read an Ebook Week! (#Giveaway)

Hello fellow readers and writers,

In case you didn't know, this week is "Read an Ebook Week." What does that mean?
It means you should read an e-book!

It also means many other exciting things like:
I'm giving away a free ebook of The Vigilantes every day for the rest of the week!

I'll post with new details throughout the week, so check back often and try to win the free copy for that day.

Here's how you can win: Throughout the week, I will post about Read an Ebook Week. When you see those posts, check out what's going on for chances to win. I will add new ways to get extra entries as the week goes on.

Sunday: Go to the bottom of this post and share it on Twitter (+1 entry), Facebook (+1), Google Plus-One (+1), and your blog (+5), or Pin one of my books on Pinterest (+3). Also, if you link my blog to yours (add it to your list of websites) that's +10 entries. Make sure you leave a comment letting me know what you did, with links to your posts & blog. I will message you on Twitter if you win, or you can leave your email address in the comments if you don't have Twitter.

If you don't win a copy, you can still get The Vigilantes for half price on Smashwords.com for the promotion they're having this week. They are having a huge promotion! Tons of books are 25% off, 50% off, 75% off, or FREE. Make sure to go check it out. If you don't have an account, it's free to sign up, and you can download ebooks in any format so they work on whatever digital reader you have.

ANNNNNDDDD...remember how I said a bunch of books are FREE this week? Well....The Superiors is one of them. So, if you win The Vigilantes and you haven't read the first book in the series, you can get it free on Smashwords all week. And if you get The Superiors free and want a great deal on the second book, it's half off.

Check out the site and see what books you can score all week long. Yay for ebooks!

On a personal note, I will finally be finishing an ebook or two that I've been meaning to read for a long time. Look for an ebook review at the end of the week.

Review Wednesday: The Stand, by Stephen King

The Stand by Stephen King


My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I've read a lot of Stephen King, and this is one of my favorites. I read it quite a while ago, maybe 2002, around the time of the Antrax scare. So when I read this, it was so scary to me, because I kept thinking how easily it could really happen. That made it much scarier.




Most of King's books have supernatural aspects, but I usually like the ones with few supernatural elements. The more likely the situation could happen, the scarier his books. So I really enjoyed The Stand.




I thought he did an amazing job of creating a post-apocalyptic world. The banding together of the group was gradual, as all King's novels are. He never rushes anything. He takes his sweet time building suspense, which I know bothers some people who are used to the instant gratification of the action-packed fast-paced fantasy novels out today. But I'd trade all of them for The Stand.




This book is chilling in it's possibility. The different groups all seem equally possible despite their differences. When you're reading, you have no doubt that those groups would band together if something like this ever happened. There are good people, bad people, and people who will follow along with whichever group finds them. I loved the characters, even the gross ones (and it's Stephen King, so there are some horrifying and disgusting characters and actions).




Without summarizing or giving too much away, this book is amazing, and it's one of King's best. A classic that should and probably will be read for a long, long time.




Recommended to anyone who likes well-developed books of chilling possibility.




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New Year, New Book!

Hey guys,
As a lot of you already know, I just released my second novel. YAY! The Vigilantes came out on Kindle, Nook, and at the Smashwords store last week. It should be out in paperback later this week. I'm so excited about it and happy to share my journey with all of you. To learn more about The Vigilantes look for it on amazon.com, smashwords.com, or barnesandnoble.com. Or find it on Goodreads. If you haven't read the first book in the series, The Superiors you can read find it on the righthand side of my blog and also find out all about it by clicking any of the links in my blog tour.

Cyber Monday!

Alright, well, while I'm at it, I figured I'd keep my book at .99 through the weekend and Cyber Monday. So if you want to find The Superiors for super cheap, go check it out! And look at all the other great deals while you're there, too. I'm pretty excited about the tote bag I found on amazon!

Hallo-week Book Reviews! Salem's Lot, by Stephen King

Salem's Lot by Stephen King

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I picked up this book off my sister's floor after seeing it lying around for a couple weeks. I had stopped reading Stephen King after Cell, which I read after a long break from Mr. King. When I read Cell, I thought I'd finally outgrown my love of King-style horror, so it had been several years since I'd read anything 'scary.' But I had a free copy of Salem's Lot, one of King's classics that I'd never read. Plus, I'd just finished writing my own vampire series, so I thought I'd try reading a vamp classic.



Well. Turns out I am not too old for Stephen King. This book is the first, last, and only book I can ever remember giving me shivers. The kind where I have to then go check the doors and windows before I go to sleep. I've read tons of King's books, and maybe some scared me, but I don't remember any of them creeping me out this much. This book is just plain creepy.



Parts of it were a little dull and unneccessary, like when I had to read little sections about all the townsfolk who were only in a scene or two. A couple of these little scenes were a little creepy--the guy at the dump who shoots the rats, the woman who avenges her rapist husband--but mostly, I didn't care much about those. I guess some were added to up the creepy factor, like the rats. I know SK has a thing about rats--they are in so many of his books! Mostly, though, I just wanted to get on with the story of the few survivors banding together slowly to take care of the vamps as they took care of the town of Jerusalem's Lot.



The main characters were easy to relate to, especially the kid (isn't there always the kid hero in King's books--a great way to draw sympathy and give plausibility to the monsters) and I loved the old teacher Mr. Burke, and the doctor, and even Father Callahan, although he disappeared a little too quick. Guess I'll have to find him in The Dark Tower books.



I also liked how not everyone survived, and I liked how it followed Dracula pretty closely. It could have done without a few of the character sketches, I thought, but otherwise, a fantastically creepy book!



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Hallo-week Book Reviews: Carrie by Stephen King

Carrie by Stephen King

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I'm not sure why I haven't read this book before now. In high school I read tons of Stephen King, but for some reason I skipped over this one. Maybe because it was thin and I liked the big thousand-plus page books he wrote. I was finally inspired to read this book because I saw the movie, liked it, and wanted to see if the book was better.



For me, it was a good read. Some of the parts got a little tedius, but overall, it was a good book. A little immature in the King realm, but that's to be expected from his first book. Some of the characters could have been better developed, IMO, and some of the exciting parts were too slow. They would have been better if the action had been speeded up some. Such as the part about Carrie after the prom, which went on and on, and I really lost interest and drifted off to sleep a few times during those parts. I did like how the book showed how alienating it can be to be an outcast, and how that made Carrie at sort of hateful person on the inside despite her religious upbringing and her usual character for most of the book. But when she had the power to get back at everyone, all the years of being picked on boiled to the surface. I thought the book did a good job of showing how brutal girls can be, even more so than boys.



This book was pretty good, but far from my favorite King book. Recommended for King fans, since this is a classic and his first book--you sort of have to read it.



View all my reviews

Coffin Hop!

Hey guys! As some of you know, I've been invited to participate in the Halloween Coffin Hop for horror authors. If you'd like to check it out, you can win tons of free stuff, play games, find new authors, etc. Click on the coffin hop badge to the right to go to the Coffin Hop site.

Also, I am doing a giveaway as my part. I'm giving away an e-ARC of my upcoming book, The Vigilantes (sequel to The Superiors). If you want to win a copy, here's how.

Follow my blog (+1 entry)
Follow my Twitter @lenahillbrand (+1)
Like my FB page http://www.facebook.com/LenaHillbrand (+1)
Post on FB about this giveaway (+2)
Post a blog about this giveaway/the Coffin Hop (+2)

Just leave a comment here letting me know what you've done, with links to your FB or blog post.

Thanks and have fun coffin hopping!

Ten Things I Love About You

Okay, so...It's fall, officially and in every other sense. And everyone knows fall is the best season. Obviously.

In honor of my favorite season, and my favorite month, I've made a list to prove why fall is once and for all the best season ever.

1. Jeans, glorious Jeans!

2. Not one, but two, holidays. One for family (Thanksgiving) and one for troublemaking wholesome fun with friends.

3. That would be Halloween, if you hadn't figured that out. Actually, number 3 is an extension of number 2, but come on, Halloween deserves its own number. Candy, Costumes, Carving.

4. Pumpkin patches. No matter how old you are, these things are fun. And local. And you get to pick a pumpkin for that carving I mentioned above, and support your local growers (unless your patch gets their pumpkins from Mexico, and then you can support growers in another country).

5. Um, leaves. Hello, what fun would it be if you had to call it autumn all the time and not fall? Falling leaves make fall.

6. Lighting the fire again. My house smells like wood smoke again...yay! Bonfires outside are good, too. Just don't let your costume catch on fire. Those synthetics go fast. You don't want to be the naked guy (or girl) with a scorched bum. And frankly, probably no one else wants you to be either.

7. The end of the heat-wave we call summer down here in the South. That's right, South with a capital S. When the summer temps are over 110 degrees for a week straight, you have one thing to look forward to. Fall. Unless you have a pool, and then you probably don't care. And also, you should invite me over.

8. Goodbye, bugs. Now I know lots of people who don't know the irritation of a mosquito hovering next to your ear for months at a time, but it's really annoying. Just trust me on that. And we won't even get into the other friendly neighborhood bugs who think they'll try out being little itchy Draculas for half the year. And how do we deal with bloodsuckers?

9. Changing my wardrobe. Even if I only buy one new sweater, it's worth it. I'm tired of all my summer clothes by now...ready to switch back into cozy winter mode.

10. What's number 10? Football? New Sam Adam's seasonal flavor? Halloween again? Rocky Horror Picture Show? Thriller playing on the radio? Octoberfest? Haunted Houses? Austin City Limits? I can't pick just one. And I'm sure I've left out about 10 more reasons why this month and this season 'totally rock, dude!' Oh, yeah, that was in honor of all the college students swarming back into town. Yep. That's good, too.

Review Wedneday: Stephen King's The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I very much enjoyed this story about a nine 'but big for her age' year-old girl who gets lost in the Maine wilderness. For the most part. So let's get down to it.



What I liked: The girl who loved baseball. Yep, that pretty much sums up why I loved this book. I mean, how can you not love a nine-year-old who loves baseball, in large part because she shared it with her absent-through-divorce father. And maybe I'm a little biased because I was a kid who loved basketball, and then baseball, and then football. Yep, I had favorite players, I could recount their stats. I knew who they pitched against, if they had trademark moves, etc. And for sure I could understand why and how baseball was her link to the world, how she listened to the games for solace and sanity and hope, for escape and, well, everything we love about sports as children or adults. And the girl was tough-as-nails but not unrealistically so. I didn't even mind that she cried ALL the time. I mean, not only was it realistic, but it didn't annoy me how, say, reading YA books about girls crying all the time makes me want to throw the book against the wall. No, when Trisha cried, it fit into the story and didn't make her seem like a spoiled whiny brat (sorry, I have a thing against girls who cry a lot in books). Instead of giving up and feeling sorry for herself, our plucky little heroine gets her resourceful butt up and goes on.



Which, incidentally, brings me to the next part of my review: what I didn't like so much. First of all...I may have read this wrong, but I'm pretty sure this is how it happens. Girl hiking in woods with family. Girl comes to fork in the road, goes off in the MIDDLE to pee, and gets lost. She tries to slant off to one side to catch up with her family on the trail, taking the short cut. Okay, so maybe the trail winds away somewhere and she wouldn't intersect it that way. So what does she do? She keeps walking. FOR NINE DAYS!!!!! Hello, why not just turn around? She's in the middle of a fork. When she realizes she's lost, if she'd turned around and gone back, she'd have to either run into one of the two trails or come back to the intersection. It's geographically not possible that she wouldn't. Draw a picture if you don't believe me. For such a smart, resourceful kid to not think of something so simple...I don't believe it for a minute. Not for a kid who knows what to eat in the woods better than I do, and I'm an adult who happened to grow up, that's right, IN THE WOODS!

The next thing that sort of bothered me was how she got sick from drinking clear pure stream water. That's pretty much a myth. If you drink stream/river water that comes out of a farm where there's runoff from animal dung, maybe. In the middle of a pristine forest? Not so much. I'd buy it if the swamp water, or the puddle water, made her violently ill ie food poisoning, but not the clean water. And the last thing. Yeah, I know, SK points out that this was her first bad decision, to go north towards Canada instead of south when she got to almost civilization. I could see how she'd miss when she was so close. I could see how she didn't hear the town. But who goes north? Come on, she's seen maps, right? She lives in Maine, right? Can anyone name a town north of Maine besides, um, Canada? Can anyone name a town south of Maine? Yeah, that's what I thought. This girl was way too smart to make those mistakes. If she'd been an idiot, I'd buy it. But then, she wouldn't have lived.



So I guess my final word would be this: come on, Mr. King. Don't fall back on the same lame old lost-in-the-woods cliches. Your fans expect more.



Also, like most of King's almost could-happen books, I didn't need the supernatural stuff. It was hokey. There's plenty of horror in real life, plenty of scary situations for a girl lost in the woods. We really don't need wasp-gods to know it's scary. Really. I like King's supernatural books fine, but some of them, I always think, are more plausible (aka scary) without it. Those elements just ruin the spine tingling "this could REALLY happen" vibe and distract/detract from the suspense. Maybe he just adds it bc he thinks the fans like that? I know I don't need it in every book. Not. At. All.



I definitely fell in love with the character in this book, which is one of the things that Stephen King does SO well. I just didn't buy all the circumstances. But overall, it was a satisfying, if not exactly terrifying, story.



I'd recommend to younger King fans or those just getting into his work. And YA readers. And people who have gotten or would like to get lost in the woods.



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Coffin Hop!

Hey all!

As many of you know, my favorite month is coming up tomorrow!

In honor of Halloween month, I'm participating in a Halloween Blog Hop.
Details below. It will run October 24-31.

Also, all of my book reviews for October will be for horror/thriller novels. As an extra special bonus, I am posting a blog every day of Halloween week--my Hallo-week book reviews! I will post twice about the Coffin Hop that week and the other 5 days will feature horror book reviews. Oh yeah, did I mention I love October?

I will let you know about the giveaway as the blog hop approaches! Feel free to check out the website ahead of time, and spread the news!

Review Wednesday: The Shining by Stephen King

The Shining by Stephen King

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I hadn't read any Stephen King for a while, so I forgot how awesome he is. It's wonderful (and wonderfully rare) to find a writer who can maintain suspense while creating such beautifully real characters. He never sacrifices character development for plot. Which is a good thing for readers like me, who can't really care what happens at all if I don't care who it's happening to.

I know people who can't read King because of his descriptions and development, people who think he's too slow to get to 'the good stuff.' Personally, I wish a lot more writers would take his lead and stop shoving 'the good stuff' down our throats from the first sentence to the last. Stephen King writes whole, complete novels. They have real, fully developed characters as well as action, and if he sacrifices some fast-paced action to make the characters real, it only adds depth to the story. Too many of the fantasy and suspense novels I’ve read have pretty much nothing going for the characters. They are flat, Barbie-and-Ken cutouts from magazines, with only physical description and no development past what they look like. If that’s what you’re looking for, King isyou’re your ‘cup of tea.’ His novels rarely have sequels. He says all he needs to say in one book, and it's plenty, and the endings of his books are, well, endings. Not teases for a following book. They are final, wrapped, complete. And usually good, although I didn't really care for the ending of this one.

In this book, as in many of King's novels, the hero is a child. I have come to understand King's fascination with child characters in horror novels after reading a couple of his nonfiction books. Children are more innocent, and therefore more psychically receptive than adults. They haven't quite yet internalized the impossible, and therefore, they are usually (in King's novels) the ones who figure out what's going on, and usually the ones who try to do something about it, often with the help of a receptive adult father figure. And it's a good thing the protagonist in this novel has one, because we all know what kind of man his father is.

I've heard a few people say that the father is the most tragic 'victim' in this haunted house classic, but I'm not sure I agree with that. The father was never a very likeable character for me, no matter how victimized he was. Sure, he was an addict, and trying to recover. But I never really got the sense that he loved his family as much as he loved the bottle. I thought that he was not only picked off because he was the weakest link, but also because perhaps there was something inherently evil in him, something that responded to the evil in the hotel. One of my only complaints about this book was the swiftness of Jack’s transformation. It seemed like in one chapter he’s a loving (if guilty) father and husband, struggling to put his life back together. Then suddenly in the next chapter he’s fantasizing about twisting his wife’s nipples off? It seemed too sudden for this kind of evenly-paced book. I skipped back to see if I’d missed something, or if it really was almost instantaneous. I thought the suspense of him going crazy could have been drawn out a little more.

I did thing that Stephen King did a great job capturing the emotions of the mother towards her son. I'm sure his wife helped him with that! I had a bit of a hard time relating to her white-bread personality, with how passive she was and how she could still love someone who had turned into a monster. But that was how she was supposed to be. Although I didn’t relate to (or even like) most of the characters in this book, it was still a superb read. Not one of King’s creepiest, although the hedge animals were pretty great.

Overall, this was a good book. I like King’s classics, and if you do too, this one is it.







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