Category: Book Report

I have always been a big fan of what would become known as counterfactual history; why, to this day, I have a large collection of Marvel What If comic books, wherein Uatu the Watcher examines alternate realities in which pivotal events in the Marvel Universe turned out differently than they did in the actual comic books. This volume, a sequel to a book I haven’t read, does the same with actual historical events, where historians and other people who write about history imagine what would have happened if history had gone another direction than it did.

Essays within the book include musings on what would have happened had Socrates died in battle (written by the blogpular Victor Davis Hanson, whose name isn’t even on the cover), what if Antony had won, what if Pontius Pilate had spared Jesus Christ, what if France had defeated Haiti, what if Lincoln hadn’t issued the Emancipation Proclamation, what if the Chinese had discovered the New World, and a number of what ifs revolving around World Wars I and II.

To sum up, in most of the essays not dealing with Socrates or World Wars I and II, the sum result is that the United States wouldn’t exist as we know it. Either it would be the eastern part of the Chinese empire, or part if a Caribbean/French empire, or anything but the oppressive regime it is. The book was written before September 11, 2001, and before chimphitler got re-elected, so I am sure that some of these writers have other what ifs in mind to cry into their lattes.

To illustrate how some of the speculation slightly skews anti-American, take the example of the essay “The Chinese Discovery of the New World, 15th Century”, wherein Theodore F. Cook, Jr., muses on the possibilities of expansion during the Ming Dynasty. The story centers around eunuch admiral Zheng He, who led several large armadas to Africa, India, and throughout the southwest Pacific, overcoming many youthful difficulties, including:

Selected for his alertness and courage by the general himself and marked a “candidate of exceptional qualities,” after enduring the excruciating agony of castration by knife (which traditionally removed both penis and testicles), the boy was assigned to the retinue of one of the emperor’s sons, the Prince of Yu (Zhu Di’s ititled during his father’s reign), [sic] at the capital of Nanjing.

So the Chinese were painfully emasculating a portion of their population, but on the other hand:

Might not the worst horrors of the Atlantic slave trade been aborted by a halt to Portuguese expansion along the African coast at this early date?

This author happily trades forced castration for stopping the Portuguese slave trade. To many academics, undoubtedly, it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

I found many such idealogical digs and inflammatory throwaway lines to note, but once the book got back to warfare, where apparently the serious historians play, it turned more coldly analytical.

Still, it’s a good read and worth your time as each essay explains what happened and how it might have changed, which serves to remind and reinforce one of historical knowledge one might have, or need. Counterfactual history, as the introduction notes, reminds us of the narrative of history instead of the dry dates and campaigns of history. Plus, it makes me feel like Uatu.

This book represents the best book value I’ve gotten all year. The book weighs in at 605 pages. I paid $.33 for it at Hooked on Books. That amounts to 18 pages per penny, friends, and you won’t find dime detective fiction any cheaper.

The book collects a number of short stories from the 1930s and 1940s from the pulp detective fiction. The authors include Raymond Chandler, John D. MacDonald, Erle Stanley Gardner, Paul Cain, and Robert Leslie Bellem (as well as Robert Bloch, Fritz Lieber and others). The language? Oh, yeah:

I grabbed her gently, but firmly; pulled her close to me. “No look, Frenchis, I like you, see? Your glims are like stars. Your stems belong behind footlights.”

Poetry.

Unfortunately, as with any book of this size, the authors feel the need to include stories that wander into the fantastic, including two Depression-era Robin Hoodesque superheroes, some Scooby-Dooish pseudo-supernatural thrillers, and a midget detective. Crikey, if I wanted to re-read The Defective Detective, I would have, or I would have gotten its sequel (if I could find it for three-for-a-buck).

Still, the book mixes the stories up, so when you read about a special mad scientist murder method in one story, you can rinse your mind out with some mindless two-fisted, slug-of-scotch action in the next.

I inherited this book from my grandmother and grandfather indirectly. So I didn’t pay anything for it, and the book is worth more than that.

It’s a set of lessons and steps to playing well with others. Unlike other self-help tomes, this one’s particularly literate. Carnegie draws on Benjamin Franklin, William James, William Shakespeare, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and other learned sources to make his points. He wrote this book originally in 1936, and it would testify to how far we’ve fallen as a culture if Dr. Phil only quotes luminaries such as Oprah in his books. After all, Carnegie must have expected his audience would know who William James was.

At the best of times, this book resembles all self-help books in presenting the philosophy of pragmatism, particularly in dealing with other people. Sometimes it reads like an Elements of Style for courtesy, but at its worst it strikes me as a sort of Becoming Peter Keating. After all, Carnegie would have you win friends and influence people by being pretty yang, by putting other people first and by not contradicting others directly.

I’ve seen too much of this behaviour from used car salesmen and marketing professionals to swallow the hook, but it’s convinced me to try to temper my natural surly nature. For example, I try to keep my net Carnegie Karma positive by not saying harshly critical things about people more than I compliment people. However, some days I still net positive through accounting gimmicks, such as telling another driver that his exceptional amorous ability undoubtedly traces to practice with his matriarch, but I’m working on it.

The book sold millions of copies in an earlier, more civil age, so perhaps there is something in it.

I bought this hardback book from Hooked on Books in Springfield (Missouri) for 33 cents (part of 3 for $1). Hey, it was worth it.

I don’t read a lot of horror because it really doesn’t scare me, but I bought this book because I figured it was worth the price. It was. It’s a collection of short stories dealing with ghosts and whatnot around trains. The fiction within the book splits its time between the United States and England, with most of the pieces appropriately enough set in the late part of the ninteenth century or the early twentieth. In between the stories, the editor recounts several real alleged hauntings near rails that might have inspired the stories.

A fairly even collection, with some highs and some lows (Algernon Blackwood, unfortunately). Stories by Charles Dickens, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and others.

Worth a look if you’re into that sort of thing.

I piad $1.95 for this book at Downtown Books in Milwaukee last month. As some of you will recall, I read Judge Me Not and On the Run in the last month. My affinity for John D. MacDonald and my respect for his talent and his range continue to grow.

A Key to the Suite represents less of a crime novel than a fictional anthropological study of a lifestyle in which a crime happens to occur–much like One More Sunday or Condominium, where a hurricane plays the part of the crime. MacDonald examines corporate politics and dirty dealings that happen as part of a convention in a Florida hotel. Floyd Hubbard, a hatchet man, has come to the convention to put together a confidential report on an executive about to get fired. However, the executive fires back with a scheme involving a prostitute whose affection will impugn Hubbard’s reputation and report.

The book’s fairly brutal and bleak in its resolution, but MacDonald really creates a sense of place. I can almost imagine the scene in the burgeoning Florida resort scene as a post World War II company man would have seen it.

I got to be more like this guy.

Curses! Although I bought five of Roger L. Simon’s Moses Wine novels in iBooks editions, the release order of the books got me. This book was released as a trade paperback by iBooks second after The Big Fix, so I picked it up second. Ha ha, you guys got me! This is actually a later book, 25 years after the first. Moses Wine is almost fifty, and one of those young children is in college and is accused of murder.

I guess that 25 years is the reason the author got a basic fact wrong regarding the plot of The Big Fix: that the politician was running for the Democrat nomination for President, not for re-election to the Senate. But I digress.

I like this Moses Wine better than his youthful counterpart. He’s no longer smoking hashish every couple of pages. Instead, he starts bawling every couple of pages. Sorry, wailing or sobbing, but same thing. Once again, it’s not someone I want to emulate, because I strive to remain emotionally stunted and repressed.

As I mentioned, the son has been accused of eco-terrorism which resulted in the death of a logger. Moses Wine goes to northern California and finds himself embroiled in a long running battle between eco-terrorists and eco-vigilantes, between Republicans in Congress and those who don’t want to rape Mother Nature on a pool table.

It’s a pretty good book, a quick and engaging read. In his introduction, Simon says he’s going for a more novelistic approach instead of a mystery novel. Well, he’s not as transcendent of genre as Chandler, but he’s not Elizabeth Linington.

I bought this book for six bucks, new, during my recent Springfield binge. Its cover announced that it’s the quintessential libertarian science fiction adventure. Hey, I’m a libertarian sort of fellow!

I fully expected this to be an Ayn Rand novel with some sci-fi verve, and that’s what it was. Basically, a cop from the dystopian future of 1987 (this book was originally published in 1980, so it’s an extrapolation of Jimmy Carter’s America) breaks on through to the other side–where the other side is a Libertarian paradise where George Washington didn’t put down the Whiskey Rebellion under his statist jackboot and the Hamiltonians were run out of the country. Unfortunately, the cop’s statist pursuers, well, pursue him and join up with the Hamiltonians in America and bring gasp! nuclear weapons.

So we don’t have the bounty of Galt’s speech with its pages of long paragraphs, but we do get a lot of shorter lectures from the enlightened libertarians. At the beginning of the book, it’s okay because the action isn’t overwhelmed, but at the end, when the book should be reaching climax, it cuts right to the talking. So, ultimately the book drags, but it’s another interesting dystopian future piece written twenty years ago (much like A Death of Honor).

Still, it was an enjoyable and easy read, fortunately for me; I also bought the sequel, The American Zone and would really hate to let it slip into the pile of books I’ve owned, but haven’t read, for over a decade. Unfortunately, that segment of my library is growing every year. Honest, Dr. Block, one day I will read that textbook I was required for my Literary Criticism class.

I bought this book, a 2000 paperback reprint of the 1973 novel, for five bucks during my book buying spree in Springfield this weekend (wherein I bought 26 new books for myself, which I cannot fit onto my swamped to read bookshelf and must stack on the floor). Mr. Simon, I want you to know that I bought it at an 80% off store, not a used book store, so I hope you’ll get your pennies at the end of the quarter from the purchase. Unlike other bloggers whose books I have bought used.

Well, the quality of the book drops from the cover, wherein Ross MacDonald lauds it, to the introduction, where an apparently hashish-enhanced Richard Dreyfuss, that guy who co-starred with Mike the Dog in Down and Out in Beverly Hills (and, I guess, The Big Fix movie, which would make him keenly insightful into American detective fiction). Dreyfuss gushes about the sixties, man, and how Moses Wine is all that and a big bowl.

The book certainly pays homage to Ross MacDonald and Raymond Chandler. The setting is a light version of Ross MacDonald’s California, not the romanticized landscape of Chandler. The main character is well-read and intelligent man, albeit one who indulges where Philip Marlowe would abstain. Sure, Marlowe drank, but tells a naked Carmen Sternwood to put her clothes on and go home. Wine? He smokes all the dope and hash profferred and takes the freebie from the prostitute. So the main character is likeable enough, but not someone whom I’d want to emulate. So he falls underneath Marlowe, Spenser, and others in the genre. I’m sure Moses Wine is a good role model if you want to be a self-indulgent adolescult (or however you would spell it phonetically to get the proper ess sound out of the sc) like some baby boomers, particularly those I would imagine in California. But not for this stoic-worshipping hard-boiled reader.

The plot, in a timely enough fashion, revolves around a barking moonbat whose support could derail a Democrat candidate’s chances in the primary, and a cabal of rich shadowy figures have their own reasons for it. Moses Wine has to delve, rather easily, into leftist political groups and individuals to find out why. Here’s a hint: It involves Satanism and gambling, but no overt Republicans, although holding companies and corporations play a role.

It’s also quite the period piece; as I was reading it, I was imagining it in the fashion of Altman’s The Long Goodbye which came out the same year.

I did have a little trouble keeping up with the characters and their roles when I was reading a chapter a night, but it eventually cleared into a climax which would have ended differently undoubtedly if Moses Wine carried a gun–which he doesn’t, of course.

But I enjoyed it, thankfully, since I bought the rest of the Moses Wine series except for Wild Turkey for five dollars a throw this weekend. Because he’s a blogger, see, and I hope someday he’ll repay the favor.

When I was in Milwaukee in October, I visited Downtown Books and bought a number of John D. MacDonald paperbacks, including this one, immediately after I read Judge Me Not. Well, okay, it was the next morning, but I plunked down $1.95 each for five of them.

On the Run runs long at 144 pages, but the title page indicates it was based on a story published in Cosmopolitan. A lot of the filler material includes long passages of declarations of love between the protagonists and a lot of early 1960s I’m OK, You’re OKism. Also, orgasms for women are good, and women who want them are not too much for a man to handle, they’re just right.

The premise, or at least the tease on the back cover, is that a man on the run from the mob is startled to find a beautiful woman who claims to represent his unremembered rich grandfather who wants to find his estranged grandchildren before he dies. The Man On The Run (MOTR) thinks it’s a scam, but he soon falls for the Cosmobabble of the liberated woman, who happens to be the rich grandfather’s nurse.

The book represents the worst pacing I have ever seen in a John D. MacDonald book, and I really hope he chalked this one up as an experimentation in style and a departure because he wanted to grow as an artist. However, at its slight weight, it’s interesting enough to follow to its conclusion, one of the darkest I have ever seen in a John D. MacDonald book–although the dark ending matches the beginning of The Green Ripper.

Well, sorry, MacDonald fans for blowing it for you.

I picked this book at a yard sale some years ago and have just gotten around to it now. It’s a thin book, 124 pages, broken into chapters that provide different puzzles/means of cognition and intelligent ways to approach them. Memorization tips, visual skills, and whatnot.

It’s an interesting little book, with nice little tricks. However, it’s not going to put me over the cusp into the warm embrace of Mensa, mostly because the book doesn’t cure lazy. But if you’re motivated to improve your thought, it’s a quick enough read.

I bought this book from my aunt at our semiannual yard sale, and I insisted upon paying her the whole blooming quarter because I don’t want to have her come begging from money from us when Social Security collapses. Also, I like John D. MacDonald.

I have to admit that this is the most exciting tale of a City Manager I’ve ever read. Of course, the city manager and his assistant are going to rid a small town of the syndicate, which this book charmingly misspells as maffia because it was written before the Godfather came out. The Maffia don’t want to go cleanly, and before the 160 pages elapse, murder, kidnaping, and other various mayhem erupts. Also, there’s a fair amount of sex.

I grew up on these potboilers, or at least kettlewhistlers, and I’ve forgotten how much fun they are to read (and they’re very instructive, too; for example, one can learn a lot about how to treat members of the opposite sex, particularly women of the night with hearts of gold). So I ventured to Downtown Books this weekend and bought a couple more.

I wonder if John D. MacDonald, churning several paperback originals a year throughout the 1950s and 1960s, could imagine how well his books would hold up so that some punk kid in the 21st century would read them and find inspiration.

I bet he didn’t.

I bought this book on the remainder rack at Borders for $1.00. It’s by a relatively obscure columnist from Minnesota….

All right, all right, I bought the book full price, okay? Lileks gets his fifteen cents of my money. Not that he needs it with his following, wherein acolytes daily stoop at his altar and do whatever his voice commands them.

The book features photos of mod (er, sorry, slang from the wrong decade) rooms depicted in interior design magazines from the 1970s interspersed with Lileks’ wit. Undoubtedly, most of them are outliers on the stylishness scale, but you’ve got to see them to believe them. Sure, it’s a rip-off of an X-Entertainment feature from a couple years back, but hey, Lileks has the pull to get it into print.

That aside, I liked this book more than I liked The Gallery of Regrettable Food because man, I can remember what it was like in the 1970s. A lot of the rooms in the book were in finished basements or in attics turned into additional bedrooms. Who has those now? Out here in the suburbs, houses are carefully crafted to have no space into which you can expand.

Also, this book reminded me of my red velvet table. You see, when I was in middle school, my family received a houseware which was essentially a cable spool wrapped in a shaggy red fabric. It’s a trailer park thing, you dig? When we moved into an actual house, we brought it along. I took it to college. I brought it home from college. I moved it to my apartment. Hey, it was a functional piece of furniture, of which I had a full eight in my apartment. Then it ran (or rolled) headlong into my wife, who has taste.

So I could relate better to this book because, quite frankly, but a birth a couple decades too late, I could have decorated like this. Actually, some of it’s kind of interesting. So I might yet. Also, Lileks’s text is shorter and more less linear than in TGORF, where he examined entire cookbooks in detail and each section ran on beyond its natural lifespan. With only a photograph to go on, Lileks’ quick humor fits better. Also, I read it in a night.

And I have a collector’s edition, which contains an incomplete word wrap erratum in the the author bubble on page 11. So run out and get yours before they correct it in the next printing. I read this book in Milwaukee, though, a city where no one can spell anything anyway, so this error was only one of many, many I encountered this weekend so I’ll let Lileks off easily by not crippling his Web host with a Briantrickle from this review. Hey, it’s almost the least I could do.

I bought this paperback (oh, the horror, the horror!) from the local library for a quarter. Heather and I, although we’re upper middle class, we’re the evil upper middle class who buy books second hand so the poor starving artists don’t receive their pittances and from the library for less than the books are worth as sort of another tax break for us. Muhahaha!

So what you’ve got here, basically, is a book about immortals that was published ten years ago based on a movie that came out twenty years ago. Wrap your heads around that. Man, where was I ten years ago? Working as an assistant editor at a magazine and moonlighting as a produce clerk, which is where I was when I got the call that my father died. Man, that’s a heavy thing to come up from a cheap little multimedia tie-in book like this, but wow, has it been ten years since that syndicated television show aired? Yessir.

This book, which might have been the first in the series, features the characters from the movie and the series and they run about, lopping off other immortals’ heads, which really means that the immortals are only mostly immortal, but if you don’t know the mythology of the bit before you pick up the book, you probably wouldn’t pick it up in the first place, even for a quarter. But I digress….don’t I?

Unlike the first movie and most of the episodes of the television series I saw, this book takes place entirely in the past, with an old immortal who thinks he’s a god and who doesn’t understand the rules of the Game, which to be honest I’m not entirely sure of, either. But he vows revenge on Duncan and Connor Macleod. 220 pages later, it doesn’t work so well.

Sorry to ruin it, but the Highlander lives on to fight in other books in the line. It’s not a bad junk read, a bit slow in spots, and I sometimes get the sense that the author has done just enough historical research to mention but not really give much sense of place. But the flaws with the book–that it’s written with a definite sense of being adapted from television and lacking in proper setting and mood–come with the genre.

Over a number of Guinnesses as we watched the snow fall on my birthday this year, which I spent in Milwaukee helping a friend move, we exchanged book reading recommendations. I suggested Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, and my friend, who is a part-time Elvis impersonator and full-time Elvis lookalike, suggested this book. When my beautiful wife and I visited Florida this spring, we went used book shopping, which is our wont, and at The Book Exchange on Northlake in West Palm Beach, the book faced out and caught my eye. So I spent ten dollars on it, because my friend really wanted me to read it.

Well, it’s not a hard read. The full title is Caught in a Trap : Elvis Presley’s Tragic Lifelong Search for Love. The introduction says the author’s goal is not to evangelize. The book is published by Word Publishing. You can guess which impulse won out.

Rick Stanley’s mother married Vernon Presley after his wife died, so the Stanley brothers are Elvis’s stepbrothers. That’s his in onto the lifestyle of Elvis, as his family moved to Graceland when Elvis mustered out of the Army in 1960. Stanley became part of Elvis’s traveling crew when he was sixteen, so he had some access.

Still, instead of a straight biography, we get an evangelist building a parable. Two brothers, one really talented and beloved, the other lower key but saved by his eventual conversion to a mid-seventies blue-jeans-and-tee-shirts denomination of Christianity. Stanley relates actual events in Elvis’s life, but he adds pop psychological interpretation to Elvis’s inner state that emphasizes his parable. He also interjects a number of biographical details from his life, which he sets up as a parallel to Elvis’s except for the love of a good Christian woman which will ultimately redeem him from the world of the entertainment industry and the drugs. The final chapter takes place after Elvis’s death, where Stanley comes out on his own as a legitimate evangelist speaker, loved by many because he used to serve the King and now serves The King.

The story and the parable and everything are an interesting read; it sounds as though the story would have made an interesting novel of some sort. Unfortunately, it’s not a good Elvis biography as the man really only plays a bit role in the greater story the author’s trying to tell.

I was first introduced to O’Neil De Noux ten years ago (already) by my friend Stever. He also introduced me to Laurel K. Hamilton, to whom I have introduced my beautiful, but only lightly posting lately, wife. So Stever’s gift lives on eight years after he moved to a better job with a better junkyard back east.

I probably read this book when Stever loaned me his collection, but I’ve been looking for them lately in used book stores. I scored this paperback on our recent excursion to Kansas City, and the fact that I paid two and a half bucks for a paperback should indicate what I think of the series.

Basically, Dino LaStanza’s a new homicide cop in New Orleans, and he’s quite the hotshot after solving the Slasher case (in a book prior to this one). He’s feeling his age (he’s ancient at 31) and it doesn’t help–well, actually, it does–that he’s seeing a younger woman. Like 22. Hey, I know the feeling. I’m ancient at 32, and I cannot keep up with my younger, more attractive, and more energetic wife.

LaStanza catches a whodunit murder–meaning anything which involves more than a percursory investigation–he’s in the pressure cooker again because you’re only as good as your last case. Except this victim is in the Mafia, and suddenly LaStanza’s dealing not only with people who’d put a two .22 slugs in you for no known reason, but with his own Sicilian heritage.

The O’Neil De Noux books are tidy little police procedurals with grit, gristle, and some pretty steamy sex scenes in them. Although they’re not Ed McBain, and although the book didn’t live up to ten years’ worth of idealization, it’s a good, quick read. If you can find it. The book’s out of print and it wasn’t a blockbuster release even in 1990 or 1991.

I bought this book as part of my initial membership with the Writers Digest Book Club last year, and as all writers who subscribe to that book club want the cheap Writer’s Market, and everything else is gravy.

This book looked colorful, and its paragraph description led me to believe it would inspire me in my quest to write suspense novels and mysteries. Well, at least it didn’t take too long to read.

The book is a cross between a morbid coffeetable book, chock full of crime scene photos interspersed with movie stills, and an almost textbookish overview of crimes and their investigations. As a matter of fact, the author spends the introduction explaining that he’s written textbooks. So he’s a credible witness. Until he gets to the Firearms section of the Means to Murder chapter (chapter 2), which starts:

Firearms (other than crossbows, which are occasionally used as murder weapons) fall into two categories: smooth bore or rifled.

And a couple paragraphs later:

Single-shot automatics have to be loaded manually each time the gun is fired.

This section triggered enough doubt about the expert testimony that the author’s presenting to look with a skeptical eye on any technical detail within the book, which pretty much rendered the author’s claims to authority kinda moot.

Plus, it really only captures and distills the procedures and considerations given to a crime (particularly murder) that one would get from a number of years of Ed McBain, Thomas Philbin, and O’Neil De Noux. Of course, it includes the aforementioned photographs, so the actual text of its 190 some pages only really comprises 110 pages or so, but it’s still textbook enough to lack excitement.

Perhaps I’ll have gotten something from the page-long case studies in murders from Ted Bundy to the Unabomber to more obscure–to Americans–cases from the U.K. But probably not.

My beautiful wife gave me this book for no particular occasion. THIS JUST IN (since she’s watching me type this): she heard Bill Sammon on KMOX radio and thought I would like it, but I repeat it was not for my birthday or Christmas or anything.

And then she read it before I did.

I can only imagine the glee with which the historians of the future will dig into the plethora of primary secondary sources for the politics of our time. Tomes such as Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, When You Ride Alone You Ride with Bin Laden, Slander, Treason, Stupid White Men, and other commentary by pundits, comedians, and know-nothings, or the books written by the disgruntled government officials, or whoever wants to make a quick buck off of the suddenly bestselling venomous tome collection.

Future historians will find this book more useful, as it tells the story of the Bush administration, particularly in the run up and execution of the Iraq war, and presents the narrative as the Bush administration would want it written. Sure, it’s lightly partisan, particularly in the choice of verbs to connect a quote to a speaker who disagrees with the Bush administration, but it’s not invested heavily in name calling or scoring cheap points. The book explores how the straight ahead style of the administration often confounds its self-appointed betters.

It’s an encouraging book, and it’s inside baseball in some places, but you’re a political junkie anyway if you’re reading this blog. So read the book if you’d like. Enjoy it while it’s relevant, before it becomes just one more book in the stacks in some university library where it will end up.

I bought this book earlier this year, for full price (minus 30%) from Borders because I didn’t think I read enough contemporary fiction, or perhaps genre fiction, or maybe just good fiction. I was right; I read this book in under two days from the previous fiction book I read, which is some number of weeks less than it took me to read the penultimate fiction book. Maybe I shouldn’t buy all of my books for under a dollar.

So, onto Odd Thomas. This is the first Koontz I’ve read, undoubtedly influenced by those strange disembodied voices I heard telling me to read Odd Thomas–that is, the radio commercials for it. So I gave it a whirl, and I liked it. But since this is “horror” fiction, I have to compare Koontz to Stephen King, and I like them both so far, but each has different strengths.

The first person narrator of this book engaged me immediately, and the voice carried me through the book. The book builds a lot of small incidents into a climax of less scope than a King book, but the voice carries the reader. King’s books begin with what the dark half in The Dark Half would call the wetwork; third person narration, with each character likeable, but inevitably they start dropping like flies pretty early.

On the other hand, King’s foreshadowing is more subtle; although Koontx does the same, it’s obvious that the paragraphs he dedicates to foreshadowing are foreshadowing; however, I forgive him that.

The book deals with a 20-year-old fry cook in a desert community in California who sees dead people. When a stranger comes into the diner where he cooks, followed by a number of shadowy harbingers of bloodshed, Odd Thomas knows trouble is coming. And as he badly foreshadows, the trouble will change his life and that of his town, Pico Mundo, forever.

That’s a shorter summary than you’ll get on the dust jacket, but it will take you not much longer to read the book.

And I don’t want to spoil anything for you, but Deckard was a replicant.