My review of Doctor Sleep by Stephen King

Doctor Sleep by Stephen King
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It was a thrill to revisit Danny, all grown up and full of problems, and to watch as he finally overcame his demons and use his powers to help others. Then he mentors a child who is even more powerful than him and winds up helping defend her against the True Knot, a group of shining-eating entities that once were people.

There's a lot of great stuff in there. It's not a rehash of The Shining, but it certainly evokes memories of it. Doctor Sleep started a little slowly, and it definitely doesn't have the creepy feel that The Shining did. But Doctor Sleep is a more expansive story with a bigger picture. The character of Abra - the little girl that Dan helps - is very compelling and well-imagined. Her powers are incredible and, frankly, scary to imagine when hitched to the mind of a 12 year old.

No one can tell a story like King does, particularly when it comes to all the little stuff along the way and the dialogue that makes King so loved by the everyday reader. The tidbits of blue collar dialogue. The details of AA meetings and quotes. Snippets of well-placed lyrics and poetry. Little recurring visions.

From a writer's perspective, King had quite a few "point of view shifts", where the story suddenly jumps from one character's POV to another's. These annoyed me, but it's something King has always done. I prefer to stay in one character's POV until changing to another chapter. But this wasn't a big issue. The ending was satisfying to me, something I can't say about all of King's books.

One last comment: the book of Doctor Sleep follows the storyline of the book of The Shining. The movie does not. The movie for Doctor Sleep follows the storyline of the Kubrick movie for The Shining. And there are some HUGE differences between the book and the movie, like the ENTIRE ending. Both are equally satisfying, but in very different ways. Be sure to keep that in mind as you watch or read them back-to-back.

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Cheers and happy reading!

A great interview of me by Worldhoppers' Guild

Worldhopper's Guild is a great site for learning about up-and-coming authors, and I'm please that they recently featured me and my recently-released horror story collection, AROUND THE CORNER FROM SANITY.

As part of that feature, they also did an interview of me. Learn:

• How my dayjob as a scientist affects my fiction writing
• What quirks I have for getting in the writing mode
• Where I find my inspiration
• How my readers can best engage with my writing
• More!

Read the interview HERE.

(RELATED: For prior interviews of me, see HERE and HERE.)

Cheers and happy reading!

My book, Around the Corner from Sanity, is featured at Worldhoppers' Guild

Worldhoppers' Guild is a great site that features up-and-coming speculative fiction authors. I'm honored that they have now posted a page for me and my horror / paranormal humor story collection, Around the Corner from Sanity.

You can also go to their site to read, for free, the first story in the book, "Purgatory's Price" (What would happen if you had to play a game show to get into heaven?).

They also have featured other authors on their pages. It's a great place to peruse those authors and their content.

Also, watch for a Q&A interview of me, coming soon at that site!

Cheers and happy reading!

My review of "Diggum" by Isaac Thorne

Diggum by Isaac Thorne
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was a dark humor sort of paranormal short story available on Amazon for a dollar.

From Amazon: "Meet Diggum, the local graveyard caretaker, who lives in a small cottage at the edge of the lot. Diggum has spent most of his life angry with God, whom he blames for the devastating house fire that cost Diggum his family. But Diggum has a secret. It is a secret he will carry to his own grave. It is a secret that he hopes will finally get him his ultimate revenge on God."

My review:
I got a chuckle out of Diggum's dark humor. The main character had a very consistent, folksy voice. He was twisted in his logic, and his goal of burning remains so they didn't go to God was intriguing. Told in first person, it was a little window into the crazy old, murderous, cemetery caretaker's head. I won't give it away, but the ending is a paranormal treat. And I got some good laughs. Worth a dollar or a pound to purchase this quick read!

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Cheers and happy reading!

Collaborative storytelling - The Enchantress of Tanglewood (Part I)

Rules: Read the excerpt below. Then VOTE with your choice on how you think the story should continue.

The Enchantress of Tanglewood -- Part I

No one goes in the Tanglewood. But Tarynn dared, and she would come to regret it.

(Image by Stefan Keller from Pixabay)

Mushroom hunters are an odd bunch. Part amateur mycologists, they can rattle off scientific names and quote cryptic ecological literature. Part forest rangers, they traverse difficult terrain as if born there. And part secret agent, they engage in espionage to find the clandestine mushroom hunting grounds of others while keeping their own secret.

It was this last quality that drove Tarynn to explore the forbidden forest. The first Fall rains had come. Prime time for chanterelle hunting in the drizzly woods of Oregon's Coastal Range. Cantharellus cibarius was easy to spot – a perky orange-yellow poking up out of the mossy and drab brown forest floor, its fluted stem rising several inches to a vaguely-oyster shaped cap. And if she was lucky, she might even come across king boletes.

The decades were replete with stories of missing hunters and hikers who wandered into the Tanglewood. Of bizarre and gruesome screams from its depths. Of strange mists that seemed to transport those who entered its margins. And children's tales of witches and devils wandering its dense foliage. But the lure of those delicately delicious fungi, sautéed in a bit of butter or put into a cream sauce, and her own personal patch to harvest, was more than enough impetus to challenge the spirits of the wood.

There were no trails. And after several hours of climbing over downed fir trees and wading through thickets of sword fern and wild rhododendron, Tarynn found herself lost. Worse, the day was waning fast. She had the distinct feeling of being watched with increasingly predatory eyes as the quiet woods seemed to close in on her.

Tarynn stopped and drank the last of her water, the hair standing up on the back of her neck. She turned at the crack of a branch. "Hello?" she called out. Only silence answered. Long shadows grew in the waning light filtering through the thick forest canopy and bramble.

Then the shadows moved. There was no breeze, yet the leaves fluttered. The limbs bent. The woods came alive as if a tempest roared.

Terror gripped her. She ran, but within minutes was stopped by a thicket so dense she would have to crawl and squeeze to get through.

Tarynn turned, her pulse beating in her neck, and faced a sight she could hardly comprehend.

A fog formed around the thicket and coalesced around limb and leaf. The corpus of an entity emerged, its long limbs reticulating from downed wood. Its skin and breasts were composed of the bark of trunks. Its long hair was formed of moss and lichen. Then it opened its eyes -- portals of darkness that swallowed Tarynn's attention. With words that spoke with the whisper of wind through the canopy, it said, "You have trespassed," and reached toward Tarynn.

How should Tarynn react?

1. Fight for her life
2. Appeal to the entity
3. Make a run for it
4. Cast a Wiccan spell

--> Cast your vote HERE.

Do you measure space monsters in meters or feet?

A couple days ago I was happily typing away at my space opera scifi novel in my favorite coffee shop, sipping on my chai latte, when my hero, Dirken Nova, saw a massive alien emerge from a tunnel....

Grimmag Ruby-Eye was the largest Eradini that Dirken had ever seen. He was easily twenty five feet long and perhaps ten feet wide. Like others of his species, he was basically a giant maggot with a wide, tubular body that wobbled as if filled with jelly.

But wait....  I stopped typing and read back over that bit. Something bothered me about it. Well, besides comparing an alien to jelly....

And then I realized. I was measuring this beastly alien using the English (Imperial) system. But isn't this a scifi novel set a thousand years from now?? Shouldn't it be a bit more scientific? Shouldn't it be metric?? Shouldn't that be eight meters long by three meters wide? (I'm rounding the value, here).

I'm a scientist by day. I work in the metric system all day long. It just makes sense. Everything is a base-ten and easy to convert between units. Well, except maybe for cooking.

Yet I'm from the United States and, according to my blog stats, the majority of you reading this blog are from the United States as well. The U.S. hasn't yet fully adopted the metric system for some inane reason. It's in lonely company, along with Liberia and Myanmar. If I say that something is three meters long, most of my fellow Americans would scratch their head and puzzle over what that would look like, maybe getting their cell phones out to look it up.

So I got some other opinions. I ran a poll on Twitter (Twitter's great for that!). And the response was overwhelming....

As you see, "metric" won the lion's shares of votes at 64%.

I think the most compelling argument that people made in the comments is that this is the future and science fiction readers are more likely to be fluent with science measurements, which are almost always metric.

One Twitter follower (ScifiFan) pointed out that a meter is not the same on Earth as on Mars, but it turns out he was using the old definition (originally, a meter was defined as "one ten-millionth of the distance between the equator and the north pole," which would certainly be different on different planets. But later it was redefined as "the length of the path traveled by light in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second." (Wikipedia) That's an easy number to remember, right?

So I'll go with metric.

As another Twitter follower (Benjamin W. Bass @TheDarkRabbit) commented:

In space, no one can hear you divide by 12....

Cheers and happy reading!

My review of The Starving by Jon Dobbin

The Starving by Jon Dobbin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I found The Starving to be surprising and original. First off, it's a horror/western genre mash-up, which in itself is pretty unique. Louis L'amour meets Bram Stoker (though this isn't a vampire story, it shares the investigative and pursuit quality of it). And it is a different take on an authentic North American monster from Native American mythology, though I won't spoil the nature of it here.

Three bounty hunters capture an Indian and travel to Colorado to collect their bounty. But their goal changes when they volunteer to help the local sheriff of a small town and his deputy hunt down a creature that is slaughtering and eating the citizens. Soon they, and their Indian captive, are caught up in a life-and-death struggle against a supernatural, ravenous beast that seems undefeatable, in the wilds of the wintery Colorado forests.

I consider myself a seasoned reader, but even I was surprised by the ending -- then surprised again. This is a tale that rides high in the saddle and will leave you hungry for more.

Buy the book on Amazon HERE.

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Cheers and happy reading!