Tails of Wonder and Imagination edited by Ellen Datlow

About the book: What is it about the cat that captivates the creative imagination? No other creature has inspired so many authors to take pen to page. Mystery, horror, science fiction, and fantasy stories have all been written aobut cats.

From the legendary editor ellen Datlow comes Tails of Wonder and Imagination, showcasing forty cat tales by some of today's most popular authors. With uncollected stories by Stephen King, Carol Emshwiller, Tanith Lee, Peter S. Beagle, Elizabeth Hand, Dennis Danvers, and Theodora Goss and a previously unpublished story by Susanna Clarke, plus feline-centric fiction by Neil Gaiman, Kelly Link, George R.R. Martin, Lucius Shepard, Joyce Carol Oates, Graham Joyce, Catherynne M. Valente, Michael Marshall Smith, and Many others.

Tails of wonder and Imagination features more than 200,000 words of stories in which cats are heroes and stories in which they're villains; tales of domestic cats, tigers, lions, mythical part-cat beings, people transformed into cats, cats transformed into people. And yes, even a few cute cats.

My thoughts: I chose this book of short stories for two reasons: I like stories about cats and I needed a short story collection for one of my challenges. For the most part I enjoyed this book. It was mostly fantasy with a healthy number of stories falling into dark fantasy and horror. The scariest was Cat in Glass by Nancy Etchemendy. Only two of the stories got me smiling and those were: Gordon, the Self-Made Cat by Peter S. Beagle and The Burglar Takes a Cat by Lawrence Block. One of the cat series I follow is about Midnight Louie and is written by Carole Nelson Douglas so I was happy to see a short Midnight Louie here. One of my favorites was the retelling of a Japanese fairy story called The Poet and the Inkmaker's Daughter by Elizabeth Hand.

I did not like that so many of the stories included the cats coming to some kind of harm. My recommendation will be to those of you who enjoy reading fantasy. I have to say that I love the cover!

Rating: B

Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King

About the Book: "I believe there is another man inside every man, a stranger . . ." writes Wilfred Leland James in the early pages of the riveting confession that makes up "1922," the first in this pitch-black quartet of mesmerizing tales from Stephen King.

For James, that stranger is awakened when his wife, Arlette, proposes selling off the family homestead and moving to Omaha, setting in motion a gruesome train of murder and madness.

In "Big Driver," a cozy-mystery writer named Tess encounters the stranger along a back road in Massachusetts when she takes a shortcut home after a book-club engagement. Violated and left for dead, Tess plots a revenge that will bring her face-to-face with another stranger: the one inside herself.

"Fair Extension," the shortest of these tales, is perhaps the nastiest and certainly the funniest. Making a deal with the devil not only saves Dave Streeter from a fatal cancer but provides rich recompense for a lifetime of resentment.

When her husband of more than twenty years is away on one of his business trips, Darcy Anderson looks for batteries in the garage. Her toe knocks up against a box under a worktable and she discovers the stranger inside her husband. It's a horrifying discovery, rendered with bristling intensity, and it definitively ends "A Good Marriage."

Like Different Seasons and Four Past Midnight, which generated such enduring films as The Shawshank Redemption and Stand by Me, Full Dark, No Stars proves Stephen King a master of the long story form.

First lines:
1922: My name is Wilfred Leland James, and this is my confession.
Big Driver: Tess accepted twelve compensated speaking engagements a year, if she could get them.
Fair Extension: Streeter only saw the sign because he had to pull over and puke.
A Good Marriage: The one thing nobody asked in casual conversation, Darcy thought in the days after she found what she found in the garage was this: How's your Marriage?

My Thoughts: The 4 stories in this collection had this Constant Reader up late two nights in a row. They aare dark tales. I found these to be especially creepy fare because they were, for the most part, about human nature rather than monsters and the supernatural. The main characters were, as is King's want (and as he stated in his afterward) ordinary people placed in extraordinary circumstances, they are easy to relate to. Who hasn't been afraid of getting a flat tire on a lonely road? How awful would it be to find your spouse was keeping a DARK secret?

My least favorite of the four was the story "Fair Extension." It was the only one that had any real amount of the supernatural, the man selling his soul to the devil. Well he didn't sell his soul, he paid money. When reflecting on this I decided it was my least favorite in part because there was no good guy to come out on top. The bad guy got it all. I didn't feel for the main character at all. he was filled with hatred and greed because he was jealous......of his "best" friend.

The most heart pounding one was "A Good Marriage" which King based on the BTK serial killer. The first part of it was rather bland, what a great set up for what came next.

The one that hit home the most was "Big Driver." In this one we find Tess, an author of cozy mysteries, stuck on a back road with a flat. Raped and left for dead, she seeks revenge. The ending was predicable and satisfying. One time I had a flat in the middle of the night on a stretch of road that was deserted and unpopulated in the early 80s, a time before everyone had a cell phone. While nothing bad happened to me it was really scary.

I'm going to rate this as an A for all you Constant Readers, suspense, and horror fans. If you read true crime 3 of the the 4 may appeal to you. I'll save this one and reread it sometime.

Rating: A

What the Night Knows by Dean Koontz

About the book :In the late summer of a long ago year, a killer arrived in a small city. His name was Alton Turner Blackwood, and in the space of a few months he brutally murdered four families. His savage spree ended only when he himself was killed by the last survivor of the last family, a fourteen-year-old boy.

Half a continent away and two decades later, someone is murdering families again, recreating in detail Blackwood’s crimes. Homicide detective John Calvino is certain that his own family—his wife and three children—will be targets in the fourth crime, just as his parents and sisters were victims on that distant night when he was fourteen and killed their slayer.

As a detective, John is a man of reason who deals in cold facts. But an extraordinary experience convinces him that sometimes death is not a one-way journey, that sometimes the dead return.

Here is a ghost story like no other you have read. In the Calvinos, Dean Koontz brings to life a family that might be your own, in a war for their survival against an adversary more malevolent than any he has yet created, with their own home the battleground. Of all his acclaimed novels, none exceeds What the Night Knows in power, in chilling suspense, and in sheer mesmerizing storytelling.

First Lines: What year these events transpired is of no consequence. where they occurred is not important. The time is always and the place is everywhere.

My Thoughts: As usual when I read Koontz the story gabbed me at the start and had me staying up late reading to find out what would happen next. Koontz really knows how to tell a story that will not let go until the book ends. This was a chilling read that had me caring for and rooting for the the ordinary people he plopped down in the middle of this nightmare. While it won't be on the top of my favorite DK books list it was definitely a scary fun read.

Rating: B

Links:
Dean Koontz (video trailer)

Darkness Under the Sun by Dean Koontz

About the book: The chilling account of a pivotal encounter between innocence and ultimate malice, Darkness Under the Sun is the perfect read for Halloween–or for any haunted night–and reveals a secret, fateful turning point in the career of Alton Turner Blackwood, the killer at the dark heart of What the Night Knows, the forthcoming novel by #1 New York Times bestselling author Dean Koontz. There once was a killer who knew the night, its secrets and rhythms. How to hide within its shadows. When to hunt. He roamed from town to town, city to city, choosing his prey for their beauty and innocence. His cruelties were infinite, his humanity long since forfeit. But still…he had not yet discovered how to make his special mark among monsters, how to come fully alive as Death.
This is the story of how he learned those things, and of what we might do to insure that he does not visit us.

First line: A week before his eleventh birthday, when Howie Dugley climbed to the roof of the former Boswell's Emporium to watch the normal people doing all kinds of ordinary things along Maple Street, he saw the monster for the first time.

My thoughts: This was a quick read and a good one. I liked Howie, the child and adult, a lot. Koontz has always been able to do that for me, create likable characters with good hearts that I want to root for. I felt bad for Howie and the decision he had to make at his young age. This is not just a horror story it is a psychological thriller. This novella, only found in eBook form, stands alone well but I am glad that there is more in the novel What the Night Knows. (I have to get it off my wish list and into the house, soon.) The tension built well and kept me turning pages. The creepiness of the story held on all the way to the end. If you have never read Dean Koontz, this is a great way to sample his work.

Rating:

Quote: "There's always a parade, Howie. When it's something you can't ever join but only watch, then it's a parade"

Links:
Dean Koontz

Riding the Bullet by Stephen King

About the Book: Riding the Bullet, the tale of a terrible encounter near a lonely graveyard, is, as the narrator points out, the kind of ghost story told around campfires. It's no surprise that no one tells such a story as well as Stephen King. From the moment Alan, a college student, decides to hitchhike to see his mother in the hospital (his car is out of action) and further decides to avoid the main highway where police might ticket him, you can imagine what's coming, and this makes what does come more awful and delicious. Josh Hamilton can't do a Maine accent (as who can not born to it?), so it's too bad he tried; everything else about this reading is delightful.

From Wikipedia: Riding the Bullet is a novella by Stephen King. This work marks King's debut on the Internet. Simon & Schuster, with technology by SoftLock, first published Riding the Bullet in 2000 as the world's first mass-market electronic book, available for download at $2.50. In 2002, it was collected in King's collection Everything's Eventual.

First Line: I've never told anyone this story, and never thought I would -- not because I was afraid of being disbelieved, exactly, but because I was ashamed...and because it was mine.

My Thoughts: What a scary, fun read. It's pure Steven King to take an ordinary person and put them smack in the middle of a nightmare. Being short I was afraid I would feel the story was incomplete, which is my feeling with most short stories I read. However the entire story is here. It had my heart racing as I flipped pages on my Nook. But as Alan's mother was fond of saying "Fun is fun and done is done." And so it is.

Rating:

The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan

Synopsis:In Mary's world there are simple truths. The Sisterhood always knows best. The Guardians will protect and serve. The Unconsecrated will never relent. And you must always mind the fence that surrounds the village; the fence that protects the village from the Forest of Hands and Teeth. But, slowly, Mary’s truths are failing her. She’s learning things she never wanted to know about the Sisterhood and its secrets, and the Guardians and their power, and about the Unconsecrated and their relentlessness. When the fence is breached and her world is thrown into chaos, she must choose between her village and her future—between the one she loves and the one who loves her. And she must face the truth about the Forest of Hands and Teeth. Could there be life outside a world surrounded in so much death?

First line: My mother used to tell me about the ocean.

My Thoughts: I truly enjoyed this YA dystopian novel. I thought it verged on horror with the gruesome deaths and descriptions of the Unconsecrated (zombies.) I found the Unconsecrated to be creepy and the romance to be as painful as I've come to expect from YA romance. The setting reminded me of the movie The Village mixed with your choice of a zombie movie. Interesting. This page turner kept me reading until well past my bed time, and I'm too old to stay up too late.Ryan's world building here was quite good, I was surprised to find that I wasn't reading about happenings on an alternate world, but right here on our earth. That made it that much more scary. I had a couple of issues with this story. One was I didn't find out how the how it all began, what caused The Return. Another was with Mary. As much as I liked her character in this book I wish she could have found happiness. I hope these things are covered in the sequels. I'll be reading them. If you like YA, dystopian or horror novels I think you'll like this one.

Rating:

Quote: I try to get a feel for the blade in my hand, for my only weapon. From a young age everyone in my village is taught how to fight for a day such as this. The wood on the handle is smooth and slippery from the dampness of my palm. It feels awkward and unwieldy, and the bag of food throws me off balance.

Links:
Carrie Ryan

the series

Horns by Joe Hill

About the book: Ignatius Perrish spent the night drunk and doing terrible things. He woke up the next morning with a thunderous hangover, a raging headache . . . and a pair of horns growing from his temples.
At first Ig thought the horns were a hallucination, the product of a mind damaged by rage and grief. He had spent the last year in a lonely, private purgatory, following the death of his beloved, Merrin Williams, who was raped and murdered under inexplicable circumstances. A mental breakdown would have been the most natural thing in the world. But there was nothing natural about the horns, which were all too real.
Now Ig is possessed of a terrible new power to go with his terrible new look - a macabre talent he intends to use to find the monster who killed Merrin and destroyed his life. Being good and praying for the best got him nowhere. It's time for a little revenge. . . . It's time the devil had his due. . . .

First Line: "Ignatius Martin Perrish spent the night drunk and doing terrible things."

My Thoughts: I really enjoyed reading Heart-Shaped Box by this author so I was looking forward to reading this. I wanted to love it.....but I didn't :(. The story revolves around a murder mystery, and Hill uses flashbacks from the characters to to bring the pieces of the story together. It is a love story, a horror story, and a crime story all rolled up in one. I was hooked on reading it early on but I found it to be an emotionally draining and painful read all the way around. Ig's predicament tore me up.The main mystery,who killed Ig's girlfriend,is revealed fairly early on so the rest of the book is spent watching Ig come into his own and seek his revenge. I really wanted to know why and how Ig got his horns but that was never told. If you like horror stories, you'll probably like this one. It is well written with some funny spots. The overwhelming hopelessness sadness, though, was a little too much for me.

Rating:

Quote: "The best way to get even with anyone is to put them in the rear view mirror on your way to something better."

Links:
NY Times on Hornes
Joe Hill
Wikipedia Info