This is a very even collection of short stories inspired by visits to places protected by the Nature Conservancy. They run the gamut from stories with an environmental message to stories about people set against wild backgrounds, but all are well written and engaging, without a clunker among them.

From Hell is a graphic retelling of the Jack the Ripper saga, casting Dr. William Gull as the famed killer. The story features a dizzying cast of characters – many of them well-known artists, authors and members of the royal family – and a complex conspiracy that includes illegitimate royal children, the Freemasons and a bizarre desire on the Ripper’s part to usher in the 20th century. The convoluted story, combined with the sometimes confusing artwork, makes events difficult to follow at times; I highly recommend reading the appendices as you go along to help make sense of it all. But the story is ultimately compelling and a good overview of the most famous serial murderer of history.

A very weird but fascinating read. The story concerns the last surviving member of a strange religious cult that sends all but its eldest children out into the world to work as menial laborers, who then send back their wages to make the cult rich. When the scam is discovered, all members of the cult – both in the colony and working out in the world – kill themselves, except for the narrator. His notoriety as the last survivor of the cult takes him on an incredible journey as a celebrity evangelist, with his twin brother pursuing him, and aided by a girl who knows everything that’s going to happen to him and everybody else. The book swept me along fairly well until the very end, when things pretty much fell apart. But up until then, it was well worth the trip.

While this early horror novel starts out with a very intriguing opening paragraph – “They caught the kid doing something disgusting out under the bleachers at the high school stadium, and he was sent home from the grammar school across the street. He was eight years old then. He’d been doing it for years.” – it quickly strains suspension of disbelief past the breaking point.

This is the story of Horty, a human photocopy produced by strange living crystals that exist among us without us being aware of them. Except for one man, the Maneater – the evil, sociopathic owner of the carnival where Horty winds up after being evicted by his adoptive parents.

Although there are no details in the text to date this novel to the 1950s, it comes off sounding impossibly old-fashioned, far less relevant to our world today than the works of Jane Austen or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or even Sturgeon’s contemporary, Richard Matheson. This novel is better left forgotten.

This is a collection of loosely connected stories whose characters all live in the same apartment building in Manhattan. Falling somewhere between a novel and short stories, this book fails on both ends. The stories are too disconnected to achieve the flow of a novel or for the reader to care much about the characters’ development, but they are too interconnected to really stand on their own.

The writing is, for the most part, very good, but the characters are often unsympathetic and alien. Some judicious editing would have helped this book; for instance, the story “Jacob’s Bath” could have safely been cut, which would have made for a stronger book. However, a few stories stand out and are good enough to stand on their own; two of my favorites were “Fourth Angry Mouse,” about a failed comedian who finds his voice in the persona of a giant mouse in an off-Broadway play, and “The Opals,” about a man who meets a strange Hephaestian jeweler in the basement of a sex shop and receives a gift of the earrings he will someday give to the woman he loves. I could have left the rest of the volume alone, though.

I hesitated about recommending this book, but it is so powerfully written, and some of the scenes – particularly the more horrific ones – are so vivid that I had to recommend it solely on that basis. (I won’t reveal the particulars of one very powerful scene, but I am sure the grotesque events described in excruciating detail will stay with me for a very long time.)

The main problem I had with this book is that it focuses almost completely on two incidents in the main character’s life: his participation in the massacre at My Lai during the Vietnam War and an incident in an isolated cabin at a northern Minnesota lake many years ago. Granted, these are the pivotal events of John Wade’s life (as is the suicide of his father, which is also constantly touched upon), but the narrative continually circles these two events, so that after several chapters it feels as if we are going over the same ground over and over again. We crave some new information, and the horror loses its power to horrify, particularly in the Vietnam scenes. The book spirals back out of this pattern at the end when it becomes very dark, very disturbing and very engrossing yet again.

Another reason I liked the book was its narrative structure; it reads like the unfinished manuscript of a frustrated true-crime writer. This unnamed writer gradually becomes another character in the story, whose obsession with what happened at the Lake of the Woods and the mystery of Kathy Wade’s disappearance drives the story forward. At the end, this mystery is never neatly solved, which may annoy some readers, but I enjoyed the ambiguity and the opportunity to make up my own mind about what happened between the husband and wife in the dark night.

This collection of essays and reflections, interspersed with recipes, is more a handbook for conscious cooking than a cookbook. Heavily influenced by Buddhist philosophy–the author is a practicing Zen Buddhist–the lessons imparted are equally applicable to any cook’s forays into the kitchen, whether you’re Buddhist or not, whether you cook professionally, for your family or simply for yourself.

The reflective essays before each group of recipes attempt to illustrate the interplay between our spiritual lives and the tasks of our everyday lives, especially cooking, eating and cleaning up afterward. As Brown says in his introduction: “After all, this is where we live: with things that are not just things, and with meaning that can be more real than things. I want the spiritual to reach the kitchen. Otherwise it is empty of significance.”

If you would like to start practicing conscious cooking–to be consciously aware of the tasks you perform in the kitchen, of the connections between the foods you eat and the world you live in–this book is the perfect beginner’s guide. And the simple, everyday vegetarian recipes will fortify you with the basics for your own experiments.

http://simplycooking.wordpress.com

Somehow I missed the fact that this was a sequel when I picked up this book. I only gradually picked up on that as I read, when the text kept referring to characters as if I should already be familiar with their histories and with past events. That, the large cast of characters and the disjointed nature of the writing left me confused and frustrated as I delved deeper into the book.

I must confess that I as hooked by a strong, interesting beginning, but I was quickly lost in a muddy sea of characters and events, feeling I was on the outside without some secret knowledge that would allow me to fully enjoy the book. Barker should probably have done a better job of making this a standalone novel, and the book’s cover should have done a better job of making clear that this was a sequel (in which case, I probably would never have started reading it in the first place). As it was, I was left feeling dissatisfied and like I had wasted a huge chunk of my reading time, once again convinced to remove Barker’s works from my reading list.

This fictional “diary” was inspired by the King-penned miniseries Rose Red, which aired earlier this year. Supposedly edited by Dr. Joyce Reardon, the ghost researcher who was the main character in the miniseries (and who met a very bad end), and written by Ellen Rimbauer, the character who haunted the mansion, Rose Red, the diary details the early years of the haunted house that was the subject of the miniseries.

The diary wasn’t written by King, but by a ghost writer, Ridley Pearson, and the writing is fairly clumsy. That makes the “diary” merely a curiosity, a collectible for avid King fans. If you want a good story or even a good King story, I would advise you to look elsewhere, though.

This review is based on a reread of the classic Gothic romance-suspense novel. While the story was every bit as enjoyable and enthralling the second time around, some aspects of the book bothered me a bit more this time than when I first read Rebecca as a teenager.

The characters with whom we’re supposed to sympathize – the unnamed narrator and Maxim de Winter—were not very sympathetic: the girl too mousy and passive, the man’s motivations murky and suspect. The bad guys – the sinister Mrs. Danvers, the loutish cousin, and even the specter of the dead first wife, Rebecca – were all much stronger, more vivid and, in a way, more likable characters. Also, the end (which I won’t give away here) was very abrupt, and as a result, not very satisfying. I don’t mean to over-criticize: This is still a suspenseful, engaging read, just perhaps not as meaty as I remembered it.