Behind Blue Eyes

Angel Fire East by Terry Brooks My rating: 4 of 5 stars Nice ending to the trilogy. What this book had that was better than the first two: Villains. Sinister, creepy villains. Not the cookie-cutter bad demons from the first two. Findo Gask and Penny Dreadful were wickedly delicious. Had to love Twitch too, and the whatever-it-was shadow thing (ur'droch). John Ross was a bit of a dud in this book though; Nest carried the show. I mean, when she was meeting with Gask and Penny, John is just standing around, leaning on his staff. What the hell, man? Are you a Knight of the Word, or what? I got a little fed up with all the "I shouldn't have come here and put you in danger" junk. No, I thought. You shouldn't have come here and stood around like a lump while Nest did all the work. Where I used to work, we had a name for someone like that: a Blister. Because they'd always show up when all the hard work was done. Anyway, the ending had me...

The Road to the Dark Tower: Exploring Stephen King's Magnum Opus by Bev Vincent My rating: 4 of 5 stars Looking for a way to revisit Roland and his ka-tet without reading the entire 4000 pages of The Dark Tower series? Read The Wind Through the Keyhole . Then here is the place to go. It's a great overview to the characters and story of King's masterpiece. Do not read this book unless you have finished all 8 7 Dark Tower books. It will spoil it, otherwise. View all my reviews

The Hellbound Heart by Clive Barker My rating: 4 of 5 stars 3.5 stars, really. But I'll give it a bump up just for being the place where Cenobites originated. A gift, for me? No, thank you. I had a Rubik's Cube in high school. That was bad enough. View all my reviews

The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly: 8 Secondary Characters from The Dark Tower Series by Bev Vincent My rating: 3 of 5 stars This is a decent little companion book to The Road to the Dark Tower: Exploring Stephen King's Magnum Opus by Bev Vincent. Here's where Vincent explores a few characters that didn't fit into the main book. Useful to Dark Tower junkies, but that's about it. View all my reviews

A Knight of the Word by Terry Brooks My rating: 4 of 5 stars Number two in the Terry Brooks urban fantasy series doesn't disappoint. I didn't like it quite as much as the first, but it was pretty close. This has more "urban" as it goes from small town Illinois in the fist book to Seattle in this one. And once there, one must wonder just how many times the characters will stop for Starbucks. Nobody listened to Nirvana in this though (that happened in the first book), so it wasn't too bad for Seattle stereotypes. It did mention the Kingdome a couple of times. That's a bit dated, but as a longtime Broncos fan, I remember that as a scary place. But back to the story. This happens 5 years after the first book, and we have an all grown up Nest Freemark going to Seattle to knock some sense into John Ross, the Knight of the Word who has lost his way. And where do we go from here, but to Angel Fire East . Looking forward to that. View all my reviews

The Walking Dead: Just Another Day at the Office by Jay Bonansinga My rating: 3 of 5 stars Decent little "short" story, and I do mean short. This was one of those ebooks priced at $.99, and for the first time I felt a little cheated by that price. Not that it was a bad read, but that it was so brief. Still, rating the content (what there was of it), I enjoyed the 20 minutes or so that it took me to go through this story at a leisurely pace. I do have one gripe, though. It bugged me when I read Rise of the Governor and this story starts out with it. Whenever the time is noted in these books, it specifially gives that time in Central Standard Time. It makes repeated notes of the time being Central Standard. Well, the thing is, these stories take place entirely in the state of Georgia. Which is on Eastern Standard time. No character is going to fall back an hour to convert to Central time during the zombie apocalypse. It's just not going to happen. Not when said characte...

The Gunslinger by Stephen King My rating: 5 of 5 stars This was my fifth or sixth time reading The Gunslinger, but my first to do so with audio. I've read the original version and the revised edition a couple of times each. When I did my series re-read a couple of years ago I read the revised. Some friends and I got to talking about the audios, comparing the readings of Frank Muller to that of George Guidall, who did the last three books in the series. As it happens, Guidall did the revised reading of The Gunslinger. Though Guidall is one of my favorite audiobook narrators, I did prefer the readings of Muller in the early books. This discussion got me thinking and I was in need of a new audiobook. So here we are. I'd read the revised edition the last couple of times I'd read The Gunslinger, so this seemed like a good idea. And it was. I really like the way Muller handled this series. View all my reviews