[Ever since Wool series of books, one author he continues to mention in interviews is Dave Cullen, the author of Columbine. Hugh first wrote this review for crimecritics.com, a site we tried to start but later dissolved after Hugh started his writing career and I couldn’t juggle site duties between two sites. I later imported his excellent review of Columbine over here to dreamindemon.com in March 20, 2009. Still hard to believe that was four years ago. After reading a recent Huffington Post article in which Hugh mentions Dave Cullen, this book and the glowing review he wrote for it, I figured I would bump the review so you can read it and check out Columbine yourself, a book I think readers of this site will find very eye-opening. – Morbid]
Ten years have passed since the tragic event that has become synonymous with school shootings. Columbine was once a word that simply denoted a high school, a football team or a state flower.…
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Here, Now – Back in June I gave you a preview of Hugh Howey’s upcoming book I,ZOMBIE. Since I am a very important man, I got a beta version of the book to read and it was better than I expected, and I already expected it to be good. I’ve already reviewed Hugh’s best-selling WOOL series, giving it 5 stars, and it looks like I am giving him five more. Here’s the synopsis:
This book contains foul language and fouler descriptions of life as a zombie. It will offend most anyone, so proceed with caution or not at all. And be forewarned: This is not a zombie book. This is a different sort of tale. It is a story about the unfortunate, about those who did not get away. It is a human story at its rotten heart. It is the reason we can’t stop obsessing about these creatures, in whom we see all too much of ourselves.
I won’t be spoiling anything when I tell you that I,ZOMBIE is about a zombie outbreak told from the point of view of zombies.…
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Here, Now – I’m back with another great Kindle read for under $5. I promised that I would write these things up within hours of reading a book, but I am already four books behind.
Anyway, THE LION, THE LAMB, THE HUNTED is a crime thriller by Andrew E. Kaufman that came highly recommended and hit the #1 spot on Amazon’s Psychological thriller and Mystery & thriller lists.
Here’s the Goodreads synopsis where the book is sitting at a 3.74 with 844 ratings:
“She only step outside for a minute. But a minute was all it took to turn Jean Kingsley’s world upside down–a minute she’d regret for the rest of her life. Because when she returned, she found an open bedroom window and her three-year-old son, Nathan, gone. The boy would never be seen again. A tip leads detectives to the killer, a repeat sex offender, and inside his apartment, a gruesome discovery. A slam-dunk trial sends him off to death row, then several years later, to the electric chair. Now, more than thirty years later, Patrick Bannister unwittingly stumbles across evidence among his dead mother’s belongings.…
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Here, Now – I mentioned over the weekend that we’ll be bringing back book and movie articles to compliment our news articles and help round out the overall theme of D’D. The only difference is that they will not be full-fledged reviews, but rather recommendations from us to the D’D reader.
So, that being said, I couldn’t think of a better way to kick things off than with Hugh Howey’s WOOL OMNIBUS EDITION.
Anyone who has been on this site long enough is familiar with Hugh Howey. He was one of our writers, one of the site founders, and a very close, longtime friend of mine. A while back he decided he wanted to be an author, and within a short amount of time, he was.
Already having written a handful of well-received books, it was his latest effort, the self-published WOOL series, that shot him to the top of everyone’s reading list, landed him in Entertainment Weekly and with a movie deal.
I reviewed the first WOOL, a novella involving people living in an underground silo after some kind of catastrophe made living above ground impossible.…
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Here, Now – Since we are trying to get back into the groove with the book and movie suggestions, it wouldn’t be right if I didn’t point you guys towards our very own Hugh Howey’s recent novelette titled Wool. We get emails from time to time, asking about Hugh’s whereabouts, from people unaware he had changed professions. He is no longer our resident troll and site co-founder, trading all that to become an author.
Full disclosure: Hugh and I go back more years than I care to mention. I admit this because I don’t want anyone assuming that because of this, I am willing to forego journalistic integrity (lol!) so that a good friend can make some coin. I’m no shill (sometimes to a fault in regards to this site) and I take my recommendations seriously. I know what it feels like to waste time with a bad movie or book because some jackass got a free copy and repaid the creator with a blowjob disguised as a glowing review chock full of bullshit.…
Continue ReadingThe Cracked Spine: Tom Franklin’s “Crooked Letter Crooked Letter”
October 21, 2011 at 3:29 pm by Morbid
Here’s another book recommendation for you. I already missed one day and if I go two days without telling you all about a good book or movie, then it’s all over with. This would just hurt you ’cause if I recommend it, then it’s worth checking out. That’s a fact.
Today’s suggestion is Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin. I’ve never read anything from the guy, but his book was high on the Amazon must-read list, and the synopsis sounded promising:
“In the 1970s, Larry Ott and Silas “32″ Jones were boyhood pals in a small town in rural Mississippi. Their worlds were as different as night and day: Larry was the child of lower-middle-class white parents, and Silas, the son of a poor, black single mother. But then Larry took a girl to a drive-in movie and she was never seen or heard from again. He never confessed . . . and was never charged.
More than twenty years have passed. Larry lives a solitary, shunned existence, never able to rise above the whispers of suspicion.…
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I’m trying to get back into the groove of writing up reviews, so here’s another book for you. This is the last one I finished called The Lock Artist by Steve Hamilton. I regularly peruse the Best Books of the Month on Amazon and this particular book was high on the list in January. I was already familiar with Hamilton’s McKnight series, which this is not a part of, so I checked out the official synopsis:
Marked by tragedy, traumatized at the age of eight, Michael, now eighteen, is no ordinary young man. Besides not uttering a single word in ten years, he discovers the one thing he can somehow do better than anyone else. Whether it’s a locked door without a key, a padlock with no combination, or even an 800-pound safe… he can open them all.
It’s an unforgivable talent. A talent that will make young Michael a hot commodity with the wrong people and, whether he likes it or not, push him ever closer to a life of crime.…
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It’s been awhile since I have had anything resembling a review on the site, and this is mostly due to a lack of time. So in order to combat that, I am simply going to stop trying to write long-ass, mostly skipped over reviews and just offer some recommendations. Sort of like the Oprah Book Club, but for DD readers and without all the crap.
To be honest, all I really want to do is navigate DD readers, who probably share some of my morbid interests, around the stinking turds and towards material they may enjoy as much as I did. I’ll leave actual reviews to the people who are paid for it and will link to them within my future recommendations if you’re looking for more in-depth analysis.
To start things off, I’d like to talk about one of the best books I have read this year, Harlan Coben’s 17th novel, Caught. Here’s the official synopsis:
17 year-old Haley McWaid is a good girl, the pride of her suburban New Jersey family, captain of the lacrosse team, headed off to college next year with all the hopes and dreams her doting parents can pin on her.…
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It’s been 12 years since John Landis directed a movie and about two decades since he directed a good one. But now he’s back with BURKE AND HARE, a black comedy about two real-life serial killers from Ireland who operated in Edinburgh, Scotland, in the 1800s, selling their victims’ bodies to the local medical college for dissection. So how does Landis do? Pretty friggin’ bad. Lets check out the “hilarious” trailer, which is almost as bad as the movie. Almost.
The crimes of William Burke and William Hare have already been adapted for the big screen about five times, from The Body Snatcher (1945) to The Doctor and the Devils (1985), all to varying degrees of success. And why wouldn’t someone want to adapt this nasty bit of history? It’s a morbidly fascinating tale that doesn’t need to be embellished or altered to make a compelling film. That’s why I have no clue why Landis decided to make a black comedy in which Burke (Simon Pegg) and Hare (Andy Serkis) are made out to be two aloof scoundrels who simply stumbled into their ghoulish profession and continued committing their heinous crimes for justifiable reasons.…
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This is the third story we have posted from Al Bruno III, and I am pretty sure he is the only author we have posted stories from. But this is only because I love his short stories PLUS he is the only author who alerts us when he writes something we may be interested in and allows us to repost them here for our readers. So if you stumble upon any dark writing out there or an author with stuff you think our readers may be interested in, let us know and we will be happy to post it here for our mabazillion of fans. As for this story, well it is a doozy. I’ve not read all of Bruno’s work, but this one is longer than the other two we have posted (“In Memory Alone” and “Roadside Burials“) and more disturbing. It deals with a Lovecraft-ish mythos of Bruno’s own creation that he calls a “mythology on progress”. This one a story of a world where both dreams and monsters lurk in the shadows, where love and forgotten rituals fight for control of the human heart.…
Continue ReadingReview: Infected – I’ll Never Look At Chicken Scissors The Same Way
July 15, 2009 at 10:08 am by Morbid
The United States has been invaded by an enemy and no one even knows it. But when they finally realize what has happened, it may be too late to do a damn thing about it. The problem is that this invader is a microscopic parasite. All across the United States, average people are turning into raving lunatics suffering from extreme paranoia and committing horrendous acts of violence against friends and family – even themselves – after becoming a host. Now a small group of investigators must try to determine what this parasite is, what it does and where it came from. Is it natural, having been dormant for thousands of years? An advanced biological weapon? The only link shared with the infected, aside from their acts of violence, are their insane rantings about “triangles” that coincide with the symbols later found on their bodies. Meanwhile, an infected man marked with seven of these triangles, attempts to cure himself before he also does something horrifying – more horrifying than anything anyone could have possibly imagined.…
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