Archive for October, 2011

CHOKE HOLD by Christa Faust

CHOKE HOLD is novelist and former peep show girl Faust’s second title for Hard Case Crime, and it’s a sequel to MONEY SHOT. Faust is Hard Case Crime’s first female novelist, and if you think that means a tender, sensitive look at crime, then think again. Faust’s protagonist is tough former porn star, Angel Dare, a woman who feels more comfortable giving a blowjob than extending a sympathy hug. In Money Shot, Angel, owner of an adult modeling agency came out of retirement for one last gig. Big mistake. The job is a set-up by some particularly nasty gangsters who are hunting for a briefcase full of cash. Angel, who’s raped, beaten and stuffed in the trunk of a car, finds herself on the wrong side of a prostitution ring.

October 9, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , , ,  Â· Posted in: Noir, Thriller/Spy/Caper, US Southwest

THE NIGHT STRANGERS by Chris Bohjalian

In Chris Bohjalian’s THE NIGHT STRANGERS, Chip Linton is a forty-year-old commercial airline pilot who is traumatized when, through no fault of his own, one of his regional planes goes down in Lake Champlain. In the aftermath of the accident, Chip, Emily, and their ten-year-old twin daughters, Hallie and Garnet, move from Pennsylvania to an isolated three-story Victorian near Bethel, New Hampshire, in the scenic White Mountains. Emily resumes her career as a lawyer, the kids enroll in the local school, and Chip becomes a do-it-yourselfer, replacing wallpaper, painting, and doing carpentry around the rickety old house.

October 8, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , ,  Â· Posted in: Horror, NE & New York, Psychological Suspense, Speculative (Beyond Reality)

THE CAT’S TABLE by Michael Ondaatje

In his new novel, THE CAT’S TABLE, Michael Ondaatje imagines a young boy’s three-week sea voyage across the oceans, from his home in Colombo, Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) to England. The eleven-year-old travels alone and is, not surprisingly, allocated to the “lowly” Cat’s Table, where he joins an odd assortment of adults and two other boys of similar age.

October 7, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , ,  Â· Posted in: Coming-of-Age, Contemporary, Facing History, Literary

THE VISIBLE MAN by Chuck Klosterman

It was more than one hundred years ago that H. G. Wells penned the science fiction classic, The Invisible Man, which subsequently paved new paths in the horror genre. The idea of a mad scientist who makes himself invisible and becomes mentally deranged as a result, is one that has taken root in popular culture ever since.

In his genre-bending new novel, Chuck Klosterman borrows the essential elements from Wells’ classic with some modifications. For one thing, he fixes the science. There has been some discussion that a truly invisible man would have been blind whereas Wells’ lead character, Griffin, clearly was not. So Klosterman’s protagonist, referred to simply as Y_, is not invisible — he is the visible man. But Y_ , much like Griffin, has an ability to make himself invisible to others.

October 6, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: Contemporary, Scifi, Texas

THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES 2011 edited by Geraldine Brooks

This year’s editor of THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES 2011 is Geraldine Brooks, an accomplished journalist and fiction writer. She says of her selections “that the easiest and the first choices were the stories to which I had a physical response.” I would agree that the best stories in this collection are those that are most visceral and physical in nature. Ms. Brooks also states that “In the end, the stories I fell upon with perhaps the greatest delight were the outliers, the handful or so that defied the overwhelming gravitational pull toward small-canvas contemporary realism.”

October 5, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , , , ,  Â· Posted in: Short Stories

CAIN by Jose Saramago

Saramago’s last, indeed posthumous, book is a real treat. Brief, inventive, funny, it furthers the author’s well-known distaste for religious dogma by traversing many of the familiar stories of the Old Testament by means of a fanciful parable told from a rational point of view. Much like The Elephant’s Journey, it shows Saramago’s stylistic fingerprints in relaxed form.

October 4, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags:  Â· Posted in: Allegory/Fable, Alternate History, Humorous, Satire, Translated, World Lit, y Award Winning Author