This book was published in 1971 and it was amazing to me that the prologue was set in Northern Iraq.  In the prologue a priest who is along for an archaeological dig  gets his first encounter with the ancient demon that plays a bigger role at the heart of the story.  The book is about a famous movie actress Chris McNeil who lives in the Georgetown area of Washington D.C.  She has a pre-teen daughter named Reagan.  Other people in the house include Sharon, the tutor and Chris’ secretary, and Carl and Willie, husband and wife servants from Switzerland.

Reagan starts to be visited by what Chris thinks is an imaginary friend named Captain Howdy. It starts innocently enough through the Oija Board, but soon Reagan becomes inhabited with the demon. She begins shouting obscenities, shaking the bed in convulsions and then wetting it and exhibiting multiple personalities.  This is where the book becomes both very interesting and ultimately frustrating.  Chris starts taking her to the family doctor. The doctor is convinced she doesn’t need psychiatric help, that what is wrong is a physical condition with the body.  They do all of these tests on her, give her Ritalin, and theorize that she may have Frontal Lobe disorder in her brain.  When all of the tests come up negative, the doctor has to concede and refer her to a psychiatrist.  They can’t do anything either except give her Librium to try to calm her down.

One evening Chris has a dinner party and meets Father Carris for the first time.  He is a Jesuit priest and a specialist in psychiatry and eventually becomes involved in the Reagan case.  Also in the meantime a movie director friend of Chris’ is found dead outside her home and a detective begins coming around asking questions.  Reagan has deteriorated to the point of being strapped down to the bad and is visited by many demonic personalities and can speak in many different languages.  By this time the book starts to become a little frustrating because I’m saying “Do the exorcism already!” Father Carris want to make absolutely sure Reagan is possessed before he gets permission from the church for the exorcism.

It is an interesting book from a psychological/psychiatric perspective and how all of these doctors try to rule out every kind of mental disorder. There is also some interesting exposition about the history of satanism, possession, and exorcism.   The demonic scenes are kind of fun to read also and how the demon tries to trick and cajole Father Carris.  I listened to the audio book and it was narrated very well by the author. He had some great accents for some of these characters where it really did play like a movie in your mind.  The characters are well developed enough that the reader can identify with them.

I remember hearing about this short story when Amazon first released the Kindle.  Stephen King basically wrote a story for Amazon showcasing the Kindle.  The story is about Wesley who is a literature professor at Moore College in Tennessee. Moore is a mediocre college and Wes is a mediocre professor.  Wes just had a major fight and broke up with the girl’s basketball coach Ellen.  Ellen had had a bad day with a student and Wes was buried in a novel not paying any attention to her when she wanted to vent.  Ellen told him that he should just learn to read off the computer like everyone else.

One day while teaching a class, Wes notices a student come in with a new device.  He’s about to tell the student to put it away when the student, Robbie, tells him that he has the assigned book on it and it is an e-book reader, the Kindle.  Wes is intrigued and based on what Robbie tells him and what Ellen told him when they broke up, he goes on Amazon and buys a Kindle.  In the next couple of days he receives it in the mail and it is pink.  That’s not the only strange thing because he soon finds out in the experimental section of the device these things called Urs.  He soon finds out that an Ur is an alternate reality and there are millions of them.  He searches Hemingway in Ur Books and finds out the death date of Hemingway is not right, he lived a couple years longer. He also wrote some books that Wes or his colleague Don Allman had never heard of and they are literature scholars.  They go crazy searching for more authors and finding more books that have never been written.

Next he discovers Ur Local which is local news in the future and discovers something horrible is going to happen to Ellen. This encourages him to try to change the future, Paradox laws be damned.  I won’t reveal any more other than to say it was a fun story, typical Stephen King writing and just a joy to read.  As far as I know it is only available on the Kindle, Kindle iPhone app, or now the Kindle PC application.

Dan Page is a police officer, whose wife suddenly disappears. He puts together some clues, and eventually follows her to a little town called Rostov, that is located in Texas. He has no idea why she left so quickly to this tiny dot on the map, or for what reason. Dan eventually learns that she went to watch the “Rostov Lights”. She believes in them, refuses to return home, and cannot completely explain her attraction to them, or why she simply had to go to Rostov to watch them, in a way that Dan can understand or accept.

Things get extremely creepy from here. The “Rostov Lights”, Dan learns, are unexplained multicolored balls of light that appear in a nearby field at nighttime. They don’t come every night, and they don’t always stay for long.

No one knows what they are, where they come from, or what they mean. No one can explain why some people can see them, and other people cannot. Many people have set out to explore these lights, and readers get to hear details of all their stories, and these “mini-stories” within the main story line are fascinating. Bad things seem to happen when a person goes too far into the field, searching for the lights.

When Dan first finds his wife, he tries his best to convince her to leave Rostov, and come back home with him. Out of nowhere, a man who came from a busload of people that were on a tour to see the Rostov Lights starts shooting into the crowd. A massacre happens, and it serves as the readers first example of how sometimes, the Rostov Lights make people go insane. You do eventually get the back story about the shooter, and it’s quite bizarre.

Rostov, Texas, is just a teeny little town, out in the middle of nowhere, but it is starting to gain attention because of this massacre. News crews arrive, to report on the shooting, the town, and the mysterious lights. Dan and his wife find themselves on the run from the press, who are hunting them because they want “the story” about their part in the shooting that happened. All this attention is unwanted by the locals, and is also unwanted by the U.S. Military, who just so happen to have some local, and mysterious, bases set up near the unexplained Rostov Lights.

I can’t decide which is spookier, the idea of little balls of colored light that dance in a field and make people go crazy, or the idea that the U.S. Military is somehow involved with the creepy little lights. Readers get to be inside the head of Dan, and several other characters, and in the process, get to “experience” many different points of view about these Rostov Lights.

For more information about this book, you can go check out the official page for the Shimmer book. You can read an exerpt from the book, and watch a video about it. Or, you can go to David Morrell’s website, and find out more about the author, his work, and stuff he has going on right now.

Fun Fact: David Morrell is the author who wrote “First Blood” and “Rambo, First Blood Part II”.

What exactly are the “Rostov Lights”? Reader get to discover lots of things about them, but, by the end, you get to decide for yourself what you believe them to be. In the back of the book, after the story ends, there is a section called “Afterword”. Here, Morrell explains some of his inspiration for this book.

It seems there actually is a little town in Texas called Marfa, that has a history of having mysterious lights appear. Morrell created an extremely detailed, suspenseful, and creepy story out of a few newspaper clippings, and some speculation. I will leave you to search google for “Marfa Lights”, and decide what you think about those as well. To me, just the thought that things like the “Rostov Lights” might actually exist is extremely creepy, and exciting, all at the same time.

This is not actually a book, but more of a short story contained in a collection called Tales of the Jazz Age.  After having just watched the movie, I decided to read the story. It was a quick read; it probably took about an hour to read the whole thing. I was wondering how they could make an almost 3 hour long movie from a short story and here is the answer: the only thing similar between the two is that Benjamin Button ages backwards.  Everything else is completely different.

In this story, Benjamin is born in 1860 in Baltimore, Maryland right before the Civil War to a hardware retailer. His father arrives at the hospital and the doctors and nurses are just horrified by what has been born and when the father says who he is everyone treats him scornfully.  The baby is an old man and when he can talk he asks his father for a cane.  Unlike the movie, the father doesn’t give Benjamin up, but instead dyes his hair to make him appear younger.  One kind of racist thing in this story (of course you have to think about the time it was published, 1922) is when the father is walking with Benjamin by a slave trader he secretly wishes his son had been born black so he could get rid of him.

At age 18 Benjamin tries to enroll into Yale College, but he has run out of hair dye.  He goes to the interview with his natural hair, he probably looks like he is in his 50′s or 60′s, and is basically thrown off the campus. No one believes he is freshman age. It’s kind of funny that the Yale freshman taunt him to go to Harvard.  Shortly after this he gets married to the daughter of a general, Hildegarde.  Their marriage goes along fine at first and then Benjamin tires of her so he enlists in the army for the Spanish American War.

The story further documents the exploits of Benjamin as he grows older in age and younger in appearance. He has a son who he soon bypasses as in he looks the same age as his son and then starts to look younger than his son.  His son in his thirties doesn’t want anything to do with Benjamin as he is an embarrassment to the family looking like a teenager.  No one seems to understand nor want to believe that Benjamin can’t control what happens to him and they all seem to think he is doing this on purpose.  That part is very strange.  It is a very interesting story though and night and day different from everything that happens in the movie.

The only other book I’ve read by Cormac McCarthy was No Country For Old Men. This one is quite different. Like No Country, this is another book that has been turned into a movie. The movie version is supposed to be released in late November of this year and I’ll be seeing it with my local book club.

This is set in the future and is a post-apocalyptic tale.  Everything has been burned and all that is left is ruins and ash. The sky is gray all of the time with ash and when there are rainstorms, even that doesn’t clear away the permanent gray ash.   Not  just a portion of the country is destroyed, but apparently everything all over the world.  There is very little left to eat and some people (among the very few survivors left remaining) have turned cannibalistic.  The book’s heros, a man and his son, are the good guys and either go starving or luck out and find left behind canned goods.  They start out in Minnesota at the beginning of the book and head Southwest ending up at the beach by the end of the book. There is no mention of any character names in the book.

The father is a good protector of his son.   They push a small cart (I believe it was a grocery cart) with them on their travels which is filled with all the possessions they could take with them or find on their journey.  The father has a pistol with only two bullets left. When he fires one, he has to whittle more out of wood and pray that he doesn’t have to use it.  The father also develops a pretty bad cough (maybe Tuberculosis?) and has to be careful when they are hiding to restrain it.  The son is a very interesting character. I imagine he is about 9 or 10 maybe a little older. He is very compassionate and wants to help the people he meets on the journey. His father is a little more realistic and more intent on survival and knows that they have to look out for themselves first.  When the father mentions that they can’t help these people the boy sulks a bit until the father explains how dire their situation is.

They are also very lucky. They manage to find food stores or at least take blankets and extra clothing from the deserted homes they come across.  They also manage to avoid the bad guys.  There is one particularly gruesome scene at a farmhouse where father and son come across a group of people hiding in a store closet, with limbs missing and finding human bones on the cooking stove. This is one of those situations where the boy wants to help, but the father knows they need to get what they can and get out of there.  There is another horribly gruesome thing they witnessed later on at an abandoned campsite blackened on the spit.

Here is an example of the writing and a very deep conversation the boy and their father have near the end of the book. A bedraggled man steals their cart, the father and son catch up to him. The father wants to shoot the man and the boy begs him not to. “He is just hungry,” the boy says. The father finally relents, they take the cart back and they leave the man standing there naked.  Here is the conversation after that:

“He was just hungry, Papa. He’s going to die.

He’s going to die anyway.

He’s so scared, Papa

The man squatted and looked at him. I’m scared, he said. Do you understand? I’m scared.

The boy didn’t answer. He just sat there with his head bowed, sobbing.

You’re not the one who has to worry about everything.

The boy said something but he couldn’t understand him.

What? he said.

He looked up, his wet and grimy face. Yes I am, he said. I am the one.”

That is a really deep thing for the boy to say. He is the one with the weight on his shoulders, the one who worries about everyone and everything.  All I could say after reading that was, “Wow!”

The writing is very well done in this book and I found myself going to the dictionary a lot.  Not a lot happens, plot-wise, but it was still an interesting and captivating read. I never found myself bored with it.

Who do you trust? Who shouldn’t you trust? Can you really trust the people who you love, and who you believe love you back? What is your first reaction when someone says “Trust me”?

Peter Leonard, son of famed novelist Elmore Leonard, has written a fast paced book filled with dubious characters that may, or may not, be completely trustworthy. All the people in this book seem real, with their own plans, dreams, and stumbling blocks. It was easy to “see” exactly what each of them looked like, and “hear” their voices. Leonard takes you inside the mind of many of his characters, and yet, I still was completely unable to anticipate the twists the story would take. This is one intense read, that I would love to see as a movie someday. It would be interesting to see who the cast would be.

Karen Delaney just wants her money back. She trusted her boyfriend, Samir, to hold on to $300,000 for her, and keep it safe. Today, Samir has become Karen’s ex-boyfriend, and Karen has become the increasingly bored fiancee of Lou Starr. Lou, a man who owns a restaurant, a man who has changed his name years ago, a man who isn’t known for being the most observant person in the world, is, of course, unaware of Karen’s boredom, as well as her past with Samir.

Samir, unfortunately, is not someone Karen can simply walk up to and request her money from. He just so happens to be the head of an illegal bookmaking operation. Samir is continually surrounded by armed bodyguards, and is a dangerous man all by himself. Karen and Samir didn’t exactly end their relationship on good terms, either. Karen wants her money back, but she has no idea how to go about getting it. All she knows is that it probably is still located in a particular safe of Samir’s.

One night, two men break into Karen and Lou’s home, tie them up, and start stealing things. Karen, who knows a great opportunity when she sees one, enlists the help of these intrusive strangers to get her $300,000 back from Samir. It’s one of those plans that is so crazy it just might work. Along the way, more people become involved in this scheme, each with his or her own motivations. A tangled web weaves around all the people involved, drawing in more people, and trapping everyone in it’s sticky strings.

Eventually, Karen, (and company), get perused by a man named O’Clair, a determined man who is both an ex-cop and an ex-con. O’Clair is currently working for Samir, attempting to track down the money that went missing. He is relentless in his pursuit, and not afraid to go around the law to get his answers. In addition to watching and following Karen, and the people she brought into this whole mess, O’Clair is watching several of Samir’s men, and Samir himself, as he tries to discover who took the $300,000.

This is one of those books where I cannot decide who I think the real “bad guys” are. I’m not certain anyone could be entirely classified as the “good guys”. It seems that Leonard’s characters are not “black and white”, but rather several different shades of gray. “Trust me”, they implore each other. Should they, or should they not be trusted? Read the book, and decide for yourself.