In May’s most exciting fiction releases, Kate Atkinson returns to characters introduced in her masterful award winner Life After Life, Chuck Palahniuk’s stories are collected for the first time, and Matthew Pearl writes a literary caper you won’t be able to resist.
In the mid-1980s Stephen King famously proclaimed, “I have seen the future of horror; his name is Clive Barker.” This was back when effusive praise from the notoriously blurb-happy author really meant something—the equivalent of Emperor Palpatine announcing that he was stepping down and promoting Darth Vader to head Sith. That gobsmacky declaration was all the convincing […]
It can be a treacherous journey when an author decides—decades later—to resurrect a beloved character as the centerpiece of a new book. Is it desperation? Maybe simple fan service? Or something more organically grounded: a long-delayed reunion, characters coming alive once again for an adventure that will add to their legacy? Stephen King made us wait 36 years […]
Suspension of disbelief is a heck of a thing. Some books ask for a little more heavy lifting than others, especially when travel from the “real world” to an alternate universe is involved. No one wants a dissertation on quantum physics, but sometimes the mechanisms for traveling to a magical land are startlingly… well, the […]
Halloween is upon us again, and that means three things: one, we all get to dress up in costumes and pretend to be something else for a little while; two, all the candy we can eat before going into some sort of sugar-shock coma; and three, scary stories. Scary is a moving target, of course. […]
