I know I read this when it was first released, but I remembered NOTHING about it. Turns out, that's because it didn't really leave an impression on me, then or now. But considering the strange journey this story took to make it into novel form, that's not really surprising.

Cycle of the Werewolf details a year in the life of Tarker's Mill, a small town in (where else?) Maine. In January, at the full moon, a man is mauled to death by what appears to be a giant animal of some kind. It happens again in February, March, etc...By July, the entire town is terrified. So terrified, they cancel the 4th of July fireworks. Marty Coslaw, a ten-year-old, wheelchair-bound boy, sneaks out to light off some firecrackers his uncle left, and is almost killed by what turns out to be a werewolf. Eventually, Marty discovers the true identity of the killer, and begins sending him anonymous letters, begging him to take his own life to spare the town. In the end, Marty sets himself up as bait in a final showdown.

The book actually began as short vignettes written to accompany a calendar being illustrated by comic-book artist Bernie Wrightson. Not surprisingly, King found the brief nature of the vignette too constricting, and decided to expand the story into a short novel. That initial structure, though, gives the narrative a choppy feeling, since the flow of the plot takes 30 day jumps from chapter to chapter.

By now you'll recognize that a couple of King's traditional motifs are present even in this short, contrived novel. The hero is a child-a boy child, specifically-which comes to be a feature of almost all of King's best loved novels. He also continues to explore the idea of normal, everyday people becoming monsters, though in this book he does it more literally than in others. Because of the nature of the narrative and the brevity of the text, most of King's signature character development is not present in this book, which may be part of why it didn't impact me enough for me to even remember what it was about.

It was turned into the movie "Silver Bullet" in 1985, because by then almost any new King book was likely to be turned into a movie. The film, starring a very young Corey Haim, as well as Gary Busey and Terry O'Quinn, opened to mixed reviews, and became something of a cult classic. I remember seeing it on VHS at some point in the late 80s or early 90s, but even that didn't help burn the story into my brain. I suppose it's an enjoyable enough read in the moment, but it's really a popcorn book; it lacks substance, but is oddly satisfying; it fills you up in the moment, but before long you're hungry again.

The Body Finder, Kimberley Derting

To quote the wisdom of Ben Parker, "With great power comes great responsibility". In The Body Finder, Violet Ambrose discovers the truth of this statement when she is drawn into the search for kidnapped girls in her small Washington town.

Violet has known since she was a little girl that she could sense things that other people could not. For as long as she can remember, she has been drawn to the bodies of small animals killed by predators, compelled to give them a peaceful burial in her backyard. At the tender age of eight, she was drawn to the biggest, most gruesome discovery of her short life-the body of murdered girl. Despite Violet's inexplicable discovery of the body, the killer is never captured.

Nine years later, Violet's town and the surrounding area are once again rocked by the disappearance of young girls. While at an end-of-summer party, Violet is drawn to the body of one of the disappeared girls, floating in the marshy reeds at the edge of a lake. Older now, Violet realizes that not only can she feel the bodies of the violently deceased, she can sense the same energy coming from their killers. Violet, with her best-friend-maybe-boyfriend Jay, hatch a plan to search for the serial murderer terrorizing their small town. But the responsibility she feels to the dead may come with deadly consequences for herself.

Derting has managed a pretty astounding feat with this novel. She has written a sweet teenage love story and a gruesome murder mystery all in one. And amazingly, neither one feels shorted. While the theme of friend-turned-love-interest is a common one, Derting does an admirable job making this particular love story charming and believable. While there is no real explanation or exploration of how and why Violet got her unique ability, the internal logic of what it is and how it works hang together pretty well. Derting creates enough suspense that I found myself unable to put the book down the closer I got to the end, and there was at least one gasp-worthy moment as the story came to a head. While this book reminded me in some ways of Barry Lyga's I Hunt Killers, it is much less graphic, and the violence when it comes is more implied that explicit.

This book is the first in a series about Violet and her strange power, so if you are looking for a new YA series for yourself, or if you are looking to hook a teenage reader with a love of supernatural crime shows (goodness knows the CW is full of them), then I suggest checking this out. We are using it next school year as a choice book for literature circles with our senior English classes, and I sincerely hope the students who choose it enjoy it as much as I did.

The Passage Trilogy, Justin Cronin

I have a rule about audiobooks. If I am going to spend the money to purchase them, I need to get the most hours for my money. Most of my audiobook purchases are epic fantasy novels like Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time series, or long historical fiction, a la Ken Follett's Kingsbridge series. This also allows me to get looooong books read on otherwise "dead" time-when I am driving. This frees up my actual reading time for shorter novels that help me make my Goodreads goal (I know, I know...I might have a problem).

I recently read Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (review to come, I promise), and one of the things she shares in the afterword is the title of a novel that she made passing reference to within the context of her story. To be honest, I don't even remember the reference from Station Eleven, but I was so in love with that book that I figured if she liked it, surely I would too.

The book she mentioned was The Passage by Justin Cronin. Now, I had heard of the book before. Anyone who reads as much horror and supernatural fiction as I do can't help but run into the title, and I figured the fact that I even read the afterword of Mandel's book (I'm not so good about reading the forewords and endnotes of the novels I read. Mea culpa), was the universe's way of telling me it was time.

I'm always up for a new take on vampires (and werewolves and zombies and other creatures of the night), and Cronin's vision is at once completely new and utterly familiar. In the world of The Passage, a virus created by the US government (because who else) in an effort to create a super-soldier has been given to twelve convicted murderers living on death row (because expendable). When a mysterious event destroys the compound where the once-human-now-something-else creatures were kept, the "virals", as they came to be known, are unleashed upon an unsuspecting world (because of course), and quickly decimate the population, turning millions of people into blood-sucking monsters who prey on anything with a pulse.

The first book jumps back and forth between the time when the virals were being created, and a time about 100 years later, when what is left of humanity is dealing with the aftermath. Because the virus gives its hosts immortality, some of the characters overlap. There is a mysterious girl who was given a version of the virus that somehow did not turn her into a monster, the man who tries to save her, a nun who's life is unnaturally extended through some mystical force that never really becomes clear, a group of brave souls who strike out across the empty landscape to find help for their dying community, and lots and lots and lots of vampires.

Cronin has woven an intricate story of human connection and intense action. There are themes of love and family and faith and oppression, with sympathetic figures on both sides of the fight. Cronin's writing is full of beautiful, terrifying imagery, to the point that occasionally I want him to stop using so many words already and get on with it. But it's not because the words are unnecessary, like I feel with some authors <cough> Anne Rice <cough>, but because he's created such a compeling story that I can't wait to find out what comes next. I suppose if I was reading rather than listening to the books, I'd probably be skipping those long descriptions in favor of getting to the action, and I would surely be missing out.

Help for the Haunted, John Searles

I love spooky stories.  Some of my very favorite authors write the best ones (I'm looking at you, King and Gaiman).  I am also a skeptic.  I read supposedly "real" accounts of ghosts and spirits and the like and I am completely unmoved.  But a fictional ghost story gets me every time.

I also love mysteries, so I was pretty excited when my mother recommended Help for the Haunted by John Searle.  A murder mystery of sorts, with all of the supernatural, paranormal creepiness I could want.  The narrator of the story, Sylvie, is the daughter of a pair of "spirit hunters".  They make their living giving talks at paranormal conventions, and helping people with hauntings.  After getting a strange phone call one snowy night, Sylvie and her parents leave the warmth of home for a cold dark of an empty church at midnight.  Before the night is over, both of her parents are dead, and Sylvie and her sister are left orphaned.

One year later, Sylvie is trying to deal with her grief over her parents' deaths, and to process her feelings about her own role in the events of that winter's evening.  She feels as though there is something important she is not remembering about what happened in that church, and she desperately wants to remember before the man accused of killing her mother and father go on trial.  Her sister, who is now her guardian, is no help, all anger and indifference and sarcasm.  And, the spooky events that used to plague her family during her parents' work have started happening again-dolls that appear where they shouldn't, lights that appear to turn on and off by themselves.  It's all too much, and Sylvie feels as though she will go crazy if she can't discover the truth.

I really enjoyed the mood of the whole book, up until the very end.  There is just enough creepy goodness to make you a little uncomfortable (in a good way, if you like that sort of thing) while you are reading (probably with the lights on).  But this is also a story about mothers and daughters, about faith vs. skepticism, and about trying to do right by people, even when you're not sure what "right" is. That said, I was disappointed in the ending.  Without giving anything away, I can confidently say that most readers of this book will be completely blindsided by the answer to the riddle of what happened that night in the church, not because Searle expertly crafts such a tight narrative that the clues are only obvious in hindsight, but because the clues are not really there to begin with.  While this isn't technically the right term for what I mean, the resolution to the story had a deus ex machina kind of feeling.  Something comes right out of left field that no one could have seen coming, which annoyed me on a certain level because it made the end feel disjointed, like the ending to another story. Or maybe I was just not paying enough attention (but I don't think so).  At any rate, I'd still recommend this book to anyone who likes a good scary story, or a good family story, or a good mystery story. It's a (mostly) satisfying read.

The Metaxy Project

Layton Green is an author that I discovered when he reached out to me about reviewing a new series he was writing, the Dominic Grey series.  That series now has three titles (The Summoner, The Egyptian, and The Diabolist), and I found them to be a delicious combination of well-paced action and interesting information about cults, the occult, and the psychology surrounding them.

Green is back with a new stand alone novel, The Metaxy Project.  Like his previous books, Green explores the supernatural from the point of view of a skeptic.  In this case, the skeptic is a young man named Derek Miller, a poor kid from the wrong side of the tracks who had the good fortune to start a friendship with a rich kid from an influential family.  When his friend is killed in a car accident, his father (a wealthy, well-known professor and researcher) takes Derek under his wing and helps him get into and through law school.  Derek is just at the beginning of his career, and he has scored a plum job as an associate at a "biglaw" firm.  But when the professor is murdered, Derek is drawn into the search for the killer.  He discovers a super-secret government project related to the supernatural.  The government was experimenting with telekinesis, telepathy, and remote viewing in an effort to weaponize them.  Derek puts his life and sanity in danger to bring down the conspiracy and avenge his dead mentor.

This is going to be a strange connection, but Derek reminded me very much of the main character from the USA series Suits.  Both are young, down-and-out kids who are given a break by powerful men; both are whip smart and underestimated by those around them; both are prone to pretty women in distress.That's pretty much where the similarities end, but it did make me like Derek's character pretty much from the beginning, since I like that show so well.

As a skeptic myself, one of the things that I like about Green's writing is that he tries to make some connection between seemingly inexplicable phenomenon and actual science.  While the story in The Metaxy Project is very definitely in the realm of fantasy, it is not such a stretch, even for a confirmed atheist and realist like myself, to go along with the events of the plot.  Green's work is reminiscent of James Rollin's books, only smarter.  Whereas I sometimes read Rollin's stories with a good deal of eye-rolling at some of the more fantastical plot points, Green's stories sweep me up completely as a combination of reality and possibility.  While I certainly don't believe that things like mediums and ESP are evidence of some larger force at work, who's to say that science won't someday have an explanation for the seemingly supernatural experiences people have reported experiencing over the decades.

Boy's Life, by Richard R. McCammon

I suppose it is human nature to idealize our own past.  As we age, we recall the good ol' days when things were simpler.  Nothing beats the nostalgia of our remembered childhood.  A certain toy or a snippet of a

song can transport us back to an earlier time, when the biggest thing most of us had to worry about was our little league team's record, or when the next installment of our favorite comic was coming out.

Ok, I know that the past was not nearly as idyllic as "Leave it to Beaver" or "The Brady Bunch" would have us believe.  There was ugliness-child abuse and alcoholism and racism and poverty are not exactly new phenomenon in human history.  But if you were lucky, and you grew up in the 60s and 70s in America, your dad had a decent job in a mill or a factory, mom was home to greet you after school with a snack, and your summer was full of bike-riding and swimming and catching fire-flies.  It is that America that exists in Richard McCammon's Zephyr, Alabama, the setting of his novel Boy's Life.  The main character, Cory, is a 12 year old boy, in that awkward phase we now call the 'tweens.  His dad was a milkman, his mom a stay at home mother, and he and his four best friends loved comics and baseball and looking for arrowheads.  But, just as we know that the good ol' days weren't always that good, Zephyr has its secret horrors hiding below the surface.  One morning, on the way to school, Cory and his father see a car go over the guardrail and into the lake.  Cory's dad jumps in to save the driver, only to find that he is already dead-his face unrecognizable, a piano wire wrapped around his throat, handcuffed to the steering wheel.  This incident haunts Cory's father, and throughout the course of the novel we find out what happened to the man in the car.  The novel takes place over the course of a year, and is chock-full of magical happenings, culminating in the resolution of the original mystery.

The novel is written very much in the style of "Stand By Me" by Stephen King, and there appeared to be a few send-ups to the great man himself-a pet that comes back from the dead, a ghost car that prowls the roads.  McCammon sets a scene about as well as King does, with evocative descriptions and creative turns-of-phrase.  Perhaps it was my own summers spent in rural southern Alabama as a kid, but the characters and story felt very authentic to me, even as the magic strains belief.  While reading the novel, one can take the story literally as a supernatural mystery, or one can see the magic as a metaphor for the magical thinking we all have in childhood, when monsters under the bed are real, and riding our bikes really does make us feel like we've sprouted wings to fly.  It is also very much the story of one boy going from child to not-quite-a-man, and realizing that the adults in his life are not entirely what he thought them to be.  Cory learns some hard lessons the year he was 12, but they are lessons that all of us learn at one point or another.  Most of McCammon's other novels sound very much like lurid monster fiction, but they are on my to-read list anyway, because I have to believe that the man that wrote this thoughtful, nostalgic book handled those stories with the same finesse he used writing Boy's Life.

Afterwards, Rosamund Lupton

Last week, I was at a conference for reading teachers in Springfield, IL.  One of the vendors in the exhibit hall, Anderson's Books (a great independent bookstore in Naperville, IL, in case you happen to be local), had some reader-centric t-shirts in their booth.  I came home with these two...

But there was another one that I plan to get, that expresses a sentiment I have always felt.  Namely, that authors are my rock stars.  I never ceased to be amazed at the ability of good writers to create whole new worlds, or to shine a light so starkly on the world we already live in.  After thousands of years of the written word, the fact that there can still be anything literarily new or original is mind-blowing.  

In this spirit, I eagerly picked up Afterwards, by Rosamund Lupton, in preparation for my book club last month.  We had already read her book Sister, which engendered a great discussion about whether we agreed with the use of the literary device she employed.  In that book, the story is told in what we think is a letter to the main character's sister, only to discover that the while conversation is taking place in the main character's mind.  Lupton tried out a different narrative structure this time.  For Afterwards, which is essentially a mystery just like Sister, she placed the narrator and her daughter in a limbo state, stuck between life and death, able to observe what was happening to them and their loved ones without really being able to interact with them.

Afterwards begins with the narrator, a 40ish year old mother named Grace, realizing that her daughter is trapped in a burning school.  She rushes in to save her...and the next thing she is aware of is being in the hospital, looking down on her own comatose body lying in a hospital bed.  Her 17 year old daughter Jenny, who was horribly burned in the fire, is also in a coma, and together they start wandering the hospital, trying to find out what has happened to them.  It soon becomes apparent that each woman is in critical condition.  It also become apparent that their injuries are not the result of a tragic accident, but arson.  Grace and Jenny spend the rest of the novel alternately dealing with their own rather bumpy relationship, or tagging along with other characters who are actually living in the world as they try to solve the mystery.

And that is where Lupton lost me a bit.  Because was seemed like an interesting plot device at the beginning soon got rather tired.  Because the fact is that as much as Grace may follow her husband as he tries to keep them safe, or her sister-in-law the police officer as she investigates the fire, she can't actually DO anything.  Except have conversations with people that they can't hear, or discover clues that she can't tell anyone.  And as the book progresses, it becomes more and more sentimental, to the point that I was actually slightly annoyed by the resolution not of the mystery, which had be guessing until almost the end, but of the novel's other major plotline, that of whether Grace or Jenny can be saved.  I won't say that I didn't enjoy reading this book, because it kept me engaged throughout.  But I found myself reading faster and faster as the end approached, and not necessarily because I wanted to find out whodunnit-I was ready for it to be over.