To See or Not to See: Sinister

There's not a whole lot in the horror arena hitting the big screens this Halloween season, sadly.

September saw the release of:
Resident Evil: Retribution -- I didn't expect much and was still disappointed.
House at the End of the Street -- pretty underwhelming

And then we hit October with:
Frankenweenie

The upcoming:
Paranormal Activity 4

Silent Hill Revelation

And indie movies likely not to be playing in a theater near you:
V/H/S
Rec3
Grave Encounters 2
Smiley
Bigfoot: The Lost Coast Tapes

And then there was Sinister. Now given my great disappointment with horror flicks of late, I'd hoped that Sinister would surprise me but had understandable reservations about it. Some of the producers were also behind 2010's Insidious, which was fairly good. So yes, I hoped Sinister would be great but I was prepared for it to suck.

Frankly, though, the movie didn't suck at all. Instead, it was shocking and highly unsettling.

Ethan Hawke plays Ellison Oswalt, a true crime writer who's last few books have not been well received. He has one bestseller to his name, though, and hopes that his latest project will again bring him to the top of the NYT list. What he doesn't tell his family is that this time they've not just moved to a town where a horrible crime has occurred, they've moved into the exact house where said crime happened. The previous owners were hung and their youngest daughter is still missing.

The first day in their new house, Ellison discovers a box of home videos in the attic. As he sits down to watch, he quickly realizes that the tapes are recordings of murders. Not just the most recent one that occurred in his new house, but others that took place in different houses in past decades. Ellison believes he's on the verge of a huge discovery, one that will ensure his new book will be a big hit. But as time goes by, he begins to realize that things in the house are maybe a little beyond his control.

You can check out the trailer here.

I think the folks behind this movie did everything right! The suspense is killer -- they spend plenty of time building the Oswalt family -- you know that things have not been easy since the last books, Ellison's relationship with his wife is tense, and his kids have problems of their own.

The story is interesting and unique -- their created boogeyman has a believable story behind him even though he's completely fictional.

The movie is shocking and pretty gory. There were definitely some jump out of your seats scenes and lots of uncomfortable squeamish moments. It's an intense watch, in my opinion. I left the theater feeling more than a little ruffled and that hasn't happened in quite a long time.

At this point, I can say that I've seen at least one great horror movie in 2012. Now I just wish we could have some more!

Death and the Girl Next Door by Darynda Jones Excerpt + a Giveaway!

I'm pleased as punch to be part of the Grimlet tour for Darynda Jones's teen debut, Death and the Girl Next Door!

Lorelei's life is a bit odd. Her parents disappeared ten years ago and she's been raised by her grandparents ever since. And Lorelei has visions. Strange visions that she often doesn't understand, like the one she had about the new guy, Jared, fighting a dark, demonic creature. While Lorelei tries to figure that one out, she also realizes that a fellow classmate is stalking her. But that's just the beginning. 

Ooh, I don't want to give too much away on this one. This is the first in Darynda's new Darklight series and it's perfect for teen readers and fans of the Charley Davidson books as well. The premise is definitely unique and the characters are great -- plus it's all packaged in Darynda's trademark style!

Here's an excerpt to give you a taste -- and don't forget to check out the giveaways below!

Death and the Girl Next Door (excerpt)

By Darynda Jones

I laughed to myself and headed toward the back of our favorite

and pretty much only hangout. It sat a mere block from our

alma mater, Riley High, and we practically lived in our corner

booth. I ducked past the snack counter and into a very dark back

hall. Judging by the boxes lining the narrow passage, I’d be taking

my life into my hands if I risked a journey to the little senorita’s

room without illumination, so I ran my hand along a

paneled wall. Where would I be if I were a light switch? Just as

the tips of my fingers found the switch, a silhouette stepped out

of the shadows and brushed past me. I startled with a gasp.

“Excuse me,” I said, placing a hand over my heart.

“Sorry.” The guy paused slightly before continuing on his

way, and in that instant, I saw the makings of utter perfection: a

long arm with shadowy curves that dipped around the fluid

lines of muscle; a tall, wide shoulder; dark hair that curled playfully

over an ear and led to a strong, masculine jaw. Something

inside me lurched, craving a closer look at his face, but he walked

by too fast and the hall was too dark for me to catch anything

else.

After a couple of seconds, I realized my hand had brushed

against his arm. It was enough to send a vision crashing into me,

like the flash of a nuclear bomb, bright and unforgiving. Tamping

down my surprise— I hadn’t had a vision in a very long time— I

pressed shaking fingers to my forehead to wait out the familiar

storm, to see what treasures would wash ashore in the aftermath.

Yet the things I saw were unreal, impossible, and certainly not

of this world: A desolate landscape lay before me with scorched

clouds and a roiling, violet sky. The air was stagnant and so impossibly

thick, breathing it took effort. Then I heard the clanging

of metal. I turned to watch in horror as a being, a boy of no more

than sixteen or seventeen, fierce and somehow not quite human,

struggled with a dark, monstrous beast. The boy’s arms corded as

tendon and muscle strained against the weight of the sword he

wielded. He slashed again and again, but the monster was fast,

with razorlike talons and sharp, gleaming teeth, and the boy

knew what those teeth felt like when they sank into flesh, knew

the blinding pain that accompanied defeat. But he also knew the

power he himself wielded, the raw strength that saturated every

molecule of his body.

Another herculean effort landed a thrust in the monster’s

shoulder and continued through its thick chest. The monster

sank under the boy’s sword with a guttural scream. The boy

looked on while the beast writhed in pain, watched it grow still

as the life drained out of it, and somewhere in the back of the

boy’s mind, he allowed himself to register the burning of his

lungs as he struggled to fill them with air.

Blood trickled between his fingers, down the length of his

blade, and dripped to the powdery earth beneath his feet. I followed

the trail of blood up to three huge gashes across his chest.

Evidently three of the monster’s claws had met their mark,

laying the flesh of its enemy open. I gasped and covered my

mouth with both hands as the boy spun toward me, sword at the

ready. Squinting against the low sun, I could almost make out

his features, but the vision evaporated before I got the chance. A

heartbeat later, I was back in the dark hallway, gasping for air,

one palm pressed against my temple, the other against the wall

for balance.

I squeezed my eyes shut, fought the memory of the vision,

the fear that summoned the taste of bile in the back of my throat,

the feel of blood dripping down the boy’s arm.

There are a couple of tour wide giveaways with this one. The first signup below is to win a copy of Death and the Girl Next Door. The second is for a surprise giveaway. There's plenty of time to enter both.

Good luck!

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Forgotten by Catherine McKenzie

I had to take some time off from my horror reading to get to Catherine McKenzie's latest. In truth, I spent much of last week and the weekend sick enough to be miserable and Forgotten turned out to be just what the doctor ordered, especially in the wee hours of my latest insomnia night.

Emma Tupper never wanted to go to Africa, that was her mother's dream. But her mother's dying wish was for Emma to travel to Tswanaland. She was supposed to be gone for just a month but an illness and then a tragic earthquake left Emma cut off from the outside world for a total of six months. Emma's return is something of a shock for everyone considering she was pronounced missing and presumed dead. Her apartment has been re rented and her possessions are gone. Fortunately, the new tenant is willing to help Emma out as she tries to set things right and rebuild her life. 

I love McKenzie's work! Her stories are amazingly heartfelt without being sappy and her characters are real -- Emma, Anne of Arranged, and Kate of Spin, are the kinds of girls I'd be friends with. I connected with each of them and sympathized with them all.

With Emma, I shared her frustrations and her sadness (yes, I teared up a little) as well as her elation over each accomplishment. I was left wondering how I'd react in her situation -- it's a scary prospect, being cut off from the world and facing the possibility of losing everything. I wonder if I'd reinvent myself, as Dominic suggests, or if I'd try to go back to life as normal. Who knows!

There's so much emotion and depth in McKenzie's tales. She's quickly become one of my favorite must-read authors this year. Each new book has been an absolute joy to read -- even at 1am with a ridiculously stuffy head.

Forgotten is already out in Canada and hits shelves in the US today. I can definitely, highly recommend it and I can't wait to see what McKenzie will do next.

The Witch of Babylon by D.J. McIntosh

John Madison is an art dealer who's recently lost his brother in an accident everyone is quick to blame on him. When he finally ventures out to attend a party given by his friend Hal, John ends up being dragged into a conspiracy and a puzzle of large proportions. Hal is murdered and John is witness to the crime. What's more, it seems Hal stole a priceless artifact John's brother recently brought over from Iraq. Though John's never laid eyes on the piece, Hal's murderers are intent on finding it and convinced that John knows its whereabouts. Fortunately, Hal left John clues about the piece. Unfortunately, time is running out for John to solve the puzzle. 

It seemed there were a ton of these sorts of historical thriller/puzzle titles in the wake of The Da Vinci Code and while I'm a fan of them, D. J. McIntosh's Witch of Babylon doesn't stand out for me as being particularly inventive or original.

By no means does that imply that The Witch of Babylon is not entertaining. The story moves at a fairly quick pace and there's a good bit of action throughout. The puzzles, though, are a bit confusing and I found I had to rely solely on the characters and their explanations and just take their word for it in some cases. There were also some odd transitions between scenes -- weird downtime with the characters that seemed unnecessary given the accepted urgency of solving the puzzles and finding the engraving. And the history of the piece itself was fascinating but greatly slowed the novel. Anytime there was a good bit of narrative about the engraving and its supposed background, the story stalled much more than I'd expected.

Overall I found McIntosh's debut to be a fun read but one that started to lose appeal if I really thought too hard about what was going on. As long as I just went along with the story and did't try to figure anything out on my own (tough for someone with a long history of mystery reading) it was all good.

This is the first book in McIntosh's Mesopotamian trilogy. It hits shelves in the US tomorrow, October 16.

New Releases 10/15/12

Some of the new titles hitting shelves this week are:

The Twelve by Justin Cronin

Forgotten by Catherine McKenzie

The Secret Keeper by Kate Morton

The Panther by Nelson Demille

Cold Light by Jenn Ashworth

Only Superhuman by Christopher L. Bennett

Angel's Ink by Jocelynn Drake

The Walking Dead: Road to Woodbury by Robert Kirkman & Jay Bonansinga

Father Gaetano's Puppet Catechism by Mike Mignola & Christopher Golden

Death in the Floating City by Tasha Alexander

The Fifty Year Sword by Mark Z. Danielewski

A Fatal Winter by GM Malliet

Golden Dawn by Thomas Kastigan

Portlandtown by Rob DeBorde

The Elementals by Francesca Lia Block

The Witch of Babylon by DJ McIntosh

Lola's Secret by Monica McInerney

Sacrifice Fly by Tim O'Mara

The Bone Bed by Patricia Cornwell

Crewel by Gennifer Albin

The Innocents by Lili Peloquin

Hidden by PC Cast and Kristen Cast

Beta by Rachel Cohn

New on DVD:
Chernobyl Diaries
Moonrise Kingdom

New reviews at Bookbitch.com:
Robert Ludlum's The Janus Reprisal by Jamie Freveletti
The Turning by Francine Prose
Velveteen by Danny marks
Falling Together by Marisa de los Santos
Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone

Guest Post: Max Gladstone and the Origin of Three Parts Dead

Good morning, all! I'm thrilled to be hosting Max Gladstone on the blog this morning. Max is the author of Three Parts Dead, out now from Tor.

Three Parts Dead is such a unique and fabulous story. I wanted to know more about how this story and this world came to be written. Here's Max's piece on the idea behind Three Parts Dead:

Invisible Worlds

By Max Gladstone

The idea for Three Parts Dead came from the end of the world.  Or, the end of a world.

I was fresh back from two years teaching abroad, caught in what editorial columns were starting to call a 'quarter-life crisis.'  My time in China had left me with a quiver full of stories, two and a half finished novels, and confusion as to what I was supposed to do with the rest of my life.  I knew I didn't want to be an ocean and a continent away from friends and family, but I knew little else.

            

No worries, though.  I had a degree, I could speak Chinese, my friends were doing well in PhD and professional programs.  The woman who would become my wife was rocking her first year of law school. I didn't have a job, but that wouldn't take long to remedy.  It couldn't.

            

So I thought, when I moved into a small house in Inman Square in late August 2008.

            

You know what happens next.  Initial job inquiries seem promising.  Job leads return my calls.  Resumes excite interest.  I pursue the future. 

Until the economy implodes.

            

At first I don't notice.  The world collapses on the front pages of newspapers, but the damage is invisible.  Leads start to dry up, but leads dry up, and as the man says, the leads aren't weak.  You're weak.  But as September deepens into October, I wander around Cambridge and notice something's changed.  Light assumes a different quality.  A world I can barely sense has frozen.  Men and women more attuned to this invisible world explain causes and consequences to audiences and television cameras, but that world itself remains invisible.  Debts fall due, yes, contracts collapse, uncertainty creeps into markets and values.  No houses have been burned, no factories lie in rubble, but the invisible world has changed, and soon those houses will burn, and those factories stand abandoned.

           

Once, a Chinese high school student asked me about Taiwan.  She felt, very strongly, that Taiwan was rich, and that China should invade and take Taiwan's money for itself.

            

I tried to explain to her that the wealth she wanted wasn't in a bank vault somewhere.  Taiwan's money was spread throughout the world, immaterial, and a war would destroy its wealth.  I didn't understand global economics very well myself at the time, so our conversation drew off into confusion as we both tried to describe an invisible world in our second languages.

             

I remembered that conversation two years later, as the invisible world unraveled.  It felt like a Time War, a secret apocalypse.  And folks unlucky enough to be in my position, looking for work in the chaos, we wandered around trying to make sense of the new world in which we found ourselves.

            

That was the year of Three Parts Dead: a year of hope and fear, a year of reeling, a year of feeling somehow betrayed.  A year of realizing how much my actions had been driven by a drum beat I'd never been aware of hearing.  A year of wondering what's next.

            

I wanted to answer that question, or at least explore it, but I didn't know enough.  Nobody did.  So I tried to dream.  I needed a world with an invisible component that a reader could understand intuitively, a world that would resonate on a spiritual level.  Gods seemed a good place to start.  Ragnarok was too huge for the project I had in mind; why not focus on one god, and follow the consequences of His death for His people?  A story about nothing but the god's death and His worshippers' reaction seemed to rob human characters of agency, at a time when the papers regaled us with attempted interventions in the collapse.  So, a class of professionals emerged, related to the gods but not of them—inimical to them in many respects, symbiotic at least if not parasitic.  Problem-solvers rise in response to problems.  Society takes shape.

            

At which point the characters and their motivations took over.  Symbols grew, cohered, and interacted on their own.  The world twitched, and gave birth to its own problems, its own characters.  Gargoyles entered from stage left.  A goddess grew within the frame of the story.  A police officer with a problem stumbled out of a back-alley bar.  And all of a sudden the ending world in the book no longer felt like an echo of the world I knew.

            

A world, or something like it, had come to life.

            

I don't think the cracking of the old system was the key to writing Three Parts Dead; I'd had ideas about money and law and magic before.  But that cracking gave me the energy I needed to write the book.   As I looked for a way to live in the real world, the characters of my book searched for a way to live in theirs.  I've charted a stable course, for the moment; Tara and her companions resolve their immediate challenges as well, but they too must negotiate a transformed world.

            

The end of the world, you see, is just another day.  It's what we do after that counts.

Big, big thanks to Tor for inviting me to participate in the tour for Three Parts Dead and huge thanks to Max Gladstone for the guest post today. For more on Max and his work, visit his official website here. You can also follow him on Twitter. 

Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone

Kos Everburning has died. The city of Alt Coulumb and the surrounding areas have long relied on the old God for power and heat, so his death would have terrible results for everyone. Tara Abernathy has been hired by Kelethras, Albrecht, and Ao to work the case. If they can find the cause of Kos's death, they can possibly bring him back. Though she is helped by one of Kos's Novices and one of the city's Blacksuits, Tara has limited time to unravel the cause behind the God's demise and when they find the Gargoyles have returned, things become complicated.

It's kind of hard to sum this one up in a brief synopsis. First, while the plot is basically a mystery -- what caused Kos's death -- the world and the history of the world are very intricate. You have the God Wars in which Kos's fellow goddess Seril was killed. You have the banishment of the Gargoyles, the creation of the Blacksuits -- the police force and servants of Seril in her new form --, and the Craft. And to try and tie those elements into the synopsis kind of gives away some of the great build of the story itself.

In essence, Three Parts Dead is a bit of a legal thriller wrapped very deeply in a web of super cool fantasy. With such a detailed and different concept behind this one, any wary reader might expect one of two things, the dreaded info-dump, or being completely lost as you wind your way through a story with little to no info. Neither is the case here. Gladstone does a fantastic job including enough bits and pieces along the way that nothing comes across as confusing or overly detailed and slow. Quite a BIG accomplishment with this kind of story.

Whether you choose to read more deeply into Gladstone's story is your choice. Based on Gladstone's comments on the genesis of the story, you can definitely read more into the book and apply current politics and economic issues, should you choose. It's all there but thankfully never overwhelms the tale. I much prefer a quieter symbolic look at the possible downfall of the world than a blatantly bleak beating over the head. Never fear fellow ostriches, in terms of pure entertainment, Three Parts Dead is intriguing and suspenseful. The plotting is smart and the pacing is spot on. What's more, this is the kind of cross genre release that'll appeal to lots of readers across the board.