harrietj's reviews
227 reviews

This book, about a milkman who watches as his community becomes more and more literally haunted around him, unflinchingly drives into how trauma and repression affect adults and how easy it is not to notice at the time the things that end up shaping us into who we are. It explores pregnancy, birth, and parenthood through a horrified male lens, which for obvious reasons isn't the one we typically see. It's also a horror novel and Fletcher very effectively manages to make the most mundane parts of life seem unbearably threatening and dark.

Witch Bottle was really good, but it was just so incredibly bleak that I don't think I can really say I enjoyed it at all. Reading it was a horrible experience. I did love the descriptions of the gorgeous natural landscape - I wonder if this was intended as a counterpoint to how utterly ugly and unnerving the human characters were.

Solid horror. Heavy shades of Pet Semetary and IT, as a lot of reviewers have said, but it works. Quick read. Perhaps a little light on the horror but what there is, works, and the thriller side of the book is done well. Pleasing twists towards the end.

I really enjoyed this very brief look at Christopher Knight's choice to essentially hide in someone's garden for twenty-seven years. What a fascinating mind. 

The book is brief because there really isn't that much to say about Knight's decision, especially as neither he nor his family would talk much about his motivations to the author, but there are some really interesting meditations on solitude and our human need for space and socialisation.

This was good, but it was definitely my least favourite of the three Tales books I've read so far. It wasn't nearly as funny as the other two, and even the most lovable of the characters come off as kind of sociopathic.

How on earth can anyone be discussing wedding invites when as a household they've drugged, beaten, and kidnapped a terrified woman, who has no idea what's going on or when or if she'll be free?

It's monstrous.

And the Jonestown massacre stuff, though flat-out hilarious in its absurdity, sometimes felt like a tiny bit too much. A lot of real people and real little children died. It felt almost a bit tacky to use it as a crazy plot device. But maybe that's just me being oversensitive. I will say that if I let my mum take my little little kids away on a cruise and she left them with a random man for days on end simply because he repeatedly asked her to I would never get over it because that is literally insane.

It's Maupin's romantic nature that really carries this one. Especially between Jon and Michael, we get some real gems of just perfectly articulated wisdom, particularly, but not exclusively, about relationships. Maupin isn't afraid to be absolutely as sentimental as you can get and I love it. He doesn't shy away from emotions, he dives straight into them, and - especially between the male characters - that's a really precious and rare thing to see. Michael and Brian's entirely platonic friendship is such a wonderful and touching one. It's the kind of relationship often depicted between women but rarely between men, especially when one is gay and one is straight. I love it.

Still really looking forward to book 4 but this was a relative low point for the series.

I enjoyed this. It can be hard to translate Spider-Man into prose - his brightly-coloured suit and barely-human body language is just made to be shown visually - but it comes across well in this novel, and Jim Butcher is a skilled enough writer that his trademark wit is ever-present. Supporting characters are true to the comic versions and I liked Peter and MJ's relationship. It's also always a treat to see (read?) Black Cat, and if the back-and-forth jealousy between her and MJ that's always tentatively resolved by the end of the story is a little overplayed by this point, well, like I say, Butcher is a good enough writer that I wasn't bored.

It helps that I really like Rhino. Weird choice of villain, but I don't think he gets used enough.

Overall this book isn't going to be setting the world on fire, of course, but if you like Spidey and his supporting cast in words with no pictures then you could certainly do a lot worse. I enjoyed it. And the cover of my edition is really cool.

Maybe I just read this too soon after Hideaway but I'm sick of Koontz just bringing out angels to fix everything at the end. Also his own little soapbox moments are tiresome. I gave him the benefit of the doubt with Hideaway and told myself that the anti-liberal stuff was the characters' opinions but it's too prevalent in this novel, too, to be coincidence. Koontz can only write one male lead and I think it's his own hero-version of himself. 

The dialogue is better in this novel than the last two of Koontz' that I read, and there were a couple of genuine chills, so points for that.

Also I'm sick of people using Roman Castevet as a clever little easer egg name in their Satanist horror; it long ago ceased to be amusing. 

There's also a strange fixation on describing this kid peeing on a houseplant. He literally does it like four times. It was weird. I couldn't tell if Koontz was trying to be funny? 

This was good, but very repetitive, since most of the stories were more or less the same, and it didn't really go into much detail. I was expecting to learn a little bit more about bears. I also would have loved some pictures. 

I was really hesitant with this book because I hated Nothing but Blackened Teeth so very much, but this was way better. It was poetic rather than pretentious and the mythology felt deeper and better understood.

Felt more like filler than the last volume (of course), but still excellent, and as incredible to look at as ever.