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It’s Cold Outside: Books To Heat You Up

polar bear vortexBrr. Freezing temperatures have meant I’m stuck inside, wearing multiple layers and telling my kids to get their cold feet off of me. Don’t get me wrong, it is beautiful out there, but I am about to go stir crazy. Friends of mine are sharing photos from their holiday vacations in Mexico and the Caribbean, with sunny, bright blue skies, and I so want to soak up some of that warmth.

Alas, I’m in the freezing Midwest, and I’m not going anywhere. And wherever you are, unless you’re in Florida, you”re probably feeling some frosty weather coming your way as well. In the spirit of escaping it all for warmer climes, I thought I’d give you a list of titles that take place in warmer locales.  While we’ve reviewed some of the books on this list, I can’t vouch for them all, and as always, not every book is right for every reader. Still, here are some books to add some heat to your TBR pile.

 

The Lamplighters by Frazer Lee (reviewed here). Working on an island paradise is not all it’s cracked up to be.

The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells. A classic tale of mad science and genetic manipulation.

Shady Palms by Allen Dusk (reviewed here). Want to vacation in California? You’ll want to avoid staying at Shady Palms.

Amazonas by Allan Peter Ryan (reviewed here). An atmospheric tale of a journey down the Amazon and into supernatural horror.

The Disappearance by Bentley Little (reviewed here).  A college student mysteriously disappears while on vacation at the Burning Man festival in Nevada.

Slither by Edward Lee (reviewed here) Lee creates a deadly mix with killer worms, scientists, the military, and a bunch of college students, and plenty of gore and sexual violence, taking place on a tropical island in the Gulf of Mexico.

Tropic of Darkness by Tony Richard (reviewed here). Havana, Cuba may be a delightful place to visit, but the music there can be deadly.

Lost Girl of the Lake by Joe McKinney and Michael McCarthy (reviewed here). Mark expected summer vacation in Gaitlinville, Texas to be boring, but it turned out to be a haunting experience.

Red Rain by R.L. Stine (reviewed here).  A novel for grown-ups from the master of children’s horror. Travel writer Lea Sutter is trapped on an island in South Carolina during a hurricane, and returns home with two strange children orphaned by the storm.

Tribesmen by Adam Cesare (reviewed here). A producer sends his movie crew to a Caribbean island to film a B-movie horror film, using the natives as extras.

Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton. Dinosaurs recreated for an amusement park near Costa Rica behave, well, like dinosaurs, with disastrous results.

The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine by Peter Straub (reviewed here).  In this atmospheric tale of subtle horror, Ballard and Sandrine are on a cruise down the Amazon that seems to take place during a time warp, beginning in 1969 and ending in 1997.

Zombie Fever: Malaysia Outbreak by B.M. Hodges. Abigail and Jaime join a reality show that has them racing across the Malaysian Peninsula, which has been overrun by zombies.  We have a review of this one coming soon.

The Island by Richard Laymon (reviewed here) Told in diary format, this is the story of Rupert, his girlfriend Connie, and her family, stranded on an island and stalked by a killer. Note, Laymon is not for the faint of heart.

 

Here’s hoping one of these warms you up, or at least distracts you while you try to stave off the chills. Happy reading!

 

 

Posted on January 8, 2014 by , Reply

The Invisible Man @ your library

No, not Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. This one. I understand that it can get confusing. Certainly, the reviewers on Amazon seem confused.

Why yes, I do love this picture.

The Invisible Man is often overlooked, and he’s not only important culturally, but has morphed in some pretty cool ways (link). So I thought I’d shine a light on him, so to speak, and share some information, and some resources, about this unusual monster. Note, if you’re going to be making a homemade Halloween costume for an 8 year old boy who loves monsters, as I am, this is an easy one.

Every single one of the items pictured below is related in some way to the Invisible Man. Want to find out how?

                                    

What with Teen Read Week’s theme this year of “Seek the Unseen” it seems like the perfect time to give some visibility to a human monster often lost in the crowd: the Invisible Man. While the Invisible Man doesn’t have the iconic status of vampires, zombies, man-made creatures, and werewolves, he has, in his invisible way, insinuated himself into popular culture.

As with Frankenstein, The Phantom of the Opera, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the Invisible Man has literary origins, first appearing in a novella of the same name by the famed H.G. Wells. And as with Frankenstein and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Invisible Man is a cautionary tale about the perils of pride, in taking science just a step too far in the direction of a nightmare. In the novel, Griffin, a scientist who has discovered the secret of invisibility, and tested it on himself, arrives in a small town hoping to complete experiments that will allow him to reverse the process. Obsessed and ambitious even at the beginning, he becomes more and more detached from humanity and willing to commit destructive and amoral acts, until finally he is killed and becomes visible again. The novella was made into a Universal horror film in the 1930s, and since then he has been represented in a number of different ways: as an increasingly psychopathic and violent monster(in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, for instance); as a redemptive figure unrelated to the Wells novel except for possessing the power of invisibility(such as the one in the Sci-Fi channel series The Invisible Man); and as an entertaining member of ensemble-related monster movies such as Mad Monster Party and Hotel Transylvania. Queen even introduced him into the world of music with their song “The Invisible Man”. Yet, while he continues to resurface, it doesn’t seem to me that he is especially noticeable (par for the course, I suppose). Many of the tropes of invisibility that appear throughout popular culture (including Harry Potter’s Cloak of Invisibility) can be attributed to The Invisible Man, though, including tween and teen novels (a few are pictured above)  and media (Out of Sight, Out of Mind is a favorite Buffy episode of mine)  I will take a moment to note that the original movie has really awesome special effects– here’s a link— so this is also an opportunity to pull out books on that topic!  As you prepare to seek the unknown for Teen Reed Week you might consider him, and ask teens to consider this: if you had the power of invisibility, what would you do? Where would you go? What kind of person would you want to be?

 

 

 

 

Posted on October 4, 2013 by , Reply

Monster Movie Month: Frankenstein and Other Mad Scientists

Why is it that so many people are drawn to the tales of mad scientists? Their obsessions drive them beyond caring about notions of right and wrong; they go far beyond in testing the limits of what it means to create or alter life and humanity. From Victor Frankenstein to Dr. Moreau, mad scientists appear in literature and film again and again, warning us of the dangers of seeking knowledge out of selfishness and arrogance, and giving us visions of the horrors that can emerge from experiments gone awry.

The archetypal mad scientist is Frankenstein- the man, not the monster- who, once he has brought his terrifying creation, stitched together from stolen body parts, to life, abandons his responsibility to the frightened, innocent creature. The story behind the origins of the Frankenstein story is enough to capture the imagination, and since then, it has gone through many incarnations and interpretations. One of the most famous of these is the 1931 Frankenstein produced by Universal Pictures, reviewed here, but there are many more books and movies based on or inspired by Mary Shelley’s original novel. There are also many other resources on Mary Shelley and Frankenstein available.

But Frankenstein is hardly the only mad scientist in the movies. During the same time period that Universal produced Frankenstein, it also released Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Invisible Man, and The Island of Lost Souls. Since then, audiences and readers have been treated to a variety of mad scientists in both movies and books, and as long as science has the potential to lead to disaster for humanity, that trend seems certain to continue.

For a list of Frankenstein-inspired movies, check out this page from Wikipedia.

For a list of “mad scientist” movies of varying kinds visit this page from Wikpedia

Here’s an entertaining entry on the Mad Scientist trope from TVtropes.com, and here’s a more thoughtful piece from Strange Magazine.

 

For watch-alikes and read-alikes to three great mad scientist movies released by Universal Studios, look below. And note, this is a great way to get someone hooked on the classics, on the screen and on the page.

Frankenstein(1931)

Watch-alikes: Bride of Frankenstein(1935), Son of Frankenstein(1939), The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)

Read-alikes: Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley, His Dark Endeavor by Kenneth Oppell (young adult), Angelmonster (young adult) by Veronica Bennett, The Monsters: Mary Shelley and the Curse of Frankenstein (nonfiction)

 

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1932)

Watch alikes: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1932), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941),  Mary Reilly(1996), The Invisible Man (1933)

Read-alikes: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, Mary Reilly by Valerie Martin, The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells

 

Island of Lost Souls (1933)

Watch-alikes:  The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), The Fly (1986), Jurassic Park (1991)

Read-alikes: The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells, Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton

 

Enjoy your visit, but don’t stay too long… you might not escape!

 

Posted on July 19, 2012 by , Reply