 |
| Tuesday, 26 June 2007 |
| Review: The Husband, by Dean Koontz |
Koontz keeps the nasties coming thick and fast here: The Husband is not a book for the faint-hearted, but it's classic, wonderfully imaginative horror with an extremely human face.
Mitch, our hero, is an ordinary guy, who happens to be completely in love with his wife. So when he receives a telephone call saying that she's been kidnapped, and demanding a two million dollar ransom, he's prepared to go to hell and back to save her. And he does. Koontz writes a pacy and thrilling plot that's one of his better recent creations: this stays on track much better than, say, Velocity. The twists are unexpected but plausible, and the suspense goes on right to the last page.
I'm happy to admit I'm a fan of Dean Koontz - but not a blindly faithful one: there are some of his books (the Odd Thomas trilogy, for example) which I just don't like, and the less supernatural activity there is in his books, the more effective the plotting is. The Husband does what Koontz does best: takes an ordinary man and puts him up against some extraordinarily nasty bad guys. In the sense that it repeats that basic pattern, this is formulaic: but it's writing to a formula that Koontz does very, very well, and that old fans and new readers alike will love. |
| posted @ 16:00 |
|
|
|
| Sunday, 24 June 2007 |
| Words don't come easy |
| This is an absolutely amazing article about a linguist working with an Amazonian tribe, and how their language doesn't fit with the Chomskyan model of a UG. |
| posted @ 18:10 |
|
|
|
| Saturday, 9 June 2007 |
| Plane words |
I'm spending this weekend packing for eBay Live: flat shoes, check; camera with long lens to get piccie of Meg (yes, I'm a fangirl), check; books for 36 hours of plane journies... not checked. Because everything I want to take, I get worried that some person in US immigration will take one look at and disapprove of and put me on the first plane back to cheese-eating monkey land. I desperately want to get going on Ronald Hutton's The Triumph of the Moon, but I think that one's asking for trouble. Books about evolution? I worry they'll get me sent to Bible boot camp.
I'm sure I'm totally overreacting here, but everything I read about America just says that if you don't toe the religious party line, someone somewhere gets upset. And turning up in Boston going, hello, I'd like to visit your convention but I'm bringing my evil European thoughts with me... well, maybe I'll find something a little safer to take. |
| posted @ 17:03 |
|
|
|
Suzie's Book Pages | Blogger Templates by Gecko & Fly.
No part of the content or the blog may be reproduced without permission.
|
| |
|
|
