Saturday, December 14, 2013

The Resurrectionist: The Lost Work of Dr. Spencer Black, by E.B. Hudspeth


Rating: 4/5
192 pages
2013
Publisher: Quirk Books
Source: Library book

Description: The Resurrectionist offers two extraordinary books in one. The first is a fictional biography of Dr. Spencer Black, from a childhood spent exhuming corpses through his medical training, his travels with carnivals, and the mysterious disappearance at the end of his life. The second book is Black’s magnum opus: The Codex Extinct Animalia, a Gray’s Anatomy for mythological beasts—dragons, centaurs, Pegasus, Cerberus—all rendered in meticulously detailed anatomical illustrations. You need only look at these images to realize they are the work of a madman. The Resurrectionist tells his story.

Saturday, November 30, 2013

The Dark Tower, by Stephen King


Rating: 4.5/5
830 pages
2004
Publisher: Grant
Source: My collection

Description: The final volume in Stephen King's Dark Tower series. Roland Deschain's quest for the tower comes to an end.

Review: Full disclosure, The Gunslinger was one of the first Stephen King books I fell in love with. I really can't completely separate myself from that.

Saturday, November 23, 2013

The Day of the Triffids, by John Wyndham


Rating: 4/5
272 pages
1951
Publisher: Penguin Books
Source: Borrowed from family

Description: Tired of watching humanity struggle for survival against hordes of vampires or zombies? How about predatory plants for a change?

After a strange event leaves most of the world's population blind. Humanity's struggle to survive is complicated by the Triffids, a species of mobile carnivorous plants.

Saturday, November 16, 2013

William Shakespeare's Star Wars, by Ian Doescher


Rating: 3/5
172 pages
2013
Publisher: Quirk Books
Source: Library book

Description: Star Wars IV: A New Hope rewritten in the style of Shakespeare.

Saturday, November 9, 2013

Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, by Mary Roach


Rating: 4.5/5
327 pages
2013
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company
Source: Library book

Description: Science writer Mary Roach explores the human digestive system and gets answers to questions you probably never would have though to ask in the first place.

Saturday, November 2, 2013

Uzumaki 1-3, by Junji Ito

Rating: 4/5, 4/5, and 3/5
2001
Publisher: Viz Media
Source: Borrowed from family

Description: Shortly after Shuichi Saitos father becomes obsessed with spirals snail shells, whirlpools, and man-made patterns he dies mysteriously, his body positioned in the shape of a twisted coil. Soon, the entire town is afflicted with a snail-like disease. (from Goodreads)

Saturday, October 26, 2013

Awoken, by Serra Elinsen


Rating: 4/5
310 pages
2013
Publisher: Self Published
Source: Amazon.com

Description: In his house at R’lyeh, great Cthulhu lies dreaming... of her.

What would you do if you discovered you were the only one in the world with the hidden power to keep it from utter annihilation?

What if you had no idea what that power might even be?

Andromeda Slate, the self-proclaimed most ordinary girl in America, can’t figure out why the gorgeous but mysterious new boy at high school seems to hate her so much. It couldn't have anything to do with the strange dream she had the night before he first showed up in class, could it? The dream where the very same boy rescued her from a giant, green, tentacled sea monster?

And it couldn’t have anything to do with that time she read aloud from that ancient tome of eldritch magic, the Necronomicon... could it?

Andi Slate never imagined she’d find herself in a situation where somehow she was the key to saving the world.

Her life is about to get a whole lot less ordinary.
(From the back cover)