This story contains a high octane charged sequence of events that grip you from the very first page and does not let down in momentum. The story has aThis story contains a high octane charged sequence of events that grip you from the very first page and does not let down in momentum. The story has a great plot and some good old hard boiled characters, elements that pan out into a solid thriller. There is loads of tension and intrigue, the writer displays craftsmanship in weaving this story together. One actress finds herself the target of a hot pursuit and to be cleaned, eradicated. A house-sitter, fixer kind of guy who has connections with FBI finds himself tangled up in the web, a cover up. They must both find a way out in this cat and mouse game because once The Accident people are called in they can only be one outcome. I wait in anticipation for his next instalment in this Hardie trilogy with Hell and Gone by Duane.
Some insightful excerpts.
'Number of accidental vehicle crash deaths in the United States per year: 43,200.'
'Number of vehicle stolen in Los Angeles every year: 75,000.
'Number of accidental suffocations per year: 3,300.'
'Number of accidental falls per year: 14,900.' 'Percentage of murder victims killed by someone they know: 58'
"She never cared that she was going thirty miles faster than any sane driver would attempt on this road. She loved the ocean air smashing into her face, the feel of the tires beneath as they struggled to cling to the asphalt, the hum of the machine surrounding her body, the knowledge that one twitch to the left or right at the wrong moment meant her brand-new car, along with her brand-new life, would end up at the bottom of a ravine, and maybe years later people would ask: whatever happened to that cute actress who was in those funny romantic comedies a few years ago?
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Check out the second and thirdinstallments, all great thrillers. ...more
Oh BizArro! where for art thou bizarro! A trip to a very big bookstore left me quite embarrassed I asked the salesman about some authors and he checkeOh BizArro! where for art thou bizarro! A trip to a very big bookstore left me quite embarrassed I asked the salesman about some authors and he checked the computer with no joy, I asked about bizarro genre and he looked at me strangely! This trend of bizarro is not out there yet in the stores in the u.k, online and in ebook format are the only sources out there for me. Day two bizarro search.. I wake up from sleep as I drag my legs out of the bed and gently place them on the ground I find my shorts are very heavy as I stand they fall off. I am looking at a small book miniature sized it's a bizarro book there in my shorts, is that where you find them? Did the fairy bizarro hear my wishes and visit me in the sleep? I don't know. The story The Egg said Nothing writes about the same experience as me, but the protagonist gave birth to an egg and over a course of few hours went on a killing spree. The story was not like Dickens or Lovecraft but was a flowing quick read on the bizarro side. Well I feel in need of someone cerebral stimulation on the wacky side so I am going to try and want more bizarro and see what I find in my underpants tomorrow morning. I fear for society as this bizarro craze is rising, put a stop to it for you own sanity please!...more
The actions of people in the pursuit of love and happiness are sometimes unplanned spontaneous and dangerous. In this story a man comes to town and beThe actions of people in the pursuit of love and happiness are sometimes unplanned spontaneous and dangerous. In this story a man comes to town and becomes involved with a married woman. They plan and plot her way out of the marriage, options on the table they want things to be clean. They have a plan, how will it unfold? Will they walk away in each other arms in happiness?
One thing for sure is there will be blood. Well if your familiar with the authors writing and read his novel Double Indemnity you will know that his story becomes intricate and a web that his characters must free themselves from. This was another enjoyable tale of individuals and the macabre.
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I found this info on the title of the novel on good old Wikipedia..
The title is something of a non sequitur in that nowhere in the novel does a postman appear, nor is one even alluded to. The title's meaning has therefore often been the subject of speculation. William Marling, for instance, suggested that Cain may have taken the title from the sensational 1927 case of Ruth Snyder. Snyder was a woman who, like Cora in Postman, had conspired with her lover to murder her husband. It is recognized that Cain used the Snyder case as an inspiration for his 1943 novel Double Indemnity; Marling believes it was also a model for the plot and the title of Postman. In the real-life case, Snyder said she had prevented her husband from discovering the changes she had made to his life insurance policy by telling the postman to deliver the policy's payment notices only to her, and instructing him to ring the doorbell twice as a signal indicating he had such a delivery for her. In the preface to Double Indemnity, however, Cain gave a specific, and entirely different, explanation of the origin the title for The Postman Always Rings Twice, writing that it came from a discussion he had had with screenwriter Vincent Lawrence. According to Cain, Lawrence spoke of the anxiety he felt when waiting for the postman to bring him news on a submitted manuscript—specifically noting that he would know when the postman had finally arrived because he always rang twice. Cain then lit upon that phrase as a title for his novel. Upon discussing it further, the two men agreed such a phrase was metaphorically suited to Frank's situation at the end of the novel. With the "postman" being God, or Fate, the "delivery" meant for Frank was his own death as just retribution for murdering Nick. Frank had missed the first "ring" when he initially got away with that killing. However, the postman rang again, and this time the ring was heard: Frank is wrongly convicted of having murdered Cora, and then sentenced to die. The theme of an inescapable fate is further underscored by the Greek's escape from death in the lovers' first murder attempt, only to be done in by their second one. In his biography of Cain, Roy Hoopes recounts the conversation between Cain and Lawrence, only he extends Lawrence's remarks. He did not merely say that the postman always rang twice, but rather that he was sometimes so anxious waiting for the postman that he would go into his backyard to avoid hearing his ring. It was no good, however, for if the postman's first ring was not noticed, his second one, even from the backyard, would be.
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You are transported to the world of Ivan and walk with him to his last moments at deaths door. A story of the terror of death and Ivan's fear of dyingYou are transported to the world of Ivan and walk with him to his last moments at deaths door. A story of the terror of death and Ivan's fear of dying, his concern and sorrow for his families witnessing of his howling and decline. Suffering realizes joy of youth and memories of the best of days, while he is in this process of death the solitude brings him to doors of gone memories of happiness. How our daily trappings take us away from finer and truer happier moments of life, a time lost so valuable, we are a generational lost by media consumption, mobiles, internet and tv fine examples of vehicles of joyous hours but are also guilty of stealing our treasured hours that could be spent in much so joyous moments, i myself am guilty of these behaviours but i find the much joy in the solitude and private thought of words and reading. A short story but the magnitude of the message conveyed great to me I am now thinking of my past and age of innocence, ignorance is bliss words uttered by oh so many. This is the first reading of any of Tolstoy's works for me and I wait in anticipation to descent upon the treasure trove of his works of literature, Bon voyage alas I must hasten to read more and more.
"From the very beginning of his illness, from the time when Ivan Ilyvich first went to the doctor, his life had divided into two opposite states of mind, which alternated each other: now there was despair and the expectation of the incomprehensible and terrible death, now there was hope and the interest-filled process of observing the functioning of his body. Now there hung before his eyes a kidney or an intestine that shirked it's duty for a time; now there was only incomprehensible, terrible death, from which there was no escape."
"In the recent time of that solitude in which he found himself, lying face to the back f the sofa, that solitude in the midst of the populous town and his numerous acquaintances and family- a solitude than which there could be none more total anywhere; not at the bottom of the sea, not under the earth-in the recent time of that dreadful solitude, Ivan Ilyvich had lived only on imaginings of the past. One after another, pictures of the past appeared to him. They always began with the nearest time and went back to the most remote, to childhood, and there they stayed."
"And again right there, along with this course of recollection, another course of recollection was going o his soul-of how his illness had grown and worsened. The further back he went, the more life there was. There was a goodness in life, and more of life itself. The two merged together."As my torment kept on getting worse and worse, so the whole of life got worse and worse," he thought. There was one bright spot back there, at the beginning of life, and then it became darker and darker, ever quicker and quicker. "In inverse proportion to the square of the distance from death," thought Ivan Ilyvich. And this image of a stone plunging down with increasing speed sank into his soul. Life, a series of ever-increasing sufferings, races faster and faster towards it's end, the most dreadful suffering."
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A girl who’s traveled the land, her mind filled with people, sights and words, with sins and redemption. She’s only 15 and has killed many
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A girl who’s traveled the land, her mind filled with people, sights and words, with sins and redemption. She’s only 15 and has killed many the rule is kill or be killed. A desolate land of death and zombies, she did not choose this destiny. Amongst the contagious spreading of zombies, she hides from many in the shadows and is well equipped to fight twice her size equipped with her Gurkha knife. This story is written well, a story so bleak about death and survival and love has some beautifully written lines, written in eloquent prose that makes the zombie story that so much better.
The story is about death and redemption and one girl’s eventual outcome amongst darkness, at times heart-breaking. The island, The Lighthouse, The Moon and The Miracle of the Fish.
"And, too, a carnival of death, a grassy park near the city center, a merry-go-round that turns unceasing hour by hour, its old-time calliope breathing out dented and rusty notes while the slugs pull their own arms out of the sockets trying to climb aboard the moving platform, some disembodied limbs dragging in the dirt around and around, hands still gripping the metal poles—and the ones who succeed and climb aboard, mounting to the top of the wooden horses, joining with the endless motion of the machine, dazed to imbecility by gut memories of speed and human ingenuity. And the horde, in the blackout of the city night, illumined only by the headlights of the car, everywhere descending and roiling against one another like maggots in the belly of a dead cat, the grimmest and most degenerate manifestation this blighted humanity on this blighted earth—beasts of our lost pasts, spilling out of whatever hell we have made for them like the army of the damned, choked and gagging and rotted and crusty and eminently pathetic, yes, brutally, conspicuously, outrageously pathetic."
[image] The Books Behind The Reapers Are The Angels As I suspect is true of all novels, The Reapers Are the Angels is cobbled together from the fragments of other books. Any but the most passive reader will collect certain baggage from the books he or she reads—lingering impressions that stick like burrs in the back of the brain and sometimes, especially if the reader is also a writer, plant themselves in the imagination like seeds that grow into other books entirely. For me, these influences can range from a narrative style that I wish I could emulate, to an unforgettable scene, or a perfectly written sentence, or even an ideally chosen and placed word (like the word "thrapple" in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian). For a writer, those are the things that brought you to literature in the first place—a fascination with artful storytelling—so it's not surprising that the things you admire most make their way in sometimes insidious ways into your own writing.I've heard this process referred to in a number of ways: everything from plagiarism to artful thievery to homage. But I think I like Tolstoy's metaphor best: art is a contagion. It infects you with its brilliance, and you feel inspired, however humbly, to recreate it and infect somebody else with it.
Even though it is, without question, a zombie novel, Reapers traces the source of its literary infection back to the Southern Gothic tradition and the classic stories of the American frontier. Here are some of the contagious books that have contributed to The Reapers Are the Angels.
[image]The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner. The more I write, the more I find myself in debt to Faulkner. The unquestionable master of the Southern Gothic, Faulkner is an icon for writers because he is unafraid to go big: he does not hesitate to launch into epic considerations of good and evil, womanhood and manhood, sin and corruption, nobility and redemption. You could accuse him of being melodramatic, but in an age when so many books seem to be written in a snickering, self-deprecatory style, I personally would rather see someone err in the direction of grandiosity rather than modesty. Some small homages to Faulkner in Reapers: Temple's name, which comes from Sanctuary, and the figure of Maury, who is based upon Benjy in The Sound and the Fury. Also, the Grierson episode evokes the short story "A Rose for Emily," about a woman (Emily Grierson) who refuses to make the transition from the past to the present.
[image]The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain. Reapers is structured as a classic American road novel, the form of which has its roots in Huck Finn. It is episodic, and we are drawn forward by an overdetermination of motives: an escape from whatever imprisonment is behind the hero and a pursuit of whatever freedom lies before the hero. Temple is, I think, a version of the pragmatic, earnest Huck Finn. The pseudonym she uses, Sarah Mary Williams, is the same one Huck Finn himself uses when he dressed up as a girl.
[image]Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy. For my money, this is one of the great American books of the second half of the twentieth century. Its storyline makes it more of a Western, but its style is pure Southern Gothic. The primary conflict is between an unnamed "kid" and a man who seems echo the expansive, chatty evil of a Faustian devil. I think my character Moses is a kinder, gentler version of that antagonist. In addition, a number of the scenes of vast violence in Reapers are inspired by those from Blood Meridian, particularly the infamous Comanche attack scene.
[image]Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston. You wouldn't normally associate Hurston's lovely, poetic, romantic novel with zombies—but she does tap into a folkloric kind of mysticism that has always fascinated me. My term for zombies, "meatskins," actually comes from Hurston, but she uses it simply to describe puny human beings: "meatskins dancing around the toes of time."
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Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell and Smonk by Tom Franklin. These are two masters of the contemporary Southern Gothic genre. My character of Temple is inspired by the tough, relentless heroines of these two novels. Both of these authors create teenage girls who have managed to survive in brutal surroundings, who have actually grown accustomed to violence and corruption. But what both these authors admire about their characters (you can feel it in the affectionate way they write about them), is their ability to maintain a certain purity within their own individual codes. These girls survive because, even though they live on the rough and tumble margins of society, they are driven by a personal idealism that tells them what to do.
And it would be remiss of me not to mention two television shows that have contributed a great deal to Reapers: Deadwood, which is the perfect representation of a violent, blustery, and wholly beautiful frontier lifestyle, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which represents a landmark in tough, intelligent, complicated and sympathetic young female protagonists. Alden Bell's Top Ten Zombie Movies [image] 10. I Walked with a Zombie Jacques Tourneur's 1943 classic illustrates the voodoo roots of zombie mythology. The stiff melodrama of this film fits perfectly with the hypnotic movements of the zombies themselves and the decaying gothic sensibility of the setting. This is a different kind of zombie: there are no half-rotted walking corpses here—only haunted figures wandering in authentically creepy trances.
[image] 9. 28 Days Later This seems to be the movie that changed the genre. Suddenly zombies were driven by fury more than hunger, and they ran after you with surprising athleticism rather than loping with a stiff, corpse-like gait. Personally, I'm a fan of the more traditional slow zombies, but I admire this movie for the way it uses the zombie backdrop to portray a very gritty story of human frailty.
[image] 8. Night of the Living Dead What George Romero did with this movie was show that zombies make a marvelously accommodating metaphor for whatever political, social or philosophical point you want to make. He shows us that modern zombie stories aren't, for the most part, about zombies—which is beautifully illustrated by the opening scene where the zombie doesn't jump out at you but lingers, unfocussed, in the background for quite a while.
[image] 7. Zombieland I love this movie partly because it is reminiscent of Dawn of the Dead in its playful fascination with post-apocalyptic landscapes but also because it features a cast of characters all of whom have already learned to be survivors. Whether through brutality or trickery or avoidance, these characters have learned to live in the midst of a zombie infestation—and their masterful handling of a blighted world is deeply satisfying to watch.
[image] 6. Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn I have no excuse for this one. I saw it as a kid and thought it was the height of wit. How could the movie be so irreverent to something as deadly serious as flesh-eating zombies? It was my Noel Coward. As a teenager, I had the movie poster fixed permanently above my bed. A grinning skull gazing at you with a sly sideways glance.
[image] 5. American Zombie A brilliant faux documentary about the marginalized population of zombies living on the fringes of Los Angeles. This movie does more than any other to humanize zombies—even turning them into an oppressed yet articulate minority. Understated and surprisingly touching.
[image] 4. Re-Animator I don't know if this exactly qualifies as a zombie movie, but I love it anyway. It delights in its perverse grossness, and it hearkens back (in a mostly sincere way, despite the number of viewers who like to see it as campy) to old fashioned mad scientist tales.
[image] 3. Cemetery Man This underrated 1994 movie, featuring Rupert Everett as a cemetery keeper who has a problem with the dead returning to life, has some of the most wonderfully absurd incarnations of zombie mythology, including a troop of zombie boy scouts, a zombie motorcyclist, and a zombie bride who is no more than a head. Plus, it features the classic line, uttered by the vivacious Anna Fulchi, “You know, you've got a real nice ossuary.” Yes, the movie wants to be a hundred different movies at once. Yes, the special effects are clumsy and the humor broad. But, curiously enough, it's also a deeply cerebral study of life circumscribed by death.
[image] 2. Dead Alive (also called Braindead) When this first came out, it was lauded as the most gory movie every made. I don't know how such things are measured, but it would certainly take some effort to find a movie more stomach-churning than this one. Priding itself on bizarre dark humor and innovative ways to be killed, the movie is great because of its unabashed Freudian subplot. Leave it to Peter Jackson to combine a zombie slaughter-fest with the psychological trauma of a severe Oedipal complex.
[image] 1. Dawn of the Dead For me, this is the archetype, this is where it all began. I remember watching it in complete wonder at all the curious reversals: the portrayal of the zombies as sad and rather pathetic background figures, the fixation on the technical logistics of survival (how much time is spent on showing how the survivors fortify and clean up that shopping mall?), the implication that humans are a far greater threat than zombies, the lack of a beginning or ending (the feeling that the movie is all middle), the portrayal of the loneliness and boredom and downright normalization of life in a post-apocalyptic world. And this, ultimately, is what makes the film so unique: where other movies in the genre do everything in their power to show how different and strange the zombie apocalypse is, Romero focuses on how familiar it Can be. http://more2read.com/?review=the-reapers-are-the-angels-by-alden-bell ...more
I am writing this down in my journal I must do this otherwise I fear tomorrow I might not remember anything. Anything about the bookJune 15th 2am 2011
I am writing this down in my journal I must do this otherwise I fear tomorrow I might not remember anything. Anything about the book I read today or about me or my wife, well she says she is. I woke up this morning and my eyes were cast upon a striking beautiful woman in an even more striking body wearing nice lingerie that fits like a glove. I have no idea at that moment who she is, she says she's my wife but I don't remember being married! I am trying to piece together my life. All this is too much to muster I have been told I was in an accident I had fallen over an egg and banged my head. Strange but I don't remember this, this is what she my wife tells me. I need to write this in my oh so important journal otherwise I will run through the same routine again and not recollect her or the egg. Oh yes that book before I forget this book has inspired me to write more into this journal as the female protagonist is in same situation as me. Her story is ever so more gripping, its tense I am almost glued to the pages her quest is heart warming and heartbreaking I felt tears of joy and sadness on the completion of her story. The story is in the first-person narrative and flows in a visceral fashion. They say it can be cured what we have if we piece together our past and write, I hope so. The story was something fresh and different well worth the read. When I wake up tomorrow I must remember on reading this journal that I have to share these thoughts and write a review.
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