Garton does dirty sex well. If you’re after a down and dirty sweaty story, you couldn’t do much better than this.
Meet Lorelle Dupree, the sexy new neighbor in the small town of Redding, USA, whose just moved in opposite the Pritchards, the average American family. Lorelle wastes no time in seducing each and every member of the family as her thirst for kinky sex is unquenchable. But she holds a darker secret, one that threatens to destroy the Pritchards once peaceful existence, maybe even their neighbors of Deerfield Avenue, their town and maybe even the entire world. .
‘The New Neighbor’ was originally released in 1991 as a limited edition $150 paperback is now available in e-book form, if like a bit of sex with your blood and gore, I urge you to grab a copy. With Lorelle, Garton has created the fantasy female sexual partner for either gender. A voracious sexual appetite is her weapon of choice as she tears families apart with her promiscuity, but beneath her veil of divine beauty, Lorelle hides a horrible secret, one that Robby Pritchard, our cum-soaked teenage hero discovers to his dismay, he must be the one to rise up and defeat her, no matter what the cost.
I loved this book, Ray Garton does uncomfortable sex well, even making the reader feel a little wrong and guilty in his frank and visceral descriptions of sex acts. I did think several times during the course of the story, “should I be reading this?” What if I met a lady like Lorelle? Could I resist? Would I want to? If you were offered endless carnal pleasures that fulfill your every wanton desire, would you want to resist, even if it cost you everything?
When a novel makes you question who you are, you know that you’re reading something good and true, even if it reads wrong and makes you want to take a hot and cold shower afterwards.
A great read that challenges family values and the institution of marriage, whilst creating a strong though priapic female character who strangely I found myself rooting for as Lorelle is only satisfying urges which come natural to her. The ending was a little abrupt as Garton left it ominously open for a sequel and it would have satisfying to delve deeper into Lorelle psyche aside from that I can’t wait for the new neighbor to move next door to me!
5/5
_ I first saw a copy of this in my hometown library when I was ten. It was the cover that intrigued me. “Slaughter House 5” it glared at me in big yellow letters. I was getting into reading Guy N Smith at the time so a title like that would pinch my interest.
Slaughter House 5! , I thought. That means there must be a Slaughter House 1- 4 as well also filled up with enough blood and guts to sate my strange, curious interest in splatter horror. I picked it up and immediately become disinterested. It was a war novel, and would most likely depress me, as the people dying in it would have been real people. I only liked made up people dying. I wasn’t a psychopath.
I put the book back on the shelf and didn’t pick up another copy until nearly twenty years later after I’d read ‘Galapagos’, I should regret every day since then, for even though it contains war, this isn’t a war novel. Not strictly horror, but still horrific in places it made me shudder slightly.
In the future you’re going to be an old bookshop, or a charity shop/thrift store, car boot sale.
Whatever.
You’re going to see an old battered copy of this and you’re going to buy/steal it, then you’re going to read it and be blown away. It’s timeless and fun to read appealing to the human in all of us.
I don’t know why I like reading Vonnegut, but I do. I can’t help it, it’s like rubbernecking a horrendous crash, you know what you’ll see will haunt you forever, but you look in anyway.
If you’ve not read it, here’s the quick synopsis; Billy Pilgrim becomes unstuck in time, and through this temporal dislocation he finds himself plopped into different parts of his life, back and forth, back and broth. From the horrors of being a POW during the bombing of Dresden in WWII, to being mannapped by aliens and forced to make love to a Hollywood beauty to satisfy the aliens delight. Vonnegut happily bumps about this mans lifetime, taking the reader along with him.
Even though it has aliens and time travel, it’s not a Sci-Fi story, it’s something more, it carries a message that in our minds, we never really die, we are destined to relive our greatest and our lowest moments over and over again, we don’t need war to prove how good or bad we are, we should know that already.
Now the rumour is that Guillermo del Toro is currently in the works to direct a film version sometime next year. Do yourself a favour and get a copy before the film comes out. There’s a lot more worse things you could do today.
So it goes.
(Not even going to rate this one, It was rated #18 in the best novels of the 20th century)
Being a father of two in my late twenties, I’ve not read much YA fiction (apart from The Hunger Games, Go Read It NOW!), as I’m outside the demographic. But when I was offered the chance to read this new offering from Nate D. Burleigh I jumped at the chance. In the past I’ve read a few of his short tales and have being suitably impressed, so I thought why not?
Without giving too much away the story, set in late eighties America involves a young man named Coert who discovers by way of a genetic awaking, has developed extraordinary powers, giving him a God-like power over the rest humanity, who he must harvest in order to gain sustenance in order to continue using his great power. But it seems a power even greater than himself is stalking the students of his high school.
There’s enough twists and turns in this to keep your attention, even if it is aimed generally at a teen audience, I enjoyed it all the same and found myself chuckling in places at a few of the one-liners. The action scenes are excellently described and there’s enough gore without scaring off younger readers.
The monster is apt, tying in nicely with the story and various legends and mythologies, making for a brutal and seemingly indestructible villain who ever hungers for the end of humanity (which good villain doesn’t?).
The setting of late eighties America is beautifully caught as is the parlance of the times, Burleigh takes you there, creating an atmosphere you can’t deny was once real and really mattered to the author.
My only sore point is the ending was a little abrupt, I like things tied off nice and neatish when I finish a novel, and the cliff-hanger ending, whilst keeping the story open ended for an obvious sequel, wasn’t needed in the way it was done.
A well crafted story, deserved of its praise. Though I suspect that a younger crowd might gain more enjoyment from this that I did, still a decent read that held my attention throughout.
5/5
_
_With a title like this I kinda expected it to be like Kevin Costner’s ‘The Postman’ but with zombies. In a way it is, the character of DJ, The Last Mailman of the title does indeed fill that role somehow and the book starts off with him doing what every good post-apocalyptic postman should be doing, delivering good news and bad, to the last bastions of humanity.
Burke ups a gear by having DJ delivery a human cargo to the outpost that makes up the survivors of Atlanta, who want fertile young women in exchange for a supposed cure for the ever-present zombie virus.
All seems to be going well until a disaster put our hero and his motley crew out amongst the ‘Wilds’ of North America. From here the action really kicks off.
I really enjoyed this, Burke injects some genuinely funny moments that had me smiling as well as apt homage’s to The Evil Dead series as well as alluding to the typical Romero Zombieverse. With more than enough inventive deaths to sate the thirst of the gore fan and some nice one-liners there is no reason this should sit of the zombie lovers shelf. But my only gripe would be after a while, the endless zombie killing grew tiring and if a good 20-30 pages had been trimmed off of the ending I would have easily awarded this 5/5 for what it could have been; a fantastically paced zombie action novella. Not quite first class, but not entirely lost in the post.
_There’s that old adage;“Would you go through Jim Corr to get to his sisters? Well now they’re asking are you happy to go through Stephen King to get to Joe Hill. The answer is yes. If it took the creation of Stephen King to bring about Joe Hill, then fine, so be it. I’m not saying that Mr Hill is better than his father, he’s a long way off earning that; it’s just nice that he’s carrying on the family trade.
As comparisons are to be made, Hill isn’t as visceral as his father, but even as a stand alone author he is good, his tales might not terrify as much as his father’s tales, but that’s the point, he’s got his own stories to tell, his own style to forge.
Horns starts with a privileged young man named Ignatius ‘Ig’ Perish, who awakes one day to find out he’s inexplicably grown a hair of horns from the top of his head, along with this new physical trait he also now has the ability to eek out the deepest darkest desires and confessions from anybody he meets. Ig decides to use this newly discovered power for good, mainly to seek out whoever murdered his beloved the previous year, with both humorous and tragic consequences . . .
‘Horns’ plods along a happy, fulfilling pace flitting backwards through time and through several characters as secrets, trysts and twists are revealed but the inevitable fiery ending. I enjoyed it, as it poses the question to the reader, “what would you do with this power?’ Despite the power of devil being pretty much one of the ultimate earthly superpowers (persuasion, ability to control fire, animals, etc) Hill weaves this in a way that make this emerging demon to use his powers for good, instead of death and destruction, which is a path many would have taken to right the wrongs in our lives, making the case that the devil/demons aren’t intrinsically evil, just misunderstood.
With summer glinting themes of brotherhood, young love and tested friendships, Hill has created a geeky though well-meaning supernatural hero to rival Koontz’s Odd Thomas, both of whom have the inevitable movies in the works as you read this.
Hill has written other books, of which I devoured hungrily, I urge you to jump on board this terribly kept literary secret, because one day, he’s going to overtake his old man.
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