The Readin Roos

Jake Marlowe discovers that he is the last werewolf on the planet, and sets out to put his affairs in order before WOCOP, the secretive organization that makes it their mission to kill supernatural entitites, hunts him down. As he does so, we ends up getting tangled up with vampires (yep, they exist too) as well as a young woman who holds the key to the survival of his species.

Reviewed by Buddy Pennington

Before it was a competent U.S. horror film, it was a great Swedish horror film. And before that it was a so-so horror book. The idea is so good it is amazing it hasn't come up before. Oskar is a twelve-year old boy in a suburb of Stockholm who is bullied at school. Everything changes when a mysterious girl arrives in his apartment complex, accompanied by an old man Oskar assumes is the girl's father. The girl only comes out at night and seems older and wiser than she appears. She befriends Oskar and he eventually learns her true nature.

Ignatius Perrish has problems. One year after his girlfriend is brutally raped and murdered, he wakes up one morning to find horns growing out of his head. And if that isn't bad enough, whenever he's around people those people have a strong desire to confide him in their deepest, darkest secrets. To make things worse, most in the town believe he was guilty of killing his girlfriend and used connections to get off. So he gets to hear that over and over again as he tries to figure out what to do in his situation.

This collection of four lengthy stories is Stephen King at his gruesome and gory best. In "1922" a Nebraska farmer murders his wife to prevent her from selling off the family farm. A mystery writer is attacked and left for dead in "Big Driver." Of course, in Stephen King's world, both of these victims will get their revenge one way or another. In "A Good Marriage" a woman learns that her husband of many years has a horrible, secret life. King's inspiration for this story was Dennis Rader, the Wichita man known as the BTK Killer, who led a seemingly normal family life at the same time he was murdering his neighbors.

This book has already been reviewed on this blog, but I'm going to add in my 2¢. It was a lot of fun to read and took very little time. I've already expressed a love of zombies F(x_x)F and this book made a solid addition to my knowledge of zombie lore. If you are looking for a good place to spend the night during a zombie apocalypse, a casino may not be your best bet (pun acknowledged). See also: Zombieland; amusement parks offer interesting possibilities for evading the living dead, but may not be recommended for long term shelters.