Michele Lee

Dying to Live by Kim Paffenroth

Like the real world the fictional world in Dying to Live is brutally unfair. One would expect no less from a book set a year after the world succumbed to zombies. This isn’t a story of the uprising, the slow rot of the human beast. This is a tale part in retrospect, told by characters who are in a brave new world, but still remember and mourn their old world.

Jonah is a man living a grim existence, spared from the initial zombie take over, but finally persuaded to leave his seaborne safe haven to search out his loved ones. After finding his former home empty, with no signs of violence his life took a turn toward simple goals– namely surviving. He wandered the countryside, with no purpose or goal outside of the drive to find food and not become food, until, by a million little coincidences, he finds a compound of survivors.

Hidden in what was once a museum the motley crew of living humans each have their own tales of how they came to safety, their own haunting losses and their own emotional battles to face just to maintain the will to survive in a dangerous world. Jonah and the war refugees wrestle not just with the undead, but with questions of how to, and even if they should, restart society in the face of the horrific future before them.

Flavored with a combination of Biblical end times and a touch of Richard Matheson’s classic I Am Legend, Dying to Live is a novel that transcends the shuffling dead image of classic zombie fiction from the beginning, nearly taming the creatures by giving them an odd sort of humanity and exposing humans as the root of the evil.

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March 26

Storm Front by Jim Butcher

The first book in the Dresden Files series (ten books and counting so far) is a refreshing wind for the urban fantasy genre and this reader. One of the cannon examples of urban fantasy, a blending of mystery and paranormal in a modern setting often with a touch of romance, Storm Front is slanted more toward suspense than romance.

Harry isn’t another supernaturally endowed, kick-ass female heroine, taking on the world of evil and the world of men at the same time. Harry is a somewhat-awkward, technologically challenged wizard who only has his training and his will power working for him, and the mysterious “Doom of Damocles” (two strikes, one more and you’re out), a black wizard killing by magic, and a supernatural version of a patrol officer (who thinks he’s the killer) all working against him. As soon as Dresden figures out the black wizard is using spring storms to fuel his magic he also hears that he’s the next target. The next rumble of thunder could be bringing his death.

Storm Front is suspenseful, the use of the storms as both plot point and for tension is excellent. Dresden is a charming hero, who gets by by the skin of his teeth and sheer luck, not by out magicking (or out sexing) the bad guys. The romance angle is lightly handled, the humor organic and the story will keep pages turning. This book is a great start for men or women who want to test out the urban fantasy waters.

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March 26

I Will Rise by Michael Calvillo

“I Will Rise” is a strange tale from the beginning. The prose is a jarring mix of common, even gutter slang (“super cool”, “Nothing super wrong”, “soooo”) and sheer weight (“ferocity of my utterance”), as if the writer is undecided on his own voice. The voice wavers between a musing reminiscence and addressing the reader in a more conversational tone.

If there wasn’t a sense of repulsion from this almost-anti hero from the beginning the narrator’s well described efforts to keep himself from masturbating through body-funk visualization in the first chapter should be enough. By the end of the first chapter we know that Charlie is a socially awkward, fat, oily, ugly man who is a victim of the media and society and of the parents who casually called him “a fucking nut job”. He fakes seizures and steals, but won’t let himself be sexually aroused because God is watching.

Calvillo’s voice, the overwhelming main building block of the book, is intense and disarming. Certainly dispirited readers will find much to connect with. But the flow of thought style is distracting, obscuring a plot that doesn’t begin until 50 pages in with a half hearted attempt at poisoning people followed by a confusing death and rebirth into being the reformer of mankind. There’s a disassembled feel to the story, an expanded, and at times out of control version, of the feel of the cult movie Fight Club. “I Will Rise” absolutely captures the tilting, half-insane, anarchist feel but with more rawness and less refinement.

If readers can accept the hallucinations and ranting flow of thought style in this dizzying tale of horror and social degradation they’ll likely list “I Will Rise” as one of their favorites, but definitely as one of the most memorable books they’ve ever read.

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March 26

Into the Cruel Sea by Rich Ristow

Novella and novelette length stories are a fast-fading art, so it’s always exciting to see them show up. Rich Ristow’s Into the Cruel Sea is a fast paced tale set on a military base in Bermuda where Beth, a teen girl on the cusp of adulthood, is about to face the imaginable.

Into the Cruel Sea is, in a way, a coming of age story. Beth is commonly and brutally battered by her father while her mother pretends not to see, or worse blames her for her father’s rage. She’s a teenager stuck on a small island, if not physically then certainly mentally. The abuse and constant blame she suffers is pushing her hard into the worst kind of life. Already she’s an alcoholic, a smoker, and a pothead. Since she can’t do anything right she’s stopped trying, drowning her impotent rage in becoming numb, and, like so many others, by jumping into the arms of the first person to give her a bit of positive attention.

But Wade has problems of his own, and one strange day he viciously slaughters his parents before disappearing, literally, into the sea. But Wade has every intention of coming back, however changed he might be, to reclaim Beth with a shadow of the very abuse she wants to escape from.

Into the Cruel Sea does not make light of abuse or addiction, like some tales. It uses it as a very effective tool, on a back drop of what should be paradise, to push the characters to either their freedom, or their doom.

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March 26

Grave Surprise by Charlaine Harris

Grave Surprise is the second book in the Harper Connelly series from Charlaine Harris. Harper is a woman with a bad past, the most obvious event being the day she was struck by lightning, leaving her with a myriad of small damages and the ability to find the dead. Unlike in other urban fantasies Harper is one of, if not the, only person in the world to have a psychic power. She and her brother, Tolliver who acts as her manager, travel the states working cases where people, or their bodies, are missing.

In Grave Surprise Harper has been hired to do a demonstration for a college professor’s class on psychics. Sure that he’s called her there to debunk her instead Harper names the occupants and cause of deaths for a little graveyard with stunning accuracy, right down to finding a new grave, a grave on top of an older grave. The newest addition the the cemetery is an eleven year old girl that Harper herself was hired to find a year ago.

The find is stunning enough for the Memphis PD, but the fact that Harper already worked the girl’s case, and that the parents moved from the city where their daughter was abducted to Memphis, not far from the graveyard, makes the local cops suspect Harper and her brother and they suspect they’ve been set up.

Harris is a veteran mystery writer more popular for her Southern Vampire series, but with the Harper Connelly books she’s turned back to her mystery roots creating a world that’s a strange combination of real and dark. The cover of Grave Surprise (first US mass market edition) features a skulled jack-in-the-box popping out of an open grave. It matches the feel of the book perfectly, implying that this world inside should be bright and whimsical, but never quite makes it out the dark shadows. Likewise Harper and her brother are both trying to help people, and trying to shed the memories of an abusive past, and instead seem to be trapped by subtle chains, like depression and fears, into living dark lives.

This is the best book in the series so far, the plot is sneaky and more compelling than the first, but just as well written and unnerving. While Harris’ other books might appeal to a more romance-oriented crowd this series has the potential to draw in fans who never thought they’d like a book like this, proving that Harris and her work should not be dismissed as another in a line of trend writers.

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