California Literary Review

Articles written for the California Literary Review:

• Book Review: The Passage by Justin Cronin
  Posted on 17 Jun 2010 in Fiction Reviews, Horror, Mystery, Thrillers
  

  Justin Cronin has written an epic here. Like Stephen King’s The Stand and Robert McCammon’s Swan Song, this book is a character-driven apocalyptic road trip of a novel that takes us on a journey both physical and metaphysical. His writing transcends genre in every way, including a haunting description of death by nuclear fire.

• Book Review: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest by Stieg Larsson
  Posted on 25 May 2010 in Fiction Reviews, Mystery, Thrillers
  

  Lisbeth Salander is broken, maybe beyond repair. Wanted for three murders in Stockholm, she shows up in the Emergency Room in Goteborg still breathing but with a bullet in her head. Her other wounds have been patched with duct tape, an improvisation the doctor on call admires as he preps her for life-saving surgery assisted by an American surgeon with a blood alcohol level that’s off the charts.

• Book Review: Kaboom by Matt Gallagher
  Posted on 05 Apr 2010 in History, Military, Non-Fiction Reviews
  

  Gallagher has a lot of conversations with his platoon’s interpreter (“tarp”), a man his men call “Sage Knight” and treat like a rock star when they find out he has two wives and often has sex six times a day. But Gallagher never develops the same relationship with “Suge” that New York Times reporter Sidney Schanberg did with his interpreter Dith Pran in The Killing Fields, and we can’t help but think the conversations were nothing more than a way for Gallagher to pass the time.

• Book Review: The Dragon Factory by Jonathan Maberry
  Posted on 10 Mar 2010 in Fiction Reviews, Horror, Thrillers
  

  The Extinction Clock is counting down. Time is short—10,800 minutes (just seven days)—and if the clock zeroes out, billions will die.
  Ex-cop Joe Ledger and the DMS (Department of Military Science) are assigned the mission to stop the clock and the men behind it, a pair of freakishly brilliant monsters who intend to commit genocide on an apocalyptic scale.

• A Dark Matter by Peter Straub
  Posted on 15 Feb 2010 in Fiction Reviews, Horror, Thrillers
  

  Novelist Lee Harwell is having breakfast at his favorite Chicago diner when a hostile homeless guy shouting a single word—obstreperous—interrupts his meal. He’s unsettled by the encounter and finally realizes why. The homeless man reminds him of his childhood friend Hootie who has been confined to a mental hospital since the sixties and communicates only in single words and literary quotations.

• Under the Dome by Stephen King
  Posted on 10 Nov 2009 in Fiction Reviews, Horror, Thrillers
  

  Still, despite the ending, this is King’s best work in years, a richly textured novel of people under pressure that will move readers and provoke them and make them want to tell their friends. Forget Blaze and Duma Key, the King is back. Long live the King.

• The Child Thief by Brom
  Posted on 26 Oct 2009 in Fiction Reviews, Horror, Science Fiction and Fantasy
  

  There are moments of genuine mystery and magic, scenes where we are bedazzled and terrified simultaneously. The walk through the mist, crunching on the bones of those who strayed from the path has a Tolkienian resonance. The bloody battles that Peter leads in the real world echo those in the enchanted world. And the myth of the Horned One, who is Peter’s father, overshadows everything. For Peter is an immortal wild child who may look mostly human but who is decidedly something … other.

• The Big Machine by Victor LaValle
  Posted on 03 Sep 2009 in Fiction Reviews, Science Fiction and Fantasy
  

  The Big Machine is what urban fantasy looks like when it’s grown up and the writer isn’t relying on paranormal clichés to flesh out an epic tale of good versus evil. Not that you can pigeon-hole this novel—it’s a dizzying slipstream mashup of genres and memes and tropes and legends wrapped around a cross-cultural love story. This is a story that has depth, richness; a heart and a soul. Above all, it has a soul.