Tag Archives: Horror

Gone, Michael Grant #50BookPledge

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I read Michael Grant’s Gone on my sister’s recommendation, and I’m so glad I did. It’s brilliant and exciting, Lord of the Flies meets X-Men in a contemporary small town setting.

I was hooked by the very first paragraph: “One minute, the teacher was talking about the Civil War. And the next minute he was gone.” I can imagine lots of kids wish their teachers would just disappear, especially during really boring classes, but what if it really happens? What if all the adults in the world disappear? “No ‘poof.’ No flash of light. No explosion.” Just disappear. I actually appreciate how non-climactic the disappearances are, such that the kids the remain at first think they must have imagined  it.

The premise of Gone reminds me of a Star Trek episode where all the adults in an alien planet have died from a disease and the kids have formed a Lost Boys type society, basically being complete brats and driving the Enterprise crew insane. Thankfully, the children in Gone are more mature. Everyone 15 and older has disappeared. Main character Sam is a natural, albeit reluctant, leader. As scared as the other children, the only advice 14-year-old Sam can offer when the adults disappear and younger children look to him for guidance is eat a cookie. There’s almost a Peanuts-type wisdom in that advice, now that I think about it, but mostly it just reflects the children’s helplessness.

The adults disappearing isn’t the first weird thing to happen to Sam however. Something else has happened to him, which I won’t reveal here because part of the fun is finding it out, but basically it makes Sam worry that he has caused the adults’ disappearance. Later on, he finds out that he actually isn’t the only, um, unusual resident of the area, and the unusual nature of certain children may hold the key to what has happened to the adults.

In a world without adults, who’s in charge? As Sam’s best friend Quinn tells him, adults are no longer around to keep the bullies from imposing their rules. How can children who don’t know how to drive and barely know how to cook fend for themselves and care for the really young children? Even more urgent, what happens when they themselves turn fifteen?

Gone has an exciting premise and likable characters. I love seeing Sam’s growth from scared kid to hero, from avoiding the leadership role to embracing it and working to improve their situation. Quinn is an interesting character as well, a free spirited surfer unable to handle the pressure of responsibility, and I look forward to seeing him develop even further in the next book. I love that Astrid is such a strong female character. Nicknamed Astrid the Genius, she spouts random facts when she’s nervous. Her character however is given added nuance because of Little Pete, her autistic younger brother. When the adults disappear, she has no idea where he is, so she sets off to find him, taking Sam and Quinn with her. Mary, who takes responsibility for the day care centre, is forced to become remarkably mature, caring for babies and toddlers all wanting their mothers, and I love how she has her own personal demons to battle as well. Perhaps the most endearing character is Albert, who takes over the local McDonald’s. He takes his role so seriously he actually studies the McDonald’s manual cover to cover.

The bad guys range from bullies to an actual psychopath. Their leader is charming, intelligent and powerful, more than a match for Sam and his friends. I’ve always believed that amazing bad guys help make heroes amazing as well, and Gone has a match up I love reading about. The ending of their ultimate confrontation in this book was a bit frustrating, as my sister warned me, but good news is, there are several more books in this series.

One thing that surprised me is how religious some of the main characters are. It’s not a bad thing, just unusual in contemporary fiction. It’s not preachy in any way, which is good, and the events these kids face certainly merit some appeal to a higher power.

The book answers a lot of the questions it poses, even as it leaves a lot of other questions hanging. Gone is exciting, action-packed young adult fiction. I’ll definitely be checking out the next book in this series.

The Passage, Justin Cronin #50BookPledge

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For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been lugging around an 800 page hardcover wherever I went, sneaking pages on the subway, in the food court, and practically everywhere else I could find the time. I once attempted to read this 800 page hardcover with one hand, simply because the subway was too jerky for me to keep my balance without holding on to something. My point: Justin Cronin’s The Passage is just very, very difficult to put down.

My one sentence (and completely inadequate) summary of the 800 pages: a military experiment goes wrong and humans must now survive in a world populated by vampires. Vampirism is a virus, and heads up, Twilight fans – these vampires don’t just sparkle; they glow like radioactive glow sticks. Seriously, these vampires are far from Meyer’s vamps, or even Anne Rice’s seductive creatures of the night. Cronin’s vampires are very much like Richard Matheson’s vampires in I Am Legend – savage, blood sucking zombies.

The Passage reads like a movie – action-packed and full of twists. It’s an exciting science fiction/horror thriller and like all good books in those genres, gets you emotionally invested in the characters. I was surprised by that, considering the format of the book. Passage begins in the year 5 B.V. (Before Virus, I presume), chronicling the failure of the military experiment up to Year Zero. Then about a third of the way through, the book makes a leap into the year 92 A.V. Having come to care for in the characters of the first part of the book, it was jarring to be introduced to a completely new cast. The only character who plays a major role in both parts of the book is Amy, a six year old orphan who is seen as a possible solution for the vampire virus. We do find out what happens to some of the other major characters from the B.V. era, and quite honestly, a few chapters into the A.V. era portion, I’d already become so involved in the relationships among new cast of characters that I no longer as interested in what happened to the people from B.V.

The world had completely transformed in almost a century, and the characters in the A.V. era can’t even imagine how the world must have existed before being overrun with the vampire virus. In one of my favourite scenes, two of the characters are talking about Where the Wild Things Are, and finding it hard to understand how such an unrealistic tale could have be so appealing in the Time Before. Peter and his friends cannot afford to indulge in fantasies. Yet they still fall in love, start families, and the little things become even more precious because of the threat that any day, they can all be eaten or infected by vampires. In one of my favourite passages from the book, Maus, who is pregnant, says, “A baby wasn’t an idea, as love was an idea. A baby was a fact…Just by existing, it demanded that you believe in a future…A baby was the oldest deal there was, to go on living.” There’s also a great love triangle between Peter, Alicia and Sara, and I was cheering for Sara (the Eponine figure) all the way.

Cronin intersperses his narrative with passages from journals, ostensibly discussed in conferences 1000+ A.V., which adds a sense of detachment to very emotional material. The way he uses such a segment to end the book left me just thinking: Wow. It’s a wallop of an ending, heightened by the sense of detachment. These segments also raise questions, as Cronin mentions conferences for studying human behaviour. In the long term then, do vampires win? Or, as I prefer to think, humans win and it’s humans in the future studying humans of the past?

Fair warning: Passage ends on a cliff hanger. It’s the first in a trilogy, with the next instalment coming out in 2012, and a possible movie later on. If you find the 800 page hardcover too cumbersome to carry around, Passage is also out in ebook and will be out in paperback this May.

Bitten, Kelley Armstrong #50BookPledge

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I read this book after about half a dozen people recommended it to me on Twitter. I also learned that she was doing a book signing in Indigo Yorkdale on April 3rd, so I wanted to find out if I liked her books in time to still have the opportunity to get my book signed. Final verdict: count me in on the Kelley Armstrong bandwagon.

Bitten is the story of Elena Forbes, the only female werewolf in existence, who tries to live a normal human life in Toronto (love that detail, actually, especially since Armstrong really uses Toronto landmarks and streets in her book). Her human boyfriend, Philip, is remarkably understanding of Elena’s late-night walks, where, unbeknownst to him, she turns into a werewolf and runs around the city (where was your partner last night, eh?). Pack Alpha Jeremy (my newest literary crush) summons her back to deal with a mutt crisis. Mutts are Pack-less werewolves, and in Bitten, unknown mutts are killing humans in Pack territory, putting the Pack in danger of discovery. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, for Elena, reuniting with the Pack means living with Clay again, the hot werewolf who was once engaged to Elena, and who clearly still has sparks with her. While reading the book, I called the experience “good wolfy fun,” but in all seriousness, even putting hormones aside, Bitten is such an enjoyable read.

Armstrong has created some fascinating characters, and put them in difficult situations. Elena is a strong, independent woman. In a twist from the ordinary, love interest Clay uses her as bait to draw out the bad guys. While quite understandably pissed off, she admits she would’ve been more pissed off if he’d thought her too weak to take care of herself. Smaller and physically weaker than the other, all-male werewolves, Elena nevertheless gives as good as she gets, and makes for some action-packed fight scenes. Clay is also a compelling character – physically attractive, hot-tempered, total bad boy type who obviously loves Elena. He is overall a bit too aggressive to be my literary crush in this book, but towards the end, he shows a very appealing vulnerability. Jeremy as the Pack is a strong leader who commands respect, but also gets overwhelmed by the mutt attack. Even the bad guys are interesting – each has his own motivations and long-term schemes behind their actions, and just watching them interact is like watching politicians try to negotiate for the best deal.

Bitten has compelling characters and an exciting story with emotional pull. It’s the first of Armstrong’s Women of the Otherworld series, and I’m definitely looking forward to reading the rest of it.