Great googly moogly! This story is relentless. Chuck knows how to keep you ripping through his yarn, and just when you think you've got the entire thing figured out (yet you're scratching your head 'cause there's a hundred pages still to go), he pulls a fast one and and leaves you scrambling, muc...
The word "hisses" 17 times. Used too many times in Mockingbird too. Although this time it didn't always describe how someone said something: "no she hissed". Kept track just out of curiosity. (And to sorta be an a-hole) "growl" 13 times. Don't recall this one being a distraction in previous books...
It was difficult to tell the procession of the story, which has a world-tour feeling similar to a James Bond film, should 007 visit underground caverns and Atlantis in addition to the standard tourist locations. However, I felt lost during some location transitions and had a hard time remember wh...
This is one of those times when a second book in a trilogy surpasses the first. I can see now that Under The Empyrean Sky was the basic introduction to the characters, the world, and the situation they are living in. Blightborn is where the real action begins. I just can't rate it higher becau...
It has all the accoutrements next to it: the ink gun, swabs and swaddles, bottle of alcohol. Bryan kicks over a small wheeled office chair and Miriam stares. "Go ahead," he says. "You sit. I want to pace." "Seriously?...
His head is turned at a bad angle, the chin up over the shoulder and pointed at ninety degrees. The eyes, open and glassy. The mouth, closed, as if posed forever in thought. His bag lies a few feet away. A cell phone, a few feet past that. Miriam descends the steps. &nbs...
With it, a flood of memories: the husband named Simon blowing out candles on a birthday cake, tacking a sailboat through clear lake waters, having a street monkey in Lahore steal his kulfi dessert right out of his hands as Leslie loses her breath laughing. Or: Simon in the wreckage of an intersec...
Corpse faces. Brined and swollen like tumors. The boat thumps against them.They’re not real. It’s just the Trespasser.Dead mouths drift open. Silvery bubbles burst to the surface, carry with them whispers that crawl into her ears like snakes–Chooser of the slain…You don’t know what awaits you…You...
She still gets up, moves around, speaks to Gwennie, but her words are dull and mumbled. Her shoulders hunch forward. She looks like she’s trying to push herself inward—farther and farther, perhaps, until she is able to simply disappear.“Everything’s okay?” Gwennie asks. “With Scooter and Squirrel...
Some of the rotters saw them pass, tried to follow, slapped at the vehicle as it passed—but they were too slow, too stupid, to matter. They bounded pasted a gutted Starbucks. An overgrown park. Boutique hotels and shuttered restaurants. And all around them, dead people: some still moving, others ...
That’s not a thing they would admit to publicly, but it’s a true statement. It’s not just spiders, either. Sometimes it’s Madagascar hissing cockroaches. Or scorpions. Ez has even bought a few praying mantises and walking sticks that way. The trick to the van is this: People buy spiders and they ...
Possibly even hive-minded, as each individual gobbo seems confused, inept, like an ant who has wandered too far from the hill. But when together, they work together. They work as one. Tribal breakdowns do exist among them – some by belief, some by purpose, others by the way they look. Some gobbo ...
Your First And Most Important Goal Is To Finish The Shit That You Started Let's get this out of the way right now: if you start a fucking novel, then plan to fucking finish that fucking novel. Your hard drive is not a novel burial ground. It's like building your own Frankenstein monster -- robbin...
Only upside to today being Harvest Home is that nobody else is out there. Everybody’s here to eat, drink, watch the youngins get Obligated, and then finish the night with a Lottery that none of them will likely win. Cael walks to the festival with his father and several other families who live do...
His Manhattan apartment was, for all its luxury, small as a coffin, admittedly—but this ‘room,’ if it could be called that, was basically a doll’s bedroom. His Fluevog-clad feet hung over the edge. Sure, he was a tall, lanky sort, but even still—this bedroom made him feel like a giant. And not in...
It’s a short packet of information, shown in a three-dimensional display—before him, the surface of the planet Akiva grows bigger, blowing up like a balloon until it seems like he could reach out and move the whorls of clouds with the flat of his hand. Like a god. But it’s just a projection. A ho...