One for Sorrow

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Eerie melancholy story of the friendship between two teenage boys, one living and one dead. Made into the also quite effective film “Jamie Marks is Dead”

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8 months ago

One for Sorrow

Wrote a review for

Eerie melancholy story of the friendship between two teenage boys, one living and one dead. Made into the also quite effective film “Jamie Marks is Dead”

Read full review

8 months ago

Vagabond: A Memoir

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A walk through Tim Curry’s entertainment career on stage, screen, and television is dry as dust with any revelations limited to which directors or costars he didn’t like at the time but has subsequently made friends with. His childhood is presented at short length but he offers no relections on how it affected his work. One also would surmise from the memoir that Mr. Curry maintained a pretty celibate lifestyle; I wasn’t hoping for a tell-all, but I wasn’t expecting a no-tell either. Not ho-hum, but relatively humdrum.

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8 months ago

The Silent Companions

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A gothic horror story of a set of Caroline era wooden stand-up figures with a suspect provenance and possible malignant intention. The plot builds trepidation well across two timelines, one during the reign of Charles I and the other timeline contemporary to the main story during tge Victorian era. The earlier timeline explains the cause of the apparent fall of the Bainbridge family and the latter details its final demise. The author created enough murkiness in the narrative to leave the reader unsure of what, if any of it, actually happened. The narrator is unreliable, and all of the tragic events are unbelievably presented as either the act of one person, or of a set of painted wooden stand up likenesses that can change personality at will. Witchery, possession, murderous intent, and unbelievable coincidence come together to an unsatisfactory conclusion. Recommended only for someone who likes a good tale of building dread only to be left with one of multiple conclusions to come to at the end, none of which would tie up all the threads woven into the story.

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8 months ago