Finished ONCE UPON A RIVER by Bonnie Jo Campbell. I was turned off at first because she adapted two of her short stories as part of this novel, and one was right at the beginning so I got this feeling of "Is this some kind of retread?" but it ended up being pretty good. It must have been, I ended up reading almost the entire thing yesterday morning. Still, her two novels have basically dealt with the same type of story, and I'd like to see a branching out of some kind. Some people do end up telling the same story, though. I guess it's what they call an idea fixee.
THE LAST WEREWOLF by Glen Duncan is probably the best horror novel I've read in a long time. People love vampires, but werewolves are more interesting thematically, yet no one really writes much about them. Until now. Best line ever: "Reader, I ate him."
THE LEFTOVERS by Tom Perotta. This hatched from his research for THE ABSTINENCE TEACHER, which involved him hanging around Christian groups. Those groups have a big thing about The Rapture [and I will talk about my own history with that at some future date] and I guess that piqued his interest enough to write this. But unfortunately like THE ABSTINENCE TEACHER, this book gave me the "Is that it?" reaction, although I'd say it was a little better than the aforementioned book in that some fairly big stuff happens here, but the book is slow to develop. The Rapture hits and the country is still confused about what exactly happened a year or so later. It's a national trauma and the whole country has a bad case of survivor's guilt, although they aren't sure how and why exactly they survived and what happened to those who left. There are traumatized parents who've lost kids, traumatized kids who've lost parents, and a number of cults that spring up among those who remain. There's no apocalyptic chaos to speak of, just a lot of sad people trying to carry on. In the end, though, it's about people trying to form relationships among fellow "survivors" and the whole Rapture setting is just a device to explore those relationships. I wouldn't say it was a bad book, but it's another one of those where I get over 200 pages into it and still don't really know where it's heading storywise...I don't feel like the story is really unfolding as it should. Maybe I should just stick to fantasy and werewolves, I don't know.
