Lost Homicidal Maniac (Answers to "Shirley") (Strand, 2011)

Sypnosis from Amazon:

Andrew Mayhem is back! In this dark and hilarious new adventure, Andrew has started up a private investigation business with his best friend Roger (slogan: "We Solve Weird Problems"). Since his options in life will become somewhat more limited after his wife Helen gives birth to triplets, it's his last-ditch effort to get out of being stuck with a corporate day job.
       One of their first clients is an attractive woman named Shirley. Keeping with the kind of luck Andrew has had his entire life, her problem is: "I think I may be a serial killer."
       Yeah, he takes the job. Even after she insists on being handcuffed to him while they investigate the house where she might have stored the bodies of her victims.
       But Andrew discovers that this day has much more danger in store than being handcuffed to a woman who may or may not be a homicidal maniac. Because Mr. Burke, the sadistic villain of his last adventure, has been watching Andrew and plotting a truly ghastly revenge...and the attack begins now!

Thoughts:

Jeff Strand is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors. Like most people coming into the Andrew Mayhem novels late in the mix, I read the previous three back-to-back. It was then that I noticed that the 4th installment was on it's way out. No waiting around for me! With the thought that i would get burned out, put it on the back-burner and read a couple or other novels first.

    I'm thinking that i didn't let enough time pass. No, it's not that it isn't good. It's great. I love his writing. It's just that this one lacked something that the other three exceeded in. While it is roughly the same amount of pages as the previous three books, this book's main story didn't really take off until the last quarter of the book. This could have easily been another 60 pages long.(maintaining the same writing style)

I stilled loved the book, but i felt like someone had flipped the switch on the roller-coaster and we bypassed the massive loop that everyone was waiting for.

Could have been 5, the M gives it 4/5

Prodigal Blues (Braunbeck, 2006)

Prodigal blues was hard to put down, although i wanted to many times because of the nature of the story. 

Synopsis from amazon:

         After he finds himself stranded at a truck stop in Missouri, Mark Sieber gets one of the biggest shocks of his life when he recognizes the face of a little girl on a Missing poster as belonging to the same little girl he saw only a few minutes before. Looking around for some sign of her, he comes back to his table in the restaurant to find the little sitting there, waiting for him.
         As the police and media begin to converge on the truck stop, Mark retreats back to his hotel room to call his wife and let her know what's going on, only to be taken hostage by the same people who released the little girl. But his abductors are little more than children themselves.
        Ranging in ages from 12 to 19, Mark's abductors are in the process of escaping from a sadistic pedophile known to them only as "Grendel" a man whose practices include torture and mutilation specifically, mutilation of the face.
       Mark's abductors have all been mutilated by Grendel who may be very close behind them and need someone with a "normal face" to help them carry out their plan for justice and returning home.

The vileness of the story is hard to swallow at times, but Braunbeck's wit and humor keep the story from getting too morose.

The denouement of this novel left me teary-eyed while being both bittersweet as well as haunting. Immediately upon completing the book,(after i wiped the tear from my eye of course,) I thought about how neatly constructed this novel was: the beginning being repeated in the end, the sayings dispersed throughout the story being repeated once more, worries being tapered off, and hope for the future right at the end. It almost feels as I imagine a senior thesis for a masters in English fiction must be.

5/5

The Axman Cometh (Farris, 1989)

This is my first John Farris novel. I started the book with the notion that it was a slasher story. Boy, was I wrong. It is often that you cannot judge a book by its cover and i admit, i'm a sucker for a cool cover. Saying that, i'm even more perturbed when I cannot judge a book on its title or synopsis either.
Upon completing the novel, I immediately searched the web to find other reviews of the book, mainly because of the large cloud of WTF that hung over my head. I found all of 3 reviews, all of them on amazon. One person attested to my confusion with the novel. John Upton mentioned "I remember thinking at the time that Mr. Farris must have put the book aside and someone under the influence of LSD finished the book for him." My thoughts exactly.


Spoilers Below


Now that you are warned. Ok, I know no one else is reading this, but it's an open blog so I figured i'd be safe.
First and foremost, there is no real resolution to the conflict in this book.  While the axman is killed in a dream-state, we never leave that dream-state to find out about what happened to Shannon in the elevator.
Second and equally perplexing, the main character or protagonist changes from Shannon to Don slowly throughout the book. After the axman is killed the story never does not return to Shannon it stays with Don.
Third, somehow this is still a very good book.

4/5

p.s. - If anyone felt confused about the spelling, "ax" is typically used in U.S. English and "axe" is the preferred spelling used in other countries.

Population Zero (White, 2008)

3/5 Thoroughly engaging. Hard to put down. Read a while back forgot to post. 3/5 because i forgot to post it. Meaning that it was that unremarkable. 

Grimoire Diabolique (Lee, 2011)

5/5 I only had to read three of the twelve stories to complete this collection. This is because the remaining nine are what make up Brain Cheese Buffet (Lee, 2010). Two of these three came from a book called Bullet Through Your Face (Lee, 2010.) So Grimoire Diabolique is basically Brain Cheese Buffet and Bullet Through Your Face minus a story in Bullet.. called "The Refrigerator Full of Sperm." I shall track it down.
I wish this was available in paperback or hardback. Maybe with some strange anatomical drawings in it like the cover shows.  This would be a great gift to the unexpecting. These definitely are the most disgusting stories I've ever read.

Sleep Disorder (Ketchum & Lee, 2003 )

3/5 Seven Stories. Two of which are first drafts. 3/5 for being entertaining. Feels like left over stories that we not good enough to fit in other volumes. All of them felt like episodes of Tales from the Crypt: Someone indulging themselves too much gets what the want or hate in a twist ending. 

The Morbidly Obese Ninja (Mellick, 2011 )

2/5. This book is only 60 pages. I'm glad i found that it was one of the ones he gave away free in eBook form for a few days because if i'd paid 8 bucks for a book that was a short story I would have demanded my money back. That being said it was enjoyable but nothing new and nothing really bizarre as promised. 2/5 for being enjoyable while doing nothing new.

The Wasp Factory (Banks, 1984)

This is a wonderful look into the mind of our protagonist, Frank, whose mind has been both tampered with by both nurture and nature. Told in first person, we follow a boy around the age of 17 who seems to have a type of schizophrenia. He finds meaning is strange objects. He thinks he can predict the feature by certain repetition of acts in a obsessive compulsive way. One of these compulsions is putting live wasps in self-built  murder "factory." The book reads like an insane Holden Caulfield, coincidentally also 17 years of age, from The Catcher in the Rye (Salinger, 1951.)

The novel, while only 150 pages, reads a little too long for my tastes with the excessive descriptions of outside environment. I think this is because i'm more interested in knowing the thoughts of the main character. That is just a small hang-up in an amazing story.

4/5