Rating: 
Summary: Awesome and darkly disturbing from page one...
Review: A very disturbing and chilling novel, just what Little-ites gobble up!!! This book is one of his best (The Walking, The Association, The Store, The Ignored) and it cements him as a master of the macabre, like King says.
If you haven't discovered Little, you need too! However if you like to be eased into his unique style of gore and sex, read The Ignored first. He pulls no punches and this is a shockfest of eerie thrills and a real creepy story. This is on par with Laymon's end of the world tales and certainly as gory!!
Little's characterization is in fine form here, it can be carboard sometimes, but not here. He describes the two main young characters very well and this should be a crowd pleaser among teens.
One of his best!!
Rating: 
Summary: Bentley Little can take something simple...
Review: and make a horror story out of it. When I read the back of the book, and have read The Association and The Summoning, I wanted more of Bentley Little, so picked up this tale. Dominion is about Dion Semele, a teen who moves with his mom April to Napa California from Arizona to start a new life, there he meets Penelope Daneam, a sort-of outcast girl who has a very unusual family; she lives with her mothers, and I mean mothers (she has seven mothers who own a winery). At school Dion meets Kevin, a smart-ass kid who makes fun of Penelope calling her a lesbian and other names. It is there that Dion starts to fall for Penelope, and since they have the same class; Greek Mythology to be more exact, and Dion is a wiz at it. Eventually, murders start to happen around Napa; people are getting chopped up and there are wine bottles around the murder scenes, but no clues for the police. Eventually, Dion goes to Penelope's house, he meets her mothers, and he notices that one of them are flirting with him, but he ignores it. Eventually, Penelope and Dion are dating and things are going well, until something happens...
What happens is that everyone in town gets drunk off of Penelope's mother wine and it turns people crazy! They start killing other people and have sex with dead corpses and people they don't know, it is like a huge orgy of death and sex. It is there that Dion finds out that he is the human form of Dionsysus; the Greek God of Wine. He is then smothered in blood and wine and the Greek God is brought back to life. Penelope's mother is having sex with him and impregnates her mother with his seed. It is there that Kevin and Penelope try to get out of dodge, but the roads are blocked off by debris of burned-out cars and garbage, then out of the chaos they go to their mythology teacher's house and find out that he is part of a cult of some sort that kill the mythology god's that are brought back, so now he calls on other members of the cult to torch the winery Penelope's mother has so that way it can dry out their supply and kill Dion for good. Eventually April (Dion's mother) comes back to her senses and brings Kevin and Penelope to Dionysus, and eventually kill him. At the end of the book, the government comes in and calls Napa a nuclear dump, and they promise to clean it all up. In the end, Kevin and Penelope get together as a couple and eventually marry.
I have to say that book reaks of orginality, and kicks ass! Though the book takes sometime to get good, it is still a good read.
Rating: 
Summary: Would not recommend
Review: At first I was hooked to this book. Then less than halfway through something went wrong... Little lost it. The storyline is interesting- Greek mythology woven into a modern-day "what if" scenario, although I think it could have been written better.
The way it's written felt almost amateurish; very choppy and not well thought out. Little definitely has a way for creating a scene, I will give him that, but a story needs to encompass much more than simply setting up an image, and that's where he lost it.
One of the main things I really did not like, which made me lose interest VERY fast, was that the characters lose their realness and the dialogue between all of them becomes ridiculous and not believable. As the plot progresses the changes within their psyches are not well documented and it made me wonder whom I was suddenly reading about.
My suggestion? If you can find a library that carries this book, borrow it before you buy.
Rating:
Summary: One of Bentley's Best!!!
Review: Awesome book, a tad bit different than his other books..A lot seems to happen in this little book, from all that you read it seems the book should be thicker.. Awesome, check it out!
Rating:
Summary: Disturbing
Review: Be warned this book has high violence, sexual contents and very perverse, yet it all fits nicely into the context of the story and mixes in nicely with the anciant Greek mythology, I found many sections of this story to be disturbing, but isn't that what horror is all about??, this book may be to graphic for some peoples tastes so if you are week of stomach this is not the book for you, the high intense murder, sex and even bestiality all adds to the atmosphere and the sudden insanity and the disappearance of all inhabitions of the community.
The book is in two parts, the first focuses on Dion, who starts at a new school and he is some one we can all relate to and it is impossible not to like him, He develops a crush on a girl named Penelope, and as you read there relationship grows stronger but so does the unstability of the city's people.
The second part concentrates on Penelope and Dions best friend Kevin as they try to come to grips with the evil that has become of there lives and as they try to figure how to get Dion back.
I'm not going to say muck more but while reading this book you can not help but be affected by it, and the effects last long after the completion of it and a sense of loss, a must read for those who like horror with bite adn those who are not afraid of the disturbing.
This is the fist book I have read by Bentley Little but definatly not the last.
Rating: 
Summary: Not scary, not interesting...
Review: Bentley Little has outdone himself with this one. In another review I made on Amazon, I said "The Store" is my favorite BL book.
This one might have made me change my mind. Yes, it is brutally graphic - especially in the second part, but if you check his source material; Euripides "The Bacchae", written in about 450 BC, he is staying true to the form of the original myth, transplanted from ancient Greece into modern-day Napa Valley.
BL has done his research, mapped out his story, and unlike some of his other novels, this one has a truly satisfying ending.
The story stays with you long after you finish it - the scope of the horror, the visceral violence and the true sense of Dionysian chaos - the Bacchanalia mixed with violence.
You'll definitely think about it as you open your next bottle of wine
Rating:
Summary: Myth in contemporary society - Euripides to Bentley Little
Review: Bentley Little has outdone himself with this one. In another review I made on Amazon, I said "The Store" is my favorite BL book.
This one might have made me change my mind. Yes, it is brutally graphic - especially in the second part, but if you check his source material; Euripides "The Bacchae", written in about 450 BC, he is staying true to the form of the original myth, transplanted from ancient Greece into modern-day Napa Valley.
BL has done his research, mapped out his story, and unlike some of his other novels, this one has a truly satisfying ending.
The story stays with you long after you finish it - the scope of the horror, the visceral violence and the true sense of Dionysian chaos - the Bacchanalia mixed with violence.
You'll definitely think about it as you open your next bottle of wine
Rating:
Summary: A true master of the macabre.
Review: Bentley Little is a genius. He manages to weave the mythology of ancient Greece into a gripping horror tale. Little catches the reader's attention instantly with a gruesome prologue that opens this captivating novel. Dion Semele moves to Napa Valley after his mother is fired from her job in Arizona. He meets Penelope Daneam at his new high school and the two are instantly drawn to each other. Unlike the synopsis on this site, Penelope has not been raised by nuns, but by a group of women who run a winery. She does not know which one of them is actually her mother. Dion and Penelope do not realize that their meeting has been fated. Each has felt a force within them. Their union will bring about an evil that will forever change the world. This is a disturbing book. Little does not flinch in his writing. The scenes are extremely graphic. When the town is gripped by the insanity that follows the rebirth of the god Dionysus, no one is safe. The violence is constant and brutal. The book is filled with drunken celebrants, satyrs, and Maenads who turn Napa Valley into a hell on earth under the rule of their new god. A couple of reviewers have stated that the ending was too abrupt. That's not necessarily a bad thing. When an entire novel is a battle between good and evil, a long drawn out ending is just overkill. I tried for a long time to get my hands on this book and it was definitely worth the wait. I would easily count it as one of my favorite novels. It has everything, great characters, an original storyline and the kind of writing that keeps you reading well into the night. If you can find it, snap it up, you wont be sorry.
Rating: 
Summary: Return of the old gods
Review: Bentley Little's "Dominion" turns mythology on it's ear. In it, Dion has just moved to California's Napa Valley to start a new life. He quickly makes a new friend Kevin, who encourages Dion to pursue a relationship with schoo oddball Penelope. Penelope takes him home to meet her 'mothers', a bunch of women who own and run a wine factory, but evidently don't sell any it. Meanwhile, the town begins acting very unusual, and drinking way way too much. The centrel mystery is eventually figured out in the first hundred pages, though Little drags it out for almost three hundred. There was a lot good with this book. The sex and violence was graphic and not just a little disturbing. Some of it will turn your stomach. I liked some of the chacacters; especially the mythology teacher Mr. Holbrook. Holbrook is a hero by the strictist definition only. He is smug, arrogent, and in the end, though he wants to help, he dosen't. The main evil entity is Dionysus, Greek the god of wine. He was a metophor for the dangers of alcoholism in the old world, and it is obvious that is what Little is trying to get across now. That and the danger of pure chaos, with no law or order. It also has a little to say of personal responsability. I really liked this book, and if your a fan of horror, than I think you will too.
Rating:
Summary: Horror isn't all Greek to everyone...
Review: Dion Semele has just moved to Napa Valley, California. He lives with his attractive mother who has trouble holding jobs due to her hormones. He is a high school senior, a typical kid by most respects. On the first day of school, he befriends Kevin Harte, a local rude-yet-cool dude. By the end of the first week, he befriends Penelope Daneam. Penelope lives with her mothers at their winery. They are strange yet friendly, and treat her as if she were there own daughter. In fact, one of them IS her mother, but she doesn't know which. Finding the identity of her mother will soon become the least of Penelope's concerns. For she falls madly in love with Dion, but there is a catch. The wine produced at the windery--Daneam Wine--is not your typical beverage. It is the same recipe used by the ancient Greeks, and it has astounding effects on those who drink it...like insanity... Penelope and Dion soon find out that Napa Valley is in for a wave of trouble. It appears that the Mothers want Dion for a ritual...a ritual to bring about the ressurection of the god Dionysus... Their entire world thrown into chaos, Penelope must join forces with Kevin to save the Valley, themselves, Dion...and quite possibly the world. This is a great read. Bentley Little outdoes himself. Yes, some of the content is graphic and disturbing; but it adds to the novel (in an entirely appropriate way, I mean). Bentley Little's "Dominion" is packed full of scares, gore, and some great Greek trivia. Not a read for someone alone at night...
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