Rating: 
Summary: Best Book I've Read All Year!
Review: Bentley Little takes the old canard that "evil is banal" and illustrates this point in a most unique and original way. As always, Little has created believable, sympathetic characters that the reader cares about and placed them in a plot that is impossible to predict. He never gets the press of King, Koontz or Barker, but for my money Bentley Little is better than them all.
Rating: 
Summary: Didn't live up to the great reviews ....for me....
Review: I'm giving this 3 1/2 stars. What works? The situation of the walking itself----creepy, fascinating. There are harrowing moments as the relatives and the coroners deal with this phenomenon. What else works? The "then" part of the story set in the West, where witches form a place of refuge that is infiltrated by a very evil individual. The "bad land" is truly terrifying. Bentley did a great job of making this reader believe this is one place you don't even want to see from a distance!What didn't work? The boring parts dealing with the protagonist's father's stroke. All that space should have been put to use in going further into the interesting homeless female character and into Isabella, a truly vicious creature. What else didn't work for me? The ending. It seemed needlessly abbreviated. (Trust me Mr. Little, by that point, we would have stuck it out through a true epic battle, good versus evil.) The ending was rushed and the villain too easily vanquished. For someone with the kind of power Isabella has, we expect to see some truly explosive and well-explained conclusion. Didn't happen. I will indeed be reading another Little book. The man has got to have some of the most original and gruesome forms of death I've ever read. And he sets up some scenes with great atmosphere, but it's uneven. The menace doesn't permeate EVERY scene (and I even found myself skipping paragraphs in the middle, which should not happen if every paragraph COUNTED). Some characters were too easily dispensed with without using them to their full potential, I believe. Also, there was a clear anti-Christian sentiment in the book. Gee, all Christians are evil persecutors or small-minded scaredy-cats or flat characters with no gumption. Witches, on the other hand, can be good or petty or evil (but if they're evil, by golly, there's a good explanation), but the Christians are mere two-dimensional tyrantsor weaklings. If that kind of treatment was applied to black characters as a whole or gay characters in toto, you'd hear the mighty roar of BIGOTRY or HOMOPHOBIA. Wonder why it's okay to make Christians cardboard cut-out villains in so many horror and other genre novels? Perhaps The Revelation next.....let's see what he does with a "preacher" there. :D *Mir*
Rating:
Summary: Not very compelling
Review: I picked up 'The Walking' based on the reviews on the cover, and it seems I'm in the minority. I just didn't find this book compelling. Its a great premise, and I kept waiting hopefully to get sucked in by it, but it never happened. I think that the primary job of any author of horror or fantasy fiction is to make you really care about their characters, to make their characters three dimensional and real. If the characters seem real, then the scary or fantastic elements seem real as well. Unfortunately Mr. Little never quite made me care about his characters like Stephen King, Peter Straub or Dean Koontz can. So I ended up doing a lot of skimming just to see where the plot went. The plot was unlike anything I have ever read, so I will probably give Mr. Little another chance. He just never brought me fully into the world he created, and since he couldn't do that he couldn't scare me. And isn't that what we all read horror for?
Rating:
Summary: Bentley's Best
Review: Wow! This was a sursprise. My friend Pam kept telling me to read this & I kept putting it off. I didn't think it was going to be very good. I thought it might be lame. I was wrong. I loved this book. It keeps the reader wanting to find out why these people are still walking. This is a true page turner. Loved the story as well as the characters. If you like King & Koontz,then you're going to LOVE Bentley!!!! I went out & bought 3 more books by him. Happy Haunting.
Rating:
Summary: Little puts you under his spell again!
Review: Bentley Little, my favorite horror author does it again with this truly chilling horror novel.Little can take a old horror cliche: walking dead and breaths new life to it(no pun intended. A town of witches, walking dead and evil curse from beyond the grave are some of the elements in this terrifying novel.Little's novel sinister atmosphere is so palpable you can almost feel the evil and the terror.Another classic of true fright!
Rating:
Summary: Bentley Is The Best!
Review: Bentley Little is by far the best horror novelist in my opinion. Each one of his books get better and better. "The Walking" is certainly no exception. Mr. Little takes readers on an 100 year adventure. An evil force is murdering men all across the country who worked on a dam ten years ago. The dam accidently overflowed and the community of "witches," below the damn, were killed. Now one witch is getting revenge, by killing her victims one by one, and making them WALK for her. If you like horror novels, then I strongly suggest Bentley Little.
Rating:
Summary: A must even for those who do not like Horror...
Review: If you think you don't like "horror" or "supernatural" books, read the first 8 pages of this book. If you can put it down after that, you've got more willpower than I did. But DON'T start reading this one unless you're willing to read it all. You will not want to put it down. The characters, the story and the suspense (who ARE the walking? Why are they acting as they do?) will keep you riveted to every page. Little is an absolute master of the genre, who has even gotten raves from Stephen King (no slouch himself).
Rating:
Summary: ANOTHER CLASSIC
Review: Prolific and astonishingly consistent, Bentley Little has written the best horror fiction of the past decade, hands down. With THE WALKING, he does it again. An unpredictable and epic work that canvases America from the Old West to contemporary Los Angeles, it deftly explores the effect the past has on the present and subtly hints that some of our most cherished national myths may not be quite correct. Scary and profound, filled once again with the realistic characters for which he is known, THE WALKING is the work of a master. Even more rewarding for longtime Little fans is the way characters from previous novels are woven into the fabric of this wonderful tapestry. Gordon and Marina Lewis from THE REVELATION are here, as is FBI Agent Rossiter from THE SUMMONING. Of course, Little's old nom de plume Phillip Emmons gets a typically sly mention as well. Horror doesn't get any better than this.
Rating:
Summary: Better thn King-Don't sht off the lights
Review: From the beginning of time, they were burned at the stake for being who they are and most went into hiding, migrating when their identity was about to be revealed. William rejects the notion of a God that says, "Thou shall not suffer a witch to live and dreams of a place where he and his kind can live without fear of persecution and lynching. He petitions the President of the United States for land. The President grants him land in Wolf,s Canyon, Arizona Territory. Eventually, William met and married Isabella, a self-proclaimed witch who proved her talent with a demonstration. Over the years, the community grows and William becomes the de facto leader, but behind his back Isabella plots to take control. When she commits a heinous crime, he realizes she is not a witch but something else. He destroys her, but she remains haunting everyone long after her death. In the present, Wolf,s Canyon has been flooded thanks to a new dam. Isabella reaches out from the grave to take care of descendants from the original town and some of the dam workers. However, everyone seems to act strange and dangerous, and there is no William alive to remedy the situation. Bentley Little writes horror tales that are so creepy and scary, readers will leave the lights on throughout the house while nightmarishly sleeping. THE WALKING is the genre at its best, matching the top works of King, Koontz, and Straub. The several subplots are told in flashbacks that add to the fascination and terror. Ironically, Mr. Little is a giant in the world of fiction. Harriet Klausner
Rating: 
Summary: These boots are made for walking
Review: Horrible deaths await the characters in this book--undeserved deaths, for the most part--but I was able to read "The Walking" through the night without turning on extra lights or calling extra cats into the bedroom for company. Horror is the 'oh yuk, how can these hideous events be happening' reaction. Terror is knowing that in the darkness, if you reach for the light switch, something will realize exactly where you are. That said, this novel is hard to put down. It has likeable, interesting characters and an evil vampyr named Isabella, who has understandable motives for murder. Bentley Little's finest descriptions are reserved for her vengeful killings. The story jolts forward with death after gruesome death, but the reader finally catches on to the reason for the murders and the walking zombies, without too much prodding from Bentley Little. It's always a pleasure to deduce whodunit and why without a flat-out, often tedious explanation from the author. This novel's main protagonist, a nice-guy private detective named Miles Huerdeen is asked to investigate the mysterious stalking of an old man. Another one of his cases ends abruptly when his client is torn in half, lengthwise. Old men are dying horrible deaths all around him. Then his own father dies, walks out of the morgue and disappears. Several hellish visions and deaths later, Miles realizes that a monster is waiting for him in the depths of Wolf Canyon, where a village of witches had been deliberately drowned by a government hydroelectric dam. "The Walking" isn't the scariest or most gruesome horror novel I've ever read--go to Stephen King for those superlatives--but it is clever, non-stop reading.
| 
