Rating: 
Summary: HARDCORE HORROR
Review: I had a jaw-dropping good time with this book by hardcore horror author Edward Lee. True, he is not a very literary writer, but try as I might, I couldn't put the book down. I've been reading horror for almost 20 years and it's rare for me to be shocked by what I'm reading. However, with THE CHOSEN, I was aghast many times during the graphic gore and sex that is plentiful throughout the book. Edward Lee isn't afraid of anything when he writes and I appreciate his no-holds-barred approach. This book is definitely not for the weak of heart. You were warned.
Rating:
Summary: HARDCORE HORROR
Review: I had a jaw-dropping good time with this book by hardcore horror author Edward Lee. True, he is not a very literary writer, but try as I might, I couldn't put the book down. I've been reading horror for almost 20 years and it's rare for me to be shocked by what I'm reading. However, with THE CHOSEN, I was aghast many times during the graphic gore and sex that is plentiful throughout the book. Edward Lee isn't afraid of anything when he writes and I appreciate his no-holds-barred approach. This book is definitely not for the weak of heart. You were warned.
Rating: 
Summary: Pathetic
Review: I really wanted to like this book, but Lee couldn't write his way out of wet paper bag. The characters are horribly written, the viewpoint is juvenile, and the style is even worse. One might even think the author lived in his parents' basement for all the insight he manages to deliver on adult subjects.
Rating: 
Summary: Underappreciated, High Quality Horror Novel
Review: This horror story about a mysterious resort hotel with a sinister secret is a great tale from Lee and one of his faster paced efforts. The idea is handled with humor and originality, the characters are quirky and well crafted, and the story line itself is interesting.
There are some great scenes in this one, especially when the protagonist goes into the cellar and gets a glimpse at what she's become involved with. The cook, a parody of Lee no doubt, is hilarious as the foul mouthed comic relief.
I would recommend this to anyone who wants to escape for a while with a good horror story. I also recommend Brian A. Hopkins, Richard Laymon, Heywood Steele, and Philip K. Dick.
Rating: 
Summary: Not especially compelling
Review: Vera Abbot is the best restaurant manager in town and very happy with her fiancé, with whom she lives. A mysterious stranger arrives in town and inquires who the best restaurant manager is. When Vera's name is the most common answer, the stranger (Feldspar) offers her a job at a new resort of sorts. The offered salary is much greater than her current salary, but she decides not to take the job because of her allegiance to her fiancé. However, when she finds him in their apartment engaged in a ménage à trois with a prostitute and an hermaphrodite, her decision is much easier, and she flees to The Inn to begin her new job.The Inn, built on the site of an infamous sanitarium where patients were tortured, proves to be the source of strange events. From Feldspar's complete apathy over the restaurant's success to the strangely mute hotel staff, things seem askew from the beginning. Then, Vera begins having strangely erotic dreams that begin to be the highlight of her days. Her staff, friends recruited from her former place of employment, begins to act strangely, as well. Running throughout this narrative is the rampage of a pair of killers who pair off with couples and, after sexual escapades, kill the man and abduct the woman. "The Chosen" is not a particularly frightening read, as there is just something lacking and preventing true chills. There is a great deal of sex in the book, and some of it seems rather silly, while other parts are rather well done. In the end, though, there really is not much to draw the reader to the main characters. Vera seems too ambivalent, which is understandable under the circumstances (a woman who has caught her fiancé cheating) but still problematic for engaging the reader. There is, therefore, a certain distance between the reader and the characters that makes the high body count and graphic sex rather ineffective. "The Chosen" is competently written, but it is little more than that.
Rating:
Summary: Five Stars, Highly Recommended One heck of Ride!!
Review: Vera Abbot's new position as the boss of Wroxton Hall seems like every restaurant manager's dream. A high salary, an unlimited budget, and an exclusive clientele. The perfect escape from her dead-end job in town and a cheating drug-addict fiancé. But pretty soon too many things at the bizarre country inn don't add up. Footsteps and voices when the inn is empty, strange mute servants, and nightmares of demented sex with a faceless stranger. In the meantime, wise-cracking psychopaths Zyra and Lemi scour the countryside for attractive victims to serve some diabolical purpose. Scenes of blistering sex and mind-boggling horror at first seem totally disconnected with Vera's macabre discoveries at Wroxton Hall, but soon we learn that both Vera's engima and the perverted exploits of Zyra and Lemi both serve the same end. In THE CHOSEN, Edward Lee takes the traditional bits and pieces of a standard haunted house story and purposely assaults the reader's expectations by turning all those bits and pieces at opposite angles. The result is a thoroughly entertaining modern horror novel that succeeds in every way. Great writing and great characters skillfully blended into a plot that never lets go. Soon the reader is thrust into an inescapable maze of violence, torture, demonic sex, and loose ends tied up into an explosive climax. As far as erotic horror goes, nobody does it better than Lee, and THE CHOSEN is just one more example. Five Stars, Highly Recommended.
Rating:
Summary: When The Bad Gets Worse
Review: Vera, restaurant manager at a successfully established facility, finds herself with many of the aspects a person expects from the perfect picture of what life should bring. She has a job she likes, people working under her that entertain her and that make her laugh, and she feels as if life is going somewhere for her. That, in and of itself, is more than most people can ever bargain for. More than that, however, she has something else going for her, that of the perfect love. Then, out of the blue, a chain of events happens, one that begins with an offer of a job that pays more money than she's ever dreamed and ends with her walking in on her lover with another woman and a -yeah, leaving her with all her dreams smashed and with prospects of the future lying open. In those, she finds herself accepting a position in an ex-sanitarium/now extravagant vacationing spot that local tales say is haunted and that is teeming with odd occurrences. Along for the ride are three of her friends/ co-workers as well, ones that she decides to staff this new position with, and before she knows it, they all find themselves in for more than the typical management position bargains for. Within Edward Lee's books, there seems to be an underlying current telling one to always look a gift horse in the mouth - especially when dealing with jobs that seem too good to be true. This is because there's always a catch, always some sharpened instrument waiting in the dark to sing a lullaby to an unsuspecting audience, and it always seems to be fashioned from the same threads. There, the unfortunate woes of the rurally-challenged reigns supreme, always greeting the unfortunate in some sexually explicit way they never seem to want, and there are always lurid dreams and doom lurking in the shadows. Many times, this is a good combination, too, and it makes something that is well worth checking into. Unfortunately in the instance we call The Chosen, all this book has to offer on an otherwise interesting theme that this author has been developing is a seed, a little seed, and the cohesion of the book's multiple themes, well, they never pan out. Sure, there are violence tones, many of them, with people and blades greeting one another and the people oftentimes regretting it (the blades, well, they never seem to offer their opinions), but the way this is presented is mostly useless. The blood spilled seems to be nothing more than filler, plodding the story along on a course that, to me, ends in the dullest of manners. Sure, there are shadows and things going bump in them, but the explanation comes late in the book and the reasoning, it is a lifeless thing that only evokes more blood and the death of other people. And the build, based on dreams of hands that grope and do some rather livid things, really begins to wear on the patience after a time. Basically, this book is nothing more than an erotic dream manifesting itself in a creepy place full of events that, for some odd reason, seem to be a fright train destined for a little town we call Disappointment. As an Edward Lee reader, it basically made me have to take a break from his works, almost keeping me away from some of his newer ideas on what a monster should be. Within all of my objections, the word "demonic pimp" can be attached, showing the questioner why they might want to rethink looking into the idea. . Yes, with phrases like this, the mood built in the beginning is defeated soundly.
Rating:
Summary: Underappreciated, High Quality Horror Novel
Review: Were it not for a neurotic obsession with finishing any book I start, I would never had read this whole novel. About the only good thing I can say about The Chosen is that it is not boring. I can add that it is also not erotic at all, nor is it scary. Vera, the protagonist, is a restaurant manager soon to be married. Out of the blue, she is offered a job managing a restaurant at a remote inn for an exorbitant salary. She turns down the offer because of her fiancée; arriving home, she finds her fiancée "entertaining" a girl and a hermaphrodite. She then takes the new job and moves out of town, bringing along three of her coworker friends to run the place. The restaurant and the connecting inn just happen to have once been a sanitarium where the patients were tortured and brutalized. Don't let the back cover mislead you into expecting some haunted house aspects to the story--the sounds heard in the night are judged to be the doors of an elevator opening and closing, and nothing ghostly happens at all. Basically, we are treated to literally hundreds of pages of demonic, disgusting, pointless sex acts which are anything but erotic. I don't mind reading scenes with sex and violence, but the reader of this book is simply deluged with the same lewd descriptions over and over again. Vera begins having erotic nightmares--that's fine, but I don't need to read the same description of the whole nightmare twenty-something times. The characters themselves are superficial and unsympathetic, seemingly capable of expressing anger, sexual desire, and nothing more. Two of the men can only communicate by throwing insulting sexual innuendoes at each other, and their material is below that of even the most dirty-minded juvenile. There is a story of sorts buried in the morass of sexual descriptions. Every so often, it seems like it might get interesting, but alas it never does. Furthermore, the author does not even bother to tie up many loose ends. The most obvious question harkens to the title itself--Vera was "the chosen," apparently, yet I never found out why she was chosen or exactly what she was chosen for. Some of the basic premises of the plot itself simply make no sense. One thing I found most galling occurred in the last few pages of the book--Vera refers to something that she has no knowledge of whatsoever because the only person to have discovered it is one of the other characters. I could go on and on. Suffice it to say, this book is badly written and reeks of adolescence. As is typical with Lee, the plot seems to exist only for the purpose of providing him with a means of unleashing his deep torrents of sexual fantasies. My copy has a number of typos and grammatical errors in it, but I can hardly blame an editor for letting these things slip because no one should have to read this novel thoroughly. I hate to criticize a novel in such harsh terms, but The Chosen may well be the worst book I have ever read.
Rating:
Summary: A book with no redeeming quality whatsoever
Review: Were it not for a neurotic obsession with finishing any book I start, I would never had read this whole novel. About the only good thing I can say about The Chosen is that it is not boring. I can add that it is also not erotic at all, nor is it scary. Vera, the protagonist, is a restaurant manager soon to be married. Out of the blue, she is offered a job managing a restaurant at a remote inn for an exorbitant salary. She turns down the offer because of her fiancée; arriving home, she finds her fiancée "entertaining" a girl and a hermaphrodite. She then takes the new job and moves out of town, bringing along three of her coworker friends to run the place. The restaurant and the connecting inn just happen to have once been a sanitarium where the patients were tortured and brutalized. Don't let the back cover mislead you into expecting some haunted house aspects to the story--the sounds heard in the night are judged to be the doors of an elevator opening and closing, and nothing ghostly happens at all. Basically, we are treated to literally hundreds of pages of demonic, disgusting, pointless sex acts which are anything but erotic. I don't mind reading scenes with sex and violence, but the reader of this book is simply deluged with the same lewd descriptions over and over again. Vera begins having erotic nightmares--that's fine, but I don't need to read the same description of the whole nightmare twenty-something times. The characters themselves are superficial and unsympathetic, seemingly capable of expressing anger, sexual desire, and nothing more. Two of the men can only communicate by throwing insulting sexual innuendoes at each other, and their material is below that of even the most dirty-minded juvenile. There is a story of sorts buried in the morass of sexual descriptions. Every so often, it seems like it might get interesting, but alas it never does. Furthermore, the author does not even bother to tie up many loose ends. The most obvious question harkens to the title itself--Vera was "the chosen," apparently, yet I never found out why she was chosen or exactly what she was chosen for. Some of the basic premises of the plot itself simply make no sense. One thing I found most galling occurred in the last few pages of the book--Vera refers to something that she has no knowledge of whatsoever because the only person to have discovered it is one of the other characters. I could go on and on. Suffice it to say, this book is badly written and reeks of adolescence. As is typical with Lee, the plot seems to exist only for the purpose of providing him with a means of unleashing his deep torrents of sexual fantasies. My copy has a number of typos and grammatical errors in it, but I can hardly blame an editor for letting these things slip because no one should have to read this novel thoroughly. I hate to criticize a novel in such harsh terms, but The Chosen may well be the worst book I have ever read.
Rating: 
Summary: Good inside, awful outside
Review: What an awful cover!
I can't imagine who Pinnacle thought the market was for Edward Lee's The Chosen to have picked such a lurid picture and tagline -- certainly not discerning horror aficionados. Lucky for me (and, in turn, for you), several other things were working against that first impression to get me to actually buy it. First, I had heard of Edward Lee through his novels -- City Infernal, its sequel Infernal Angel, and the recent Messenger -- and I knew of his reputation. More importantly, however, this book was on the clearance table for $3.99 (of course, the blurb on the back from Cemetery Dance didn't hurt, either).
One or the other would not have done it, but the combination of the two found me leaving the bookstore with it while wondering to myself if I would ever have the nerve to read it in public (I did, as it turns out, just carefully hiding the cover from passers-by). Lurid covers on crime novels often, surprisingly, designate high quality (see, for example, the Hard Case Crime series), but on a horror novel, it usually represents the worst in the genre. (The same publisher did much better by Bentley Little's The Summoning.) Fortunately, there is a truly solid scarefest in these accompanying pages; one that doesn't skimp on character or carnage.
Reputed restaurant manager Vera Abbot -- through a series of unexpected events -- takes a job managing the restaurant side of the newly opened The Inn. It is all she ever dreamed of: triple her former salary, carte blanche on spending for staff and supplies, and free room and board at the suite of her choice. Oh, sure, The Inn used to be Wroxton Hall, an asylum where noted atrocities took place, but this doesn't bother Vera.
At least not until the dreams start, and other questions need answering: Why does the room service kitchen always outperform the restaurant, and why does the owner not seem to care? What are the strange noises coming from the supposedly-empty second-floor suites? And what's up with the surly, mute housekeeping staff? Meanwhile, a pair of fetishistic hedonists named Zyra and Lemi spend their time picking up swinging couples and having their way with them. Sex and violence are inextricably intertwined, as unsuspecting victims are pleasured (usually without their consent) and killed (always without their consent) with unflinching frequency.
Edward Lee is a master of extreme erotic horror. The Chosen pulls no punches and is not likely to be appropriate for reading at mealtimes. Luckily, character is at least as important to the author as blood flow. Sure he could have written a novel full of little more than carnage, but that wouldn't be nearly as interesting as getting to know the character before they're snuffed (and that includes nearly everyone). In particular, Vera's kitchen staff -- waitress Donna, chef Dan B., and dishwasher Lee -- are given a lot of page time. The usually coarse Lee is even given an especially tender storyline, complete with "love interest."
Of course, nothing is ever as it seems and, in fact, one of the best choices the author made in The Chosen is that we know something is going on at The Inn, but that we don't have a clue what is going on until the final fifty pages. Having two of the characters turn out to be the same person was a special touch of genius. This isn't necessarily the kind of stuff I like to read all the time, but when you've got a taste for it, you can't do much better.
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