Ghouls

Rating:
Summary: Don't play with your food...eat it now!
Review: Actually only 4.5 stars, but I give Lee the benefit of the doubt. Very well fleshed out characters and descriptive prose paint out the creepiness of tale in vivid color, taking place in the boondocks of Maryland along Highway 154, a little place called Tylersville.

With a brief prologue from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in 1978, we are quickly moved ahead seven years into the life of Kurt Morris, a small town cop who rents a room from his Uncle Roy and is basically content with his life.

Lee wastes no time acquainting us his characters, exposing them completely right off the bat, forcing your acquaintance with then and making them familar to you whether you like them or not.

Lenny Stokes is the local yokel do-nothing scumbag who marries the innocent good-girl Vicky, a waitress at the local topless bar called The Anvil. Police Chief Bard is posed immediately as a fat, boorish cop who is barely competent, Kurt's co-workers Mark Higgins and Doug Swaggert are competent in their own rights and fully characterized right away; with Higgins as the happy-go-lucky guy and Swaggert as the guy who takes no crap and has been in trouble for his attitude. Kurt's long time friend Glen Rodz is a strange if amiable guy who works night shift as a guard on Dr. Williard's estate named Belleau Wood. Vicky Stokes is a mildly vapid but sweet girl who married wrong and seems determined to live with a husband that beats her and cheats on her. Joanne Sulley is The Anvil's prize dancer, and openly having an affair with Lenny Stokes. Melissa is Kurt's twelve year old neice, who is an obnoxious tease, but never seems to really develope as much as the rest of the characters. Another character called Sanders will show up later in the storyline...but I won't ruin that for you.

Things in Tylersville are as predictable as the rain, until the town's drunk Cody Drucker dies and is buried, only to have his coffin dug up just days later. Baffling enough in and of itself in this quiet town, Kurt barely has time to wonder about Drucker's missing body when a young girl turns up missing also. Things start looking their worst when one of Kurt's co-workers goes missing also, but he little does he realize this is just the beginning.

Very strange and unexplainable things are happening in Tylersville, and they all seem connected to Belleau Wood; and the strange, enigmatic Dr. Charles Willard and his beautiful young wife Nancy. Bit by bit Kurt tries to peel away the layers of mystery and the unknown horror that seems to be settling over his town, while Glen seems to become more and more vague, Vicky more and more harassed, and Chief Bard is forced to suspend him from the force.

As the title suggests, there are Ghouls out there, but what are they, and where are they, and who is behind their arrival in Tylersville? A decently thick 444 page novel, I nonetheless tore through this in less than a day. It is a plainly written, extremely fast paced journey into horror and mystery and suspense that you should not deprive yourself of. Though Lee's work has definitely developed over the years, this earlier work has less gore and more "feeling" to it, but there is still enough blood to make it a tasty addition to your library. Enjoy!

Rating:
Summary: Don't play with your food...eat it now!
Review: Actually only 4.5 stars, but I give Lee the benefit of the doubt. Very well fleshed out characters and descriptive prose paint out the creepiness of tale in vivid color, taking place in the boondocks of Maryland along Highway 154, a little place called Tylersville.

With a brief prologue from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in 1978, we are quickly moved ahead seven years into the life of Kurt Morris, a small town cop who rents a room from his Uncle Roy and is basically content with his life.

Lee wastes no time acquainting us his characters, exposing them completely right off the bat, forcing your acquaintance with then and making them familar to you whether you like them or not.

Lenny Stokes is the local yokel do-nothing scumbag who marries the innocent good-girl Vicky, a waitress at the local topless bar called The Anvil. Police Chief Bard is posed immediately as a fat, boorish cop who is barely competent, Kurt's co-workers Mark Higgins and Doug Swaggert are competent in their own rights and fully characterized right away; with Higgins as the happy-go-lucky guy and Swaggert as the guy who takes no crap and has been in trouble for his attitude. Kurt's long time friend Glen Rodz is a strange if amiable guy who works night shift as a guard on Dr. Williard's estate named Belleau Wood. Vicky Stokes is a mildly vapid but sweet girl who married wrong and seems determined to live with a husband that beats her and cheats on her. Joanne Sulley is The Anvil's prize dancer, and openly having an affair with Lenny Stokes. Melissa is Kurt's twelve year old neice, who is an obnoxious tease, but never seems to really develope as much as the rest of the characters. Another character called Sanders will show up later in the storyline...but I won't ruin that for you.

Things in Tylersville are as predictable as the rain, until the town's drunk Cody Drucker dies and is buried, only to have his coffin dug up just days later. Baffling enough in and of itself in this quiet town, Kurt barely has time to wonder about Drucker's missing body when a young girl turns up missing also. Things start looking their worst when one of Kurt's co-workers goes missing also, but he little does he realize this is just the beginning.

Very strange and unexplainable things are happening in Tylersville, and they all seem connected to Belleau Wood; and the strange, enigmatic Dr. Charles Willard and his beautiful young wife Nancy. Bit by bit Kurt tries to peel away the layers of mystery and the unknown horror that seems to be settling over his town, while Glen seems to become more and more vague, Vicky more and more harassed, and Chief Bard is forced to suspend him from the force.

As the title suggests, there are Ghouls out there, but what are they, and where are they, and who is behind their arrival in Tylersville? A decently thick 444 page novel, I nonetheless tore through this in less than a day. It is a plainly written, extremely fast paced journey into horror and mystery and suspense that you should not deprive yourself of. Though Lee's work has definitely developed over the years, this earlier work has less gore and more "feeling" to it, but there is still enough blood to make it a tasty addition to your library. Enjoy!

Rating:
Summary: Awful.
Review: I'm not sure why I decided to pick this book up. I had tried to read another Ed Lee book, CREEKERS, and couldn't get past the first couple of chapters before I threw it down. Maybe it was the cover. It shows a screaming creature and a figure carrying a body through a cemetery. If nothing else I hoped it might be fun in a drive-in, b-movie kind of way. After all, I love horror novels--even the cheesy ones if they are fun. Well, GHOULS isn't even good in a bad way. It was just awful. Hopelessly juvenille, mysogonistic, pointlessly gory, and full of characters that talk like they are on some grade school playground. And to make matters worse, it's 444 freakin' pages. Don't waste your time. You'll end up like me: pissed off and feeling cheated.

Rating:
Summary: 101 Reasons to Never Trust a Fogbank
Review: Something is stalking the town of Tylersville, leaving behind a plague of murders for the local police to deal with and a mysterious lack of evidence to go on. In fact, all the evidence points to something that could not be possible, that cannot be probable, but that seems to be stalking the shadows in search of both the living and the dead. It begins with the unearthing the recently deceased town drunkard, his body spirited away in the depths of the night, and then things begin going from bad to worse - leaving a trail of bodies in their wake before any answers begin to appear. For Kurt Morris, local police officer and man smitten by another's wife, things couldn't be worse, either. Not only does he have to deal with the motions taking place in that sea of would-be poaching, drug dealing, wife-battering, and drunken onslaughts of stupidity, but now he has the world of bodies to contend with. Worse still, it all seems to be stemming from that place, that shadowed form standing atop its own foreboding hill, its form surrounded by unkempt woodlands and discarded mines that could possibly hold secrets of the most sinister type.

As a person that has read quite a few of Edward Lee's books, I was actually surprised by what Ghouls brought to the proverbial table because it wasn't the atypical piece that he manufactures. First, the writing structure seemed more refined and the descriptions were laid-out better than some of his more horrific works, letting the town of Tylersville actually come to life around you as events began to manifest. Instead of faceless entities being lead to wholesale slaughter, the people therein became something denoted with a bit of realism that made them stand out. They, brimming with hopes and dreams and desires, befriended some people, playing wording games and delving into pits of small talk with them, while equally hating others. This made you feel a little something for them when the night came for them or when their friends died, and it gave you rhymes and reasons instead of a lack of dimensions. Second, the layout of the monsters themselves, although not used nearly enough to quench my thirst for abominations, was actually researched and backgrounding was given on the matter. The queries of "how" were answered as well as "what," not leaving so many question marks to plague the mind of the reader when all was said and done. Third, we do have elements of Lee that are mainstays, with evisceration going hand-in-hand with passion and pretexts of "rural subclassification" and making the read fun. Granted, it does take time to get to bodies dropping like flies, but when they come, they come with wings. Lastly, the length of the book let him delve into all type of subjects that Lee wanted to cover. Too often, he seems rushed, with the book passing by and the reader wanting even more. While I still wanted more when the book ended, I thought that the 440 plus pages (in rather small print) said what needed to be said and covered many grounds - even some of them almost seemingly mundane but working to flesh out the characters.

For anyone that likes Lee's newer works, then the monster type in the book might work well for you. You simply have to bear in mind that the pages don't run with blood immediately, nor do things manifest as quickly as some of the other books do. Here, time is taken and people are developed, giving more to the grounds when they are fed the remains of the living. For anyone that hasn't checked out Lee, I wouldn't recommend this as a starting point, but I would say that it would be something to check out if the chance presents itself.

Rating:
Summary: Exhibit A
Review: This is the kind of garbage that killed the horror genre in the late 80's. Publishers started putting out really bad books, throwing them at an audience they underestimated, underappreciated, and didn't consider intelligent (apparently.) So, they saturated the market with pure schlock and the public got so fed up that people stopped buying horror (except for the die-hard fans like me.) GHOULS is one of the many sub-par books that left a bad taste in readers mouths and pushed them to other genres. (Pinnacle and Zebra were the absolute worst offenders.)Lee is like a 7th grade kid on the playground when he writes; full of tired yuk-yuk macho sexual innuendos, throwing gore for cheap thrills-- because he doesn't understand how to scare readers-- and generally insulting the genre and it's fans by polluting the market with garbage.

Rating:
Summary: This is the way Horror is meant to be....
Review: This was the first Adult horror book I had ever read, and it is still one of the goriest, risque books I have any knowledge of I'm I'm a horror fanatic. The author takes you into a world that is inside our own little safe communities, and shows you what is really scary. If you can find this book, and you love horror and gore, then pick it up, if you don't have a strong stomach then leave it alone, and that goes for anything by this author.