DEAD LINES

Rating:
Summary: Is it a novel or a book of short fiction? BOTH!
Review: Ah, yes, Skipp and Spector, where are they now when we need them the most? This was the fourth of their six collaborations, and as usual, it is definitely fantastic! In essence, it is a book of short stories intertwined with a framing/interlude device. The stories and the framing device are brilliantly horrifying, insightful, and at times, even bittersweet. FIND THIS BOOK AND READ IT! That goes for all of their work: The Light At The End. The Cleanup, The Scream, Dead Lines, The Bridge, and their last, but not least work, Animals. CHEERS! PJH

Rating:
Summary: blurs the line between short story and novel
Review: If you can get a hold of it, read it. After taking over a loft, the new owners discover a box of unpublished short stories. Each is wonderfully written, and could stand alone, but the power of the novel is in how the main characters become drawn in to and addicted to the short stories, even as their lives become horribly altered by reading them. As will yours be.

Rating:
Summary: Best short-length horror novel I have ever read.
Review: John Paul Rowan thinks his life is bad, so he checks out. Then he finds out what bad really is. Meanwhile, two young ladies take over his apartment (after a little cleaning and painting it looks pretty normal again) and find some of the previous occupant's stories. With a little reading and a little supernatural twiddling, the writer figuratively and literally finds his audience.

This book clicks on so many levels you'd swear it was wearing taps. From Katie's mysterious eye scar to the reprintings of Rowan's short stories this book flows and scares with ease. Skipp and Spector were always at their best writing about the Big Apple; "The Light At The End" and this are two of the best horror books I have ever read.

Find it, buy it, read it. And try to wonder what would happen if there really were Old Ones, and they really did get tired of their witching day being celebrated with Count Chocula and Austin Powers costumes....

Rating:
Summary: Worth reading for the short stories
Review: NYC: A self-pitying writer hangs himself in the opening scene. Some months later, a young lady moves into his apartment and discovers his collection of stories, which are reprinted in the book. He's, you know, around and he gets interested in her as a way back into the world he so casually left behind. Some of those stories (especially the one about the Halloween when the Old Ones got tired of humans not taking their day seriously enough) haunt me to this day, and I read this book _years_ ago.

Skipp and Spector never got enough credit for the power and viscerality of their writing. Read anything you can find that was written by them (except maybe for "Animals", that one wasn't so good).

Rating:
Summary: Dead Lines
Review: Two young women--Meryl and Katie--move into a roomy New York loft. Meryl has basically been assigned, by her interfering father (she calls him "The Beast"), to settle into that loft and get her life straightened out after pulling out of College. But, she needs a roommate, so enter Katie, the attractive waitress, who has nowhere else to go after walking out on Colin, who is a User in just about every sense the word can be applied.

Katie and Meryl do not strike up a friendship that quickly, thanks mainly to Meryl sequestering herself in an added-on room in the loft, which contains a box left by one of the former occupants, marked Do Not Open Til Doomsday.

Meryl opens it and her whole life changes. She meets John Paul Rowan ("Jack") through her obssessive reading of his unpublished short stories--but that isn't all that's left of the author in the loft, and Katie can feel it too. It's bad dreams--the same bad dream--for both girls, and they both feel like they are being observed.

Rowan's short stories are actually represented here; we read them as Meryl reads them, and their contents are enough to make this a disturbing horror novel. But as we get a look at "Jack's" disintegration as it plays out in his fiction, we also start to fear for the women, especially Meryl, and rightly so. It seems that bitter, unfulfilled Jack is still around, somehow, in some form, and he has an awesome power that he's willing to unleash on a world that never, he feels, gave him a break. The result is a simple, but very compelling, haunted loft story.

This is not an intricate terror tale, though the inserted short stories--the wicked fictions within the larger, even more frightening, narrative--help put an extra spin on what's going on. Skipp and Spector indulge here in a stark, almost cruel style that flays everything open that it touches, including, ultimately, poor Meryl's soul. Blood, gore, and vile secretions spilling from a bitter philosophy of life that infects the innocent, even from beyond death. Be there, beware, or be square.