Rating: Summary: Whats real whats not. Review: Im going to make this short and sweet. This is a fantastic book! If your looking for a new auther to try out, give this book a try. I have passed this book on to 7 different friends and they all loved it. Give this and his other books a try. If you enjoy this, check out some books by Philip Jose Farmer.
Rating: Summary: A remarkably absorbing story Review: Mr. Spencer's plots unfold like water lilies, you should never pick up this book unless you happen to have nothing else to do; you will not be able to put it down. Watching this story unfold is completely hypnotic. No matter how often this book is re-read, it will never be predictable. If you do not read this book, you are seriously missing out.
Rating: Summary: Ostonishing!!!!!....THE BEST BOOK EVER WRITEN!!! Review: The descriptions in this book shame every poet. In fact i would go so fare as to say every poem writen is just a lazy attempt at a Zod Wallop! Some pepole have said that the charcters in this book are under developed, but if they would take a closer look at the writeing style it's self they would find each word Spencer uses to describe the charcters are not only acurate, but the condentations to how the words where put together are worth a million words from any other writer. Spencer is a genuise of the highest order!! I'll stake my life on that one. Also there is a lot of comparing Zod Wallop to Mr. Carolls The Land Of Luaghs. Both are great achivements in thier own right. How ever I must say : bare none Zod wallop demotes the Land Of Luaghs to little more then drivel. Where the Land Of luaghs focused more on charcter development, (becuase caroll is not advancesd as Spencer this took up a lot of time, & room)- Zod wallop focused mostly on creativity, and something actualy happening.
Rating: Summary: Effective and imaginative Review: The inevitable comparison that Zod Wallop brings to mind is to Jonathan Carroll's The Land of Laughs. Both novels revolve around a children's book that is directly affecting the lives of the other characters. The approach that the two authors take to the subject is quite different--Carroll, even in his first novel, drifts around the fantastic, never quite making it real, preferring to define his characters by the world of which we know. Spencer embraces the fantastic, so much so that it is hard sometimes to tell where the "real" world and the fantastic world come together. If one thinks of this balance between the real and the fantastic as a see-saw, in Carroll's world the heavier child is the real world, and vice versa in Spencer.Harry Gainsborough wrote books for his daughter, Amy. His books were so good that they were published and became well-loved children's books across the world. But when his daughter drowns in a freak accident, he enters into a depression so severe that his agent checks him into a psychiatric ward. In the hospital, the therapist suggests that he write another book--hoping that the creative process will lift him out of despair. Instead, the book that he writes, Zod Wallop, is a bleak, dark novel--the kind of children's book that the Wicked Witch of the West would have written. Zod Wallop is also Harry Gainsborough's most popular novel, more popular even than Bocky and the Moon Weasels or The Bathtub Wars. Children the world over love Zod Wallop, but none more so than Raymond Story, who read it while a patient at the Harwood Psychiatric Hospital. Raymond, who almost drowned when he was 8, sees his near-death experience as a link to the author of Zod Wallop. Raymond, who when he came across the first draft of Zod Wallop, destroyed the dark, original version that Harry had written. Or had he just hidden the book? Lastly, William Browning Spencer's Zod Wallop is about the drug, Ecknazine, administered by Marlin Tate to a group of patients at the Harwood Psychiatric who had extremely rich imaginative lives. The goal of Tate's experiment was to enable telepathic communication, but the drug did something else, something much more strange than telepathy. The drug enabled Zod Wallop to come to life. Spencer's novel is a complex knot of these three stories, moving at a reckless pace towards the conclusion. Zod Wallop is not a predictable book--it steadfastly refuses to toe the line of any one genre, going through thriller, fantasy, horror, science fiction, and mainstream in the course of its pages. I would not call it slipstream either, because it doesn't have a singular consistency of vision. The point is that it works, and in straight comparison to The Land of Laughs, it works better, because it works towards a resolution--one much more rewarding than Carroll's first effort. Spencer still has some honing before his prose is as sharp as Carroll's, specifically the Carroll of Bones of the Moon or After Silence, but Zod Wallop shows that he has the imagination and skills to be in the same league.
Rating: Summary: The Most Joyful Book I've Read In The Last Ten Years Review: There's plenty of darkness and tense action that the characters must stumble through before they reach the light, but even in the most horrific situations, there is an elusive sense of joy infusing every scene. Whether the joy comes from Spencer's word play and humor, or from manic personality of Raymond Story, the bottom line is that it's the most enjoyable new story I've read in the last decade. I'll leave it at that; there's no need for me to repeat plot details that you can pick up from other reviews.
Rating: Summary: A Broken Spirit: Shadows of the Past redefined. Review: This book is one of the few that has made me cry - it happens every time I pick it up and come to those last few pages. Call it a ride through Harry Gainesborough's broken soul, if you will, still wounded from the death of his daughter... you can feel his pain as vividly as if it were your own. William Browning Spencer has crafted a masterwork - a novel that penetrates through to the heart. As an aside, I've had three copies of this book 'permanently borrowed' by friends - everyone that I've exposed to the world of Zod Wallop has been affected by the power of it.
Rating: Summary: Zod Takes a Wallop Review: This is the third time in a little over a year that I am reviewing a book by William Browning Spencer. This time the book in question is THE RETURN OF COUNT ELECTRIC. This volume is a collection of short stories. During their original publication these stories prompted Roger Zelazny to declare Spencer the premier short story writer of the decade. While Zelazny may have been right that Spencer's stories are very well crafted and written, his earlier books left me unprepared for this collection. What really threw me about this collection was that I made it from cover to cover without encountering any elements of science fiction or fantasy. I did, however, encounter madness. As evidenced in his novels, Spencer has a knack for getting into the minds of the deranged and obsessed. In one amusing story we are treated to the rantings of a man convinced that his wife is having an affair with Stephen King and feeding him plots. So, while this book cannot technically be called science fiction or fantasy and resembles horror only in the most tenuous ways I was still a very appealing book. Despite the lack of SF trappings, Spencer's writing still remains as captivating as in RESUME WITH MONSTERS or ZOD WALLOP. So if you enjoyed either of those books, then you might want to take a gander at this one.
Rating: Summary: Zod Takes a Wallop Review: This is the third time in a little over a year that I am reviewing a book by William Browning Spencer. This time the book in question is THE RETURN OF COUNT ELECTRIC. This volume is a collection of short stories. During their original publication these stories prompted Roger Zelazny to declare Spencer the premier short story writer of the decade. While Zelazny may have been right that Spencer's stories are very well crafted and written, his earlier books left me unprepared for this collection. What really threw me about this collection was that I made it from cover to cover without encountering any elements of science fiction or fantasy. I did, however, encounter madness. As evidenced in his novels, Spencer has a knack for getting into the minds of the deranged and obsessed. In one amusing story we are treated to the rantings of a man convinced that his wife is having an affair with Stephen King and feeding him plots. So, while this book cannot technically be called science fiction or fantasy and resembles horror only in the most tenuous ways I was still a very appealing book. Despite the lack of SF trappings, Spencer's writing still remains as captivating as in RESUME WITH MONSTERS or ZOD WALLOP. So if you enjoyed either of those books, then you might want to take a gander at this one.
Rating: Summary: Good, but not great Review: Zod Wallop is a book of considerable imagination that I highly recommend, but it falls short of five star status. Spencer has crafted the beginnings of a classic, but in the end, weak characterization of some of the minor players and too many unresolved loose threads left me a little disappointed when all was said and done. Still, the book is a quick, enjoyable read, and does contain many thought-provoking ideas and concepts.
Rating: Summary: Good, but not great Review: Zod Wallop is a book of considerable imagination that I highly recommend, but it falls short of five star status. Spencer has crafted the beginnings of a classic, but in the end, weak characterization of some of the minor players and too many unresolved loose threads left me a little disappointed when all was said and done. Still, the book is a quick, enjoyable read, and does contain many thought-provoking ideas and concepts.
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