Date: Fri 04-Jul-1997

Publication: Bee

Author: KIMH

Quick Words:

Koontz-King-Parker-Crichton

Full Text:

Ice Won't Be The Only Thing Offering A Few Chills

(with book covers)

BY KIM J. HARMON

Here we are, heading into the dog days of summer. The heat is getting

oppressive and the thought of spending even a minute out in the sun without a

bathing suit and a cold iced tea is intolerable.

If you need something to take your mind off all that or if just need a good

summertime read, then go and grab one of the 26 horror, science fiction,

fantasy, mystery or suspense novels listed below. Not all of the books are new

releases, but sometimes a classic story is as chilling as a contemporary

blood-and-gore battle. A well-written horror story can make a reader read in

breathless anticipation again and again, after all.

Some of the chills might cool you off a bit, maybe even freeze your blood and

whatnot, but mostly it's all just good entertainment.

Read on:

Horror

For some, it might seem like a simple act of Desperation , reading a book over

600 pages long, but Stephen King has packed some classic, apocalyptic chills

in his most recent novel. This is the sister opus to his somewhat weirder but

no less thrilling The Regulators .

Strange demon creatures, horrifying transformations and unsettling emotional

turmoil make for some riveting summer reading.

Of course, when we're talking about the apocalypse - this time by viral

infection - we're talking about The Stand (the unabridged version, which runs

about 1,200 pages). The classic epic is the tale of a flu-like disease,

Captain Trips, that wipes out most of the human race and leaves God (in the

guise of an old Midwestern black woman) and the Devil (in the guise of a dark,

foreboding man in Las Vegas) to fight over the scraps of humanity left behind.

The Devil - throughout horror fiction - appears in many guises. In James

Herbert's The Spear , a lurid and grisly tale from the early years of this

Brit's career, the Devil - Lucifer, if you will - forms an unholy (as if that

needed to be said) alliance with a Nazi group fooling with things

supernatural.

The supernatural has nothing to do with The Relic , by Douglas Preston and

Lincoln Child. It's just good, old-fashion scientific extrapolation and

supposition that creates a legendary monster that is unwittingly transported

to New York. The monster wreaks havoc, by eating a lot of people, in the

subterranean halls of the Museum of Natural History. Clever, scary, almost

plausible and so much better than the movie.

There never was - and probably never will be - a movie based on Dean R.

Koontz' Phantoms , but I wish there was, or will be. One of the most

frightening novels I have ever read, Koontz himself does some extrapolation by

creating a creature responsible for some of the mass disappearances in the

history of mankind. The creature surfaces in a small mountain town in

California and, as you can expect, a lot of people - most of the town, in fact

- disappears.

There is no disappearing stuff in Clive Barker's Books of Blood series, nor

the three follow-up volumes of short stories called In The Flesh, The Inhuman

Condition and Cabal . But there is a lot of raw, scary stuff that, almost by

its very essence, will chill your blood on a hot, summer afternoon. Read

"Rawhead Rex," "In the Hills, the Cities," "The Body Politic," and "How

Spoilers Bleed" if you don't believe me.

Science Fiction

For me, when it comes to science fiction, it's all about aliens.

There are plenty of 'em - the black, scaly kind with large teeth and claws and

a predilection towards very hearty constitutions (meaning you can't kill 'em

so good) - in Aliens: Earth Hive , the first in a series of novels based on

the Dark Horse comic novels which, in turn, are based on the popular science

fiction movies. This book, by Steve Perry (others in the series are by various

other sci-fi authors), is not exactly a shining example of the genre, but it

does hold a certain appeal and is simplistic enough to make it easy summer

reading.

What is a shining example of the genre, however, is Mars by Ben Bova. From Ray

Bradbury to Kim Stanley Robinson, and from Kevin Anderson to A.E. Van Vogt,

the planet Mars has been written about ad nauseum. While the planet remains a

romantic mystery, no one, before Bova, had written about it so

matter-of-factly. Mars is a simple blueprint about what the first expedition

to the Red Planet might really be like.

I don't know, however, what it might be like to be a future hunter certain for

the fabled horns of the Kilimanjaro elephant, but Mike Resnick, in Ivory , has

created a future history melded with the human race's legends of the past.

Resnick's writing brings out a fascinating story about a quest across time.

And there will be a time, I suppose, when wormholes - those holes in space

that permit instantaneous travel across millions of light years - would be so

prized for their economic value that people would kill to possess the

coordinates to one... which happens in Where the Ships Die by William C.

Dietz. This tome is an unexpectedly engaging sci-fi adventure that strips a

lot of the warfare stuff that saturates much of Dietz' other work.

What also might be engaging reading, if you like fiction, is what the federal

government is passing off as the truth in The Roswell Report: Case Closed ,

which attempts to tell millions of disbelieving nutcases that the 1947 alien

crash landing in Roswell, New Mexico, was merely a spy balloon incident and

the so-called alien bodies were crash test dummies dropped from the sky for

some preposterous reason. Yeah, right, tell us another one.

Fantasy

Some people can be long-winded, but after 2,000,000 words spanning seven

volumes of his epic (as if that can ever be overstated) Wheel of Time series,

Robert Jordan must hold the record. But that's okay, because Wheel , which

shows us a young man dealing with his legacy as the Dragon reborn (supposedly

the good guy, depending on which legend you believe) and his destiny to fight

the Last Battle with the Dark One (the bad guy), is as fully-fleshed and

riveting as a fantasy series can be.

The world is so finely realized and so enthralling with the different

characters and creatures of the Dark One that the first 900 pages - starting

in The Eye of the World - are a snap, and the last 5,400 are a breeze.

Mystery/Suspense

There must be a mantra or maxim in the publishing business that if you want to

sell a book, then find a way to stick a dinosaur in it. What better example of

that is there than the absolutely dreadful Tyrannasaur by Leigh Clark?

But if you want a bestseller, you have to do what Michael Crichton did in

Jurassic Park and The Lost World . More recently is what James F. David did in

his remarkable Footprints of Thunder . Crichton figured out a way to put man

and dinosaur on the same playing field through the miracle of genetics.

For David, it was a supposition of time displacement, a reactive physical

occurrence, brought on by years of atomic testing, that suddenly has

transformed the world into a patchwork quilt where slabs of prehistoric Earth

are side by side with slabs of modern Earth. Dinosaurs and man are together

again and people are getting eaten in a fascinating adventure story that poses

a lot of unsettling theoretical questions.

In theory, too, Neanderthal man might still exist in some remote and as yet

uncharted mountain hiding place, which is exactly what John Darnton is

hypothesizing in the thought-provoking and aptly named Neanderthal . A group

of scientists intrudes on a Neanderthal society which has eluded the drift of

time. The effects of that interaction prove disastrous, as you will read...

Two concerned scientists, meanwhile, try to prevent worldwide disaster in

Mount Dragon , by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. In a secluded Nevada

laboratory, a chemical and pharmaceutical company has developed, in an effort

to cure the common cold, the most violent and deadly virus ever known to man.

The facility has untold number of safety measures designed to keep virulent

strains of bacteria contained. But nothing is perfect.

Nothing may be perfect, but the suspense Dean R. Koontz generates in Intensity

comes as close as possible. It's a simple plot: two people cross paths, one a

nice upstanding citizen and the other a violent psychopath, and it leads to a

murderous chase, reminiscent of earlier books like Darkfall, Whispers, The

Face of Fear, and Shattered. It's high Intensity.

Although not real intense, Chance by Robert B. Parker is the finest sort of

detective novel you might come across. Spenser is the wisecracking detective

that spawned a generation of wisecracking detectives, but Spenser is funnier,

tougher and much more urbane than any of his followers. In Chance, Spenser has

to chase down the son of a mobster while he figures out why they want him so

bad.

Good stuff - much like anything else listed above.