reviews

A Retelling of Jekyll and Hyde Authors: Robert Louis Stevenson and Libby Spurrier The story of Jekyll and Hyde is a familiar one, even if you haven’t read the original novel. Examples of mad scientists acting out the duality of human nature by using potions to split themselves into a good (or at least non-aberrant) side and an evil side populate everything from children’s cartoons to retellings across plays, books, and movies. But . . . what if the mad scientist was a woman, and what if she lived during a time of cell phones and more advanced science? Henrietta [...]

A Collection with Two Good Stories, and a Lot of Duds Author: Eric Miller I love horror stories, and I love all things trucks, especially big rigs with their sensuous power and subliminal call to adventure. What could be better than a combination of isolation horror and the strange goings-on between truck stops interspersed with the semi-lonely, semi-romantic life of a long haul trucker? Enter 18 Wheels of Horror, a book that I’ve been longing to read for years. 18 Wheels of Horror contains 18 horror short stories, focusing in and around a trucker’s life on the road. While the premise [...]

A Lackluster Mystery, a Grim Murder Author: Fiona Barton When a tiny skeleton is unearthed at a building site, journalist Kate Waters can’t let it go. Who is the Building Site Baby? Are the bones the answer to a famous kidnapping of nearly twenty years before, and if so, how did the baby get there? What tragedy do those sad bones, suspended under a long dead potted plant, have to tell? Kate doesn’t know, but she intends to find out. The first step is writing an article, the second is going through the history of the gentrifying neighborhood and tracing back [...]