Lord Samper's Library

  Page Count: 93 Pages While it hasn’t been a great week, it has been a pretty good week for reading and you know what…? I’ll take that, especially when I’ve got no plans for the weekend other than to keep on reading ;o) In the meantime, I thought I’d round off the working week with a Jack Ketchum novella that I found lurking in the back of ‘Red’ . And… When Janet’s car breaks down on a quiet road, her only real concern is how long it will take before she can flag down a passing car, any passing car. One lift, from a very angry motorist, later and it couldn’t possibly get any worse, could it?  Oh, it could. And it does… Before we get going, I feel like a little advance warning would be useful here. I’m not really going to go into the rape scene, in this post, but it does happen and that’s something that some readers may want to consider before reading ‘The Passenger’. It’s up to you. Ketchum doesn’t make it the focus of this tale but similarly to ‘Red’, it does happen. Anyway…...

  Page Count: 211 Pages I’ll be honest… I’m very much a ‘dog person’ (although Cats 1 & 2 are growing on me) and that’s the reason I haven’t read ‘Red’ up until now. If you’ve read the book, or even just the blurb, you know what happens and I just wasn’t ready to go there. And then I saw a copy of ‘Red’ for sale (Greenwich Oxfam, I love that shop...), the other day, and couldn’t very well leave it there. And once I’d brought it home, I couldn’t very well not read it; not when I’m trying to be a little more disciplined about reading the books that I buy… I’ll warn you now, there’s an absolutely massive spoiler in the blurb, below, and if you’re a dog person, you might not want to read the blurb at all. I get it :o) It all started with a simple act of brutality. Three boys shot and killed an old man’s dog. No reason, just plain meanness. But the dog was the best thing in the old man’s world, and he wasn’t about to let it pass. He wanted justice, and he’d make sure the kids paid f...

  Page Count: 293 Pages I told you that I was all excited about reading ‘Offspring’… :o) Excited enough that after another ‘one of those days’ at work yesterday (there’ll be a few more of those this month, I think), I stepped away from my work laptop and settled down for a read.  And…? I should have picked something different to read, last night, but not for the reasons you’re probably thinking… The former sheriff of Dead River, Maine, thought he had killed them off ten years ago – a primitive cave-dwelling tribe of cannibalistic savages. But somehow, the clan survived. To breed. To hunt. To kill and eat. And now, the peaceful residents of this isolated town are fighting for their lives… If it ain’t broke and all that… ;o) In ‘Off Season’, Jack Ketchum struck gold and discovered the formula for telling a gripping tale of survival horror; one that turns your stomach while really showing you just what a person will do to make it through the night. Well, time may have passed in D...

  Page Count: 308 Pages (incorporating the short story ‘Winter Child’, included with this edition) I came across this copy in Greenwich Oxfam on Saturday afternoon, no surprise, that shop is being very good to me at the moment :o) After a brief internal discussion over whether I already had a copy (bloody ‘chemo-brain’…), I chanced it and… I didn’t already have a copy after all. All’s well that ends well. Yesterday was a designated ‘reading in the comfy chair day’, and ‘Off Season’ was right there in front of me, so I thought I’d give it a go. In case you hadn’t realised, there is nothing scientific about how I choose my ‘next read’. It’s very much a case of fancying a certain genre and then seeing which book catches my eye first ;o) Anyway… September. A beautiful New York editor retreats to a lonely cabin on a hill in the quiet Maine beach town of Dead River – off season – awaiting her sister and friends. Nearby, a savage human family, with a taste for flesh, lurks in the darkenin...

  Page Count: 138 Pages It has been so long since I read anything by Jack Ketchum that the other day I thought to myself, ‘I really should check him out’ and grabbed myself copies of ‘Offspring’ and ‘Ladies’ Night’. Turns out that way back in 2008, I read ‘Old Flames’ and didn’t think an awful lot of it. Oh well, If I’m having trouble remembering what I did yesterday, I’m not going to beat myself up for forgetting one book that I read seventeen years ago ;o) Either way, it’s been long enough that it was worth paying Ketchum’s work another visit, just to see if things were better this time round. ‘Ladies’ Night’ was the book I kicked off with. Tom Braun and his wife Susan aren't exactly a picturesque couple and it’s no surprise that Tom continually spends late evenings in bars and cheats on his wife. Unfortunately, their son Andy is caught in the middle of his parent's constant argument. One life-altering evening turns this family's, along with most of New York's, perc...