You Always Try to Kill Me in Your Dreams by Carlton Mellick III

 

(pb; 2023)

From the back cover

“Dreams shouldn’t kill you. If you die in a dream you should be fine in real life. But that’s not what Elias [Thompson] learns once he moves in with a girl named Roe who has the terrible habit of pulling people into her dreams with her whenever she falls asleep. Although she’s the nicest, coolest, most attractive woman Elias has ever known while she’s awake. Roe is a complete psychopath in her dreams. She will stop at nothing to kill anyone who finds their way into her subconscious worlds. But Elias has no choice but to survive her crazy dreams every night if he ever hopes to make it in a world that has been torn apart by a global pandemic and economic collapse.”

 

Review

Always, a relatively light entry in Mellick’s oeuvre, is pure delight, poking fun at Portland, Oregon, the author’s current city-of-residence while marking the social anxiety of the recent COVID-19 outbreak as well as the uncertainties, cruelty and fickleness of collegiate youth.

The characters are deftly sketched out, fleshed enough to ring as relatable and true, while the fast-moving, often funny and sometimes gory story, with its well-placed (and often quiet) twists redirecting the plot/action into new, distinctly Mellick territory, darkly hilarious with underlying seriousness and a multilayered, disturbing-or-comforting finish, depending on your mood. This is a great read if you’re looking to read a lighter-in-tone, later Mellick work, one of my favorite novellas by him.

Alien: Covenant -- Origins by Alan Dean Foster

 

(pb; 2017: book-only prequel to Alan Dean Foster’s 2017 movie tie-in novelization of Alien: Covenant)

 

From the back cover

“The Covenant mission is the most ambitious endeavor in the history of Weyland-Yutani. A ship bound for Origae-6, carrying two thousand colonists beyond the limits of known space, this is a make-or-break investment for the corporation—and for the future of mankind.

“Yet there are those who would die to stop the mission. As the colony ship hovers in Earth orbit, several violent events reveal a deadly conspiracy to sabotage the launch. While Captain Jacob Branson and his wife Daniels complete their preparations, security chief Daniel Lupé recruits the final key member of his team. Together they seek to stop the perpetrators before the ship and its passengers.

Review

This official prequel to the events of Alien: Covenant (2017; director: Ridley Scott) is a well-written but superfluous, fill-in-all-the-timeline-blanks work. Foster, a consistently solid-to-great author, penned a solid novella-length story with solid characters—a few of whom appear in Scott’s Alien: Covenant, e.g., Daniels, Tennessee and Lupé. Unfortunately, Covenant—Origins isn’t a novella, it’s a novel, with a story that feels lightweight, character and event-wise, compared to the bigger-in-scope Alien works, an entertaining but overlong trifle in a series studded with some excellent entries, cinema and book-wise.

I’d recommend Covenant—Origins if you’re a die-hard/completist fan of the Alien franchise, looking for story- and character expansions you won’t get in the films and other books. This is a worthwhile read, if you’re of those mindsets and keep your expectations of Covenant—Origin’s stakes relatively low, and enjoy sporadic bits of gunplay/action, corporate intrigue, roughshod revolutionaries (the Earthsavers), and don’t expect a lot of monsters (besides those clawed shadow-things in Duncan’s apoplectic nightmares).

All the Rage by F. Paul Wilson

 

(pb; 2000: fourth book in the Repairman Jack series)

From the back cover

“Can you imagine a new chemical compound, a non-addictive designer drug that heightens your assertiveness, opens the door to your primal self, giving you an edge wherever you compete, whether on the street or the football field, in a classroom or a boardroom? Wouldn’t you be tempted to try it. . . just once? What happens if it releases the uncontrollable rage and makes you a killer?”

 

Review

Wilson’s Rage is full-on-screenplay/nothing-left-to-the-imagination ambitious, a mostly excellent novel with its thoroughly explored characters (some annoying, e.g., the often shrill/emotional-flip-out Gia), memorably wild and well-foreshadowed situations, and story-centric callbacks to earlier Repairman Jack books. Fans of H.G. Wells’s 1896 novel The Island of Dr. Moreau (or at least three of its cinematic adaptations) may especially enjoy Rage, which often references Jack’s fondness for it.

If I have any nits about Rage, it’s that some of its near-the-end scenes run a bit longer than necessary (almost to the point of ridiculousness, character motivation-wise) or the characters do or say dumb things. But this is a minor complaint for an otherwise superb work, one worth reading and owning, despite its several overlong end-chapters. Followed by Hosts (2001).

The Green Ripper by John D. MacDonald

 

(pb; 1979: eighteenth book in MacDonald’s twenty-one-book Travis McGee series)

 

From the back cover

“It was a new kind of game for Travis McGee.

“It was called love. . .

“In another season there were girls of summer, robust and playful in their sandy ways, and now here were the winter ones, with cool surmise in the tended eye, fragrant and speculative, strolling and sailing and tanning, making their night music and night scent. And then there was Gretel.

“Gretel had discovered the key to me—all of me. And suddenly I had something to hope for.

“Then terribly, unexpectedly she was dead. From a mysterious illness, they told me. But I knew they were lying. Gretel had been murdered. And now I was out for blood.”

 

Review

Narrated by series protagonist and “salvage consultant” Travis McGee in first-person past-tense, this entertaining, often conversational-toned and sometimes dark mystery/thriller is a blast-through read, with well-developed characters (even if you’re new to the Travis McGee series like me), cut-to-it pacing and overall excellence, its death cultic villains (the military-minded members of the “Church of Apocrypha”) worth hissing at whilst indicating a larger, more ominous threat, should McGee fail in his quest to avenge the needless killing of his beloved girlfriend, Gretel Howard. Green does a great job of setting up this umbrella, moneyed threat for future McGee novels (something I hope MacDonald delivered on with later McGee entries).

Worth owning and a standout (in a good way) beach read—especially in southeastern Florida, where McGee often lives—Green was followed by Free Fall in Crimson.

Black Orchids by Rex Stout

 

(pb; 1941, 1942: ninth book in Stout’s Nero Wolfe series)

 

From the back cover

“The incredibly brilliant Nero Wolfe is the orchid-growing gourmet whose sheer genius at deduction is without peer. Together with his confidential assistant, Archie Goodwin, he must utilize his vast resources to solve two cases that concern something perhaps too close to his heart—orchids. Black orchids. Never has the big man been matched against a mystery so curious—or fragrantly deadly.”

 

Review

In “Black Orchids,” a wildly clever and deadly shooting at a New York City Flower Show compels Wolfe and his reliable, sarcastic “confidential assistant” (Archie Goodwin, who narrates Wolfe’s mystery-solving adventures) to suss out who set up the public death of a scoundrel (Harry Gould).

In “Cordially Invited to Meet Death,” a young woman (Bess Hiddleton) who’s receiving threatening letters turns up dead, her ending borne of tetanus—a seeming, strange accident (to some) that sets off Wolfe and Goodwin’s crime-solving alarm bells.

“Black” shows how Wolfe gains six rare, black orchids that he badly wants whilst solving a well thought-out killing, with a consistently randy Goodwin flirting with the ladies, often while doing Wolfe’s sarcastically commented-upon bidding.

“Cordially” is a bit racier in parts (a woman, with good reason, is accidentally seen sans clothing—with nary a description, for those who are concerned about that sort of thing), with an ending that speaks to, hints at Wolfe’s rarely seen tender side, keeping with the tone of these two consistent-with-the-series clever and fast-paced tales.

Black, structurally, is a great anthological offset to the novels that came before it, its use/linking of black orchids excellent, in a character-expanding, tonally true way. Great read, worth owning. Followed by Not Quite Dead Enough (1944).

The Scarlatti Inheritance by Robert Ludlum

 

(pb; 1971)

 

From the back cover

“Her weapons: money and power. Her target: the most dangerous man in the world—her own son. Elizabeth Wyckham Scarlatti has a plan, a desperate last-minute gamble designed to save the world from her son, Ulster, an incalculably cruel man who is working for the Third Reich under the name of Heinrich Kroeger. If Elizabeth cannot stop him, Ulster will give Hitler the most powerful instrument on earth.”

 

 

Review

Scarlatti is equal parts accounting reports and Ludlum’s trademark (sometimes emotional) character-based action, an entertaining, clever, element- and character-balanced conspiratorial ride set in the time just before World War II. Scarlatti is also a stylistic and trademark offset tale from Ludlum’s other more action-heavy novels, e.g., Ludlum’s Bourne trilogy. Worth owning, this.

Black Wings Has My Angel by Elliott Chaze

 

(pb; 1954)

From the back cover

“When Tim Sunblade escapes from prison, his sole possession is an infallible plan for the ultimate heist. Trouble is it’s a two-person job. So when he meets Virginia, a curiously well-spoken ‘ten-dollar tramp,’ and discovers that the only thing she cares for is ‘drifts of money, lumps of it,’ he knows he’s met his partner. What he doesn’t suspect is that this lavender-eyed angel might just prove to be his match.”

 

Review

Black Wings, told in the first person from the perspective Kenneth McClure (aka Tim Sunblade), is an immediately immersive, exciting and sometimes violent and flirty read, detailing his adrenaline-spiked criminal run with Virginia, to its darkly humorous and karmic finish. If their trajectories, separate and together, are familiar to pulp/noir fans, it’s not to the detriment of Chaze’s work here: it merely provides the framework in which the character-driven action happens.

Fans of wild-women characters may especially enjoy Black Wings’ Virginia, who reminds me of other iconic noir/pulp femme fatatles: Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) in Double Indemnity (1944), Vera (Ann Savage) in Detour (1945) and Annie Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins) in Gun Crazy (1950).

Black is another great entry in the pulp genre, up there with other top tier works in the genre—worth owning.

#

Il gèle en enfer (1990; English translation: He’s freezing in hell), directed and co-scripted by Jean-Pierre Mocky, was adapted from Black Wings and released in France on April 25, 1990. Jean-Pierre Mocky played Tim. Lauren Grandt, billed as Laura Grandt, played Georgia (the cinematic equivalent of Virginia from the source novel).

Signalz by F. Paul Wilson

 

(pb; 2020: sixth book in the Adversary Cycle, aka the Nightworld Cycle)

 

From the back cover

“Twilight has come. Night will fall.

“It will begin in the heavens and end in Earth.

“But before that. . . the rules will be broken.

“The Change is coming, and the world as we know it is ending. Sixteen-year-old Ellie Tate has changed. She looks the same, but her mother detects someone else looking out through her blue eyes. Ellie builds a ‘shelter’ in her room with an entrance that leads. . . elsewhere.

“And what of the convoy of tractor trailers Hari Tate watches drive up to a mountain road and return without the trailers. . . leaving nothing on the mountain. What are they shipping?

“And the writer who finds a hole in the floor of his NYC apartment and tumbles through into. . . elsewhere.

“They will all find each other and find their answers in the electromagnetic pulses piercing the Earth from Out There, pulses that no one should hear, but some do. But they are not simply pulses. They are Signalz.”

 

Review

Nicola Tesla, or at least his legacy, again plays a part in Wilson’s work, with electronic pulses, heard by a few, taking them to scattered, faraway places, most of them within our terrestrial realm. This is a fun science fiction/horror, nightmares-melting-into-reality-and-back work, with interesting characters (e.g., Hari Tate, a tough forensic accountant) and a no-going-back, semi-cliffhanger finish that made me excited for the next and (thus-far) final Adversary Cycle book, Nightworld.

Money Shot by Christa Faust

 

(pb; February 2025. First book in the Angel Dare series.)

 

From the back cover

“THEY THOUGHT SHE’D BE EASY. THEY THOUGHT WRONG.

“It all began with the phone call asking former porn star Angel Dare to do one more movie. Before she knew it, she’d been shot and left for dead in the trunk of a car. But Angel is a survivor. And that means she’ll get to the bottom of what’s been done to her even if she has to leave a trail of bodies along the way.”

 

Review

Faust, with her gritty and pulp-veracious execution, penned a quick, reader-hooking read when she wrote Money—it has human warmth in unexpected places, sleaze, greed, violence, lust, gore and even a quick rape scene that’s not gratuitous and lends appropriate-but-succinct emotional weight to that last crime. Just as importantly, Faust brings together dark/wry humor, an insider’s view of the porn industry with the natural sleaze factor that makes pulp so palpable and worth reading. This is a great, if overlong novel (its last quarter could’ve been shorter, more action-intense gritty and genre effective). Worth owning, this. Followed by Chokehold.

Hatchet Girls by Joe R. Lansdale

 

(hb; 2025: fourteenth novel in the Hap and Leonard series)

 

From the back cover

“When Hap and Leonard are called in on a strange request (subduing a meth-hopped hog) by a desperate young lady, they quickly learn this woman is part of a fringe group: The Hatchet Girls, who have pledged their allegiance to a crazed and grudge-bearing leader bent on bloody societal revenge. The timing couldn't be worse to be caught in such a vile, sticky wicket of a case: both boys are wrapped up in their domestic lives: Leonard is in the midst of wedding planning with fiance, Pookie. And meanwhile, Hap and Brett are hard at work on their new home. Homemaking bliss will have to wait as Hap and Leonard are driven to stop the danger in its tracks and better understand the group's mission and the plans they have already set in place for helter-skelter-esque mayhem.

“Life changes, midnight sneaks, and dark encounters with misguided dames who yell ‘Chop, Chop,’ lead Hap and Leonard into one of their darkest adventures yet.”

Review

Hatchet, as with other Hap and Leonard [H&P] works, finds the colorful, quip-exchanging duo (as well as their friends and family) taking on  another “simple job” only to have it metastasize into bigger, uglier, offbeat, timely and infinitely more dangerous situations. Unlike Sugar on the Bones, the previous H&P book, Hatchet feels downsized storywise, with only a few H&P core characters (Brett, Hap’s wife; Pookie, Leonard’s fiancé; Justin, the newest local sheriff; etc.) involved in the action—a nice offset from the excellent, warm Sugar, making for a more intimate, equally warm, occasionally nasty and (at times) hair-raising follow-up.

There’s a lot of meditation about getting older in Hatchet, a relatively lighter tone that further shows the maturation of Hap and Leonard, as well as those around them. I love this series; every entry inspires a sense of visiting old friends within me. Another great read from Lansdale, worth owning.

Reprisal by F. Paul Wilson

 

(pb; 1992: fifth book in the Nightworld Cycle, aka Adversary Cycle.)

 

From the back cover

“In The Keep, a squad of Nazi soldiers unleashed a terrible life force far more monstrous than the Third Reich.

“In Reborn, a human embryo struck fear in the hearts of the chosen few who could feel its power from the womb.

“Now, in Reprisal, bestselling author F. Paul Wilson resurrects the ancient, vampiric evil in a young man born of flesh and blood. A young southern college student named Rafe hides his true and secret identity. But soon the whole world will know. All of humankind will suffer. And Rafe will feed, forever, on their tears and pain.”

 

Review

Reprisal is a relatively straightforward (with a few big twists, fewer than usual) read. A good number of its characters, e.g., former Jesuit priest Will Ryan, now going under the name Will Ryerson, are returnees from Reborn, and two of them—Mr. Veilleur, aka Glaeken and Glenn; Rasalom, aka Molasar—appeared in the first Nightworld Cycle novel, The Keep.

But things are different now for them. Veilleur/Glaeken is a septuagenarian man, whose wife (Magda, from Keep) now has Alzheimer’s. Rasalom, who’s gone through a few incarnations, is now Rafe Losmara, a collegiate edgelord-type who’s in tune with his dark, murky-world powers—powers he means to unleash upon the world in full, once he’s accomplished his current mission, something that has to do with Ryan/Ryerson and those around him.

An easy-to-gauge-its-“secrets” novel, Reprisal is a fun-blast offset from some of Wilson’s more ambitious works. I enjoyed it for its almost B-movie-simple plot, its tight editing, and straightforward pushing-toward-a-Rasalom-Glaeken-climax writing.

One of my favorite Wilson books, this. It’s not a wrap-up—it has a semi-cliffhanger-ish finish—but it’s a satisfying and hard-to-set-down bringing together of familiar characters worth rooting for or loathing. Followed by Signalz.