Tag: paranormal

Book Review: Lifeblood by Lind (5 Stars)

Lifeblood by Werner Lind

5 out of 5 stars

Read in October 2008

Warning: Spoilers

What a wonderful book to wrap up the Halloween season!

Ana is a 17th century vampire from Transylvania, transplanted to eastern Iowa by the strangest and saddest of circumstances. She is hunted by a zealous priest who paralyzes her with his crucifix and drives a wooden stake through her heart. Fast forward 300+ years to an automobile accident involving an armored car that was transporting her remains to a museum exhibit. The accident dislodges the stake and Ana find herself restored to a fiery confusion, which she escapes in her bat form.

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Book Review: Those Who Hunt the Night by Hambly (3.5 Stars)

Those Who Hunt the Night by Barbara Hambly

3.5 out of 5 stars

Read in October 2009

Vampires without the romance. Very refreshing. Well drawn historical setting in late 19th or early 20th century London and Paris.

James Asher, a professor of philology at Oxford, and his wife Lydia, also a doctor, but of medicine, are reluctantly coerced into investigating the case of a serial vampire killer. Don Simon Ysidro, a Spanish vampire old enough to remember (and barely survive) the great London fire of 1666, forces James into his service by threatening Lydia’s life.

Rather than risking his wife’s precarious safety and sending her into hiding, he recruits her help in tracking down both the vampire killer, and the vampire victims haunts and hidey-holes. Lydia pursues the research through probate courts, registrar of deed office, newspaper articles and other public records and resist’s the siren call of the medical pathology mystery of vampirism while James accompanies Ysidro to interrogate London’s undead citizens.

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Movie Review: Red Riding Hood (2011)

Red Riding Hood (2011)

2 out of 5 stars

One of a crop of edgier dark fairy tales retold in recent years, Red Riding Hood bears a passing resemblance to the French ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ by Perrault; more so than Grimm’s ‘Little Red Cap.’  But plain old wolves weren’t good enough or scarier enough for director Catherine Hardwicke (perhaps she should have consulted Joe Carnahan or watched the Grey?).  The villagers of Daggerhorn suffered a werewolf among them for years, or generations even.

The only acting performance of note not surprisingly came from veteran actress Julie Christie, whom I fondly remember as Lara.  Even Gary Oldman couldn’t inspire the uninspired plot.