Bookworms Unlimited: Now open! Look below for reviews of Neal Stephenson's Zodiac and Ray Bradbury's Graveyard For Lunatics.
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And now, the reviews.
Availability = Widely Available
What can be said about Neal Stephenson?
Neal Stephenson is imaginative, innovative, skillful, and can write a cracking good novel. That's what can be said about Neal Stephenson.
In Snow Crash, Stephenson took us on a wild ride with the Deliverator through cyberspace. In The Diamond Age, he brought society full-circle and introduced Victorian values in the middle of a molecularly-engineered future world. In Zodiac, however, Stephenson takes us someplace he has never taken us before: Boston, the present day.
Meet S.T., hired gun for an independent environmental agency that takes up the slack left by the E.P.A. S.T. goes after the corporations that the E.P.A. can't touch, and he's the best at what he does.
Something has gone wrong in the Boston harbor. That's nothing new. People have been dumping there since a group of rowdy rebels got the idea that it might be good to dress up as Native Americans and throw tea off of British ships. The difference, however, is that these chemicals are serious trouble. We aren't talking carcinogens or something that fifty years down the line may cause heart failure. We're talking instant, horrible death. But who can be behind it? And why are S.T.'s samples from the contaminated bay constantly conflicting? Just what has happened now?
Billed as an "eco-thriller", Zodiac is a cracking good read about the environment that manages to deliver a good story without becoming preachy. Another Stephenson masterpiece.
Availability = Currently Out of Print
Ray Bradbury is a master of suspense, science-fiction, and fantasy. In A Graveyard For Lunatics, Ray Bradbury writes about a place scarier than even the darkest carnival -- Hollywood.
Bradbury calls upon his experience in Hollywood to build this realistic horror story about the man who should be dead and the screenwriter who claims to have seen him. The story is populated with Bradbury characters. There's the mortician who prepared Lenin's corpse, now driven out of his homeland and working as a make-up artist in Hollywood. There's the special effects man and his best friend, the screenwriter, who both grew up on pulp novels and King Kong. There's the monocled director who dares to snap at even the biggest names in Hollywood. And then there's J.C., the man who would be a saviour. They all have some part to play in the tragedy that is about to unfold, and none of them will ever be the same.
A Graveyard for Lunatics is a great novel by a great American author. It does not measure up quite to the level of Something Wicked This Way Comes, or even Bradbury's short story collections, but it makes for a cracking good read anyway. Check it out where you can find a copy.
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