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  I just got finished with this book by Richard Matthison.

I Am Legend and Hell House

This volume consists of two novellas, intermediated with a handful of short stories.  

The first novella is “I Am Legend”.   It involves a man who seems to be the last surviving human on Earth, or at least in the area he lives.  The world has been plagued by a “vampire” flu, that has turned those people living and dead into vampires.  It follows how this man strives to maintain his humanity while also trying to maintain his life.  He has set up and followed strict routines for himself, while trying to also figure out the source of this mutation, as well as a possible cure.   His world gets thrown off course when he finds “Ruth”-  a seemingly other survivor of the plague.    It is written well, and is easy enough to follow.  When he started to talk about the studying of the blood, genes, etc, it got a bit difficult to get through, since it was a bunch of medical talk that I don’t understand, but it was light enough to be able to get the general idea of what he was trying to say there. 

 

Hell House was my favorite in the book.  It is about a mansion that had been occupied by an evil madman.  It was a house of blasphemy, lies, torment, perversion, drugs… anything went in this house.  Occupants and visitors were encouraged to do anything and everything their minds could conceive of- quite literally.   What resulted was rape, torture, death.   When family members finally got to the house and broke in, they found several dead bodies.   Once closed up, the house became terrorized by haunting and poltergeist.  A group of parapsychologists, mediums and scientists entered in 1940, and only one young teenager ( a medium of great acclaim) made it out alive, found on the doorstep naked and shivering. 

Thirty years later, a twisted old millionare on his death bed decides he wants to know the secret of life after death, and hires 3 people to go back to what has been deemed “Hell House” and discover this secret.  He sends a physicist with an interest in parapsychology and his wife, a great spiritual medium, and the now adult survivor of the previous group.   The book follows the four as they explore the house, each trying to prove their case, and the horrors that envelope them within the house.  It is terrifying and intriguing.  The characters development was fantastic, and fun to follow as they try to understand and overcome what is going on.

 

While I found the short stories interesting, they were somewhat hard for me to read.  Some were quite entertaining in their telling and storyline.  Others were rather quick and left me wondering what had just happened.  All in all though, I found the book quite pleasurable, and it is a nice one to have for those quick lunchtime reads. 

 

 

I just finished reading a book entitled The Box Children by Sharon Wyse. It was an intriguing tale of 11 year old Lou Ann in a most memorable summer in 1960’s Texas farmland where she turns 12.  Her mother, a cruel and crazy woman, is pregnant, and Lou Ann must bear the brunt of her mother’s anger as her father is caught in a series of adulterous acts. Her brother has turned away from her as he himself struggles with becoming a man and all that it entails. She begins a diary, which she keeps hidden from everyone, and thus ensues her tale of this remarkable summer and all of the trials and tribulations that occur as she becomes a young woman.
It narrates her struggles with understanding how people judge other people, what it means to become a woman, romance and relationships.

All of this is accompanied by the box children- who are a group of plastic dolls she keeps in a box in her room. Each doll represents one of the babies her mother has miscarried before.

It is told in a sweet and innocent voice. The phonetic misspellings just add to the atmosphere of this young lady’s tale. I was a bit disappointed at the end, however, as I very much would like to know what happened next.