Lee Hunts

I just finished reading The Girl Next Door, by Jack Ketchum. This is a widely known novel, infamous for its content, and for a variety of reasons. It often makes lists of "Most Disturbing Books That I Have Ever Read." It is also loosely based on the death of Sylvia Likens, an actual woman who suffered at the hands of an adoptive mother and a number of her adoptive siblings and even the surrounding neighbors. The book has aroused a rather interesting array of responses, so I want to talk about that as much as I want to talk about the book itself. The Response From the outset, many people who are critical of this book dismiss it as torture porn. It depicts a wide range of horrific acts of violence inflicted on the innocent victim in the story while she is tied up and defenseless. I disagree with this characterization, or I at least disagree that it is only torture porn; I will get into the details down below. All the same, the book takes you to places physically, even sexually,...

I just finished reading Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. For reference, I read the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation, which is apparently the most accurate translation. It replicates the rough syntactic structure of the original Russian text that other translations often try to smooth over for the sake of readability, and they also apparently selected vocabulary and turns of phrases that existed in English predating the original release of the book in Russian in 1866. The result is a fairly dense and very raw read, but one that is also very engaging, if you are willing to give it a chance. You have to push through paragraphs that last four pages, perhaps even longer, and infamously long rants from characters—but I actually got used to it rather quickly, and by the end, it was like reading anything else. This novel, rather famously, involves a man (Raskolnikov) who believes he is justified in killing a corrupt pawnbroker with an axe, on the judgement that she is an active dr...

I just finished reading The Devil All the Time, by Donald Ray Pollock. This is my second book by this author, having read Knockemstiff, which is a short story collection. All of his books fall firmly within the southern gothic tradition, with a gritty, stripped back prose used to tell the various stories of what are essentially villainous characters. These people have no self control, no compunction, and they all represent the worst of humanity. Just like the short story collection, this novel puts it all on display: we see everything from pedophilia to serial killers to necrophilia to animal sacrifice and worse. Pollock sits you down in the filth and makes you nestle in it. If that's your thing, then this might be worth checking out. Experience I thought for a moment about what I wanted to write in this review because I did not think I had all that much to say in a traditional sense. The characters are not the most interesting or deep. They are described easily in the beginning, a...

I just finished reading Rage, by Richard Bachman. This is an early novel by Stephen King, and it is undoubtedly one of his more controversial novels, even for King himself, as he has allowed it to fall out of print. According to wikipedia, five incidents involving students going to school with guns have been inspired by this book. People were not killed in every incident, but in some they were. The book was written in 1977, and the inspired shootings and attempts didn't start to happen until a decade later. All the same, there were five. As you can guess, the book is about Charlie Decker, a High School student who takes his class hostage with a gun, after killing his teacher. The novel explores his daddy issues, his problems with authority, and the general issues that teenagers face regarding sexuality in that time. Controversy On its face, the book comes off as remarkably poor taste to the average person (I guess?). I can only guess, because my second (unpublished) novel was also ...

I just finished the Stone of Farewell, which is the middle book syndrome of the four book trilogy, Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, by Tad Williams. This book picks up right where The Dragonbone Chair left off, and like the previous entry, it methodically moves forward, following the various characters as they trek to their new destination. We have Simon in the north, with the trouble that Binabik is facing. We have Josua and his ragtag people now fleeing in the wake of the events of the last book. We have Miriamele, who is, in turn, chased by Isgrimnur, traveling south on a fruitless mission. And we have Maegwin, who is a headstrong woman now leading a defeated people after the first book. There are other characters, as well, who are more sidelined, but these are the core of the novel. All in all, I think this book was quite rough. It was a serious step down from book one. This does not mean there aren't good aspects to the book, but from a storytelling perspective, the way the story co...

I just finished reading The Long Walk by the obscure writer Richard Bachman. This is my first novel by the writer. It is also apparently his first novel, though it is not his first published one. He wrote it when he was a freshman in college, and I found the project to be especially impressive given this background. The basic premise of this book is very simple: there is a totalitarian society that has replaced the American government, and it now hosts what is called "The Long Walk," which is a yearly event where one hundred young men compete to win a prize. However, the execution is far more straightforward, but also more brutal, than other dystopian fiction like the Hunger Games. In this game, they have to keep up a pace of 4 miles per hour. If they fall below this pace, they receive a warning; after three warnings, they are then shot and killed. The last one walking is then declared the winner. It is from this decidedly simple premise that a terrifying and brutal story fol...