Lee Hunts

I just finished reading The Prince of Thorns, by Mark Lawrence. This is the first book in The Broken Empire trilogy, and it follows Prince Jorg Ancrath, a decidedly nasty protagonist who is about to return home after multiple years of raping and pillaging the landscape with his band of outlaws. You get a sense of the kind of character you are dealing with from the very first chapter, where Jorg steals, rapes, and kills people with his troupe of men for no reason but loot. And this is the crux of the book, the major selling point. Jorg is the most unlikeable character imaginable, treating everyone around him like they are pawns in his schemes. The cherry on top is that this story is told from the first-person perspective, giving the reader a close telling of his actions and psychology. Also, he just turned fourteen. No Spoilers Character I was drawn into this story from the very beginning. And I am happy to say that I was satisfied with the story throughout the course of the novel, and ...

I have finally finished reading Stephen King's IT. I started this one before Ocean at the End of the Lane and BoneMan's Daughters, but its length extended my reading time quite a way beyond those other ones. The main reason for reading IT was to be prepared for crossovers that are to come in The Dark Tower series, as I am still working through that. My first impression is quite positive. I don't regret the time spent or lament the length. Summary (No Spoilers) IT is a book about a town, and a collection of characters in that town, who are terrorized by an evil entity that manifests as their worst nightmares before killing them. The overall structure of the book is two plotlines that are spliced into one another. One plotline takes place in 1958, when the characters were 11 years old, and the other plot line takes place in 1985, when they have begun to approach their forties. The story is presented largely from 1985, with the events of the first chunk...

I just finished reading BoneMan's Daughters, by Ted Dekker. Dekker is a Christian author who writes suspenseful thrillers. I read a few of his other works when I was growing up, though I don't entirely remember all of them. Dekker always had the reputation of being a weird and disturbing writer, someone who was always controversial within the Christian community. That, of course, was why I liked him as a kid; he was one of the "cool" authors. So, I was interested to revisit him and consider the work from my more recent perspective. Summary (No Spoilers) BoneMan's Daughters is a book about a failed father who has become estranged from his wife and his daughter. This is because of a long past of neglect, after putting his career as an intelligence officer before his family. But, his attitude changes, and he wants to fix things. Juxtaposed with this is the BoneMan, a serial killer about to be released, who sees himself as a perfect father and ...