Tom Wallace lived an ordinary life, until a chance event awakened psychic abilities he never knew he possessed. Now he’s hearing the private thoughts of the people around him–and learning shocking secrets he never wanted to know. But as Tom’s existence becomes a waking nightmare, even greater jolts are in store as he becomes the unwilling recipient of a compelling message from beyond the grave!

Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend is one of my favorite novels of all time. Having read it, and after finding the movie based off this book interesting, I had high hopes for A Stir of Echoes. Unfortunately, this novel was just alright — not bad nor really good. It definitely isn’t one of Matheson’s best, but what saves it from being bad is the thing I love Richard Matheson for most. Matheson is an expert at entering the minds of his main characters and letting his readers see just how those minds shift and change after being faced with various evils. His characters literally fall apart mentally and emotionally before putting themselves back together and overcoming their obstacles, and seeing their strange worlds through their eyes is incredibly fascinating. The more paranoid they are, the better. I loved it in I Am Legend, and I loved it in A Stir of Echoes.

The ending was also rather shocking, and differed from the movie. Aside from those two things, nothing really made this novel great.  A lot of the novel seemed outdated, which is understandable, as it was published in 1958, but I was constantly reminded of its age when reading it. The protagonist writes to his family when he has a problem instead of calling them. for example. His wife received a letter saying her mom was sick. There were a few more things, but they were to be expected. What I didn’t like personally was how long it took me to connect with the novel. With I Am Legend, I was emotionally connected from the very beginning. The book was scary, and I cared what happened to its protagonist. This book wasn’t scary, and I didn’t care what happened to Tom until near the very end, but before that point I considered putting the book down several times, and would have had I not already been a big fan of Matheson.

Rating – 3/5 - I was kind of torn with how to rate this. Compared to Matheson’s other works, it’s not great, but in general it’s not a bad book overall. I mean, it is Matheson. He’s a horror legend, and one of my biggest inspirations as a writer. I would recommend this book to anyone looking for a quick fast-paced read, but if you want something great, read I Am Legend.

Its appetite is ravenous. Its teeth scalpel-sharp. Its power unstoppable as it smashes the steel doors holding it in a Monterey, California aquarium. The captive twenty-ton Megalodon shark has tasted human blood, and it wants more.

On the other side of the world, in the silent depths of the ocean, lies the Mariana Trench, where the Megalodon has spawned since the dawn of time. Paleo-biologist Jonas Taylor once dared to enter this perilous cavern. He alone faced the monster and cut its heart out; and he wears the painful scars of that deadly encounter. Now, as the body count rises and the horror of the Meg’s attack grips the California coast, Jonas must begin the hunt again.

But to do that means returning to the dark terror of the trench . . . where the Meg is waiting. Using himself as bait, Jonas will enter the ultimate battle – a fight to the death between man and beast in the darkest recesses of the ocean . . . and a fight for his sanity from the depths of his own tormented soul.

The Trench is the second in the four-book Meg series.  Having really liked Meg, I was pretty excited to pick up The Trench, but I honestly didn’t expect it to be as good as its predecessor. Sequels rarely measure up in my opinion, and I didn’t know what else Alten could possibly do with the Megalodon. Sure, shark attacks are interesting, but how many times can one read a story about a loose man-eating shark?

Luckily, Alten is a creative genius. Not only did he do something completely different with the Meg (Instead of wanting to be free, the creature wants to return to the trench.), but he introduced a new species — the Kronosaurus — as well as a human antagonist opposite Jonas to give the plot intense depth. I was literally left turning pages and thinking about the book after I put it down.

Positives: The Trench had everything good that Meg had and more. Alten can still write the hell out of a shark attack scene. One thing that really pleased me was this book had major character development for both Jonas and another character from Meg, Terry. The was rather cool because I felt deep character development was something the first book lacked. Good people  died in The Trench unlike Meg as well, which made the deaths more realistic. The ending just like Meg’s was fast-paced and suspenseful.

Negatives: I was able to predict various plot elements before they happened, so very little was surprising. That didn’t take away from the book’s enjoyability, though. Maybe I’m just that good.

Rating – 5/5 - The predictability of the plot doesn’t warrant taking a point away in my opinion. The Trench was a lot better than Meg, which I really enjoyed a lot. The writing was better, the plot had more depth, the characters had more development, and the Megalodon was still cool as hell. I recommend it, but first read Meg.

On a top-secret dive into the Pacific Ocean’s deepest canyon, Jonas Taylor found himself face-to-face with the largest and most ferocious predator in the history of the animal kingdom. The sole survivor of the mission, Taylor is haunted by what he’s sure he saw but still can’t prove exists – Carcharodon megalodon, the massive mother of the great white shark. The average prehistoric Meg weighs in at twenty tons and could tear apart a Tyrannosaurus rex in seconds. Taylor spends years theorizing, lecturing, and writing about the possibility that Meg still feeds at the deepest levels of the sea. But it takes an old friend in need to get him to return to the water, and a hotshot female submarine pilot to dare him back into a high-tech miniature sub.

Diving deeper than he ever has before, Taylor will face terror like he’s never imagined. MEG is about to surface. When she does, nothing and no one is going to be safe, and Jonas must face his greatest fear once again.

I love sharks. I don’t know what it is about them, but every time I see something with a shark on it, I have to pick it up. Unfortunately, this had led me to watch a few bad movies and read a few terrible books. Thankfully, Steve Alten knows how to write a shark attack scene.

The book flowed very much like an action/horror movie, and the characters were developed like they were from one. The characters were developed enough for the story, but not as developed as you’d find characters in other novels. This novel wasn’t very character-focused, though. The main focus was its main attraction — the Megalodon, the prehistoric ancester of the Great White Shark. I did start to care about the novel’s main characters, Jonas and Terry, but not until the last few chapters of the book. Up until that point I didn’t really care if they lived or died. I think if Alten spent more time on those two characters together, the climax would have been greater because emotion would have been there. As it was, though, at least for me, it was just really cool and nothing else.

As for the Megalodon, it was scary as hell. Alten put enough science in the novel to make the monster realistic. It made me wonder, could this really happen? Science didn’t bog down the novel, however,  so it wasn’t in the least boring. Like I said though, I love sharks, so others may not agree.

While the shark was realistic, and while its attacks were too, I found who it chose to attack wasn’t. It seemed to me that the bad people in the novel died while the good people lived, and that’s not the way life works. Additionally, everything in this book was the biggest and the best, from the shark to the subs and boats, to the characters. Big and great is fine, but I kind of wish Alten would have included a Plain Jane or an Average Joe in the novel to level things out.

Rating - 4/5 - For what it was, Meg was really good. It was suspenseful, fun, and an intense page-turner, but it was nothing thought-provoking. No one picks up books like this for its deep thematic elements anyway. There are three more books that follow the events of this one, and Meg has left me satisfied enough to at least pick up the next one. It has another shark on the cover. I’m intrigued.

Harry and his brother, Alex, are dying to fit in at Camp Spirit Moon. But the camp has so many weird traditions. Like the goofy camp salute. The odd camp greeting. And the way the old campers love to play jokes on the new campers.

Then the jokes start to get really serious. Really creepy. Really scary. First a girl sticks her arm in the campfire. Then a boy jams a pole through his foot. Still, they’re just jokes . . . right?

I used to read Goosebumps a lot as a child before I discovered Animorphs.  I never read Ghost Camp, though. I had a random attack of nostalgia and picked up two random Goosebumps books from Barnes and Noble tonight. This one was a short and cute read.

I thought the idea was genuinely interesting and a bit creepy, both qualities I would look for in a Goosebumps book. I think a fifth or sixth grader would enjoy this book a lot more than I did, but it made me smile, so it wasn’t all bad.

As for negatives in the book, there was little to no character development. The protagonist’s little brother Alex had more qualities about him that stood out than did Harry who narrated the novel. We learn that Alex has a beautiful singing voice and that Harry is a little jealous of him for it.  We also learn that Harry can beat Alex in sports. That’s the extent of Harry’s character for us. I think not knowing much about Harry made it hard for me to care what was happening to him. I cared more about Alex who was going through the same events. Maybe he should have narrated the story. Also, some description of events came off really awkward. While I knew what was happening to Harry through context, the writing didn’t help me picture it as well as it could have.

Rating – 3/5 – For a children’s book, this wasn’t bad. I would have rated it higher if it had more character development and stronger description. The book’s strength is definitely its unique story. I would recommend this to any middle-schooler or 23 year old.

September. A beautiful New York editor retreats to a lonely cabin on a hill in the quiet Maine beach town of Dead River — off season — awaiting her sister and friends. Nearby, a savage human family with a taste for flesh lurks in the darkening woods, watching, waiting, for the moon to rise and night to fall….

And before too many hours pass, five civilized, sophisticated people and a tired old country sheriff will learn just how primitive we all are beneath the surface…and that there are no limits at all to the will to survive.

I never read Jack Ketchum’s stuff before, so I really didn’t know what to expect. This is most definitely the most disturbing book I have ever read, though. Was it entertaining? Yeah, because I love the horror genre, but there were parts of the book I had to put the book down and take a break from after reading. The book was overall really well written to be Jack Ketchum’s first though. Too bad it wasn’t well received when it came out; it’s a classic in horror literature today.

Apparently I read the unedited and unabridged version of the novel. I’m curious to how clean the original is, because a lot of the book is very open, talking about sex and murder freely, and when it came out in the 80s it was called pornographic violence. I actually didn’t mind the sex scenes, because really, how many good horror movies have you watched where characters don’t have sex? And the death scenes were really chilling. Ketchum makes you care about the characters before they die, and I think it’s really effective.

The book didn’t really take off for me until about page 100, but I couldn’t put it down after that, and the first 100 pages aren’t boring.

Rating – 4/5 - I can understand why people wouldn’t like this book, and I think it would really come down to personal preference, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.