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Gumbywan

Randolph "Dilda" Carter

A rant about books, horror, and the weird.  I sometimes take on my love/hate relationship with goodreads and Amazon.

Currently reading

Perchance to Dream: Selected Stories
Ray Bradbury, Charles Beaumont, William Shatner
Progress: 140/336 pages
Pavane
Keith Roberts

Monster Fest

Stinger - Robert R. McCammon

Pretty fun monster fest. The plot is all formula disaster: take a bunch of people, throw them together in an isolated disaster, Inferno, TX, and no matter how much they love or hate each other they are going to have to work together to overcome the threat, here the alien Stinger. People die, loves and lasting friendships are made, there are tons of heroics and new frights and lots get killed.

What saves McCammon's better efforts like this are characterization. His characters at least start out believable if not sometimes the stuff of melodrama. They become real for us and we care about them. There are lots of asides from the main plot to develop new and existing relationships good and bad.

It's not great art are but it is a lot of fun and McCammon knows what to do and lays on the seemingly unbeatable monsters thick. How is anyone going to get out of this before dawn? Gradually there are some chinks in Stinger's armor and things don't look quite as hopeless. McCammon brings the whole thing to a nice satisfying conclusion, which we already knew he would, just not exactly how.

Three stars doesn't mean I hated it, I like a good monster mash as well as anyone, but it didn't aspire to be anything more than what it was which as they say, was real good.