Stephen King is a jerk. First, he gets you to care about a bunch of people waiting in line for a job fair, and then he goes and kills ’em all by having a big gray Mercedes plow through them. The story resumes with the now-retired lead-police detective of the case receiving a letter from… Read more »
Posts Categorized: First Lines
First Lines: The Straits of Galahesh & The Flames of Shadam Khoreh
There’s a (now slightly outdated) joke asking why George R.R. Martin doesn’t use Twitter. Because he killed all 140 characters. While I’m two seasons behind on my Game of Thrones-watching, I get the point. While Bradley P. Beaulieu’s The Staits of Galahesh and The Flames of Shadam Khoreh, the second and concluding volumes of The… Read more »
First Lines: De donkere kamer van Damokles
W.F. Hermans’s De donkere kamer van Damokles is a bona-fide Ductch literary classic. As I somehow managed to avoid it in highschool, I put it on my list of 40 books to read before my 40th birthday. With this one, it’s twenty-six down, fourteen to go, with roughly five years left. It’s World War II,… Read more »
First Lines: The Winds of Khalakovo
Without knowing a thing about Bradley P. Beaulieu or the books he’d written, I backed one of his Kickstarter projects. The one to fund the release of his short-story collection, probably. The exact reasoning eludes me at the moment — it happened a while ago, and a lot has happened since — but I’m guessing… Read more »
First Lines: I am Legend
Richard Matheson’s I am Legend is a weird book. One could easily call it a post-zombie/vampire-apocalypse novel and get away with it, but it’s neither very eventful nor horrific. Robert Neville (who sometimes indulged in daydreams about finding someone. More often, though, he had tried to adjust to what he sincerely believed was the inevitable… Read more »