Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer: fiction

Showing posts with label fiction. Show all posts

Thursday, September 22, 2022

[Review]—In "Barnabas Collins and Quentin's Demon," Things Get a Little Hairy

It's another Thursday, so it's time for another Dark Shadows review. Don't I sound ecstatic? I lost track of how many of these Dark Shadows I've read, and, after a time, they started to blur together. Today we're looking at Barnabas Collins and Quentin's Demon, the fourteenth installment authored by Daniel "Dan" Ross under the pen name Marilyn Ross (his wife's name). What a split second, what happened to Barnabas Collins and the Mysterious Ghost, book thirteen? It's not accessible as an eBook on Kindle for reasons unbeknownst to me, so I had no alternative but to skip it and move on to the next.

[Review]—"The Peril of Barnabas Collins" by Marilyn Ross

Billy Burgess books , Dark Shadows

The cursed vampire played by Jonathan Frid in the original Dark Shadows soap opera and the theatrical spinoff "retelling," House of Dark Shadows, captivated young and old audiences in the late 1960s and early 1970s. If my memory serves me properly (it's been a while since I've seen the series), Barnabas Collins was continuously looking for a cure to restore his humanity. The Dark Shadows novel series, written by William Edward Daniel Ross under the pen name Marilyn Ross (borrowing his second wife's first name), strayed away from soap opera plotlines, but with the 12th book, The Peril of Barnabas Collins, he resurrects the "cure" narrative, but with a few intriguing twists.

[Review]—A Magnificent Thriller from Start to Finish: "Girl, Forgotten" by Karin Slaughter

Billy Burgess books , fiction

Despite knowing about both, I'm probably one of the few bloggers who hasn't read Karin Slaughter's Pieces of Her or seen the Netflix series based on it. I'd never read anything by the author until I read Girl, Forgotten, the sequel to Pieces of Her. I'm curious about the book for two reasons: the title and the cover. "Girl, Forgotten," the title's two simple words, are strangely alluring. Then there's the front cover. The cover is hypnotic... and a little creepy.

[Review]—Shea Ernshaw's "Long Live the Pumpkin Queen"

Billy Burgess audiobook , books

Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas has become a cult classic, a must-see watch on Halloween and Christmas. For many years, there have been rumors (or talks) of a sequel, but nothing has come to fruition, with the exception of the recently released young adult novel Long Live the Pumpkin Queen by Shea Ernshaw, published by Disney Press.

[Review]—'Barnabas Collins Versus the Warlock' by Marilyn Ross

Billy Burgess books , Dark Shadows

I haven't seen an episode of the Dark Shadows soap opera in many (many) years. According to what I recall, the creator, Dan Curtis, and his writing staff ran out of supernatural concepts, or, to put it another way, they basically used and reused every horror trope imaginable. As a result, the series came to an end. While his plots swayed away from the television storylines, William Edward Daniel Ross (a.k.a. Marilyn Ross) took the same approach with his Dark Shadows novels by incorporating every horror trope into his stories. This gave him the freedom to place the cursed vampire Barnabas Collins in unusual situations.