Velocity by Dean Koontz

Rating: 4.0

Velocity is a cat-and-mouse type of suspense story. There's really nothing exceptional about it but it definitely kept my interest nonetheless.

Billy Wiles finds the first of several mysterious notes on his windshield after leaving his bar tending job one day. It says 'If you don't take this note to the police and get them involved, I will kill a lovely blond schoolteacher. If you do take this note to the police, I will instead kill an elderly woman active in charity work. You have four hours to decide. The choice is yours.' And so begins a fairly intense story in which Billy has to make some pretty extreme choices. The choices become more difficult as the story progresses. Billy can't go to the police because the killer has planted evidence incriminating him. He has no choice but to play this macabre game in the hopes of turning the tables.

I always enjoy escaping in a Koontz book for a couple of hours. Velocity was no exception. It has a fast paced plot with plenty of room for speculation. I think it could have benefited from a bit more character development, but overall it was a quick, fun read.

The Terror by Dan Simmons

Rating: 5.0

The Terror is a pretty engrossing story. It's quite lengthy but it really held my attention.

Two ships set sail, Erebus and Terror, in 1846 in search of the fabled Northwest Passage. The ships end up getting frozen in the ice far from any civilization. After a couple of years scurvy sets in, their food supply becomes poisoned, and a huge beast that seems otherworldly is stalking them. They end up hiking it across the ice in search of open water as the beast continues shadowing them. Many die either from the cold, scurvy, poisoned food, the beast or each other.

The Terror is a very dismal story. The mens situation leaves little to celebrate. The landscape is pretty bleak as well. Simmons did an excellent job at really making the reader feel the -60 degree weather and hear the ice popping and snapping all around. The scene is set wonderfully in The Terror. The environment is a perfect one for the creepy beast that claws at their ship to get in and dismembers sailors at every turn. I loved the historical fiction aspect of this novel mixed with the horror. It really kept the book gripping and the reader on their toes just waiting to see what would happen next. So, if you aren't intimidated by the over 900 pages and you feel in the mood for an atmospheric thriller, I would totally recommend The Terror. But beware of cannibals.

The Washington Post says: "Dan Simmons's new novel, The Terror, dives headlong into the frozen waters of the Franklin mystery, mixing historical adventure with gothic horror -- a sort of Patrick O'Brian meets Edgar Allan Poe against the backdrop of a J.M.W. Turner icescape. Meticulously researched and brilliantly imagined, The Terror won't satisfy historians or even Franklin buffs, but as a literary hybrid, the novel presents a dramatic and mythic argument for how and why Franklin and his men met their demise."

Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse edited by John Joseph Adams

Rating: 4.0

Wastelands is a book containing 22 short stories of life after an apocalypse. The editor did a really good job at picking stories detailing a variety of different world ending scenarios and the struggles of those left to rebuild society and start over.

Some of these stories are just so-so....nothing special or memorable. Others, though, were really great. There are some that take place in the near future and some that take place so far away in time that people aren't even recognizable as people anymore. Some of these stories are very sad and don't show much hope for humanity, while others end on a very optimistic and happy note...a fresh start. "All of them explore one question: What would life be like after the end of the world as we know it?" If you are into the Post-Apocalyptic sub-genre, then this is definitely a book you should check out.

I like what Publisher's Weekly had to say about these stories: "Keynoted by Stephen King's "The End of the Whole Mess," the volume's common denominator is hubris: that tragic human proclivity for placing oneself at the center of the universe, and each story uniquely traces the results. Some highlight human hope, even optimism, like Orson Scott Card's "Salvage" and Tobias Buckell's "Waiting for the Zephyr." Others, like James Van Pelt's "The Last of the O-Forms" and Nancy Kress's "Inertia," treat identity by exploring mutation. Several, like Elizabeth Bear's "And the Deep Blue Sea" and Jack McDevitt's "Never Despair," gauge the height of human striving, while others, like George R.R. Martin's "Dark, Dark Were the Tunnels," Carol Emshwiller's "Killers" and M. Rickert's "Bread and Bombs," plumb the depths of human prejudice, jealousy and fear. Beware of Paolo Bacigalupi's far-future "The People of Sand and Slag," though; that one will break your heart."