Yesterday was my lucky day, I guess. I won a free tire rotation by answering a trivia question on my local car dealer’s Facebook page, and when I got home I found a package containing both the hardcover and audio versions of Full Dark, No Stars, which I won by tweeting something in Scribner’s Twitter contest a couple of months ago.
The cold front is starting to move through. Down to 47° en route to 31° this evening.
Michael Bracken pointed out this detailed, somewhat spoilerific review of Specters in Coal Dust. The reviewer says: One of the creepier ones, “Centralia Is Still Burning”, is written by Bev Vincent and is definitely one of my favorites.
I posted my review of Laura Lippman’s I’d Know You Anywhere last night. The book was nominated for an Edgar Award yesterday. Richly deserved, I’d say.
I finished reading H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine last night, too. I was surprised at how short it was. Barely more than a novella. However, I was impressed by his concept of time travel, which isn’t often used. Wells’s Time Traveler saw time as a literal fourth dimension in which one could travel, the same as the other three. He didn’t set a date on his time machine and get there instantaneously—he traversed the time dimension until he got somewhere, passing by everything that happened in the intervening years along the way. As he went faster and faster, it became more of a blur, but he was cognizant of the fact that he might stop somewhere inconvenient. His xyz coordinates weren’t changing, so it was possible that he could stop at a time where there was something physical occupying the same space. He didn’t explore the possible repercussions of doing so, but it was a clever notion. I guess Weena must have been the one who told him the names of the Eloi and the Morlocks, though that particular conversation is never related. Finding matches in the museum was a bit convenient, but there was less of that kind of thing than in the Jules Verne novel at least. Not a bad story, though I did kind of skim over the part where he jumped into the far future, as it seemed anticlimactic after what happened in the year 802,701.
Has anyone noticed that for someone who is as geeky as Reid is on Criminal Minds, he sure seems to go through a lot of different hair styles? The priest’s outburst while in the interrogation room was a tad overblown, I thought, and it seemed to me like they were trying to imply that Reid was having precognitive experiences by having him flash on the house where he ultimately confronted the killer. I thought it was funny when I wrote a story about a guy who tries to capitalize on the fact that his book tour seems cursed in “Knock ’em Dead” (When the Night Comes Down), but this guy went the extra step, becoming a mass murderer to promote his forthcoming book!
