criminolly's reviews
2380 reviews

God only know why I read another TNT book after not enjoying the first one. But I did and it wasn’t any better. 
In this one super agent TNT goes up against a fascist group and attempts to find El Dorado. Along the way there’s a smattering of not very exciting violence and a LOT of slightly weird sex. TNT is literally insatiable and proves it a number of times. 
If I was to compare the books to anything I suppose it would be to some kind of salacious 70s Euro comic, only without the diversion of sexy pics. 
Do not recommend. Need to resist the masochistic urge to read the other one I have. 

This seems to be a book that gets widely varying reviews from readers. I suspect that’s because it’s somewhat misleadingly marketed as folk horror, publishers’ desire to constantly pigeonhole books is often unhelpful. There is some horror here, but only enough to fill a thimble. What you get instead is a charming, affectionate and engaging written story of a 13 year old girl from a loving but slightly dysfunctional family trying to negotiate life in a new environment. She and her family move to a country village when her father gets a job at the local Manor House. The book is set in 1960 and packed with lovely detail of the rural northern England of the period. It’s cosy and amusing and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The elements of horror (focusing on a haunting and the Green Man of the title) are fun too, but I think this is a book best enjoyed as a nostalgic coming of age tale. To put it another way, this is a horror story I think my mum would like. 

A mostly entertaining romance novel from Janet Evanovich that is gently amusing and sweet at times, slightly spicy at others, but which suffers from a lack of romantic tension. The set up is simple and appealing, a 30-something single mother applies for a job on a construction site because the hours work well for the school run. The hunky owner of the building company takes a shine to her and gives her the job and romance follows. The problem is that the romance follows almost immediately and is only ever very vaguely threatened. I like lots of obstacles to the happy ever after in my romance novels and this had hardly any. Throw in a weird subplot about a local flasher that dominates the latter part of the book and you have a story that feels out of balances. The individual scenes were often charming, but it didn't really hang together.

This felt like kind of a miracle. I am, and have been since childhood, a fan of movie novelisations. They’re often entertaining, and a fun way to revisit a favourite film, but they also can feel like they’re lacking something that would make them fully satisfying as a book in their own right. Books can get turned into Oscar-winning movies, but no novelisation is ever going to win a literary prize. 
So my expectations of Tim Waggoner’s adaptation of shockfest ‘Terrifier 2’ were tempered. I’ve read and enjoyed one book by him in the past (and original work called ‘They Kill’), but he’s not an author I know well. This book made me want to get to know his work better. He’s managed to pull off two tricky things here, Firstly, capture the weird magic of the movie - the horror, the black humour, the touching and convincing family dynamic, and the unhinged tone. Secondly, he’s managed to turn a film that is incredibly visual, Art doesn’t even talk, for crying out loud, into an effective book. Even at 400 pages I found it a thoroughly enjoyable read. 
It should go without saying though, that if you aren’t a fan of the films this is NOT for you. 

A humorous, philosophical short novel from 1912 concerning a mysterious figure, Innocent Smith, who turns up at (and disrupts) an English boarding house. 
This was the first book in a series of buddy reads I am doing with my dad of his favourite books. I definitely enjoyed it, but not sure I'm as much of a fan of it as he is. It's definitely amusing at times, with a wonderful turn of phrase at times. but I found it a bit convoluted and more concerned with it's message than with telling a story. 

David Morrell is an author who deserves more recognition. Best remembered for creating the character of John Rambo in his novel ‘First Blood’ I think modern readers may have the impression that he writes the kind of gung ho action typical of the later Rambo movies. In fact his work is much more subtle, tense and interesting than that.
‘The Totem’ is no exception, a dark, suspenseful horror novel about weird series of deaths in a small town. It pits a mismatched duo of typical 70s thriller stalwarts (a cop and a journalist) against an unknown horror that gradually ramps up and comes into focus as the book progresses. 
The book has a slightly fragmentary style, skipping rapidly between scenes that are sometimes no longer than half a page. This may in part be because this 70s version of the novel was a cut down one (Morrell published a much longer version years later), but it works, keeping the reader constantly off balance. It’s tense and compulsively readable stuff, with a very 70s sense of paranoia and uncertainty that works brilliantly. 

A disappointingly obvious end to the vampire trilogy. Boo. 

The second instalment in the Sweet Valley High follwos on neatly fromn the first, gradually building the mystery and suspense. Is heartthrob Jonathan really a vampire? It's certainly starting to feel like it, and the body count continues to rise. It's a lot of fun seeing the SVH twins go up against something like this. The books so far haven’t had quite as much stuff going on as the werewolf trilogy, but they’re still an entertaining mix of mystery, horror and yearning teenage romance. 

The first book in the notorious Sweet Valley High vampire trilogy, this was a fun read but didn't quite match the delirious highs of the SVH werewolf books I read recently. Published 9 years before 'Twilight', it reads a lot like 'Twilight', with a brooding, dark haired young man who is romantic one minute and standoffish the next moving into a small town and making the local girls swoon. One of the swooners is SVH twin Jessica, and naturally her sister Elizabeth is suspicious of newcomer Jonathan Cain, not least because a dead body with holes in its neck turns up in town just after he arrives. 
All a lot of fun and builds to a pretty great cliffhanger climax.

A fun early entry in the Goosebumps series with some enjoyably creepy moments. There are the usual Goosebumps elements - sibling rivalry, well-meaning but useless adults, tried and tested horror tropes. In this case there’s a haunted ventriloquist’s dummy and a pair of competitive twins. I was expecting a better twist at the end, but it was still an entertaining quick read.