The Summer 2011 Reading Spectacular #5

Getting there.

I read the second book in Stieg Larsson’s Millenium Trilogy in July, as well. The Girl Who Played With Fire took a little bit to get the momentum rolling, but once going, it was another quick and easily-motivated read. I normally spread out the reading of books by the same author (particularly those in a series), but I picked up all three of these movies (the Swedish films, obviously, as the North American versions haven’t yet come out) and won’t watch each until I’ve read its book. There are odd little things about the series (I don’t understand why so many characters need to have such colourful sex lives, for one thing, as they're minimally relevant to the plot), but the stories themselves are fun, well-crafted and full of enough interesting turns of plot to keep me reading. It’s not particularly high-brow literature, but hey, who says it has to be? Now I have to wait forever for The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest to come out in a paperback edition that matches the two I’ve already got. [Insert dramatic sigh here]

Speaking of not high-brow literature …

Onto some relatively trashy reading, I whipped through The Missing by Sarah Langan, an author I’ve come to enjoy in the past year or so. I don’t normally profess to be a rabid fan of the horror genre (in books or in movies), but I enjoy a good creepy-weird read now and then (and Betsy and I do enjoy watching awful “scary” movies together and laughing). The Missing blends elements of zombie, killer-viruses, and cannibalism together into a decent tale, complete with graphically unpleasant images to spare. Not entirely unlike The Strain by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan, but preceding it by two years, it moves along between story threads that necessarily become linked, and dives headlong into gore, moving quickly and inexorably toward unpleasantness at nearly every turn. I unwittingly bought this book twice, once under its UK title, Virus, and also under its less-sensical title, The Missing. It was this edition that I read, because it was smaller for carrying around.

Towards the end of July, I also read Promise Not to Tell. I discovered Jennifer McMahon in the same way I discovered Sarah Langan – at a big sale at The Book Depot. (Book Depot, have I told you lately that I love you?) I read another of McMahon’s novels, Dismantled, a year or two ago and enjoyed it immensely. Unlike many suspense/mystery/thriller/whatever this genre really should be called, in which you essentially know the outcome but you’re just seeing how we get there, I found myself having to continually modify my expectations as I moved through Dismantled’s pages.

In some ways, Promise Not to Tell is more straightforward than Dismantled (perhaps this was due to its being a debut novel), but McMahon makes the reader walk the line between supernatural and earthly explanations for what’s happening quite nicely even as she jumps between the story’s present day (2002) and the past (1971), in search of the connection between a recent killing and the unsolved murder of an outcast girl those many years ago.

A curious sidenote is that Promise Not to Tell was released in Germany as Das Mädchen im Wald (The Girl in the Woods). Dismantled was released in the UK under the title Girl in the Woods. How’s that for needless confusion?