Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village by Elizabeth Warnock Fernea.
Okay…So I didn’t actually finish THIS book - for all the good intentions I just couldn’t get into it. (SEE!! This is why I didn’t make “NY Resolutions”…but monthly goals instead!!
updated 12/30/07:
(Hailey gave me this book for my birthday.)
Twilight Eyes by Dean Koontz
Plot Summary
The book is introduced with Slim sneaking up on, and killing, a “Goblin” on the fair grounds of a local carnival. Goblins are monsters which have the ability to shape shift between human and bestial forms, genetically engineered super-predators with a built-in desire for bloodshed and human misery. Created in an ancient, technologically superior, era of human civilization, they exist purely to torment, terrify, and ultimately murder all of mankind. They can only be seen by a few people, including Slim himself, Rya Raines (his wife), and Joel Tuck (Slim’s friend and fellow carnie). These goblins are superhuman compared to normal humans and are extremely dangerous and genocidal, but also as intelligent as us if not more so, able to perfectly mimic normal human behavior with peerless cunning and skill. While they might appear and act as a normal man or woman would, they have the capacity to experience only a limited range of negative emotions such as fear and hate. The only pleasure they are mentally wired to experience is in the act of torturing and brutally murdering true human beings. They are anathema, the perfect inhuman example of every serial killer ever known taken to superhuman extremes.
Slim’s claim to fame is his “Twilight Eyes”, which give him the ability to receive psychic, or prophetic, premonitions of the future. They also allow him to see through the human seeming disguise of the goblins. These eyes are named what they are because they are colored purple like the skyline at dusk.
After this encounter, Slim proceeds to join the carnival (one of many he has drifted from) as a way to support himself while killing goblins and hiding from his murderous past (in which he killed an uncle by marriage that was a goblin responsible for the deaths of several family members). One of the prominent members of the “carnies” is a young woman named Rya Raines, who quickly becomes his lover and confidant. As their relationship matures, Slim has several more run-ins with the goblins which leads to the revelation that his friend Joel, and even Rya herself, can see the goblins too, and that each of them in their own way has suffered terribly from the goblins actions in their past. It is soon revealed that Rya had long before made a pact with the goblins to report to them whenever she found someone who could see through their disguise in exchange for safety from their predations. She wants him to make the same pact with them, but he refuses. This reality creates a gulf between her and Slim that almost comes to bloodshed between them. She regrets this later and after reconciling with Slim becomes his wife, and decides to join him in his personal mission to destroy any and all of the creatures he can.
Together they set out on a personal mission to wage a secret war against the monsters in a small mining town named Yontsdown, Pennsylvania, the seeming center of their cruel and brutal version of civilization. There they would discover and face the ultimate, diabolical plans the goblins had for the world and all of mankind.
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Lord Brocktree
by Brian Jacques
Salamandastron, ancestral home of the Badger Lords, is under threat from an enemy whose power would seem to be absolute and whose evil knows no bounds. Ungatt Trunn can make the stars fall from the sky, the very earth shake underfoot, and with a horde of vermin as numerous as the leaves in autumn, the wildcat appears unstoppable. The mountain’s defences are weak. Who can save it now?
Salamandastron’s only hope is the badger Lord Brocktree who is drawn to the fortress by an undeniable sense of destiny. If he is to rescue the mountain from the dark days of vermin rule, Brocktree must raise an army capable of combating Trunn’s formidable Blue Hordes.
Join Lord Brocktree and Dorothea (known to all as Dotti) the irrepressible haremaid as they journey to Salamandastron, gathering a host of brave creatures to fight alongside them in the ultimate struggle: good versus evil.
