troysennett's reviews
346 reviews

Read this on the recommendation of a friend who considers it his favorite of all time. It lived up to that and more — sublime language and weird in my favorite ways. An obvious influence on House of Leaves.

My least favorite of King's Richard Bachman experiment, but I still found it a little better than its reputation. It's no surprise at all that this is the one that led to the pseudonym being revealed — it's so obviously his voice and his favorite settings and character types.

I liked the horror elements of it (the gore, which Davidson writes particularly well, and the twisted folklore), but I found the core story to be a little bit lacking.

Probably my favorite Atwood that I've read so far. It's a beautiful exploration of age and regret and the changing of times in a small town, with a weird structural setup that reveals its purpose in a really satisfying way.

Picked this up because of the viral tweet about it. It's so short that I felt like I was just getting used to the style by the time it was wrapping up, but I really liked the time travel mechanics and hints at world building. It's also one of the more successful co-authored books I've read. Those tend to feel pretty disjointed to me (Good Omens in particular), but this solves that by having each author write one of the characters.

Had a pretty good guess about how this was going to play out early on, but that didn't make it any less heartbreaking.

Read these in story order rather than publication order, but this one probably works better once you've learned a bit about the world of Narnia.

I was a church kid who loved fantasy, so it's surprising that I never read The Chronicles of Narnia growing up. They're kind of slight in terms of story and allegorical to a fault, but I really like how they treat wonder and awe and imagination. The way Lewis engages with the idea that children have access to worlds of the mind that adults simply don't, and the way he allows his main characters to age out of the fantasy world, runs so counter to the "you can be a kid forever" mentality that it would feel kind of daring coming out today.