Tag: collection

The Living Dead

Reviews

In time for the Halloween season, I picked up a collection of zombie short stories called The Living Dead.

One thing I have learned over the years running into zombie fans on the internet and out in the world is that everyone has their favorites.  Some like the slow Romero zombies (my personal favorite), others like the fast running Dawn of the Dead remake style, while still others prefer the hoodoo voodoo zombies, and there are many more flavors.  This collection of short stories pretty much covers them all.  From the cursed living who return from the dead to the mindless drones and even to actors playing extras in Romero’s original Dawn of the Dead at the mall.

Because of this wide range of coverage, I can’t say I loved every story.  In fact, I’d probably say I only loved maybe a third of them, possibly less.  Some of them I could barely trudge my way through, so alien were the concepts of zombies envisioned by their authors (hence the reason why it took me well over a month to read the whole thing).  But, it did make me realize how wide the idea of “zombies” can run, and that perhaps the ideas I’ve been nurturing are not as common as I thought they were.

When I closed the cover of this tome, I was relieved to finally be done what, in part at least, had been a chore to get through.  But I was also satisfied, and really, what more can you ask of a book than that?

The Mist

Reviews

One day, long ago, I picked a random book off my older brother’s shelf and started to read. The book happened to be Skeleton Crew, a collection of short stories and novellas by Stephen King. There were a number of cool stories in it, but the one that stuck the most was The Mist.

Later, when the family would go and purchase our first PC, a Leading Edge 8088 with 512K RAM and a 20MB hard drive (yeah, Megabyte, not Gigabyte), we would also pick up a handful of games. The Black Cauldron was one, and Stephen King’s The Mist was another. The game differed from the book a little, but that was okay, it needed to because as good as the book was, it wouldn’t make for much of a game. It was a text adventure, and that means I spent hours and hours trying to figure out the right combination of going North, East, South, West, every direction in between, picking things up and using them, in order to not get killed.

But I always wanted them to do a movie… and now they have. Frank Darabont, the man who did The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, took a crack at it, and I have to say, I’m very satisfied with the result.

This movie perfectly captures the mood of the book of people trapped in a country grocery store surrounded by a think mist. There are monsters in the mist, and inside the store isn’t going to be safe forever. The tense building of the religious cult as people take sides on what just might be the end of humanity is well portrayed.

Like the old text adventure, the movie strayed from the book, which in this case it didn’t have to do, but where it did it worked. Especially the end… the end of the book haunted me, and part of me hoped to see the same ending because I felt it was so good, but the movie has a new ending, but its haunting just the same.

Overall, two thumbs up from me. Worth the money to see in the theater.

Back to my comic books…

Random Thoughts

As you may recall, I have a collection of comic books I want to unload. eBay won’t let me do it as I want to, and rather than spend time and money splitting the sets out to sell them in parts, I need another service.

If anyone knows any online auction place that will let me set up something for sale at around $5,000 minimum bid, let me know.

My Comics and eBay.

Random Thoughts

First off, let me say this. I’m selling my comic book collection. Over a number of years I bought and read comic books. I loved them, and if I had the money, I would love getting them still. So now, after having enjoyed these comics, I have 14 long boxes full of them and they take up space.

I have a list of most of what I have here. And if you want to make me an offer, please do so.

Next: eBay sucks.

I tried to go and place this collection up for auction. Repeatedly the site would give me errors and then erase everything I had done. And they some sort of add policy that states in order to sell something, you must be able to buy it. I tried to put this collection up for a minimum bid of $5,000, since to someone with the time and contacts its worth about $10,000, and it tells me I don’t have $5,000 worth of credit.

I mean, if I had $5,000 I wouldn’t need to sell my comics.

Sometimes I just don’t get it.