Daily Archives: February 23, 2012

Where JK goes, we’ll follow

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Here’s an admission: I still haven’t read “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.”

Considering the the last book in the series came out in 2007 and I loved J.K. Rowling’s series about the boy wizard and his friends, that seems kind of strange, I know.

I’ve seen the movie version of course and found it a very satisfying ending to Rowling’s series.

Something has kept me from reading the final book, though. Sure, part of it is the press of other books to read. I eagerly move from book to book and, despite my intention of going back and re-reading some classics from the past, I’ve been more interested in moving on, relentlessly on, to the next new book.

Part of it might be that once I’ve read “Deathly Hallows” the series will be over. That’s a finale and finality I don’t look forward to.

I’ve enjoyed what Rowling did with her characters and her story over the past decade-and-a-half. I don’t think I could name another writer who has maintained an entire series of books with the same integrity and consistency — brilliant consistency.

Most of us can’t imagine how hard a task Rowling took on … and completed.

Word came out today that Rowling’s next book will be published by Little, Brown. No title yet, no hint of the story, not even a publication date.

Just the revelation that the book will be aimed at adults.

For the next few months, there’ll be a lot of speculation about what Rowling has written (for she almost certainly has finished the book by now, or mostly). There’s some suggestion that Rowling was working on a crime novel in the years since “Deathly Hallows” was completed.

Oh man. I am so there.

Crime novel or not, Rowling’s new book will find a reader in me.

She’s more than earned her reputed billion dollars. She’s earned millions of readers, helped revitalize the publishing industry, jump-started books for young adults and made a new generation of people so eagerly anticipate a new book that they will turn out at bookstores at midnight.

I’ll be there for Rowling’s new book, as will millions of other readers.

Heck, I might even get ready for her new one by going back and reading “Deathly Hallows.” Finally.

Cops and zombies: Jonathan Maberry’s ‘Dead of Night’

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Shambling and slow as they might be, we just can’t get away from zombies.

There’s “The Walking Dead” on TV — the biggest hit on cable — and “World War Z,” the movie version of Max Brooks’ terrific book and starring Brad Pitt, to come out later this year.

And there’s Jonathan Maberry’s “Dead of Night.”

Maberry is a writer of suspense fiction, comic books and thrillers that take their cue from biological warfare and the queasy possibilities of modern-day laboratory horrors.

In “Dead of Night,” Maberry does a couple of things I’ve not seen in a zombie book before.

He gets inside the mind of a couple of zombies — yeesh — giving readers a feel for the zombie perspective.

And, most interestingly and importantly, he approaches the possibility of a zombie apocalypse from the perspective of small-town cops dealing with its early stages.

Think about it: Most zombie books and movies, even if they have a small-town or isolated setting, include characters who know the big picture.

While Maberry’s story has those characters, it follows, especially early on but throughout the book, the street-level shock troops dealing with the beginning of the end of the world.

Maberry’s small-town Pennsylvania cops and TV reporters don’t know, at least for a while, that a plague of zombies has broken out. They only know that a couple of people have been killed, in grisly fashion, and that a couple of bodies have disappeared. A suspect is on the loose, but it takes a while for them to realize that the suspect and the missing corpse are one and the same.

The characters try to puzzle this out but thankfully never seem oblivious to the mayhem developing around them. As a matter of fact, there’s nothing like a previously dead body attacking you to change your perspective.

“Dead of Night” is a well-written thriller with appealing, made-for-cable-TV characters and situations.

The ending is open just enough to allow for a sequel. I don’t know if Maberry is planning one, but I’m ready to rejoin the zombie hordes if it happens.