Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Books: Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Buffy the Vampire Slayer 1 & 2
Coyote Moon, by John Vornholt
Night of the Living Rerun, by Arthur Byron Cover
Portal Through Time, by Alice Henderson
Halloween Rain, by Christopher Golden & Nancy Holder
Bad Bargain, by Dina Gallagher
AfterImage, by Pierce Askegren

2010 edition

Sometimes I want to read something that I can simply read and not unconsciously examine for writerly things like plot, characterization, etc. Something that will just take me out of my life for a while and free up my mind.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer books filled the bill for me in the last two weeks. I picked up two anthologies, each a fat 650 pages bearing three separate books, off the bargain table at Books-A-Million and settled in each evening for some monster slaying and 1300 pages of reading.

I loved the series, so the characters, being familiar and all, are like old friends.

Simon and Schuster, the publisher, should be ashamed of itself for allowing so many typographical errors in the first text, though. What, you couldn't afford a proofreader for that first run?

None of these stories were bad; however, they also aren't especially memorable. Halloween Rain was my favorite story. I think it was the most complex. It was about a scarecrow that comes to life.

Buffy precedes the current vampire Twilight stuff and so is a grannie of the genre. The TV series sort of fizzled out at the end, as so many do, but when it was on, it was on and well worth watching.

I've read a lot of the books over the years (but didn't keep track of them) and most of them are okay. They're like TV episodes that didn't make the air. Generally the writers catch the characters well enough that it flows with what you already know.

1 comment:

  1. I'm a big Buffy fan. Still watch reruns now and then and occasionally see an episode I must have missed. Agree about the series fizzling out. The last episodes weren't that satisfying.

    ReplyDelete

Thank you for dropping by! I appreciate comments and love to hear from others. I appreciate your time and responses.