A-Z Wednesday is hosted by Reading at the Beach.Here are the rules: Go to your stack of books and find one whose title starts with the Letter of the Week and post the following:
- A photo of the book
- Title and synopsis
- A link (Amazon, B&N, etc.)
- Come back here and leave your link in the comments
If you’ve already reviewed this book, post a link to the review as well. Be sure to visit other participants to see what books they have posted and leave them a comment (we all love comments, don’t we?) Who know? You may find your next “favorite” book.
THIS WEEK’S LETTER IS: L
My “L” Book is:
(New York: Avon Books, 1968)
Paperback, 224 Pages, Fiction
ISBN: N/A, US$0.75
From the Cover: The Little People—Elves? Demons? They speak German. They carry whips. And they are connected in some mysterious way with Nazi experiments carried out in the charming old Irish castle during World War II. When members of the vacation party are found to be missing from their beds, and when pleading cries ring through the halls of the great house, terror grips hearts and minds, and the vacationers are brought face to face with the unknown…
My Thoughts: I haven’t yet read this book, I just got it for Christmas from my sister-in-law, and what I wrote then was “This book first came to my attention through the blog The Groovy Age of Horror back in March 2007, and it’s been on my Wish List since that time, but it was only this Christmas that my patience was rewarded. How can you not want a book with such an awesome/awful/groovy cover on your bookshelf? I cannot wait until it makes its way to the top of my To Be Read pile!” and that sentiment hasn’t changed even though Grad School has conspired to keep me away from this book for the moment.
Paperback, 224 Pages, Fiction
ISBN: N/A, US$0.75
From the Cover: The Little People—Elves? Demons? They speak German. They carry whips. And they are connected in some mysterious way with Nazi experiments carried out in the charming old Irish castle during World War II. When members of the vacation party are found to be missing from their beds, and when pleading cries ring through the halls of the great house, terror grips hearts and minds, and the vacationers are brought face to face with the unknown…
My Thoughts: I haven’t yet read this book, I just got it for Christmas from my sister-in-law, and what I wrote then was “This book first came to my attention through the blog The Groovy Age of Horror back in March 2007, and it’s been on my Wish List since that time, but it was only this Christmas that my patience was rewarded. How can you not want a book with such an awesome/awful/groovy cover on your bookshelf? I cannot wait until it makes its way to the top of my To Be Read pile!” and that sentiment hasn’t changed even though Grad School has conspired to keep me away from this book for the moment.
That said, I wouldn’t necessarily call this a “foundation book in the genre of weird fiction” like, say, The Body Snatchers or I Am Legend or anything by Lovecraft … but it certainly is a child of that movement. How successful it is in continuing that legacy I couldn’t say, but The New York Times in the cover blurb says that The Little People is “carefully laid-on horror” so … it can’t be too bad, right?
I think what draws me to this book is that as someone who is exploring the ways in which the horror genre is a reactionary genre to social changes (horror is inherently political) the trend in the 60s and 70s to lay the root of horror and the horrific at the feet of Nazi scientists is an interesting one (another book that comes to mind in the trend is Ira Levin’s The Boys from Brazil) and so Christopher’s choice to couple Irish legends of fairy folk with Nazi experiments is, to say the least, intriguing to me.
1 comments:
Love the cover!!
Thanks for playing!
Post a Comment