Book Discussions - AfterBuzz Books

UNDER THE SKIN is a sleek and bizarre science fiction story by Michel Faber, a sometimes erotic, sometimes ice-cold portrait of a disfigured alien predator. Strategically disfigured as a honeytrap for earth men who will soon be meat. Her name is Isserly and she picks up hitchers on the motorways of Scotland, conducting them into castration, mutation, and processing into foodstuff at the behest of a decadent cosmic aristocracy. The book pushes buttons like JG Ballard on hits of champagne-spiked estrogen. Through the insect eyes of a huntress in disguise, we're tricked into thinking about where our food comes from and who it used [...]

DOCTOR SLEEP is Stephen King's gripping and surprisingly endearing sequel to THE SHINING, a classic 70s horror novel that opened bloodsoaked corridors of terror in the collective psyche of a generation (in its literary form and via a masterful film adaptation by Stanley Kubrick). The book revisits Danny Torrance, the psychically gifted little boy whose daddy Jack was possessed and destroyed by the malignant ghost culture of an evil old hotel. Danny is Dan, now, in his thirties, a survivor of traumas the ordinary world can scarcely imagine, dulling the dark edge of his supernatural sensitivity with liquor and drugs for decades. The [...]

NIGHT FILM follows a broken journalist's investigation into the haunted life and death of Ashley Cordova, the mad director's beautiful daughter. It begins as a mystery with overtones of dream-like horror. It flickers and dims and deepens into a study of people who burn too brightly, burning up the souls around them until their aftermath is a legacy of ashes. It's about art that goes too far and the fanatical religious passion such art can trigger in those strangelengs who are attuned to its frequency. It's about the nature and function of fantasy, the damage done to the ties that bind by those who [...]

After her mother's death and her marriage was destroyed, Cheryl Strayed embarked on a 3-month trek across the Pacific Crest Trail, which stretches across the west coast from Mexico to Canada. She hiked over 1,000 miles of it, and details the terrors and triumphs of her experiences in her memoir, Wild: From Lost to Found on The Pacific Crest Trail. In this edition, hosts Jeffrey Masters, Cassidy Gard, Kylie Hodges, and Sean Overman discuss Cheryl Strayed's memoir, Wild.

"Of all the things I'd been skeptical about, I didn't feel skeptical about this: the wilderness had a clarity that included me." - Cheryl Strayed [...]

HUNGER GAMES, by Suzanne Collins, is a 2008 young adult novel (quote/unquote) that became a publishing sensation, spawning two sequels and two hit films with a third in the wings, wooing readers and watchers from every walk of life with its mythic tale of Katniss Everdeen, the Girl On Fire, a poor girl who hunts squirrels to feed her family in a brutal dystopia (a future gone wrong, it seems, or perhaps a parallel universe that overlaps with our own in all the wrong places). She scrapes and survives with a traumatized mother and a fragile sister in one of twelve districts, where [...]

Step into the Circle and bear witness as the BCO narrative dissection team explores Samantha Shannon's THE BONE SEASON, an exciting and widely hyped new novel (the first of a projected seven-part series), wherein we meet Paige Mahoney, our narrator and heroine, a nineteen year old criminal clairvoyant who can slash her way into the headspaces and dreamscapes of those around her.

She performs her little thought crimes in a future London, circa 2059, a London under the control of SCION, a tyrannical security force that runs six other major cities and seems poised to take over a globe even darker and more troubled [...]

“A Brilliant Novel in the Works” edition, is an exploration of Yuvi Zalkow’s “A Brilliant Novel in the Works”, an almost semi-autobiographic piece about a man struggling to write a novel. Host Jason Squamata talks about the book on the levels of craft, theme, and character. Joining Jason with the breakdown are co-hosts Doug Dean, Pat Janowski, and Mark Savage. It’s Book Circle Online's “A Brilliant Novel in the Works” podcast!

About “A Brilliant Novel in the Works”:

When Yuvi's wife finds him in his underwear, standing on top of his desk, she isn't terribly impressed with him and his writing habits.

But Yuvi [...]