I am not a religious man. Despite my Catholic upbringing and coming of age in the American midwest, the world of the spiritual has never called out to me. I’ve never felt the rapture of religion or the whisper of the divine. As such, I find myself sorely lacking in vocabulary to describe my experience…
Continue reading ➞ A Lush And Seething Hell – If This Is Hell I’ll pass On Heaven
I don’t have a lot of experience with dating apps, having been in a long term relationship until recently, and as such have viewed them with the same amused indifference granted to most of the technology I don’t interact with. Having spoken to friends that have used them, and through some low-level environmental exposure, I…
Continue reading ➞ Ghoster – Too Substantial to Properly Spook
I would not say that The Last Astronaut by David Wellington is a bad book. It just didn't quite hit the marks that it set out to hit. The story itself was okay on its own; it did not feel entirely new to me, but it was not stale either. The possibility of extraterrestrial life…
Continue reading ➞ The Last Astronaut – One Small Step Into… Eh, You Should Figure It Out
I am back with installment two of our collective journey through the strange abyss that is Peter F. Hamilton’s The Night’s Dawn Trilogy. If you have absolutely no idea what I am talking about, the staff of QTL is doing a collective read and discussion of this iconic sci-fi trilogy. However, the discussions have a…
Continue reading ➞ The Neutronium Alchemist – Hotter Than A Dying Sun
I have not engaged with a lot of horror on the written page. I enjoy watching horror movies, good or bad, and sometimes play survival-horror games, but I rarely read it. I have Edgar Allan Poe’s collected works and got turned onto Laird Barron by our resident horror reader Will, but beyond that, I am…
Continue reading ➞ The Luminous Dead – Dark, Bleak And Lively
Stephen King’s Pet Sematary plunges readers into a deep well of terror that provides a steady supply of eerie atmosphere, horrifying happenings, and a look into their effect on human relationships. The novel wrestles with death, grief, and human nature, bleeding dark themes onto every page. Pet Sematary transformed me from a hesitant first-time King…
...and the punchline is an 850-ish word essay about his inaugural experience with The King of Horror, which Google tells me is one of Stephen King’s nicknames. It’s admittedly difficult to kick off a piece like this knowing full well that Stephen King has a body of work large enough to be called a pantheon…
Continue reading ➞ A First-Time Stephen King Reader Walks into a Pet Sematary…
The writers of The Quill to Live are undertaking a small project this year - we are reading a book series as a group and recording an audio discussion for each installment. The series in question is The Night’s Dawn Trilogy by Peter Hamilton. The books, starting with The Reality Dysfunction, are absolutely massive, clocking…
Continue reading ➞ The Reality Dysfunction – Patience Is A Virtue
Show of hands, how many of you out there have worked for a large corporation before? For those of you sitting at your desk with a hand raised, likely sipping a lukewarm coffee that may or may not have been the last cup before the carafe needed to be refilled (you think we don’t know?),…
Continue reading ➞ The Atrocity Archives – If You Gaze Long Into IT, The IT Also Gazes Into You
I’m certainly not a prolific reviewer - you can take a look at the history of the blog and see that without too much difficulty. At the same time, since joining The Quill to Live I’ve reviewed a decent amount of horror stories. I’ve come to some conclusions on what attributes great (or just my…
Continue reading ➞ The Ballad Of Black Tom – Not Going To Dance Around This One
