#WPPromp Three Books…
List three books that have had an impact on you. Why?
This is like asking a parent who their favorite kid is. But you secretly know you have one.
I had a reading problem in second grade. I had to go to reading therapy daily to get me caught up in reading. I don’t really remember much other than I was at kindergarten reading by midway through second grade. But reading therapy helped me learn to understand what I was reading. And in third grade we got our very own public library cards.
By fourth grade I had discovered Avi. And of the many books I read of his one of my favorites that stand out is Nothing But the Truth. Ninth grader Philip Malloy is forbidden to join the track team because of his failing grades in English class. Convinced that the teacher just doesn’t like him, Philip concocts a plan to get transferred into a different homeroom. Instead of standing silently during the national anthem, he hums along. And ends up on trial.
By eighth to nineth grade I had moved from chapter books and read my first Stephen King book Cycle of a Werewolf, I loved Silver Bullet, which is the movie made off of this. Avi had introduced me to some horror, but King was real horror. I became such a huge fan. Not much anymore. I just can’t get into his newer stuff.
The first scream came from the snowbound railwayman who felt the fangs ripping at his throat. The next month there was a scream of ecstatic agony from the woman attacked in her snug bedroom. Now scenes of unbelieving horror come each time the full moon shines on the isolated Maine town of Tarker Mills. No one knows who will be attacked next. But one thing is sure. When the moon grows fat, a paralyzing fear sweeps through Tarker Mills. For snarls that sound like human words can be heard whining through the wind. And all around are the footprints of a monster whose hunger cannot be sated… Cycle of the Werewolf.
My third will have to be Swan Song. I LOVED King’s The Stand. And a friend said if you love The Stand have you read Swan Song by Robert McCammon? Of course now I have to read said book. And I will say I loved it just as much maybe more than The Stand. The Stand dealt with a plague that kills off 99.9% of the human population and the survivors have to deal with good vs. evil. Swan Song deals with a nuclear war and life vs. death. Swan Song solidified my love for apocalyptic reads.
Swan is a nine-year-old Idaho girl following her struggling mother from one trailer park to the next when she receives visions of doom—something far wider than the narrow scope of her own beleaguered life. In a blinding flash, nuclear bombs annihilate civilization, leaving only a few buried survivors to crawl onto a scorched landscape that was once America.
In Manhattan, a homeless woman stumbles from the sewers, guided by the prophecies of a mysterious amulet, and pursued by something wicked; on Idaho’s Blue Dome Mountain, an orphaned boy falls under the influence of depraved survivalists and discovers the value of a killer instinct; and amid the devastating dust storms on the Great Plains of Nebraska, Swan forms a heart-and-soul bond with an unlikely new companion. Soon they will cross paths. But only Swan knows that they must endure more than just a trek across an irradiated country of mutated animals, starvation, madmen, and wasteland warriors.
Swan’s visions tell of a coming malevolent force. It’s a shape-shifting embodiment of the apocalypse, and of all that is evil and despairing. And it’s hell-bent on destroying the last hope of goodness and purity in the world. Swan is that hope. Now, she must fight not only for her own survival, but for that of all mankind.
A winner of the Bram Stoker Award and a finalist for the World Fantasy Award, Swan Song has become a modern classic, called “a chilling vision that keeps you turning pages to the shocking end” by John Saul and “a long, satisfying look at hell and salvation” by Publishers Weekly.
Honorable mention the early Anita Blake books my Laurell K Hamilton because it brought me to the world of Urban Fantasy, which led to Romantasy.
