My Top 5 Favorite Books

In the realm of the reading I haven't been a member very long.  My love of reading started at an early age but quickly became bland as I turned my sights to movies, TV shows, and video games.  Many years later as I entered into my twenties I picked the hobby back up on the recommendation of my girlfriend Alecia and I haven't been able to put the books down.  So here is a short list of the best books I've read from the start of my obsession to my newly developed love of the printed page.

5.  The Goosebumps Series.

The first book I ever read was R.L. Stein's masterpiece Attack of the Mutant in the Goosebumps series.  I was 9 years old and just finding out that I had a deep love of being afraid.  My mother brought home a short paperback book with a sandy cliff and a giant ghost hovering over a grave stone.  Above the art was a word written in what appeared to be bumpy slime that said 'Goosebumps'.  The book itself was called Ghost Beach.  I stayed up into the night reading it and it scared me half to death.  From that point on I couldn't get my hands on enough Goosebumps books to feed my appetite for them.  By the time I was thirteen I owned every one that had been released up to that point.  It got so bad I was reading a book in a three hour period and moving on to the next one.  Even now at the age of twenty four I can still open one of these books and enjoy the hell out it.  Some of my favorites are the aforementioned Ghost Beach, Attack of the Mutant, The Ghost Next Door, Ghost Camp, and The Werewolf of Fever Swamp.

4.  The Dresden Files Series

The Dresden Files books were created by master author Jim Butcher as a challenge by one of his college professors and has since become a literary giant.  My brother turned me on to the series with the first book entitled Storm Front.  The thing that makes these books stand out is the protagonist Harry Dresden a wizard for hire.  He has a dry wit and is a complete smart ass but he makes up for it by being a genuinely good man and a damn good wizard.  In these books he battles everything from other wizards, to vampires, werewolves, and even demigods.  So far I have only read the first two books, Storm Front, and Fool Moon but the series has already been imprinted on me as one of the finest out there.

3.  No Doors. No Windows.

As of late I can't seem to drive by a Borders or Barnes and Noble and not stop in to take a peak at their horror sections.  One particular day I walked into a Borders that was closing soon so everything was on sale and I found a book by an author I had never heard of and the only thing on the cover was an old house.  The title read No Doors. No Windows.  I became interested, picked it up, and turned it over.  The plot of the book struck me immediately as it sounded unique and very promising.  The author is Joe Schreiber and the front of this book exclaimed that he was the author of such stories including Star Wars:  Death Troopers and I thought to myself the author of a sci-fi book is tackling a horror story?  I was intrigued.  The book is amazing. The thing that stands out the most to me is that it is actually frightening.  I've ready many horror books that are by all means great books but none of them actually scared me.  No Doors scared me on multiple occasions and in one instance scared me so bad I had trouble walking around my apartment alone.  The story deals with torn apart families, dead and gone murderers come back from the grave, child ghosts, and a fantastic cast of characters.  To top it all off the book is incredibly written by Mr. Schreiber and is a strong force behind my own writing.

2.  Hell House

After reading No Doors. No Windows. I started looking for more books to actually scare me rather than just tell a good story.  With the internet at my disposal I did a google search for the scariest books of all time and Hell House by Richard Matheson always came at the top of the list at number one.  A week later it arrived in the mail and within three days I had it read.  Published in 1971 Hell House tells the story of four people from different walks of life with different religious views and psychic powers who willingly spend a few days in the most haunted house in the world.  What threw me off was that the book is very sexual.  If books had MPAA ratings this one would be NC-17.  Now as far as it being the scariest book of all time I'd have to really think about that but I will say that it was indeed scary as hell.  Matheson wrote this story with a delicacy of a master craftsman and after one chapter in it was difficult to put the book down.  It was eventually made into a feature film called The Legend of Hell House but I have yet to see it.  All I can say is that this book is scary, disturbing, and a great look into the world of the supernatural through the eyes of skeptics and  mediums alike.  

1.  The Dead Path

I walked into a Borders one night on a whim and found this book behind a couple others, hiding from me.  I picked it up and looked at the cover and read the title.  The Dead Path.  Something about it stuck out and I felt I had to buy it.  I turned the book over and read the synopsis of the story and then I knew I had to buy it. One morning I sat down and read the first chapter.  Not only did it completely engulf me in the story and keep me wanting to read more but it almost had me in tears.  The book is written by Stephen M. Irwin and his words bleed to the page with poets blood.  To this day it is one of the most beautiful books I've ever read and by far my favorite book of all time.  It centers around a man who's wife has recently died and shortly after her death has developed the ability to see the dead.  But he can't speak to them or communicate with them in any way.  He sees ghosts in their final moments dying on an endless loop before his very eyes.  From there the story takes him back to his childhood home where things escalate into a nightmarish welcoming back that will threaten his very life.  I won't go into anything else because to be honest I can't even do it justice by just talking about it.  It has to be read and once you read it, it will soak itself into your very being and stay with you forever.

A Few Miles Further

Let me tell you all a story.

Once upon a time I met this amazing girl. It was my freshman year of high school and if you didn't know me then, let me paint you a picture. At the age of nine my parents divorced and my mother moved into kind of a bad part of town. Me being the shy anti social boy I was I opted to always stay in the house eating Dan Dee cheese curls watching Batman the animated series. It sounded good at the time but little did I know that it would result in me plumping up and forever being the "fat kid" from sixth grade onward. Now here I was, in ninth grade, the first year of high school. It felt great except the fact that I was still ridiculed on almost a daily basis and while I kept a slightly cool exterior I was, on the inside, withering away with every insult uttered.

But I digress. So there I was and it was the last day of school before Christmas break. Two weeks of nothing but sleeping in and playing the original Halo. It was going to be bliss, and as a young apathetic high schooler, that's all I cared about. So for the last day before break the school decided to show a little movie for us so we wouldn't have to do any work. The movie was Shrek and I couldn’t care less. For me this was a time to goof off and hang with my friends. As students piled into the small viewing room, I sat next to a group of friends and made idle chit chat when all of a sudden she walked in. My God you should have seen her. Long brown curly locks, beautiful amber eyes. It was actually difficult to think straight when I saw her. All I wanted to do was talk to her, and that’s exactly what I did. After I got her attention by lightly stepping on her hand while the movie played. What do you want? I was young and stupid. But it worked.

From that point on she became a paradise to me. We started dating but, being young and stupid I chose to play Halo instead of hanging out with her. Strike one. So a couple months into the relationship we broke up. Normally I would have shrugged it off and said something like “I don’t need her!”. But unfortunately for me not having her in my life just made me realize a very important truth: For the first time in my life I was in love.

From there we remained friends throughout high school. She dated a close friend of mine which, while it hurt to see them together, it did offer me the chance to be the bigger man and let them be happy. And that’s what I did. After a year they broke up and that’s when I started seeing her less frequently. So we jump now to my senior year of high school. I was still fat but people seemed like me for me (finally) and even if they didn’t I had developed a nice “I don’t give a crap what you think of me” attitude. And then one day, just as God was about to start laughing at my torment, she walked in again. Stunning as ever. Just seeing her made me want to do great things, and lucky for me we had a few classes together. Our friendship became strong once again and over time, somehow she saw something in me that no one else did, and we started dating again.

I was in heaven I mean, I couldn’t believe that she would give me another chance and by now my love for her was so strong it was driving me crazy. I thought to myself, “I can’t lose her again. I have to be the perfect boyfriend.” But my version of the perfect boyfriend was anything but, and I chose to be the same old me again (playing games, lazing around not giving a damn) and it led to strike two. So once again she called it quits and this time it was like an atom bomb dropping on my life. Have you ever seen the episode of South Park where Wendy breaks up with Stan and Stan gets really depressed and stays in his room all the time and then goes goth? Well that was me (except for the goth part).

At this point in the story I graduate and leave the high school forever. Now she was a grade behind me so she still had a year to go. Needless to say I hardly ever saw her.

Then in 2006 I met a girl named Molly. I never thought I would ever love anyone as much as I loved the girl of my dreams whom I lost. But Molly made me believe again. Until she cheated on me and destroyed my heart and soul. Now I’m not trying to bash her here. She has actually since gone on to lead a great life. She met a guy whom she really adores and who really adores her and they have since married. She’s living with him now, I believe she’s a nurse (I only say that because that’s what she was going to college for when we dated) and she has a little black cat. I hear she’s doing great and I’m happy for her.

I bring her up because during our relationship I made the mistake of telling her about this girl from high school. Well she didn’t like that one bit and she forbade me from talking with this girl any longer. I fought this tooth and nail for months. I thought, “No way. We are just friends and we don’t even see each other a lot as it is and since I’m 100% faithful and always have been I see no harm in remaining her friend.” But eventually the battle got to be too much for me and I gave in. Now this is a moment in my life I am not proud of in the slightest. I Myspace messaged this girl and told her I was done with her. She wasn’t happy about it, and we ended things a little badly.

Well a little while later guess what? Molly and I broke up. It was a liberating thing and I then dedicated my life to focusing on me and making me happy again. It was nice. 

So life seemed to be looking up again, until I lost my job. To this day I have never been so terrified. Looking for a job on a daily basis and getting nothing was something that nauseated me. Little did I know that things were about to get a lot worse. That friend of mine that she dated in high school? He was my best friend since we were ten years old and shortly after I lost my job he passed away from cancer. It was devastating and to this day I miss him greatly. I decided to blog about him on my myspace page (back when I had one) and it helped me get some things off my chest and say goodbye to him in another way.

So I get an interview, ace it, get the job, and leave. As I’m pulling out my phone rings and I see I have a voice mail. I put the phone to my ear and out comes the sweetest voice. A voice I haven’t heard for about three years at this point. It’s the girl and she wants to meet at Denny’s to catch up. That night we met, and the second I saw her all those feelings came rushing back to me. It was like we had never split at all. We arrived at Denny’s at ten o’clock at night and didn’t leave until eight the next morning. We talked into the night about everything that had happened with us over the past three years and to this day it is a milestone in the cannon of my life.

So this girl. She’s unbelievable I mean really, she doesn’t just light up a room. The lights freakin’ explode when she enters. After we rekindled our friendship we kind of spent every waking moment together. Well not EVERY waking moment but eventually it did get to that point haha. That was one hell of a summer. I remember one night in particular we were hanging out at her parents house which wasn’t far from the Denny’s we initially met at so we decided to walk there being as it was a warm summer night. We had yet another great meal and conversation there and then began the trek back to her parent’s house. On the way back we saw a meteor shower. No joke it was the night of a meteor shower, first one I had ever seen. We looked up into the night sky and she said “make a wish.” I wished that we would be together again. Not just as young lovers or even best friends turned lovers but as something stronger. As soul mates who travelled far and wide to find each other and the seas were kind enough to grant us a meeting. A couple weeks later we were boyfriend and girlfriend once again.

Now here we are, almost two years into our relationship and I couldn’t ask for more. I have found my one true love. People search their whole lives for something like this and never find it. I guess I’m one of the lucky ones. Oh and guess what? She’s just as beautiful as ever. When I wake up in the morning and turn and see her face, eyes closed sleeping peacefully into the morning it makes me rejoice. I am talking of course about my wonderful love Alecia Zhenee Waddell. The girl who let me step on her hand in ninth grade and still gave me the time of day. The girl who let me have two strikes and at one point completely throw the game gave me another chance. She saw something in my that perhaps I couldn’t even see in myself.

So in conclusion to this rather lengthy blog I just want to say that Alecia Waddell is my girlfriend. My partner. My soul mate. I couldn’t ask for someone more wonderful, beautiful, funny and kind. Even now while she sits on our couch watching funny videos on her phone she reminds me just how lucky I am.

Well, I’m going to call this one finished. I’m going to go tell her how much I love her.

Movie Review #1: Let Me In

In recent years my tastes in film have changed dramatically. For instance when I was younger I would go to the local movie theater to watch the latest and greatest action movie and leave the theater saying "wow that movie was awesome!", and it seemed that every movie I saw got this reaction out of me. Now it's much much harder to please me. Most of the time now I leave the theater saying "it was okay", or "it was garbage!". I really miss being able to go to see any movie and loving it but sadly as I've gotten older I've just realized that what I want in movies is greater than what the industry is giving me. Especially in a world where every big movie is either a summer blockbuster that's as thin as a wet paper towel or a horror movie remake (or ANY remake for that matter) that fails to deliver in the same areas that the originals did. In some cases the remakes are just plain awful (I'm looking at you Friday the 13th). Well a little while ago I heard about this movie called Let the Right One in based on the book of the same name. I was told it was a Swedish film based on a Swedish book about vampires. Well vampires, needless to say, have been done to death (pun INTENDED!) in most mediums and I can count the good ones on one hand so my enthusiasm for this movie was limited. But the movie came out to stellar reviews and it got me thinking. So then I hear about another movie called Let Me In that is essentially a Hollywood remake of Let the Right One In. "Well that's odd," I thought but miraculously this movie also came out to stellar reviews. So I thought okay, the book is doing great, and now both films are getting critical praise maybe I should check it out. Then the driving force behind me wanting to see the film came crashing at me when I saw the studio responsible for Let Me In was none other than Hammer.

A little background on Hammer as I know them.

Hammer was a British film company founded in 1934 that found major success in the horror genre when, in the 50's, they decided to remake some of the Golden Age Horror films such as Dracula and Frankenstein. These movies were so good they became known for reestablishing the Gothic Horror genre and really breathing new life into the medium. The movies were in color, there was more sexual undertones, and there was full on bloody violence. I myself own the first Dracula and Frankenstein films Hammer made and they are simply amazing. Well around the late 70's to early 80's they kind of disappeared leaving behind their many masterpieces and moving on to something better. However this meant that they pretty much disappeared entirely and nothing much was heard of them. Until now.

So seeing that Hammer Horror was making a comeback with this movie that was "reinventing the vampire genre" I couldn't help but get excited. The movie came in the mail through Netflix, I waited till night fell, and my girlfriend and I sat down with our dogs and watched it. To my great satisfaction this was not a typical "it was okay" movie. No this movie absolutely rocked me. I thought it was amazing, so much in fact that after we watched it I started it over again to watch it a second time. It's that good.

So here's a quick rundown. The movie is about a twelve year old boy living with his mother who's parents are going through a divorce. He befriends a twelve year old girl who moves in next door to him who just so happens to be a vampire. The movie is about their relationship growing from friendship to more and then to so, so much more. My likes for this movie are staggering. The camera work is incredible and some of the scenes actually had me scratching my head as to how they did it. There is a particular car crash scene that had my jaw dropped. The direction was top notch. The acting, especially from the young kids, was just awe inspiring. Where this movie really takes me in is with the story. The relationship between these two characters is done so well and so beautifully that in my opinion it's one of the best love stories I've seen in quite some time. The movie also uses the folklore of vampires to an amazing degree and answers some questions that most movies overlook. I wont give anything away but the last thing I will say is that the ending is just divine. Once again I wont give anything away but it's another scene that had my jaw dropped.

So in conclusion every now and then a movie comes along that is so good, and hits me so hard in such a profound way that it makes me want to make movies myself. This was one of them. By the far the best vampire movie I've ever seen and a love story worth feeling good about. Well in an almost morbid sort of way. So with that being said that is my first ever movie review and if you haven't seen this movie I HIGHLY recommend you see it as soon as you can. I still can't get it out of my head.

Have a wonderful rest of the weekend and I'll talk to everyone later.

Been Awhile...back with a 3rd.

Happy post Memorial Day to whoever reads this!

So yeah I haven't posted in a while and that's mostly due to the fact that I have a job now.  Sadly it has cut down on my writing considerably but I'm still plugging ideas away all the time.  I have a close friend who is also a dedicated story teller who wants to make movies and he and I have been bouncing ideas off of each other for a few weeks now and let me tell you it's been helping quite a bit.  So this latest blog is going to kind of be a message about where I'm going to be taking the blog in the near future.

Yes I still want to write and I will periodically post some of my poems/stories/treatments and the like on a regular basis.  But I'm also going to start using the blog to let out some of my feelings and opinions on certain things, mostly the entertainment industry.  I will be starting this by posting my first ever movie review tomorrow.  I won't give away the movie just yet but I will say that it's the best movie I've seen in a long time.  In recent years it's become more and more difficult to please me in the realm of celluloid and this movie certainly impressed.

So that's it for now, especially since I just got home from work and I'm exhausted, so check back in tomorrow (if I have anyone that checks in at all) for my first ever movie review.