The blog of author Stacy Kingsley - Stacy Kingsley

Movie Review - THE AXE MURDERS OF VILLISCA

8/27/2018

Where do I start with The Axe Murders of Villisca? I think I will start with the most interesting tidbit about the movie, there really were axe murders in a house, and they happened on July of 1912. Another little bit of interesting information is that the murderer was never found. This movie is supposed to take place in the house of the murders, and it revolves around three misfits who all have something dark in their past.

The main character somehow was never convicted of being complicit in the robbery his father took him along to commit, even after both his father and the clerk were killed. Apparently his best friend took the fall for him, but it still doesn’t make sense. His best friend is a young gay man who lost his entire family in a car accident. And the day they decide to go visit the house for their small time, and small town, show about the paranormal, they meet a young female peer who has made friends with the wrong men.

This movie is honestly just a huge mess. It doesn’t delve deep enough into the reason behind the horrors that happened at the house, where apparently eight people died. This in itself makes things hard, because if I have no idea what causes the evil to happen, then I am not going to care much about why it happens. It might involve something about regret, guilt, and possession, but it isn’t really given much credence or thought.

There were no really scary moments, and for a movie about ghosts or possession I would have liked something to be frightening or suspenseful, but there was neither. In the end I don’t have much to say about this movie except, don’t waste your time. It isn’t even a movie that you’d watch simply because it is on streaming. No matter how you watch it, it will feel like a waste of time. So, if you heed my review, and listen to what I am actually writing here, then you will skip this movie and find something else to watch. There are several movies on this blog that I have reviewed better than this movie.

Book Review - OUR LITTLE SECRET by Roz Nay

8/26/2018

SPOILERS!!!

In Our Little Secrets by Roz Nay, the scene starts in a police interrogation room. A young twenty-six year old woman, Angela, is being questioned in a police station by a Detective Novak about her relationship with a young man named HP and his wife. During her time in the police station, Angela continually goes back, beginning her story in the formative high school years of her life, when she first met HP. Throughout their years HP and Angela were friends, but eventually they become more involved after being very close friends for years. When Angela finds that she is being forced to go to England to go to university they make an agreement that they will see how things happen, but they both apparently want their relationship to continue.

In all honesty this book wasn't bad, but I didn't believe what was going on. I didn't believe that Detective Novak would continually let Angela run her mouth off about what life was like as she grew up and grew closer to HP. Every officer I know would have more aggressively brought her back to the subject at hand, what has happened and where is the missing wife? Being able to ramble through her life, meeting HP, inserting herself into his life later, and basically lying about everything, seemed to be a little to much. She was given more time than anyone would have been given to talk about her past relationship.

The one thing that I did take away was the narcissistic nature of the main character, Angela. She was obviously either mentally ill or had antisocial personality disorder. This book did remind me a little of the book The Weight of Water by Anita Shreve. The stories had similar main characters, woman who were in love with a man who they weren't sure loved them, or a love triangle.

The ending of the book did surprise me. Although there were characters I wanted a little more information about, like Angela's self-involved mother, her new best friend Freddy, and her absent but intelligent father. I even wanted more information about Saskia, the wife of HP. I don't feel she had enough of her own personality and character, which I do understand since she is being represented through Angela's eyes, and Angela is obviously biased.

I do think this book was interesting, and I do recommend that if you liked books like Girl On a Train and Gone Girl this might hit some of the right spots for you. While I enjoyed it, it did seem to stretch a little long, and I wished that it had gotten deeper into the story earlier. After a certain point I didn't care what was going on between Angela and HP. I just wanted to get to what happened after HP and Saskia were married.

Book Review - I AM NOT A SERIAL KILLER by Dan Wells

8/24/2018

I Am Not A Serial Killer is a thrilling idea from the point of view of a fifteen year old sociopath. John Wayne Cleaver is a young man trying hard not to become a serial killer, and for the most part he seems to be doing a good job. He lives with his mother, who owns and works in a mortuary with her twin sister, Margaret. This may not seem like the place for a young man who is trying not to kill, but for John it seems to work.

John also has a sister, Lauren, who we don't see much of, but get a short scene towards the end of the book that makes us wonder what she may or may not know about John, and their absent father.

Throughout the book a serial killer is stalking the citizens of Clayton. John is trying to figure out who the killer is and why they are killing. In the end John finds out more than he expected to find.

I liked the idea of this book more than I liked the book. When the author shows the audience who the killer is I was frustrated and annoyed. It didn't fit with what I wanted to see and to be honest nothing about this book told me that it was going to be as odd as it was. This isn't the first time that I have been disappointed in a book not really delivering what it promises.

I enjoyed the view of the main character, John. He constantly questioned how he could save himself from being a serial killer, and he obviously doesn't really want to become one. This was an interesting idea, and it was fascinating to listen to John as he debated what he should and shouldn't be doing, but it also wasn't realistic and I wondered how much the author actually knew about serial killers.

Not all serial killers escalate, and not all serial killers kill to dominate or show their power. But I digress.

So while I thought the idea behind this book was promising, I don't think the inclusion of this particular serial killer was the best choice for this book, nor did I think the ending of the book was what I had been led to anticipate.

Movie Review - THE QUIET PLACE

8/20/2018

The Quiet Place, unlike many horror movies people have recommended to me in the past, was really quite good. Several people recommended It Follows to me because it was a slow burn, but I really did not enjoy most of it.

The Quiet Place is a quiet movie about an apocalypse of origins unknown. What the audience does see is a quick moving monster that kills quickly and for what seems like no reason. The movie begins with a a family on a quiet shopping spree, and while on their way home tragedy ensues. One of the three children, daughter Regan, is deaf, and possibly has been since birth. The parents are seen as a loving couple who try to find romance when they can, but what can you do when you live in a world without sound.

As life continues, and the family learns to live with the silence, and in silence, a relationship is ruptured due to the previous tragedy. Things escalate as it is revealed the mother is pregnant with a child and about to give birth. When that moment comes, everything that can go wrong, does. The alien monsters are blind and work through echo location, searching for their prey through even the slight sounds they make. They run towards the home the family has made, ready to eliminate them all. One by one the family has to fight for survival, and one by one they either live or die.

The ending of this movie was for a moment surprising, as a character is killed who I did not expect to be killed. There is a lot of anxiety in this movie that creates intense feelings of apprehension. One is walking carefully through this movie with the characters wondering who will live and who will die, or if the entire family will be executed.

I did enjoy this movie quite a bit. I would have liked a little more backstory into the alien monsters and how they came to be, but there were hints, although not enough for me to feel satisfied. This movie also reminded me of the movie Mars Attacks a little due to the way the aliens were killed in both movies.

I recommend a viewing of this. And although I am not reviewing it, I highly recommend BlacKkKlansman.

Book Review - THE KILL JAR by J. Reuben Appelman

8/14/2018

I won The Kill Jar by J. Reuben Appelman on goodreads, and I really, really wanted to like this book, but I just could not. The topic was interesting, but I am not sure if, besides police corruption, it gave any new information about the case at hand. I looked up the case on google as I read, and the information in the book about the case was all the same information I could find on google. The hard part of this book was that the chapters didn't transition well. One chapter could be about the case and the next about a pedophile ring that may have had something about the case then the next would be about the authors relationship with his father and then there was a lot about girlfriends, his family, and self-harm. This book was very disjointed, although I understand how the families of the victims might have found some relief in this book as someone was once again talking about their deceased loved ones.

I didn't think the author wrote as well as he could have either. From one chapter to another there were so many open ended ideas and questions, and in the end nothing was resolved. For example, the author met up with an old girlfriend, Ellie, and at the end of the book, in his last meeting with her he sees that she looks tired and different, but he doesn't question her about her appearance, so why did he bring it up? He talks a lot about his infidelities and self harm, but it all seems to be about him, not the story he is telling about the victims of the killer. He leads the reader into a circular thought pattern, and nothing is resolved, or changed by his telling of this story.

I wish this had been more cohesive, and contained more information about the victims, as it seemed to focus on the pedophilia of the suspects and others who might have been involved in the coverup of the pedophile ring.

This was not a great, or even a good book, it was too hard to read and left the author with nothing to look into or wonder about as it is a case which will most likely never be solved. So what was the purpose of writing this book?

Movie Review - NIGHTWORLD

8/13/2018

A movie about the gates to the afterlife? Yes, please.

Nightworld is a 2017 movie about a man, who after losing his wife to suicide, needs a place to go to get away from the nightmares he is having of her and her death. His friend, Alex, sets him up with a job working security for an interesting building.

Brett, the main character, is a former LAPD officer who needs to get away from the house he shares with his wife. He is sent by his friend, Alex, to interview for a security job. As a former police officer he is seen as someone who has the potential for the job. Brett isn’t a character that one might be fond of. While his employers are interesting and very secretive, he is constantly asking questions. After eighteenth question, even I think his inquisitive nature is a little annoying and want him to shut up. After he is there for a while, he finds that not only has he lost time, but he has found a new woman to set himself up with, and he has learned a few things about the building, like the fact that it is empty, instead of full of tenants, which is what he was told. At the end of the movie he has to work to save anyone, and in the end he loses himself.

I did indeed think that the main character, Brett, was a little annoying, I also thought it served his logical personality. As a former police officer he did have to think in the realm of what is real and what is not. The things that he starts seeing in this one room he is never supposed to enter, don’t make sense to him, and he has to push beyond what he believes is reality to what is actuality. And he has to push his own limits of belief fast, within an hour.

The suspense in this movie, trying to figure out what was going on and what was happening or being hidden in the forbidden room was interesting, and I found myself actually wanting to see what was in the room. I didn’t get an otherworldly feel until almost the end of the movie, as for a few moments I thought it was going to be about aliens (it was not). The main female character, Zara, didn’t seem to add anything to the story, but she did have a humanizing effect on Brett. In the end, however, she was a waste of a good character.

Robert Englund was also a character in this movie, Jacob. I feel like he did a great job with his character, but I also feel he was wasted and not as developed as he could have been in this role. I love Englund, especially since my foray into horror and his role in the Nightmare on Elm Street series. I would have liked to see him in a little bit of a stronger position in the role, not a major character who remains static throughout.

This is not a bad movie, good to watch while you are doing other things and need something on in the background. I watched it while grading papers, and I didn’t miss much at all.

Movie Review - GHOST HOUSE

8/6/2018

Ghost House is about a young couple who go on a vacation to Thailand and find themselves haunted by a malevolent spirit after bothering a “Ghost House.” It starts out with your basic white people (why didn’t anyone have a Pumpkin Spice Latte) doing what they always seem to do in foreign countries in horror movies, meeting up with strangers, trusting those strangers, and ending up living in hell for a while until they can find a way out.

In this movie the strangers are two British men, who meet Americans, Jim and Julie, and decide they are going to take them out to show them a good time. Since they are British apparently they can be trusted. This is obviously not true as they end up fighting, well at least Julie, for their live and their sanity.

The idea behind the movie is a good one, as who has ever heard of a ghost house, to keep the spirits at bay? It traps souls that need to be trapped, but if you remove something from the ghost house you are letting the evil soul into your life.

Now, Julie is tricked into this, and if she hadn’t been as mad at her fiancé as she was then maybe life would have moved on and everything would have been fantastic. However, then there would be no movie. Julie is slowly driven mad but the ghost of a Japanese woman who was killed in a fire she set, a fire she set to kill her husband and his mistress. She was the only one who died, which causes her to be a vengeful spirit, with zero care in the world.

As Jim tried to find a way to help or save Julie and every step he takes seems to make things worse for her. The ending of the movie is somewhat predictable, as it really only go in one of two ways, but as things move along the audience sees that it really can only go one way.

This wasn’t an awful movie, but it wasn’t great either. Some of the characters were well written, including the crazy, old, white hippie who is there for the crazy “hey let’s go see a witch doctor” moments. Why is it always the old hippies who know all the secret weird witch doctors?

Not this was better than a few movies I have watched in the past, most notably the movie Pandemic, which was just terrible. This movie did have elements of horror and suspense, but it does make me wonder why white people go all over the world desecrating things that they know will come back to haunt them, possess them, or kill them.

So is this a great movie, no, but is it watchable, yeah. It does have some interesting elements, and if you are a white person, traveling to a different country, please, for the love of all that is holy, don’t touch anything that looks like it shouldn’t be touched!

Book Review - VENDETTA by Iris Johansen

8/5/2018

Have you ever read a book where every character is the same? If not, read Vendetta by Iris Johansen, because every character is the exact same character, male and female. The synopsis from amazon makes it sound a lot more interesting than it was:

With his dying breath, Carl Venable, head of the CIA task force on terrorism and Jude Brandon’s final link to terrorist ringleader Max Huber, gives Brandon a mandate: keep his daughter, Rachel, safe at any cost. But Rachel Venable has a shocking, twisted past of her own, one that comes rushing back after her medical clinic in Guyana is attacked by Huber―the same man who murdered her father and kept her imprisoned for months.
Brandon and Catherine Ling, Rachel’s longtime ally and fierce protector, are determined to keep Rachel out of danger, but she knows that it’s impossible to stay hidden when Max Huber wants you dead.
As Rachel and Brandon race against the clock to bring Huber down before he can orchestrate a disaster that will lay waste to half the country, they also fight a growing attraction to each other – an attraction that could prove just as dangerous as Huber himself.

I won this book in a Goodreads giveaway, and while it says it is an "Eve Duncan Novel" it is not as there is no character named Eve Duncan, so I am hoping that there is a fix in the cover before this novel is released in October.

While the book synopsis makes this sound like an interesting book, this is a flat book. All of the characters are exactly the same, with the same types of speech patterns, and the same physical attributes or movements. I couldn't get involved in any of the characters because they were all blunt and forward, and they ended up blending into each other. I would have liked at least one character who wasn't trying or pretending to be strong. In fact the most interesting character was Huber, because he had childish outbursts, which made him stand out from other characters.

Also, this book is a little long, and it took a while to get through. I wasn't interested enough and some of the scenes could have been deleted. I just wasn't a fan.

I think that, to be honest, I am not a fan of Iris Johansen's writing, so I will most likely not read another one of her books.