Ranking Stephen King's Night Shift

In this exclusive video, Eric presents a top 20 ranking of Stephen King's Night Shift stories. Each story includes a capsule review with tons of book covers, movie clips, and magazine inserts through the years from various publishers. Also some fun facts about King's work is included. Watch it below or stream HERE.

The Road

Shortly before Cormac McCarthy's death in 2023 he received a passionate letter from a French artist named Manu Larcenet. In the letter, Larcenet explained how he had read the author's most prescient novel, The Road, over and over for six months. He pleaded with McCarthy and explained how he had almost lived in the book's bleak narrative for months. He asked McCarthy if he could adapt the novel into a graphic novel adaptation and the legendary author consented to the request. Unfortunately, McCarthy died before seeing the finished product. Larcenet's adaptation was published in 2024 by Abrams Comicarts.

This is an usual adaptation in the way that Larcenet doesn't actually write any of the book's dialogue or scenes. Instead, he simply quotes directly from the novel itself, straying from any semblance of the film adaptation. Larcenet pencils these dire apocalyptic scenes into harrowing exhibits of human loss and anguish. Often the scenes are washed out to properly convey the atmosphere of ash and snow blanketing America in a white sheet of doomed oblivion. 

If you are unaware of McCarthy's The Road, it was published in 2006 and serves as a post-apocalyptic melodrama as an unnamed father and son walk across a scarred landscape that has been obliterated by a  nuclear war. Along with marauders and bandits, the two face the cruelest enemy of all – starvation. Using that as a dismal background, Larcenet punctuates McCarthy's work in a more enhanced, deeply troubling adaptation that orchestrates humanity's downfall in the most intimate way possible. While the film left something to be desired, Larcenet's adaptation hones in on the insanity and utter hopelesness in a unique way. This is a stunning visual art. You won't be disappointed.

Get your copy of the book HERE.

Gone to the Wolves

In a New York Times 2009 interview with Gregory Cowles, author John Wray professes his love for abstract music and its dream-like ability to spawn creative processes. My take is that Wray likes really weird music – nothing more and nothing less. I'm a weirdo for music as well and authored hundreds of heavy metal and hard rock reviews for a decade (MaximumMetal.com). It was of great interest to me to find Wray's 2023 hardcover Gone to the Wolves in an indy book store in Tampa. It is fitting that the book begins and ends on Florida's Gulf Coast, an area about four hours west of my Florida coastline home.

Gone to the Wolves begins in 1990. A teenager named Kit arrives in Venice, Florida to live with his grandmother. Kit feels out of place but strikes up a bizarre friendship with a black bisexual teenage boy named Leslie. Kit rescues Leslie from what he believes to be an assault, then later realizes that Leslie was just buying weed from his dealer. Kit and Leslie quickly become friends through music. 

If you aren't a heavy metal mophead, the quick basics is that death metal music (cookie monster vocals over heavy distortion) was arguably formed in and around Tampa in the mid 80s. The genre hit corporate radars in 1990 and became a marketable trend. Leslie is up to speed on the early death metal movement and incorporates Kit into the vinyl and tape trading explosion of death metal and thrash. Kit quickly replaces his love for U2 and Huey Lewis with bands like Morbid Angel, Death, and Cannibal Corpse. 

Venice doesn't have much to offer so the kids hang out at a place called the Grids, an abandoned section of unfinished housing. It is here that Kit gets to know Kira, a distant teen girl that clearly has a lot of emotional baggage. The three become a tight-knit trio and eventually move to Los Angeles. This is the middle portion of the narrative and features events that you will typically find in any rock documentary ever made – heroin, cocaine, sex, music, the Sunset Strip, and heroin – did I mention heroin?

Kit and Kira become a couple, although its loosey-goosey at best. Leslie falls in love with a guitar player and then becomes hooked on drugs. This portion of the narrative is a rags to more raggedy story of kids coming of age through a baptism of fire. Eventually, Kira's love of extreme metal leads the couple to Europe. It is here that the third act takes place, a narrative in the darkest confines of Norway. Kira is taken by strangers at a metal show and Kit spends a year wondering where she is. Eventually Interpol contacts Kit and things get ominous very quickly. 

Again, if you aren't a heavy metal mophead, the quick basics is that black metal music (think Mariah Carey caught in a bear trap over three-chord riffs and blast beats) emerged in the late 1980s and exploded in Scandinavia with a lot of occult mysticism and Viking lifestyles that aggressively rebelled against Christianity. The infamous church burnings began and there were musicians killing themselves and other musicians during this arson phase. Needless to say, Kit and Leslie journey to Norway during the height of this era and begin investigating Kira's disappearance. 

It's a cliche, but I will say this book is a love letter to heavy metal. There are enough references to musicians, albums, songs, lyrics, and riff religions to blanket Wacken in a mortuary drape. The central story is a discovery of independence and the development of adulthood. Personality, hormones, identity, and a skewed remembrance are all key factors in the storytelling. There is a purpose to it all and the finale is a very dark place that dips the book into horror's blood red red room. 

Gone to the Wolves is a mandatory read if you love heavy metal. Without at least a minimum interest in abstract music, the book may not have as much of an impact. If you are a devil's horn denim and leather wharf rat then this book is all gravy. Highly recommended for headbangers. John Wray, if you ever see this review, I cracked the logos coding and path.

Buy your copy HERE.

Fatherland

The premise of Robert Harris’ most acclaimed novel, Fatherland (1992), is an interesting thought-experiment expanded into an alternate-history crime novel. The premise? What if Germany won World War Two and controlled Europe for decades thereafter under the leadership of Adolph Hitler?

The year is 1964, and the German Nazi party presides over Europe’s The Greater German Reich with an aging Hitler still at the helm. Our guide through this world is a Berlin police detective named Xavier March who, of course, investigates crimes for the Reich while driving a Volkswagen.

The novel begins with the discovery of an old man’s corpse by Berlin’s Havel River. March is assigned the case, and watching him investigate is a total pleasure. He’s so good. The author does a great deal of world-building for the reader to understand the fictional events of WW2 and the world as it exists in the Fatherland universe. I won’t spoil anything here, but Harris really thought this through.

The mystery of the riverside corpse opens the door to other mysteries for March to solve. He’s a good, honest cop working in a paranoid system with multiple layers of secretive bureaucracy and hidden truths.

Despite the excellence of the mysteries and the protagonist, the real star of the show here is the alternative history setting. The author seems to have thought of everything in his imagining of what the world would have looked like in 1964 Europe under Hitler’s unbroken reign and how a more successful Reich would have hidden it’s atrocities from the eyes of the world.

However you read it, it’s a certainty that you’ll enjoy this paperback quite a bit. The book has sold three million copies and been translated into 25 languages. There was also a so-so HBO film adaptation starring Rutger Howard. But start with the book. Always the book. Get it HERE.

Paperback Warrior Podcast - Episode 110

In this last episode of 2024, Eric takes a breathtaking leap into the high-adventure, high-octane world of Alistair MacLean. He dives into MacLean's career with capsule reviews and descriptions of every single novel including commentary on the various films and screenplays spawned by the author's work. In addition, Eric remembers the late Robert Randisi and reviews a historical action-adventure novel titled Viking Slave. A companion to this podcast episode can be found HERE which showcases Eric's robust Alistair MacLean book collection. Stream the episode below or download HERE. 

Listen to "Episode 110: Alistair MacLean" on Spreaker.

Conan - Lord of the Mount

British publisher Titan Books began licensing Robert E. Howard's Conan character from Heroic Signatures in 2022. The publisher has been very active in printing a new series of Conan the Barbarian comics and The Savage Sword of Conan magazine. In addition, the publisher has thrust the character into novels and novellas like S.M. Stirling's Blood of the Serpent. In 2023 the publisher launched a series of ebook short stories dedicated to Conan and other characters like Solomon Kane and Belit titled Heroic Legends. The first of the stories was Conan: Lord of the Mount, published in September 2023 as an ebook and authored by Stephen Graham Jones (Night of the Mannequins, I Was a Teenage Slasher).

In this 23-page story, Conan awakens as a cow is licking his face. He has no clear memory of what has happened to him other than he was engaged in battle with the Two Kings' army. A cattle farmer named Jen Ro is nearby and he explains that he thought Conan was another sacrifice to something called Lord of the Mount. Jen Ro then uses some sort of magical black lotus to cut a piece of steak from a live cow. Weird. Just weird.

Jen Ro advises Conan that if he will ride with him and the cattle through a mountain pass then he will bring him to the fabled village of Trinnecerl where “your cup will never run dry”. The catch is that Conan will kill this aggravating creature deemed Lord of the Mount. 

The duo venture through the pass and Conan fights the creature(s). He learns that Jen Ro had a reason for leading him to the creature and the reader is left with this very forgettable story. 

Needless to say, this may be one of the worst Conan stories I've read this far. It was shocking to me considering that Stephen Graham Jones, a quality writer, wrote this kind of uninspired drivel. While I've read some mixed reviews of these new Titan shorts, I had no idea that it would be this underwhelming. Or, how someone like Jones became involved in this. He clearly has no understanding of the Conan character. An example would be in this scene when the creature claws Conan's stomach: “Conan screamed, rolled away, and when he came down it was to nearly impale himself on the faint purple horns of a long-dead cow or bull.” Two words - “Conan screamed”. That doesn't happen. 

Conan's dialogue and mannerisms fail to match what fans have come to expect from the mighty Cimmerian. Granted, every author has a unique perspective on the characteristics and traits, but they should still have a uniform scope to preserve the integrity of the character and series. Despite the identification issues, the story just isn't that interesting. 

Conan: Lord of the Mount is nothing short of abysmal. Even at the $2 price point it isn't worth the pixels it possesses.

The Vendetta

Marvin Albert (1924-1996) was a paperback pioneer whose writing career spanned over five decades, multiple genres and a handful of pseudonyms, including Nick Quarry. The Vendetta (1973) was his attempt to capitalize on the popularity of The Godfather.

The year is 1921, and prohibition has outlawed liquor in the USA, but that’s not stopping the good people of the (unnamed, but certainly New York) city’s Little Italy from enjoying a libation or two. Especially at an Italian restaurant where humble everyman Paolo Regubuto, age 30, waits tables. When a couple of liquor salesmen come into the restaurant looking to supply Paolo’s restaurant with bootleg alcohol from the Irish mob, he politely declines the men in favor of his own Italian supplier.

To send a message, the rejected salesmen return that night and explode Paolo’s restaurant with dynamite. This hospitalizes Paolo while killing his wife and kids who are in the basement apartment. Rather than sparking a mob war, no one seems to care much about Paolo, his family or his restaurant. If Paolo wants justice, he’ll need to find it himself.

Thus The Vendetta is born.

Things get extremely violent as he hunts the men directly and indirectly responsible for his family’s death. I’m serious here. This isn’t for the weak-of-stomach. Paolo also puts together a crew of young men from the neighborhood to help him in his crusade. The author essentially took the model of a violent war against the mafia adventure paperback, and placed it in a Godfather wrapper - and it works.

Paolo hunting and killing mafia bosses is the best part of the novel, but there’s also quite a bit about the conflicts between mob factions seeking control of bootlegging that was far less fascinating. But if you’re into underworld power struggle stories, you’ll probably enjoy it just fine.

But overall The Vendetta is a winner, and men’s adventure paperback fans will find a lot to enjoy in this thin, well-written novel. Recommended.