Voices under the Sun 陽光下的聲音

Thriftbooks has put out a list of (preloved) books about supernatural powers, which of course grabs my attention. Among the nine titles included in their e-newsletter are some familiar names, such as James Herbert, Dean Koontz and Joe Hill. I have reserved and will soon receive the horror film The Unholy (2021) from my local library, which was adapted from Herbert’s novel Shrine (1983). As for Hill, I enjoyed his Horns (2010), but the novels NOS4A2 (2013) and The Fireman (2016) also look like good reads.

Also read about three other interesting authors, who are Faith Hunter, Edgar Cantero and Douglas Clegg. The new word I learned today is “epistolary”, with an “epistolary novel” meaning a work “written as a series of letters between the fictional characters of a narrative” and may also include other kids of fictional print and digital documents such as letters, diary entries, newspaper clippings, recordings, radio transcripts, blog posts and emails, etc.

But this post is about false memory and mistaken identity. i.e. I have always remembered Dean Koontz as the one who writes medical thrillers, and therefore found his novel Twilight Eyes (1985) – about a guy using his psychic powers to hunt Goblins – a bit “out of character”. It took me a (long) while to realise the medical thriller writer in my memory should be Robin Cook! Growing up, I read some of Cook’s novels that had been translated into Chinese (perhaps illegally) and were very impressed by them, although I can’t remember what they are now. A quick search revealed these to be Brain (1980), Fever (1982), Godplayer (1983), Mindbend (1985) and Outbreak (1987).

(Day 72 #WarmWinterRead #WWR25 via @librarieschangelives)