Rex’s reviews of anything (but mostly books)

No one knew where they came from. Few knew they existed at all; fewer still could hope to comprehend them. What little was known about the Triangles could easily be inscribed on a 3×5 index card without having to write small:

• people who had Triangles were studies in paranoia
• they always ended up killing others in a murderous rage
• the bodies of the infected decayed at an astounding rate after death
• no one had been infected and lived

There had only been half a dozen cases or so, all near the base of Michigan’s thumb. The tiny team investigating these cases were operating with the working hypothesis that whatever caused the Triangles was a heretofore undreamed-of bioweapon. A trio of CIA agents and a couple of CDC pathologists were, so far, all that stood between the Triangles and the rest of the world – the “need to know” just didn’t extend any farther.

Perry Dawsey knew, of course – he knew all about the Triangles, since he had seven of them growing on various corners of his body. Perry’s Magnificent Seven weren’t so magnificent though, just insidious. Of course, when your selection process is random, there’s always the chance that you’ll make a mistake… and the Triangles just might have made a mistake in landing on “Scary Perry” Dawsey, once an All-American linebacker for the U of M.

A couple of badass spooks, a pair of cutters, and a twenty-something computer support tech with a blown-out knee: they’re all that stand between the Triangles and the rest of humanity. It’s the stuff of legend – of Infected. Read the rest of this entry »

Life can change forever in the blink of an eye. Edgar Freemantle learned that tidbit when the irresistible force that was his body collided with the immovable object that was a 100-ton crane. That meeting scrambled his brain, crushed his hip, and severed his right arm. Six months later, partially rehabbed and newly divorced, Edgar’s shrink suggested that he needed a hobby. “I used to draw a little,” he mused. Life can change forever in the blink of an eye, or it can take a little longer: Edgar Freemantle may have thought his changes were over, but he was wrong.

Edgar has departed the icy winter of Minnesota for Florida; taking up residence in an isolated beach house he’d rented sight unseen. “Big Pink,” as he calls his temporary home, has somehow become his Muse: from that very first night he began to draw and then to paint; works of a depth and power he’d never before sensed within him. It is as if something has flipped a switch inside his raddled brain: the art simply pours out of him. Some of it he could swear he’s painted with his right arm: those are the ones that frightened him…

The only other residents of Duma Key are Edgar’s landlady, eighty-something Elizabeth Eastlake, and her companion Wireman. These three disparate people are bound by more than mere geography, however; for a thing of great evil is awakening on the tiny island. Awakening for the first time in eighty years, awakening even as the only person who remembers how to defeat it slips slowly into the darkness within her mind.

If Edgar Freemantle thinks the changes in his life are done, he has another think a-comin’. Read the rest of this entry »