Last month, after an intense study of 200 young adults roughly 18 and 19 years old, researchers learned the following: Put a pretty girl in front of a guy for three minutes and he becomes a bonobo monkey. It doesn’t matter if he’s as homely as Homer Simpson: He’s going to convince himself he looks […]
Tag Archives: The Night Strangers
At some point this week, perhaps even today, I will stand a live fir tree in the bay window in my living room, my small way of buying my family’s six cats’ affection for another year. Trust me, there is no better cat toy than a Christmas tree. As much as my cats enjoy a […]
Okay, ice skating fans and men of a certain age who had serious boyhood crushes on Peggy Fleming: How many of you immediately envision rivers of snot whenever you recall Fleming on ice? Answer: Zero. Actually, that’s not correct. Someone somewhere made the connection between the Olympic figure skating gold medalist and phlegm. She is […]
Among the papers my brother and I brought back from Florida after our father died this summer was his honorable discharge from the U.S. Army. The papers show that he enlisted in the Army when he was 17, weeks after graduating from high school in Yonkers, New York in 1945. It was July. By then […]
So, THIS was a pleasant surprise: THE NIGHT STRANGERS is a finalist in the Horror Category of Goodreads 2011 Choice Awards. I must confess, I did not see that coming And what thrilled me the most was this: The process. According to Goodreads’ Jessica Donaghy, “We analyzed statistics from the 87 million books added, rated, […]
Halloween is fast approaching, a holiday that is all about good taste, decorum, and style. And nothing says elegance more than a $35 “slutty nurse” costume from Spencer Gifts. Actually, that’s not true. There are plenty of “do-it-yourself” ways to make a bold and humiliating fashion statement this Halloween. I asked readers for some daring […]
It’s a paperback that cost 45 cents when it was brand new. It’s a little more squat and wide than a traditional mass market edition, and has a red moon and a black bird on the cover. I wrote my name atop the first page with a blue Magic Marker, the ink bleeding through the […]
Earlier this month I was at the single digit A gates at Washington’s Dulles Airport late on a Saturday afternoon. There are few airport concourses in this country more reminiscent of the American embassy in Saigon in 1975 – as South Vietnam is collapsing once and for all – than this corner of Dulles: It […]
I’ve now had my first fire in the woodstove, which means the Lincoln Volunteer Fire Company is on high alert. Okay, that’s an exaggeration. They’re only on medium alert — sort of like the old Homeland Security color-coded warning system, which was set always at orange. Orange, you will recall, meant, “We have no credible threat, […]
That headline is a line from Nanore Barsoumian’s review of “The Night Strangers.” I love it. But there have been other terrific lines so far, too. To wit, this one from Justin Cronin in his review: “To put the matter succinctly: The first chapter of Chris Bohjalian’s The Night Strangers is so riveting, I dropped the book […]
