Word: ghosting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...SHUs New Mexico State University's Chile Pepper Institute last week certified the Bhut Jolokia, or "ghost chili," from India as the hottest ever tested. By comparison, most pepper sprays come in at 2 to 5 million SHUs...
...jaded and cruel and bored and emotionally shut-down, living in rural splendor in a converted farmhouse with his various disposable goth girlfriends, his recording days long behind him. He likes to collect gruesome artifacts like snuff films. "When Danny Wooten, his personal assistant, told him there was a ghost for sale on the Internet and asked did he want to buy it, Jude didn't even need to think...
...This turns out to be a tactical error. The ghost, a dapper old man with scribbled-over eyes, is very real and very evil, with a surprise personal stake in ruining Coyne's life, and it sets about its business in a fine, frightening style. Hill has a nice touch with those sinking moments when you suddenly realize that things, which you knew to be bad, are so very much worse than you ever could have imagined. "The dead pull the living down," is one of the ghost's tag lines, and it does its level best to deliver...
...Soon Coyne is out of his house and on the road with his girlfriend, Georgia, racing the ghost (who drives a phantom pickup) south in search of the woman who sold it to him in the first place. There are quite a few artfully scary supernatural manifestations along the way - at various points the ghost takes control of the car radio, of a Ouija board, of other drivers, and even of the electronic voicebox of a stranger in a restaurant who's had a laryngectomy...
...cathartic. A lot of horror writers wind up revealing a sentimental streak in the end, but if Hill has one he keeps it well in check. This is, ultimately, a book about fathers and sons: Coyne must come to terms with his abusive father, and with the avenging ghost, who is the father of another key character. It's an appropriate enough theme for Hill, because every artist has to work in the shadow of his or her father-in-art, and symbolically, Oedipally overcome him, and in Hill's case his father-in-art is also his literal, biological...