I just found an interesting mystery blog out of New Zealand called Crime Watch. The blogpost from Thursday, November 18 refers to an article from The Guardian about settings for mystery books, written by crime fiction expert Maxim Jakubowski. I'm posting "The Top 10 Crime Locations" according to Jakubowski. For the full article, including explanations for these choices, click here for guardian.co.uk.

1. Los Angeles in Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep (1939)
2. London in Derek Raymond's I was Dora Suarez (1990)
3. New Orleans in James Lee Burke's The Neon Rain (1987)
4. Paris in Fred Vargas's Have Mercy On Us All (2001)
5. Bologna in Barbara Baraldi's The Girl With the Crystal Eyes (2008)
6. Brighton in Peter James's Dead Simple (2005)
7. Miami in Charles Willeford's Miami Blues (1984)
8. San Francisco in Joe Gores's Spade and Archer (2009)
9. Oxford in Colin Dexter's The Dead Of Jericho (1981)
10. New York in Lawrence Block's Small Town (2003)

There are books I have to be ready to read. I don't just mean "in the mood for". Rather, I refer to books that I know are going to be painful or emotionally draining for me to read; those that cause a visceral response. But read them I do, because when I know about all the bad things that happen in the world, it makes the good things seem even better.

Recently I decided it was time to read the highly acclaimed Night by Elie Wiesel. An autobiographical account of Wiesel's internment at the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps in 1944 and 1945, it is a short work of true life horrors. Although the people in his town were warned of the coming atrocities, they thought it was too terrible to be true. Elie and his father were separated from their family (who they never saw again), forced to work with a meager amount to eat and little sleep, Elie experienced as a teenager things that should never happen to anyone, anywhere. His love for his father is strained by contempt for his father's sickness, which in turn causes Elie no end of shame. Night is harsh, frightening, shocking and just unthinkable, but through it all there is a desperate love, camaraderie from shared experience, and for some, a bittersweet survival.

Call them reimaginings, retellings, alternative literature or historical horror. Classic literature or famous figures with a horrific something added to the story has become terrifically trendy. Not for literary purists. These books are geared to those of us who find the absurd hysterically humorous, and can easily imagine Abraham Lincoln planning the elimination of the undead to save the nation.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter

Paul is Undead: The Beatles Zombie Invasion

"On those cloudy days, Robert Neville was never sure when sunset came, and sometimes they were in the streets before he could get back." 

~ from I Am Legend by Richard Matheson

Vampires, vampires, vampires! You've got Bram Stoker's Dracula, Anne Rice's Lestat, Sharon Drake's Carpathians, Bill from the Southern Vampire Series by Charlaine Harris, Edward and the whole Cullen clan who sprang forth from the Twilight Saga by Stephenie Meyers, and numerous others. They're sexy. They're cool. They may not drink blood, but they want to. And right now vampires and their undead friends are riding a big wave of popularity.

The vampires of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend may not be pretty, but they are downright scary. Written in 1954, the story takes place in the future 1976. Robert Neville is quite sure that after a horrible plague, he is the last living man on earth. But he is not the only moving creature. The plague has left behind monsters, bloodthirsty vampires who fear and hate Neville for being different, and at night they attempt to attack and destroy him. Although he quests for the cause and a cure for the vampire virus, Neville is forced to realize he is the only member left of the "old race". Recommended for thrills, chills and plain good writing.