Phil Leader (619 KP) rated The Big Over Easy (Nursery Crime, #1) in Books
Nov 8, 2019
Investigated by detective Jack Spratt (usefully the name Jack is quite common in nursery rhymes) and his new partner Mary Mary we meet a number of characters from nursery rhymes, songs and myth and legend. As the body count rises Jack and Mary must do what all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't, and assemble the pieces of Humpty's demise to find the culprit.
The world Fforde creates - a fictional version of the town of Reading (and strongly implied to be the same world that Thursday Next lives in, in the book-within-a-book Caversham Heights) works suprisingly well, perhaps because other than the traits inherited from their nursery rhymes the characters are otherwise conventional. So Jack can't eat any fat and is destined to sell something for beans, but at the core is a straightforward detective.
This contrasts with, say, The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse by Robert Rankin which again is a detective story populated with nursery rhyme characters (and poor Humpty is again a victim, but in a very different murder) where the setting is in Toyland so doesn't have the grounding of reality that The Big Over Easy does.
The plot itself is very complex - there are red herrings, theories and suspects galore - and Fforde enjoys playing with the reader as much as with Jack. And there is of course humour aplenty, both simple gags from the story and characters and also some good knowing winks to the reader when events mirror the characters' nursery rhymes. Above all Fforde never forgets that this is after all a detective novel.
Probably not quite as good as the Thursday Next books but definitely a good read and will entertain from the first to the last page.
Cat's Cradle
Kurt Vonnegut and Benjamin Kunkel
9.3
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Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle is an irreverent and highly entertaining fantasy about the playful...
Into the Dead 2
Games
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Journey through the zombie apocalypse in a race to save your family. Arm yourself with an arsenal of...
Dead on Arrival 2
Games and Entertainment
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Intense co-operative zombie survival! PLEASE NOTE: Not compatible with iPhone 4 and iPod touch 4th...
Bible Louis Segond
Reference and Book
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Téléchargez cette nouvelle application qui vous offre une Bible audio pour écouter et lire la...
60 Seconds! Atomic Adventure
Games
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60 Seconds! is a dark comedy atomic adventure of scavenge and survival. Collect supplies and rescue...
Twisted World
8.0
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Twenty years ago a deadly virus swept the globe, ravaging the population. People died and came back...
Post Apocalyptic Apocalypse Dystopia Dystopian Zombies
The Amory Wars: The Second Stage Turbine Blade
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Released in the summer of 2004, the comic books narrate the events of approximately the first third...
Bob Mann (459 KP) rated Army of the Dead (2021) in Movies
Sep 28, 2021
Positives:
Park brain at door. You gotta love the splatter-fest of a zombie-movie once in a while, and this one delivers a lot of requisite gore and a zombie white tiger to boot! You have to admit that Zack Snyder does have an eye for style. There are some neat moments in this… like when the casino power comes back on and the silence is filled with that familiar slot machine noise and Elvis track that you only ever hear at scale in Vegas!
Dave Bautista is nearly always either in an ensemble piece or a bit-part “heavy” – the only other film I can immediately think of is the (very funny) comedy “Stuber“. He’s seldom the lead. But, understanding that the script is horribly vomit-inducing in places, he’s pretty good in this. I also liked Ella Purnell who plays his daughter, although couldn’t get over how much she looks like Olivia Cooke!
The special effects and prosthetics work is pretty impressive. This would have been good to see on the big screen.
Negatives:
Interspersed amongst the (often entertaining) action sequences are some horribly soupy sections of dialogue where the forward momentum of the movie completely stalls.
Some of the acting is on the decidedly ropey side and makes the glossy piece feel more like a B-movie.
A number of elements of the story really don’t make sense. The most blatant happens at the end: Tanaka could have got the money anyway!
At nearly two and a half hours, it’s another Snyder bladder-tester.
Laura Doe (1350 KP) rated Last One at the Party in Books
Jan 12, 2023
The book is a series of diary entries and a couple of transcripts from a woman who tells us about a new pandemic, only a few years after the covid-19 pandemic, there is a new one called 6DM, and it has a 0% survival rate. Everyone is terrified and can do nothing to stop it ripping through the population of each country. Pharmacies end up giving out pills that will help people to end it before the symptoms of 6DM get too bad for people to cope with.
The person writing the diary entries never introduces us to her so we never find out her name, but we know all about her life and her family. She goes between writing what is currently happening and how she is coping in a world where she seems to be the only survivor and going back in time to the years leading up to the 6DM pandemic.
Although she doesn’t exactly do what most people would do when thinking they’re the only person alive (trying to survive by finding somewhere safe to stay with food, water and any other essentials) she instead goes on a little bit of a drink and drug bender until she is shocked back into reality. She becomes mostly desensitised to everything around her including the many dead bodies that she stumbles across. But in the end she does realise that she needs to make some attempt to survive and make a life for herself, even if it is going to be a lonely life.
The story ends on a cliffhanger, and I really do hope that this means that Bethany Clift will write a sequel as I’m dying to know what happened to our unnamed diarist after the last transcript! Thank you to Bethany Clift and the Pigeonhole for the chance to read this incredible story.