Mini-reviews!

The Screaming Room, by Thomas O'Callaghan

Thomas O'Callaghan's The Screaming Room is not a book for the faint of heart or the weak of stomach. It's a thriller featuring a series of gruesome, sexually motivated killings (all of which are committed by a pair of teenaged twins who were themselves horribly abused as children) and is the second book to feature O’Callaghan's manly-yet-sensitive hero, NYPD homicide detective John Driscoll.

I can't say that this book was a total waste of time: after all, I did learn something (I had to look up the word "anthracite"* when O'Callaghan used it to describe his heroine's hair). And if one can get past all the stomach-churning details, O'Callaghan is a competent writer. Unfortunately, The Screaming Room is less of a thriller than it is an exercise in endurance, consisting of countless pages of gory murder scenes, horrible flashbacks of abuse, and young children discovering mutilated bodies. There are undoubtedly people out there that want to read a hybrid of Flowers in the Attic and Silence of the Lambs, but I am not among them.

*It's a kind of coal, in case you were wondering.


Queen of the Underworld, by Gail Godwin

I'm not sure whether Gail Godwin's semi-autobiographical novel Queen of the Underworld was actually a good book or if it just seemed that way because I was still recovering from The Screaming Room, but I'm confident that it was at least a huge improvement--a sharp, elegantly written story about a young woman working to establish herself as a journalist in post-Castro Miami.

Queen of the Underworld opens in 1959, when twenty-one-year-old Emma Gant becomes the newest reporter for The Miami Star. Living in a hotel full of Cuban immigrants, Emma spends her nights pining after her married lover and her days getting to know the eclectic group of people that surround her--including former madam Ginevra Brown, the so-called "Queen of the Underworld".

It's tough to warm up to a character that is unrepentantly having an affair with a married man (one with a perfectly lovely wife), but there's no denying that Godwin makes eager, brash Emma seem like a real person. Queen of the Underworld drifts to a close, leaving far too many of its plot twists unresolved, but it works beautifully as a "slice of life" novel, painting a vibrant picture of a time and place.