Coma Books

I liked this book. Each chapter jumps from present day to past events leading to this unknown horrible event that you are reminded of in every chapter but you don't know what it is. I liked the book but I only gave it 3 stars b/cs I didn't like the ending.

The book was confusing and dreadful. The only thing I can say good about it is that it mentioned places in Minnesota I am familiar with.

Minnesota is a cold place. The memory of mild weather is the only thing that gives hope to the people living there as they battle the long hard winters. Lewis Ingraham is feeling the chill of winter hard this year. He's on antidepressants after the recent torturous death of his wife from cancer and his daughter, Jay only twenty-three with a preschool child of her own, is dating a man Lewis detests.

Lewis isn't certain of much lately. At the advanced age of forty-seven he let his high paying executive career fade away after his wife's death and he's struggling to pay the bills from his new job as a salesmen in a men's store. The medication he's taking doesn't seem to help much because he's as unhappy and bitter as he's ever been, and in addition he isn't in control of his emotions. His boss has told him he's been acting strangely. Lewis is going on a downward spiral of depression and he has negative, sometime violent feelings towards his daughter's boyfriend, Stephen. In his mind, the only reason to continue living is his daughter and his granddaughter; for those two he would fight to the death. As his mental instability progresses, Lewis becomes more comfortable with the idea that doing violence to Stephen would help cement his family together and when his dead wife appears to him, he decides the family must be reunited.

Beautiful and brilliant, Jay is also having a difficult time of it this year. Her mother's death has made life difficult, not only that they loved each other but now she has no buffer between her father and herself. Always a hard emotionally aloof and cold man, her father Lewis never lets Jay forget that she made a mistake by dropping out of a bright college future to have her baby, as an unwed mother, at age nineteen. Jay is working as a waitress and feels stuck in her life. Her father is calling her on the phone from morning to night and she doesn't have the heart or energy to tell him to back off. She's also dating a college professor Stephen and her father hates him. Her father's constant undermining of the relationship is making Jay miserable.

There isn't much suspense in the overall book as the opening chapter starts with an altercation, the most violent act in the story, and then goes back in time to show how it came about. As the outside temperature plummets the outlook for everyone in the story does too.

14 Degrees Below Zero is advertised as a story of psychological suspense but it is not for the usual suspense lover. It's a dark story that's unrelenting in the desperation and despair of its characters and the cold and dark skies of the Minnesota location contributes to the overall feel of the story. Well written, Quinton Skinner, the author will take you through the character's emotional turmoil and will leave you feeling as wrung out and bleak as everyone in the book.

Like everything of Charlotte Armstrong's that I have read, this book (originally published in 1966) is an engaging, nicely plotted suspense novel. The characters are interesting, the plot makes sense, and the book is fun to read without being demanding. What makes Charlotte Armstrong stand out of the crowd of similar authors is her clear, unsentimental voice.

This novel is not her best (A Dram of Poison and The Gift Shop, to my mind) but it's very nice. Read it & you'll be scouring libraries & second-hand bookstores for more.

This is a very muddled story of identical twins, very attractive, blonde daughters of a drink sodden, once attractive harridan and a skip-out father. One of the girls is a wanna-be movie star and the other, a slow witted and easily manipulated child. One of these girls appears at the door of medical technician, Matt Cuneen and his mother, in answer to the "room to let" sign in the window. She promptly puts herself to bed and descends into an unwakeable sleep which alarms the Cuneens to the point where they take her to the local hospital to see if they can awaken her. The story leaks to the press via a nosy, pushy reporter who publishes a photo of the sleeping girl in the paper. A man appears at the hospital, claiming that the girl is his ward, Dorothy Daws, a very rich heiress whose estate he manages, and who needs, he claims, to be removed from the hospital, to his personal care. From there, the plots thickens into a muddle of police, doctors, a cult leader and an ex-husband. Save it for when you're really desperate for something, anything, to read.

I was so happy when I accidentally came across this book. I LOVED both the original book and the movie with John Cassavetes and Mia Farrow, so I was thrilled to find out that a sequel had been written so many years later.

I wish I had never seen this book. After I finished reading it, I felt so angry. How dare anyone -- let alone the original author -- totally tear down the ENTIRE plot of the original story, which was so perfectly written and filmed.

I promptly threw this book in the trash, where it belongs. I couldn't even bring myself to sell it. I wouldn't want any fan to experience the extreme disappointment and anger that I did.

Appalling!

"Son of Rosemary", Ira Levin's 1999 follow-up to the wonderful "Rosemary's Baby", was not as horrible as I expected but was much worse than I hoped. Gone is the subtle nuances and shadowy tension of the original novel. Instead, Levin who attempts to re-create the mysterious intensions of his characters and fails, pushes forth an unbelievable plot with characters lacking any sort of common sense.

The major problem with "Son of Rosemary" is that Ira Levin introduces a scenario that is so unbelievable in such a quick fashion that the story has no chance of credibility right from the beginning. Rosemary who wakes from a thirty-three year coma finds her son has grown into a charismatic international celebrity leading a group called God's Children (GC). With the new millennium approaching, the GC has organized a worldwide show of solidarity with Rosemary's son Andy as the messiah. The implausibility of the world rallying around a pseudo spiritual leader like Andy with everyone wearing "I love Andy" buttons and watching GC specials on TV was laughable. Of course with no back story this premise is thrust upon the reader in a few pages and seems so manufactured that the novel never recovers.

Another issue is that Rosemary does not resemble the character we were concerned about so many years ago. After thirty-three years in a coma Rosemary accepts her son's new role so quickly that she is doing press conferences, interviews, attending staff meetings and producing television spots for the GC. Huh? What happened to Guy? What happened to her friends? What happened to the father of Andy? For a woman absent from the world for so long and the mother of the son of the devil, she sure doesn't have any problems assimilating herself into her new life. She does worry shallowly about Andy's intentions, but is just as pleased to overlook a myriad of susceptible behavior by her son and those around him.

The ending that has so enraged many readers was in fact quite clever and the only redeeming portion of the novel. The reader needs to recognize what is actually happening instead of just accepting Rosemary's explanation. I found the ending (really there are two endings) good and creative but not good enough to rescue the implausibility of the rest of the novel.

Written thirty years after the hugely successful Rosemary's Baby, this sequel is not the wonderfully creepy book the that its predecessor was. Rosemary wakes from a coma just before the dawn of the new millennium to find her son Andy a worldwide phenomenon spreading his message of peace, unity, and love. But of course, only he and Rosemary know his true heritage and Rosemary seeks to discover if there are ulterior motives to his altruistic plan.

The writing was choppy, sometimes confusing, and there was absolutely no suspense. The only slightly compelling aspect of the plot was Andy's moral uncertainty, being half human and half devil, torn between the destructive grand schemes of his father, and the love and innocence of his mother. However, the ending didn't deliver and I felt let down that I had gotten through the whole of this substandard novel only to encounter an even more disappointing conclusion. Mind you, it's a quick read, but it doesn't leave its reader anything to dwell on or savor.

Place this one at the top of the list of sequels that never should have been written. The plot is ridiculous and the writing abysmal, coming nowhere near the brilliance of the original book, which Levin ultimately dismisses with an unexpected plot twist that leaves the reader dumbfounded and angry. Furthermore, his failure to reveal the anagram of ROAST MULES, which he continually touts as a key element of the story, is frustrating and inexcusable. What a tragic way to end what was an otherwise noteworthy writing career.

This book should never have been written-shame on Ira Levin. Was he senile when he wrote it or just hard up for money? I kept on reading, hoping for the same tension that kept me on the edge of my seat when I read the original. I was sadly disappointed. And when the climax finally came(Joe nobody is Satan?-why?)it seemed lame. Adrian(Andrew) is nailed to the wall? Talk about your cliches. And I found the whole "Strawberry fields" thing preposterous(poor John Lennon). Then the ending, when it was all a dream, and the Bram is now the Dakota, which was black, which is now pink? Huh? Musings of a senile old man, if you ask me. So, it never happened? This kind of reminds me of the way they ended "St. Elsewhere" as a dream in an autistic child's snowglobe. Another WTF moment. Please, send this awful story back to whence it came-the depths of hell!

I thought this book was going to be sooooo good! It was on my wish list for the longest time and I finally got it about a week ago. Now I wish I didn't! Personally I thought it was a waste of money! In a nutshell, the story's about a girl getting rescued by her loner admierer Simon and forms a "bond" with him etc,etc,etc. But all througout the book the character Helen keeps having these dreams about her little rock star idol. She later falls in a coma from an accident and yet again the dreams come to her, only this time while she's in a coma. The ending was horrible and disappoing and besides that, I found never ending mistakes all throughout the book! I admit the plot is good. It's what made me buy the book in the first place, but it wasn't well written...or edited! Esp with all the mistakes I found. I wouldn't waste your money!