And then I added shading and tone with a good old fashioned B art pencil.
Partly because I was working on this and partly because I noticed that the third book had come out I started reading Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein. Despite having a bit of an obsession for the Frankenstein Monster I don’t seem to need to pay attention to all the movies and novels that feature him (or versions of him). The movies are often entertaining. And, as I write this, I realize that, with the exception of a story by Brian Hodge in one of his short story collections I haven’t read any other prose continuations or sequels to Shelly’s novel. That’s not really surprising I suppose. My Frankensteinian interest is newer than most of my other monster obsessions.
I finished Prodigal Son the first book in Koontz’s trilogy. It’s an easy read – clean prose, short chapters and a variety of characters. I’ve got the other two volumes on request at the library. It will be interesting to see where the story goes.
I have a couple of those Koontz Frankensteins in my browsing paperbacks collection at Claremont. So far no one’s bit.
Do Koontz’s books get much play in general? I know he’s a best selling author and all but, at least from my experience at Half Price Books, most best selling authors’ novels have a limited appeal. The author’s fans buy them, read them and forget about them. We always liked to have at least one copy of the authors’ books in stock but, most of the time, one copy was plenty. Three copies meant it was time for a discount. And that was in paperback. A year old hardback was automatically discounted.
Ha! I learned this, too. The mass market size best sellers are usually duds. Koontz among them.
I don’t deal with hardcovers but the Friends of the Library don’t want the library’s hardcover fiction discards – there’s no market.
I finished the trilogy yesterday. It was never dull reading. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who wasn’t already a fan of Koontz or Frankenstein but I was entertained.
I have this feeling that the people who read best sellers and the people who read a lot are mostly two separate groups of people. Sure, the best seller reader reads a few books that are not found at the supermarket and the active reader probably reads a best seller now and then but, over all there’s not much border crossing. Not that I have any real evidence to back up this theory.
I had a woman come to the Info Desk asking me to recommend a book – fiction, a best seller, preferably recently made into a movie (or about to be made into a movie). I asked her if she had a particular novel in mind. She did. Fortunately I was able to find a copy for her.