The hero of John Updike’s first novel, published when the author was twenty-six, is ninety-four-year-old John Hook, a dying man who yet refuses to be dominated.
In the near future, as America virtually loses the war on drugs, Robert Arctor, a narcotics cop in Orange County, Calif., becomes an addict when he goes under cover. He is wooing Donna, a dealer, to ferret out her supplier. At the same time, he receives orders to spy on his housemates, one of whom is suspected of being Donna’s biggest customer.
In Knight in the Snake Pit, we follow a character Allister Ward who is stuck in two worlds, jumping back and forth at random. One world is 1940’s Los Angeles, where he’s a patient at a mental hospital and the other world is a medieval fantasy world, where he’s being begged by a king to save his daughter and his kingdom from an impending invasion that could happen at any moment.
Allister must determine if he’s really suffering from delusions or if everything in both worlds is real. If that’s the case, he needs to worry about how to not get killed by his “delusions.”
Set in the not so distant future, the DC Universe is spinning inexorably out of control. The new generation of heroes has lost their moral compass, becoming just as reckless and violent as the villains they fight. With Batman retired, Superman in a self-imposed exile and the rest of the Justice League nowhere to be found, it seems that all hope is lost.
Rosemary’s Baby is a 1967 horror novel by American writer Ira Levin, his second published book. It sold over 4 million copies, “making it the top bestselling horror novel of the 1960s.”
