A couple of years ago I made a few suggestions for books that Panatics might be interested in checking out: Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot, Cycle of the Werewolf, and The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon; Charles Portis’s True Grit; Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes; Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange; and Giorman Berchard’s The Second Greatest Story Ever Told. You can read my mini-reviews here.
Well, with summer 2014 officially starting tomorrow, what better time for a new list of books you might want to consider? This one’s a little shorter, but they’re still good choices (in my humble opinion).
The Day of the Triffids, by John Wyndham: First published in 1951, it’s a fast-paced, enjoyable science fiction adventure that would seem to have been an influence on the quasi-zombie apocalypse film 28 Days Later (a patient in a hospital wakes up to find himself apparently the only unaffected person in a ravaged London). Except instead of zombies, you have carnivorous plants hunting a human population that’s been mostly stricken blind by the light of a passing comet. But as the lead characters quickly learn, it’s not the Triffids that pose the greatest threat, but the other unaffected humans…
Rosemary’s Baby, by Ira Levin: The 1968 Mia Farrow–starring film adaptation is a horror masterpiece, and Zoe (Guardians of the Galaxy) Saldana starred in a 2014 television miniseries remake that was well received, but Ira Levin’s 1967 source novel is a brisk, entertaining masterpiece of its own. Rosemary and Guy Woodward move into an NYC apartment building with a long history of witchcraft and devil worship—and the current residents have plans for Rosemary… Apart from cultural references that firmly set the story in 1960s New York, the story remains as enjoyably horrific and humorously macabre as it did almost fifty years ago.
The King in Yellow, by Robert W. Chambers: This 1895 short story collection influenced not only writers like H. P. Lovecraft, Grant Morrison, and Stephen King, but also served as a major plot point in the first season of HBO’s acclaimed series True Detective, starring Matthew McConaghey and Woody Harrelson. The conceit is that The King in Yellow, a fictitious two-act play, drives people mad when they read the second act (which is never reproduced in the book). The first four stories in the collection are linked to the play. Download The King in Yellow e-book for free from ManyBooks.net.
And of course…
Blood Feud: The Saga of Pandora Zwieback, Book 1: What, I shouldn’t plug my first Pan novel—on the very site dedicated to the series it’s part of? 😉 With its sequel, Blood Reign, soon to make its long-awaited appearance, this is the perfect time to catch up on the start of Pan’s debut adventure (if you or your book-loving friends haven’t already read it, that is). Warring vampire clans! Fallen angels! Monster hunters! Romance! Danger! Pick up a copy and find out why HorrorNews.net called Blood Feud “far and away one of the best young adult supernatural fantasy novels released in the last few years.”
So get to reading—and have a great summer!
Blood Reign: The Saga of Pandora Zwieback, Book 2
And please keep in mind that Pan’s publisher, 
Don’t worry, Panatics, the wait is almost over! The highly anticipated Blood Reign: The Saga of Pandora Zwieback, Book 2—the second part of Pan’s debut literary adventure that began in the novel Blood Feud—is on its way (and I deeply apologize for the lengthy delay between books), but in the meantime you can download a free chapter of Blood Reign!
Continuing our review of SWC’s backlist, today we look at our most popular illustrated classic, Carmilla. Written by J. Sheridan Le Fanu (Uncle Silas, In a Glass Darkly), this 19th-century vampiric romance has influenced generations of writers from Bram Stoker to Laurel K. Hamilton, and has been adapted for the screen many times, including Hammer’s The Vampire Lovers and Roger Vadim’s Blood and Roses. The StarWarp Concepts edition features exclusive illustrations by Eliseu Gouveia (The Saga of Pandora Zwieback Annual #1, The Saga of Pandora Zwieback #0).
Continuing our review of SWC’s backlist, today we look at our young adult dark-urban-fantasy comic book The Saga of Pandora Zwieback Annual #1, written by Steven A. Roman and Sholly Fisch, and illustrated by Eliseu Gouveia, Ernie Colon, and Elizabeth Watasin, with cover art by Henar Torinos. Here’s the synopsis:
As a follow-up to this past weekend’s first BookCon, I thought it would be a good time to introduce first-time visitors to our StarWarp Concepts and Pandora Zwieback sites, and new readers of StarWarp Concepts’ titles, to the SWC backlist (and to remind old ’Warp fans of the wide range of our offerings). So while you’ll find the majority of listings appear on the SWC blog, I figured it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to duplicate the entries relating to Pan and the “Paniverse.”