Ling's Report

I have two confessions to make. The first confession is that I do not usually read non-fiction books; I have always been more of a fiction reader, meaning that my picking up The Disaster Artist by Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell is a little out of the ordinary for me. The second confession is that I have not watched Tommy Wiseau’s movie “The Room” in its entirety, though I know and have seen enough to understand the things detailed within the book.   Greg Sestero’s account of his time as one of the key actors of “The Room” and his friendship with the movie director Tommy Wiseau is a fascinating read. While Greg is the narrator and point-of-view character, this book is as much of Tommy’s story as it is Greg’s, shedding some light on a man whose origins remain a mystery even to this day. Each chapter alternates between Greg and Tommy in the early stages of their friendship and the filming of “The Room” itself, transitioning quite seamlessly. The structure of the narrative ...

I have recently been in a phase that I call the “Neil Gaiman Phase.” I will admit that my past knowledge of Neil Gaiman consisted only of the knowledge that he came up with “The Sandman” comics and wrote the book Coraline . However, after stumbling upon a book of his called American Gods , I began looking for more of his works; this resulted in me finding a book I had heard of before but never knew was written by him: Neverwhere . Neverwhere is the story of Richard Mayhew, a relatively ordinary man whose life seems to consist of him being jerked around by his fiancée Jessica. However, that all changes when he runs into a heavily injured girl and decides to help her out. The girl’s name is Door, and it turns out that she comes from another world. However, helping Door ended up having unintended consequences: he seems to have become all but invisible to the people of London, and he also finds himself in Door’s world, known as London Below. As he struggles to get his life back on ...

Deeper is a horror science-fiction novel by Jeff Long and a sequel to The Descent , a dark tale of a group of explorers who discover that a group of humanoids dwell in a large underground kingdom; the humanoids are known as ‘hadals,’ named for their scientific name Homo hadalis , and their culture is one of frightening brutality. The sequel story is kicked off when a group of children suddenly disappear and it seems as though the hadals are responsible. Linguist Ali von Schade, the sole survivor of the previous expedition, finds herself going back to the underground to help find the children. Meanwhile, a mother of one of the missing girls gathers a miniature army to go down and retrieve the children. However, they are ill-equipped to handle the underground world and unprepared for the horrors found there… The strongest part of the story is most definitely the atmosphere and setting. The caverns are a very claustrophobic setting and Long does a good job in showing how the sanity ...