6 Sickening Moments in Classic Literature

If you've ever taken a course in creative writing, you'll know that being on this list is a compliment! A writer's main goal is to manipulate his reader's emotions. The writers on this list manipulated my emotions so effectively that they bypassed all secondary and tertiary emotions and tapped into one of my primary emotions, …

Harry Potter and the Power of the Heptalogy

JK Rowling's Harry Potter books claim 7 of the slots in the top 10 bestselling books of all times. That's a stupefying statistic if I've ever heard one! Rowling's writing is enchanting by its own right. If she had stopped at Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, the book still would have fared well with children. If she had wrapped Harry's …

What Makes a Book Scary?

Happy Halloween again! Boy, I'm a fan of this holiday: the colors, the candy, the folklore. If Halloween had nothing going for it but jack-o-lanterns, I would love it still. What, other than a jack-o-lantern, combines warm, glowing light with spookiness?  Because of my enthusiasm for Halloween, I've decided to honor it with two posts. The first …