Customer Reviews

COVEN

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Of all of Lee's many fine horror novels, Coven is far and away my favorite. It is gruesome, horrifying, demented, perverse, and, very often, hysterically funny. As another reviewer indicated, the cover of the old mass-market edition is quite misleading and not indicative of what awaits the reader. Scenes of depravity are written with gleeful gusto. This is gonzo horror writing, sort of a mad synthesis of 70's and 80's b-horror movies, the sensibility of a Hunter Thompson or Douglas Adams, Animal House, and more. I also enjoyed the references to many of Lee's favorite imported beers of the time. Mr. Lee published three novels before Coven (two under the pseudonym Philip Straker), but I consider this the true beginning to his career--this is where his reputation as the king of "extreme" horror began. Used copies can be costly, but it's worth seeking out. Or you could hold out for the new limited edition hardback due from Necro Publications in 2003.

Together with Patrick Gates, Edward Lee is -- for me -- the ultimate gore/ extreme horrorwriter. His stories ooze with nasty sexscenes and brutality, and COVEN is no exception.

Don't let the cover fool you. It shows a woman in a black cape with a pentagram on her chest and holding an axe, but this book isn't about witches. An evil force is trying to take over the world and it's up to a slacker student and an ambitious female deputy to stop them, and they do fall in love halfway through! Without spoiling to much; Lee pulls no punches, from people who get sliced in half by a enormously large axe, to gruesome alien experiments and a zombie that can't be killed, COVEN has it all. Also worth mentioning is Lee's quirky sense of humor and his knack to create characters, which are most of the times stereotypical, but also make you laugh out loud because of their human traits. An example is the way he sends up rich, spoiled collegestudents, with their expensive cars and their taste in foreign beer.

This book is very hard to find (like most of Lee's older books) and I myself paid a ridicously large amount of money for it. But it was totally worth it and if you can find it I recommend it to any fan of extreme horror!

Let me start off by saying that it's about time that this book was re-released.

I read this book about 10 years ago. I ended up getting a first printing for about 50 cents, in a second hand bookstore. At the time, I thought the owner of the shop was getting the deal. The art work was horrible; but, the description on the back page got me interested.

I would have gladly spent $50 bucks for this book.

I know that the majority that are reading this have already read Lee's other works (ie: Bighead, City Infernal, Incubi...etc), however, for that small few that have never read one....Start with this one!!!

With the exception of King's "Tommyknockers", this is the only horror book to combine science fiction into its plot, and actually pull it off.

Just remember....Lee has no boundaries. For the faint of heart...look to the left on the bookshelf---you'll find King and Koontz.

Coven was originally published in 1991 and re-released by Necro in 2005. This is Edward Lee's second book -- his first was Ghouls (1988) -- and you can easily see how he began writing extreme horror with this one.

For the most part, it's an awesome book; I loved the setting of a college campus and the town Exham. The story unfolds at a fast pace and is full of twists and turns. Although I lost a bit of interest in the third act because it veered a tad too much into sci-fi. I would've preferred the sci-fi element to be kept to a minimum. The characters reminded me of me and my friends when we were in college, drinking beer and partying. The H.P. Lovecraft references are numerous and fun to spot. There's a lot of technical discussions pertaining to forensics and scientific issues which felt a bit forced at times.

Overall, Coven is a good read and one that I would recommend to any Lee fan. If you like sci-fi as well as horror, then you'll probably enjoy it even more than I did.

Just did not enjoy this book. I finished it to see what he was going to do with these characters. The characters are very one dimensional, and I just do not buy how Lee plays things out. There is no story here, just some provocative scene sketches. This particular tale seems to have a lot of RAPE obsession thrown in, yet written so that the victims LIKE it. Yeah. Great.
Lots of gory goo- but not scary, not creepy. Just gross.
Did someone say Lee is the heir to Stephen King's throne? I think not.

Just finished reading Coven on the Kindle. This has been one of Lee's older books that I've been meaning to read for some time now. With the quick download on amazon I was able to start reading this book in no time and let me tell you once I started this book I COULDN'T PUT IT DOWN until I finished it. This book has it all: great likable characters, suspense, mystery, violence, sex and a coven full of nasty things waiting to devour everything in its path. I even noticed a few themes that reminded me of Lee's Infernal series. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND this title to any fan of horror.

I dont have many comments. I liked this book, the start of it was engaging in that I quickly became interested in what was going on, I was interested in some of the characters and not so much on others. Once you know what is going on, the book starts to go down hill a little but all in all I liked it. Kinda gross throughout but not revoltingly so.

You really have something going wrong at the college. The women in black are running amok, and they seem to be having fun doing horrible things to people. You also have your redneckish types that seem to live in Edward Lee's mind, berring it up and doing things that seem to get them all killed. Combine that with the many Lovecraftian things that sleep in his mind and you have yourself a grand book.

A lot of Edward Lee is great, some good, and a few are of the lower variety. When Lee was writing his newer stuff, it was all nice to read. Creekers was the best of the best, but this book hung in there and did its thing. It felt like one of the older horror movies that had come to life, decided it wanted to get really gory behind-the-scenes, and showed people what Lee was all about. Sometimes I feel like a few things just hit the paper wet, and those little pieces of fun are what makes Lee great.
He goes and the mind wallows.

In this bok I also liked the way the characters popped. In some books that was lost, but here it seemed like they lived in this world. They also didn't take sides when it came to living and dying, giving you a look into the mind of some of the smart and some of the dumb. And the dumb - you know they get really bad out there when the clock stikes "Dying time."

If you want a great book that is getting a little harder to grab, then take this one and run with it. I loved it when I read it and it reminded me why I liked the books. Some call it guilt pleasure reading, but this is simply fun to have around. It might not make you create the next PhDuhhh, but they make a whole branch of (yawnnn) books for that. This is good the way it is, and goes well with a nice heavy lunch.
5-5 stars earned.

I was looking forward to reading this earlier book of Lee's as I have become a late comer to his books. Well I found it a little disappointing with a rather juvenile prose regarding the characters. It was one of thosr books you pick up read a few pages and put down again when in the mood, Iam hoping Succubus and Incubus will be more to my liking

More like a revved-up gross-out `70s B-movie, COVEN revels in its ultimate editorial no-no: it's science-fiction dropped into a contemporary horror plot, something that horror editors seem to never buy. Maybe this one sold because it works. Originally entitled THE WOMEN IN BLACK, this original take on the There's Something Messed-Up At The College plot highlights Lee's gross-out skills early on and demonstrates that pulp horror writers really can create fresh, well-developed, easy-to-realize characters. Cameos of Lee's then-favorite beers--during his beer-snob days--appear in abundance, and Lovecraftian symbols abound (it's fun just picking them out), but wait till you meets the gals in this book. This is the only existing novel that Lee wants to sequelize.