Customer Reviews

Pandora Drive

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

 

 

A young woman named Damara has the power to make people's dreams and nightmares come true. She has no control over this power, and sparking her imagination causes horrors beyond your worst nightmares. When childhood friend Tristan comes back to her neighborhood to renovate his dead mother's house, Damara's powers become more and more potent.

Tristan begins to notice gray ooze coming out of his walls. Kenneth, one of Damara's neighbors, who has erectile dysfunction, finds it cured, so that his new condition is quite the opposite of his old one. Add to that the fact that Kenneth is extremely perverted, and he becomes very dangerous. His wife, Emma, develops skills at pruning more than weeds, such as the ability to easily rid the neighborhood of those she thinks of as being weeds.

This novel begins calmly, and gradually erupts into a full blown nightmare of gore and violence. It is not for the faint of heart.

Damara lives in a small town in Ohio on the title street. She has grown up knowing that she has the ability to make things happen. If she lets her imagination loose, bad things can happen. She has kept things pretty much under control by avoiding others and thinking about polar bears in snowstorms (pure white image). But things are changing now for the worse. Damara's power does not want to be held back any more. It is leaking out into the minds of the neighbors. Now their deepest desires are coming true.

As Damara's power seeps into others strange things begin to happen to the locals. On neighbor has their darkest sexual fantasies burst forth while the spouse can now rid the area of delinquent weeds (kids). But these are not the only two touched. Damara's mother and boyfriend are also recipients. And those not touched directly are affected by the changes in others. Soon Damara's power is almost completely out of control as the local world goes mad. Now Damara must try and control her power if she is to save herself and the innocents around her.

This is an interesting power. Sort of a bit 'The Man Who Could Work Miracles" and a bit "Forbidden Planet" but far darker than either could be at the time of their release. Some of the imagery may be too strong or upsetting for some readers but then they really shouldn't be reading modern horror. Fans of Edward Lee will feel right at home with this one. Not for the faint of heart. Check it out.

All I can say is wow, I think I'll be reading more Tim Waggoner. His writing style is fast paced, descriptive and interesting. The book is about Damara, a woman with a terrible power that makes people's dreams/nightmares come to life. This power has caused her to become a loner, hiding away in the house she shares with her mother for 17 years. However her powers, for whatever reason, has begun to leak out into the neighbourhood and it leads to frightening results. I would tell people to read this book, it's interesting and creative. Waggoner has been added to my list of authors to watch out for.

Damara Ruschmann has a strange and wondrous power: the ability to make people's thoughts real. When she was younger, it was less powerful and just seemed to affect her family (though she carries the guilt of her brother's death and her father's disappearance because of it).

But as she has grown older, it has left her control. Now it has spread all over her neighborhood (located on Pandora Drive), and her neighbors' worst fears, greatest fantasies, passing wishes, and even spoken metaphors -- anything they can imagine -- are all coming true. Zephyr, Ohio, will never be the same.

Author Tim Waggoner has followed up his critically acclaimed 2005 novel Like Death with 2006's Pandora Drive, an exercise in imagination that brutally illustrates the adage, "Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it."

A novel with as simple and open-ended a setup as Pandora Drive succeeds or fails by the author's imagination. Does Waggoner create realistic characters with fantasies that make entertaining reading? Does he set up these thoughts and their consequences in a way that is believable yet surprising? Is the prose fast-paced enough that we get swept up in the series of events with little time to wonder how it will all turn out? All of these questions get a resounding yes.

Waggoner has no shortage of ideas and he approaches them unflinchingly -- fans of the extreme horror novels of Edward Lee should enjoy Waggoner's vision immensely -- and executes them flawlessly. There is imagination to spare, and Pandora Drive is as much a thrill ride as you would expect a novel that begins and ends at an amusement park to be.

PANDORA DRIVE is another staggeringly original work of terror by Tim Waggoner. If critics thought his first novel, LIKE DEATH, was a fluke, this should set the record straight. Tim Waggoner is indeed talented and has proved it once again. It's very rare for me to give a writer two 5-star reviews for their books -- author Gary A. Braunbeck, Tom Piccirilli, Bentley Little, Jack Ketchum, T.M. Wright and Richard Laymon are the only ones to date -- but Mr. Waggoner has now joined that elite group. Infused with emotion and brimming with evil, this is an original and extremely adult tale of horror. My only grip is with the copy editor who unfortunately missed quite a few spelling/grammar errors. I can't begin to tell you how excited I am to read this author's next book. Highest recommendation if you want something different in your horror tale.

Horror absorbed by dark fantasy is the best way to describe Tim Waggoners latest gore filled free for all. Horror is unleashed in this small midwestrern town where your deepest and darkest fantasies become reality with no regard to human life. Definatley entertaing and fun to read.

While I am a fan of both the genre and the author, this book seemed as if Waggoner took twenty of the 'disturbing vignettes' that had been kicking around in his head and wrote them all into one book. There were certainly some fantastic gruesome visuals, but no compelling storyline connecting them.

I found this book a most interestingly entertaining , weird and graphic horror book I have ever had the chance to read.It's a novel well written by this author and I look forward to reading "Like Death" which I bought after starting to read this book "Pandora Drive" plus I also this past week ordered another book "Darkness Wakes" by this author Tim Waggoner.I've recieved this book this past chrsitmas as a gift from my sister.She was right on the money when she purchased this book for me.I LOVED IT! Excellent read and look forward to reading the other two books I have and will have in my future readings.

First: there are depictions of very strong sexual violence, assault, and rape in this book. If these are absolute no-gos or triggers for you, please do not read this book.

This is a tale of a young woman with an extraordinary power - she enables dreams, nightmares, and thoughts to become reality. The problem is that she cannot control it, and all of her neighbor's most hidden thoughts become reality, with disasterous results.

The book is a well-crafted dark adventure, set in modern-day rural Ohio. The twisted parodies of dreams and explicit nightmares are a surreal backdrop as Damara searches both love and control of her powers. It ventures (often) into the gross and disturbing, but does not fall into either splatterpunk or pure visceral horror. Instead, these elements become creepy monsters to fight against.

It does fall short of being truly "horror" - though it is well within the genre classification. The quick transformation - and descent into degeneracy or evil - of the antagonist doesn't allow them to be very sympathetic. Many of the victims are onstage long enough to be sketched out as people - but not quite long enough to care too horribly about thier fate. There are a few places where the opportunity for horror existed - including questions of what makes someone real - but this is not that kind of book. As mentioned earlier, this is a dark modern adventure - the type that the "horror" genre largely consists of.

It was an interesting read over the course of a few days, and worth picking up if this kind of dark adventure is your cup of entrails... I mean, tea.

This is a book that started out so quietly I feared I'd have to give it up but then it evolved into a full out gore-filled horror novel reminiscent of Richard Laymon (lots of sex related gore and grossness). It crept up so quietly that I was a little stunned which is a good thing because I'm too easily bored lately.

Damara cannot allow her imagination to run wild because even the most innocent of daydreams can often have deadly consequences. She's suppressed her imagination for years and lives the life of a shut-in. But her power has started to seep into the lives of her neighbors and all h*ll is breaking lose.

This book was gruesome and then some. Yikes, this guy is right up there with the likes of Ed Lee for the gore factor. I had to put it aside because it was so bad at one point but, of course, I just had to go back and read it. Awful, nightmarish and completely horrific stuff. Recommended only for those with strong stomachs.