Six Degrees of Separation

Six Degrees of Separation is hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. This month it starts with the classic Christmas story by Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol.

I have not read very many books by Dickens (and I have given up to be honest), but I have read A Christmas Carol and I liked it very much. It is a perfect story for the season. Mr Scrooge is evil and that leads me to Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. Here Emily created a character who is the embodiment of evil and eternal love.

Just finished a Swedish thriller called Solitairen (the Solitaire) by Anna Lihammer & Ted Hesselbom, which also features a very evil man, who controls all the people around him.

Evil lingers on the American plains in Alma Katsu's The Hunger. Stephen King says: "Deeply, deeply disturbing, hard to put down, not recommended reading after dark."  He is right, there is something disturbing out there in the wilderness. The novel tells the story of the Donner party, a group of American pioneers who travelled west to California in a wagon train in May 1846. This is a true story and the party was delayed due to mistakes in planning, bad organisation and choosing the wrong route. They were stuck in the Sierra Nevada over the winter. Of the 87 members of the train, only 48 survived. It is said that they resorted to cannibalism to survive. A very tragic story.

The heroes and heroines of Allison Brennan's excellent books are always surrounded by evil. Wether it is in the Lucy Kincaid series, Make Them Pay, or the series about Max Revere, Poisonous. 

That leads me to Pere Goriot by Honoré de Balzac, which also contains evil and selfish people, who is trying to get as much money as possible by any means.

The last evil thread will go to the old, Greek Gods, and Mythos by Stephen Fry. He, himself, narrates his own book and here is a fight for survival on all grounds. Power to control the world can make people, and even gods, really nasty.

Well, that was a little bit of an evil chain today. I don't know how that came up, at a time, when we want to be kind to everybody. Alas, it is not always the case. Hopefully, the Christmas atmosphere will make the world a better place to be.