Coven

My first thought on reading this was "You could buy this book in a grocery store?"Indeed, it is hard to imagine that a book this extreme would be published in mass market today. The outrageous plans for "interspecies breeding" by the villains is so disgusting and ridiculous that it caused me to laugh out loud. While Edward Lee doesn't reach the gross-out heights that he would later in his career this is the first of his books that feels like what most would classify as an Edward Lee novel. No one else could describe these horrific events with such a sense of playfulness and pure fun. This is a good starting point for new readers and one that fans of latter-day Lee should check out if they have missed it.

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.

I have read other books by this author and really liked them. This one however I could not even finish. Charactors were unlikable, and the whole story was very dry and boring only made it to 52% and I almost always finish a book. I was just to bored to finish it.

Edward Lee's The Coven is a pretty good read. If your into horror sex and gore then this book is for you.

Different for Edward Lee black comedy great character development excellent book in the extreme horror genre huge Edward Lee fan

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.

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.

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!

Wade St John is a rich, good looking playboy. The coolest on campus, with all the parties and girls one would want at his disposal, so why bother at all with that stupid studying stuff? Well, that is until his father, having got tired of numerous parking tickets and irate calls from The Dean, as a result of Wade's exploits, gives him an ultimatum. Start having some respect in school, get your results to improve, get a campus job and stop messing about or you're off to military academy! In short, playboy Wades' world is about to change, and not for the better... But with the arrival of an admittedly hot but tough female cop, the faculty acting stranger than ever and some unsolved murders and disappearances around campus, things could be about to get a lot worse..Thoroughly enjoyed this Lee novel. I have to say, I'm certainly a fan of Lee's work and I can understand that his stuff isn't for everyone but I found this (like most of his other output) really amusing and well written, with of course, plenty of splatter.The cover, which I've heard you shouldn't judge books by, is not a particularly good one, and, as ashamed as I am to admit this, is what actually delayed my reading of this novel, as it makes it look dull and formulaic, with I guess, the covers only saving grace being that it gives nothing away, an example I'll try to follow in the next couple of sentences...As this is actually packed full of, un~dead super~human psycho killers, a lovecraftian alien super~fiend and lots of campus cuties getting snuffed out, or used in a hideous intergalactic cell specialization breeding program!! Oops probably said too much already! However, when you couple this with lots of silly dialogue, action and foreign beer you do have a very entertaining horror novel, that is very reminiscent of some of the better gore comedies from the 80's. You know, the ones with a sort of 50's B~movie appreciation to them, like Night of the Creeps, Re~Animator or Return of the Living Dead! Which don't get me wrong, hardly qualifies it as high art but it's enjoyable nontheless and certainly recommended to those of you that have already read and liked Lee's other work. And, when considering the potential for the rather explicit subject matter, I found this to be relatively pornography free, when compared to some of Mr Lee's other literary discharge!Recommended!4.25/5 stars.

Struggled to finish it. Big fan of Lee so i always have high expectations but this book was a huge disappointment.

not really my type of book but interesting from a stretch of imagination I needed patience to finish reading it