cdove Wrote:After some waiting and some help from Queen Lisa (thank you) I am finally a member of the board. I thought it might be fun to introduce myself by telling you how I became an avid reader of (most of) FPW's work. This will end up being a fairly long first thread, and I promise that I won't be so wordy again.

By the way, the name is Chris.

In the summer of 1993, my fairly new wife (married in December, 1992) and I decided to test our new marriage by taking a car trip from our home (Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada) to Newfoundland (where she was born), a trip that covered 6 Provinces, and 9 States. Let me tell you, spending that much time alone in a car was the perfect opportunity to see if our marriage would work, and, I’m happy to say, we survived it and are still quite happy.

Anyway, we spent 10 days visiting my wife’s Grandmother in the town of Springdale, Newfoundland. Springdale is a nice little town with absolutely nothing to do. We spent our days wandering the countryside and visiting extended relatives, and my wife was content to visit with her Grandparents and Aunt after supper. I ended up spending most of my evenings reading (and smoking) in the local coffee shop. Before leaving on the trip, I had loaded up on all of the Prey novels by John Sanford (I had just discovered them), but it didn’t take me long to go through them. I found myself “out of book” on day 7 and, as many of you will know, the prospect of having nothing to read so far away from home was unnerving. I walked over to the drugstore and went through their limited supply of new novels. After much looking, I finally settled on a book called “Nightworld” by an author that I had never heard of. When I say that I settled on it, I really did because there was nothing else that even came close to catching my interest. In fact, I may have chosen Nightworld for the simple fact that it was so out of place with the other genres featured.

I began the book and was hooked. It ended up taking me close to a week to finish it because we ended up on the trek home, but, once done, I had a new author to fixate on (I am very much an author oriented reader). I became focused on collecting all of the books in the cycle, as well as anything else by F. Paul Wilson. On the way home, I managed to find The Keep, and was through it by the time we arrived back.

In 1993, Regina had 7 used book stores (now we have 2). This was a fair amount for a city of 190,000, and I combed each one of them until I had all of the books written by FPW to date. I ended up reading Black Wind after The Keep and it was one of the best that I have ever read. I completed the rest of the books, and reread Nightworld (this is one of only 4 books that I have ever read twice).

Following my final reading of Nightworld, my fixation with FPW began to wane. I bought a couple of the medical thrillers, but, like Robin Cook novels, they didn’t hold my interest enough to start anticipating the arrival of the next new volume.

I had pretty much given up on FPW when a book dedicated to Repairman Jack came out. I have been back on board ever since.

There. Hope this wasn’t too long.

phoenix rising Wrote:My first FPW book was The Keep, after seeing the movie. (Book being the better of the 2 of course) The movie couldn't capture the characters as well. (But that is a whole other whole bag of worms) I also was recently activated here, thanks a ton Lisa!!!! I've been an avid reader since.......well 1992 notgonna tell you how old I was then, but I was pretty young.......

cobalt79 Wrote:Welcome Phoenix Rising....if I didn't already.