An accomplished advertising executive and best-selling writer, James Patterson has proven again and again that he understands how to please his audience. Concentrating on thrillers and suspense stories, he has fostered a loyal following of avid readers,...

Spider, starring Ralph Fiennes as a mental patient discharged into his grim childhood neighborhood and his even grimmer, hallucinated childhood memories, is David Cronenberg's latest adaptation of an unadaptable piece of literature. This time it's Patrick McGrath's first-person novel, about a schizophrenic whose mother...

AImost every night of her life, my mother, compelled by an aversion to spiders, circled her bedroom with a long-handled brush. Sweeping it into corners, she dislodged all intruders and flicked them deftly out of the window. Spiders belonged outside. She would have been...