We regularly obsess about the sorts of books that sell in our store, because every store is a reflection of its local customer base. We have to anticipate and reflect what everyone wants to read, and that can be tricky. It's like having a room full of puppies. Everyone likes puppies, but maybe the surrounding community is primarily made up of condominiums and apartments. Smaller houses need smaller dogs. If our puppy room is filled with huskies and long-haired snout-hounds and Bavarian snow-bounders, we're going to end up feeding all of them ourselves for years and years. We've got to have baskets of tiny yapppy dogs, dogs that can hide under davenports, and cuddly dogs that can fit in purses.
However, after a year or two, we've sold everyone a small dog, and other people who live farther away have heard about this marvelous place where you can get a pocket dog. They wander in, but you know what? They live in areas with yards and green spaces, which are dangerous for pocket dogs (because, you know, coyotes). These folks are looking for the bigger dogs, and so we have to suddenly pivot to having baskets of big puppies.
Hello, and welcome to A Good Book's weekly newsletter, where we have a roundabout way of getting to the point. In this instance: horror. Or, Books That Are Orange. Your choice.
First up is Clive Barker's The Damnation Game. Once upon a time, Clive showed up with his razzle-dazzle, shock-'em-till-they-drop style, which gave the genre a much needed jolt of adrenaline. Times went a-changing, and Clive went off to make movies and paint pictures and other sorts of creative things. Many of his books slipped off the shelves, and we're delighted to see them coming back with fabulous new cover treatments. The Damnation Game is the story of a man who thinks he's more clever than Death itself. Naturally, debts come due, and the question remains: how far will you go to avoid paying the ultimate price?
This book is both orange and horror. Sort of mean of us, but we just want to let you know that books on this list can be both choices. We know, we know. But rules are meant to be broken.
Let's try another one.
Grady Hendrix's The Southern Book Club's Guide to Vampire Slaying is definitely more green than orange, and while it may appear to be a bit of earnest commercial fiction, it's all a trick, really. It certainly seems like a suburban family drama about bored wives and disinterested teens and bla bla bla—we've read it a thousand times already (and seen the subsequent Netflix series), but there's something not quite right here. It's like that tiny flap of skin that you keep picking at. You pick and pick and pick, and then—oh, crap—you pull too much and now you're bleeding all over the place.
Oh, hang on. We should make that the shelf-talker. A Grady Hendrix novel: "You can't stop picking at it, and then you're bleeding all over the place." Boom! Done.
Oooh! Grady has a new book coming out in July. Excellent. You know we're happy to take pre-orders, right? Okay, good. [Give us a shout or use that handy bookshop.org list at the top and PRE-ORDER!]
Okay, this one is easier. It's not orange, which means it's got to be horror. However, debut novelist Nicole Jarvis's The Lights of Prague is an extremely moody gaslamp drama about creatures that go 'gronk!' in the night and the lamplighters who stalk the streets, keeping them at bay. Our protagonist is Domek Myska, a lamplighter with ambition, who discovers a captive will-o'-the-wisp. Naturally, he follows the wisp and deadly hijinks ensue. Jarvis has dunked this Eastern European flavored gothic novel in a deep vat of Dark & Murky (TM), and the result is a heady cocktail of atmosphere and action.
And here's C. Robert Cargill's Day Zero, which is basically "How The Family Dog Saved Little Ezra When the Lights Went Out," but, you know, the family dog is a self-aware robotic tiger. And when we say "the lights went out," we're talking apocalyptic world-wide EMP nonsense. Cargill takes Asimov's Three Rules of Robotics and mixes it with equal parts Skynet Doomsday Predictions and Cormac McCarthy's The Road, creating something thoughtful, heartbreaking, and action-packed.
This one isn't a horror story in the traditional sense (nor it is orange, frankly), but our reaction to that cover art is definitely one of horror. This month's edition in the William W. Johnstone (Very Deceased) Western of the Month Club is Savage Sunday, and it's got outlaws and cattle rustlers and gunslingers, as well as a hero out of Central Casting who is shooting his pistol in the wrong direction. Hey, Duff! The bad guys are behind you! Oh, phew. Someone photoshopped your buddy into the frame and pointed him in the right direction. Goodness. The lighting is all wrong, and the more we peer at it, we're not entirely sure that the horses of that posse riding up in the background have legs. <shudder>
Meanwhile, horror writer Christopher Buehlman is taking a break from the dark and twisted to visit a world of knights and goblins. The Blacktongue Thief follows the misadventures of Kinch Na Shannack who robs the wrong guy, gets roped into helping a badass female knight deal with krakens, giants, and other monsters much too big for a single page. All sorts of strange darkness lurks at the edges of the narrative, along with a sardonic wit that reminds us of Michael Shea's Nifft the Lean stories. Recommended.
Meanwhile, here's another book that is both orange and firmly in the horror camp. John Dover hauls a couple fifty gallon drums of stage blood into the frame for Once Upon a Fang in the West, a fast-paced romp that is equal parts Nosferatu and Once Upon A Time in the West. Bullets and body parts! Vengeance and vampires! Gunslingers and gore!
Let's take a moment and sluice off the set here. Wipe down the walls. Put up some "This is brain on books!" posters. Clean ourselves up a bit . . .
Oh, look, here's Steven Rowley's latest feel-good novel, The Guncle. It's Auntie Mame for the 21st century, where a once-famous sitcom star is suddenly saddled with his niece and nephew. Fortunately, Gay Uncle Patrick (as the kids soon call him) is more than up to the challenge. Rowley, whose Lily and the Octopus was a delightful tear-jerker read, knows how to hit the maudlin notes while keeping the story moving. Witty, frothy, and delightful.
And finally, if you are wondering how we manage to skip and hop among the titles in this newsletter without injuring ourselves, here is Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else. Jordan Ellenberg is a fan of geometry, and in Shape, she uses it to elucidate the clever connections between just about everything. After all, geometry asks pretty simple questions: Where are things? How do you get from that thing to this thing? Why is that thing way over there?
