Crash Into Me

Crash Into Me
by Albert Borris

Review by Sesana
Three out of five stars

Publisher Summary:

Owen, Frank, Audrey, and Jin-Ae have one thing in common: they all want to die. When they meet online after each attempts suicide and fails, the four teens make a deadly pact: they will escape together on a summer road trip to visit the sites of celebrity suicides...and at their final destination, they will all end their lives. As they drive cross-country, bonding over their dark impulses, sharing their deepest secrets and desires, living it up, hooking up, and becoming true friends, each must decide whether life is worth living--or if there's no turning back. "Crash Into Me puts readers in the driver's seat with four teens teetering on the edge of suicide. But will their cross country odyssey push them all the way over? Only the final page turn will tell, in Albert Borris's finely-crafted tale of friendship forged from a desperate need of connection.

My Review:

Four suicidal teens decide to go on a road trip. They'll tour the graves of famous people who killed themselves, then commit suicide as a group in Death Valley. Sound tense? It certainly can be.

But the pacing is so very slow. Considering how important the suicide grave tour seems to be in the blurb, and at the beginning of the story, most of the book takes place in between. This is not necessarily bad, because some of the best moments in the book happen in those in between places. But it does mean that the hook gets lost, and that's a shame.

This is one book where I do wish that the author had gone with multiple POVs. I would have loved to have seen into the heads of the other characters, and I think it would have kept the story from dragging. Because for me, I think the POV character, Owen, was one of the less interesting ones in the book. I especially would have loved to have seen what exactly was going on in Audrey's head, since she baffled me as a character throughout. I'm left, at the end of the book, wondering what exactly she wanted and expected to happen going into this. But that's just one of the many open questions left at the end of the book.

It certainly isn't a bad book, though. I think a lot of the conversations and reactions the characters had were genuine, even if the situation as a whole isn't exactly the most believable. The ending probably won't surprise anyone, at least not once they get there, and there are plenty of loose ends for these characters. Satisfying enough of an ending, though.

Also reviewed on Goodreads.

A Double Shot of Hinkson.

Hell on Church Street

Jake Hinkson

New Pulp Press

Available Now!

While leaving a corner store and getting into his vehicle, Geoffrey Webb is shocked to see a man sitting in the passenger seat brandishing a hand gun. The would-be attacker demands Webb’s money but rather than going along with it, Webb decides to take the offensive. He doesn’t attack his assailant but rather chooses to go on a long drive and recount his days as a youth minister of a small Arkansas town. Threatening to crash the car if the crook doesn’t listen, Webb is finally able to clear the air surrounding his time in the cloth.

This is one hell of a debut novel (pardon the pun), let me tell you. Jake Hinkson has unleashed a story that will stick with me for years to come. I was so engrossed in the story, that I lost sleep after I finished it. I couldn’t help thinking about the way Hinkson writes violence – it was just so damn raw. Hey, I can’t speak to the authenticity of a murder scene but I truly felt right there in the room when it was happening. You know that feeling when you’re watching a horror movie and the cheerleader is about to walk into a room and even though you can’t communicate with her, you just want to will her not to do it. Hinkson takes that feeling and dials it up to eleven.

“Then again, the third fundamental truth of life is this: to 99.9% of the world you don’t exist. I’m not being self-pitying when I say that because I’m talking about you. You do not exist to most of the rest of the world. How many people even know you’re alive? Of those, how many care? Don’t add it up if you’re the type that gets easily depressed.”

I shouldn’t throw all the praise on the suspenseful or violent scenes as there’s lots in here to shed a spotlight on. Webb wasn’t exactly interested in being a youth minister, as at heart, he’s a con-man. He looked at a career in religion as being a job where you can get the most out of doing the least amount of work. Our narrator is a cynical man believing that people only want to talk to someone who shares their prejudices or someone who is going to tell them exactly what they want to hear, he thinks he has it all figured out and truthfully, he does, until everything goes awry.

“There’s a level of trouble you can’t talk your way out of,” he said. “Some trouble is like a cancer. It just grows inside you. Nothing stops it. It just keeps growing and growing, eating everything it touches.”

While he’s excellent at deceiving those around him, Webb soon learns how hard it is to perform damage control. Getting his roots into the community and becoming the mindless, suck-up that everyone loves happens quicker than walking up an escalator, the true talent comes in keeping up the act when something outside of his plan materializes. For this, all that is needed is one person to doubt his sincerity, to see him for who he truly is, to drive him mad in an attempt to keep everything together. There’s nothing a con-man can’t stand more than someone who is immune to his charm. Webb’s interactions with those who see through him are intense and add so much to his character.

Hell on Church Street is the second novel I’ve read from publisher New Pulp Press. If both this novel and Matthew McBride’s Frank Sinatra in a Blender are any sign of the quality of work this company is putting forth, I need to get some more of it.

The Posthumous Man

Jake Hinkson

Beat To A Pulp

Available Now!

Elliot Spilling wakes up in a hospital to discover he succeeded in killing himself. Well, for three minutes anyway. A chance encounter with a nurse leads to Elliot injecting himself into a plan to steal millions in drugs from a hospital shipment. Will Elliot and his new found associates reap the rewards of a successful plan or will everything come crashing down around them?

Having just finished Jake Hinkson’s first novel, Hell on Church Street, I was hungry for more. Luckily for me, I didn’t have to wait. For a criminally low price, Hinkson’s follow-up The Posthumous Man is available as an e-book on the Kindle Store. Coming in at a brisk 148 pages, Hinkson takes us to a small town in Arkansas shortly before a gang of wannabe heisters steal a load of Oxy to earn a cool two million dollars. Comprised of a bankrupt businessman, a cop and his twin brother, a nurse and a man recovering from a failed suicide attempt, there’s no way the plan can fail!

In an attempt to avoid spoilers – and believe me, with the way this novel turns out, the less you know the better – I’ll leave it at that. Hinkson uses his talent for creating likable scumbag characters by throwing out this rag-tag collection of losers you can’t help but root for. Even when everything is falling apart, you’ll still pulling for a victory.

Just like with Hell on Church Street, the violence is swift and coarse. There’s no sugar coating anything here – Hinkson rips open a wound and forces you to look at it. It’s good to know that after reading crime fiction for all these years, there are still authors out there that can shock me with a certain way of writing brutality.

If you’re looking for a rapid read that’s hard to put down, look no further than Hinkson’s The Posthumous Man.

Bow Grip

Ivan E. Coyote
Arsenal Pulp Press

Reviewed by: Nancy

4 out of 5 stars

Summary

Ivan E. Coyote is one of North America’s most beguiling storytellers and the author of three story collections, including Loose End, which was shortlisted for the Ferro-Grumley Award for Fiction in 2006. Bow Grip, Coyote’s first novel, is a breathtaking story about love and loneliness; in it, a good-hearted, small-town mechanic struggles to deal with a wife who has left him for another woman until a used cello and an acquaintance’s suicide attempt compel him to make some changes in his life. With quiet authority, Bow Grip is about one man’s true rite of passage—trying to keep the ghosts of personal history at bay with a heart that’s as big as the endless prairie sky.

My Review

Joey Cooper is a 40-something mechanic from a small town in Alberta, Canada who must pick up the pieces of his shattered life after his wife, Allyson, moved to the big city with another woman. Joey’s journey to self-discovery and fulfillment begins with some time away from work to return his ex-wife’s possessions, solve the mysterious disappearance of the stranger who bought a used car from Joey’s shop, and learn to play the exquisite hand-made cello he received from the stranger in exchange for the car.  

I loved this spare, engaging, and elegantly written story with its cast of quirky and colorful characters that help Joey discover life can be full of joy and wonder. The characters were so well drawn and interesting that I felt like I was leaving old friends behind when I closed the book. I also loved the vivid descriptions of small-town Alberta.  

My only gripe is the story was a little short, and everyone was so nice. I would have liked a lengthier story with more drama and conflict.  

While there were a few sad and touching moments, reading this story made me happy and gave me a slight warm and fuzzy feeling toward humanity. 

This is Ivan E. Coyote’s first novel. I’m looking forward to her short story collections.

Also posted at Goodreads.

But It Does Have a Beautiful Cover

Fragile Beasts
by Tawni O'Dell
Published by Crown

2 1/2 Out of 5 Stars
Reviewed by Amanda

When I read Tawni O'Dell's Coal Run a few years ago, it became an instant favorite.  So I was certain that I would love Fragile Beasts. I hate it when I'm wrong.

Set in Pennsylvania coal country, Fragile Beasts tells the story of the wealthy and reclusive Candace Jack, a woman who has tried to recreate the Spain of her youth in the remote mansion where she makes her home.  Her obsession for all things Spanish begins as so many obsessions do:  with a loss.  The love of her life, a Spanish bullfighter, is killed in the ring, leaving Candace to forever mourn what could have been.  Understandably, the town sees her as the crazy old spinster lady that nobody ever sees--although, in lieu of cats, she keeps a bull.  That's right.  A bull.  She bought the bull that killed her lover and has always kept one bull from each generation of his progeny.

So, we have an old woman nearing the end of a life created from walling herself off from her own emotions and from other people.  We've been here before.  There's only one thing to do:  create a plot device by which she is forced to interact with a young person who is damaged himself/herself and through this unlikely pairing, both will be forever changed.  In this case, Candace agrees to take in two teenage boys who have recently lost their father in a drunk driving accident.  Their mother left years ago and is clearly an unfit parent, even though she returns to collect the boys and move them to Arizona.  Candace reluctantly agrees to take the boys in mainly to spite the mother, to whom she takes an instant dislike.  The rest of the novel follows the uneasy relationship between the two boys, Kyle and Klint, who are coping with the death of their father, and Candace, a woman whose motherly instincts are non-existent.

The main issue with the book is that there is simply too much going on.  There are two stories, one set in the past during Candace's experiences in Spain and one in the present.  The present day story is narrated from 3 points of view:  Candace, Kyle (the sensitive, more emotionally open boy), and her Spanish butler/friend, Luis.  However, the "voice" between these three perspectives isn't varied enough.  Kyle in particular seems inauthentic as his chapters don't always read like that of a young teenager.  Sure, he's mature for his age, but I've never known a teenager to be that insightful.  Candace Jack is exactly what one would expect of a wealthy older woman--always concerned with the proper way of dressing, speaking, eating, behaving, etc.  If she had been more salty and cantankerous it would have given the novel more energy and perhaps more suspense.  She has flashes of humor, but they're sparse.  These first person points of view also lead to a lot of telling and not showing.  Most of the chapters are presented as internal dialogue in which the character reflects on the progress being made in forming the tentative bonds that may eventually bring them together as a family.  Instead of reflections, I would have preferred to see more in the moment interactions between the characters.  The Luis chapters serve primarily to explain what happened in Candace's life decades ago.

Despite its predictability and its flaws, there are some compelling moments, some witty dialogue, and I admire O'Dell's refusal to shy away from the dark corners of life.  For me, the back story of Candace and the bullfighter are the most interesting, as are Luis's stories about being a boy in Spain.  These stories made me wish an entire novel had been dedicated to Candace's youth.  As it is, the competing storylines never seem to get the breathing room they need to come alive.

Jay Lake Pre-Mortem Read-a-thon, Review the Sixth: MADNESS OF FLOWERS

MADNESS OF FLOWERS (The City Imperishable #2)
JAY LAKE
Night Shade Books
$14.95 trade paper, available now

Reviewed by Richard, 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: The battle has been fought and won, and all have been transformed by the struggle. Imago of Lockwood has become Lord Mayor of the City Imperishable, though at a price beyond his wildest imagination. Bijaz the Dwarf has been imbued with a godlike power and a responsibility he scarcely understands. And Jason the Factor, resurrected from death at the hands of his sister, the Tokhari sandwalker Kalliope, has become the sula ma-jieni na-dia, the fabled Dead Man of Winter. When a beautiful mountebank arrives in the City Imperishable, offering to lead an expedition to uncover the lost tomb of the Imperator Terminus, she stirs up the mob with promises of treasure and imperial power... but what will her quest unleash? Political intrigue, adventure, and all-out war await the principles and inhabitants of the City Imperishable. Through it all, the City may endure, but none will remain untouched by the Madness of Flowers...

My Review: Oh damn. This is the last book set in the City Imperishable. No more adventures for Bijaz the newly minted demigod/dwarf, no more cruel rivalry between the Sewn and the Slashed...

I will miss annoying Jason the factor. I will miss obnoxious Imago the Lord Mayor, who gave me my new favorite blasphemy: "By Dorgau's infected nostril!"; and Bijaz most of all. Bijaz, now possessed of startling powers he spends most of the book learning how to cope with:

A thought came unbidden to his head. Enough fire. Transformation was easier than heat and light. His fingers brushed tons of paper. From the madness of insects he would make instead a madness of flowers.
With that, it was done. The paper exploded in roses the color of light and flame, twisting in a whirlwind as the reaper touched Bijaz's shoulder to claim back his fragment of the sun.

Oh hell yeah.

I will miss the cadence of speech that Lake created for his barbarians, the Winter Boys: "I am to be receiving ever more pointed letters from the south," the mercenary commander added. "Higher authority is to be calling me home." It rolls and swirls, this dialect, it feels natural and suggests the difficulties of speaking a language whose rules aren't in your bones. And yet it's not phonied up pseudo-archaic claptrap. Yeah, me likee.

I confess that Kalliope, sister to Jason the factor and a sandwalker/desert mage, made a pretty big dent in my enjoyment of the book. She was such a superior, self-satisfied character that it was hard for me to warm to her. When she meets Bijaz after he gains his startling new powers, her greeting is, "Must you hide in these ridiculous places?" Shades of Hermione Granger the Swot! And then, mere moments later, she utters this ponderous and condescending line: "To whom does a godling pray?"

I want a baseball bat and five minutes alone with her.

But that's part of the magic that Jay Lake weaves around me in this book, this pair of books. I care about the people I've met in the City Imperishable. I like some, don't like others, am constantly reassessing my responses to all of them in light of what they've done and what they're doing now...I respond to them, in other words, as people, not plot-forwarding devices.

Many, if not most, fantasy novels I've read (not a huge number) have the fatal-to-my-pleasure problems of Speechifying, giving long (or longer than my interest lasts, anyway) disquisitions on the whys and wherefores and whosomevers of The Problem or The Quest we're here to learn about. I think of it as the Robert Louis Stevenson Disease: Explain explain explain action recap. Repeat ad infinitum.

Ech.

And then there's the other fantasy novel failing, the Stock Character on the Stock Quest: Teenager with Special Hidden Powers meets Cutesy Sidekick, is thrashed by Evil Villain, recovers in Hidden Hovel with Obi-Wan Kenobi, and emerges to Thwart Evil Villain and become Super Ruler. Or whatever small variation on that theme and those characters the author has rung. Yes, yes, all quest novels are versions of that story. Put some effort into hiding it! Distract me and engage my attention elsewhere, so I'll trot along behind your people as they go through the paces, smiling instead of sighing.

That's what Jay Lake did in his creation of the City Imperishable. He recapitulated eleventh-century Byzantine history mixed with the iconic Star Wars quest and made me, the most cynical non-fantasy reader ever, like it. He did it by making me invest in people, believe their eccentricities were real and interesting, and told me enough about the world they live in for me to know that it wasn't my world but one a bit more interesting.

So, yeah. The city is.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

I'll take my post-apocalyptic zombie fic with a side of Southern Gothic, please!

The Reapers are the Angels

Alden Bell

Holt Paperbacks

Reviewed by: Terry 

3.5 - 4 out of 5 stars

 

Well, I gotta say I didn't expect that ending.

_The Reapers are the Angels_ is my first foray into the très au courant genre of zombie apocalypse. It was a fortunate choice and I can only hope I enjoy other forays into the genre as much. One thing I can say is that it’s definitely a real page-turner . The story of Temple, the young bad-ass action-grrl born into a world after the rise of the undead, is compelling and engrossing and has definitely got velocity. Temple herself is interesting, a strangely positive girl despite the darkness of her past and the violence of both her world and her deeper character. She's a strange oxymoron, an optimist who seethes under the surface with supressed rage. I suppose she could be seen as yet another product of the Buffy/Katniss/whatever-action-grrl-of-the-moment template, but I thought she generally came across as being much more real than that stereotype would imply. She may be a warrior princess of sorts, but Temple has a certain naïve charm that sets her apart and she rarely goes looking for trouble, though of course it often finds her. Temple is also interesting in that she was born into the world of the apocalypse, so the status quo doesn’t disturb her in the same way as it does the survivors from the old time. She doesn’t see the world as a punishment and a curse, but rather as a gift. She sees the hand of God in everything and even the fact of the shambling dead is a miracle when you look at it from the right angle. It’s an interesting perspective however off-the-wall it might seem.

The other major element of the novel is its prose. The southern twang that nearly drips off the page is a joy to read and makes the novel seem, on the one hand, very literary. Yet there was another element to it that kept breaking through in the back of my mind and which occasionally broke the spell of the prose itself: this is also a novel that very much reads as though it were written with the cinematic version strongly in mind. At times it is almost like a movie treatment for the soon-to-be-produced vehicle starring the next Jennifer Lawrence as Temple (maybe Chloe Moretz? She’s young enough and certainly her stint as Hitgirl in ‘Kickass’ gives her some of the required experience in extreme violence). This isn’t exactly a bad thing, I guess, and the author is welcome to any income he can derive from his work, but it was a little distracting sometimes to think “ah yes, I can just see the dollar signs in the author’s eyes as he wrote this scene just for the big screen.” Unfair of me maybe, I don’t know, but it was a feeling I definitely got from time to time while reading. That said, this is still a great novel to read and it’s simply filled with the poetic palaver of the South so mellifluous to Northern ears.

Aside from being both a quest road-trip and the story of a young girl (who’s really more of an adult in all but the most literal temporal sense) coping with her past as she faces her future it is also, as others have pointed out, definitely a story about the American landscape. It’s a blasted and decayed landscape, but one where the character of its past still shines through in what remains. Ironically it seems to be those who are most willing to let go of this geographical memory that are most likely to succeed in this new world as opposed to the hopeless dreamers trying to claw their way back to the world of civilization and who pretend that their little enclaves of the old world are anything other than a fantasy.

I’ll conclude by saying that Alden Bell also did a great job of building up his characters and even those who had little more than a walk-on were generally interesting and unique. A shout-out has to go to Moses Todd one of the better villains (or perhaps I really ought to call him an antagonist) I’ve come across in awhile. He’s nearly as compelling as Temple and seeing the two of them together was nearly always a treat. I’m surprised to see this listed as book one in a series, but I’m willing to go along with Bell in his further forays across the twisted landscape of undead America.

Also posted at Goodreads

More than seven questions with James Moore

Today's guest is James Moore, author of the upcoming Seven Forges.

How long was Seven Forges in your head before you put pen to paper?
I was batting the idea around for a little over six months before I finally broke down and started writing anything. That’s not really unusual for me. If I think of something I usually wait a while to see if the idea sticks. I have ideas all the time. It’s a matter of seeing which ones are worth revisiting.

How did you hook up with Angry Robot?
I had a friend of mine who sometimes works as my first reader suggest them to me as a good fit for SEVEN FORGES. So I picked up a few of their books to see what sort of stuff they were doing and then decided he was right.

What are the big inspirations behind Seven Forges?
Honestly, I just wanted to do something different. Something that was a change of pace for me. And I love the idea of a serious culture clash. I started toying with the differences between a large and complacent world power and a smaller but very, very hungry nation and my mind sort of ran off in its own direction.

How many books in the series do you have planned?
I’m currently contracted for two novels, but honestly I have at least a dozen stories bouncing in the back of my head. I am already in love with Fellein and with the Blasted Lands.

Who would you cast in a Seven Forges movie?
Heh heh heh. Let’s see. Vin Diesel, James Purefoy, Jason Momoa, Jeremy Renner, Scarlett Johansen, Tom Hiddelston, Taylor Kitsch, Daniel Craig, Emma Stone, Emma Watson, Benedict Cumberbatch, Julianne Moore, Andrew Garfield, Hugh Jackman….I can think of any number of possibilities.

What are you reading now? 
Westlake Soul, by Rio Youers. I just finished The Language of the Dying by Sarah Pinborough. Before that it was Joyland by Stephen King. All three are excellent.

What is your favorite book of all time?
One book? GAH! Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury.

What writer would you say is your biggest influence?
Over all? Stephen King.

Is there a particular book that made you want to be a writer?
Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach made me believe I could be a writer. The World According to Garp by John Irving made me fall in love with the written word.

Any non-series books in the works? 
A couple planned. I’m currently working on the sequel to Seven Forges, tentatively called The Chosen. I’m also working on a novel called Boom Town, a novel called Fresh Kill and a collaborative novel tentatively called The Suburbs of Hell. I also plan on working on about three more novels in the immediate future. I like to stay busy.

Any words of wisdom for aspiring writers?
Read every day. Read different types of books. Expand your horizons. Write for yourself. Always write for yourself. No exceptions. If YOU do not like your book you readers most likely won’t like it either. Write every day. Every day. Finish the book and THEN edit. Do not edit while writing the first draft or you risk never finishing the book.

Automatons and Aerostats - An Interview with David Barnett

Today's guest is David Barnett, author of Gideon Smith and the Mechanical Girl.

How long was Gideon Smith and the Mechanical Girl in your head before you put pen to paper?
Gideon was one of those weird books that kind of burst forth fully formed; well, not really, obviously, but as soon as I started thinking about what I wanted to do I almost immediately had the bones of the story mapped out. It was only when I started putting flesh on the bones that it emerged I was sort of writing about the nature of heroism and heroes.

How did you hook up with Tor?
When I’d finished the first book, or at least the first full draft of it, I sent it to my amazing agent John Jarrold who started to put it out. Claire Eddy at Tor came back very quickly and expressed interest, and we decided to work with them, which was an excellent decision. Claire is an excellent editor and Tor are right behind the Gideon books.  The book will be published simultaneously in the UK by Snowbooks, and Emma Barnes there has done a great job on a completely different cover design.

What are the big inspirations behind Gideon Smith?
Not so much current steampunk fiction but more Victorian adventure literature in general and specifically the pulps and penny dreadful – Boy’s Own adventure stories, the derring-do of square-jawed, flag-waving defenders of the Empire, which I wanted to get under the skin of.

Gideon Smith and the Mechanical Girl isn't your first trip to the rodeo. What made you want to write a steampunk book?
I never sat down and said, “Right, going to do steampunk next”. I wanted to write a full-blooded, head-down, charging at 100mph adventure story, but with modern literary sensibilities. The Victorian era fit the bill nicely as the world was still a new, exciting and in some cases undiscovered place, but society and people are recognizable to us today. The steampunk gloss came from necessity – I wanted to shift characters across the world pretty quickly, and the old steampunk trope of airships came in handy for that. Then I started messing about with alternate history, and Gideon’s world kind of emerged from that.

How many books in the series do you have planned?
Tor have bought three Gideon novels. The second one is Gideon Smith and the Brass Dragon, out in June 2014, and the third is as yet untitled but out, I think, in February 2015. They’re all standalone novels but they do form part of a longer story arc. I reckon six books in total should tell the first story arc, but whether that happens largely depends, I suppose, on sales of the first three.

Who would you cast in a Gideon Smith movie?
I answered this question recently on a blog post (with pictures!)

What are you reading now? 
Just been re-reading a load of Kerouac novels for a piece I did for the Guardian newspaper; currently reading Charles Stross’s The Bloodline Feud (first two books of his Family Trade series). Think I’ll be looking at Ben Aaronovitch’s Broken Homes next.

What is your favorite book of all time?
God, impossible to say. Changes on a daily basis. I do always have a soft spot for Kerouac’s On The Road, and I re-read Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes every Halloween. I also love RA Lafferty’s Fourth Mansions, which is bonkers.

What writer would you say is your biggest influence?
I don’t think I am inspired by actual books or writing, but very often by writers and what they say, if that makes sense? In other words, I don’t look at other books and think, Hmm, I’d like to write something like that. I recently interviewed Neil Gaiman and found him hugely inspiring – he started off in newspapers and I work as a journalist by day, and pretty much every thing he says about writing and creativity chimes with me.

Is there a particular book that made you want to be a writer?
Probably John Irving’s The World According To Garp. Beautiful, weird and human.

Any non-series books in the works? 
Yeah, I’ve got a few that I wrote pre-Gideon which weren’t published which I still think are great, though they probably need a fresh look at them. I’ve got stacks of ideas and half-started works, but it kind of depends on how Gideon does, whether Tor want any more books out of me, and what they’d like to see. Everything I write has some kind of fantastical elements, but I can’t see at the moment that I’d write non-Gideon steampunk.

Any words of wisdom for aspiring writers?
Gideon Smith and the Mechanical Girl was the seventh book that I submitted to my agent John Jarrold, and the first one to get a major publishing deal. Some writers are overnight successes and earn six-figure sums based on one chapter of a book. I’m not one of those writers, and probably no-one reading this is either. An obvious piece of advice: If you want to be a writer, you’ve got to write. A perhaps less-obvious piece of advice: If you want to be a writer, you’ve got to keep writing, even when you’ve papered your spare room with rejection slips and it feels like the whole world is telling you it isn't worth the effort.

A Return to Blue Deer, Montana

This is the second of Jamie Harrison's quirky mysteries set in the small fictional town of Blue Deer, which is nestled up against the Crazy Mountains in southwestern Montana. All the principal characters from the first book, The Edge Of The Crazies, appear again, including the county's laid-back sheriff, Jules Clements, who is the main protagonist. It's now the middle of summer, and Jules and his fellow townspeople are gearing up for the annual Wrangle, a rodeo that draws large numbers of tourist...more Reviewed by James L. Thane Four out of five stars Reviewed by James This is the second of Jamie Harrison's quirky mysteries set in the small fictional town of Blue Deer, which is nestled up against the Crazy Mountains in southwestern Montana. All the principal characters from the first book, The Edge Of The Crazies, appear again, including the county's laid-back sheriff, Jules Clements, who is the main protagonist. It's now the middle of summer, and Jules and his fellow townspeople are gearing up for the annual Wrangle, a rodeo that draws large numbers of tourists into the small community for a party that, even under the best of circumstances, can be a headache for the tiny sheriff's department. Things begin to go downhill in a big way when someone reports a tent floating in a reservoir near Blue Deer. Jules heads out to investigate, anticipating a nice, lazy afternoon away from the office. But when it turns out that there are two bodies floating inside the tent, Jules' lazy afternoon quickly melts away. The victims are a local environmental attorney, Otto Scobey, and his young girlfriend who had been camping near the reservoir. It quickly becomes apparent that their deaths were no accident; someone in a very large truck ran over the tent and then pushed it and its occupants into the water. The dead lawyer had been a principal in the development of a major new resort complex. Everyone insists that Otto was well liked, that he had no problems, and that he was totally cool with the fact that his ex-wife, Sylvia, also a partner in the development, was now in a relationship with film director Hugh Lesy, the third major partner. As Jules investigates, however, he senses problems below the surface of the relationship among the resort's developers. While he attempts to tease out the truth of the relationship and find the killer, he's also forced to deal with a wide variety of other eccentric characters who have made their way to Blue Deer, including a sexy blonde who quickly has Jules in her sights. Jules' problems will only multiply several times over when the Wrangle commences and the fun really begins. Jamie Harrison has woven here another entertaining story set against the background of the new West where, in places like Blue Deer, Hollywood celebrities and other newcomers are mixing with long-time natives, not always harmoniously. Jules Clement would remind no one of Matt Dillon or of any other Old West lawman and it's great fun to get reacquainted with him and the other characters who populated the first book in this series. Anyone who enjoyed The Edge of the Crazies will certainly want to find Going Local.

Sex & Murder

Small Town
by Lawrence Block

Reviewed by Kemper
3 out of 5 stars.

Apparently one of my favorite mystery writers has a bit of a kinky side.

This one seriously shocked me when I first read it back in 2002.  Part of this was because Lawrence Block represents New York to me in a lot of ways, and it seemed like this book was his response to 9/11.  While the shadow of that day hangs over everything, it was odd to find that a big part of the story also involved nipple rings, bondage and various sex toys.

The story starts several months after the Twin Towers collapsed.  The body of a murdered woman is discovered in her apartment, and a writer named John Blair Creighton is arrested since he admits that he went home with her after they met in a bar.  Art gallery owner Susan Pomerance gets fascinated by the case since the woman had been her realtor, and her morbid curiosity about the murder and Creighton comes as she discovers an increasing desire for new sexual experiences. Former police commissioner Francis Buckram is bored and killing time with public speaking engagements and considering running for mayor in the next election.

A series of shocking murders occur by a man the press dubs The Carpenter because of his use of a hammer as a weapon. Block reveals to the reader that killer was just another retired middle-aged New Yorker who lost his entire family because of 9/11, and now that grief has transformed into an insane belief that the city requires a series of sacrifices to sustain itself.

When a link is made from The Carpenter’s killings to the death of the realtor, Creighton becomes a celebrity and his stalled writing career takes off. Susan meets Buckram and seduces him with a dominatrix routine that shocks and thrills him.  Susan also continues to be obsessed with Creighton while Buckram is fascinated by the manhunt for The Carpenter.  Meanwhile, Creighton begins to enjoy his new found fame while having doubts about if he actually did kill the realtor while in an alcoholic blackout.

Block does a nice job of developing all of these characters and many more supporting players like a gay alcoholic cleaner who discovered the first body and finds himself an unwitting player in The Carpenter’s delusions.  By putting together a series of chance encounters that have profound impacts on those involved, Block really does sell the idea that New York is really a small town when viewed from insides these webs of relationships.   I particularly enjoyed the story of how Creighton’s shame at being accused of murder turns into the best thing for his life and career.

But damn there’s a lot of sex in this…..

Susan’s erotic adventures include a wide variety of encounters and Block spares no detail.  It’s the same type of stuff he’s done in other books like Getting Off, but where he combined sex and murder seamlessly in that one, he never quite gets the same thing going here.  Susan’s story seems removed and distant from what else is going on in the book despite her  being one of the key links between everyone.  Going from a story about a man driven mad by 9/11 and showing how this effects various New Yorkers just doesn’t fit with the sexual encounters of a woman exploring her kinky side.


I think part of my disappointment stems from the notion that this was going to be Block delving into what 9/11 did to New York, but other than The Carpenter, none of the characters make anything other than causal remarks or observations about how the city has changed since.  For me, Block had deeper and more meaningful things to say about the subject when he wrote about how his professional killer character Keller reacted in Hit Parade.