A few years after DC Comics invited indie cartoonists to poke fun at its stable of superheroes in BIZARRO COMICS and its sequel, BIZARRO WORLD, Marvel gets into the act with the brilliantly subversive STRANGE TALES. The result is a sure bet for the year’s most fun comics collection.
Paul Pope’s Inhumans adventure is continually interrupted by big dog Lockjaw’s desire to be fed. In a purposely overly cute style à la Hello Kitty, Junko Minzuno imagines Spider-Man depressed while living in an all-spider town, because his powers are no longer special. Dash Shaw’s psychedelic “Dr. Strange vs. Nightmare” pits the sorcerer against perhaps his greatest foe yet: the overwheming desire to yawn.
[click to continue…]
When you see the names Lee Child and James Patterson being bandied about as blurbs on a book cover, you sort of know what kind of novel it will be: one with a lone hero, like a former government agent who plays by his own rules. It seems to be a subgenre all its own in most modern thrillers, so I was a bit hesitant going into THE BRICKLAYER, the debut novel from a former FBI agent writing under the pseudonym of Noah Boyd.
Right away, this book stands as a breath of fresh air. In what’s obviously meant to be the start of a series, we’re introduced to protagonist Steve Vail at a bank robbery. While a SWAT team waits outside, Vail takes justice into his own hands, then leaves the scene to avoid any sort of credit. Right away, you get the sense that Vail is not a man to be reckoned with, and it shines throughout the book.
[click to continue…]
In ALICE IN WONDERLAND AND PHILOSOPHY: CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER, editor Richard Brian Davis examines the compelling issues behind Lewis Carroll’s classic. It’s part of the Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture series, and here’s the introduction. Read me:
“You take the blue pill,” Morpheus says to Neo in THE MATRIX, “and the story ends . . . . You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.” It’s a tempting offer, isn’t it? For at one time or another in our lives, we’ve all wanted to escape — from a dull and tedious job, an impossible relationship, from a world in which we often have so little control over what happens to us. Perhaps it’s for reasons such as these that our culture has become positively obsessed with the idea of transcending the confines of this world for the cool fresh air of another. Whether it’s by a red pill, a secret wardrobe, a looking glass, or a rabbit-hole, it doesn’t really matter. We’ll take it.
[click to continue…]
We could easily spend this entire page arguing if ABLE ONE, the latest from the ever-reliable Ben Bova, is science fiction or a techno-thriller using slightly extrapolated hardware. It’s a bit of both, actually. But, bottom line: It is one of the most suspenseful, insightful, can’t-put-it-down-for-long novels you are likely to read this year.
A seemingly typical day goes wrong when truck drivers and other commuters notice that their GPS devices are suddenly no longer working. Then, TV and radio stations find themselves off the air. Most phone lines and, yes, even the Internet is down. Before long, the heads of state discover that damned near every source of electronic communication is no longer working, and global commerce is brought to a near-total standstill.
[click to continue…]
THE BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY STORIES 2009 is a pretty solid anthology of short stories, only some of which are true “mystery stories.” The problem with this volume, for readers who actually expect a book with the term “mystery stories” in the title to be comprised entirely of such, is that fewer than half of its 20 tales originally saw print in publications devoted to the crime genre. Few of us in the mood for a mystery are going to pick up THE NEW YORKER or THE VIRGINIA QUARTERLY REVIEW.
And when you figure in that guest editor Jeffery Deaver is one of the trickiest crime writers in the short form at work today — if you’ve never read his short stories, or those of Peter Lovesey, you should — this volume becomes even weaker. (Note: I know that Lovesey is a Brit and so could not be included in a book of American mystery stories. I’ve met the man, heard him speak. Very British.)
[click to continue…]
