This new year may be but one month gone, but I think we have a clear contender for the best non-fiction book of 2006 in James L. Swanson’s MANHUNT: THE 12-DAY CHASE FOR LINCOLN’S KILLER. Everyone knows the story of President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination at Ford’s Theatre the night of April 14, 1865, but what happened afterward is, arguably, a story every bit as interesting, if far less often told.

Swanson’s book puts a real face on Lincoln’s murderer, egotistical actor/lothario John Wilkes Booth. A Confederate sympathizer and white supremacist, Booth was angered at the President both for the surrender of Robert E. Lee in the Civil War and the President’s subsequent decision to award blacks the right to vote, which Booth decried as “nigger citizenship.” MANHUNT’s first third deals with the planning, execution and immediate aftermath of the assassination, not at all the simple, point-and-shoot affair as textbooks would have you believe. With a band of recruited conspirators, Booth first had hatched a plot to kidnap the leader; when that was thwarted, he seized on the opportunity of Lincoln’s public appearance at Ford’s, formulating a new plan in less than a day, no less complex.

Except this one was no mere kidnapping. And it called for the simultaneous murders of Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William Seward. Booth left those to his associates, who promptly botched them (you’ll find all the details, ranging from the gory to the comic, here), while taking the biggest assignment for himself. After succeeding, he broke his leg jumping on the theater stage in his escape. That fracture should have proved an omen to the week and a half that followed, a bizarre series of misadventures that occasionally find him in good luck, but more often find him at the mercy of his injury, grown so large he cannot remove his boot. At one point in his journey that crosses three state lines, Booth loses a day when he inadvertently rows the wrong way up the Potomac, and near the end meets his fate in the form of a man who has castrated himself. I certainly don’t remember learning that in Mrs. Denton’s class.

So hateful of the powers that be and showing no remorse for his crimes, Booth struck me as the precursor to Timothy McVeigh, albeit with the added value of charm, talent and good looks. You get to know him well, so strict are his politics, so deluded his thinking. Swanson’s narrative is wholly absorbing, as it reads like fiction. Assembled from original sources, it also has the benefit of being real. It really is, as he writes in his introduction, “far too incredible to have ever been made up.”

With its wide array of colorful characters both good and bad, and Booth’s every hour accounted for, MANHUNT plays out like a colonial version of 24. It is the most accessible and suspenseful true-to-life tale since Erik Larson’s THE DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY. Beautifully designed and supplemented with period photographs and illustrations, it also certainly stands as the definitive book of its subject. I don’t often read history books because I find them so dry, but MANHUNT is alive. It’s one to savor. –Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

Holy crap, are there a lot of notable new releases coming out today. At least seven by our count. Also by our count: We expect to have reviews of at least four of them soon. Which four? Exactly half the fun is coming back to find out. (Seriously, exactly half. We counted that, too.)

• Because this world is short on STAR WARS books, Timothy Zahn offers STAR WARS: OUTBOUND FLIGHT. We have no idea what this one’s about, but we’re guessing maybe spaceships. Perhaps yours is as good as ours?

• Miles away from that universe is THE DEEP BLUE ALIBI, Paul Levine’s immediate sequel to SOLOMON VS. LORD, the dueling-lawyers mystery that seems like it just came out last week. And before you blink – okay, August – he’ll have the third installment out, called KILL ALL THE LAWYERS. Now there’s a concept we can get behind. We’ll have a review of ALIBI ready in, oh … five days ago.

• Speaking of third installments, Marc Cerasini has 24 DECLASSIFIED: TROJAN HORSE, the third (see!) original novel based on the kick-ass TV series. Despite the title, it is not about Jack Bauer on the hunt for equestrian condoms. We hope.

• A new dark fantasy series gets underway with Tim Lebbon’s DUSK. The sequel will be called DAWN, and no, we’re not just being snarky there. Lebbon hasn’t had a book out in forever – like four weeks ago – so it’s nice to have him back after the long hiatus.

• Another new dark fantasy series takes root in Christopher Golden’s THE MYTH HUNTERS. Subtitled “Book One of The Veil,” we tagged it as one of the 10 books we were most looking forward to in 2006. We hope it doesn’t disappoint.

• For straight horror, don’t count out GRIMM REAPINGS, R. Patrick Gates’ long-awaited sequel to his horror-fan favorite, 1990’s GRIMM MEMORIALS. Even after 15 years, the horror community has not forgotten.

• And finally, Robert Silverberg’s acclaimed 1972 novel THE BOOK OF SKULLS is brought back into print by Del Rey, in advance of what’s sure to be an unsuccessful transition to the big screen by director William Friedkin, who hasn’t made anything worth seeing since, what, 1985? (And by that we refer to TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A., not C.A.T. SQUAD.)

Another month, another look at search terms that brings surfers to the world that is BOOKGASM. Amidst all the usual suspects (Mimi Rogers, Uschi Digard … do I sense a trend?) we find not one, not two, but eight differently worded searches for James Frey, the recently/rightfully tarred-and-feathered “memorist” whose credibility has broken into (if you’ll forgive the pun) A MILLION LITTLE PIECES.

However, the award for My Favorite Search Term of the Month goes handily (if you’ll forgive the pun) to “sex fuck flicks under $5.00,” as if $6 is simply out of the question when it comes to masturbatory material. Hey, the economy sucks. But this list doesn’t…

• james frye a million little pieces
• james frye oprah
• sex fuck flicks under $5.00
• koontz the husband
• james frye on oprah
• james frye smoking gun
• a million little pieces/frye
• james frye one million little pieces
• sexy movies
• uschi digard
• ryun patterson
• mimi rogers
• evangeline lilly naked
• smoking gun james frye
• oprah and james frye
• gloria trevi
• jessica lange king kong
• book reviews of brian garfield’s novels
• steve berry templar legacy
• steve alten hell’s aquarium
• questions unanswered of otzi
• splinter cell operation barracuda
• torture drawings
• grimm reapings release date
• essential book of kakuro
• marc cerasini
• 24 declassified
• christopher golden myth hunters review
• the book of the dead pendergast
• dance of death preston child
• first and fifteenth pop art short stories
• paperbacks release january 2006 publisher fantasy scifi
• 1940s gas executions
• hg wells comics
• 1602 new world preview
• revolution on the planet of the apes mr comics
• planet of the apes fans
• dean koontz’s frankenstein book three
• king kong skull island adventure
• fables homeland
• amityville horror
• gaiman
• goth icky

What’s a nice girl like The New York Times doing reviewing a bad boy like J.F. Gonzalez’s SURVIVOR? The NYT’s cover blurb says the novel “pushes your eyes of the page and then pulls them back,” which is a euphemism for “this one is sick, but you’re just as sick for reading it.” Fair enough.

It begins with a highway road-rage incident that yields genuine unease (especially for someone like me who harbors travel anxiety), but is child’s play compared to the grisly scenario that will follow. The victims are vacationing yuppie lawyer couple Brad and Lisa Miller, and through a set of circumstances too complex to go into here, Brad has to spent the weekend in jail under citizen’s arrest. Lisa has it worse, however, when the man who put Brad in the clinker kidnaps her from her motel room and hauls her off to a remote cabin.

The man promises he won’t hurt her. But Al and Animal will! They are, respectively, the behind-the-camera and on-camera talent of a series of underground snuff films, in the next of which Lisa is set to star as the most unlucky and unfortunate receptacle of Animal’s fluids, desires and abuse. She won’t live through it, which is exactly the point of a snuff film (in reality, merely the stuff of urban legends … we hope).

Needless to say, a huge twist occurs before her life can be extinguished, and you’re going to react in one of two ways: by tearing through the rest as fast as possible to find out what happens, or by hurling the book across the room. Just before it, I thought SURVIVOR was fairly tame compared to other stuff I’ve read – perhaps one Habitrail away from matching the depravity of AMERICAN PSYCHO – but then that damned page 142 rolled around. I won’t divulge the details, but suffice to say, it’s not something I ever expected to read anywhere, an act that not only puts the “X” in “extreme,” but bolds and underlines it as well. And you’ve still got 230 pages left to go!

Yet I couldn’t not finish it, because I had to see these people punished. And that trip is wrought with frustration and tension, both marks of a truly effective horror novel. Passages will sicken, yet seem oddly comic, i.e. “But he’d never thought of a neck stump as a sexual orifice before last night” or “I like to baste the asses in the oven with onions and bacon strips.” But at least the shock has a definite purpose to the story; without it, there simply wouldn’t be one.

That said, SURVIVOR needs some tightening, as points and phrases are repeated multiple times, often in the form of awfully long exposition that is entirely repetitive. And despite that occasional bit of over-the-top dialogue, the book feels mostly grounded in reality, except when the bad guys get diarrhea of the mouth, such as when Animal launches into a 13-page explanation of how he came to be the beast he is. You could do it in two, though I’d argue it’s more horrifying not to know at all.

Purposely unpleasant and unflinching, SURVIVOR’s zero-immunity stance makes for a read that is good, though not exactly enjoyable. Make any sense? If so, you’ll likely be part of the group that makes it past page 142. –Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

Lawrence Block has the honor of having written the first book to come out in the Hard Case Crime series (GRIFTER’S GAME) and is one of the few authors to have had a second book under the imprint as well (THE GIRL WITH THE LONG GREEN HEART).

Soon, he’ll be the only one to have a third, and this time it’s a major coup for Hard Case: LUCKY AT CARDS, about a crook and the dangerous woman for whom he falls. Unavailable for almost four decades and written under the pen name of Sheldon Lord, “It’s a terrific book – and no matter how big a Lawrence Block fan you are, there’s practically no chance you’ve read it. It’s one you’re not going to want to miss,” said editor Charles Ardai. “Over the past half-century, Block has consistently produced some of the very best crime novels being written, and like many of Block’s readers, my only complaint is that I’ve read everything he’s written and crave more.”

In the meantime, you can preview covers for three Hard Case titles coming this fall – THE GUNS OF HEAVEN by Pete Hamill, the previously unpublished THE LAST MATCH by David Dodge (author of PLUNDER IN THE SUN) and GRAVE DESCEND by John Lange (aka Michael Crichton) – after the jump.

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Freydar
(fra’där’)
noun

1. an instinct for determining the level of fabrication, enhancement and/or outright falsehoods in a memoir. Ex. “I don’t really believe this author’s claim that he located a horde of zombies under his back porch. He’s tripping my Freydar.”

Here at BOOKGASM, it’s no secret that we love the Hard Case Crime series. Seeing that cool yellow-ribbon logo is like paperback crack. In between issuing monthly editions, series editor Charles Ardai talked to us about the line’s genesis and its future.

BOOKGASM: As the sole editor for Hard Case Crime, what is the selection process like when choosing novels for publication? Have there been any older titles you wanted to acquire for reprint, but were unable to?

ARDAI: It’s very simple: I buy novels I love. Nothing could be easier. For the reprint side of the line, I go to my bookshelves and the thousands of paperback crime novels I have there, and I pick out the ones I remember being blown away by when I read them. I also get recommendations over the transom from our readers, and have a pile of several dozen books on my to-be-read pile at any given time.

For original novels, the process is different, but the criteria are the same: We’ll only buy a book if we love it, if it tells a remarkable story in a remarkable way. We get about 1,000 submissions per year, mostly by e-mail, and I read as much of each as I need to in order to tell whether it’s good enough and interesting enough for us to publish. The simplest way to describe my selection process is this: If I can stop reading, I do; if I can’t, we buy it.

Since we only publish between four and six original titles each year, we have to say “no” to more than 99 percent of the books we receive; the positive way of looking at that is that we have the opportunity to hold out for those rare few that are really irresistible.

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I love when I discover something I’ve heard absolutely nothing about. MISTER X is one of those rare things. Or, rather, was one of those rare things when I happened upon the first collection last year. Loving every page of it – even the ones accidentally duplicated in a printing mishap – I waited nearly a long year for the recently released MISTER X: THE DEFINITIVE COLLECTION VOLUME TWO.

For the uninitiated, MISTER X was a relatively obscure but highly influential indie comics series that was published briefly (and sporadically at that) in the 1980s, created by Dean Motter (who went on to do TERMINAL CITY for Vertigo). The bald, bespectacled Mister X is some sort of mad genius with many skeletons in his closet, but the plot doesn’t matter as much as the setting – think Fritz Lang’s dreamworld city of METROPOLIS. I don’t know if comics have captured the German expressionist and Art Deco looks better than this puzzling, crime-minded series. The story is really secondary to the marvelous visuals, especially in this follow-up collecting the final eight issues, continuing the threads laid in the previous book. (In other words, start there.) Its plot is complex, entailing blackmail, murder and pharmaceuticals, all in a candy-colored universe that recalls the brightness of COOL WORLD, but with harsh, sharp edges and true bite.

Again, it’s really the art that drives it. Which is why the very last chapter disappoints, newly redrawn by Motter himself, after being unhappy with the issue that was published so long ago. The man can draw, obviously, but it’s not up to the caliber of the rest of the series, which came to life under the sure hand of Seth (DRAWN AND QUARTERLY) and the Hernandez Brothers of LOVE AND ROCKETS fame. To justify the “definitive,” this collection includes an eight-page story in the world of MISTER X, written and illustrated by none other than Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, before they collaborated on the landmark SANDMAN. There’s other stellar talent on display as well, courtesy of covers by the likes of Howard Chaykin and Bill Sienciewicz. –Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

James Frey made a return appearance to Oprah’s show yesterday in an attempt to answer charges claiming his memoir A MILLION LITTLE PIECES is largely fabricated. I was critical of Oprah for her defense of Frey on LARRY KING LIVE, but she redeemed herself at the show’s start, saying her judgment had been “clouded” and that she had sent the message to the nation that truth doesn’t matter.

I’m sure Oprah doesn’t feel she’s wrong very often, so to admit that not once but numerous times throughout the broadcast is brave. But not as brave as Frey, who took such a beating from the host, the other guests and the audience members that I hope he didn’t start using shortly after exiting Harpo Studios. He owned up to some of the charges, but seemed awfully wishy-washy on others.

The best line of the hour went to Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, who asked about the scene where a bloody, vomitous Frey boards a flight, “How’d this guy get on an airplane? I can’t get on with a third piece of luggage.” I won’t recap the entire show since others already have done so, but I must take offense at publisher Nan Talese for trying to save her own reputation by saying that a memoir is an author’s “remembrance” of events. Which is true, Nan, until they actively create falsehoods; then it’s a novel.

Lessons learned from this ordeal: You can’t trust a drug addict, and you do not make Oprah look like a fool. Who knew?

I gave a fairly tepid review to Paul Levine’s first book featuring the lawyer characters of Stephen Solomon and Victoria Lord, cleverly titled SOLOMON VS. LORD. It wasn’t terrible, but it was riddled with clichés and stock character situations that came directly out of Lifetime Channel movies. Still, in spite of these flaws, the pace of the novel was relentless, and the addition of a tricky custody battle centering around Bobby, the semi-autistic 11-year-old nephew of Stephen, was a strong enough emotional hook to make the reader care about the story.

Now, in this second book of the series, Levine has improved a hundredfold. THE DEEP BLUE ALIBI is a rock-solid mystery novel with decent chunks of courtroom action and with better-established characters. Not having to explain everyone’s story from the ground up prevents Levine from telegraphing the plot, which involves the multimillion dollar development of a floating casino and hotel, situated in a very sensitive coral reef environment. Of course, the developer happens to be a beloved uncle of Victoria Lord, and dear Uncle is the one who is directly implicated in the murder of a federal environmental official.

The bickering between Solomon and Lord matched with the mediating wisdom of Bobby and Solomon’s father, placed against the eccentricities of Lord’s family, fuels the book’s story arc and the growing relationship of our two protagonists. While the plot itself is about a real estate deal gone awry, the joy is in the humanity of the book’s characters, their interactions, their foibles and moments of honor.

The book isn’t perfect. Levine is so fond of brand names you wonder if he’s angling for payola. And the last few scenes are so improbable, even a first-year law student could rip the case to shreds. But it is a good read, and much better than its predecessor. If you like exciting mysteries set in South Florida (think the legions of Carl Hiaasen fans), then you won’t be disappointed. But read DEEP BLUE ALIBI first, and then go back to the first book in the series, because you’ll want to start with the better book – the one that lets its characters be themselves, the one that captures the protagonists’ relationship in full bloom instead of its seedling stage. It’s worth your time. –Mark Rose

Buy it at Amazon.

And now for the second edition of PANEL DISCUSSION, BOOKGASM’s occasional round-up of comic books and graphic novels to which you should be paying attention. Did you miss the first one?

PLASTIC MAN: RUBBER BANDITS
Abe Lincoln! Dinosaurs! Vampires! Brain-Swapping Ray Guns! Books of Forbidden Evil Knowledge! Cute Mice That Live in a Round-Topped Hole in the Wall Who Refuse to Die! This is the stuff that mainstream comics has been missing, and now will continue to miss with the recent cancellation of DC’s award-winning PLASTIC MAN title. Luckily, we’ve got this collection, assembling issues 7-12 in their Chuck Jones-meets-MAD Magazine glory. Sole creator Kyle Baker improves upon the uneven first collection with a balls-to-the-wall approach that hits exponentially more than it misses, as well as sneaks in some not-so-subtle political commentary. Highly recommended for smart fans of smart/dumb humor.

SMAX
Despite the title, SMAX is not a new breakfast cereal from General Mills. However, it is indeed magically delicious. A sideways sequel to Alan Moore’s magnificent “HILL STREET BLUES with superheroes” book TOP 10, SMAX is a fantasy adventure for everyone who loves – and hates – fantasy adventure. Not unlike most of Moore’s oeuvre, SMAX is exciting, hilarious, frightening and ultimately brilliant, often within the same page. Zander Cannon (also a TOP 10 graduate) fills each panel with layers and layers of in-jokes without getting in the way of the narrative, and his character design does a nice job of balancing the light and dark aspects of the story. The only real negative of the experience is knowing that Moore has once again “retired” from comics and other creators are now in charge of these great characters. A damn shame. As strong as they may be, very few writers come close to the creative power of Alan Moore.

OCEAN
Warren Ellis is a great writer. Warren Ellis is a horribly overrated writer. I agree with both sentiments. When Ellis is on, his work is fun and exciting and fresh. When he’s off, it’s usually because he’s trying too hard to push his vision of hip nihilism through too-cool-for-school characters and obnoxious, sub-Cronenberg organic gore. He’s generally not boring, though, so I was surprised that OCEAN turned out to be the comic book equivalent of a Saturday night, made-for-Sci-Fi Channel flick, or a feature directed by the second unit AD of RESIDENT EVIL, shelved for two years and then released in mid-January.

The plot concerns a U.N. weapons inspector (the standard Ellis model: painfully clever and all-knowing, but this time he’s black!) investigating a space station orbiting the moon Europa. Standing in his way is a platform operated by the super-conglomerate DOORS. That’s right, “DOORS.” I mean, Jesus, calling them MacroHard would’ve at least made for some good jokes. It turns out that there are thousands of space coffins in the ocean of Europa – with convenient windows so we can see the faces of the space vampires lying within. Turns out, they’re ancestors to humans on Earth! And they’re about to wake up! And transport to the moon to invade after a million years or some bullshit like that. This entire premise gets sillier the more I think about it.

And did I mention the conveniently international, mostly female crew? The butchy white chick! The Asian hottie! The Middle-Eastern love-interest-but-not-really-because-all-they-do-is-touch-hands-and-act-coy! And featuring the slobbish white guy who’d have been played by Paul Giamatti during the lean pre-AMERICAN SPLENDOR years.

Boring, boring, boring. But it does feature great art from Chris Sprouse (TOM STRONG), whose pencil work is like what Dave Gibbons’ would look like if his characters had slightly more mobility than Kenner’s early Star Wars figures. So it’s a pretty, albeit pointless, read.

Wait for the movie, then don’t rent it. –Brian Winkeler

Entertainment Weekly reports that the title character of Jeff Lindsay’s acclaimed crime novel DARKLY DREAMING DEXTER and its sequel, DEARLY DEVOTED DEXTER, will be making the transition to the small screen later this year on Showtime’s DEXTER.

SIX FEET UNDER star Michael C. Hall will play Dexter, the “forensics expert who moonlights as a serial killer of violent criminals.” The series sounds like a winner to my dark-humored tastes, but I guess I need to crack open that copy of DARKLY beforehand, which has now been sitting unread on my shelf for, oh, a year and a half.

If you made it at least as far as junior high, you probably heard the story of Atlas from Greek mythology. But you’ve never heard it told from his point of view, which is what Jeanette Winterson’s WEIGHT – part of the inaugrual title wave of the Canongate Myths series – is all about. Winterson is perhaps best known for her novel ORANGES ARE NOT THE ONLY FRUIT, which I had to read as part of a college English course, yet recall nothing about it today.

Atlas has a life that’s all fine and dandy, happy with his family and asked to serve as guard for the Garden of Hesperides and its marvelous crop of golden apples. But when his daughters steal some of the fruit, Atlas has to pay for their sins by bearing the weight (hence, the title) of the entire world on his shoulders. It’s a task he doesn’t enjoy, to say the least, but at least some levity soon arrives when Heracles (aka Hercules) comes a-calling for a favor (and also to chide Atlas, “Can you balance Africa on your dick?”): He needs a few of the apples as part of the dozen-item scavenger hunt the gods have him doing, and only Atlas holds the key to the garden.

Though Heracles, who’s portrayed as more than a bit of a jerk (”Women, like wood, were for splitting and for keeping him warm”), is able to slay the hundred-headed snake that guards the garden, he’s unable to get the apples, so he offers to take Atlas’ place long enough to get the job done. Atlas appreciates the time off, even though he knows he’s doomed to resume his duties. However, WEIGHT takes a surprising – and at first bewildering – twist toward the end involving the Russian space program.

Yes, you read correct. The Russian space program. Needless to say, this is not your grandfather’s (nor Edith Hamilton’s) mythology. Winterson even finds a way to work in sex – and lots of it – albeit in the form of Heracles masturbating in a mere “dozen quick strokes,” an instance of near-rape by centaur and Heracles walking in on Zeus and his stepmother, a sight which makes “his prick (go) kangaroo.”

WEIGHT has lots of great lines, some witty, some blue. Heracles gets all the best quips, though. To wit:
• “My punishment is to work for a wanker.”
• “Does any woman feel love for her husband’s bastards?”
• “Hera was deceived into suckling me. She’s not happy about that. Women don’t like a stranger at the tit.”
• “I was a bit of a braggart in my youth – killed everything, shagged what was left, and ate the rest.”
• “While I was mad, I slit six of my own children, which I regret.”
• “Independent woman are like that. I don’t know which is worse – the dependent ones who bleat at you all day, or the bitches who couldn’t care less.”

In other words, it’s a brainy but breezy slice of literature that goes down easy. And quickly, at just 150-odd pages. Ironic, isn’t it, that something called WEIGHT weighs not so much?. It makes up for it in ideas. –Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

Even though Isaac Asimov excelled at doing so, most people are unaware the sci-fi master dabbled in mysteries. And I’m not talking about the ones with robots. I speak of The Black Widowers, an exclusive club of armchair Sherlocks who meet once a month and do all their detecting over brandy. Asimov wrote more than 65 of these short tales before his death, and THE RETURN OF THE BLACK WIDOWERS is the sixth and final one, and newly out in trade paperback.

The Black Widower stories follow a comfortable, tried-and-true formula: one of the Widowers brings a guest with a mystery to solve, the Widowers grill him with questions and eventually a solution is found … by their waiter, Henry. The mysteries posed to the group are range from murder cases to less-than-felonious offenses like collegiate cheating or a scientist’s swiped theorem. And some are merely brainteasers, with no crime committed, such as the misplacement of an umbrella. From a drunk’s accidental stumble into a counterfeiting ring to a meteorite of questionable value, nothing escapes the collective brain power of the Black Widowers. So long as Henry’s around.

Each mystery is prefaced with a good dose of conversation amongst the Widowers. Much of the talk is merely extraneous and fails to serve the plot, but to skip it would be to deprive yourself of this series’ affable, fussy charms, dialogue-driven as they are. There’s not a single one here that isn’t simply fun, and with good reason. Editor (and Hard Case Crime creator) Charles Ardai has stocked the collection with the 10 best Black Widowers of all time (spanning a roughly two-decade period beginning in 1972), plus six stories (including one with Batman!) that were not collected in previous editions and a spare thrown in simply to appease the ego of Harlan Ellison, who provides the book’s foreword. Ardai offers a new Black Widowers story that successfully follows Asimov’s blueprint – even with all its references to Asimov himself – and William Brittain serves up an excellent homage, every bit as ingenious as the puzzling originals. This RETURN is a real treat through and through. –Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

As far as cash registers are concerned, this week’s new releases begins and ends with Stephen King’s CELL. The selling point: Stephen King. (Have you placed your mysterious CELL phone call yet?) Our copy’s “in the mail,” as they say, so as soon as it arrives sometime next week, we’ll be reading it for your review-reading pleasure.

But there also John Lescroart’s HUNT CLUB, for those who prefer law-on-the-street mysteries to rampaging zombies. Wussies.

Timed to coincide with the theatrical release of X-MEN 3, the fifth annual Free Comic Book Day is slated for Saturday, May 6. This year’s sponsor titles have been announced, with the big boys – Marvel and DC – giving away issues of X-MEN/RUNAWAYS and JUSTICE LEAGUE UNLIMITED, respectively.

Another gold sponsor offerings include a STAR WARS/CONAN twofer from Dark Horse, a TRANSFORMERS: BEAST WARS special from IDW and comics featuring G.I. Joe, Donald Duck, Future Shock, The Simpsons and Archie. Manga purveyor Tokyopop will be offering a sneak-preview sampler.

You can get more information on all the titles – including silver sponsors – at the Free Comic Book Day website.

Better known for his Easy Rawlins series of detective books (such as DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS), Walter Mosley returns to science fiction with THE WAVE, his best book yet in the genre. At just over 200 pages, THE WAVE follows the food pyramid style of writing: lots of sustenance and almost no fat. Unfortunately, this also makes it really hard to describe the plot without giving anything away.

Errol Porter, recently jobless, wifeless and hopeless, can’t get his dad to stop calling him. The trouble is, his father died nearly a decade ago. The calls finally lead Erroll to the cemetery, where he confronts the truth behind the communications, although the real truth is still years away. Equal parts TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE and THE X-FILES, Mosley leads readers through a world of flawed, mostly depressed people who rarely get what they want and seldom get what they need, but still manage to stay alive. As the small plot unfolds into a rather huge story, THE WAVE spans months and years without losing the strings of its plot, keeping the story rolling on through the well-realized conclusion.

The book is so lean it almost feels like the Cliff’s Notes version of some 1,000-page epic, and that’s really Mosley’s crowning achievement: Every word and character has a vital role to play. Philosophical sentiment could easily hijacked the book (as it did in an earlier Mosley SF book, BLUE LIGHT), but the thematic underpinnings of THE WAVE don’t overwhelm the story or the characters. As SF shelves are filled more and more with 1,000-page sagas consisting of half-remembered plots and complexity for complexity’s sake, THE WAVE manages to take on an epic scale with a human face, and it’s a welcome sight. –Ryun Patterson

Buy it at Amazon.

Small towns freak me out. Though big cities are inherently more dangerous, there’s something downright eerie about a tight-knit, economically depressed community where everybody knows everybody else. As an outsider, you’re always under suspicion. Or perhaps you’re prey. You could disappear forever and all those who live there would back each other up.

James A. Moore exploits this fear to wondrous effect in WRIT IN BLOOD: SERENITY FALLS, BOOK I, the first of a three-book series, all of which recently debuted in paperback. (The SERENITY FALLS trilogy originally appeared as one huge novel in 2003, from a small press and sporting an atrociously ugly cover; I suspect it works best in three smaller bites, anyway.)

The small, colonial town of the title is anything but serene, having one of the most sordid histories on record. Unfortunately, that record is only an oral one, so Serenity Falls’ elderly recluse, Simon MacGruder, declares himself unofficial historian and decides to write a book about its 300-year history – partly out of interest, partly out of boredom. As he peruses police reports and interviews residents, MacGruder realizes he didn’t know the extent of Serenity Falls’ string of strange events. The trouble began shortly after its founding, when a woman was wrongly accused of being a witch and executed while her husband was out of the country; upon return, he promises to make the town pay. Being a dabbler in black magic, he does. For three whole centuries.

Simon’s research is interspersed with consecutive chapters from his book, each detailing a horrific event involving either murder, torture, rape, kidnapping, arson, demonic possession or any combination thereof. This approach is great, because instead of weaving their telling in via dialogue between Simon and his interviewees, it’s like getting several short stories that – while standing on their own – greatly supplement the main narrative.

There’s another plot, however, with a mysterious stranger named Jonathan Crowley. He harbors supernatural powers, which aid him well in dispatching the vampires he encounters as he moves state to state. Exactly what his role in all this is remains to be seen, as he has yet to step foot in Serenity Falls when WRIT reaches its close. With an ending that resolves nothing, WRIT may be mere set-up for the next two books in the trilogy – THE PACK and DARK CARNIVAL, both of which I eagerly await reading – but it’s highly satisfying. There’s a lot going on here, and even at 300 pages, it feels like an epic.

For the most part, that’s a good thing. It’s only detrimental when you struggle to keep the various levels of generations straight, but luckily, that’s not all that often. Moore draws you in from the start with an intriguing plot and keeps piling on so many instances of depravity that you can’t help but be wholly absorbed. One thing’s for sure: It’s never dull. The cover suggests it’s the best horror novel since ‘SALEM’S LOT, and while I wouldn’t go that far, it’s one of this decade’s better offerings in the genre. –Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

It is one of horror’s most classic premises: “George and Kathy Lutz moved into 112 Ocean Avenue on December 18. Twenty-eight days later, they fled in terror.” We speak, of course, of Jay Anson’s THE AMITYVILLE HORROR. If there’s one good thing about the recent, wretched film remake, it’s that its release finally put Anson’s 1977 novel (?) back into print.

My first exposure to the book was shortly after its release, when the young woman babysitting me and my brothers for the night brought it with her to read. I was creeped out by the illustration of the houseflies that occasionally dotted its pages (sadly missing from this new Pocket Star edition). I read it a few years later, before I saw the 1979 movie, and – what with all the unexplained voices, toilet goo, evil faces, telephone interference, loud noises, dead Indians, levitation and flaming red pig eyes – it scared the bejeezus out of me.

Revisiting it today, I’m not sure why. Anson’s documentary style approach really prevents it from approaching real terror. There’s simply no tension. Anson will be describing some utterly mundane activity for several paragraphs and then throw in an exclamation like “Father Mancuso returned to his apartment to find a stupefying odor of human excrement pervading his room!” It’s not shocking because it comes from nowhere, but every time you spot an exclamation point, know that Anson wants goosebumps to follow.

Even though Anson’s you-are-there prose isn’t exactly lively, the story remains compelling after all these years. Even people who’ve neither read the book nor seen the movies can relay freely at least some details surrounding the Amityville legend. But even the initiated probably don’t recall how clunky the book actually is, like this doozy of a sentence, which would be laugh-out-loudable in any book: “Regardless of the weakness he still felt in his loins from the diarrhea, George wanted to make love to Kathy.”

And that mental image, my friends, is far scarier than any poltergeist or possession. –Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

Why is it so difficult to make a good movie about auto racing? Oh, there was John Frankenheimer’s GRAND PRIX, but that had to kowtow to the Hollywood mindset and had tons of … shall we say, irregularities. There was DAYS OF THUNDER, which while it had great imagery, was not a very good film. And let’s not even mention DRIVEN. Damn, I just did.

But it’s not that difficult to write a great book about auto racing. Two books released in the past two years need to be on every gearhead’s bookshelf: Peter Golenbock’s NASCAR CONFIDENTIAL and the autobiography JANET GUTHRIE: A LIFE AT FULL THROTTLE.

Released in 2004 but only now making it to the top of my reading list, NASCAR CONFIDENTIAL is a book about America’s greatest racing series by sports author Peter Golenbock. He eschews statistics for the human stories behind the races and the sport. Starting at the beginning, he scores interviews with some unusual NASCAR pioneers, including female driver Louise Smith (that’s right, the sport had at least three female drivers on the circuit into the early ’50s); Francisco Menendez, who drove as Frank Mundy; and Judy Judge, the widow of famed driver Fireball Roberts.

Each interview is tastefully done and woven into an historical perspective that outlines how the sport grew from its rough-and-tumble dirt track Southeast origins to easily the first or second most popular sport in America today (football may still beat it out). As we move through the decades, Golenbock highlights some of the lesser-known lights and focuses on some of the lights that have been dimmed. What’s interesting is that he manages to avoid interviewing any of the Pettys or the Earnhardts (or they managed to avoid him). This absence of the giants of the sport isn’t really felt at all, because it’s refreshing to get more information about folks like announcer and past champion Benny Parsons, former great Fred Lorenzen, and views from the eyes of a crew chief like Jimmy Makar or Larry McReynolds. It’s a book that lovingly devotes its pages to the history and evolution of the world’s fastest-growing sport, and concentrates on the people that were to make it so.

And if you like good stories about good people, then you simply must purchase JANET GUTHRIE. Want a real heroic role model for your child? This is the book to provide. It would be a tremendous gift for any young girl, but it would also work for any recipient no matter their age, sex or whether or not they like motorsports. Why? Because Guthrie was a true pioneer in both sports and science. An astronautical engineer by trade, she could not resist the lure of speed and automobile racing. Cutting her teeth in sports car racing, she eventually went on to stock car racing in NASCAR and open-wheel racing at Indianapolis and the IndyCar circuit. Yep, that’s right, kiddies, Danica Patrick isn’t the first female racer at Indianapolis. And Guthrie may have been better.

Facing unbelievably intense sexism, and a case of possible outright sabotage, she fought through the madness, shoddy equipment, and selectively applied rules to carve out a place for female athletes in motorsport. Racers like Shirley Muldowney, Shawna Robinson, Erin Crocker and Danica Patrick all owe her a damn big “thank you.”

And there are two things to note: 1) Guthrie was an excellent racer with real successes to her credit who often raced without significant sponsorship money. If there was someone with her talent in NASCAR today (Erin Crocker, I’m talking to you), sponsors would fall all over themselves to give her the money necessary to win; and 2) Even with all the crap that was dumped on her head, Guthrie persevered through it all with a tremendous grace and style. Faced with out and out hatred, she carries on, doing the best she can, never giving in or up, and emerging from the fracas with a rock-solid character. You just can’t help but respect and like her. –Mark Rose

Buy it at Amazon. And the other one, too.