Spy magazine’s influence on my writing, my sense of humor, my career, my life cannot be understated. From that fated day I stumbled upon a 1988 issue in a Buy for Less grocery store in Oklahoma City of all places, I was hooked. Never before had a magazine been created seemingly just for me. Never mind I had spent a grand total of 10 days in New York, which served not only as the magazine’s home but the recipient of most of its well-aimed arrows – its unique mix of satire, investigative reporting and design went straight to my heart.

So why, then, did I hesitate to read SPY: THE FUNNY YEARS, a warts-and-all account of its dozen years of existence? Because the chintzy powers that be at Miramax Books ignored my two requests for a review copy? Perhaps.

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Scouring out the weekly singles scene … in comics!

THE IMMORTAL IRON FIST #1 (Marvel) I don’t care who it is – give a D-list Marvel character a new book, and I’ll be first in line to try it out. You can have your Spider-Mans and Captain Americas, but for me, the best, most intricate, most interesting characters are the ones that tend to stay in the shadows of the biggies. In the past few months, we’ve seen the returns of Blade, Moon Knight and now, after about six failed relaunch attempts in the past decade, it’s time for Danny Rand – aka Iron Fist – to get a gritty new feel, courtesy of writers Ed Brubaker and Matt Faction. Seamlessly interweaving the history of the Iron Fist lineage with the current Iron Fist whipping a whole army of Hydra operatives, this is a great start to the series. Wisely, they are going for a darker, Daredevil-esque style that works very well with the character.

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Our monthly depressing look at the search terms that bring pervs to BOOKGASM!

Tim Downs’ latest thriller, HEAD GAME, begins like no other: Its first chapter is almost entirely wordless, rendered as a six-page comic-book story, in which a man draws his own suicide note – what we’re reading, ostensibly – before taking his own life.

That man, we learn, was named Kirby. Along with pal Cale Caldwell and Capt. “Pug” Moseley, he was part of a propaganda mission for the United States in the first Gulf War, charged with creating and dropping surrender-style leaflets over enemy territory. They did their job well, but Kirby’s untimely, tragic death suggests it was not without a price.

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Finally! I got my hands on a scanner, with thanks to my landlord Jon. What this means for you, dear reader: No longer do I have to search around online for covers. This opens up a whole new world of content, since there has been a stack of books for which I could not get covers. It also means we’ve hit a real low point in this column’s storied history; just look at book numero uno if you don’t believe me.

THE BOUNTY HUNTER #1: THE DEADLIEST PROFESSION by Tiny Boyles and Hank Nuwer – Here it is, folks: the classiest book in my whole collection. When I purchased this fine tome, I knew this was bottom-of-the-barrel material. Was I far off in that assumption? In a word: nope.

The 1981 novel is a low-rent aggressor-type, based on a real character – that would be said Tiny. Our hero Tiny – that’s really him on the cover – is a hulking, 380-pound bounty hunter. He’s no religious freak like a certain TV bounty hunter with a really awful haircut. The hard case that Tiny and his crew have to bring in is a Charles Manson-esque leader of a outlaw Mormon death cult in Utah. Let that sink into your heads, people.

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Jack Ketchum is very rarely off his game, and I’m delighted to say he is in top form in CLOSING TIME AND OTHER STORIES. This too-thin collection from Gauntlet Press brings together 17 hard-to-find gems, one previously unpublished piece and the brilliant title story, which won the 2003 Bram Stoker Award for long fiction. It’s so good I can almost picture the other finalists drowning their sorrows together in the hotel bar … before the ceremony even began.

It should come as no surprise to his fans that Ketchum pulls off feats of violence and poignancy with equal aplomb, as in “Olivia: A Monologue,” collected here, but those only familiar with novels like THE GIRL NEXT DOOR and especially OFF SEASON will find themselves pleasantly moved reading these stories.

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Every comics fan of a certain age or level of degeneracy owns at least one book or comic by Robert Crumb. Since he bummed a ride to San Francisco in 1967, and later that year began his ascent to “America’s Best-Loved Underground Cartoonist” status, Crumb has published a seemingly endless number of comics and books, the latter mostly reprint after reprint of the former.

In his brief introduction to THE SWEETER SIDE OF R. CRUMB, signed as by “Mr. Nicey-Nice Himself,” the artist insists that his work is not beloved by the ladies. Perhaps they don’t appreciate his patronizing tone, or think the joke it conveys is worth the grating condescension.

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As the title of Lawrence Block’s LUCKY AT CARDS has it, Bill Maynard is good with kings and queens, mostly because he has an ace up his sleeve. When caught cheating in Chicago, his angry poker mates do a number of his teeth and tell him to leave town. So he does, with the intent of staying long enough only for a dentist to fix his choppers.

But when the dentist invites him to his friends’ regular poker game, the money-hungry Bill sees an easy target – namely Murray Rogers, a wealthy lawyer who’s all too trusting. And then Bill meets Murray’s wife – she of the “hooker’s hips and queen-sized breasts and a belly that had just the right amount of bulge to it” – and sees her as an easy target, too … just with an entirely different objective in mind, one involving an area below the belt.

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Ghost Rider has generated more origin stories than your neighbor’s cat has pumped out kittens. GHOST RIDER: THE ROAD TO DAMNATION is among the latest, and since it’s written by PREACHER’s Garth Ennis, it’s worth a look. The art by Clayton Crain will knock you back on your heels as well, with its Bruegel-esque visions of hell splashed across the pages in fiery oranges and reds.

Ennis’ version of Ghost Rider’s birth and fate doesn’t add anything startling to what we’ve already been told: Johnny Blaze, a stunt motorcycle rider, trades his soul in exchange for the extended life of a dying pal. The deal remains the same even if the identity of the one to be saved differs from telling to telling. Blaze then becomes the Ghost Rider.

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Since the advent of motion pictures, horror has been linked closely – inexorably, even – to the medium. Cemetery Dance’s anthology MIDNIGHT PREMIERE, edited by Tom Piccirilli, celebrates that mutually beneficial marriage of the terrifying and the visual. Offering an angle unique from previous horror fiction collections delving into film, PREMIERE includes contributions from actual B-movie personalities.

But it’s the big boys that make this book such a treat, starting with Gary A. Braunbeck’s “Onlookers,” which works wonders with a “lost film” conceit, right up to its unsettling final page. But Jack Ketchum immediately shows him up in the disturbing department with “Elusive,” about a man’s ill-fated attempt to try to catch a horror flick everyone raves about. Whether in theaters or on video, his protagonist is unable to see it, as if it were cursed. The true reason is chilling.

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A long strain of Catholic mystery fiction exists, from G.K. Chesterton to Ralph McInerney, all the way up to Dan Brown. Mystery writers love to use the pomp, sanctity and ritual of Catholic religion to express an outer mystery that often mirrors the inner mysteries of the religion itself. One can take almost any aspect of Catholicism’s history and turn it into a rip-roaring adventure story. From the Flagellants to the Cathars to lost tribes to the healing waters of Lourdes, an author can – and, in DA VINCI CODE’s wake, almost certainly already has – spun a marvelous contemporary tale based on a largely misunderstood semi-historical understanding of one part of the supreme mystery of the divine.
 
For instance, the Knights Templar, who are involved in Julia Navarro’s THE BROTHERHOOD OF THE HOLY SHROUD, translated by Andrew Hurley. Here, Navarro weaves together four separate tales all surrounding the enigmatic Shroud of Turin – the cloth that is said to bear the image of Jesus, transferred by miracle when the cloth was laid over His body in the tomb.

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Why are horror fans so scared of God? Are they afraid of receiving some kind of final retribution from the Lord for all their hours of sitting in front of the TV, watching gory slasher after gory slasher desecrate everything that he has created? Or do they think that maybe, by admitting that there’s something more to this life – an afterlife – that they aren’t hardcore enough?

The reason I ask is because many of the reviews of GOSPEL OF THE LIVING DEAD: GEORGE ROMERO’S VISIONS OF HELL ON EARTH seem not to really talk about the book, but instead about the reviewers’ hatred of all things sacred, some even going as far as to say how dare the Christians try to invade “our” territory.

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In INFINITE CRISIS, Greg Cox faced the unenviable job of adapting DC Comics’ miniseries of the same name – one of those long-running “events” the industry does to shake up their imagined worlds and, thus, shake up sales – into a 350-page novel. Teeming with characters and telling a story that relies on visuals, the comic would seem unworkable in the prose format, but Cox streamlined the sprawl as much as he could, resulting in a surprisingly readable modern pulp.

Basically, the foundations of the Justice League of America are crumbling, as its space-orbiting Watchtower has been blown up, and its three core members aren’t speaking to one another. The multiverse – a string of parallel worlds alternate to our Earth – is engaged in an intergalactic war, and Superman feels powerless to stop all the explosions, hurricanes and whatnot. Batman is racked with guilt and doubt, giving in to his dark side, while Wonder Woman finds herself ever pursued by OMAC cyborgs intent on killing her as payback for her taking the life of an enemy.

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All the news that’s fit to capsulize!

WORLD’S MOST DANGEROUS UPDATE
It’s official: Our report last week on The World’s Most Dangerous Bookstore is BOOKGASM’s most popular post ever, judging from the incoming traffic thanks to Wired magazine and others. I’ve read comments at several blogs linking to it, stating that they’d like to make a pilgrimage to Oklahoma City just to witness it for themselves. Don’t! As much as we’d love to have you, the article was written in 1996, and my co-author informed me last week that the place indeed burned to the ground a few years back. And if you’ve seen the pictures, you can understand why.

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Time for me to get a little publisher-specific with this column. Gold Eagle still cranks out the he-man aggressor stuff on a never-ending monthly basis, so let’s delve into some of its back catalog, shall we?

TRACK #3: THE ARMAGEDDON CONSPIRACY by Jerry Ahern – This 1984 book is so of its time, in that it feels like Ahern just took a gun catalog and started to write. This TRACK adventure is so filled with product placement, it got to the point that if I took all the references to the types of cars or guns out, it would be about 60 pages shorter.

Track is also the spy of his time: bland with a capital B. Ahern tries to make him into a Mack Bolan/Remo Williams type of figure, but what you get is an extremely boring hero, like from some of those action movies from the ’80s that you’ll forget 10 minutes after watching. The big conspiracy deals with a group of Nazis that takes a town hostage with a nuclear weapon. But here’s the kicker: The President is also one of the hostages. Cue awful ’80s music moments a la TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE (montage!).

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I never tire of seeing Edgar Allan Poe’s works being adapted and appropriated into movies, TV or novels. And especially comics. It’s been done before – witness GRAPHIC CLASSICS: EDGAR ALLAN POE for one recent example – but never quite like the manner in which Richard Corben and company handle it in Marvel’s hardcover collection HAUNT OF HORROR: EDGAR ALLAN POE.

Perhaps best known as a contributor to HEAVY METAL, Corben draws 10 Poe stories and poems in his own inimitable style from scripts by Richard Margopoulos, serving as a reunion from their Warren magazine days of the ’70s (pieces of which can be found in the recent reprint books WEREWOLF and THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER AND OTHER TALES OF TERROR). Rounding up Marvel’s three-issue miniseries, this HAUNT casts much of Poe’s stories in a whole new light, while remaining reverent in stark black-and-white images.

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What the world needs now is a fun thriller about Bigfoot. Just not this one.

Matthew Scott Hansen’s debut novel THE SHADOWKILLER is all about the legendary, mythical hairy brute on a killing spree. It’s being sold as camp, but I’m not sure anyone told Hansen, because he takes the subject too seriously for the story to take flight. Such subject matter would seem the kind of unapologetic pop-junk on which BOOKGASM was founded, but sadly, it’s too much of a narrative mess.

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Wow. I mean, really: This is a debut novel? Because if I had read this book in 2006, it would have easily made my Top 10 list. Lisa Unger has released a stunner with her BEAUTIFUL LIES, an emotional thriller starring new series character Ridley Jones, a freelance writer who, by sheer chance, saves a toddler from a vehicle on a crowded street. Also by chance, a photographer takes a picture of the heroic deed and puts it on the wire. It is from such combinations of chance that Jones’ life becomes completely inverted, and folks whom she has trusted and loved now seem alien, as does her own identity.

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In writing fiction for teenagers, the subject matter has to be toned down a bit from regular adult fare. But on the other hand, young adults hate being patronized and talked down to, so the fiction has to be real and relevant to succeed.

Scott Westerfeld has made a career out of walking this thin line, and one of his most acclaimed young-adult series started with UGLIES, proceeded to PRETTIES and now brings us SPECIALS. This series is set in a post-apocalyptic future in which people are subjected to a regime of surgery and brain modification that leaves them vapid and gorgeous, living out their lives in perfect cities with nary a care in the world.

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Enduring legends are borne of disbelief: Scotland has its Loch Ness Monster, the Himalays its Abominable Snowman, and Oklahoma City, not to be outdone, has the Bookman.

Joe had first heard about the Bookman from a college philosophy professor who doted on spinning myths concerning the biblio-obsessed hermit to his students. Joe, thirsting for seeking out such splendidly apocryphal wonders, in turn told Rod. Together, we sought out the mythic lair of the Bookman in no time. Located in the heart of one of OKC’s hotbeds of illegal activity (you know, one of the fine neighborhoods regularly sporting standoffs showcased by a 6 o’clock, Johnny-on-the-spot newsteam – a tract oft referred to but never actually visited by political candidates as exemplary of the “sad state of welfare”) is Bill’s Yesterday Books.

As we arrived, the chunky, braided proprietor – Bill – was seated in a folding chair in the sweltering outdoors, smoking a cigarette and leisurely reading through the new edition of the gripping Southwestern Bell Oklahoma City Area Telephone Directory. Our hunt was neither deterred nor derailed by the “CLOSED” sign leaning against the establishment’s front, as Joe had been tipped prior by his educator that rumor had it Bill’s Yesterday Books is never officially “open.” Rather, the treasury of literature reportedly had been classified by crime-busting city officials as a “fire hazard,” exposing Bill to the potential of touch liability issues, steep consequences and monetary fines.

We would soon discover why.

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