It is much harder to do a series character than most mystery authors seem to think. You have to make your protagonist interesting, perhaps with a gimmick that can be used to intrigue the reader. You have to make the character likable but not too saintly, vulnerable but not too fragile.

You have to reintroduce the character in each new book for readers just coming to the series, and you have to make the character grow and be dynamic from one book to the next, but not to grow too far from the roots that made the character popular in the first place. It’s a tall task and it can be very limiting.

That’s why it’s such a joy to read of the adventures of Inspector Ian Rutledge. Rutledge is the creation of Charles Todd, a pseudonymous American mother-and-son team which has crafted Rutledge as a traumatized British ex-soldier from World War I.

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Lurker Films’ first two H.P. Lovecraft DVDs gathered up short films based on the author’s work, but this one – THE H.P. LOVECRAFT COLLECTION: VOLUME 3 – OUT OF MIND – features an interesting take on his writing.

Originally shot for the Bravo channel in Canada, OUT OF MIND: THE STORIES OF H.P. LOVECRAFT – the disc’s centerpiece – is a quasi-biography program about Lovecraft, in which the author interacts with one of his fictional characters. What starts out looking like archival footage of Lovecraft speaking into a camera is actually from now, just made to look old-timey.

We watch as Lovecraft walks in the woods, working out some of the names that will become some of his most important creations. Cut to today, where we are introduced to a man named Randolph Carter, who meets an lawyer with a package that’s been waiting for him for some 30 odd years. That package contains a mysterious book that will rock Carter’s world in a huge way.

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

When you’re a kid who has to use your own meager allowance to buy comic books, a company’s surest way to snag that money is a team-up book. At least it was in my spending decision, because it was like getting two titles in one not normally seen together – the four-color equivalent of a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup.

That explains why I grew up with a stack of DC’s THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD in my collection. Each month, Batman would fight crime alongside one B-level hero or another, and the variety of oddball partners month in and month out made for half of the fun. Now 21 before-my-time early issues are collected in the clumsily titled SHOWCASE PRESENTS THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD BATMAN TEAM-UPS: VOLUME 1.

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When most people think of Robert E. Howard, one name comes to mind: Conan. But he created some other great characters. Now, like H.P. Lovecraft, there are various tomes of Howard’s writing with massive crossover, and I know what a pain it is to sift through stuff you might already have bought or read. Del Rey is reissuing Howard’s series character stories – Conan, Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn, Kull – but there are other publishers tackling more obscure tales, such as these…

BOXING STORIES by Robert E. Howard – Out on shelves, there are two collections of Howard’s boxing stories: this 2005 one and another called WATERFRONT TALES. For those interested, grab this one, since it’s cheaper yet printed on better paper.

An avid boxing fan and boxer himself, Howard loved writing these stories, which mainly star a sailor named Steve Costigan. All the stories are from Howard’s manuscripts with original character names and titles intact. When these were put out in the fight pulps, those were changed to be made more gripping for readers. You’re probably thinking, “How could Howard write stories that don’t just repeat themselves over and over?” Simple: exotic locales featuring those down on their luck.

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Just who is this ROBBIE’S WIFE? Before you know that, first you have to meet Jack Stone.

In Russell Hill’s new novel – a Hard Case Crime original – Stone is a 60-year-old screenwriter. Twice divorced and in a creative rut, he sells everything he owns but his laptop, which he takes with him to England, where he hopes to recharge his batteries, save his soul and produce a script that’ll bring him a landslide of a studio payday.

He settles on renting a room at the English countryside home of Robbie Barlow, a brutish sheep farmer who lives with his 10-year-old son and a true MILF of a wife, Maggie. At first, Stone fits right in like a member of the family. But he takes a shine to the two-decades-younger Maggie, and begins to confuse real life with the sexual fantasies he types out onscreen in proper Final Draft format.

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There’s one in every office: that “wacky” guy where everything he does or says is some sort of forced craziness. Whether it be recounting a Dane Cook routine, putting up “ironic” posters of monkeys or getting a well-deserved smack to the breadbasket for taking “Talk Like a Pirate Day” way too far, you know who I’m talking about. It’s a facade – an attempt to carve a persona, a personality, where there is none.

And now, they have a new magazine to read. It’s called Geek Monthly. Because it’s for geeks – get it? Not for real, over- or underweight, socially awkward, D&D-playing nerds who wait until 2 a.m. for the latest copy of Windows Vista geeks, but those cool, fashionable ones who wear tight lime-green sweaters, have $500 faux-thick glasses and masturbate to photos of Weezer in between shopping sprees at Hot Topic, whereupon they buy a shirt of Chuck Norris playing an old-school Atari.

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Tokyopop is bringing super-popular Japanese novelist Fuyumi Ono to America. THE TWELVE KINGDOMS: SEA OF SHADOW is book one of what will be a seven-volume epic, and it definitely should stir the fantasy-loving hearts and minds of readers. The series has sold more than 15 million copies in Japan, and its success stems from its reliance on traditional and well-loved fantasy motifs peppered with a cool and exuberant visual aesthetic.

Yoko Nakajima is your typical Japanese high school girl, living with her typical family. She has the normal sorts of worries about school and friends, and there is little that blights her life, except for some extraordinary nightmares and the fact that her hair has an unusual reddish tinge. This is enough to set her apart from the others – a fantasy-fiction staple – but it causes her trouble in a conformist society that looks for excuses to punish the different.

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WESTERN TALES OF TERROR whetted my appetite for Western comics with a horror/fantasy bent. While I await the next JONAH HEX trade paperback for such, THE WICKED WEST II: ABOMINATION & OTHER TALES fills the void.

ABOMINATION tells the tale – or, rather, two dozen of them – of cursed cowboy Cotton Coleridge, who’s always running across ghosts, monsters and other beings of supernatural origin. Apparently, the first WICKED WEST – I haven’t read it, and you don’t need to in order to enjoy this one – told one story, of Cotton battling vampires in the Old West. This sequel, however, is an anthology from a host of talented authors and artists.

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To be honest, I never knew the stories of LESTER DENT’S ZEPPELIN TALES even existed. When I always thought of Lester Dent, the one and only thing that would spring to mind would be Doc Savage. But Dent wrote a variety of other pulp tales in his time, and this collection showcases his love for the airships.

The collection rounds up five such stories, nicely reprinted with some of the text harkening back to what Dent originally wrote before editors hacked away at it. A warning label on the cover cautions us of bad words and violence that permeate the stories. Some of the terms in the tales indeed may be considered offensive, but I don’t think we really needed a glossary for them.

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As I read Louis Theroux’s THE CALL OF THE WEIRD – a collection of interviews and updates with some of the most fringe people in America – I took a look around the Greyhound bus on which I rode. Two seats behind me was a Charles Manson look-alike spouting off about how the government controls the weather. To the side of me sat a comically unfit mother, singing what appeared to be a Samhain song to her newborn – it had the words “blood,” “uprising” and “Astaroth” in the lyrics. Toward the front, an Insane Clown Posse reject worked on his smooth Juggalo-flow.

I was surrounded by the people in this book. I was reading about it as I experienced it.

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Discussing books on movies … almost as good as watching them, and without the sticky floors!

To fans of cinema literature, the British Film Institute is the equivalent of a Columbian drug lord, and its two essay series – BFI FILM CLASSICS and BFI MODERN CLASSICS – are its crack cocaine.

Both are comprised of long, thoughtful essays about important films published in easy-to-carry – if irregular-sized – trade paperback form. The first series is devoted to great films from the silent era to the ’70s, while the second takes a look at more recent works from the ’80s to the present. And, like the popular street drug, they are very addictive, quickly finished and liable to bankrupt you if you become obsessed with them.

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When writers of popular fiction try to take on real-world issues, the results can be disastrous. Push too hard and you risk alienating core audience members with opposing viewpoints; soft-peddle the issue and there isn’t enough spark to support the plot. Richard North Patterson has definitely written an issue-based thriller here, and EXILE attempts the nearly impossible: to try to define the sides and issues of the Israeli/Palestinian crisis.

EXILE revolves around David Wolfe, an up-and-coming politician and lawyer in San Francisco. When a Palestinian woman he had a romance with in law school is arrested and charged in connection with the assassination of the Israeli prime minister, he gives up his comfortable life and begins exploring both his feelings for the woman and the ugly truths of the Middle East.

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Scouring out the weekly singles scene … in comics!

I just got back from seeing the latest Marvel Comics movie GHOST RIDER and it made me angry. Not because the movie was bad – quite the contrary. The filmic version of GHOST RIDER is a totally fun ride that I can’t wait to take again. It’s not an overlong epic like SUPERMAN RETURNS and it doesn’t take itself seriously like an X-MEN flick; it’s a pure popcorn good time that I’m sure most people will write off as “lame.”

No, what pissed me off is that the movie version is exactly how I wanted the newest comics incarnation to turn out: a demon-possessed daredevil biker with a flaming skull for a head. How can you not make that fun? Well, with its recent series, Marvel has done a damn good job of making sure that every bit of kitsch and wackiness is zapped out in favor of faux-MAX style that is just a chore to read.

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Patricia Sprinkle’s DEATH ON THE FAMILY TREE is a Southern cozy mystery with a capital C. So cozy, in fact, that the author is shown on the inside back cover with a teacup in her hand. But it’s a little too cozy in that the super-leisurely pace gets tedious and can provoke a nap.

Katharine Murray is a fairly well-to-do homemaker who is now suffering from empty nest syndrome. Her husband travels to D.C. throughout the week, and her son and daughter have both left home. The only thing to occupy her time is that she has just received 10 boxes of her recently deceased Aunt Lucy’s belongings, most of which is junk. But Katharine finds a rare piece of Celtic jewelry and a diary in German among the knickknacks.

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Flip open your newspaper to the bestseller lists any week and you’ll see the fiction one rife with – if not outright dominated by – thrillers. But it wasn’t always that way, and Patrick Anderson charts the genre’s birth and upward climb ever since in THE TRIUMPH OF THE THRILLER: HOW COPS, CROOKS, AND CANNIBALS CAPTURED POPULAR FICTION.

It may be no more than a lengthy essay, but it’s to Anderson’s credit that, at times, it’s as much fun to read – and in some cases, even more so – than the titles he discusses. A thriller writer and reviewer himself, Anderson knows of what he speaks, and with very little exception – his statement that John Grisham is a better scribe than Stephen King, for example – it’s hard to disagree with him.

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As you can tell – with this column’s title swiped from the fine folks at the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society – I figured it was time to revisit an author from my youth. Plus, the 70th anniversary of his death is coming up in March, so what the hell.

Lovecraft’s books are a tricky thing sometimes – not the writing, mind you, but the sheer amount of his collections. Del Rey has put out countless anthologies of his short stories, with tales being used more than once. But I’m here to clean up the mess and just suggest the following three books, since they have all of the Lovecraft you’ll ever need, minus his poetry.

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I’m always excited to get a new book from Pyr, because as of yet, they haven’t let me down. I’ve stumbled up against a couple of books lately that have utterly failed BOOKGASM’s 100-page test – that is, I made myself read the first 100 pages, but the quality just wasn’t there. John Meaney’s TO HOLD INFINITY – originally published overseas in the late ’90s – is the antithesis of this.

Once you get past the fairly horrible cover (more on that later), TO HOLD INFINITY is an snapshot of a stunningly well-realized future that grabs hold and doesn’t let go.

At its core, the book is the story of a family. Broken by death, loss, and shattered expectations, Meaney’s novel revolves around a mother and a son and the journeys they undertake on Fulgor, a world far from Earth on which the upper class have cybernetic enhancements that alters their fundamental perceptions, creating a world of wonder that the non-enhanced can only dream of.

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I love AMERICAN IDOL. Oh, I know half of you now will completely discount everything I say. But there’s still a lot of fun to be had in the old franchise, whether cheering encouragement to the decent singers, or gawping in amazement at the rampant sense of entitlement those under 28 years old seem to have. It is as much a cultural marker as the brilliance of THE OFFICE or RENO 911.

And, of course, that means it’s ripe for parody, or at least a not at all thinly veiled takedown. David Hiltbrand’s DYING TO BE FAMOUS does this exquisitely, attacking the integrity of the show, the judges and the participants all wrapped up in a quick-to-read murder mystery. Hiltbrand’s series character is private investigator Jim McNamara. He’s known for his work with musicians, and his exploits are recounted in titles like DEADER THAN DISCO and KILLER SOLO.

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What if 60 MINUTES interviewed Dracula? That’s the basic idea behind John Marks’ FANGLAND, which borrows the structure of Bram Stoker’s classic novel as it updates it to the cutthroat world of TV journalism, and part successfully at that.

Young, pretty Evangeline Harker – get it? – is a producer for an esteemed news program called THE HOUR – get it? – and she has the unenviable assignment of traveling to Romania to interview one Ion Torgu, a man of mythic proportions and reputed to have criminal ties. Turns out, his danger level goes much deeper than that, because he’s a vampire. Harker is held hostage in his castle, until she finds a most bizarre method of weaseling her way out.

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