This is the book I’ve been waiting for Brian Keene to write. I know that sounds a little condescending, but trust me, I don’t have visions of the guy wiping sweat from his brow and grinning in gratitude because he’s pleased me. The thing is, I enjoyed CASTAWAYS so much, I’d like to slap its author on the back, tell him “you really had me going this time, you bastard,” and then buy him a beer.
The novel’s setup is perfect: Would-be celebrities in quest of a million-dollar grand prize and the crew for a reality TV show called CASTAWAYS are on a small island in the bugfuck quadrant of an ocean somewhere. The program is a SURVIVOR clone. Contestants play a game that draws from them the worst elements of human nature: greed, duplicity, arrogance, insincerity and just plain ol’ screw-you meanness. Alliances form and everyone gears up for several weeks of backstabbing fun.
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COLD BLOODED CHILLERS: TALES OF SUBURBAN MURDER & MALICE #3 is the best issue of this indie horror comic thus far, primarily because all three stories carry art that’s up to snuff. Both issues before it have sported a story where the drawing didn’t match the level of the tale, so the calibration is appreciated.
“Shadow” is going to bother some readers, no doubt about it, because it deals with a boy whose mom’s boyfriend is selling him out to truckers for rest-stop quickies. Since CHILLERS is built upon twist endings, you can’t wait to see the sleazeball get what’s coming to him, but prepare to have your expectations shattered.
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A sampling of some of the bizarro search terms with (thankfully) low numbers that brought people to BOOKGASM over the last 30ish days:
• i love lucy fan fiction stephen hawking
• sex with a ninja
• baby ruth hawkman
• statute of limitations on dumping trash
• don’t make a black woman take off her earrings
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Looking for some reassurence that 2009 might be a good year after all? Here you go: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard is reissuing the Hap and Leonard novels by Joe R. Lansdale — one of Texas’s gifts to the world of genre fiction — in attractive trade paperback editions, starting with the first two of the series: SAVAGE SEASON and MUCHO MOJO.
Why is that such good news? Well, for one thing, these novels have been sadly out-of-print and damned near-impossible to find for almost 20 years. More importantly, they are among the finest, most unique and dependably entertaining crime novels you’re likely to read.
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Mike Kearby’s new Western for young adults isn’t filled with the clichés that make the genre what it is. In THE LAST RENEGADE, you’ll find no cattle drives, land barons, rapacious railroads, gunfights on the street in front of the saloon, or dewy-eyed school marms in this one. There is an Indian, however — Young-Man-Who-Listens — and he’s the title character.
He’s shot and captured as an adolescent. and sold to a traveling tent show to be displayed as Chief Raging Buffalo, The Last Real Renegade Indian, a bloodthirsty savage with more scalps to his credit than Pawnee Bill has circus posters. The only education he receives in the ways of the white man is the brutal treatment he is accorded by his captors. He picks up the language to the extent he hears it regularly from the men who care for him. Or don’t care for him, as the case may be.
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