reading material to get excited about
From the monthly archives:
A sampling of some of the bizarro search terms with (thankfully) low numbers that brought people to BOOKGASM over the last 30ish days:
• supergirl panties
• punched karen in her gut
• overweight horror protagonist
• carol burnett nude
• can the solar plexus make you poop?
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In what could be subtitled “The Comic Misadventures of Prince Amir,” our imperious but lovable prince from Nathalie Mallet’s THE PRINCES OF THE GOLDEN CAGE returns in THE KING’S DAUGHTERS. Amir is escorting Eva, one of the king of Sorvinka’s titular daughters, back to her home in order to obtain the approval of her father for their marriage. But in the first of a series of missteps, Amir has as his escort soldiers from a neighboring kingdom that is at war with Sorvinka.
The king is most displeased. This displeasure mounts when it turns out that one of Eva’s sisters has been abducted, and a strange beast is roaming the castle, killing innocent men and women. Another of Eva’s sisters goes missing, and Amir decides to investigate.
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Darren Speegle might have been born too late for speculative fiction’s “New Wave,” but reading A RHAPSODY FOR THE ETERNAL, his third short story collection, recalls the heady days of the late ’60s and ’70s, when writers like Harlan Ellison, Michael Moorcock, Robert Silverberg and several others were stretching science fiction, fantasy and horror into new, previously uncharted areas.
Like most of the work from that groundbreaking period, Speegle’s stories are impressively literate, intelligent and highly imaginative. But they can also lose sight of their narrative intention in an intoxicating whirl of sensations — again, like their New Wave predecessors.
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Admit it: We all secretly root for the bad guys. Just look at the crime genre in books. Donald Westlake alone came up with two great bad guys in Parker and Dortmunder. You actually want these two criminals to pull off their schemes. So I present three novels in which the bad guy takes center stage. People will always be drawn to the criminal element, even if they are loathsome. The bad guys always come off as cool, while the good guys seems like milk and Dudley Do-Right.
THE BOOSTER by Eugene Izzi — The author is best known for the bizarre circumstances surrounding his death. I’ve always been on the lookout for his books to cover. Well, now that I’ve actually read this one from 1989, I’ll probably pass on others. The title refers to Bolo, a retired safecracker who runs a bar. He is contacted by a mob figure who wants him to do one last job: breaking into an apartment in the Sears Tower, by way of the outside.
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Some books are easy to call. If you’re not into heavy metal music, you won’t be into PRECIOUS METAL: DECIBEL PRESENTS THE STORIES BEHIND 25 EXTREME METAL MASTERPIECES. Edited by Albert Mudrian, who also fronts DECIBEL magazine, which I’m unaware existed, the book does exactly what it sets out to do, telling chapter-long “making of” tales of more than two dozen albums.
While I respect Mudrian’s insistence at having contributors interview every member of the band, and the Q&A format keeps the engine chugging, I’ve never heard of these supposed hall-of-fame masterpieces, much less the groups. I know of Black Sabbath, Slayer and Monster Magnet, but who is Carcass? Eyehategod? Kyuss? Darkthrone?
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