After reading Michael Adams’ recent, yearlong diary of bad-movie-watching, titled SHOWGIRLS, TEEN WOLVES, AND ASTRO ZOMBIES, I found that I enjoyed it, but not quite enough to keep it for posterity’s sake. My home office has an entire shelf devoted to books on less-than-stellar films that often are more entertaining than watching the flicks they discuss. Although mostly all out-of-print, the volumes below — in order indicative of nothing, once you get past the first one — are well worth owning for the connoisseur of cinema’s cheesiest. Happy hunting!
Miss ThrillerFest 2009? The next best thing to having been there is catching up on this batch of videos, in which authors like James Rollins, Andrew Gross and Steve Martini discuss gruesome death scenes, favorite bad guys, Hannibal Lecter and more:
1. Invent a time machine, throw handwritten copies of each Harry Potter book into a backpack, go back in time, kill J.K. Rowling and head immediately to the publisher that didn’t reject the manuscript for HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER’S STONE.
2. Contrive to be born as the heir to a large fortune; earn a reputation as a vapid, if willowy, party monster; and appear in a poorly shot, amateur sex tape.
3. Imagine that the majority of your target audience can — on a good day — identify 12 to 18 letters of the English alphabet. (See James Patterson for the best example of this approach).
4. Write up a list of a hundred things that would be really fucked up to do while on drugs, pretend that you did all of them, and call the result “a harrowing memoir of one person’s struggle and eventual victory against the horrors of addiction.”
I don’t read much nonfiction. I simply don’t have the time, and when I do, its not generally from the “thriller” genre. So how come I have written three guide books to three thrillers? The answer is simple: Dan Brown. What Brown has managed to do brilliantly within the framework of his novels, is weave facts and fiction seamlessly together in a coherent and logical way, the like of which is rarely seen. I’m not saying its all perfect — indeed, as I point out in my guide books, some of his factual research leaves much to be desired — but he does have an uncanny knack of being able to hit the zeitgeist of the moment when it comes to historical themes and ideas.
For the third installment of BOOKGASM’s “WTF Q&A,” in which we hurl at an author random questions having nothing to do with his/her book, we put Lou Berney in our sights. He’s just made his full-length debut with GUTSHOT STRAIGHT, a crime novel cut from the cloth of Elmore Leonard. Er, if Leonard made cloth …
BOOKGASM: Ratio time! Radio Shack : banana = Lou Berney : ______.
After reading Michael Adams’ recent, yearlong diary of bad-movie-watching, titled SHOWGIRLS, TEEN WOLVES, AND ASTRO ZOMBIES, I found that I enjoyed it, but not quite enough to keep it for posterity’s sake. My home office has an entire shelf devoted to books on less-than-stellar films that often are more entertaining than watching the flicks they discuss. Although mostly all out-of-print, the volumes below — in order indicative of nothing, once you get past the first one — are well worth owning for the connoisseur of cinema’s cheesiest. Happy hunting!
1. Invent a time machine, throw handwritten copies of each Harry Potter book into a backpack, go back in time, kill J.K. Rowling and head immediately to the publisher that didn’t reject the manuscript for 
