I’m not telling you anything you don’t know when I say the last thing the world needs is another humor book on vampires. Yet here comes V IS FOR VAMPIRE: AN ILLUSTRATED ALPHABET OF THE UNDEAD by Adam-Troy Castro. At least this one has an actual sense of humor.
The perfect size and weight of any Dr. Seuss title on your kids’ shelf, it’s exactly what it sounds like: an ABC book where each letter pertains to some element of the creatures of the night, like G for garlic, or V for Van Helsing. Welcome are the more creative entries, like “J is for Just Some Goddamned Cat” and “Y is for You’ll Never Defeat Me, Mwa-ha-ha.” Each letter bares an accompany illustration by Johnny Atomic (not his real name, one presumes). —Rod Lott
Buy it at Amazon.
I think Adam Mansbach’s GO THE FUCK TO SLEEP might have been a viral sensation before the book was even out. Maybe like me, someone emailed you an entire PDF of it. Maybe you weren’t even aware it was an actual printed work. The much-buzzed-about audiobook versions by Samuel L. Jackson and director Werner Herzog certainly have brought it a huge dose of Internet fame.
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If you have Internet access, a valid email address, and friends who mass-forward links incessantly, you’ve probably received two things: 1) supposed “proof” of our president being born in another country, and 2) the work of David Thorne. In a perfect world, the work of the former would be just a prank of the latter.
A graphic designer by trade, Thorne is a natural-born prankster — mostly via email. He’s perhaps most famous for the chain of correspondence in which he attempted to pay an overdue chiropractic bill with a drawing of a spider; coincidentally, that scrawl adorns the cover of his first collection of his cyberterrors, THE INTERNET IS A PLAYGROUND: IRREVERENT CORRESPONDENCE OF AN EVIL ONLINE GENIUS.
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At first glance, Ross Horsley’s MY FIRST DICTIONARY could indeed pass for something you’d find on your kindergartener’s bookshelf. Then you notice the alphabet blocks stacked by the character on the cover: They spell “vodka.”
“What the hell?” you might say, and randomly flip open to the “L” section, which kicks off with the word “Last,” teaching young minds its definition by using it in a sentence: “Billy’s horse finished last. Billy’s horse finished after all of the others.” Nothing unusual about that, except that the accompanying illustration is of Mom picking out a cut of meat at the butcher’s counter.
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