Had she thought of it, your mother would’ve told you, “Never get involved with a woman who dances with snakes at a carnival.” And from what the protagonist of Ray Garton’s outrageous road-trip novella SERPENT GIRL goes through, your mother would’ve been right. As in, dead-on.

Steven Benedetti is just passing through a California mountain town when he decides to stop at a two-bit carnival, where he’s entranced — or at least his nether regions are — by Carmen, the titular (in every sense of the word) woman whose act consists of writhing about suggestively as reptiles encircle her voluptuous body. Afterward, Benedetti witnesses Carmen in an argument with her boss, sticks up for her and offers to give her a ride (eventually in every sense of the word).

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Somewhere at this very moment, a guy is contemplating getting a tattoo that will stain his skin for the rest of his life. He is narrowing his choices toward the select one for permanent status. Suddenly, it hits him: “I know! A pile of shit! With flies on ‘er!”

It happens. And with alarming frequency, if one is to believe the “art” on display in Aviva Yael and P.M. Chen’s NO REGRETS: THE BEST, WORST, & MOST #$%*ING RIDICULOUS TATTOOS EVER. In frightening full color, the humor collection prints page after page after photos of truly horrendous tats that their owners should have been talked out of. (Seriously, ignore the word BEST in the title.)

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As reliant on rhythm as any given pop song, Veronique Tanaka’s METRONOME is a unique graphic novel worthy of your time. Each of its 64 pages are divided into 16 symmetrical squares, slowly telling a story through images, not words.

At first, those images appear abstract and unconnected. The entire first page is taken up by the ticking of the titular object, soon joined in the next couple of pages by a wristwatch and extreme close-ups that pan out to reveal a housefly, a telephone, an odd statue, a picture on a wall, a fan, a lava lamp and a photograph of a smiling woman.

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Here’s what a lot of horror novelists do, even the good ones: They start off with a unique variation on a standard theme and then, in an effort to stretch the material to novel length, they pile on so much extra spookshow cliché hoo-hah that a terrific short story or decent novella becomes a downright silly book. Even Bentley Little, one of the best of the post-Stephen King generation writers, can fall into the trap.

But what makes Little so different from his colleagues — and one of the top four or five horror novelists working today — is the fact that just about the time you start to think that his story is sliding off the rails, he tosses in something spookier than what has gone before and it ain’t so silly anymore. That goes for THE VANISHING.

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Because time isn’t always kind: economic reviews in a world full of waste!

When I was in junior high school back in the mid-’80s, lots of fellow students read the fantasy novels of Terry Brooks, starting with THE SWORD OF SHANNARA. If I were there today, I suspect those same kids would instead have a copy of the new DARK WRAITH OF SHANNARA in their hands – Brooks’ first graphic novel, adapted by Robert Place Napton with art by Edwin David. Set after the events of WISHSONG OF SHANNARA, it follows Jair Ohmsford, the boy whose notes can turn him invisible; an ancient text of evil; and a witch behind it all. There’s plenty of swords, sorcery, clawed creatures and the usual fantasy tropes – imaginative in story and well-done in shades and tones, although probably better served if it were in color. As a newcomer to the SHANNARA world, I was more pleased to see the “making of” features in the back that demonstrated how the book came to be, and who contributed what.

Not long after a Planned Parenthood clinic is bombed, one of its teen clients is found dead in a Dumpster, in L.J. Sellers’ politically charged mystery THE SEX CLUB. Investigating separately are Oregon homicide detective Det. Wade Jackson and understandably shaken youth outreach clinic nurse Kera Kollmorgan. It’s the latter’s discoveries that drive this procedural. Her findings? These kids of today like to get freaky! (Hey, it’s right there in the title.) The prurient nature of the plot makes this CLUB worth a trial membership; it may not break new ground, but is brave in its telling. Clearly Sellers has an agenda here, so if it doesn’t match yours, don’t even start. If it does, you’ll rally behind it.

Military science fiction remains elusive to my tastes. I get caught and confused by all the lingo, nicknames, abbreviations, rank and descriptions of weapons. I had higher hopes for ORPHAN’S JOURNEY by Robert Buettner, based on its appealing cover and its Orbit Books parentage, but registered as another SNAFU with me. Its star is Jason Wander; on the plus side, the futuristic hero fights giant slugs and sea monsters, but over in the minus column, I got lost not long after that. Part of the problem may be that this is the third of a sci-fi series, so Wander’s world may seem like shorthand to fresh enlistees. With so many adventures under Buettner’s belt, I’m sure the ORPHAN series has its loyal soldiers, but I’ll have to respectfully go AWOL.

Not quite an episode guide, tie-in novel or encyclopedia, THE SUPERNATURAL BOOK OF MONSTERS, SPIRITS, DEMONS, AND GHOULS is designed to be a narrative from the himbo-brother duo of The CW’s X-FILES-esque shriek series SUPERNATURAL, only it’s written by Alex Irvine. He apes their smart-aleck tone well as they dish facts and folklore on zombies, poltergeists and creatures of urban legends, most of whom have merited considerable face time on their own episodes. If monsters are your thing, this book is actually fun and can stand alone from the show, so no advance knowledge is needed. With cool illustrations from Dan Panosian, the BOOK is well-designed (save for an ugly font used for journal excerpts) and offers stories within stories. It even made me want to watch the show, which had to be the intent all along. –Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

THE HOWLING becomes THE MOANING in Ray Garton’s werewolf novel RAVENOUS. See, the werewolf curse is not propagated via bites, but – there’s no delicate way to put this – via sex. Hey, at least that’s an angle I’ve never read before.

The first victim is Emily Crane, an overweight wife and mom whose car breaks down on the way home from a weight-loss support group, and is raped in the forest by a werewolf. She doesn’t know it’s a werewolf, but it eventually gets figured out, after she becomes incredibly horny and hungry for raw meat.

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Frank Cho may not be involved, but the jiggling jungle girl he resurrected returns in Marvel Comics’ SHANNA, THE SHE-DEVIL: SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST, written by the JONAH HEX team of Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti, and drawn by Khari Evans.

The four-issue story begins when jewel thieves steal a load of diamonds from a luxurious cruise ship – one which then is attacked by a leviathan and swarmed by its sharp-toothed babies. Our modern-day pirates escape on a boat that crash-lands on Monster Island. No sooner have they stepped foot on sand than they’re staring face to face with hungry velociraptors.

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When’s the last time reading material kicked you in the balls and laughed as it left you vomiting on the sidewalk? I’m guessing it was the issue just prior to the just-released OUT OF THE GUTTER #4. Yes, the indie “modern journal of pulp fiction and degenerate literature” is back with another 200 pages of stories and article so rough-and-tumble dirty, you’ll need a shower afterward … during which it will come back and rape you.

This is all a good thing, of course, being made a book’s bitch. Editor Matt Louis has deemed this “The Hard Times Issue” – timely that – and the contributors run with the loose theme. As always, the mag begins with a flash fiction section, where Robert T. Lord offers “For I Have Sinned,” in which a mother’s confession to a priest who apparently has ignored his own advice of “Do unto to others …”

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Who is killing the great hipper-than-thou of Brooklyn? Well, the guy in the Iron Maiden shirt, of course, but that’s not the point. What is the point of Rayo Casablanca’s 6 SICK HIPSTERS is that the pop-culturally elite aren’t safe – not the LP collector, underground filmmaker, album cover painter nor performance artist. And certainly not the comic-book store clerk who meets his demise for being unable to name six VOLTRON characters in two minutes.

But the title of this raucous debut novel refers to the group of guys who aim to solve this most twisted serial-killer streak. Among them is a rocker who looks like Jesus, but the protagonist is Harrison, who writes science-based pornography.

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Sometimes I wonder where else horror can go, get depressed, and think the genre is tapped. Then something comes down the pipe that gives me hope and spins everything around. The book in question is Brian Keene’s DARK HOLLOW.

The cover blurb promises he’s the new Stephen King, but since King isn’t dead, I’ll withhold judgment. 

But I can promise that DARK HOLLOW provides not only an interesting new form of evil, but a shocker of an ending, and maybe the greatest opening line I’ve read this year: ”It was on the first day of spring that Big Steve and I saw Shelly Carpenter giving head to the hairy man.” 

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In February 2005, news of the capture of Dennis Rader made headlines and TV newscasts everywhere. What surprised me most was the fact that this guy was a serial killer with a three-decade-long history and 10 victims, and I’d never heard of him. Like a pro athlete, psychopathic murderers have to ply their trade in a major media market if they want the public to know who they are.

Rader – a lower-middle-class borderline loser, family man, church president and city code enforcement officer in Wichita, Kan. – turned out to be the self-named “BTK” strangler – the initials standing for “bind, torture, kill,” his primary means of communication with strangers. His story is explored in John Douglas and Johnny Dodd’s INSIDE THE MIND OF BTK: THE TRUE STORY BEHIND THE THIRTY-YEAR HUNT FOR THE NOTORIOUS WICHITA SERIAL KILLER.

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Should you choose to read DARK DISTORTIONS – the inaugural release of indie publisher Scotopia Press – it’s a near-guarantee that the book will undergo a transformation in the process, from a mint-condition paperback of considerable heft to a dog-eared stack of no-longer-solid-white pages, stuck between peeling covers.

It’s my own fault, really. So into its nearly 600 pages of brand-new dark fiction I was that I took it everywhere I went: to breakfast, to bed, to work, to the park, in the car. I put it through the ringer, but several of its stories did the same to me.

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Pinkerton: It’s more than just a Weezer album, kids.

Allan Pinkerton was the founder of the Pinkerton Agency, a private investigation firm where he developed many detection methods now de rigueur today, including shadowing suspects and going undercover. But he was also a spy for the U.S. government, and that role provides the focus for PINKERTON’S SECRET, a historical adventure that serves as Eric Lerner’s debut novel.

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Because time isn’t always kind: economic reviews in a world full of waste!

I’ve never quite been able to get into Dennis Etchison’s work. I’ve always ending up liking the anthologies he’s edited more than the actual fiction he’s written. The same goes for GOT TO KILL THEM ALL & OTHER STORIES, Cemetery Dance’s new collection of his short stories – some new, others dating back to the birth of his career in the ’60s. To me, his fiction seems a little fill-in-the-blank, as if not everything he needs to say is said, leaving this reader feeling like either every other sentence has been removed or that I just don’t get the joke. This is a shame, because KILL THEM sports a number of intriguing premises … that just didn’t pay off for me. I’m in a minority there, I know.

Perhaps no one deserves a ribbing as much as the Nazis, and New Yorker cartoonist S. Gross gives them 120 pokes in WE HAVE WAYS OF MAKING YOU LAUGH: 120 FUNNY SWASTIKA CARTOONS. This rectangular hardback takes about five minutes to read, with one drawing per page. The entries fall into two categories: deliberate barbs at the Nazi party, and largely nonpolitical ones where the swastika merely takes the place of a random object, like a lamp or a Slinky. Despite the subtitle, not all 120 are funny (I’d say half are at least humorous), but you have to love the fairy waving a wand at a Nazi and saying, “Poof! You’re circumcised!” and the cactus who asks its armband-wearing owner, “Are you my mother?”

Every year, sorority girls wanting to get back at their dads pose nude for Playboy’s college issues, which may or may not later become a sticking point with prospective husbands. But imagine the explaining the coeds pictured in BOINK: COLLEGE SEX BY THE PEOPLE HAVING IT will have to do. Edited by Alecia Oleyourryk, Christopher Anderson and Vanessa White, this collection of articles and pictorials from the collegiate sex mag is most notable for featuring no-imagination-needed photo spreads of higher-ed student couples – same- and opposite-gender – playing around with themselves and one another. But like Playboy, you might want to read it for the articles, which include true confessions of a guy who’s still a virgin and a girl who’s a serial masturbator. Interesting to say the least, even if it leaves you wondering why.

Move over, Sudoku! Now there’s YUBOTU. You might known it better as Battleship. Peter Gordon, Mike Shenk and Conceptis Puzzles (the firm behind SNAKES ON A SUDOKU) here assemble 200 of these “addictive” pencil games for the armchair torpedo commander in you, divided into different skill sections like “petty officer” and “admiral.” As with the Milton-Bradley game, the object is to find – and sink – the fleet floating in a visually pleasing grid. Unlike Battleship, it’s not so simple. In fact, it takes about 15 pages of rules up front to explain. Because of that, the impatient among us won’t even make it to the first round. –Rod Lott

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Horror fan fave Ray Garton dishes out a lucky 13 scraps of short fiction in SLIVERS OF BONE, a new collection from Cemetery Dance featuring a mix of reprinted and all-new material. Any worries that the collection might not feature Garton’s usual salacious blend of sex and suspense will be dispelled from the start, as “The Guy Down the Street” concerns a couple of suburban dads who decide what to do about their creep neighbor who’s been doing their daughters on the Internet.

“Second Opinion” is about a writer who’s claimed to have penned the perfect story, except for the ending, which he can’t figure out. Trouble is, everyone he consults to help pays for doing so with their lives. “Website” has a WWW newbie driven insane by a mysterious site that shows him video clips of what everyone in his immediate circle is doing at that very moment.

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Richard Laymon does not waste any time. Not even two sentences deep into his novel CUTS, bare breasts are being rubbed in a guy’s face. Love him or hate him, at least the author delivers from the word “go.”

Originally published in 1999 in a long-out-of-print Cemetery Dance edition, the ’70s-era CUTS centers on Albert Prince, who’s anything but. Like any other 17-year-old high school senior, he’s sexually frustrated, but takes said frustration out with a big ol’ butcher knife, which begins when he has an orgasm while stabbing a dog for no good reason.

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Flashback to 1986, when my 15-year-old hormones were in full force. I was just starting high school, and to me, Kathleen Turner was “it.” Yes, she’s a terrific actress, but I mean she was sex incarnate.

Just a hair over two decades later, how things have changed. Although not short on talent, she’s no longer an A-list draw. What happened? Lots, as it turns out, as she reveals in her autobiography SEND YOURSELF ROSES: THOUGHTS ON MY LIFE, LOVE, AND LEADING ROLES, written with Gloria Feldt.

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One man’s pain is another man’s pleasure. And does any time in life prove more painful than puberty? MORTIFIED: LOVE IS A BATTLEFIELD bets not.

Curated by David Nadelberg, the anthology boasts 34 writers sharing deep, dark pages from their personal teenage diaries and writings of years past –  warts (and yeast infections) and all –  unedited, but supplemented with biting hindsight commentary. If we knew then what we know … well, we wouldn’t have brave projects like this, would we?

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Vietnam was a cake walk compared to the horrors that await vet Bobby Ives in London – namely, his propensity to turn into a werewolf, in Thomas Tessier’s terror tale THE NIGHTWALKER.

Bobby lives a happy life with his girlfriend Annie, aside from the occasional fainting spell or migraine. When tragedy befalls them, however, he hulks out into a full-blown killer, scouring Hyde Park for joggers to disembowel. He also picks up a young punk-rock girl – not to kill her, but to be his slave for sex and abuse. Now harboring these werewolf tendencies, Bobby gets turned on by having her menstrual blood drip all over him. Hey, to each his own.

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Because time isn’t always kind: economic reviews in a world full of waste!

Cross Encyclopedia Brown with Will Shortz and you might get Winston Breen, the grade-school star of THE PUZZLING WORLD OF WINSTON BREEN. Eric Berlin’s young-adult mystery has Winston using his mad puzzle skillz to unravel a riddle that will lead him to a rumored million-dollar booty. Interspersed within the story are all sorts of puzzles that Winston must solve – but not before the reader has a chance to do so, too. These make the novel interactive, even if most are unconnected to the plot. Kids will dig it, but so will adults, even if more for the games than the story. This has franchise potential.

Marc Aronson and HP Newquist’s FOR BOYS ONLY: THE BIGGEST, BADDEST BOOK EVER may be an even cooler treasure trove of knowledge – both useful and arcane – than the runaway hit THE DANGEROUS BOOK FOR BOYS. It downplays the studied nostalgia for a more Internet-savvy, here-and-now approach. With a cool, icon-driven design, its scattered, uncategorized contents touch on everything from great moments in video games to how to best survive a shark attack. There are also natural disasters, math tricks, treasure maps and just a ton of other bits and bites to keep lads young and old busy. Reading the book could pay off, too; its margins are embedded with secret codes that, if cracked, can land you big prizes. Check the website for details and bonus content.

It may not be E.C., but CHAMBER OF MYSTERY: WITCHCRAFT VOL. 1 collects 13 “ghastly tales of 1950s ‘pre-code’ horror!” These comics aren’t nearly as grotesque (or as clever) as TALES FROM THE CRYPT, but who cares? It’s just a blast to have them at all. The stories entail a circus contortionist haunted by a “death tattoo,” a vampire puppet, a truck driver who likes to run over cats, a cowboy bloodsucker, a shrinking scientist and a pie-eating giant caterpillar. Plus witches, undead spouses and a weird Western tale. Colors are beautifully bright, and Olympian Publishing gets my goodwill by including a couple of vintage comics ads, such as the back cover’s reproduction of Charles Atlas’ immortal “Hey Skinny!” campaign. A second volume – CHAMBER OF MYSTERY: VOODOO – is promised this spring.

We are, writes food journalist Frederick Kaufman, a gastrocentric society – not recently, either, but from this nation’s very start. A SHORT HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN STOMACH tracks – with dates aplenty – how our appetites (or lack of) have driven the way we live. From a history of diet books (including one that likens cheese digestion to a release of opiates) and Cotton Mather’s obsession with vomit as a cure-all to a look at today’s competitive eaters and their “biler-iron bowels,” Kaufman has it covered. The best chapter, however, is its first: a pornographer’s comparison of Food TV shows to XXX movies, where a close-up of a raw chicken breast is likened to “a pussy shot.” To paraphrase Rachael Ray, yum-o!

CLARK GABLE: TORMENTED STAR is the name of David Bret’s biography of the Hollywood legend. How tormented? Try this on for size: “He was uncircumcised and would sometimes scrub his penis until it bled.” He also was a bisexual who would sleep with “anything that had a hole and the promise of a couple of dollars.” There are plenty of tawdry nuggets like that, which propel you past the rest of the standard, dull, facts-a’plenty rundown of his rise to superstardom and Hollywood legend. Hardcore Gable fans may be offended at the TMZ-style openness of Bret’s approach, while the casual admirers may not care enough about the star to bother. –Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.