Another website becomes a book in Pamela Redmond Satran’s HOW NOT TO ACT OLD: 185 WAYS TO PASS FOR PHAT, SICK, HOT, DOPE, AWESOME, OR AT LEAST NOT TOTALLY LAME. It does just what it says, with advice dished on everything from Facebooking to pop-culture references that instantly date you.
Whether these tips are to be considered purely practical or taken with grain a salt, I’m unsure, because Satran writes with admirable wit. Each topic is handled quickly, sometimes with a fun list as accompaniment. If you don’t know that SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization,” you’re exactly the target this work seeks.
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Such a brilliant image on the cover of SEX, THUGS, AND ROCK & ROLL, that X-ray shot of a man blowing his brains out, only with the expelled gray matter represented by the book’s contributing authors. Don’t agree? Then you’re better off not even attempting to digest its contents, because this one’s not for the faint of heart or easily offended.
For the rest of us, however, it’s a big ball of awesome. Edited by Todd Robinson, who’s the mastermind behind the Thuglit crime-fic website, the book holds 23 tales representing “the best of neo-noir fiction.” It’s Thuglit’s second hold-in-your-hands anthology, following last year’s HARDCORE HARDBOILED. They’re so good, I hope they become annuals.
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Similar to MariNaomi’s ESTRUS COMICS is uni-monikered, San Francisco-based artist Melaina’s DATER’S DOZEN. This indie mini-comic chronicles her efforts to date as many men as possible, following her breakup with her most recent boyfriend, who’s addicted to video games.
As expected, she finds more frogs than princes. Belonging to that former group are one who yells at her in public, a possible alcoholic, another quickly heading that way and, most hilariously, a bachelor who “was artsy and yet had a steady income. But I was less fond of his starfish hands.”
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I have never read a Sherrilyn Kenyon novel, and they may be great, but the paranormal romance genre holds no appeal to me. Certainly, her stuff has its fans, so when I learned it had been adapted to manga format in THE DARK-HUNTERS: VOLUME 1, I figured it couldn’t hurt to try it out.
It did.
A former Greek god named Kyrian is now a vampire hunter. He meets a girl named Amanda who also hunt vampires, yet she is not an immortal like he is. In fact, she’s an accountant whose whole family casts spells. Neither character is introduced well, nor are their backgrounds fleshed out beyond toe-depth.
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