The slightly larger format (9-by-7) of this new work from the collaborative team of Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden is reminiscent of the picture books you carried into bed as a child. But JOE GOLEM AND THE DROWNING CITY is certainly not a comforting bedtime story. Instead, this alternate-history, horror and mystery novel is, for the most part, the stuff of nightmares.

In 1925, a series of earthquakes caused the sea level to drastically rise, leaving lower Manhattan submerged under 30 feet of water. Those who did not abandon the area called it the Drowning City. Fifty years have passed, and the Drowning City is a series of canals plagued with thieves and scavengers.

Fourteen-year-old Molly McHugh used to live on the streets, until she met Felix Orlov and became his employed assistant and closest friend. Orlov was once a popular magician, but now makes a meager living as a psychic medium communicating with the dead loved ones of his clients. One day, a séance goes horribly wrong when a group of intruders dressed in gas masks break in and kidnap Orlov. Molly pursues her friend and is rescued from the Gas-Men by Joe, a hulking man of unusual strength.
 
Joe brings Molly to meet his boss, Simon Church, a Holmesian detective whose cases are preserved as stories in popular fiction magazines, and is now living long beyond his natural years, thanks to mechanical implants inside his body. Church explains Orlov’s involvement with a strange object known as Lector’s Pentajulum, believed to have strong, possibly magical powers.

Church is certain Orlov was abducted by Dr. Cocteau, an evil genius who has studied the Pentajulum for years and is determined to possess it. With Joe’s help, Molly sets off to find Orlov before Dr. Cocteau uses the Pentajulum to release an unimaginable horror that would dominate the entire world.
 
Genre fans will easily recognize the elements of steampunk (Church’s mechanical innards that cause him to sweat oil) and H.P. Lovecraft (with the Pentajulum instead of the Necronomican acting as the portal to the world of the elder gods) that Mignola and Golden employ to embellish their story. Fortunately, these embellishments are never heavy-handed and are woven near-seamlessly into the narrative.
 
Far more impressive is the imaginative setting of New York City, divided not only by economic class, but also by those prosperous areas still completely above water compared with crime-ridden Lower Manhattan and its partially submerged buildings. Impressive also are the story’s sympathetic but oddball assortment of characters — especially Joe, a likable brute with a strange, hidden past that occasionally haunts his dreams.

In the midst of all this is an unexpected theme of mortality. It reveals itself most prominently when Church is approached and challenged by the ghosts of his former partners (Joe’s predecessors) just as his life is, quite literally, losing steam. It is then carried out to and beyond the tale’s conclusion as Molly discovers Joe’s true identity and possible destiny.
 
Mignola’s illustrations — with their slightly expressionistic portraits of faces and scene details — appear frequently and in various frame sizes throughout the novel. Their moody ambience — presented in stark, black-and-white contrasts — reminds one of Mignola’s best work from his HELLBOY series of comics and graphic novels, greatly adding to the work’s enjoyment.
 
Mignola and Golden obviously remember what it felt like as young readers to be swept away by the powerful combination of pictures and words in a book. As they so effectively demonstrate in JOE GOLEM AND THE DROWNING CITY, this feeling can be captured again in later life. It deserves a place on your bookshelf alongside those adventures of Alice, Oz, Dr. Seuss and other illustrated books you’ve treasured all these years. —Alan Cranis

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Look for our review soon of Dave Thompson’s new Limelight Editions book, MUSIC ON FILM: THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW. In the meantime, feast your eyes on this excerpt, about the film’s stage origins and finding its star in the unknown Tim Curry.

THE ROCKY HORROR SHOW was the brainchild of an actor who was essentially forced out of the London production of JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR when he suggested that King Herod (for whom he was understudy) be played as Elvis Presley. The producers, whose hands were on both the tiller and the purse strings, preferred him to tap dance. Neither party would budge, and Richard O’Brien quit the religious rock biz on the spot.

He filled his suddenly vacant time by writing a rock ’n’ roll musical that would allow Elvis full rein, penning songs around a plotline lifted straight from the 1950s B movies that he loved so much. Born in Cheltenham, England, in 1942, O’Brien was a teen throughout that era, growing up with the infant yowlings of the newborn rock’n’roll and the Cold War paranoia of period Hollywood schlock.

But he was also separated from those influences, not only by the customary dislocation that exists between audience and artist but also by distance. In 1952, when O’Brien was ten, his family relocated to a farm in Taraunga, New Zealand—the other side of the world in terms of geography; the other side of the universe in the realm of culture.

“New Zealand reminds me very much of the American mid-west,” an older O’Brien told journalist Patricia Morrisroe. “There were two movie houses where I grew up. One showed all the latest releases and the other showed all the B-movies. I went to the movies a lot. What else can you do in a small-town parochial society? You see films, you play sports. If you were a bit of a punk like me you hung out in street corners and tried to pick up girls, not very success- fully. The girls wanted to flirt but didn’t want to be picked up. This was the fifties, remember.”

He remained in New Zealand for the next decade but in 1962 returned to England, where he found work in careers as far apart as truck driving and hairdressing. He was also a keen horseman, a legacy of his days on the farm, and when he learned how valued that skill could be in show business, he put himself forward as a stuntman. Sharp-eyed observers may or may not spot O’Brien taking a tumble in such films as James Bond’s CASINO ROYALE and the comedy CARRY ON COWBOY; but such high-profile engagements only made him hanker for a life on the business end of the camera lens.

Working in whatever roles he could land, by 1969 O’Brien was appearing alongside another young actor, Tim Curry, in the touring production of HAIR (he also met his first wife, Kimi Wong, in that show); his was a tiny role, however, and three years later, he was still struggling along, this time in the chorus of JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR. It was there that he hatched the notion of the infanticidal Herod being played as a biblical Elvis, and when his idea was dismissed, he resigned from the production.

Only one member of the JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR team appeared to sympathize with O’Brien: the production’s Australian director, Jim Sharman.

James David Sharman was born in Sydney, Australia, on March 12, 1945. His father and grandfather ran a traveling sideshow, Jimmy Sharman’s Boxing Troupe, and Sharman’s formative years were spent in the twinned worlds of circus and traveling vaudeville. He went on to study production at the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney.

“Though it may seem a big step from sideshows and circuses to mainstream theater, the distance is not so great,” Sharman revealed in a lecture in 1995. “You have only to look below the surface of a seminal play like Samuel Beckett’s WAITING FOR GODOT to sense a vaudeville routine waiting in the wings. The source of most sophisticated theater is to be found in popular culture. Directing Strindberg’s DANCE OF DEATH, I was often reminded of Punch and Judy. Handke’s THE HOUR WE KNEW NOTHING OF EACH OTHER seems to owe something to that sight gag with a waiter constantly crossing the stage balancing an awkward tray. Gloria Dawn, the soubrette in Sorlie’s VARIETIES, went on to play Mother Courage in an MTC production staged by a Berliner Ensemble director, and also played Mrs. Peachum in my staging of THE THREEPENNY OPERA. This production—in the opening season of the Drama Theatre of the Opera House—made a direct connection to the vaudeville tradition.” Of course, ROCKY HORROR would allow these connections even greater rein.

After graduating in 1966, Sharman first came to wider attention with a series of experimental theater productions at the Old Tote in Sydney, but it was his production of Mozart’s DON GIOVANNI for Opera Australia that truly confirmed his reputation. At the Old Tote, incidentally, Sharman first worked alongside Brian Thomson, the set designer with whom he has been associated for much of his subsequent career.

Over the next six years, Sharman was involved in two of the era’s most revolutionary plays, as producer of the Australian productions of HAIR (which also took him to Tokyo and Boston) and JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR. The latter brought him to the attention of the play’s lyricist, Tim Rice, and by 1972 Sharman was in the UK, handling the London version of the same stage show. He also oversaw a production of American playwright Sam Shepard’s THE UNSEEN HAND. Having taken a liking to O’Brien during his brief span at SUPERSTAR, Sharman quickly handed him his next major acting role, the part of Willie the Space Freak.

In the meantime, O’Brien had discovered another role to play—that of aspiring songsmith. He was constantly writing during this period, not only amassing a plethora of songs but also forming a conceptual framework in his mind that encompassed not only his musical tastes but also his cinematic fantasies. The first pages of what would become ROCK HORROR were born there.

“I never wanted to be a writer,” O’Brien once said. “Acting was always the important thing in my life. I had no desire to be an actor, and do Shakespeare. I didn’t want to be a celebrity. I just wanted to play make-believe. It was all very child-like. Very simple.” He wrote to kill time; it was, he said, “a way for me to spend winter evenings when I was an out of work actor. It was the very first thing I’d ever written. I didn’t even see it as writing, really. I was just having a ball.”

A conversation with Jim Sharman gave the ball its bounce. O’Brien later admitted, “Writing ROCKY was almost like working on a jigsaw puzzle. I had written several of the songs before and all I had to do was slot them in. I didn’t start at the beginning and develop the plot from there. I started at both ends and then filled in the middle.” But it was not until he showed it to Sharman, sang him some of the songs, let the Australian’s experience guide his own enthusiasm, and then unleashed the vision that their shared creativity brought to the surface that O’Brien conceded that he’d actually written a stage show. Before, it was still just a piece of fun.

He did not remain in the dark for long. With his long- running sidekick Brian Thomson naturally confirmed as set designer, Sharman began recruiting both cast and crew.

He started at the top, with producer Michael White—the coproducer behind THE DIRTIEST SHOW IN TOWN, but also a guiding force behind many of the other crucial productions of the previous decade: THE CONNECTION in 1961, SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING in 1966, SLEUTH in 1969. He came close to being the first to present Andy Warhol’s seminal Velvet Underground in the UK in 1967, stymied only by time constraints and the demands of his work with Joe Orton’s LOOT; and, of course, he teamed with Robert Stigwood for HAIR, OH! CALCUTTA!, and THE DIRTIEST SHOW IN TOWN. In confronting the British theatergoing public with the unusual, risqué, and controversial, White had no peer.

Neither, as it transpired, did the man selected to take the leading role in the play. Born in Grappenhall, England, on April 19, 1946, Timothy James Curry—the actor entrusted with that particular majestic part—was the son of a Royal Navy Methodist chaplain, James, and a school secretary, Patricia. A boy soprano in his local church at six and a Shakespearean actor at ten (albeit in a school production), Curry attended boarding school in Bath, then studied drama and English at Birmingham University. He graduated with a combined degree, and his roommate, fellow drama student Patrick Barlow, recalled the moment he first realized that Curry was going to be a success.

They were seated high up in London’s Palace Theatre, watching actress Judi Dench appear as Sally Bowles in the original run of Christopher Isherwood’s CABARET. Dench had the stage to herself, a single figure in a spotlight, holding the entire audience spellbound in her palm. Suddenly Curry whispered to Barlow, “That’s what I want to be.” Days—just twenty-four hours, in fact—later, he and Barlow tried out for a street theater troupe in Chalk Farm, and Curry landed his first major role, in HAIR.

He remained with that production until early 1970, following up with further study and engagements as far apart (geographically speaking) as the Royal Court in London and the Glasgow Civic Repertory Company. At the time of his casting as Frank-N-Furter, however, he remained un- known to the public at large . . . an unknown, continued Barlow, with an amazing voice. “It was just completely perfect, just something he was born with—it came ready made. We would go to university parties and end up having a drink and whatever and he would break out into song, this marvelous bluesy voice.”

Sharman recalls his first ever glimpse of Curry at the audition. “There may have been other actors that I considered initially for the role of Frank. I can’t remember them. I just remember Tim Curry walked through the door of the Royal Court Theatre saying ‘rip it up.’ And he got the role.”

Curry also would prove to be a natural to the costume he was to wear for the production. Two years earlier, working alongside a brilliant young costume designer named Sue Blane on Lindsay Kemp’s production of Jean Genet’s THE MAIDS, Curry had been cast in the role of Solange, and sent onstage every night in a tight black corset. When Blane too was recruited for this new production, one of her first acts was to contact Kemp and ask for that same corset back. Blane’s original vision of Frank-N-Furter as a platinum blonde was quickly dispensed with (along with the German accent that Curry was toying with—he replaced it with what he described as a combination of the Queen and his mother’s telephone voice), but the corset remained. And so for wearing male attire and almost certainly a lesbian . . . [allowing] the star to fully exploit her ambiguity. Interestingly, Garbo’s appearance in this film is echoed by . . . Curry . . . [who] made bodices, stockings and suspenders almost de rigueur among heterosexual men. — Dave Thompson

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In the entertaining little NASA CONSPIRACIES, prolific Fortean author Nick Redfern peeks under the covers of all the famous and many of the obscure, NASA-related mysteries and conspiracy theories: astronaut sightings of UFOs, the face on Mars, faked moon landings. Challenger sabotage — it’s all here, carefully researched and intelligently considered. 

Redfern knows his turf, and is a tireless, well-seasoned researcher with a curious, non-dogmatic mind. He carefully explains his positions on, for example, why the moon landings were not faked, while presenting the case for the “believer” side.  

What makes this more interesting than most books on this subject is that Redfern remains willing to consider even the wildest of stories without pre-existing judgement. He presents the facts as they best can be determined, whether it is a Houston Mission Control security guard spotting a gargoyle wandering about, or delving into the stories that NASA sent a crew into Bolivia following a well-documented 1978 egg-shaped saucer crash there. He will present his opinion, but he never confuses those opinions with facts. 

NASA CONSPIRACIES is not as entertaining as Redfern’s first-person accounts (like the exceptional THREE MEN SEEKING MONSTERS), but for anyone interested in the subject, it delivers a fine overview and adds plenty of original research to many often volatile theories.

Meanwhile, Redfern’s KEEP OUT!: TOP SECRET PLACES GOVERNMENTS DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT tackles a similar terrain, but moves focus to the international stage. 

This superbly entertaining and thoughtfully compiled book points out all the usual suspects from Area 51 and Dulce Base to the slightly less known Australian Pine Gap and HAARP in Alaska before moving to the UK, China, Russia and the moon. 

Investigating a subject more difficult to unravel than the theoretically public access to the NASA files, Redfern catalogs a fine mixture of facts and stories about secret and secretive military facilities that have ties to the paranormal. 

He connects multiple threads into a narrative that is fun and exciting to read. He remains careful not to take definitive positions on anything he can’t prove. And you can’t prove a whole lot in this field.

But finding odd comments like those made by Secretary of the Defense William S. Cohen back in 1997 about his fear of man-made earthquakes provide fantastic fodder for his narrative. Especially when you connect this to the Alaskan HAARP project, blamed by some to be the cause of the 2010 Haitian earthquake. Some of this comes across as preposterous, yet with enough credibility to make you pause. 

Sounding equally outlandish is his investigation into the stories about a secret U.S. military moon base (with or without an alien presence). KEEP OUT! retains its sense of humor about such prospects, but never fails to point out those semi-credible facts floating around. 

While I personally doubt there are aliens on the moon (or on Earth, for that matter), and I equally doubt that National Reconnaissance Office is running a base on the dark side (it’d be difficult, given the presence of the Nazi UFO outpost there), it still remains interesting to consider the evidence, lore and myth that illuminates these theories. 

So what was it that Gary McKinnon found out about Non-Terrestrial Officers when he hacked into the Department of Defense computers? 

If I were conspiracy-minded, I’d be curious about the shift from government-run projects to the private sector. You cannot shoot off a FOIA request on a project managed by Halliburton like you could with NASA. We’ve seen a dramatic shift even in military conflicts from government troops to a massive corporate presence. 

Things add up when you look at them long enough. It doesn’t mean any of it is true, but some of it might be. And that’s what makes Redfern’s books entertaining and insightful. They do not answer your questions, but they give you a glimpse behind the possibilities.

Here’s one that occurred to me, reading about NASA’s Kepler program: Kepler is a space-based observatory set to discover Earth-like planets orbiting other stars. Recently, it was announced that our galaxy alone appears to host 160 billion star-bound planets. A few million of those might hit the “Goldilocks” zone capable of sustaining known life forms. 

The curious thing is that all of Kepler data was supposed to be freely and immediately available to the public for research purposes. Yet a few years back, there was a sudden announcement that the results would be edited before release with a couple of years’ delay. I haven’t yet seen the conspiracy buffs run with this topic, but but I’d like to see what they can find. 

I heartily recommend KEEP OUT! to anyone interested in these subjects. It’s an eye-opening focal point, a quick but broad overview of government secrets, purposeful disinformation, perception management and perhaps even some good-old-fashioned, bug-eyed monsters. —JT Lindroos

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In assembling THE SWORD & SORCERY ANTHOLOGY, editors David G. Hartwell and Jacob Weisman sure had a challenge ahead of them. When most people hear “sword and sorcery,” they usually think of a male-dominated tale with plenty of dragons and action, but this collection does something to balances out those stories.

Yes, you have your requisite Robert E. Howard tale, the classic “The Tower of the Elephant.” Yes, it’s a great story and probably one of the best of all of Conan the Barbarian’s adventures, but also one that people familiar with the genre most likely have read already.

But it’s followed by one of the first women to gain recognition in this genre: C.L. Moore, whose “Black God’s Kiss” would be the first in her series of about Jirel of Joiry. We are also treated to an early adventure of Fafhrd and Gray Mouser in Fritz Leiber’s “The Unholy Grail.” Another fantasy heavyweight included is Michael Moorcock, with a later tale of albino swordsman Elric in “The Caravan of Forgotten Dreams,” in which Elric believes he has finally gotten rid of his cursed sword.

“The Adventuress” is another fantasy with feminist leanings, by Joanna Russ, where Alyx helps a noblewoman escape an arranged marriage. A real surprise for me was David Drake’s “The Barrow Troll,” with an epic fight between a between a berserker and the titular troll. There is a great twist, and this story made me want to reread my trade paperbacks of Brian Wood’s NORTHLANDERS graphic novels.

“The Sea Troll’s Daughter” by Caitlin R. Kiernan is truly the standout of the 432-page book, which is saying a lot since there are plenty of heavy hitters in Tachyon Publications’ collection. But her story of a female warrior who slays a sea troll and deals with the repercussions will stick with most readers.

Among the other big names are Ramsey Campbell, Glen Cook and Gene Wolfe. Fans of the HBO show GAME OF THRONES who don’t want to dive right into George R.R. Martin’s bricks of source material can try his short story “Path of the Dragons,” focusing on Daenerys and her dealings with traders; it was later reworked into a one of the novels.

THE SWORD & SORCERY ANTHOLOGY could be best described as sort of Whitman’s Sampler of the fantasy subgenre. The work is surely welcome since it’s so well-balanced. Just take your time, because — as with most fantasy stories — the names of characters and places can easily meld into one another. —Bruce Grossman

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Best-selling author Charles Todd is actually a duo: a mother and son who live in different states. I can’t even imagine how that writing dynamic works. They have also created two thoroughly fascinating series characters, the literally haunted Ian Rutledge and the formidably strong Army nurse Bess Crawford. I can’t even imagine how difficult that must be to create not just one, but two, successful franchise characters. Needless to say, I’m a fan.

In A BITTER TRUTH, the third in the Crawford series, our heroine discovers a bedraggled woman on her front stoop. She has been hit, evidenced by a frightful black eye, and is afraid. Bess takes her in, leading to a stormy and emotional adventure as she is forced to explore the woman’s past, a potential philandering husband and the prospect of a temporarily orphaned child that may end up being the ward of the abused woman.

That sounds like the recipe for a Victorian novel of manners and mores, until the first body turns up, and Bess is under suspicion for murder. And then another body. And — heck, why not — yet another.

The entity of Todd is extremely good at sucking readers in, making them think that actions such as withholding information from the police, or lying to one’s hosts, are all perfectly reasonable. You understand everyone’s motivations, even if you know that what they’re doing is not for the best. It’s this intense care to make everything seem so realistic, from landscape descriptions to dialogue, that cossets the reader into accepting some rather unusual plot developments.

Set in Britain during the first World War, the authors are meticulous at presenting the horrors of the conflict (in both of their mystery series), and how it psychologically affects not just the soldiers, but those who have remained at home. Every Todd book is a wonder, a page-turner, a strongly felt emotional exploration that happens to contain a number of dead bodies.

The Bess Crawford series is just as excellent as the Ian Rutledge series, and that’s truly remarkable. Very well done. —Mark Rose

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The first few pages of Jussi Adler-Olsen’s THE KEEPER OF LOST CAUSES can be difficult to wade through. We encounter the five-year-old case of a missing female politician, and then spend too much time bouncing between the past when she disappears, and the present which involves the creation of a special investigative bureau that looks into cold cases such as hers.

Additionally, the translation seems a bit off. Prose descriptions are perfectly okay, but the dialogue renditions by Lisa Hartford sound extremely wooden through the first 50 pages. It is only after we are introduced to the irascibly angry detective Carl Mørck and the formation of his new Department Q that will look into such cases as the missing politician that things begin to look up.

Once his formidable assistant, Assad, comes into view, with his uncompromising attention to detail and the fact that he actually cares about a case (which Mørck is reluctant to do), the book becomes enjoyable.

One of Denmark’s leading politicians goes missing on a ferryboat ride. She was last seen quarrelling with her developmentally disabled brother. Did he manage to knock her overboard? Mørck and his increasingly mysterious but remarkably skilled assistant, Assad, begin to investigate the case, looking into her colleagues, her activities and her past. It takes a considerable amount of meticulously detailed police work and a bit of luck, mostly engineered by the cheerful and goofy Assad, to find justice in the case.

This is the first of what is hopefully to be a series of Department Q novels. Adler-Olsen has found an excellent character dynamic between Mørck and Assad. They each have strengths and weaknesses, and are strong enough to stand on their own, but together, they become a formidable and unlikely duo.

There are some rough spots of translation, at least in the beginning, but the plotting and the action scenes are riveting. This is another one of those titles in a genre that The Times of London refers to as “Nordic noir,” a genre that definitely deserves to have its collectors and readers. Add Adler-Olsen to your list and let’s hope to see another book featuring Mørck and Assad soon. —Mark Rose

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What if a character in a story suddenly became self-aware? What if it was a character in SIMS or Second Life, or any of the other countless computer simulations out there that run on intricate programs and the occasional keystroke of a nameless, faceless person? What if that self-aware character (simulation?) were you?

THOMAS WORLD by Richard Cox starts off with a wonderful quote attributed to a much-missed fictional character (Fox Mulder, for those of you wondering …) that sets the tone for the surrealistic story that follows: “They say when you talk to God it’s prayer, but when God talks to you, it’s schizophrenia.”

Thomas Phillips can’t tell if he’s having a religious revelation or if he’s losing his mind: In church, a blue orb of light enters his head and suddenly, everything changes.

His life begins to unravel. He’s accosted by a crazy man who tells him his life is a lie. He loses his job and his wife in less than a day. He’s having paranoid thoughts of being watched and followed. To make matters worse, he has the sense that all of this has happened before.

Thomas tries to convince himself that he’s losing his mind, which is a much less scary prospect than the fact that he is a malfunctioning program in a computer simulation. The problem with mental illness — if that’s what it is — is that it seems so real, he can’t tell the difference.

What Thomas can tell is that his life is unraveling: He’s being followed by two Stetson-wearing FBI agents; he lives a life of perpetual déjà vu; and the events around him seem predestined to push his life into an existential reboot … of sorts.

Worse, Thomas has no one to turn to because all of the people in his life — from his wife to his coworkers to the people he meets by random occurrence as he spirals downward on his self-destructive deconstruction of his existence — may not be any more real than him. In fact, they seem to have no memories of their lives before meeting him, and some begin to fear that they will cease to exist should Thomas leave their presence.

Or not. It could all be a mass conspiracy. It could all be a hallucination. It could all be Thomas’s mental breakdown making him think that he’s been contacted by God … or is God … or is the creation of a flawed God …

The ideas go on and on in Cox’s novel, with many meta-textual asides to the reader. Thomas not only narrates, but carries on a one-sided conversation with us (the unseen audience) as he tries to figure out what is happening to him. It’s a clever twist, yet can sometimes be grating when it’s overdone. Cox doesn’t overdo it (much).

Much of THOMAS WORLD owes to the works of the late great science fiction author Philip K. Dick, who explored the nature of reality in many of his stories — especially his later stuff after he underwent an experience not that different than what Thomas goes through. Dick even appears as a character in the story, and there are many, many references to his work throughout.

The idea that what we perceive as reality may or may not exist, or whether we are fictional characters in the mind of a creator just as flawed as the rest of us, is as old as time. I’m sure many of you probably thought of THE MATRIX, or possibly even the Will Ferrell movie STRANGER THAN FICTION (or am I the only person who saw that movie?).

Personally, I thought Grant Morrison explored the theme quite well during his run on the comic-book series ANIMAL MAN (and later THE INVISIBLES, which THE MATRIX owes much to as well). But Cox pulls it off with an ease that feels natural, and a few twists that don’t feel like he’s cheating.

And although I’ve read many of Dick’s novels, THOMAS WORLD has stoked my interest in seeking out more … and more by Cox as well. —Slade Grayson

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99 DAYS is another impressive title in Vertigo Crime’s line of graphic novels that combine intriguing, contemporary and often violent crime stories with strong, believable characters and action. The overriding theme here is how the past is inescapable and inevitably shapes the future. If it comes off a bit overstated, it’s not due to any lack of sincerity.
 
Antoine Davis, a detective with the LAPD, is called to the scene of a brutal murder of a young woman in South Central Los Angeles. The victim was clearly hacked to death, but Antoine immediately recognizes the wounds and is certain the killer used a machete.

It’s a reminder of Antoine’s childhood that he’s fought most of his adult life to forget. Growing up in Rwanda, Antoine witnessed the horrifying genocide in the spring of 1994, and was taught by his dictatorial elders to attack and torture with a machete while still a young boy. Later, he was among the fortunate ones who immigrated to America and was adopted by parents who loved him and gave his life a second chance. But his past still haunts his dreams at night.
 
Antoine and his partner, a sultry but no-nonsense Latina named Valeria Torres, launch their investigation. Before long, however, similar murders occur; stirring up dormant rivalries between the two notorious L.A. gangs, the Bloods and the Crips. Drive-by shootings are on the rise, and the city is about to erupt into chaotic violence unless Antoine and Valeria find the “Machete Murderer.” In the meantime, Antoine feels his past catching up with him and overriding his training and his sense of justice.
 
Writer Matteo Casali immediately immerses us into Antoine’s personal struggle right from the opening page. A series of flashbacks interspersed throughout the narrative shockingly and effectively reveal the trauma Antoine lived through while watching neighbors kill each other, until he is called upon to partake in the killings himself as a sort of right-of-passage initiation into adulthood.
 
Unfortunately, Casali relies too much upon the devise of a ranting radio talk-show host to convey the events and growing sense of unrest in the contemporary sections. It works fine at first, but soon becomes a bit redundant and threatens to tell us more than we see.
 
All the more regrettable since Kristian Donaldson’s sharp-focus artwork works so well with the narrative’s ambience. His opening and segue frames of the inner city are particularly stunning, and he convincingly portrays the immediacy of each scene by cutting efficiently between mostly medium and close-up frames.
 
Yet such mishaps are few and quickly forgiven. To his notable credit, Casali keeps the obvious attraction between Antoine and Valeria at nothing deeper than a tease level. The same goes for his depiction of several secondary players who might have easily been dismissed as broad-stroke caricatures.
 
While its reach slightly exceeds its grasp, 99 DAYS is nonetheless highly recommended along with most of this series of graphic crime novels that, like the finer examples of traditional crime fiction, are easily worthy of repeated readings. —Alan Cranis

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In LEHRTER STATION, David Downing’s fifth novel featuring British journalist John Russell, he pens for us an awful and awesome picture of post-World War II Berlin in the year 1945.

Russell, who sold his soul to the Soviets so he could escape with his family, now must pay the price and is recruited by Soviet intelligence to return to Berlin in order to spy on certain “comrades” who may or may not appreciate the strict party line. Feeling trapped by the Soviet spymasters, Russell decides to play a dangerous game in cooperation with his Soviet control. Both of them fear the Soviet dictatorship, and so they also decide to work with the Americans in an effort to eventually escape the grasping tentacles of intelligence work.

This espionage thriller really doesn’t have much of an overarching plot. Instead, it focuses on the ravages, both physical and emotional, of post-war Berlin. It’s a world where Victims of Fascism, i.e. Jews, now command a ration card that gives them more food than regular citizens. It’s a world where lives and virtue are cheap, easily exchanged for a pack of cigarettes. It’s a world where civilization is trying to restore itself but keeps running into insidious black marketeers.

In this world, Russell and his companion, Effi Koenen, move with a daring and decisiveness few of us could muster. Thrilling set pieces act as counterpoint to the tales of dogged legwork as both scour the city for lost relatives and friends. In every direction, there seems to be an obstacle. Sometimes the Americans help, other times they act just as bad as the Germans and Soviets. It’s a moral quagmire, and Russell doesn’t come out particularly clean.

LEHRTER STATION takes a little time to explore some of these moral ambiguities, but the real joy is in the book’s thriller aspects, threats on the lives of both Koenen and Russell, intense action scenes, and the constant dread of having one’s cover blown. If you’re a fan of spies and thrillers, this is for you. The unique setting of just after the war in Berlin is an intriguing plus. —Mark Rose

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Think your job is hell? Be thankful you’re not Joe Ledger. As chief agent of the CIA’s super-secret Department of Military Science — and the star of three previous Jonathan Maberry novels — he earns his keep saving the U.S. from some of the most ominous villains imaginable, and usually encountering some really nasty monsters along the way. Be thankful also that Maberry continues to chronicle Ledger’s wild exploits, including this latest, ASSASSIN’S CODE.

Immediately after he and his Echo Team rescue a group of American teenagers from an Iranian prison, Ledger is mysteriously summoned to a local coffee shop where he is approached by his dreaded Iranian Intelligence Agency counterpart.

This time, the meeting is not about a new threat from the Iranians. Instead, the spy presents Ledger with information about as many as six nuclear bombs planted mostly near Mideast oil fields and one possibly somewhere in the U.S. The Iranian is certain that no known Middle Eastern terrorist group is responsible for the bombs, and asks for Ledger’s help in finding and disarming them.

The only clues to who might be responsible for these weapons of mass destruction, rescued from a murdered Iranian field agent, includes reference to a cryptic, ancient text known as the BOOK OF SHADOWS.
 
Once he confirms the threat of the missing nukes with his boss, Ledger sets out to locate the weapons and the individuals behind the deadly threat. He soon discovers that a group of highly dangerous, genetically altered creatures, whose existence includes centuries of myth of lore, are involved for some mysterious reason.

Yet this is only one element of the myriad of complexities surrounding the bombs and their intended purpose. While his associates at home work furiously to uncover the mystery behind the threat, Ledger — aided by a shadowy female assassin known as Violin — continues his search for the location of the bombs before their catastrophic detonation.
 
As in the previous Ledger novels, Maberry uses actual conflicts of the contemporary world as the basis of his story, and then spices things up with liberal doses of horror. This unusual mash-up works thanks mostly to the science-based evidence Maberry enlists to justify his monsters, making it all seem undeniably credible.
 
The author also keeps the action moving and the pace sharp with his usual cross-cutting succession of chapters, alternating between Ledger’s first-person observations and events of his colleges at the DMS headquarters and the others involved in the race against time.

This latest novel, however, also includes several “Interlude” chapters whose purpose is to establish the strange and ironic historical roots of the conflict that date back hundreds of years. It’s all weirdly fascinating at first, but as the momentum and suspense builds with Ledger and his crew these Interludes start to feel more like interruptions. Their value is important to Maberry’s intended purpose, so readers should utilize these moments to stop, take a stretch, use the facilities, refill their beverage glass and then get back into story.
 
ASSASSIN’S CODE is another triumphant and outrageous horror novel for thriller lovers; as well as a contemporary thriller for horror fiction fans. That soft chuckling you hear inside your head while reading is Maberry as he deviously erases the countless years’ worth of boundaries separating these two genres.

You need not be familiar with the earlier Ledger novels to fully enjoy this latest one. Then again, why deny yourself so much inventive and high-octane fun? —Alan Cranis

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1. I’m not sure which comes first — acceptance or belief.
2. I would love to have met Groucho.
3. Americans are very forgiving.
4. Mel Brooks is the funniest person I’ve ever met.
5. A broadcaster can not be late. Well, he can.
6. Well, of course I met Bob Marley. It was no big deal.
7. This song reminds me of a good time I had with Bob Costas.
8. I’ve always hated gossip.
9. Artie Shaw was a genius.
10. My point is: I’m not Sam Snead.
11. Lincoln’s name has seven letters.
12. If you’re ever going to interview Barbra Streisand—do it live.
13. Me, I’m a guy who likes to remember the great riffs Lenny Bruce used to do about telethons.
14. In Brooklyn, if you say you’re going to be dangerous, you’d better be dangerous.
15. When I see Bono, I don’t see a musician.
16. Piers gave me a pair of Union Jack suspenders. They were clip-ons, but I appreciate the gesture.

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One of history’s most successful and artistically revered popular bands, Radiohead is infamous for the meticulous and democratic recording process that’s thus far produced seven rather amazing records (and also PABLO HONEY, its admittedly less-than-stellar 1993 debut).

To become a Radiohead song is a rigorous endeavor, as applicants’ working parts get twisted and convoluted, sped up and slowed down, reversed and fed through all manner of filters, machines and instruments, sometimes by each member of the band.

Their lyrics are toyed with, rearranged, tossed in the trash bin, sometimes to be unfolded and edited again years later at the insistence of somebody other than Thom Yorke, and, on occasion, by the second-guessing lyricist himself. As you would expect, the British quintet are not fans of deadlines.



It follows then that such a precise approach to recording popular music would yield a similarly thorough following on a massive scale. Radiohead’s are a calculating army of dedicated, fastidious fans who keep track of their favorite band as exactly as a geologist measures natural phenomena. 



Author and longtime music journalist Mac Randall is one such fan, and this unofficial account of the band’s still-unfolding history, EXIT MUSIC: THE RADIOHEAD STORY is packed with the sort of historic detail and thorough criticism you would expect from such an astute observer. 



Ever wonder precisely what equipment Jonny Greenwood used to produce that ugly note that kicks off the guitar solo in “Just”? Or which sports third guitarist Ed O’Brien played when he met his future bandmates at Abingdon School during their teenage years? Or maybe how often “Paranoid Android” changes time signatures?

Randall has your answers (and loads of other, more specific ones for the true geeks out there), all uncovered by years spent monitoring the music press and simply by acting as a careful witness. It’s obvious that the guy’s regularly listened to the group’s recorded output for decades and seen its shows whenever he could.



As a critic of music, Randall is even-headed and meticulous, and rarely given to extreme hyperbole. Where lesser critics cut straight to the feelings evoked by the band’s music, he first catalogues and measures each song’s many nuances and working parts, calculating how and with what instruments they were composed, how they interact with each other, and what effects — sonic, intellectual, and/or emotional — they eventually produce.

He, of course, harbors his little own biases and preferences, but like a good critic, he discloses them: his unabashed love for “Just,” one of the most guitar-heavy tracks on the act’s guitar-heaviest album, THE BENDS, for instance. Here’s a little taste of Randall’s exacting style, which — fair warning — skews toward detail:


“… ‘Like Spinning Plates,’ which literally emerged backwards from another song. That song, ‘I Will,’ was recorded during the KID A/AMNESIAC sessions and then abandoned (but not forever; the song would be re-recorded for Radiohead’s next album) until Nigel Godrich suggested that the band listen to how it sounded with the tape in reverse. The result — an ominously throbbing keyboard soundscape — inspired Thom to write new words to the backwards melody. From there, the going got more complicated.”



While each of the band’s eight albums gets the extensive critical treatment (this newly updated edition includes chapters on their 2007 and 2011 releases, IN RAINBOWS and THE KING OF LIMBS, respectively), Randall’s great contribution to history comes early on in the book and steadily tapers off as the group became less and less directly available to the music press over the course of their careers (he’s only actually interviewed members of Radiohead on four separate occasions).

His work depicts the stark division between Oxford’s crew of creative townie misfits and its privileged college student elite that would inform much of Radiohead’s first few albums. Randall’s many conversations with the band’s Abingdon classmates also explain its appreciation for Morrissey, particularly his great skill at writing scathing indictments of hypocritical British boarding schools. For those looking for insight to the early origins of the band, EXIT MUSIC has what you need. 



Unfortunately, Randall’s research trails off from old classmates to fellow explorers of the blogosphere as the story progresses, eventually falling into a formula that grows a bit tiresome (and, honestly, old news to anybody who’s even casual attention to the band on the Internet over the last few years) by the time his audience reaches HAIL TO THE THIEF:



1. Radiohead records an album.

2. Describe and criticize said album.

3. Radiohead toured behind album.

4. Discuss how the album affected the music industry.

5. Repeat.



It’s definitely a book that starts off great, but loses steam along the way, but for reasons the author can’t necessarily control. Those being that Radiohead’s reclusiveness from the traditional magazine rock press increased exponentially from its very stressful, aggressive post-one-hit-wonder-touring-behind-THE-BENDS days to its most recent record, and that, as the act emotionally and creatively stabilized over this course of time, there was simply less juicy conflict to write about. 


Nonetheless, EXIT MUSIC makes obvious that Randall’s connection to Radiohead, Radiohead’s music and even Radiohead’s members runs much deeper than mere observation and analysis: He’s emotionally invested in this band, perhaps even to the very core of his being.

His sympathy emerges in particularly depressing passages detailing Yorke’s college years and the mood of the earlier, uncertain time the band was trying to “make it,” as well as the deep personal conflicts and stories told in Yorke’s song lyrics. He’s even so good as to analyze the brothers Greenwood, O’Brien’s and drummer Philip Selway’s apprehensions, motivations and influences just by the music they record. 



As an extended work of criticism, EXIT MUSIC ought to be required reading, but unlike other rock bios like the ‘80s punk manifesto OUR BAND COULD BE YOUR LIFE or DOWN THE HIGHWAY: THE LIFE OF BOB DYLAN, its value as a historical document wanes the further along you go.  —Matt Carney

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Dialing it a bit back from his last book, MCGRAVE, Lee Goldberg starts a new series in KING CITY, also police-themed, but very much a modern-day Western. Tom Wade is an honest cop who took down the whole Major Crimes Unit, of which he was a part. This did not sit well with the department, so they give him a new assignment they think will either get him to quit or be killed.

The job in question is running a police substation in the part of town called Darwin Gardens, where — as you might figure — only the strong survive. Wade is also given the help of two rookie police officers fresh from the academy. One is a headstrong African-American woman, while the other is a clueless wonder who is just thrilled to be in the action. This is all the help Wade gets.

Goldberg sets up Darwin Gardens rather quickly, in the sense it’s a war zone under the control of one man, Fallon, the local boss who lets it be known that he is in charge. But Wade is a stubborn cop who makes it perfectly clear he can’t be pushed around. The book does a fine job of setting up all the pieces, with Wade taking to his surroundings rather quickly. He even makes examples of some of Fallon’s men the first night out.

But the main plot deals with the discovery of a dead woman in a car. When it’s discovered she was working in the wealthier part of the town, Wade makes it his job to find the killer, especially when the homicide department can’t be bothered to investigate or even show up.

Goldberg sets the tone of KING CITY rather well, giving the feeling of an old Western movie in which the local sheriff has no one to rely on but himself. This is the start of what hopefully will be a long-running series, since the author has done such a great job of placing all the pieces on the board. Now he can play with his creation any way he wants. From this looks of this, that promises to be full-on action. —Bruce Grossman

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Crissa Stone, the career criminal introduced last year in COLD SHOT TO THE HEART, is back in Wallace Stroby’s latest novel, KINGS OF MIDNIGHT. Not much has changed for her … and that is pretty much the main problem with this new work: Not much has changed.
 
Still desperate for enough money to assure her lover’s parole from a Texas prison, Crissa leads a two-man team on what should be a quick and easy heist. It all goes wrong afterward, however, when her partners argue about their take. Crissa ends up on the run and is further frustrated when she loses a big chunk of her stolen cash to a crooked money launderer.

Then an aging mobster friend of hers introduces her to Benny Roth, a former mobster straight for years after serving as a government informer and living under the Witness Protection Program. Then Benny is approached by an elderly mobster enforcer who is convinced he knows where a now-dead mob boss hid a huge amount of cash from a major robbery that made headlines years ago.
 
Benny swears he knows nothing about the hidden cash, but admits to Crissa that he actually has a good idea where it might be, and is willing to split it with her in exchange for her help. The parole deadline for Crissa’s lover is near, so she grudgingly agrees to help Benny find the money. It isn’t long before they discover that the enforcer is a few steps ahead of them, and just as determined to take that cash.
 
Not long into the first chapter, anyone who read and enjoyed COLD SHOT will feel as though they are reading that same novel again. The set-up and situations are almost identical: the same kind of opening heist suddenly gone bad; Crissa again quickly taking stock of herself; the same sad phone conversation with her lover in prison; the same clandestine arrangements with the lawyer trying to expedite the parole; the same reluctance to taking on a new job with total strangers even though it promises a huge take. All the same as before.
 
It isn’t until Benny — introduced to us in a long, seemingly unrelated chapter — becomes partners with her that the story deviates from the earlier work. While the slim trust Crissa and Benny hold for each other is expected, it sadly becomes predicable even in the midst of an otherwise well-constructed and fast-paced series of events that lead them to where the cash might be hidden.
 
Make no mistake: It’s great to have an immediately appealing character like Crissa back. Her skills are more than apparent, and her personal code is reminiscent of Richard Stark’s Parker, another professional thief. Plus, the simple fact that she’s one of the few female crime pros makes her somewhat unique.
 
Unfortunately, Stroby chose to tell her entire backstory all over again, rather than quickly mention the essential motivating points. The result diminishes the strengths of the entire second half of this new novel.
 
Whenever a character makes a strong second appearance, readers are usually recommended to the introductory story. In this case, however, it’s a toss-up whether they should choose either the previous novel or this one. Either way, you can skip the other with no loss whatsoever.
 
For an author as otherwise resourceful and enjoyable as Stroby, that’s an even sadder place to be. —Alan Cranis

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Hey, I’ve never heard of GENTRY magazine, either, but between 1951 and 1957, it apparently published 22 issues. This paperback collects dozens of articles from the forgotten periodical, chosen by Hal Rubenstein, who created the short-lived but much-loved, square-shaped magazine EGG in the late ’80s. If you at all remember that one, it will make perfect sense why he undertook this project.

THE GENTRY MAN works because it reprints the actual articles as they appeared, all monochrome color scheme, god-awful fonts and antiquated layout intact. Rubenstein has separated them thematically, from style and sports to food and culture.

Marvel over the pictorial portfolio of 1955 automobiles. Learn how to be a downhill ski racer. Memorize the tips to checkmate in seven moves. Whip up a batch of cheese fondue or eggplant caviar. Carve a turkey correctly. Choose the proper straw hat to look your best. Fuck, even build your own golf course!

It’ll make MAD MEN of us all yet. Cheers! And here’s hoping that someday, EGG will get a similar book of its own; my complete set got ditched in a house move 15 years ago. —Rod Lott

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“It’s good to be back.” That chilling sentence is sets RED, WHITE, AND BLOOD in motion. In the latest from Christopher Farnsworth, Nathaniel Cade is back, showing what a real vampire is like. Here’s a hint: They don’t sparkle or mope around.

This third book builds upon the foundation of the two previous novels. It’s been three years since the events of BLOOD OATH. The president is on the campaign trail and an enemy Cade thought he got rid of years ago has reappeared, much to his chagrin. Those tales of the boogeyman are true, but we only know a fantasy compared to the truth, which here is a savage killer who takes over a person to feed his blood lust. He has his sights on revenge, striking the one thing closet to Cade: the President of the United States.

For those who have read the previous books, Farnsworth one-ups himself through the whole of this one. The main story focuses on Cade and Zach, his handler, going on the campaign trail to protect the president, even to the point of showing fellow Secret Service agents exactly who Cade is. Why is this being done after all these years of being a secret? As Cade explains, he does not expect them to survive this ordeal.

And trust me: It’s an ordeal like no other they have faced. There is plenty of blood to go around. The idea of the boogeyman is great idea to infuse into this series, especially the explanation of how he came to be reaching far back to the days of Aleister Crowley. Every few chapters or so, we are treated to the early days of Cade working in the White House, even back under the administration of President Grant, who really takes matters into his own hands.

This series has gotten me hooked so bad, I want the next one right away. And you’ll be right with me once you finish this latest entry. Once again, those chapter intros give us a bit more history, but more often, they center on the presidential race, with Farnsworth doing his best DAILY SHOW, COLBERT REPORT and O’REILLY FACTOR impressions. The Colbert one in particular will have every reader laughing hard. There are also plenty of literary shout-outs throughout.

Farnsworth seems to relish in writing these books. He might have typed himself into a corner with some aspects — I can’t wait to see how he’ll pull it off in the next entry. —Bruce Grossman

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Åke Edwardson seems to have found himself yet another translator for his recently released SAIL OF STONE. This time, it’s Rachel Wilson-Broyles doing the work, and while I don’t think it’s as smooth as Per Carlsson’s previous effort, the plot seems to be a bit tighter.

While Edwardson is known for taking off on tangents and artificially increasing the length of his books, SAIL OF STONE is his most interesting book to date and shows that he is indeed one of that renowned group of Scandinavian mystery writers who now seem to clog our bookshelves.

Two main cases work their way through SAIL OF STONE, and thankfully, they do not intertwine, as that’s become cliché. Chief Inspector Erik Winter encounters an old flame, who has received a mysterious letter indicating that her grandfather may not have died during the war, as everyone believed.

Her father goes off to Scotland to investigate the matter, and hasn’t been heard from since. At first, Winter is reluctant to believe anything bad has happened, but as the investigation progresses, he’s convinced that there’s a serious mystery to solve.

On another note, African-Swedish detective Aneta Djanali is looped into a potential domestic violence case where the woman refuses to report the incident or even to talk to the police. With her newfound love, Fredrik Halders, they look into the woman and her reticent and downright annoying family.

The police work, dialogue, interaction between strongly-drawn characters, and plotting all work together in Edwardson’s book to provide a satisfying read. His chapters from the POV of the criminal are a bit irritating, and he is prone to wander off in the middle of a paragraph to aimlessly discuss scenery or historic details that don’t seem to matter to the story at hand.

He is also fond of including extensive music references, à la Peter Robinson, and these will either grate upon you or connect you to the characters.

SAIL OF STONE is a fine addition to Åke Edwardson’s canon, and a must for readers of Swedish detective fiction. —Mark Rose

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Editing a “best of” short-story anthology is challenging enough, but according to Jonathan Strahan’s introduction to Night Shade Books’ THE BEST SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY OF THE YEAR, VOLUME SIX, the past year was particularly daunting.

On one hand, there’s the ever-shrinking roster of magazines devoted to publishing short fiction, along with the depressing closure of both independent and franchise book sellers across the country. On the other hand, there’s the proliferation of original anthologies, published both on paper and online, to keep track of.

Fortunately the short-story format, especially in science fiction and fantasy, refuses to die, and determined individuals like Strahan continue to bring the finer published efforts to our attention.
 
Several of the more notable stories in this paperback volume, all originally published in 2011, play with traditional forms and themes of the genres. Neil Gaiman’s “The Case of Death and Honey” imagines Sherlock Holmes in the early 1900s — a period when, according to traditional Holmes lore, the great detective retired to Sussex to collect bees. Yet Gaiman sees Holmes busy solving what may be the most extraordinary mystery of his career.

In “The Invasion of Venus,” Stephen Baxter turns the theme of alien invasion on its ear in a thought-provoking story where a duo of scientists ponder the aftermath of an extraterrestrial invasion not of Earth, but Venus. Then renowned fantasist Peter S. Beagle portrays the dangers of becoming familiar with a concrete troll statue in “Underbridge.”
 
There are also stories that tackle new themes with varying success. Bruce Sterling’s “The Onset of a Paranormal Romance” tries to apply perpetual forms of romantic love to the attendees of a futurist convention, but leaves things somewhat unresolved. Ian McDonald’s “Digging” is more effective in its presentation of the life and work of miners on Mars as they come to realize the reality of their destiny.
 
At nearly 600 pages, with a total of 31 entries — including works by Jeffrey Ford, Catherynne M. Valente, Cory Doctorow and several others — this is an unusually generous collection. Each story is headed by a brief bio of the author, and the original publications are reported at the very end.
 
While some work better than others, as is always the case in such anthologies, there is more than enough here to make it a worthy addition to any sci-fi and fantasy reader’s bookshelf.
 
There was a time, not too many years ago, when there were almost as many year-end anthologies as there were publishing outlets. That too has changed, but for the moment we can be grateful to Strahan and his continuing efforts to find, gather together, and present the more distinguished sci-fi and fantasy stories to us devoted readers. —Alan Cranis

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Peter Bart’s INFAMOUS PLAYERS: A TALE OF MOVIES, THE MOB (AND SEX) is now available in paperback, and we’ll have a review very soon. Until then, the former Paramount Pictures exec and VARIETY editor-in-chief offers this essay — not part of the nonfiction book — about how the movies of today differ from the ones he shepherded.

There’s a significant revival of interest in the movies of the ’60s and ’70s. Films ranging from THE GODFATHER to EASY RIDER, from NASHVILLE to MIDNIGHT COWBOY have become iconic in our pop culture.

Those of us who were lucky enough to work in the film industry of that period are often asked, “Could those films be made in today’s Hollywood?” My answer is a resounding “no” and the reasons are simple.

The key aim guiding studio decision-making in that period was to surprise even shock the audience. Today’s film executives are eager to re-capture the familiar. The most important resource to tap into is “awareness,” not surprise. Studio tentpoles are predicated on giving filmgoers something they’ve seen before and hopefully will want to experience again.

The upshot, of course, is the abundance of sequels, prequels and remakes. The success of 21 JUMP STREET has underscored an appetite to re-cycle the ’80s by remaking films like ROBOCOP, DIRTY DANCING and a new DIE HARD. Geriatric action stars like Bruce Willis, Sylvester Stallone and even Arnold Schwarzenegger are in demand again. Even Billy Crystal is coming back as a leading man.

Hence, while there is a desire to revisit the past, the intent is not to re-discover films that changed the landscape of pop culture. Instead, there’s a search for recycled superheroes.

The Tribeca Film Festival caused some surprise by booking THE AVENGERS as the centerpiece for its closing extravaganza, after a two-week menu of art pictures and documentaries. This tentpole offers audiences the chance not to revisit just one superhero of the past but a veritable who’s who of heroic retreads. They include Iron Man, Thor, Hawkeye, Black Widow, Captain America and even the Incredible Hulk.

Hence fest-goers, too, can enjoy a return to the familiar — the Avengers comic book dates back to 1963.

The decision to showcase THE AVENGERS is intriguing in that festivals are customarily irrelevant to the superhero genre of motion pictures, as are the major film critics. Tentpoles need tweets and viral buzz, not the approval of cineastes.

Most of all, tentpoles, with their enormous costs, need instant awareness. The auras of books like the HARRY POTTER series or HUNGER GAMES can create a foundation for that awareness. So can some comic books and video games.

By and large, the game-changing films of the ’60s and 70s emanated from original film ideas or obscure books. Even THE GODFATHER was an unpublished and incomplete manuscript when it was acquired by Paramount. The motivation behind such films as BONNIE & CLYDE was to provide culture shock, not to capitalize on an existing franchise. Films of that era opened in a very few theaters and ultimately found an audience.

Culture shock actually was a rewarding experience. Hopefully audiences may again get to experience it in films some day. —Peter Bart

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As the baseball season gets into full swing, and as summer slowly creeps up on us, this is the time to find a rollicking good sports book, sit on the deck in the full sun, listen to the game on the radio, and discover both the peace and excitement a fan can have in the world of sports.

Tim Wendel attempts to do something very ambitious in his SUMMER OF ’68, as he blends the storylines of the 1968 Major League Baseball regular season and thrilling seven-game World Series matchup between the Detroit Tigers and the St. Louis Cardinals, along with the chaotic and revolutionary political events of that summer.

1968 was the year Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, a year when the infamous Democratic Convention in Chicago ended up with police willfully bludgeoning peaceful civilians, a year when anti-Vietnam War rhetoric was at its height, a year when cities were literally burning from race riots, a year when the word “revolution” was in the air, and when the only thing one could predict about the future was that it was totally unpredictable.

And probably wrong. But those kind of momentous milestones in our country’s history really isn’t very analogous to what occurred in baseball in 1968.

Sure, it was the Year of the Pitcher, and Bob Gibson ended his season with a truly astounding 1.12 ERA. And the World Series was an amazing seven-game duel that featured the intimidating fireballer Gibson going up against 30-game (30 games!) winner Denny McLain.

Names like Lou Brock, Al Kaline, Mickey Lolich, Willie Horton, Orlando Cepeda, Roger Maris, Tim McCarver and Curt Flood all play huge roles in this story. But it’s simply not comparable to the overwhelming political and historical moments that took place during the same time. The two don’t really seem to mesh as well as Wendel would hope.

With that said, the book is an exciting look at the year in MLB, concentrating primarily on the Tigers and Cardinals. It’s well-told, although the author’s disdain for any kind of linear structure (something he also exhibited in the fastball history HIGH HEAT) has one scrambling back and forth trying to figure out where in the season one is located.

In the end, I think it would have been wiser if he had foregone the rather pompous conflation of the historical events of 1968 with the year in baseball, and instead concentrated on comparing the ’68 MLB season with the NFL/AFL of the same time frame. He has many interesting points to make regarding the rise of popularity of football at this juncture.

Still, there is real value here. It’s instructive to learn what players of the time thought about historical and newsworthy events, and how some even had first-hand participation. Willie Horton (not the infamous felon, but the revered Tigers outfielder) once tried to stop a riot and calm down the looters and burners while in his field uniform! Others watched the police brutality at the Chicago convention from their hotel room balconies.

1968 changed this country. It may have changed MLB as well, since the bureaucracy decided that too little hitting wasn’t going to fill stadium seats, and so the mound became lowered, eventually the designated hitter rule went into play in the American League, and so on.

Maybe the horrific news events of those 12 months didn’t really have any analogy in what was a remarkable baseball year. But the baseball story is of its time, still of great interest, featuring some of the greatest players the game has ever known. If you’re a baseball fan who remembers the glory days of Bob Gibson’s frightening stare, the showbiz glitz of Denny McLain, the time when a manager could actually be named Mayo Smith, then you should enjoy SUMMER OF ’68. —Mark Rose

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Don’t dare read a single word of THE CABIN IN THE WOODS: THE OFFICIAL VISUAL COMPANION until after you’ve seen the movie. Not that the horror film bears a mammoth twist as the hype suggests, but it’ll be a much more enjoyable experience to go in cold for a change.

Then read the book, a full-color paperback housing the entire screenplay, but whose real appeal is the lengthy interview beforehand with director Drew Goddard and co-writer Joss Whedon. It tells all about the project’s genesis, references and overall vibe and spirit. That’s captured about, oh, 70 percent successfully in the book’s design, although filled with literally hundreds of stills, sketches and behind-the-scenes shots.

Titan Books simultaneously has released Tim Lebbon’s novelization of the film in the standard mass-market format, but this is the truer companion piece. —Rod Lott

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You may have noticed a slight downturn of late in number of reviews a week. We’re swamped! We need another reviewer to help lighten the load!

If you …
• love horror, sci-fi and fantasy;
• can string coherent thoughts together in a readable fashion; and
• are willing to work for no compensation beyond free books and any ensuing glory

… then email editor at bookgasm dot com, preferably with a sample review (or several) pasted into the body; no attachments. Due to the flood we have received on past searches, we will not be able to respond to every email. Thanks!

Olen Steinhauer’s AN AMERICAN SPY focuses mainly on Milo Weaver, the beleaguered CIA agent featured in two previous novels (THE TOURIST and THE NEAREST EXIT). It follows the narrative thread of those earlier stories, but manages to thrust Weaver into confrontations he never anticipated in his entire career of intelligence gathering and espionage.

Weaver is a member of the CIA’s “Department of Tourism,” a secret section of highly trained assassins who clandestinely perform the blackest of the agency’s black ops. But thanks to a mission previously launched by Xin Zhu, a member of the Socialist Chinese spy organization, 33 American agents have been killed — wiping out almost the entire team of Tourists.

Weaver and his former CIA boss, Alan Drummond, are now unemployed. Weaver sees it as his long-sought opportunity to begin a new life and devote more time to his wife and young daughter. Drummond, however, can’t seem to give up his former profession and seems to be planning a far-fetched revenge mission against the Chinese. He hints about his plans, but Weaver makes it clear he wants no part of it.
 
Shortly thereafter, Drummond travels to London, and then suddenly goes missing. What’s worse, he traveled under one of Weaver’s work aliases. Now, like it or not, Weaver is dragged into Drummond’s scheme as he retraces his former boss’ steps and attempts to find him. Xin Zhu, however, is constantly watching Weaver’s movements and plans to use him, both consciously and not, to find, unveil and foil Drummond’s plans.
 
As was apparent in the earlier novels, Steinhauer writes solidly in the John le Carré realist tradition of spy novelists, where the agents are nothing more than flawed human beings (as opposed to the super-spy tradition of Ian Fleming’s James Bond). So we find Weaver chewing nicotine gum to break his smoking habit, forgetting to add salt to his cooking attempts, and suffering nightmares where his daughter is set upon by dangers he can’t resolve. He knows full well that any sort of vengeance for the death of fellow agents is meaningless, and sets out to find Drummond more out of personal responsibility than anything professional.
 
Unfortunately, Steinhauer makes this a difficult novel to warm up to. Almost the entire first 100 pages are devoted to Xin Zuh, where we discover that his mission to destroy the Department of Tourism was unsanctioned by the Chinese intelligence organization. The slower, statelier manner of the Chinese investigation and interrogation, along with the somewhat difficult Chinese names, makes for slow going at first, almost making you wonder where the American spy of the title is.
 
Things pick up when the focus shifts to Weaver and Drummond. But before long, the complications of Weaver’s mixed family background create a new set of challenges to follow while keeping tract of Drummond’s scheme.
 
Steinhauer is clearly more interested in his puzzles and only minimally in his people. We get a strong sense of what drives Weaver, but only a smattering of insight into Drummond or the other players. This is particularly true of the author’s women, who are either thinly drawn or simply there to decorate things, such as Leticia Jones, a surviving Tourist who comes across as more of a sexpot than a spy.
 
Yet the puzzles are not without their problems, either. The shifting loyalties of Weaver and everyone he deals with are fascinating at first, then become muddled when Steinhauer abruptly flashes back to past events and encounters, only to then replay them again in the present. It all becomes almost too complicated for its own good and thus deadens the intended outcome.
 
Perhaps he felt the need to cover all the unanswered questions planted by the first two Weaver novels, as well as this recent one. Whatever the motivation, AN AMERICAN SPY, for all its admirable inventiveness and attempts at verisimilitude, leaves us with more confusion than resolution. —Alan Cranis

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Imagine you awoke with no memory of your life or where you even are — just that there are people there telling you that you’re needed for a specific task. And on top of all that, you are paralyzed with no idea how that happened.

This is the start to the latest from Brian Evenson. As you can tell, the title of IMMOBILITY is central to the story. The main character is told his name is Josef Horkai and has to go on a mission to save these people. Although confused, he is told repeatedly that he is their savior, that he has been in storage for close to 30 years, and that the world he knew no longer exists.

What is outside is a vast, post-apocalyptic wasteland that only he can survive, for reasons he is not told. The reader truly feels as out of the loop as Horkai throughout the whole novel, since we are never given an idea of why the world is the way it is now, or even why certain people can live in the outside world while others can’t.

Horkai is told his mission is to recover a metal cylinder of great importance, and that its contents will help these people. Even though he’s paralyzed, he will be given help by two men who don’t seem normal but will be used as mules, so to speak, and dressed in hazmat suits that Horkai does not need.

Evenson takes us through a nightmarish future where Horkai constantly questions his companions to no avail. The author one-ups his 2009 novel, LAST DAYS, which dealt with a world of bizarre cults. IMMOBILITY plays with the main character’s perception through the whole, to the point readers will truly be surprised by the seriously dark ending to come. You’ll have to find out for yourself. —Bruce Grossman

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Jean “Moebius” Giraud is dead. Perhaps best known in the U.S. for his SILVER SURFER: PARABLE, his importance and influence over the European comics scene is immeasurable.

Case in hand is this remarkable piece of undiluted, effervescent and life-affirming genius he concocted in collaboration with filmmaker/shaman/madman Alejandro Jodorowski: MADWOMAN OF THE SACRED HEART.

Being the story of a middle-aged professor of philosophy whose life and spirit are broken by a succession of unfortunate events, only to be rebuilt by his divinely guided (or possibly insane) student. To try and summarize the layered storyline is a preposterous idea, but it does involve the rebirth of John the Baptist, a Colombian drug czar, a horny externalization of our hero’s superego, and a running gag about explosive diarrhea.

While the book at times plays like a precursor to David Mazzucchelli’s ASTERIOS POLYP, this is a completely different type of a beast, equally impressive and layered but running on a totally different track. Like
Luis Buñuel, Jodorowsky has the ability to harness dreams and illusions into a non-religious spirituality. He tackles philosophical ideas through off-the-wall humor, lack of sentimentality while taking a perverse joy in providing Zen-master jolts of mystifying shock to the reader’s frontal lobes.

This new trade paperback volume from Humanoids is stunningly beautiful, intelligently translated and retains the original (non-computerized) coloring. The paper is thick and slightly textured, the kind that doesn’t get smudgy with fingerprints or reflect badly in sunlight.

If there is a negative to this release, I wish it had some information about the history of the publication, given that it clearly spans some years. Moebius’ style changes through the three parts of the long story, and as a result, ends up being something of a showcase of his penmanship throughout the years.

I wholeheartedly recommend MADWOMAN OF THE SACRED HEART for the
adventurous adult reader. If you’re interested in either classic or new European comics, there has rarely been a better time for either in the American marketplace than today. We’re seeing a steady stream of spectacular work by masters old and new from a wide variety of publishers.

By supporting these publishers, you can make sure more of these gems get released from the vast hidden vaults hiding behind language-barriers. Long live Moebius. —JT Lindroos

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Writers sometimes try quirky experiments to relieve creative pressure. “I’ll write this for fun,” we tell ourselves, “and put it online for whoever wishes to read it.” Like an exercise of sorts.

Or we do it to give ourselves creative pressure to force ourselves to write (because there are so many damnable temptations that take us away from the keyboard). We give ourselves deadlines, sometimes impossible ones, in order to spark our creative muse. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it works so well, some of us get book deals.

Madeleine Roux’s ALLISON HEWITT IS TRAPPED started as a blog about a woman trapped in a bookstore café, surrounded by zombies. The title character details her experiences in an online diary, which Roux used to generate readership interest and thereby got herself a publishing contract.  

The book was … okay. I gave it a middle-of-the-road review: Some parts of the novel were clever and interesting, and some parts had a “seen it all before” feel. Nevertheless, Roux’s back with a sequel, SADIE WALKER IS STRANDED.

Sadie lives in Seattle with her orphaned nephew, Shane, and a sleaze of a boyfriend. Why is he a sleaze? Because he sells Shane to some black-market no-goodniks, which causes Sadie to take vengeance on him. (I’m not giving any important plot twists away here, by the way. This happens in the first few pages.) The funny thing is, Sadie deals with this with as much emotion as if she were taking out the trash.
 
Shortly thereafter, there’s a huge calamity as the barrier into Seattle is breached by the zombie hordes. Sadie escapes the city on the last remaining boat, only to find that there really is no safe haven left.

Much like ALLISON HEWITT, SADIE WALKER is more about group dynamics and mob mentality than the horror aspect of the setting. The author covered all of this … I was going to say excellently in her first book, but that’s not quite right. She covered it adequately in her first book. So what’s the new ground covered here? There isn’t any.

Sadie, unlike Allison, never gels with the reader and never makes an emotional connection. As for the story… ah, who cares? If you loved the first book, then by all means, pick this one up. You’ll get more of the same, just with a lead character that isn’t as likable. If not, then search elsewhere for your zombie fix. There are better offerings out there. —Slade Grayson

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Dublin-born, now London-residing author Jane Casey’s second novel, the new-to-paperback THE BURNING, introduces a proposed series character in Detective Inspector Maeve Kerrigan of the London Metro Police. If this debut is any indication, we are in for plenty of intriguing psychological suspense presented in the format of police procedurals.
 
The Burning Man, a serial killer of women — so-named because of his method of burning the bodies of his victims and leaving them in abandoned areas outside of town — is haunting London. Kerrigan is part of Operation Mandrake, the police team assigned to investigate and capture him.

She sees the assignment as a way to advance her career in the face of the sexism and prejudice to her Irish origins that have dogged her from day one, so she devotes every waking moment to the investigation, even at the expense of her already-tenuous personal life.
 
Another charred woman’s body is discovered. Upon closer examination, several deviations from the Burning Man’s usual method are noted. A copycat killer is suspected. But before drawing this conclusion, Kerrigan’s supervisor assigns her to individually and privately probe the killing of this latest victim, revealed as Rebecca Haworth.

As Kerrigan interviews Haworth’s friends and family, she pieces together the life of this one-time successful executive with all her private demons. Each revelation brings Kerrigan closer to determining if Haworth is the latest victim of the Burning Man or just someone whose murder is made to look like the work of the serial killer.
 
The story is told mostly through Kerrigan’s first-person narration, with frequent observations told by Louise, Rebecca’s best friend. This divided narration is effective at first, but quickly becomes annoying with its insistence, as if Casey does not yet completely trust her main protagonist to carry the entire story. Yet there is no denying that the Kerrigan chapters are by far the richer and better written.
 
The author deserves praise for not taking the expected procedural path, instead devoting Kerrigan’s efforts to a seemingly related murder victim. The promise of this departure, unfortunately, is never fully carried out, as the plot and its resolution become sadly predictable. Adding insult to injury, Casey resorts to the overused technique of a series of press clippings to tie up all the various loose ends at the novel’s conclusion.
 
Still, the portions told by Kerrigan show Casey’s impressive skills at character insight and motivation. With a bit more attention to plot detail, and a lot more faith in the strengths of her main character, she has all the makings of a major contemporary crime-fiction talent. —Alan Cranis

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Christmas is right around the corner — if you celebrate Christmas in July, that is. But when it comes to Christmas movies, I’m not one to wait for sub-zero temperatures to fire them up in my DVD player, especially when the definition is as wide as the array of films presented in HAVE YOURSELF A MOVIE LITTLE CHRISTMAS.

With brief reviews peppered with mild wit, Alonso Duralde’s paperback guide to season’s-greetings cinema includes looks at the perennial favorites, from Frank Capra’s IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE to John Hughes’ NATIONAL LAMPOON’S CHRISTMAS VACATION. Hell, it even devotes an entire chapter to the litany of adaptations of Charles Dickens’ A CHRISTMAS CAROL.

But it’s the titles that aren’t readily associated with roasting chestnuts that make the book enjoyable. Consider the superhero sequel BATMAN RETURNS, the action spectacular DIE HARD, the teen musical GET YOURSELF A COLLEGE GIRL. They may not celebrate the birth of the Christ child, but all take place during the gift-giving season.

And churchgoers may hate to admit it, but a lively horror subgenre of satanic Santa Clauses and tinsel-laden terror exists that is anchored by the controversial slasher SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT. This chapter alone makes Duralde’s book worth the look, partly just to learn that Mickey Rooney suggested that film should be censored … yet had no problem starring in its fourth sequel.

From John Cusack attempting to get laid to Dennis Quaid attempting to solve his own murder, from Val Kilmer as a homosexual hit man to Tom Cruise at a masked orgy, MOVIE LITTLE CHRISTMAS will alter and expand your holiday-appropriate queue, largely for the better. —Rod Lott

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George Pelecanos launched a promising new series late last summer with THE CUT, but apparently felt he still had one more story to tell about Derek Strange, the black Washington, D.C.-based P.I. previously featured in RIGHT AS RAIN, HELL TO PAY, SOUL CIRCUS and a prequel, HARD REVOLUTION. Whatever the reason, we should be grateful for WHAT IT WAS, since it ranks right up there with his finest works.
 
In 1972, Strange has left the D.C. police force to set up his own private investigation business in his old neighborhood. One day, an attractive young woman employs him to find her missing ring. The case seems odd from the jump, especially since the ring is mostly cheap costume jewelry. But the woman insists it holds sentimental value, and anyway, her cash is good.

Taking the case, Strange soon finds that the ring was last in the possession of a low-life junkie recently found murdered. The police detective heading up the investigation is Strange’s former partner, Frank Vaughn. Through different methods that soon merge, Strange and Vaughn discover that the junkie was killed by Robert Lee Jones, aka Red Fury, so named for his light skin and tint of his hair. That and because his girlfriend, who runs a local whorehouse, drives a Fury.

They also learn that the junkie was just the start of a relentless series of violent robberies and killings that Red Fury has inflicted across town. The former partners agree that the only way to stop it is to put Red Fury down, by whatever means necessary.
 
All of the stylistics that so distinguished the earlier Strange novels, and helped establish Pelecanos as a major force in contemporary crime fiction, are on display here. There’s the intimate sense of place in the areas of D.C. little-known to tourists. There are numerous references to the popular music, fashion and hot cars of the period. Enhancing all of this is the stark contrast between the novel’s two main investigators. Whereas Vaughn seems a throwback to a time 50 years earlier, and does his best to suppress his quiet racism, Strange joyfully embraces his world and feels he is living in a special decade for himself and his people.
 
The narrative almost seems to lose track of itself when Pelecanos devotes a few chapters to two Italian mobsters who travel from Jersey to retrieve either the drugs or money that Red Fury stole from one of their dealers. Fortunately, we soon find that their actions dovetail nicely into the story and the author, as usual, expertly ties everything together by the final chapters.
 
Owing perhaps to the stark nature of its antagonist, this second prequel has a noticeable and far more personal intensity than HARD REVOLUTION. If anything, WHAT IT WAS owes more in spirit and tone to the three earlier series novels where readers first met Strange and that follow him in the present day.

That series’ spirit is evoked in this new book’s framing devise, where, in the opening pages, Strange and Nick Stefanos, the star of Pelecanos’ earliest novels, take time off from a case they are working together for some drinks in a local bar. A song playing on the jukebox reminds Stefanos of the summer of ’72, when the Watergate scandal broke.

“You ask some people on this side of town to recollect that year, they wouldn’t think on Nixon,” Strange notes. “They gonna tell you that seventy-two was the summer that Red went off.” This not only adds a sense of poignancy to the story that follows, but makes seasoned Pelecanos readers long to relive the many wonderful moments of the first three Strange novels.
 
Those works, as well the first prequel, are all still in print. So what are you waiting for? —Alan Cranis

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Having written a dozen contemporary Western crime novels featuring law enforcement officer Kevin Kerney, Michael McGarrity turns the clock back to tell a sweeping backstory of Kerney’s family. The first part of the trilogy, HARD COUNTRY, due out May 10. Here, the author discusses this undertaking.

BOOKGASM: What inspired you to begin you a trilogy, particularly one set from the 1870s and through World War I?

MCGARRITY: When I first put Kevin Kerney on the page as the protagonist in my crime novels, I was already imagining his family history back several generations or more. I would conjure up images of his ancestors and speculate about their lives.

It helped me define him, and as the series progressed and Kerney grew and developed, I knew I would someday have to tell his family’s story generation by generation. I never once entertained the notion of simply writing the back story of Kerney’s life prior to his introduction my debut novel, TULAROSA. That seemed too mundane.

BOOKGASM: HARD COUNTRY seems to be a mix of a historical saga and a true Western. How would you describe it?

MCGARRITY: You’re right that it’s a historical family saga and a Western in the sense of setting and era. The book covers a slice of American history filled with drama and conflict. From the post-Civil War expansion west, the Indian Wars, the growth of the cattle industry, Apache raids, the Spanish-America War, years of devastating drought and lawlessness, periods of economic boom and bust, and the horrors of World War I, readers will hopefully be caught up in the Kerney family’s struggle to survive and endure on one of the most beautiful and sun-blasted landscapes in the West.

To my way of thinking, HARD COUNTRY is first and foremost an historical novel. What genre best describes it will hopefully become completely insignificant to readers.

BOOKGASM: I’m assuming you did a lot of research.

MCGARRITY: My research was extensive both in terms of on the ground exploration and historical references and documents. I’ve posted a select bibliography on my website, www.michaelmcgarrity.com, that will give you a good idea of what went into it.

One of the richest sources of research came from the personal writings of pioneers, settlers, cattlemen and other immigrants who wrote of their adventures and experiences in a new land. Many of those books were published privately and were found in restricted Southwest research collections, on the shelves of small, rural, volunteer-run libraries, or in bookstores that specialized in rare and collectable Western literature and history. They were treasures that helped me bring the world of HARD COUNTRY to life.

BOOKGASM: Did you come across anything in particular that surprised you?

MCGARRITY: Exploring different versions of historical events sometimes raised questions about what really happened. The recollections of different historical figures didn’t always jibe. It made me more and more willing to question “official” history written by the academics.

Or occasionally, I’d find a strand in some primary source material that raised suspicions about certain aspects of motivation apparently overlooked in other reference materials. It made for some interesting hours speculating about what the truth of the matter might have been. What I came away with was the rock-solid belief that the Western code of standing by a friend no matter what almost always trumped truth.

BOOKGASM: And I’m guessing that being a former deputy sheriff and investigator yourself had to be a big help.

MCGARRITY: They do so mightily. Accuracy and authenticity are vital to good storytelling; otherwise readers get easily pulled right out of the book. I spent a quarter of a century working in the field of criminal justice in one capacity or another and I’ve often said it served as an apprenticeship for my career as a writer.

With HARD COUNTRY, the challenge was learning and integrating what law enforcement in the Southwest was like a hundred or more years ago. That meant gaining insight into the cultural mindset as to how people viewed the law and justice on the frontier. I learned very quickly that friendship meant more than the rule of law, that most folks were law abiding and civil, and the true test of a man’s character was his trustworthiness.

BOOKGASM: Why do you think Old West is so important to our American history?

MCGARRITY: Rugged individualism, self-reliance, survival, courage, and resilience played an important part in the expansion of the country. Those traits are now part of an idealized version of whom and what we are, whether true or false. It’s part of a modern mythology.

I also think that physical strength and mental toughness were absolute necessities back in the pre-industrial, agrarian world of the great Southwest. We’re a much softer society now. Perhaps we still unconsciously yearn for an identity more directly connected to the land and the rewards of hard, physical work.

BOOKGASM: With the Coen brothers remaking TRUE GRIT into a huge hit, and the FX series JUSTIFIED enjoying big ratings and awards, the Western genre appears to be experiencing a resurgence. Do you agree?

MCGARRITY: The Western contains all the stuff of legend and fable about the human drama that holds our interest. The popularity of the genre may ebb and flow but it will live on for generations to come. Right now, the Western is on the upswing, I think, because we need reassuring reminders of something heroic and larger than ourselves, especially in a time when our wars never seem to end, the influence of the rich and powerful never seems to wane, and the vast majority of our citizenry is protected from mandatory national service and sacrifice.

BOOKGASM: What’s next for the rest of the trilogy?

MCGARRITY: One thing I learned from writing HARD COUNTRY is facing the difficulty of deciding what has to be left out of the rest of the Kerney family saga. There is simply too much local, national and international history that impacts the 50-year span from 1920 to the 1970 that I can’t possibly get it all in.

There will be key events that affect the Kerneys: drought, the Great Depression, the arrival of nesters, World War II, the government seizure of the Tularosa, the search for Spanish riches on the Tularosa, and finally, Vietnam. Throughout it all, the Kerney clan will continue to face hardship, strife and family conflicts, suffer personal losses, and perhaps find love in a world rapidly changing around them.

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In 1936 Stalinist Russia, the wrong comment to the wrong person, even if told in jest, can get you sent to prison. It’s a dangerous place. The country is in transition, and no one is sure of their newfound place. Those in power can wake up to find themselves suddenly accused of crimes against the party.

Capt. Alexi Korolev of the Criminal Investigation Division of the Moscow Militia is in a precarious position: low enough in rank to be overlooked by those looking for scapegoats, but good enough at his job that he’s considered a valuable resource to his department.

Korolev is considered a tough, but fair cop, good at closing high-profile cases. He is assigned to a murder investigation of a young woman whose body was found in a church. She was tortured and murdered. Korolev suspects it is the work of someone more calculating than a psychopathic killer, especially when he discovers the victim was an American.

Plot-wise, you won’t find anything new in William Ryan’s THE HOLY THIEF. It’s all been done before. There’s the:
• high-profile case assigned to the workhorse detective, one in which certain people in power wish to see him fail;
• hero who sacrifices everything, including his marriage, for the sake of the job;
• perspective of the killer, told in italics (of course), who looks at his work with a kind of world-weary detachment;
• scene where the bad guys decide they better assassinate the hero, but thanks to a last-minute, unplanned switcheroo, he escapes certain death;
• telegraphed, from-a-mile-away setup of the love interest; and
• last-minute save that really seems pulled out of thin air.

No, there’s nothing new here in regards to the story or the characters, although the killer seems interesting, from what little we find out about his background, but his backstory is forgotten halfway through the novel.

What is interesting about THE HOLY THIEF is the setting. Ryan has done his research and writes about 1936 Moscow as if he lived through it (he didn’t; he was born in 1965). He brings the era to life without being pedantic, and gives the reader enough local flavor to make the city seem both exotic, and yet as familiar as New York City in any modern crime novel.

For the setting alone, I could almost recommend THE HOLY THIEF. But the story and the characters? Nah. We’ve seen it all before. —Slade Grayson

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Robert Harris’ THE FEAR INDEX is a science fiction-tinged thriller that works impressively well, especially if you’ve not read much science fiction. Those of us well-immersed in the genre, however, regardless of medium, will inevitably recognize the source of the central conflict long before Harris reveals it. Yet the author manages to overcome this somewhat, thanks to his unexpected approach to the theme.
 
Dr. Alex Hoffman is long noted as an innovator of algorithmic computer programming, along with his experiments in artificial intelligence — or “autonomous machine learning,” as he calls it. His dream to “create an algorithm which, when given a task, would be able to operate independently and teach itself at a rate far beyond the capacity of human beings” was realized several years ago.

Today, his dream stands at the heart of his Geneva-based company, Hoffman Investment Technologies. The company uses his invention, a super-computer called VIXAL-4, to predict movements in the financial markets. Its stunning accuracy has resulted in insanely profitable hedge funds that have made billionaires of Hoffman and his partner.
 
Then strange things happen. It all starts innocently enough, with Hoffman receiving a rare first edition of Charles Darwin that he never recalls ordering. Then an intruder manages to break into his fortress-like mansion and deliver a blow to Hoffman’s head before fleeing the scene.

No sooner does Hoffman leave the hospital when he discovers more odd occurrences. A series of wild, unexpected and seemingly risky trades have been conducted, based on fearful events in the market seconds before they happen. Profits are still made, but Hoffman privately wonders if the range of VIXAL-4’s abilities has somehow extended into unknown and potentially dangerous areas.
 
Thanks to countless novels and movies where an advanced artificial intelligence suddenly becomes “conscious” and wreaks havoc on its creators (from 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY to EAGLE EYE, to name just two), it takes very little imagination to conclude who or what is behind all the chaos in this story.
 
What saves the novel from being completely predictable is the author’s focus on the world of high finance — especially the shady, complicated world of hedge fund investing — and his uniformly credible characters. Hoffman, in particular, never seems completely comfortable with all his wealth and possessions, and continually wonders if he misapplied his years of scientific knowledge simply to make money.

The secondary characters are also believably drawn, especially Hoffman’s wife, an artist who creates compelling and often disturbing art out of medical scans; and Hoffman’s company partner, whose main responsibility is to put something of a human face to the investment firm, and openly enjoys his material success.
 
Harris also manages to explain what exactly a hedge fund is and how it works in ways that almost any laymen can understand. Such insight is obviously essential in order to appreciate both Hoffman’s scientific achievements and the danger when his creation nearly brings the entire financial world to the brink of bankruptcy.
 
We can also be grateful that Harris avoids any cliché-ridden “final encounter” with his super-computer and the obligatory debate between man and machine that is often part of such scenes. Instead, Hoffman locates the hidden central location of VIXAL-4’s mainframe and frantically sets out to destroy it. He apparently succeeds – that is, until Harris subtly implies that VIXAL-4’s data may have transferred “to a cloud.”
 
So if you’ve never experienced much science fiction in any popular form, THE FEAR INDEX comes heartily recommended. Otherwise, it is of note mainly as a different application of an already overused troupe that works surprisingly better than anticipated. —Alan Cranis

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First published in Japan in 2009, Fuminori Nakamura’s THE THIEF has been translated and released three years later by Soho Crime in the States. Our narrator has no name and is only referred to as “the thief.” He is a pickpocket by trade, and one who thinks very highly of his skills.

We watch as he goes about his day, taking any wallets he can, yet not even remembering some he finds on himself as the day progresses. He only keeps the cash and sends the wallets back to their owners; he has no interest in their identification or keeping credit cards that can be traced back to him.

He seems to always have eyes out for other criminals, to the point that he goes right up to a shoplifter and explains how he has watched her do a very bad job of it, and that she should just leave before suspicions arise.

As the story progresses, we get into more of our narrator’s philosophical aspects of his criminal career. All this gets upended when a former partner turns up with a job offer he can’t refuse: a “simple” operation of robbing an older man of some papers.

Once this is done, things become complicated, as our narrator finds out the man in question is a higher-up in the government … and now dead. Then our thief is called upon by the masterminds of that “simple” crime to work for them once again, this time just relying on his pickpocket skills.

The novel gets very philosophical from an early point, and all makes sense by its conclusion. We see our narrator try to grow with a friendship with a young boy whose mother sends him out to steal; of course, he constantly tries to push the boy away all at the same time.

THE THIEF is a very quick read and does not tie up all the loose ends most readers will expect, since again, we only get this story from one perspective. It very much has a “you are there” atmosphere as though we are just flies on the wall of this person’s life — and one you won’t mind watching, since Nakamura a fresh perspective in the world of noir. —Bruce Grossman

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Closing out the University of Chicago Press’ trio of Richard Stark’s Allen Grofield reissues is 1969′s THE BLACKBIRD — the one that shares an intro and crosses over with one of Stark’s Parker novels, 1971′s SLAYGROUND.

While in SLAYGROUND, we follow Parker after an armored car robbery, THE BLACKBIRD allows us to see what happens to Grofield, who gets knocked out due to the getaway car crashing. After the first chapter, this book easily could have been titled ALLAN GROFIELD, SUPER SPY. You guessed it: This is pretty much Stark (aka Donald E. Westlake) delving into the spy genre.

We’re not talking James Bond, or even some men’s adventure hero like Nick Carter, but BLACKBIRD definitely falls into the secret-agent realm, where we find Grofield being approached by government men willing to wipe away the armored car robbery, if only he’ll work for them.

They want him to head to Canada and “bump into” — for lack of a better phrase — two people from the series’ two previous books: the general from THE DAMSEL and the African leader from THE DAME. The federal agents want to know why these two men are meeting, and Grofield is their best “in.”

Those are the basics, and if you thought the other two books were weird entries, this one goes off the rails real quickly. I mean, it’s really strange to see a character who we have seen as a right hand for Parker go all super spy in the finale. I won’t ruin the plot’s secrets, but the story revolves around chemical warfare, and Grofield is right in thick of it as soon as he steps off the plane in Canada.

It’s nice to have these books back in print. But just be forewarned: These are much lighter fare than the dark world where Parker resides. —Bruce Grossman

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Part of Limelight Editions’ ongoing MUSIC ON FILM series, John Kenneth Muir’s just-out PURPLE RAIN: MUSIC ON FILM provides a full account of the making of a movie that made musician Prince a bona fide superstar. In this chapter excerpt, PURPLE RAIN struggles to find a director.

“I saw a movie called Reckless (1984), in a screening room, which was done by Jamie Foley,” Robert Cavallo explains. That cult film was a rebellious rock ’n’ roll anthem featuring Aidan Quinn and Daryl Hannah as star-crossed lovers in an American steel town, and it featured a pulsing, hard-rock soundtrack from the likes of INXS, Bob Seger, and Romeo Void.

“I was alone in the screening room, other than a young man sitting in the back,” Cavallo says. “As I walked out, the young man said to me, ‘Well, what did you think?’ And I said, ‘It was pretty good … but I especially enjoyed the editing.’ I wasn’t kidding. It was good. I thought it was really well edited,” Cavallo emphasizes. “And he said, ‘Oh, I did that. Jamie’s my friend; he made the movie, and I was the editor. We went to USC film school.’”

That young man was Albert Magnoli, a native of Connecticut and a recent graduate of USC School of Cinematic Arts (until 2006 named the School of Cinema-Television). He had discovered his interest in film during undergraduate school, and almost unexpectedly.

“I grew up in New England, in Connecticut, and in undergraduate school, I took a course—I was a literature major—that pretty much changed my life,” Mr. Magnoli remembered. “It was a course that dealt with the films of Ingmar Bergman and how they related to literature; Bergman in relation to stories and novels. The professor was extremely good at finding comparisons between Ingmar Bergman’s philosophies and the philosophies of Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, etc.

“We tracked Ingmar Bergman from the 1950s all the way to, at that time, the 1970s, and that was an extremely rich time for Ingmar Bergman,” Magnoli reminisces. “He started off doing romantic comedies and then concentrated on films that dealt with his background and religious philosophy. We watched The Seventh Seal (1957), Persona (1966), Shame (1968), and Cries and Whispers (1972) and they just had an enormous impact on me.

“What ended up happening was, there was a film course being offered in the school. I wasn’t part of it, but someone in the course came to me and asked if I had any short stories that could be turned into a short film,” the director says. “At the time I was writing short stories, and said I had one, and gave it to him. The location of that story needed a factory, and I had worked in a factory during the summer months, so I said, ‘I have a factory, and it’s down in Newington. I’ll talk to the manager and see if he’ll let us film in there.’ And sure enough, he did. He let us film from midnight till six a.m.

“We had one night to do it,” Magnoli details. “So I brought my friend and his crew to this factory. We were all juniors in college at the time. And when we got there, he looked at me and said, ‘Where should the camera go?’”

“I said, ‘I thought this was your film class!’ And he said, ‘I’m just the choreographer, not the director. You know the factory—just tell me where to put the camera.’ I said, ‘Well, let me see what the camera looks like.’ It was a little Super 8 camera on a tripod. I looked through the viewfinder, and at that point I knew where the camera should go. And then I started setting up shots. Essentially, we filmed for the next five or six hours. We had our actors, we finished, and as I was riding back to college, I said to my friend, ‘This is very interesting.’”

The next part of the process was even more interesting for Magnoli: the editing. Magnoli’s friend had a “little Super 8 viewer and editor, and he showed me how the technology worked, and very quickly I just said, ‘Cut here, cut here, do this, do that.’ We put it together very quickly.”

From this surprise beginning in student films, Magnoli was accepted to USC and began the rigorous process of training to become a film director.

By 1983 and his encounter with Robert Cavallo in that screening room, Magnoli was a working film editor, and on Hollywood’s radar because of his widely recognized, award-winning student film, Jazz (1979).

So Magnoli graciously offered to take Blinn’s script for Purple Rain—then titled Dreams — to his friend James Foley. Cavallo was excited about the prospect, believing Foley could really do a good job with the material. For his part, Magnoli was happy that another film project seemed to be shaping up.

“I called Jamie up immediately and I said, ‘We have our next picture. You’ll direct and I’ll edit. Life is good,’” Magnoli relates. “He said, ‘Send me the script,’ so I sent it to him, and he called me the next day and said, ‘Are you out of your mind?’”

Life? Not so good.

In other words, James Foley—like the plethora of film directors before him—passed on the opportunity to bring Prince to the silver screen. But at least Foley did help the frustrated Cavallo find a director. He recommended that Prince’s lead manager hire Magnoli himself.

At first Cavallo was intrigued; then, upon screening Magnoli’s student film, Jazz, he was highly enthusiastic. The twenty-four-minute movie had been made as a thesis project while Magnoli was at film school and had won a Student Academy Award. In fact, the 1983 edition of The Encyclopedia Britannica listed Jazz as “the most honored student film made in this country in the last twenty years.”

“It was magnificent. You should see it,” Cavallo enthuses. “I said, ‘Wow, this guy can shoot music. I’m going to go hire him.’” He screened the student film for Prince, who also signed off on the choice of Magnoli as director.

But then Magnoli actually read the script for the film as written by Blinn and wasn’t impressed. “It really didn’t work. I was distressed and depressed,” he exclaims.

So Magnoli followed Foley’s example, according to Cavallo, and also passed on a directorship. His first directorship, actually.

“I said, ‘How can you pass?’” recalls Cavallo with exasperation. “How the fuck can you pass? You don’t have a pot to piss in, and I’m going to get you DGA minimum!”

Cavallo recalls, in particular, that Magnoli felt the script was “just too square.”

“My recollection might be wrong about this, because I only looked at the script once, but there was very little music in it,” Magnoli details. “I mean, it wasn’t a musical. It was more of a … I don’t know what.

“You actually see that a lot with musical artists,” he muses. “The first thing they say is, ‘I don’t want to do music.’ They don’t want to be pinned with that musical label . . . they want to show that they have range. It’s a knee-jerk reaction a lot of these artists have, but it’s normal. I don’t think there’s anything abnormal about it. But it’s not looking at the whole picture, because their core audience wants to see them sing and dance. So there’s some friction there. . . .”

At that juncture, a desperate Cavallo urged Magnoli to change, tweak, and toy with the story as he saw fit; to create his own version of the narrative. Magnoli agreed. He called Cavallo and said they should get together to talk about it.

When Cavallo and Magnoli later met at Du Pars restaurant in the San Fernando Valley to discuss the film and Magnoli’s involvement, the young prospective director offered up a new story that he had devised, one that felt more authentic.

“So when I sat down with Bob Cavallo at that breakfast meeting, I pitched him a whole new story on the spot,” Magnoli explains. “I just took what in my gut felt right, and the funny thing about what I had pitched that morning—and what I eventually pitched to Prince after meeting him—was [it was] essentially a story that had no knowledge of what Prince himself was like.

“I hesitated for about two seconds and then launched into a story line that just came out of nowhere,” Magnoli remembered. “It was the bare bones of Purple Rain. I even had the father writing music and hiding it. The family angle was in there because I’ve always been oriented toward the family angle. So I knew the father was angry and embittered and putting that energy into his kid, and Prince was combating it. I pretty much had [all] three acts.”

And Magnoli had unknowingly made good guesses about his leading man’s background. “The fact that Cavallo responded so avidly suggested that I was somewhat correct,” Magnoli suggests.

Bob Cavallo concurs that in that meeting Magnoli “basically tells me the movie you saw.” And the presentation of that stirring tale wasn’t something he would soon forget, either.

“He’s a very athletic guy,” Cavallo describes. “He was squatting in the aisle, jumping up and down, emphasizing points physically, right there in the deli. It was very exciting.” As he described the pitch and his own response, Cavallo almost ended up cheering at the end of it.

In particular, Cavallo recalls the young man’s introductory flourish. “He said, ‘Here’s how we open the movie. Did you see the last scene in The Godfather? Do you remember when Michael’s son is being christened, and we go back and forth to that and all his enemies being killed?’

“‘Well, instead we’ll have Prince opening the movie with a song. He’s performing his first act, but we keep cutting back and forth to Prince getting his makeup on, and his band coming in, and Vanity hustling some taxi driver to get to this mecca for her future, and to Morris Day grooming himself …’

“And while he’s doing this,” Cavallo elaborates, “I’m hearing ‘Let’s Go Crazy.’ And so, you know, I just thought … that’s the greatest idea ever. And he made it a much harder-edged movie. So I hired him.” —John Kenneth Muir

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That James Sallis decided to write a sequel to DRIVE comes as no real surprise. Not only was that 2005 novel the basis of one of last year’s most critically acclaimed films, it was also a stunning example of contemporary noir fiction and perhaps his best-known work. So expectations for DRIVEN, not surprisingly, are unusually high. If they are not completely met, it’s because Sallis is also an author for whom the unexpected comes naturally.

Seven years have passed since the man known simply as Driver — movie stunt driver by day, heist wheelman by night — took revenge on those who double-crossed him, killing Bernie Rose, the “only one he ever mourned.” Now, he has taken the name Paul West and has set up a mildly successful car restoration business back in Phoenix.

Driver’s new life is brought to an abrupt halt one Sunday morning when he and Elsa, his fiancée, are attacked by two assailants. Driver puts them both down, but not before they kill Elsa. Driver immediately enlists the help of his friend Felix, a Desert Storm vet and former gangbanger, to find out who sent the attackers and why.
 
Over the next few days, more attempts are made on Driver’s life as he discovers that his past is catching up with him. He finds that he has more helpful allies than he expected, but knows too well that he must ultimately turn around and face his enemies, and the consequences of his actions, head-on.
 
The same lean, brutal, prose that so distinguished the initial novel is also utilized here. The attack on Driver and Elsa takes place entirely within the first two paragraphs of the novel’s opening chapter. The rest of the story is told with equal amounts of high-pressure economy and restraint, and clocks in at fewer than 150 pages.

Once again, Sallis pays tribute to the minimalist styling of past pulp-fiction masters while adding his own touches with flashes of philosophical insight and poetic renderings of the stark contrasts and parched scenery of the Arizona locales.
 
While DRIVE concentrated mostly on Driver’s past and the people and events that set his life in motion, this sequel deals mostly with themes of revenge, retribution and responsibility. Yet there are enough scenes of violence, terse confrontation and, yes, car chases, to keep the story from becoming one long reflective meditation.
 
Bottom-line, however: It’s damned-near impossible to recapture the essence of something as near-perfect as DRIVE. So, conscious of this challenge or not, Sallis avoids the pitfalls by creating a similar but ultimately different novel. While it may not be as mind-blowing as its predecessor, DRIVEN is still an exemplary work of neo-noir that easily stands on its own merits.
 
Sallis remains one of the most fascinating and varied authors working today, whose impressive body of work is hailed by both genre and mainstream fiction critics and readers alike. Taken together, DRIVE and now DRIVEN demonstrate how the noir techniques and attitudes of more than a half-century ago still speak to us today. —Alan Cranis

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For those unfamiliar, when Mickey Spillane passed away, he left a treasure trove of work to his friend Max Allan Collins — some just notes; others, fully developed plots. And then surprises like LADY, GO DIE!, the original sequel to I, THE JURY, but in an unfinished state. Why this was put to the side is anyone’s guess, but if it came out when originally written, it would have been just as powerful and popular as its 1947 predecessor.

A few months after the events of JURY, we find Mike Hammer and his secretary, Velda, on vacation on Long Island, in the small town of Sidon. Their first night there, while taking a leisurely walk, they come across a man in the process of getting a serious beatdown by the local police.

Of course, anyone who has read any Hammer book knows fully well Hammer is not someone to stand idly by. He comes to the rescue of the man with his own brand of justice, but the men are cops, who claim they were just “questioning” a witness. One of the local police is a former NYC officer Hammer has had run-ins with before, and to put it mildly, has not one of the cleanest records, either.

The cops want to know where Sharon Wesley, one of their more high-profile residents, has disappeared to. She’s a bit of a minor celebrity in the sense that both her husbands have wound up dead, with rumors circulating she had a hand in their demise, especially since both were very rich.

The man at the center of the beatdown is the local beachcomber, whom many consider an idiot savant; Hammer thinks of him only as an idiot. Already. we are in prime Spillane fashion and it only gets better as the book progresses.

A day later, Mrs. Wesley turns up all right: stark naked, riding a statue of a horse in the middle of the town, and from the looks of it, strangled. Hammer goes into full-investigation mode, turning up the dark secret of the police force and this quiet little town. It’s what most Spillane readers like: a nice, grisly case for Hammer to solve.

Once more, you won’t be able to tell where Spillane left off and Collins took over, but in the author’s note at the start, Collins does write he had to change the original time of the story, which Spillane had set around World War II. Since this is a sequel, those changes are to be expected. But more importantly: LADY, GO DIE! never falters, delivering one of those trademark Hammer endings. —Bruce Grossman

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Irene Fleming’s THE BRINK OF FAME is the second in her series featuring movie actress and director Emily Weiss, the first being the popular THE EDGE OF RUIN. Set in 1914 at the very beginnings of the movie industry, Weiss is, along with her husband, an independent filmmaker creating one-reelers and features, trying to make it big. Her husband has headed out to Flagstaff, Ariz., in order to film a desert adventure, and she takes the train to join him.

But on arrival, she learns that her husband has lost their movie studio in a poker game, and that he intends to divorce her and run off with the leading starlet.

Left heartbroken and penniless, she turns into a detective in order to earn some money, and gains access to a much larger movie studio that may give her the chance to actually direct a film. But then that new movie studio’s leading man is found brutally murdered, and Emily and her new partner, Holbert Bruns, are on the case.

One certainly can’t complain of the lack of dynamism in Fleming’s characters. Our heroine loses her livelihood and her spouse, finds a new job, and solves a murder all in a relatively short novel. Unfortunately, this dynamism doesn’t necessarily translate into likable characters. Emily’s emotions are often overblown and on a hair trigger, and her actions and reactions often don’t seem believable.

The real pull of this book comes from its setting: the early days of the motion picture industry. In the earlier RUIN, Fleming explored the machinations of the Edison Patent Trust, and in this book, we see the blossoming of Hollywood and the L.A. movie scene. If you’re interested in the subject matter, the involvement of Fleming’s characters with the industry should appeal. —Mark Rose

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Unless you have read Ferdinand von Schirach’s debut story collection, CRIME, you might easily ignore this follow-up with the equally direct title, GUILT. That would be a shame, as you would miss a unique and unusually moving reading experience.

Like its predecessor, GUILT is compilation of mostly very short stories based on the author’s experiences as a defense lawyer in Berlin, and he often includes himself and his involvement with the story. However, the emphasis is not on the action committed by the central characters, but the lingering aftermath and how it affects and often transforms all involved.

In “Children,” for example, a man is unexpectedly arrested and convicted of child abuse. Years later, after the accused has completed his prison sentence and struggles to establish a new life, the real truth of the case and its accuser finally comes to light. In “Funfair,” drunken members of a brass band attack and rape a young girl during a village anniversary celebration. While cleaning up after the incident, the evidence is fatally corrupted, and no one is convicted. Yet everyone, including the young and inexperienced von Schirach, is forever altered by the events.
 
A young homeless couple in “DNA” kills a man who offered them shelter when they discover that the man is a sexual predator. In the years that follow the couple completely reintegrate themselves into respectable society. Then DNA evidence reopens the murder investigation with unexpected and heartbreaking results. And in “The Illuminati,” one of the longer stories included, a school teacher accidentally dies when she discovers a group of schoolboys performing a dangerous initiation ceremony based upon an ancient cult. Von Schirach is retained by the school to clear them of any responsibility in the teacher’s death.

Von Schirach’s prose in all 15 tales is direct and unadorned (aided in no small part by Carol Brown Janeway’s translation from the German), yet he remains amazingly impartial in the telling of the often shocking events. This combination of starkness — with seemingly no words wasted — and cool detachment is positively chilling. Each story and case presented makes both an immediate and lasting impression that has you reflecting and thinking long after the story ends.
 
In all, von Schirach reminds us that guilt is a powerful but highly unpredictable emotion. It almost always follows some act of violation against a fellow human being, but the resulting consequences can be as varied as the individuals involved. If there is any seeming balance when considering guilt, it is often as transitory and misleading as the austere dust-jacket artwork to this slim yet potent volume.
 
Highly recommended, but you’re likely to find GUILT on the general fiction shelves rather than the crime section. Don’t let this or your unfamiliarity with the author prevent you from seeking it out. Crime-fiction readers, ironically, are better prepared to appreciate its startling effect than those who only occasionally or never dirty their fingers with the stuff. —Alan Cranis

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Continuing with the University of Chicago Press’ Alan Grofield reissues, we hit a true oddity with the series’ second entry, THE DAME, because Richard Stark — or Donald E. Westlake, if you prefer — wasn’t known for whodunits. Yet that’s exactly what this breezy, 1969 novel becomes rather quickly.

The story seems to take place just a few days after the events of THE DAMSEL. Grofield receives a bizarre letter asking him to come to Puerto Rico for a job offer. No other information is given — just the promise of a well-paying gig.

Grofield really should learn from his partner in crime and that’s “stick to your own jobs,” but he’s a man who likes a bit of adventure and intrigue, so he jumps onto a plane, only to arrive and receive a bizarre set of driving instructions.

They lead to the house of Belle Danamato, a rather demanding woman who expects everyone to treat her with nothing but utmost respect — a charistic Grofield, of course, avoids right away. This causes friction between the two, and the job offer is rescinded, leaving our hero confused.

To make matters worse, as soon as he heads back to civilization, he is pulled over and questioned by a group of men from the broken-nose brigade. They want answers as to how and why he came into Belle’s presence, and they don’t like the answer he gives, which is, truthfully, “no idea.”

As it turns out, the men work for Belle’s husband, a mobster of repute, who drags Grofield back to the villa, where Grofield finds out that he was supposed to be hired as her bodyguard. See, Belle is scared for her life, but quicker than you can say “plot device,” she winds up dead, and all the fingers in the house point to one person: Grofield.

The novel plays like a Ellery Queen mystery of sorts, with just a bit more action. On the whole, it comes off quite light, with Grofield even more shallow than normal, to the point that he tells another character who the killer is privately, but leaving the reader guessing until the last chapter or two.

On their own, the Grofield books are a fine group or reading, but to place them in Parker’s world is a just a bit odd. —Bruce Grossman

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Colin Cotterill’s KILLED AT THE WHIM OF A HAT is a delightfully absurd mix of comedy and detection, set in the outback of southern Thailand. Crime reporter Jimm Juree is horrified when her mother and family decide to leave the big city to operate a small tourist resort in an out of-the-way backwater.

Even though Juree’s career was beginning to take off, she feels she must accompany her mother, grandfather and younger brother to the new location because her mother is beginning to be a little mentally unstable. Depressed by the lack of modern civilization at first, Juree perks up when a VW minivan is found buried on a farmer’s lot, complete with two skeletons inside.

If that mystery isn’t juicy enough, at one of the nearby temples, a senior religious figure is found dead with multiple stab wounds. The local temple monk is implicated in the crime, but Juree refuses to believe he is guilty. From these two stories, Cotterill weaves a fascinating tale of detection mixed with the zany doings of the Juree family.

The author has a loose and friendly style peppered with natural-sounding dialogue. But he’s not afraid to go off on wild story tangents and tell jokes along the way. Dare I say it, but with all the absurdity of the Thai culture and Juree’s family, he reminds me just a bit of P.G. Wodehouse — high praise, indeed.

This is comic detective fiction at its finest with interesting storylines. You may find the unveiling of the killer to be kind of a copout, but I was having too much fun to care.

Note that this book is not a part of Cotterill’s separate Dr. Siri series. This is the first in what I hope will be a lengthy series featuring the Jurees. Oh, and for the record, the “whim of a hat” is a reference to some of the more bizarre statements made by President George W. Bush, which lead off each chapter. I think Cotterill must have read the initial quote and decided to write a story around the words. Excellent job. —Mark Rose

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Personally, I prefer paper-and-ink books to the electronic format. I like the way they feel. I like the way they smell. And I like the way they look on a bookshelf.

I like the electronic editions, too, just not as much. But there are distinct advantages to the electronic books: You can carry your whole library around with you, they’re easier to dust, the pages don’t yellow over time, and we’re not decimating trees to print up the latest Stephen King doorstopper.

Also, it’s more convenient to publish a novella or a short story on their own and not worry about the cost of printing and distribution. How many times in the past have you looked at an anthology and weighed the number of stories or authors in the collection that interested you, in comparison to the purchase price?

Generally, I scan the table of contents and mentally calculate, “I like that one, that one … oh, definitely that one … that writer I don’t like … not a fan … like that one …”
 
Usually, if I’m lucky, one-third of an anthology is composed of writers I like, one-third of writers I don’t like, and the rest, pleasant surprises. Sometimes, I discover new authors that way. Sometimes not.

But just like in the days when you were forced to buy a whole album for one or two songs you liked, now in our new, digital, one-click-purchase age, you can buy a song or a story, without a load of filler crap.

Steve Vernon has a new novella out (or “novelette,” as he calls it), a slim, 52-pager that’s only available on Kindle. It’s a perfect format for it, because for $2.99, you get a cool little horror story. If it were printed on paper with a glossy cover and shipped through the mail to your house or the neighborhood bookstore, the purchase price would be at least $9.95 or above. And what would be the sense in that?

In SUDDEN DEATH OVERTIME, we meet the residents of a small Canadian coastal town, a hybrid of Mayberry and David E. Kelley’s PICKET FENCES and Jerusalem’s Lot in ’SALEM’S LOT … and that’s two King references so far. (I promise I’m done.) The residents care about drinking, smoking and hockey. Mostly hockey.

Into this middle-of-nowhere place comes a strange, black bus. The vehicle is filled with vampires, and not the brooding, tortured, anti-hero kind. They’ve come to feed on the plucky residents and the only people who can stand up to them, or who even know what’s going on, are the over-the-hill ragtag former members of the local hockey team.
  
Vernon is one of those writers who is both writing good-old-fashioned horror stories, and also taking the genre into new and interesting territories. Like the best of the old pulp writers, he gives the readers a familiar setting and plot, and then pulls the rug out from under them.

In my review of his short-story collection DO-OVERS AND DETOURS, I called Vernon the product of a three-way sex romp between Harlan Ellison, Richard Matheson and Robert Bloch. As proof, I offer you my favorite line from SUDDEN DEATH OVERTIME:

“It looks like the Partridge Family bus after it got gangbanged by the Munsters’s hearse and the Adams Family roadster in the middle of a nuclear paint storm…”

(Yes, I know ADDAMS FAMILY has two Ds. I copied the line verbatim.)

SUDDEN DEATH OVERTIME also includes a short story and a preview of a gritty superhero tale Vernon penned. It’s lean, mean and is designed for those of you, like me, who like horror stories with teeth (if you’ll pardon the pun). It’s ideal for a quick lunchtime reading fix, or a pleasant distraction for your train ride home.  —Slade Grayson

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A spin-off from their multivolume FILM NOIR READER series, editors Alain Silver and James Ursini have compiled a companion book, FILM NOIR: THE DIRECTORS, a lavishly illustrated, 400-page tribute to 30 men who steered some classic crime movies. In this excerpt, contributing essayist Richard T. Jameson considers the noir work of the great Fritz Lang, ironically best known for sci-fi’s METROPOLIS.

Would film noir have happened without Fritz Lang? Probably, since so many factors and forces contributed to its flowering. But would it have been as rich and strange, as philosophically provocative and aesthetically exciting? Among the directors associated with film noir, no other possessed a personal vision—both style and worldview—so apt to that cinematic environment.

You could say that Lang had a two-decades-plus head start on noir. During his German Expressionist heyday, from 1921’s Der müde Tod (Destiny) to 1933’s Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse, he was exploring themes and forms, coining screen language and syntax, and forging an approach to character and ambiguity that would be crucial to the noir world. Perhaps most crucially of all, the power and mystery of Lang’s Weimar-era films sprang from a uniquely dynamic symbiosis of narrative and design: story emerged through the recognition of pattern, as character was forged in the struggle against Fate—the ultimate design.

Those films serve as early recon maps of the terrain that would become noir. Most of the major works deal with criminality and shadow societies pervading, underlying, and sometimes flourishing right on the surface of a modern city. Several feature a criminal genius whose powers of disguise and organizational supremacy make him seem ubiquitous, almost supernatural. Sometimes called Dr. Mabuse (though the mastermind in the best of the “Mabusian” films, the 1928 Spione, doesn’t go by that name), his plots to orchestrate complex capers, undermine national currencies, steal international secrets, and so forth are finally incidental to his primary impulse: to play with the very fabric of contemporary reality. The nature of that reality is suggested by a hallucinatory mise-en-scène in which the décor is at once stark and decadent, a playground for perverse spectacle and gamesmanship, a maze of corridors and doorways and streets where the modern and the Gothic interlayer. There’s a pervasive air of paranoia, a nightmare of a world in which chaos and order are opposite sides of the same coin.

Just as striking as the exoticism of these films is the social commentary. Decades before the pop sociocultural epiphanies of the Godfather films in the 1970s, Lang was asserting the essential similarity, even the interchangeability, of the criminal and corporate worlds. M (1931) carries out a more extensive dissection of society at large in the course of following the hunt for a serial killer of children. Common organizing principles and parallel behaviors are observed among four distinct strata of an urban population: the miscellaneous citizenry, the police, the criminal faction, and the shadow army of beggars, peddlers, and street creatures who pass freely among the rest. One night both the police council and the leaders of the underworld hold simultaneous meetings to discuss the crisis; Lang intercuts the two sessions and composes the action so that, say, a question raised by a municipal official is “answered” by a representative of one of the criminal guilds, and a sweeping gesture begun by the chief gangster is completed by the chief of police. Other correspondences are worked into the texture of the film overall. When, in the penultimate reel, enraged members of the underworld’s kangaroo court leap on the captured child-murderer in an angular shot and drag him back down a flight of stairs, we recognize the echo of something an hour earlier in screen time: casual passers-by on a city street mistaking a misdemeanor arrest on the top tier of an omnibus for the apprehension of the child-murderer, and swarming the steps in vigilante frenzy. (The criminals give the Kinder Mörder a trial; what the ordinary citizens do to their perp is a question left unanswered.)

And yet surely the director’s greatest legacy to noiristes is stylistic. Lang’s style invites voluminous discussion; we’ll spotlight two key principles. One of these, unforgettably at play in the early moments of M, is something we might call the force of absence or emptiness. More than merely a variation on negative space (of which, to be sure, Lang is also a master), this is an assertive stylistic event, an explicit and at the same time chillingly resonant crystallization of something irretrievably gone missing, or something too awesome to contemplate directly.

M begins with a black screen and the faint sound of a child’s singsong voice reciting the nursery rhyme formula whereby one playmate at a time is counted out of a charmed circle. That circle of children is the first thing we see, in an overhead shot of a tenement courtyard—an acceptably realistic yet abstract shot that is portentous even before a mother calls down to protest the grisly chant about the “man in black” who may strike at any time. As the singsong continues nonetheless, that mother returns to her kitchen to await her daughter’s return from school. Lang proceeds to intercut shots of the tenement and street scenes in which the daughter is approached by a dark-clad, hatted, effectively faceless figure. He speaks to the daughter, buys her candy and a balloon twisted into humanoid form. She is doomed, her death forecast not only by the reward poster about the murderer against which she is tossing her ball, and on which the shadow of the murderer falls as he greets her, but by the way the everyday details of her home environment are presented. The child will not again climb the several flights of stairs to her family’s apartment. She will not be there to remove the ring from the napkin her mother has set out in anticipation of the child’s afterschool snack. She will not again wear one of the garments drying on the clothesline in an otherwise empty attic. And as her name, called out by her mother, reverberates down those stairs and through that attic space, the child’s ball rolls from under some shrubbery, wobbles over a few feet of bumpy ground, and comes to rest. And the balloon, a grotesque simulacrum of life, is seen twitching for a moment under some overhead power lines, then borne off by the wind.

The other principle crucial to Fritz Lang (and much of noir) is the power of the frame, including the motion picture frame itself. Frames trap Lang’s characters as his films’ plots trap them. In any given shot it is difficult to imagine an actor standing anywhere other than where he stands, relating to camera, movement, architecture, light-and-shadow patterns in any other manner. In the almost entirely studio-created world of Lang’s Weimar films, the frame implies an intensely restricted awareness within an intensely restrictive environment. Again, M affords a definitive example. Beckert the child-murderer (Peter Lorre) stands on a street corner, having just realized that he is being shadowed in the night. Around him, we know from a previous scene, an army of beggars in the service of the underworld are closing the net; but we do not see them in the shot. All we see is Beckert, on the street corner, photographed from a position a few yards down the sidewalk; Beckert stands against the emptiness of an intersection, only the corner of an adjacent building visible at frame right. The whistles of the beggar patrols stab the night as vividly as blades, and with each whistle Beckert leaps a few inches one way or the other, the frame remaining fixed: he can’t get out of the shot. Finally he selects a route, in the general direction of the camera, and takes several steps. The camera pans slightly to follow him, bringing into view just a bit more of that nearby wall. Beckert freezes again: there is a man flattened along the wall, watching him. Beckert had already reached the corner; he should have seen someone standing against that wall—should have, by any rule of spatial logic except the one operative here. The motion picture frame is a trap as effective as iron bars or a cordon of pursuers. Within that frame the character is visible, and vulnerable. Just beyond it lurks … what? The unseen holds power over the seen. And although we in the audience are watchers, although we knew Beckert was being tracked by the beggars before he knew it, we didn’t know that that man would be standing precisely there. And Beckert’s knowledge was not increased until ours was increased.

Images are power; form is power. Elsewhere in M, Beckert stands in front of a display window featuring an array of cutlery. A set of blades is arranged in a diamond shape around a diamond-shaped mirror, and as Beckert stares, the mirror frames the face of a schoolgirl also looking in the window. The layers of the spectacle—including the window’s own shimmering reflection of the glinting knives—constitute a visual and virtual immersion in the murderer’s obsession. It’s perfectly realistic and at the same time hallucinatory. This window is a portal of desire, the first of many to come in the cinema of Fritz Lang. —Richard T. Jameson

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Joe R. Lansdale’s latest returns to the Depression-era, East Texas setting he used in such memorable past works as THE BOTTOMS, SUNSET AND SAWDUST and others. While the setting may be familiar to longtime Lansdale readers, EDGE OF DARK WATER easily stands on its own and succeeds wonderfully on several noteworthy characteristics.

While fishing one morning with her dad and uncle, Sue Ellen discovers the sunken body of schoolmate May Lynn, a popular, pretty young girl. Someone tied a Singer sewing machine to May Lynn’s foot, and tossed her into the Sabine River. Sue Ellen’s father would prefer tossing the dead body back into the muddy water, but the others insist they haul the corpse into town and bury her.

Not long afterward, Sue Ellen joins her friends Terry, a local boy, and Jinx, an African-American girl she has known all her life. The three recall how May Lynn always dreamed of going to Hollywood to be a movie star. Then, while reading though her diary, they discover the hidden location of a huge amount of cash May Lynn’s brother had stolen years ago. They decide to find the money, dig up May Lynn’s body and cremate it, and then travel to Hollywood where they will scatter her ashes.

Once they secure the cash and ashes, they make their way to the riverside where they know of a huge abandoned raft. But just as they are about to shove off, the friends are joined by Sue Ellen’s mother, who has fled from her drunken, abusive husband and her addiction to an alcohol and laudanum-laced cure-all tonic.
 
It isn’t long before the the group is pursued by Sue Ellen’s dad and his friends who learn about the stolen money. What’s worse, someone has hired a feral, nightmarish-looking and sadistic tracker known as Skunk to find them. Everyone has heard the scary stories about Skunk, and they know he will stop at nothing until he finishes what he was hired to do — even if it means killing people.
 
One of the novel’s immediate charms is Sue Ellen’s first-person narration. Her oft-threatening family life and the hard times plaguing East Texas make her wise beyond her mere 16 years. Her story is filled with compassionate insights and spiced throughout with bawdy, Southern-tinged humor. Lansdale masterfully manages to incorporate all the twang needed while keeping the narrative flowing and easy to follow.
 
Any novel utilizing a trip down a river on a raft will inevitably invoke Mark Twain’s ADVENTURES OF HUCKELBERRY FINN. Yet Lansdale doesn’t overplay the similarities, knowing for one thing that the Sabine River is not the Mississippi. While both stories include occasional stops along the riverside and encounters with local residents, Lansdale keeps the focus on Sue Ellen as she progressively learns more about her mother, her family, her friends and ultimately herself.
 
The book then takes a more suspenseful turn as Skunk draws closer, making the group’s quest to scatter May Lynn’s ashes — and escape their pathetic East Texas existence — a fight for survival. These sections, leading to the conclusion, are marked with the kind of over-the-top, near-surreal violence that are among Lansdale’s fictional trademarks.
 
Not just any author can combine a touching, coming-of-age story with elements of suspense, shocking violence, salty humor, social and racial commentary, and the icons of one of the best-known works of American literature, and make the whole concoction work beautifully. But as any of his many fans will tell you, Lansdale is not just any author.
 
EDGE OF DARK WATER is another stunning triumph for him, who for many years has proven himself one of the most talented American storytellers working today. His latest novel is inarguably one of the best novels of this year. —Alan Cranis

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Between consuming DVD extras, reading three decades of magazine articles and having read Matty Simmons’ 1994 NATIONAL LAMPOON bio, IF YOU DON’T BUY THIS BOOK, WE’LL KILL THIS DOG, I’m not sure I learned anything new from the movie producer’s new book, FAT, DRUNK, AND STUPID: THE INSIDE STORY BEHIND THE MAKING OF ANIMAL HOUSE, but I enjoyed it all the same.

Released in 1978, NATIONAL LAMPOON’S ANIMAL HOUSE was an instant hit and remains a comedy classic. There’s no disputing that, but Simmons seems intent on needing to the talk the reader into it, with ongoing references to how everyone loves to quote it, how the song “Shout” is still so awesome, how John Belushi is so funny in the flick, and so on.

Luckily, most of the book is just Simmons telling the story of how the movie came to be: how it was inspired by real-life frat shenanigans; how Universal Pictures treated it like a redheaded stepchild until the grosses came in; how they had trouble finding an actual college campus to shoot on; how the cast members were found; how collaborative the film was between its screenwriters, actors and director John Landis; how the resulting TV series, DELTA HOUSE, failed; how attempts at sequels over the years have never gotten off the ground, etc.

As someone who enjoys behind-the-stories of motion pictures — especially iconic ones I actually like — this is all interesting stuff, even if much of it reads like information I already had picked up from here and there. Having it from one source, however, is a plus. But FAT, DRUNK, AND STUPID is not — repeat, not — an “outrageous” story as the jacket copy claims. Simmons insinuates hook-ups and such, without delving into dishy details.

What he does offer is a breezy, conversational read. Now he really needs to do the same for the NATIONAL LAMPOON’S VACATION franchise, if in part just to put Chevy Chase’s diva behavior on permanent record. But this time, if Simmons mentions Dan Aykroyd’s name, he needs to not misspell it on all six pages the actor is mentioned. —Rod Lott

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I don’t really re-read that much stuff unless something calls for it years later. Case in point: Edgar Rice Burroughs’ 1912 novel, A PRINCESS OF MARS, and its resulting series. The film adaptation, JOHN CARTER, crashed and burned last month as one of Hollywood’s biggest flops ever, plus Library of America has released a new hardcover edition with a pulp-inspired cover and an introduction by novelist Junot Díaz. So I figured I would revisit the time spent on Barsoom — that’s Mars, for those of you who don’t know.

Burroughs is probably the pulp master, having created not one but two distinctive characters in the genre, one being Tarzan and one being PRINCESS’ hero, John Carter, a Civil War vet who is mysteriously transported to Mars, where he is met by alien creatures called Thraks.

These Thraks are giant, green, four-armed, lizard-like beasts. Carter soon finds out he has some sort of super strength on Mars. (Sound familiar, comic fans? An alien who comes to Earth and discovers the same?)

Carter rises to power and respect in the tribe because of his newfound abilities. The Thraks actually capture a beautiful red Martian princess named Dejah, for whom Carter has fallen, so he goes off to save the damsel in distress, leading to him having to sacrifice himself for the better of the planet.

I have long loved this type of stuff, from its aliens to its swordfights. How cool is that? If you’ve never read any Burroughs, shame on you. Carter comes back for two more books before the series switches to other characters in an 11-book franchise.

Library of America simultaneously has re-released Burroughs’ TARZAN OF THE APES with the same treatment. —Bruce Grossman

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Christwire.org is to the fanatical right wing Christian conservatives what The Onion is to Middle America: a satire of everything that makes them firm in their convictions, and makes them look like nutjobs to the rest of the world.

Starting as a website/blog, ChristWire is now expanding its dry sense of humor into the world of print with THE CHRISTWIRE HANDBOOK, a collection of essays with titles like:
• “Is My Husband Gay?”
• “Sweat, Sodomy, and Radical Socialism: A Shocking Look Inside America’s Most Dangerous Gay Bars”
• “Gays Invent New Wii Sex Toy, So Blacks Can Have Virtual Sex with White Women”
• “How to Know If Your Child Is a Chinese Hacker”
• “Why Can’t I Own a Canadian?”

THE CHRISTWIRE HANDBOOK is a great send-up of the supposed “evils” that threaten our morally righteous society, like homosexuals, immigrants and, of course, “vajazzling” — female college students “adorning their erogenous suprapubic area with jewels, and then trying to tempt men to follow the sparkles right to a place where only the  married belong.”

Much like Kathy Bates in THE WATERBOY would say, everything is the devil. (Or Dana Carvey’s Church Lady, if that reference works better for you.)

It’s funny and clever, the illustrations can be hilarious, and even the definitions in the back of the book gave me a smile: “Devil flesh wrap: Word used to describe a devil whore’s baby hole.”

But ultimately the joke wears thin as the book goes on and on and on. Much like an SNL skit that doesn’t know when to quit (which is the problem with most of the movie spin-offs of SNL skits), the joke becomes tiresome after a while. Best to take the book in small doses.
 
Oh, and stay away from it if you’re:
a) easily offended;
b) believe everything you read; or
c) are unable to tell when someone is being sarcastic. —Slade Grayson

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Let’s not, um, beat around the, er, bush: STRANGE FLESH is about sex. The virtual kind, to be exact. The kind of novel that sounds fun to write, right? Here, author Michael Olson details in four — ahem — parts, just how this buzzed-about book came to be.

I.

Teledildonics is the term of art for computer mediated sexual activity. “Virtual sex,” if you will. I came to the subject almost innocently.

I’m the kind of virtualist they call “naïve.” One who fully believes we’ll simulate fantasy worlds so compelling that they’re destined to surpass this unsatisfying prison of reality. And that this transcendence will happen soon.

Back in 2007, many technotopians watched grinning at the torrid growth of enterprises like Second Life. We looked at each other saying, “This is it.” The extropian rapture was at hand. The Singularity coming Near.

I’d taught a class that spring at NYU called Massively Multiuser Media and was tinkering with a machine designed to let people walk naturally around these worlds. A transitional tool for use during the brief period before we finally ditched these awkward meat-sleeves and uploaded ourselves to the digital Elysium.

My problem? Though a dedicated acolyte of the Binarium, I had a persecuted writer, the proverbial ink-stained wretch, chained up in some dark cell inside me. I’d been able to keep him docile by permitting the occasional weirdly elaborate email. But he was always plotting escape.

His break finally came over a lunchtime glass of chardonnay with a friend from college, now a literary agent at ICM. He whispered:

Well if you’re going to be a professor while awaiting your inevitable billionaire moguldom, it wouldn’t hurt to have a book, would it? What harm could there possibly be in writing a book?

The project: to forecast our incipient conversion to vat-brains by detailing the ways virtuality will cater to our fundamental drives. The four F’s: Fighting, Fleeing, Feeding, and naturally the one that rules them all and binds them, Fornicating.

The significance of that last item had recently been impressed upon me. Conversations about my occupation would constantly arrive at:

“It’s a locomotion interface. So that you can walk around a-”

“Wait a minute, you build mechanisms that provide a sense of touch to virtual worlds, and the problem you’re working on is … walking?”

As the grandmother seated next to me at a wedding put it: “You’re being silly. What you need to do is fix it so we can make whoopee in there.”

Others were indeed working on that very problem. But the tech remained very much in its infancy. You could barely discern the outlines of the alluring creature it must become. The chapter floundered; the facts just weren’t sexy. So I had to call upon my imagination.

I wish I’d known that doing so would open this chthonic portal to admit a cast of ravening demons. There was the machine yes, but it had to be demonstrated in my mind’s eye by people. And these people, once conjured, refused to leave. Like militant squatters, they started making the space their own.

I told my agent friend that I’d “spend Christmas break” drafting a novel just to “get it out of my system.” Turns out I was naïve about a lot of things. In response, I received the email equivalent of a raised eyebrow. But by then my blood was up, and the urge wouldn’t be denied. My imprisoned scrivener had escaped to raise the peasantry, and he had already set several of my mental provinces ablaze.

II.

Two years later I had a towering stack of paper on my desk.

Engineer’s tools saw me through to that point: functional decomposition, productivity metrics, and mechanistic persistence. But the stack had overflowed. The thing felt mechanical. And a rickety, lurching, unreliable, machine at that. Given a book’s aerodynamic properties, its generous combustibility, such breakdowns are fatal.

Luckily I knew a couple of good mechanics. They recommended an overhaul:

Your engine should be a love story.

Why don’t you put in dinosaurs?

That last one came from a child, who of course wouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the book. I handed him a copy of Jurassic Park instead and momentarily enjoyed his hysterical enchantment. He left the follow up question unspoken: “If someone already wrote The Perfect Novel, why did you bother writing one?”

That moment shook me: I wondered if I could even muster the cruelty of a ten year old.

My struggle with brutality wasn’t so much that I was squeamish about placing my characters in extremities, but rather I feared the pain the author would have to inflict on himself in his attempt to make another stack of paper. The project was out of control: a first time director, vastly over budget, and script rewrites coming in hourly. Management prepared to pull the plug. My spirit remained willing, but the flesh grew …

Strange, finally.

III.

It had been a day of feckless surfing with the intent of recasting some insignificant scene. But really I just indulged the manic inactivity of someone slowly acceding to despair. I hadn’t even been able to give the book a name. And that fact represented perfectly a certain incoherence of identity.

I idly noodled on a section of moribund dialog:

“… online world that’s become the holy land for nerds.”

“Pilgrims all flocking to Sodom and Gomorrah.”

That didn’t sound right. So I searched for some actual Bible verses and found Jude 1:7:

Even as Sodom and Gomorrah… giving themselves over to fornication and going after strange flesh, are set forth as an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.

My title jumped off the page at me like one of those divine fireballs. Though the passage was probably talking about underage hermaphroditic camels, I had drafted a book featuring machines overlaid with artifice and then soaked in lubricious imagination. Figments thus mechanically made Flesh. What could be Stranger?

In the same set of results my eyes found something else as well, I guess due to my recent sensitization to the topic: the words 120 Days of Sodom. A book by that master of literary cruelty, the Marquis de Sade. I am not at all prone to mysticism, but I felt like my mind had been reflashed.

Somehow I now had access to a memory from my initial research. Various historians of the discipline point to the 1992 debut of CyberSM as the first recorded demonstration of teledildonic technology. A project by two artists that allowed one to transmit electric shocks to one’s partner over a 16 KB ISDN line. I hadn’t thought it satisfied the criterion of “sexuality.” But just then, in the conceptual shadow of the Divine Marquis, I saw that I’d been wrong.

This flickering connection between electrostim, sadism, and teledildonics took root in my mind. I’d been disappointed to find that in perusing streams at sites catering to mechaphiles, I’d often felt a little turned off. We technotopians luuurve the idea of artificial sex. And yet to me many of these videos lacked any sense of eros. They seemed inert, manufactured, fake.

Like my book.

Now though I realized they weren’t meant to depict conventional sex channeled through an exotic welter of technology, but rather something a little darker. A baroque form of device bondage wherein the machine itself constitutes the active erotic component. In a curious doubly literal way, the device is the object. The fantasy isn’t about sensual stimulation. It’s about control.

IV.

A new outline for Strange Flesh leapt from my fingers like a static discharge. The book had quickened. This little spark of an idea now imbued the sterile mechanism with living tissue. Strange, yes, but real flesh all the same.

The next draft felt like a book someone else had written. The sensation of reading it brought to mind my brother’s old pit bull Jerry. Though a fearsome creature, whenever he encountered some novel life form, he’d be reduced to quivering helplessness by the glorious but intractable decision of whether to eat it or try to make love to it.

I didn’t quite know what to do with the pages I held, but I knew I finally had something that turned me on. —Michael Olson

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Following three recent novels establishing the stoic Joe Pike as far more than second fiddle to his series star, Elvis Cole, author Robert Crais allows both characters equal billing in his latest novel, TAKEN. As noteworthy as this is, it’s the subject matter that makes this new work the most intense and disturbing of Crais’ entire output.
 
Nita Morales, a well-to-do, career-driven woman, hires P.I. Cole to find her legal-age daughter, Krista. Nita is concerned, of course, but doesn’t think Krista is in any real danger. In fact, she suspects Krista has run off with her boyfriend, Jack, and now need money. Why else would the ransom call Nita received demand such a seemingly small amount?

Cole and partner Pike begin their investigation and soon discovers that Krista and Jack are in more trouble than anyone could imagine. The couple were mixed in with a group of multinational illegal immigrants being smuggled into the U.S. from Mexico and dropped off in a remote area of the California high desert.

But the immigrants were then kidnapped by a group of bajadores — bandits who abduct groups of such illegal immigrants in-transit and demand ransoms from their family or friends in the U.S. The immigrants are tortured until payment is received; if prospect of payment dry up completely, they’re killed, and their bodies dumped in the desert.
 
Aided by Pike’s professional mercenary friend, Jon Stone, Cole and Pike trace the identity and location of the bajadores holding Krista and Jack. Cole goes undercover to infiltrate the group and plot their escape. But when Cole himself disappears, Pike fears his cover has been blown. Suddenly, even more lives are at stake.
 
Crais shifts TAKEN’s narrative focus back and forth, mostly between Cole, Pike and the kidnapped couple, but occasionally given over to Stone, as well as a few other incidental players. It would ordinarily be a challenge to follow, but Crais’ driven prose and signposts at the start of each major section keep readers well-oriented.
 
Cole’s sections are told in first-person narration, as is traditional with earlier Cole-centered stories. But except for a few early and quick jabs at his self-proclaimed “World’s Greatest Detective” boast, the sly, cynical humor that has distinguished his narration in the past is either greatly subdued or absent.
 
This no doubt is due to the intensity surrounding the bajadores‘ horrifying treatment of the kidnapped immigrants. The author usually employs such heavyweight story elements and the gut-wrenching race against time for his standalone works, or when Pike is calling the shots. So it’s fascinating especially to see Cole go through such hell and manage to keep even the smallest portion of his humor intact.
 
The darkness of TAKEN is reminiscent of earlier series works like L.A. REQUIEM, where Cole confronts the more threatening and life-altering aspects of his profession and his Southern California home. Yet the structure, suspense and somber tone of this book raise the bar for this series, and reminds us that there is far more to both Cole and Pike than Crais previously allowed us to see. —Alan Cranis

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University of Chicago Press’ Richard Stark reissues have continued, with three titles most fans of the author were hoping would be included. I’m referring to the Alan Grofield books, of which the publisher has reissued the first three of the series’ four, all sharing an informative introduction by Sarah Weinman. (Hard Case Crime already squeezed out the fourth, LEMONS NEVER LIE, a few years ago.)

Those of you expecting the same cold and calculating stories of Stark’s other creation, Parker, will be disappointed. Grofield is one of the few people who is actually “friendly” with Parker, like the other side of the coin — he’s talkative and gregarious to a point, but also a criminal at the heart of it all.

As 1967′s THE DAMSEL shows, Grofield is up for some off-the-cuff adventures. This book takes place after the events of 1966′s THE HANDLE, so we find him in a Mexican hotel recovering from that Parker tale, when all of a sudden, he receives a visitor by the way of his window.

It’s a girl named Elly who is looking for a place to hide and a trunk full of lies to try and get by on. But Grofield sees through it all, and this is where the fun for him begin, since who should come looking for her, but a set of heavies. This escalates to the point that Grofield and his newfound friend are on the run in Mexico.

It’s a sort of political thriller, with a former governor and a Mexican general and their offspring all thrown into the mix. For Parker readers, the novel may come off as somewhat off-putting, especially if you plan on reading the series in order. It’s sort of a like a speed bump in the dark world of Parker. Or actually, a chance to catch one’s breath. —Bruce Grossman

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