Steven Gould’s JUMPER was one of those sci-fi novels that seemed like a no-brainer for a cool movie adaptation. In fact, when I first read it back in 1994, I fantasized about one day securing the rights to the novel and pitching it to Hollywood. (I still have that fantasy about Lucius Shepard’s GREEN EYES.)

Unfortunately, Hollywood beat me to it with the underwhelming 2008 film, in which they strayed so far from the original plot, it may as well have been an entirely different story altogether. Too bad, really, because the book is so much better than that herky-jerky filmed mess. (Although the movie does have a scene with Rachel Bilson in a bra, but whatever.)

Gould’s latest, 7TH SIGMA, is a Western coming-of-age tale masquerading as a science-fiction novel. In the near future, mechanized flying bugs have infested the American Southwest. The bugs consume metal and will eat through anything, including flesh and bone, to get to it.

Essentially, if you live or travel through this area, you better be damn sure you aren’t carrying any metal, or the bugs will be on you quicker than a pack of starving dogs on a salami. Metal inside you, such as a pacemaker or a steel plate in your head, is a death sentence.

The origin of the bugs is unknown, at least to the characters, and no one seems to much care. People adjust and continue living in the Southwest, using plastic, wood, glass and stone in place of metal. Agriculture is much more important than technology, as food is needed for survival and electronic devices are prohibited (and potentially lethal). The inhabitants of the Southwest, in effect, live a simpler, yet harder life.

The focus is on Kim, a young runaway who finds himself attached to Ruth, a woman setting up an Aikido school. With his newfound surrogate mom/sensei, Kim builds an identity for himself and a sense of purpose that gets him off the streets and on a more fruitful path.

He also gets involved in various adventures, although more from happenstance rather than choice. Kim has an innate sense of morality that belies his young age and forces him to get involved in dangerous situations, ranging from bandits preying on homesteaders, to meth dealers and corrupt law enforcement officials.

7TH SIGMA follows him over a several years’ period, although how long exactly is left to the reader’s own interpretation. He’s young and plucky and wise beyond his years, and most likely a young teen through most of the story, but it’s not really spelled out.

He’s much like Rudyard Kipling’s KIM. In fact, the reader is hit over the head with the comparison by the inclusion of quotes from Kipling’s classic between sections of the novel.

So my question is, if Gould wanted to write a futuristic update of KIM in a sci-fi setting, than why did he basically write a Western? Because at its heart, that’s what this novel is: a Western set in the American Southwest about a young boy who eventually becomes an undercover agent for the Texas Rangers.

So why not just write it that way? Why include a plot about mysterious bugs that devour metal?

The subplot of the bugs is touched upon here and there throughout the story, but almost as an afterthought. The most interesting part of the novel — a subplot of the subplot about the bugs taking other animal forms like a dog and possibly a … well, I don’t want to give that part away. Suffice it to say, Gould barely touches upon these more interesting aspects. Instead, he focuses on a character that is about as compelling a personality as Opie Taylor from THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW.

7TH SIGMA also has a non-ending, which leads me to believe that the author is either planning on a sequel, or simply ran out of steam. I tend to believe the latter because I nearly did, too.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m a fan of Gould. As I said, I loved JUMPER, and enjoyed its sequel, REFLEX. I even liked GRIFFIN’S STORY, a prequel/sequel to the JUMPER movie universe. Also great fun was WILDSIDE, Gould’s novel of a group of friends who discover a portal to a parallel Earth where humans never existed.

All of which is why I was so disappointed with 7TH SIGMA. I’ve come to expect that Gould will deliver a cool sci-fi concept and then explore it. Here, he practically ignores the sci-fi plot for a warmed-over Western. —Slade Grayson

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T. Jefferson Parker’s THE JAGUAR is the fifth novel to feature Charlie Hood, the stoic L.A. sheriff’s deputy who divides his time between local and federal assignments, and has recently been trying to stem the flow of drugs and guns running between the U.S. and the powerful Mexican cartels.

In this latest story, Hood actually shares the narrative with two other characters. The focus may be split, but the result is the most character-driven novel of the series, and easily among Parker’s career finest.
 

In the dead of night, a group of heavily armed men break into the home of sheriff’s deputy Bradley Jones and kidnaps his wife, Erin, a popular rock musician. Before they leave, the kidnappers confirm what Bradley feared: They are soldiers of Benjamin Armenta, leader of the Mexican Gulf Cartel, and the kidnapping is payback for Bradley’s years of service to and protection of Armenta’s main rival, Carlos Herredia, who heads the North Baja Cartel.

Armenta will return Erin to Bradley if he delivers a $1 million cash apology to Armenta in the next 10 days. Otherwise, Erin will be skinned alive.
 
Getting the cash is no challenge for Bradley, since his services to Herredia — unbeknown to everybody, including Erin — has made him a very wealthy man. But he does not trust Armenta to be true to his word, so Bradley enlists the help of his friend and fellow deputy, Hood. They quickly devise a plan: Charlie will deliver the cash, while Bradley tries to find where Erin has been hidden and attempt to steal her away from Armenta before the delivery deadline.
 
Meanwhile, Erin discovers that she’s been taken to Armenta’s castle, hidden deep within the jungle of the Yucatan peninsula. The building might be hundreds of years old, but Armenta has added every modern convenience, including a state-of-the-art recording studio with best instruments and equipment imaginable. It turns out that Armenta is something of a musician himself, and well-versed in the history and evolution of popular music of both is homeland and America.

After many conversations, where Erin constantly demands her freedom, Armenta agrees to release her if she composes a narcocorrido (a popular style of song that celebrates the feats of Mexican drug dealers) based on Armenta’s life. Writing the tune is just one of the many obstacles that stand in the way of her freedom, including a fierce hurricane and attacks on Charlie and Bradley from both sides of the Mexican law.
 
Parker unfolds the story through alternating chapters involving Charlie as he follows the complicated delivery orders; Bradley as he searches for where Erin has been hidden; and Erin herself as she explore the huge castle and learns more about the oddly contradictory life and work of her captor. In each instance, the author compellingly gets deep under the skin of his characters to reveal their strongest motivations and deepest regrets.
 
Two other characters figure in the narrative. One is Mike Finnegan, the shadowy, near-mythical, near-comical figure who appeared earlier in the series and here plays a more influential role. He assists Bradley directly and Erin indirectly thorough his seemingly supernatural amassing of information and insight. But Hood blames Finnegan for the death of two close friends, among other crimes, and is obsessed with his capture.

The other is Mexico itself, with its beautiful landscapes, ancient architecture and dense jungles, all contrasted with the shocking violence of its towns and cities locked in an unrelenting war between the cartels and the questionable loyalty of its police and military. Seldom has Mexico’s contemporary strife been presented in such stark detail as a place “cursed to be so far from God and so close to LA.,” as one character describes it.
 
There are moments, however, when the split focus and its many events seem to drag the story down under its own weight. But Parker valiantly prevents things from becoming too ponderous with abrupt, and mostly unexpected, spurts of violence or equally dangerous natural eruptions. These moments are where some of Parker’s finest writing shines through.
 
THE JAGUAR is a dark, but ultimately fitting addition to the Charlie Hood saga, bringing the hero and most of the other players to a sadder, but wiser place. Readers who have followed the series will have no trouble recalling all that went before. Readers new to Parker, or those who have enjoyed his previous works but missed this series, are urged to take up minimally THE BORDER LORDS or IRON RIVER in order to appreciate fully the depths of this latest entry. —Alan Cranis

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Now updated from its 1999 publication, the paperback release of Kenneth E. Hall’s JOHN WOO: THE FILMS is able to tell a more complete story of the Hong Kong director. At the time, Woo’s MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE II hadn’t been released, which would mark his American commercial peak, followed by the disappointing underperformer WINDTALKERS and the downright disastrous PAYCHECK, after which the filmmaker retreated to Asian cinema.

Now, you get the whole Woo, and nothing but, in a book that doubles as biography and critical assessment, covering the director’s entire career, from his early start in throwaway martial-arts pictures and comedies to the recent epic RED CLIFF. Naturally, the focus is on his late-’80s/early-’90s body of work that redefined the action film, both at home and abroad.

Hall has a wider perspective than your average film lover, having access to his subject on the set of Woo’s U.S. debut, HARD TARGET, a Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle that suffered from studio interference (as did much of Woo’s American output, we learn). It’s good in that we get an in-depth story of what went right and wrong on that film, but bad in that it skews the conservation heavily toward that lone title; HARD TARGET accounts for 16 pages, to M:I2′s six, FACE/OFF‘s four and BROKEN ARROW‘s mere two.

However, it’s the overall look that counts, and Hall does a good job at that, exploring the director’s hallmark touches (a relationship between good guy and bad guy, a self-sacrifice upon the hero’s part, those goddamned doves) and his influences to/parallels with other brand-name helmers.

If there’s some nitpicking to be made, it’s in the rare, not-even-close error (DEMOLITION MAN Marco Brambilla is here named Bandella?!?) and quotes opening each chapter that reek of pretension. Who cares what Winston Churchill and Voltaire had to say? Just tell me about the baby urinating on Chow Yun-Fat in HARD BOILED, y’know? —Rod Lott

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Daphne du Maurier (1907-1989) is regarded as one of the early influences and shapers of popular fiction, including genres such as suspense and horror. Those who never read her are still familiar with her work, thanks to the many notable movie adaptations of her novels and short stories, including REBECCA, JAMAICA INN, DON’T LOOK NOW and THE BIRDS.
 
Now Cemetery Dance has located the eight du Maurier short stories previously published many years ago in the collection EARLY STORIES, along with five additional, uncollected tales published in the early 1930s, and published them in a handsome, but limited trade edition titled THE DOLL: THE LOST SHORT STORIES.

Like most of her early works, the settings of many of these stories are small, exotic locations off the coast of England, and the style is somewhat formal. Yet there is an unmistakable sense that du Maurier will soon break away and find the slightly more conversational voice of her latter, better-known works. Still, many of the images and themes she became known for were first examined in these early efforts.
 
In “And Now to God the Father,” credited as her first published short story, du Maurier presents a lively portrayal of an energetic and popular local vicar whose compassion, we learn, is alarmingly misdirected. “A Difference in Temperament” details the disintegration of a couple’s love when they discover they are no longer the center of each other’s lives.
 
The macabre and the eerie sense of foreboding that distinguishes many of the author’s popular works are found in such entries as “East Wind,” where the lives of the inhabitants of a tiny deserted island are fatally disrupted when a fierce east wind forces a huge brig full of boisterous sailors into their lives. In the title story, a man falls passionately in love with an elusive young musician and then, to his complete horror, learns who the musician’s secret and true lover is.
 
It’s also fascinating to see du Maurier experiment with different narrative techniques. She uses the popular final-line zinger structure in stories like “Frustration,” while “And His Letters Grew Colder” is told entirely through an exchange of mail correspondences.
 
This collection is recommended most especially for du Maurier readers, as well as those curious to see how the kind of fiction that would define national best-seller lists was formulated in the early portion of the last century. —Alan Cranis

Buy it at Cemetery Dance.
 

If I were to list my top 10 most influential movie books, Kim Newman’s 1988 edition of NIGHTMARE MOVIES would sit snugly right alongside Danny Peary, Pauline Kael, Phil Hardy and Joe Bob Briggs.

And if I were to list my top 10 film personalities, both John Landis and William Castle would be on that list — both boisterous, larger-than-life and whip-smart directors, and both with new books. Given that Castle shuffled off this mortal coil some 35 years ago, makes his penmanship appearing now, indeed, larger than life.

But let’s begin with Landis. Famed director of AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON, ANIMAL HOUSE and many other pop-masterpieces, but a writer? Chronicling the history of horror cinema? Sure, I’ll bite.

MONSTERS IN THE MOVIES is a large, gorgeous, knowing and carefully assembled overview of creature features. The book is divided into many chapters, detailing the usual suspects: vampires, Godzilla, zombies, werewolves, etc. Landis writes a couple of pages about each subject, although if you know your monster movies, there isn’t a whole lot of surprises.

But where Landis’ writing comes to life is the many interviews he conducts with his peers, talking to everyone from Joe Dante, John Carpenter and David Cronenberg to Guillermo Del Toro and Ray Harryhausen. They’re jovial and illuminating, underscoring the fact that somebody oughta give Landis a permanent late-night TV gig.

Where this big book excels is the visuals. Brimming with hundreds of wonderful photographs and posters from the early classics to modern, CGI-infested train wrecks, this is a lot of fun to browse through. Some of the classic photos are spread over two large pages with incredible detail. That I personally would have preferred to see that zany HELLZAPOPPIN’ still full-size over anything from CONSTANTINE doesn’t mean that it’s mismanaged. It just means that kids today will recognize the movies they grew up with just as I will enjoy mine.

At age 12, I would have considered this The Greatest Book Ever Written. It succeeds in what it attempts, and if it’s lacking anything, it’s an attached audiobook version where Landis brings his words to effervescent life while you browse the printed pictures.

But to balance things out, novelist and horror aficionado Kim Newman has recently revised his essential NIGHTMARE MOVIES from the late ’80s. And when I say “revised,” he has more than doubled it in size. The first 300 pages contain the original text, which covers 1968 (NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD) to 1988, with copious footnotes bringing these entries up to date. And then Newman adds another 300-odd pages to cover post-1988 horror cinema.

Newman knows his movies. In his articles on the genre’s auteurs, he doesn’t stop at Guillermo Del Toro and David Cronenberg, but tackles the likes of Larrys Cohen and Fessenden with equal observational detail. He can spend several pages on the career of Paul Bartel, compare Jacques Rivette to Dario Argento, and opine on the influence of Antonioni on the likes of Umberto Lenzi.

The breadth of opinionated knowledge within these covers is massive. That many titles end up being bundled with other similar films is perhaps a tad unfortunate, but at 600 pages, the pace has to be furious to keep this as compulsively readable as it is. Unlike the Landis book, this most definitely is not for novices. You don’t necessarily have to know the subject thoroughly, but you do have to be seriously interested in it.

This also isn’t a book to flip through for visuals. This is jam-packed with sharp and funny words urging you to go and see and appreciate these movies. For an overview of modern horror movies you can not improve on this. Unless Newman returns in another couple of decades, rather like Castle now has.

Of THE TINGLER fame, Castle is one of the granddaddies of horror films as entertainment. Now, some 35 years after his death, his daughter, Terry, has compiled and published her father’s annotated HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL “screamplay.” Bolstered by an enthusiastic and knowledgeable introduction by Dante, who also makes a terrific appearances in both of the preceding books, this is for the obsessive fans.

Which isn’t to say it’s not great — it’s more than brilliant — but it is of somewhat more limited appeal.

From 1959, HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL is a perennial Halloween horror treat, starring Vincent Price and Carol Ohmart as a bickering millionaire couple throwing a tricked-out party packed with double-crosses, hidden passages, murderous mayhem and flying skeletons.

The punchy snappiness of the script is laced with great one-liners, and we get to observe the auteur-ial penmanship of Castle as he turns Robb White’s script from a screenplay to a screamplay.

As a historical artifact, it’s a film buff’s dream. The script is great fun, and watching Castle’s mind at work as he comments on it is pure joy. And never one without a gimmick, flicking the pages of this large, faux-leatherbound tome brings home the possibilities of “Emergo” in print just as Castle did in his films.

So whether you’re a novice to the joys of horror movies, or a battle-hardened veteran, there’s one book or more among these three that you will absolutely need. Personally, I need them all. —JT Lindroos

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TRESPASSER is Paul Doiron’s second novel featuring Maine game warden Mike Bowditch. Apparently, in the first, THE POACHER’S SON, Bowditch had to track down his criminal father and, in the process, made some enemies on the police force. These enemies continue to haunt him during this outing, so the conflict stems from both his efforts to solve the crime and personal conflicts with his colleagues and even his wife. Sadly, all this interpersonal drama doesn’t do much for the overall story.

While responding to a vehicle/deer collision call, Bowditch finds the car, but not the driver, a young woman by the name of Ashley Kim. He passes the case on to the state patrol, but her disappearance nags at him, and so he investigates, eventually discovering the poor woman, raped and murdered, in a nearby house. The police are none too pleased that Bowditch was clever enough to find the body, and apoplectic that he contaminated a major crime scene.

When he begins to make connections between this case and a much earlier case with a similar M.O., things really get heated. The D.A. and the police already have a man in jail for the earlier case of rape and murder, and they don’t need Bowditch to stir up trouble. Which, of course, he continues to do, this time by finding the body of a man with his throat cut. The man was the police’s prime suspect, and now he’s dead.

Doiron has a clean style with an eye for action, and his plotting structure is fairly strong. What’s less to like are the unrealistic motivations of his characters. Bowditch displays quite a bit of self-destructive behavior, going off to confront people when he has no business doing so, and the other police colleagues are little better, expressing considerable rage at minor comments as if they were on steroids. His own wife doesn’t even tell him she’s pregnant. Most of the other Maine inhabitants we meet would put “white trash” in the 1 percent bracket, and apparently, the state is a haven for sex offenders. Who knew?

Having your protagonist as a game warden is an interesting conceit, but making him behave like an inner-city detective investigating murders is a disconnect to me. This isn’t a bad book; it’s certainly very readable, but there needs to be a little more joy, a little less constant conflict with the men and women who are supposed to be on our hero’s side, a little more higher purpose.

At one point, a character discusses the likelihood of Bowditch quitting his job, and based on everything he goes through in this book and who he has to deal with, that’s exactly what I would expect. —Mark Rose

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Gary Phillips, the excellent and criminally underappreciated Los Angeles-based crime-fiction author, is no stranger to comics. Fact is, he’s been producing series and graphic works for almost as long as he’s written his various novels and short stories. Among his more recent illustrated ventures is Vertigo Crime’s COWBOYS, a stunning example of how a complex and involving crime story can be told as a graphic novel.
 
At the heart of the story are two law enforcement officers, different in their professional approach and personal lives as night and day. Deke Kotto is an investigative cop who works the urban streets in a reckless, rogue manner that always seems to get results. But when he discovers the dead body of tax auditor, he’s assigned to drastically clean up his appearance, go undercover and follow the trail of the money the auditor was involved with.

The other officer is Tim Brady, a white, fairly straight-laced FBI agent counting the days to his retirement pension. Then, Brady is assigned to go undercover as an investment broker and get close to a rap record producer suspected of using dirty money to fund his operations.
 
What Brady and Kotto don’t know is that they are both working the same case from opposite sides — and that their investigations are on a deadly collision course.
 
Phillips’ inventive and cross-cutting narrative effectively places both protagonists in worlds completely foreign to their experiences. Kotto quickly learns the subdued techniques of intricate white-collar crime, while Brady immerses himself in the flashy and extravagant surroundings of hip-hop. They quickly realize that both worlds, while in stark contrast, are equally dangerous as their investigations lead to an inevitable and violent showdown. Phillips further embellishes the story with his knowledge of investment trading and its potential connections with crime, and through the portrayal of the contrasting private lives of the lead characters that distract their investigation.
 
Illustrator Brian Hurtt, best known for his work on THE SIXTH GUN and DC’s HARD TIME, is equally effective in his black-and-white renderings of the differing urban settings, ranging from the stark coolness of a high-rise office to the swirling ambience of a downtown, after-hours dance club. His shifting scenes convey the contrasting stories with cinematic assurance that is especially effective in the erupting flashes of violence.
 
COWBOYS has enough story and character content for either a gripping crime novel or an pulse-pounding action movie. As is, it demonstrates how such a potent story can be effectively told in this unexpected medium – especially in the expert hands of Phillips and Hurtt. You’ll find yourself longing to re-read it several times to appreciate all it so successfully accomplishes. —Alan Cranis

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It’s no surprise why Sharyn McCrumb is a bestselling author. In THE DEVIL AMONGST THE LAWYERS, she accomplishes a feat most writers wouldn’t be able to pull off. She creates a large cast of fascinating characters, differentiates them significantly from each other, tells their own individual stories in relatively few words, and combines them all into a solid overarching story. It’s a character study within a mystery.

This book is the eighth in McCrumb’s “Ballad” series, set in the Appalachian mountains of Wise County, Va. A young woman has apparently killed her father in a fit of rage. For some reason, the case gets a bit of national attention, and so a few big-city journalists are traveling to the area to report on it.

We meet Henry Jernigan, the accomplished pro with a haunting secret; Rose Hanelon, the sad cynic; and Shade Baker, the disinterested photographer. We also encounter Carl Jennings, a local reporter from Tennessee who hopes that his youth and the fact that he’s a local may help him get the big story.

The actions and attitudes of the journalists are the real story here, as the murder case itself paradoxically gets scant attention. Set in the 1930s, but concerning something which could just as easily reflect our situation today, McCrumb explores the stance of big-city elitists who deign to visit what we now call “flyover country” in the search of local color.

Jernigan and Hanelon don’t care at all about the people or stories they cover, and even Baker, who grew up in a similar area, fights the fight but has to take the photos they want because after all, it’s a job. Along the way, we are exposed to these journalists’ vicious bigotry and cynicism. Is journalism about truth, about telling stories the readers expect to hear so they aren’t confused by incongruous details, or is it just about selling newspapers?

While the author lays the anti-journalism tirade on a bit too thickly, she manages to create a tale that only indirectly deals with the murder case (handled snappily in an epilogue) and focuses instead on the characters surrounding the trial, and how their actions affect the town in which the crime occurred. Matched with her usual attention to detail (yes, she really does know how a 1930 Ford Model A “heater” works), her brisk and accurate descriptive prowess, and her basis of real-life stories, this is another series entry you’ll want to read. —Mark Rose

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It’s with both great sadness and a sigh of relief that BLACK JACK: VOLUME 17 arrives — sadness, because this marks the end of Vertical Inc.’s trade-paperback reprints of Osamu Tezuka’s “peerless medical drama” manga; relief, because the publisher actually saw it through to the very end, as promised. I guess that meant the thing continued to sell.

If so, I’m not the least bit surprised. From the start, Tezuka’s series — first serialized from 1973 to 1983 — was a work of creative excellence, and stayed that way, through all these thousands of pages. If you’re looking to make an investment in a series that will pay off more than what you put into it, look no further.

Other than an appendix that points to which volume any given tale can be found, this one is like any other, offering a string of standalone adventures for Black Jack, our rogue, unlicensed surgeon with a scarred face and skunk-colored hair. Yes, he’s kind of a dick, but what surgeon isn’t, really?

In these stories, Black Jack:
• sends his Frankensteinian creation, Pinoko, on her way;
• turns a young woman into a literal bird;
• is asked to perform a sex change on a girl because her father wants it;
• is tricked into aiding a people smuggler;
• commits an unspeakable act of science on a horse;
• removes a stone from a man’s bile duct, then puts it right back in;
• tends to a little girl who jumped off a building to get her dad’s attention;
• actually refuses to administer life-or-death care to another child;
• digs out a tumor;
• creates a fully formed human out of a cystoma;
• works on a pop starlet’s lady parts during a typhoon; and
• performs emergency surgery on himself. Hey, he has mirrors.

As if you couldn’t tell, this Black Jack character is one of a kind, a real kick. I will miss him so. This body of work is one of genius, an ahead-of-its-time macabre soap opera that sliced open the boundaries of comics. —Rod Lott

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Rebecca T. Alpert’s OUT OF LEFT FIELD: JEWS AND BLACK BASEBALL is a gem of a history book: a concise, fascinating account of a significant American cultural element, black baseball, and an exploration of one particular aspect of that element, the interactions and attitudes — both real and perceived — between Jews, blacks, black Jews and their audiences, and what it meant to identify oneself along those lines in the mid-20th-century United States.

At first glance, you might think it’s one of those dreary academic tomes that sprout from moribund Gender Studies departments, complete with confusing jargon and tremendous amounts of moral outrage. But Alpert is better than this. She doesn’t try to be encyclopedic about the numerous black baseball leagues.

Instead, in a somewhat chaotic structure, she focuses on the owners of the teams who were often Jewish, including Abe Saperstein, founder of the Harlem Globetrotters. She discusses the business aspect of the sport, and devotes a riveting 40-plus pages to “comedy baseball,” the clowning acts that were prevalent on certain teams and during barnstorming events. She also talks about the Belleville Grays, a team comprised entirely of Jews who happened to be black.

Alpert deftly weaves in the thread of the integration of baseball, from the long and extensive campaign waged by Jewish Communist sports writers for the Daily Worker, to the eventual and much belated arrival of Jackie Robinson. Where others may have discounted the role of the Communist writers in integration, the author shows they played a significant part in keeping the story of sport segregation in front of the masses, and helping to force baseball to do the right thing.

Meticulously researched with great photos, sources, and an extensive bibliography, but with a subpar index, this book will interest anyone who loves the sport of baseball, Jewish history, black history or the history of Communism in this country. That’s quite a feat; strongly recommended. —Mark Rose

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“Who is Todd Grimson?” That was the first thought I had when someone recommended his work to me.

Apparently, he’s an author of quirky subject matters who burst onto the literary scene in the 1990s, and then faded just as quickly. Although from what I’ve read about him, he never stopped writing; he simply wrote under a different name. Now, Grimson is back with his older work — STAINLESS and BRAND NEW CHERRY FLAVOR — reissued by Schaffner Press, and a new novel on the horizon.

STAINLESS is a love story (of sorts) between Justine, a 400-year-old vampire, and Keith, a former musician and heroin addict. Justine is not the stereotypical angst-ridden Anne Rice vampire, nor the anti-hero vampire so prevalent in today’s paranormal romance novels.

Instead, she’s what you would expect a 400-year-old vampire to be: part alien when it comes to understanding humans and the modern world, and part savage animal when it comes to personal survival. Justine is a different species, after all, and her connection to us mere mortals has become an insubstantial fever dream over the centuries.

Keith is just as disconnected, although more from his own personal tragedies and the loss of his career due to damage to his hands (and that pesky smack habit). He is Justine’s caretaker and servant, her “Igor” as he has come to think of himself, who is both frightened of her and also in thrall to her — equal parts Sad Sack and tortured tragic figure. If David Goodis had ever written a vampire novel, STAINLESS would not have been far off from what he might have come up with.

In fact, reading STAINLESS made me think quite a bit about Goodis. There’s a sense of hopelessness to everything and a general despondency to the story, much as Goodis had in most of his novels (off the top of my head, I can think of only two happy endings to a Goodis story, maybe three). 

Grimson spends a lot of time developing his characters and the frequent flashbacks to Justine’s past and Keith’s doomed love affairs (pre-vampire servant status) build dimensions to their personalities, which keeps them from becoming flat or unsympathetic to the reader — an easy trap to fall into when your two protagonists spend most of their time hunting for victims.

Grimson does the same for the secondary characters, some of whom take on surprising roles later in the story. There are shifts in loyalty and some characters who begin as minor one-note players later take on an important role. But at the heart of the story is the burgeoning love between Keith and Justine — two disaffected and dead-inside people who find acceptance in each other.

Unfortunately, if you’re looking for a “happily ever after” type of romance, you won’t find it here. As we all know, happy endings always cost extra.

BRAND NEW CHERRY FLAVOR has the distinction of having the coolest title I’ve seen this year. And maybe last year, too.

Lisa Nova is a wannabe director in the film biz who takes bit roles in grade-Z horror flicks for money and has sex with powerful men to get ahead. When one 90210-type film exec reneges on a promise, she decides to get revenge. And not the keying-his-Porsche kind of revenge, either.

No, Lisa’s idea of revenge is to consult with a voodoo/Mayan magic warlock and enlist his aid. Of course, this is the baddest of bad ideas (akin to selling your soul to get back at the guy who swiped your parking spot and then hoping the devil is an honorable fellow), and it all goes downhill from there.

You would think that the first sight of zombie bikers and collection of shrunken heads would have given her pause, but no. Lisa makes a deal with Boro, the voodoo Mayan jaguar prince, and then very bad things happen.

Grimson wrote BRAND NEW CHERRY FLAVOR in the 1990s, but the book has more of an ’80s feel to its Hollywood/L.A. setting and its cast of self-absorbed industry hangers-on. Lisa’s looks are based on former arthouse mainstay Nastassja Kinski, a fact mentioned more than once by other characters in the story. From there on, I couldn’t help but see Kinski as the protagonist (which also meant her father, Dr. Nova, automatically morphed into Klaus Kinski — weird, I know).

The first third of the novel is tight and suspenseful, with a sense of urgency that kept me turning the pages. Then there’s an abrupt change in locale and the urgency is lost. The middle of the book loses its direction and threatens to derail completely.

Grimson ultimately gets the story back on track, and although the final third of the novel winds down satisfyingly, there is still a feeling that much of the middle part could have been excised without loss to the story or narrative flow.

Also, too, there’s a minor fault in that none of the characters in BRAND NEW CHERRY FLAVOR, not even Lisa Nova herself, are the least bit sympathetic. This means that when bad things happen to them, there isn’t much concern for the reader. But that’s neither here nor there.

Grimson compares this novel to the early work of Thomas Pynchon. Personally, I saw more of Tom Wolfe in its uneven parts, specifically THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES (also about self-absorbed, unlikeable people), except set on the West Coast with zombies, sorcery and psychic tattoos thrown in the mix. It’s a mixed bag, but with enough cool ideas to make it worthwhile.

Of the two, however, I would recommend STAINLESS as the more satisfying reading experience, if anyone wants to give Mr. Grimson a try. —Slade Grayson

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Not one who could afford a subscription to THE NEW YORKER, I had read Pauline Kael’s movie reviews in sparse instances over the years. In other words, my exposure to her — this was pre-Internet, mind you — was limited compared to other film critics.

It need not matter when presented with PAULINE KAEL: A LIFE IN THE DARK, Brian Kellow’s biography of the woman, who passed away in 2001. The author does his job in letting readers know why she was important. He also does his job in not deifying her, allowing her own words and actions to stand for themselves — sometimes, that doesn’t show her in the best light, but she had only herself to blame.

How interesting can the life of someone who wrote about movies for a living be? Quite a bit, as it turns out. Quickly, Kellow gets through the least interesting part of it: childhood. Born in 1919 to a failed farmer and a detached mother, she flourished into her own person while studying at Berkeley, where she fell in love with the arts and became a magnet for gay men; eventually, her only child was fathered by one.

Her closeness to homosexuals is interesting, because it’s also where she got into the most trouble, once she landed gigs as a film critics. With comments like “this fag phantom of the opera,” she was accused of homophobia, which she denied. The way Kellow tells it, it could simply be that Kael was blunt with her wit and her pen.

That honest and directness is part of why she’s so revered; this is, after all, a woman who considered screen icon Charlie Chaplin to be “a fraud.” My favorite quote of hers in this bio comes from her review of Billy Wilder’s 1961 comedy ONE, TWO, THREE, which she wrote “pulls out laughs the way a catheter draws urine.”

By all accounts, she also lacked a social filter, which cost her friendships throughout her life, and her egotism could rub filmmakers the wrong way, perhaps most notably when she told Sidney Lumet, a legendary director even then, that it was her job to tell him “which way to go.”

But Kellow gives her credit where credit is certainly due: as a champion of maverick filmmakers and their work that shook up the stodgy Old Hollywood. Among her famous pet causes were Brian De Palma and Robert Altman, BONNIE AND CLYDE and M*A*S*H, all when precious few others gave a crap, much less ink. Love her or hate her, she fanned the flames of a cinematic revolution. Where would we have been without her? —Rod Lott

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I’ve had this one on my TBR pile for a while. It’s not that I didn’t want to read DEATHLESS or that I’m not a fan of Catherynne M. Valente …

I thoroughly enjoyed her THE HABITATION OF THE BLESSED, but her writing is dense and lyrical, a step away from verse. In other words, it’s not easy Sunday-afternoon reading. You don’t speed-read your way through it, because every line is another brush stroke on a very large canvas. Rush your way through her story and you’ll miss an important wash of color.

In DEATHLESS, Marya is a young child in Stalinist Russia who watches as birds transform into men and, one by one, take her sisters as their brides. When her groom-to-be comes for her, however, he is much more than that. He is Koschei the Deathless, the Tsar of Life, and he is locked in an eternal struggle with his brother, the Tsar of Death. And you thought your in-laws were trouble.
 
Valente has taken a bunch of old Russian fables and transplanted them into post-WWI Russia. It works … for the most part. Marya is the archetypical young girl transposed into a fairy-tale world of gnomes and witches, but the story ultimately becomes a love triangle that is reminiscent of (ugh) TWILIGHT (girl finds herself straddling a world of the supernatural and is torn between the love of two men that are diametrically opposed).

Although the author shows skill at taking old fairy tales and legends and showing them in a new, modern light — much like Neil Gaiman did in AMERICAN GODS — I still found the story to be lackluster.

But damn, she has a talent for prose:
• “Silence forked across the table like ice cracking.”
• “His pale lips sought hers, crushing her into a kiss like dying. She tasted sweetness there, as though he still kissed her with honey and sugar on his tongue.”
• “It was late spring when Marya Morevna slid her brass key into the lock of the house on Dzerzhinskaya Street, feeling it slide, too, between her own ribs, and open her like a reliquary full of old, nameless bones.”

I like the novel enough to recommend it, and the author’s talent for a turn of phrase was enough to keep me reading, but don’t delve too deeply into the originality of the story. It’s all been done before, of course — just not quite this beautifully. —Slade Grayson

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A doll possessed by the devil, a freshly dug-up corpse, a musician driven to madness, a mentalist with a twisted gift, a woman who suspects her husband is a vampire, a family driven by greed — these are among the tales of terror in the hardcover comics anthology INNER SANCTUM, written and illustrated by Ernie Colón.

Pegged right on the cover as being inspired by the radio program of the same name — which birthed a series of films starring Lon Chaney Jr. in the mid-1940s — the book presents stories in the spirit of the show, rather than adaptations.

By design, they are old-school. On one hand, that means filled with pulp elements; on the other, that means thoroughly predictable ends. All in all, this INNER SANCTUM is fun, if not particularly innovative or deep. Colón’s art, however, is a pleasure throughout. —Rod Lott

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RAT CATCHER is another in Vertigo Crime’s series of wonderfully intense and suspenseful graphics novels incorporating some of the finest writers and artists working the field today. This one is a bloody and breathless story of betrayal and retribution that starts off with a bang and rarely lets up until the conclusion.

A fire breaks out in a house on a deserted stretch of road outside of El Paso, Texas. As the investigation begins, it is revealed that the location was a federal safe house, and one of its current residents was a criminal due to provide states’ evidence against a high-ranking mob boss. Moses Burdon, an aging FBI agent specializing for many years in witness protection, arrives on the scene in search of his partner, now feared dead from the blaze.

For as long as they worked together, Burdon’s partner believed in the Rat Catcher, a shadowy hit man who targets potential mob snitches. Since there has never been enough hard proof of the Rat Catcher’s existence, many federal agents are positive he’s just a myth. Now Burdon feels the Rat Catcher is a reality, especially when it is discovered that somebody survived the fire and is on the run.

The survivor might be Burdon’s partner. Or it might be the Rat Catcher himself, seeking payback for a possible frame-up by the mob boss. Whatever the case, Burdon and other law enforcement officers chase the survivor through the West Texas Badlands as the case become more complicated and more dead bodies pile up.
 
Andy Diggle, best known as the author of THE LOSERS comic series (and basis for the underrated film adaptation), is no stranger to stories where those on the side of the law are suddenly left on their own with few insiders they can trust. He is inventive enough to keep some surprising plot twists under wraps until they add the most effective weight. Additionally, Diggle cross-cuts between locations and events — and, at one point, an essential flashback — with an unrelenting pace reminiscent of your favorite crime thriller screenplay.

Victor Ibanez ably assists the story with his sharp-focus, black-and-white drawings utilizing a variety of panel sizes and sometimes full pages for optimum shock effect. His character and location depictions are easily convincing and in perfect harmony with Diggle’s plot and dialogue.
 
RAT CATCHER will easily win high favor with comic fans, especially those who prefer crime/mystery-oriented graphic stories. They should pass it along to those crime-fiction fans who have yet to be initiated into graphic novels. It provides the same satisfying rush as a well-made movie you can’t wait to see again. —Alan Cranis

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Ever since I was introduced to the magical wonderland that is DVD, I have been an off-and-on reader of Glenn Erickson. He’s the reviewer who writes under the name of DVD Savant at DVDtalk.com. Now, some of those reviews are among the more than 100 collected in the SCI-FI SAVANT paperback from Point Blank Press. It’s endorsed by director Joe Dante, so who am I to argue? (Well, maybe a little.)

Arranged chronologically by film, the book acts as a virtual tour guide through the history of science-fiction cinema, starting with reviews of Fritz Lang’s METROPOLIS — Kino’s recent restored version, to be exact — and some obscure foreign titles, and ending with one of the genre’s most acclaimed ever, James Cameron’s AVATAR.

Erickson gives thorough (and only occasionally dry by virtue of being overlong) discussions of each film, as well as the DVD itself, specific to a certain edition. This is noteworthy, as the quality from one company to another can be wildly divergent. It may frustrate you, too, that some editions are long out-of-print, but not as frustrating as the author’s off-putting insistence to refer to himself in the first person, i.e. “Savant is a booster …” or “Savant saw a full Polaroid 3D presentation …” or “Savant has a special lump in his throat …”

With poster art included, the book (edited by BOOKGASM contributor JT Lindroos, we should note out of fairness) is better utilized as a revisiting of key points in the genre’s life, rather than a work of reference. Nitpicky quirks notwithstanding (like footnotes better left in the copy), the author knows his stuff (he sure beats SCI-FI MOVIE FREAK), and I’d like to see him take on other genres in book-length format. —Rod Lott

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Following 2010′s delightful DICK BRIEFER’S FRANKENSTEIN, this second volume in IDW’s “Chilling Archives of Horror Comics,” BOB POWELL’S TERROR, as edited by the ubiquitous Craig Yoe, is equally oddball-wonderful.

While the first book chronologically covered 15-odd years of both style and character development, this tome is limited to a much briefer segment. These 18 stories — from magazines like WITCHES’ TALES, THIS MAGAZINE IS HAUNTED, CHAMBER OF CHILLS and many others — all range from a narrow slice between July 1951 to August 1954.

Bob Powell learned his craft in the Eisner and Iger comics stable beginning in the late ’30s and honed his chops on Doc Savage, Captain America, Sheena and a number of other less-famous titles before plowing into the horror field under the EC influence.

While Dick Briefer funneled his focus into whimsical weirdness, Powell here plunges his pen into proto-Cronenbergian body horror. His writing is not — for the most of this volume — on par with what Bill Gaines and gang were doing over at EC, but Powell’s eerie powers creating ideas and images with blobby, gelatinous, festering new flesh in all its imaginable forms remains admirably peculiar. The opening story which features a throbbing wall of flesh eager to expand by absorbing any bystander is a gooey delight, and things go quickly downhill … for our protagonists.

What, however, really distinguishes and elevates this book from your standard, low-budget horror fare are two complete surviving stories reprinted from the collector-owned, original, uncolored artwork. Unlike the rest of the stories, which are smudged and smeared in a very endearing way, these two pieces showcase what Powell was truly capable of: His lines are fluid in the way that Harvey Kurtzman could be, elegant and expressive, yet grounded in reality. Importantly, the pair of tales allow the reader to peer at what is lurking underneath all the others, after colors, gunk and mediocre printing have done their damage.

Storywise, peculiarly for this early work, Powell seems to have an interest in and knowledge of near-death experiences. The volume contains several stories apparently drawing inspiration from related phenomena well ahead of its mid-’70s popularization. It gives some of the best bits in the book heft and a slight edge of seriousness that bumps them well above your run-of-the-mill grist. Whether this was intentional or even personal, I’ve no idea, but the results speak for themselves.

Overall, this is a wonderfully entertaining volume, and even those stories written to a formula are elevated by Powell’s mercurial penwork and creative layouts. That these images have not been processed, scrubbed and cleaned gives them charm, and even the original printing mistakes work for TERROR’s benefit under my gaze.

Of course, I’d still take a book of all original, black-and-white artwork over this beauty, but I’ll settle for those two extraordinarily gorgeous stories amid all the phantasmagorically lurid madness that surrounds them. —JT Lindroos

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M.L. Longworth’s debut novel, DEATH AT THE CHATEAU BREMONT, has a few appealing elements. Set in contemporary Aix-en-Provence, it features two well-drawn conflicted characters, Judge Antoine Verlaque and his on-again/off-again girlfriend, Marine Bonnet, a professor of law. Their interactions and motivations form the emotional core of the book, and the author goes to great pains to present all sides of their character: his off-putting snobbishness, her unappealing silliness, but matched also with his earnestness and her intelligence.

The two become involved in a case when a documentary filmmaker is found dead at the titular site. Verlaque is investigating whether the death was a suicide or an accident; Bonnet is brought in because she knew the man who died as a childhood friend.

The investigation seems to be heading nowhere when the dead man’s brother is also found at the château, strangled to death. Verlaque and his team, with the assistance of Bonnet, now must investigate what seem to be two murders.

The police work here is intriguing and unravels naturally. The setting is different and descriptions are evocative of the area. The focus on food and wine is welcome. The characters are interesting and could easily support a series. The plot’s a bit thin and the presence of the Russian mafia doesn’t help matters, but the most egregious drawback here is the horrendous copyediting that apparently doesn’t bother the publisher Penguin.

The novel is riddled with unfortunate textual phrasings, due either to the author’s purported bilingualism, or just laziness at the publisher’s. Examples include the overuse of the cloying word “tummy,” the disjointed phrase “whipping around the room the pages of the newspaper she had been reading” (p. 24) or the obviously wrong “other wealthy usually men wore” (p. 33). On page 260, a character throws her purse over a fence, but on page 275, it’s located in the car. Name spellings differ. Each instance may be minor, but they tend to be distracting.

The ending wraps up a bit too neatly for my taste as well. So overall, it’s not a perfect book by any means, but entertaining enough for the character study and locale. —Mark Rose

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Noir is like pornography: difficult to define, but you know it when you see it. And you’ll see it in a light you’ve never seen before after reading THE MALTESE TOUCH OF EVIL, by scholars Shannon Scott Clute and Richard L. Edwards.

This is no ordinary text on the genre. From 31 movies cast in noir’s shadows, Clute and Edwards chop the stories up into 102 iconic pieces — “noiremes,” they call them — that the authors then arrange more or less chronologically by time placement in the film. The result is like the ultimate noir work — one that includes every trope, every trick, every turn of phrase.

Each noireme takes up a spread in the paperback, with a representative frame (sometimes two) on the left-hand page, and the examination of that scene on the right, pointing out elements such as camera placement, censorship workarounds, visual puns and self-reflexive shots. Clute and Edwards switch off on who dissects what, but on occasion, both will chime in, sometimes even to disagree.

Among the films utilized in this unique work are classics like SUNSET BOULEVARD, THE ASPHALT JUNGLE, TOUCH OF EVIL, CHINATOWN, KISS ME DEADLY and D.O.A. (not the Dennis Quaid/Meg Ryan remake). It includes a few movies I now need to track down (most notably, RIFIFI and GUN CRAZY), and also some surprising choices one otherwise may not have associated with noir (BATMAN BEGINS, BLADE RUNNER, IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE).

For most of the entries, you will get the point instantly; for others, you will require an explanation. Either way, you’ll probably get as hooked reading as I did. A few academic words aside — diegetic? auto-exegesis? metonymy? — their tour is highly accessible, even if you may think some of the points overreach.

For example, in ON THE WATERFRONT, when Eva Marie Saint is surrounded by rooftop antennae that could resemble crucifixes, did director Elia Kazan intend for such symbolism to be present? Or is it all just in Clute’s imagination? The interpretation is up for debate, but the point is to get you actively engaged in the film, rather than watching passively.

Your appreciation is deepened when you think about what you watch, and the authors now have a brand-new listener of their new podcast, OUT OF THE PAST, an episode guide for which appears as an appendix. But read this rather rewarding book first. —Rod Lott

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Richard S. Wheeler applies his formidable skill of combining Western historical events with fiction in THE RICHEST HILL ON EARTH, his latest stand-alone novel. Here, the story surrounds the battle for control of the rich copper mines during the early history of Wheeler’s home state of Montana.

Its city of Butte in the early 1890s may not look like much. In reality, it’s nothing more than a collection of smoky mine boilers and various shabby shacks and buildings, all darkened with air laced with soot and arsenic from the copper smelters.

But certain people know that Butte is a place to make you fortune. One such individual is John Fellows Hall, a newspaper man who arrives in Butte to edit The Butte Mineral, one of the local papers.
 
Hall’s boss is William Andrews Clark, a mining titan who owns the newspaper along with several local businesses, and has an unyielding ambition to become a U.S. Senator so as to bolster his domain. Clark’s main rival, in business and in life, is Marcus Daly, owner of the huge Anaconda Mining Company that also dominates Butte.

A former Irish immigrant, Daly remains faithful to his roots and hires most of the poor immigrants from his homeland the moment they step off the boat to work in his mines and live in his decrepit housing facilities.

But while Clark and Daly fight for power and influence, the young, college-educated Augustus Heinze uses his geological skills — and then his insight into legal tactics — to wrestle ownership and control of the mines away from both of his competitors. Soon, however, his maneuvers come to the attention of the Rockefellers and their dominating Standard Oil Company.
 
Wheeler populates his story not only with such historical figures as Clark, Daly and Heinze, but also fictional ones who populate Butte. These include Alice Brophy, the young widow of a recently killed miner who struggles to feed herself and her children. Finding little support from her husbands’ union brothers, she eventually falls under the spell of the Socialist movement and becomes “Red Alice.”

There is also Royal Maxwell, the local mortician who, while aware of the inevitability that creates the demand for his profession, still fights against the tendency of poor families burying their dead anonymously in Potter’s Field. And there is Slanting Agnes, a woman with psychic gifts who reluctantly uses her power to guide the decisions of Butte’s various small and big business owners.
 
This melding of real and fictional figures and events — portrayed in alternating chapters throughout RICHEST HILL — is wonderfully seamless. Wheeler manages to make every character as believable as those whose life and work are the stuff of history and who shaped the history of Montana.

Not surprisingly, ambition and greed are the main themes and motivating factors of Wheeler’s work and its players. It ranges from the seemingly limitless riches of the mine owners to the day-to-day battle to survive of the mine workers and other Butte residents. It all gets a bit dismal at times, and downright confusing when the author details the many complicated legal procedures Heinze used to create and then maintain his various holdings.
 
It’s also not surprising to learn that the final results of all this greed and ambition are far less than happiness and contentment. Here again, Wheeler spells out the depressing, final days of his entire cast and shows that for all their efforts they remain dim shadows of the past.
 
THE RICHEST HILL ON EARTH ironically reminds us that corporate greed and control of the government — along with the 99 percent who suffer in its wake — is by no means a contemporary phenomenon. This may not have been Wheeler’s intent, but it nonetheless adds another dimension to this fascinating if somewhat downbeat historical novel. —Alan Cranis

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Television writer Michael Dempsey turned novelist with NECROPOLIS, a sci-fi/noir blend published by Night Shade Books. Its protagonist is alcoholic NYPD detective Paul Donner, who, after dying … well, let’s let the author take it from here in this guest feature:

Paul Donner was a Brooklyn police detective who got dead — shot to death in a “random” crime. But 50 years later, Donner was back — revived courtesy of the Shift, a process whereby inanimate DNA was re-activated. This new “reborn” underclass was not only alive again, they were growing younger, destined for a second childhood. The freakish side-effect of a retroviral attack on New York, the Shift had turned the world upside down.

Quarantined in Necropolis beneath the protective geodesic Blister, clocks ran backwards, technology was hidden behind a noir facade, and you could see Elvis at Radio City Music Hall every night. In this unfamiliar retro-futurist world of flying Studebakers and plasma tommy guns, Donner took on the toughest case he’d ever had: solving his own murder.

But along the way, an unusual romance blossomed between Donner and his holographic “Girl Friday,” Maggie. Donner took a moment to jot down some tips for other reborns like himself who might be new to the romantic ins and outs of dating artificial women:

• • •

Finding out I’d been murdered, then becoming a hated “reeb” detective in some strange retro future where everyone talks like a reject from a Raymond Chandler novel … well, it took the wind out of my sails at first. I mean, a dead mafia stool pigeon I could handle, but guns that fired plasma bullets? I handled it bad at first … too much hooch, too many smokes (I know, I know, they’re illegal — so drop a dime on me to Surazal security, why don’t you?)

On top of that, I met Maggie and was suddenly forced to ponder the subject of dating artificial women. (And I’m not talking about the inflatable kind you get by mail order.) Maggie’s a smarty, of course — local parlance for an artificial intelligence. I learned the hard way that smarties have their own peculiarities, which humans don’t always tumble to. So for all you reborn skirts and shirts out there, here’s my two cents on the subject:

Smarties are people.

If you can’t get past the biological/spiritual/philosophical issues of what AIs are and whether they’re “alive,” stick with humans. Look, I sympathize — I wrestled with this, too. You flirt with her and she blushes. Is it a galvanic skin response triggered by a true emotional reaction, or some clever mechanical facsimile? But all the second-guessing eventually drives you crazy. We’re machines, too, aren’t we? Just biological ones. And who the hell knows what’s “real” anyway in this crazy world? So dive off the high board. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. Date the duck.

Smarties being people also means that they have feelings. They feel anger and confusion and fear, and they cry when you act like an asshole. So don’t act like an asshole.

Avoid smarties who won’t physicalize.

AIs can incorporate in several formats. They can exist simply within the mainframe of a computer or a smart device, as a holographic projection, or as something called a tensile hologram. I had to pick my jaw up off the floor the first time I saw Maggie strutting around a downtown bar in full 3D. In this form, they look, sound and feel the same as you or me. That’s what you want. It’s tough enough to deal with the idea of a person that can morph into whatever shape they want or exist as a floating shadow, so if the AI babe you have your peepers set on isn’t comfortable spending most of her time with two arms, two legs, a head and all the other necessary female attributes, move on. (Oh, and like humans, smarties are conceived down to the genetic level as either male or female, so you don’t have to worry about a smarty fiancée who suddenly decides she wants to be a dude.)

Don’t ask her about her orb.

Tensile holograms can move about freely because they project the nanobits of plasma and light and whatever else makes up their physical form (I’m no scientist) from a floating orb inside themselves. It looks like a grapefruit-sized ball bearing, but you’ll probably never see it. Smarties are very sensitive about their orbs. To them it’s the equivalent of their heart and soul. It’s a personal issue they generally don’t share with humans, so no matter how curious you are, avoid the topic unless she brings it up. But should she be comfortable enough to raise the issue — buddy boy, you’re in like Flynn! It means she really trusts you. In my adventures, I had the experience of having Maggie materialize around me, with me holding her orb against my chest, and well … It was the most intimate moment of my life.

Be confident.

Women like confident men. Smarty women go beyond this — they simply don’t understand men who are insecure about themselves. Think about it. Clearly a smarty woman likes the way she looks, because she chose that look! And she knows she’s intelligent — there’s no such thing as a stupid smarty. (If she’s giggling, batting her lashes and doing the dumb broad routine, it’s an act. Flee.) So be confident. But skip the macho routine — they don’t like it, and despite being pacifists they could break you in half anyway, so leave your inner caveman at home.

There are times, though, when a smarty can be as insecure as any human female. Maggie stammered and fidgeted like a school girl around me at first — not because she didn’t feel she was interesting and attractive, but because she was afraid that I wouldn’t find her interesting and attractive. If that sounds like a contradiction, welcome to the wonderful world of the female.

Be honest about yourself.

If you’re a reeb, be a reeb. I know this is hard in a city where Surazal security could drag you into an alley and beat you senseless just because you came back from the dead, but it’ll go a long way to demonstrating you have the self-confidence necessary to keep up with your date. You have white hair, black fingernails and golden eyes. So what? Skip the contacts and the Just For Reborn Men hair color kit and you’ll earn extra points. Plus, smarties have senses so attuned that they’re pretty much walking lie detectors anyway, so they’ll catch you in a fib every damn time. So if you’re thinking about setting up housekeeping with a bimbo chippy on the side in some secret Hell’s Kitchen cold water flat, think again, soldier.

Don’t try to impress her with your technical savvy.

You might think throwing around phrases like “nanoplasmatic membrane” and “buckypaper lattice” will demonstrate that you’re sensitive and deeply fascinated by what it means to be an AI, but she knows more about what makes her tick than any human ever will, so nix the techno-babble small talk. Too her, it’s just a load of hooey. Besides, the Singularity Point that was the threshold of sentience in machines is a mystery wrapped in an enigma, anyway. So stick to things you know. Unless it’s sports or hunting. Smarty women don’t get sports or hunting.

Make sure she’s not a fleshpot freak.

Smarties come in all types, just like humans, and while they’re all nonviolent, some of them can still be a little … twisted. They can develop sexual fetishes, and some of them get really hung up on having sex with humans — “fleshpots,” as we’re sometimes called by the cruder AIs. A smarty who’s only into you because you’re biological is not the basis for a healthy relationship. You wouldn’t want a human girl who only screwed midgets, would you? Don’t be a sap.

Oh, and stay away from holowhores. The idea of a women who will look like, and do, whatever you want may sound appealing, but you just feel cheap in the morning.

Learn how to make love to a hologram.

That’s really a whole other article, but suffice it to say, there are similarities and differences, and you’d better know what they are. The good news is, there are more similarities than differences. The bad news is, if you haven’t located the human clitoris yet, you’re gonna be shit out of luck with smarties, too …

Leave the bling at home.

So you wear the town’s nattiest snap-brim fedora, carry a nickel-plated snub nose .38 and tool around in a maglev Studebaker with chromium pylons. So what? Smarty women aren’t impressed with material possessions. They don’t need you to take care of them, or keep them in mink stoles, or be a good provider for a harem of kids. They’re as independent as modern human females, and there’s not even any vestigial DNA instinct urging them to find the alpha male. They care about deeper things. For some reason, Maggie took a shine to me, and it wasn’t because I’m the high pillow or drive a fancy flivver. She claimed it was because I have this schoolboy reverence of truth, justice and the American way. I smirked and replied, “That’s me. Supercorpse. Up, up and decay.” She liked that. Smarties have great senses of humor.

Compliment her clothes.

She’s a smarty, but she’s still a woman, right?

So there you go. I’m just a small-time shamus learning his way around again, so I’m no expert. But it’s what I’ve learned. Now I’ve got to go find my murderer. And make him pay.

And brother, he will pay. —Michael Dempsey

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William Peter Blatty’s novel THE EXORCIST recently earned a hardcover reissue from HarperCollins in a 40TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION. To celebrate, a few BOOKGASM staffers weighed in on their experiences with the book and, naturally, the Oscar-winning movie it spawned. Turns out we need to read more.

I’ve never seen THE EXORCIST. And I realize that makes me a giant pussy. I started watching it once. At a Halloween party in high school (circa 1987). And it scared the shit out of me. I’ve heard all about the pea-soup vomit and the spinning-head stuff — the stuff that entered the pop-culture lexicon and, if you really think about it, it’s pretty effed up that it did, you know? 1973 was strange, glorious times.

I am easily disturbed. I’d watch a great white shark eat poor little Alex Kintner on a 24-hour loop if I could, and I got a huge visceral kick (pun intended) watching Ryan Gosling stomp a dude’s head in during DRIVE last year. But the super-creepy, disturbing stuff crawls under my skin and I just can’t take it. Not even naked Maria Bello has gotten me to watch any David Cronenberg after suffering through EXISTENZ and I don’t know if I’ll try THE EXORCIST again anytime soon.

It scared the shit out of me so much that I’ve never finished watching it — that may be the best possible compliment one can give a movie like it. —Brian Winkeler

• • •

THE EXORCIST is a story that I’m only familiar with in regards to the movie. Never read the book, and never had a desire to read the book. I’ve had people tell me that the movie scared the bejeezus out of them, but when I finally caught it on cable (again, as a kid), it didn’t appear to be, you know, “all that.” I liked it, certainly. But scary? Not compared to modern horror. Of course, stuff that scared me as a kid seems tame compared to today’s horror. But anyway …

THE EXORCIST is an enjoyable film and has an underlying tension that builds and builds, unlike modern horror, which tends to rely on special effects and shock tactics. I would catch it on cable from time to time, and especially loved it when it would air on Joe Bob Briggs’ cable show because of his commentary and factoids about it. I still dig it, and fondly recall the clever dialogue between the demon and the priest: “What a wonderful day for an exorcism.” —Slade Grayson

• • •

Everyone was reading THE EXORCIST the summer it was first published in paperback, including those who I knew hated horror fiction. So naturally, I avoided it. When I finally got around to reading, I knew I hadn’t missed much for putting it off.

But obviously, its uncanny popularity, bolstered by the success of the William Friedkin movie adaptation, paved the way for the endless cycle of novels and movies about demonic possession that followed, much like THE DA VINCI CODE and the TWILIGHT books would later do for their respective themes. —Alan Cranis

• • •

Before I popped in the VHS rental of THE EXORCIST in the early ’80s, my mom told me it was the one movie she would never watch again. Suitably impressed, I proceeded through the film underwhelmed. My lesson was to always expect every film to be a turd, and most of the time you’ll be either satisfied or impressed. But at least THE EXORCIST pointed me towards Blatty’s THE NINTH CONFIGURATION, a wonderfully nutty film which the author has sometimes called the true sequel to the Friedkin movie. —JT Lindroos

• • •

I have never read William Peter Blatty’s THE EXORCIST, but it sucks. I know this because I have seen the film version and it sucks. I realize this opinion puts me in the minority, but the majority opinion sucks, too. Sucks. Sucks. Sucks.

The only thing that doesn’t suck is Linda Blair, who’s one of my favorite B-movie actresses, which makes the fact that she’s so closely associated with the worst film on her résumé so hard to bear. And, yes, I stand by that last sentence’s suggestion that THE EXORCIST is a worse film than ZAPPED AGAIN!, REPOSSESSED, NIGHT PATROL and SORCERESS. How could I possibly justify such an obviously wrong-headed opinion? Because those films are merely terrible, while THE EXORCIST is terrible, pretentious and fucking boring at the same time!

And do you know what isn’t fucking boring? THE EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC. That movie is awesome. If I ever find a copy of the novelization of that (I’m sure it had to exist at some point), I’d totally read the shit out of it and offer my thoughts in an insightful BOOKGASM review. Bet you can’t wait. Suckers. —Allan Mott

• • •

Every year in Oklahoma City, the library system has a huge sale of donated books at the state fairgrounds. In junior high, I went once, and it’s where my mom bought me paperbacks of THE EXORCIST, David Seltzer’s THE OMEN, Jay Anson’s THE AMITYVILLE HORROR, and other books for movies I hadn’t yet seen. (Also in that stack that day was Blatty’s nonfiction paperback ON THE EXORCIST: FROM NOVEL TO FILM, which I never read and wish I still had.)

I’d certainly heard about THE EXORCIST’s most notorious scenes at the time. So of course, when I get home, one of the first things I did was find how on Earth a guy would depict masturbating with a crucifix in print. It wasn’t tough to find.

That said, I never completed reading it until about 15 years later. While the book didn’t have the power as the movie, I can’t imagine one without the other. Blatty stuck pretty close to his work when adapting it for the screen. It still boggles me they actually gave him an Oscar for it; I mean, I’m glad, but did Hollywood realize it was horror? —Rod Lott

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Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth’s THE SPACE MERCHANTS has been hailed as a triumph of science fiction since it was first published in serial form in GALAXY magazine back in 1952 (under the title THE GRAVITY PLANET), and then in book form the following year. It’s rarely out-of-print for long, and is among those works generally considered a science-fiction “classic.”
 
Now, Pohl, the surviving member of the writing duo, has dusted it off, revised it and added a new introduction for this trade-paperback reissue.

The setting is a vastly overpopulated world of the near future where businesses have taken the place of government and hold all political power. In such a world, advertising holds particular importance and influence, and nobody knows that better than Mitch Courtenay, star-class copywriter for the successful Fowler Schocken advertising agency.
 
One morning, during a weekly executive meeting, Fowler Schocken himself announces that the agency has won the coveted Venus account, and Courtenay has been selected to lead the account team. The purpose of the campaign is to lure people to move to Venus and take advantage of its unlimited opportunities for personal and professional success.

In reality, Venus is a barren planet with a brutal climate, but that, of course, is not what the campaign stresses. With the help of Schocken’s interrelated service-industry clients, the ads will promise the Venus colonists a luxurious life of unlimited potential.
 
It’s an account that could make Courtenay’s career, and one literally worth killing for. So it isn’t long before his life is threatened and his identity stolen by his firm’s most competitive rival. As Courtenay struggles to regain his identity and find his way back to his headquarters, he discovers that loyalties he relied upon are quickly transferred, and those he thought he could trust are now his enemies.
 
In his new introduction, Pohl recounts the history of the book’s creation and observes at the closing that “the major targets satirized in the 1950s novel are still with us, and that they invite being laughed at now quite as they did then.” Indeed, they have grown almost to the point speculated in the novel. If anything, the ominous overtones of the satire are more threatening some 50 years later.
 
So how exactly did Pohl revise what the cover proclaims as this “21st Century Edition?” A few of the scientific and historical references have been either corrected or updated. Still, Pohl didn’t think to substitute a disc for the “reel” that is inserted into an electronic reader at the end of chapter 3.
 
At the end of the day, the book can’t help but retain its quality as a cautionary glimpse into the future from a little over a half-century ago. First-time readers will inevitably chuckle at some of the mistakenly speculated dialogue, gender roles and the race-to-the-finish ending which even Pohl admits was the standard style of the time.
 
Science-fiction fans who somehow missed reading THE SPACE MERCHANTS should definitely get this new edition. The rest of us can retire our dogged-ear paperback copies and enjoy reading it again in this sturdier, comfortable format. —Alan Cranis

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A while back, The Overlook Press began making the backlist of thriller author R.J. Ellory available to U.S. readers for the first time. The latest offering is A QUIET VENDETTA, originally published in Great Britain in 2005. Fortunately, the passing years have not diminished its impact in the least.
 
On a hot August night in New Orleans, an abandoned car is found with the body of a dead man in the trunk. Police learn that the man, whose death was both brutal and probably ritualistic, was the bodyguard assigned to Catherine Ducane, daughter of the governor of Louisiana. Investigators conclude she has been kidnapped, and await word from the perpetrator to learn his demands for her release.

When the kidnapper finally contacts the police, his demands catch everybody by surprise. Instead of money or a means of escape, he wants time alone with Ray Hartmann, a minor functionary from an organized crime task force. Arrangements are quickly made to pull Hartmann from his troubled life in New York.
 
The kidnapper introduces himself as Ernesto Perez, and wants to tell Hartmann the details of his life and career as a hit man for the mob since the 1950s. Over the next few days, Hartmann learns about the crime bosses Perez worked for and the many notable and anonymous men Perez killed in a career that carried him from his birth in New Orleans, to Havana, Miami, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and eventually back to New Orleans.

Meanwhile, investigators desperately search for the abducted girl, while Hartmann wonders what connection possibly exists between himself and this prolific murderer.
 
From the moment we meet Perez, we see how Ellory plays against expectations. Instead of a wisecracking, semi-literate thug, Perez is a soft-spoken, dapper and obviously cultured man. His story parallels the history of La Cosa Nostra in America, and Perez insists that he was either directly or distantly involved with the Mafia’s role in the deaths of such luminaries as John F. Kennedy and Jimmy Hoffa, as well as other notable events in America’s contemporary history.

It’s a long, detailed saga, but Ellory breaks it up with alternate chapters focusing on Hartmann and his fellow investigators’ interpretation and verification of Perez’s story, along with their frantic search for the daughter who they fear might already be dead.
 
Yet as fascinating as that is, the most striking feature is Ellory’s prose style. Starting with his first sentence, the author immerses us in images and descriptions that are dense, baroque, yet amazingly illuminating. Similarly, almost every character is presented with revealing personal background and insight. It’s a style that positively defies quick reading. Instead, you’ll find yourself admiring and re-reading passages to better appreciate their dark, disturbing effect before moving on to the next.
 
Once you do, you’ll quickly appreciate the subtle, but sturdy pace of the narrative, and enjoy the many twists and surprises Ellory unveils toward the end of the novel, as the truth of Perez’s intentions and his relationship with Hartmann are explained.
 
A QUIET VENDETTA is a fine introduction to Ellory’s work. New readers will quickly see why he is held in such high esteem with critics and crime-fiction fans. They’ll no doubt add their voice to the chorus thanking Overlook Press for making him easier to find on this side of the globe. —Alan Cranis

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Being raised in Oklahoma City instead of New York City, I’d never heard of the FRIGHT NIGHT film showcase that brightened the tube for roughly two decades worth of Saturday nights on WOR-TV. Turns out, such knowledge isn’t needed to enjoy James Arena’s book FRIGHT NIGHT ON CHANNEL 9. As long as you fondly recall battling bedtime to catch a scary movie in the days, you’re going to fine Arena’s ecstatic vibe infectious.

In this paperback, he offers a history and appreciation of said show before digging into the real nitty gritty of an episode guide. Taking up the majority of the 216 pages, this allows Arena to offer capsule reviews on the horror, mystery and sci-fi flicks he consumed.

As he readily admits, many of them sucked. But seeing them at all was part of the fun, because back then — before VHS, DVD or the Internet brought instant gratification — choice was not an option. You took what you were given, and you liked it.

Is there much history behind the program? No, but it does allow Arena to branch off into interviewing producer Sam Sherman, who provided many a package of films for FRIGHT NIGHT, and telling his story (told better with visuals in the excellent new documentary MACHETE MAIDENS UNLEASHED).

Vintage ad mats, lobby cards and stills throughout help sell the nostalgia concept, to the point that I devoured the book as quickly as time allowed. I tired only of reading “Looks like FRIGHT NIGHT was pre-empted for a telethon” way too many times in the date-specific episode guide, but embraced everything else and, to no surprise, came away with a list of two dozen movies I can’t wait to track down. —Rod Lott

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Wow. THE INHERITANCE & OTHER STORIES is exactly the kind of old-school short-story collection one would withdraw from the public library as an adolescent, sit down and read cover to cover, and become spellbound by the possibilities of the literary genre. Megan Lindholm, also writing under that name of Robin Hobb (they are one and the same), has made a perfect collection of 10 short and long pieces, doing it all the right way.

There’s a straightforward preface where she explains the personae of her two authorial selves, and each story opens with an introduction providing greater insight into the writer’s mind. These elements, which I feel are essential to such collections, make the reader feel like the book is really a distillation of the writer’s best work, as opposed to a hastily assembled grab bag of some stuff to which the publisher just happened to have the rights.

From the opening “A Touch of Lavender” (writing as Lindholm) to the closer “Cat’s Meat” (writing as Hobb), the author’s remarkably spare, but emotionally evocative style grabs you, holds you close, and tears you through the twists and turns of her impeccable plotting. That opener is a real stunner, first published in the November 1989 issue of ASIMOV’S SCIENCE FICTION magazine. For collectors, the title story makes its U.S. debut, and there are three new stories: two from Lindholm, and one from Hobb (the final piece, which is also a great entry).

You won’t find tedious, purple descriptive prose here. Instead, Lindholm builds the house of her plot one sentence at a time, with each phrase serving as a nail to keep the structure steady — no wasted words, no flights of fancy. It’s solid writing, pared down to the bare essentials, and it makes her stories captivating.

The raw emotions of the opening and closing tales are deeply felt, and provide a clue to the personal and intimate style of this excellent fantasy writer. If you’re unfamiliar with her work, a collection like THE INHERITANCE would be an excellent place for you to start. —Mark Rose

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Kurt Kamm’s new novel, CODE BLOOD, tracks rookie fire paramedic Colt Lewis through the corridors of high-stakes medical research laboratories, the shadow world of body parts dealers and the underground Goth clubs of Los Angeles, in which he uncovers a tangled maze of needles, drugs and maniacal ritual, all of which lead to death. But what led to writing the book? Here, Kamm gives us the lowdown.

In 2008, I moved to Malibu, California. The city is well known for its beautiful beaches, beautiful people and multimillion-dollar homes. What is less known is that Malibu suffers devastating wildfires on a regular basis. Twelve months of warmth and sunshine every year results in incredible brush growth in the hills.

Shortly after I moved in, a fallen power line and 70-mph winds set off a fire which roared through our canyon. At 4:30 a.m., we had 15 minutes to evacuate. Two homes and a church on my street burned. The fire burned to my front door. A month later, a campfire started a fire in the next canyon that destroyed almost 100 homes and did $500 million in damage.

I decided I had to learn about the lives of firefighters.

Since 2008, I have been privileged to spend time with the Los Angeles County Fire Department and CalFire. Both organizations have let me attend their training academies, meet their personnel, do ride-alongs, and face some real fires.

I went through the training academy at Camp 8, where wildland firefighters are based with Blackhawk fire helicopters for quick response. I have visited Camp 13, where female inmates are trained to respond to wildfires. The result was my book ONE FOOT IN THE BLACK: A WILDLAND FIREFIGHTER’S STORY. This was a story about a young man who trains at Camp 8 and loses his captain in a burnover on a mountainside.

I had the opportunity to attend a weeklong CalFire training session for arson investigators, and had the chance to go out into the field with LA County arson investigators as well. As a result, I was able to write RED FLAG WARNING: A SERIAL ARSON MYSTERY. This story tells of a deranged arsonist trying to burn down Malibu. (There are people like that!)

I have just finished a stint with the fire paramedics, riding with them, visiting emergency rooms at local hospitals, the county morgue, and the UCLA Paramedic Training Center. As a result, I was able to write CODE BLOOD, my new novel about a fire paramedic who loses his first patient in an accident where her foot is severed and cannot be found. He sets out to find it and discovers an underworld in Los Angeles.

I am now attending hazardous material response classes and am writing my fourth novel, HAZARDOUS MATERIAL, about a firefighter who gets involved with biker gangs and meth labs.

I have had the incredible good fortune to spend time with hundreds of first responders. They are all dedicated, hard-working people whose mission is to save and help others. As a result, I have written books about these people based on my experiences. I’m writing what I know … and I am learning every day. —Kurt Kamm

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I’d like to report that OF MUSCLES AND MEN: ESSAYS ON THE SWORD & SANDAL FILM is as much fun as it sounds. Instead, like a good chunk of the so-named peplum genre, it can’t live up to the hyperbolic art — in this case, not a poster, but a book cover.

Published by McFarland and edited by Michael G. Cornelius, the compilation of a dozen pieces sure seems like a ball. Just glance at some of the titles listed in the table of contents: “Homer’s Lies, Brad Pitt’s Thighs” and “By Jupiter’s Cock!” With rare exception — such as David Simmons’ aforementioned “Cock!” piece, which focuses on the campy cable hit SPARTACUS: BLOOD AND SAND — the essays take both their subjects and themselves too seriously.

Are Steve Reeves’ starring vehicle of HERCULES and its sequels and imitators really worth dissecting? Or are they merely just B movies with no intent but to entertain? Maria Elena D’Amelio thinks the former, batting about terms like “fascist” and “autochthonous.” I highly doubt the filmmakers were thinking about addressing the Marshall Plan or responding to the death of Mussolini — certainly they were just out to shit screenplays that would make a buck. (And, no, I don’t have a reference to cite.)

The same goes for The Three Stooges movie in which they MEET HERCULES, which Daniel O’Brien discusses in terms of how the comic team parodies the masculine man, as if that didn’t already exist on the surface.

Cornelius may be the biggest offender, reading far too much into children’s action figures in “Beefy Guys and Brawny Dolls: He-Man, the Masters of the Universe, and Gay Clone Culture.” All kids’ dolls are without genitalia, sir; it doesn’t mean He-Man can’t please She-Ra.

It is tough to take Cornelius seriously from the start since, in his introduction, he makes some startling errors — not typos, but sore-thumb errors — that undermine his authority, from misspelling the name of BEASTMASTER director Don Coscarelli to saying that GLADIATOR won a Best Director Oscar. —Rod Lott

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Southern California-based journalist Nicholas Schou’s ORANGE SUNSHINE, now out in paperback, tells the fantastic but true story of how a group of small-time thugs were transformed by drug-induced spiritual awakenings and set out to essentially turn on the entire world — along the way becoming the most successful and sophisticated drug cartel in the U.S.

At the center of the story is John Griggs, a charismatic young man living in Orange County, with a petty criminal record and a love for getting high. Somewhere along the line, he discovered LSD, which altered the course of his life. He considered his hallucinogenic trip a religious experience, and the drug became his religious sacrament.

Inspired by the writings of Timothy Leary, Griggs soon gathered a group of like-minded friends together and formed weekly gatherings at a building in the woods near Laguna Beach to drop acid while reading passages from Leary’s books.
 
The group grew in size and influence, soon calling itself the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Not long after, their activities diversified as well. They founded the Mystic Arts World, a combination art gallery/head shop/meditation center in Laguna Beach. But several members also got into drug dealing, which eventually escalated into full-scale smuggling operations bringing high-grade marijuana into California from Mexico, and even extra-strength hashish from as far away as Kandahar, Afghanistan.
 
When regular supplies and the expected effectiveness of LSD dried up, the Brotherhood developed its own ultra-potent strain, dubbed Orange Sunshine. Money from its various smuggling activities funded the manufacture of Orange Sunshine, which became so prevalent that it was literally handed out on the street, at various rock concerts, and even air-dropped over the massive crowd attending a Woodstock-like festival.

Through it all, even in the midst of its complex drug runs, Griggs insisted that the mission of the Brotherhood was to bring spiritual enlightenment to the country. But the Brotherhood soon became notorious as an illicit drug organization, especially to the law enforcement officers in the surrounding John Birch-inspired conservative Orange County, who were determined to bust the entire group.
 
The well-worn phrase that “anyone who says they remember the Sixties probably wasn’t there” is easy to believe, considering the phenomenal amount of drugs ingested during the short amount of time recalled here. But during his four-year search, Schou was fortunate enough to track down many of the surviving Brotherhood members, as well as their law-enforcement nemeses, who were willing to recall those often frantic, hazy days (although some agreed only if they remained anonymous, fearing personal or legal ramifications to this day).
 
The result is a fascinating, at times hilarious and frightening account of what drove the so-called hippie movement and its whole “Peace, Love & Music” ambience in California through the mid-to-late 1960s. A few celebrities figure in the retelling, most prominently the dubious role of Leary, but also Jimi Hendrix and few others who drifted in and out of the Brotherhood’s circle.

Sadly, however, as the group’s founding philosophical basis went up in smoke — assisted by the sinister presence of cocaine — the final chapters of the book become a series of drug busts, resulting in some Brotherhood members turning state’s evidence and ratting out on each other.
 
ORANGE SUNSHINE is highly recommended to those who both grew up during this strange but ultimately influential time, as well as those curious about what went on during that period referred to both nostalgically and ominously as “The Sixties.” Few actually knew just how long and truly strange a trip it had been. —Alan Cranis

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One would think with the title BRUCE LEE, WOODSTOCK AND ME that film producer Fred Weintraub’s memoir would be right up the movie lover’s alley. And part of it is, but overall, it deals more with his less-public days as music manager than any other topic. Therefore, audiophiles with a love for pop of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s will get more from it than fans of chopsocky.

I fall in the group of the latter, and agree with Weintraub that his all-or-nothing crap shoot of mounting an international production intended to make Bruce Lee a household name on this side of the globe, ENTER THE DRAGON, is the best martial-arts movie ever made.

Perhaps sensing its enduring popularity, Weintraub begins his nonlinear autobio with a chapter dedicated to just that. While heaping praise upon Lee’s talent, Weintraub doesn’t put on blinders, either, acknowledging the star’s private faults, from chewing cannabis and regularly cheating on his wife, to the Hulk-like ego that would emerge whenever Bruce got ticked off, which turned out to be a lot.

More problematic was simply the shoot, where language barriers were only one problem. There was also the disappearing couch and the shitting birds, but the details of those stories are best left for the reader to discover. With those, and the entirely of the book, Weintraub emerges as one with a gift for turning conversations and you-had-to-be-there anecdotes into genuine storytelling. It helps, too, that he’s not above making himself look foolish.

The gamble of ENTER THE DRAGON paid off, and so did WOODSTOCK, the landmark music documentary/concert film that likely wouldn’t have happened without the passionate, 11th-hour support and assistance of Weintraub, who, having music management under his belt, knew the potential gold mine of the material. The behind-the-scenes battle to get that made reads more wrought with obstacles than DRAGON, and they continued well after the footage was in the can.

With a few pages dedicated to the forgettable Tom Selleck aviator adventure, HIGH ROAD TO CHINA, and Steve McQueen’s late-career TOM HORN, that’s about it for the movies Weintraub discusses at length. Absent, minus perhaps a line or two here and there, are the other actioners I wanted so bad to read about, including the notorious GYMKATA, the all-but-forgotten FORCE: FIVE, the killer dogs of THE PACK, Jim Kelly’s blaxploitation turn in HOT POTATO, the utterly bizarre GOLDEN NEEDLES and the early American Jackie Chan vehicle BATTLE CREEK BRAWL, all of which found him reunited with DRAGON director Robert Clouse.

Instead, Fred delves into his other career, managing acts like Mama Cass, Neil Diamond and Bill Cosby, and running a music club. And what do you think was more dangerous for Weintraub: escaping Cuba or working with Amy Irving? As with many of his tales, the answer may surprise you. —Rod Lott

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In these twilight days of the mass-market paperback, I was delighted to see a honest-to-goodness flying-saucer paperback with appropriate hyperbole on its cover:

“Shocking accounts of UFOs observed during times of conflict.”

“Includes Incredible Photographs of UFO Sightings!”

If you have any interest in Fortean topics, that has got to warm the cockles of your heart. Having grown up in the 1970s with an eye toward the oddball and the obscure, this was what most of these books did.

Whether it was Trevor James Constable claiming to have solved the enigma of observed unidentified flying objects using Wilhelm Reich’s cloudbusters (they were really amoeba-like plasma creatures inhabiting the upper atmosphere, flickering in and out of human visual range) or T. Lobsang Rampa, the Tibetan Lama who just happened to inhabit the body of a British plumber in order to write his autobiography, THE THIRD EYE, and its increasingly peculiar sequels.

Now having actually read this current book in question, Mack Maloney’s UFOS IN WARTIME, I’m somewhat shocked at how decent a little paperback it actually is.

There is very little original research to it. It’s written by a military fiction novelist. There are no incredible photographs inside.

But at the same time, it’s affordable and easily available. It’s paced well, written in a crisp and clear manner. It collects accounts from numerous sources and draws lines between them to compile a substantial amount of fairly credible information in between its covers. As such, it already knocks out 90 percent of its competition.

That the author refuses to give any answers to the puzzle, but simply presents a parade of stories from antiquity to the first Gulf War, makes it far more believable than any of the researcher preachers who are spouting their alien-infested opinions as gospel.

Maloney’s credibility is further boosted by his willingness to dismiss popular stories like Roswell as unlikely at best. That’s not an opinion to inflate the sales among the believers.

In essence, UFOS IN WARTIME simply points out that there is a long history of recorded observations of peculiar aerial objects by mankind. It promotes the crazy concept that it might be worth looking into, and not just make automatic mockery of it simply because of the multitude of loonies attached to the field. It follows in the footsteps of serious researchers like Jacques Vallee, Keith Chester and Leslie Kean, and adds to the chorus of honest curiosity.

This is not about little green (or gray) men doing proctological exams. It’s not about the reptilian overlords of the universe. It’s not even about any government conspiracy. It’s simply about considering the massive wealth of reliable and not-so-reliable witnesses observing something they can’t explain.

So even if UFOS IN WARTIME isn’t a “great” book even in the small field of Forteana, it’s an eminently readable gateway drug, and quite possibly the last mass-market paperback of its kind. —JT Lindroos

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Pop-music critic and novelist Jim Fusilli first featured the fictional city of Narrows Gate in short stories published over the last several years. Now it is at the heart of the full-length NARROWS GATE, a sprawling, fictional retelling of the formative days of the Italian-based organized crime scene on the East Coast in the years surrounding World War II.

As the waterfront town just outside of New York City, the titular site plays home to three protagonists. William “Bebe” Rosiglino is a skinny, awkward young man who doesn’t show much promise of anything, until the day he discovers his singing voice. From that moment on, music becomes his passion and his sole motivation.

Pushed ahead by his dominating mother, who isn’t afraid to call in favors from her influential family members to bolster her “beautiful boy’s” career, Bebe changes his name to Bill Marsala. Before long, he is making hit records and causing young girls to swoon at his concerts. But as his success grows, so does his ego and arrogance, which threaten his career and reputation with those family members responsible for everything he has.
 
Sal Benno and Leo Bell grew up with Bebe, but their lives go in completely different directions. Sal supports himself with odd jobs for family members. Eventually, he is called upon to make certain “deliveries,” and becomes unwittingly involved in the family’s criminal activities.

Leo is by far the more bookish of the two, and his academic skills come to the attention of the Office of Strategic Services — a predecessor of the CIA — which enlists him to do intelligence research with the promise of funds to further his education.

Then, Leo is assigned to use his knowledge and connections in Narrows Gate to collect and report information about suspected members of the crime mob who are now considered threats to the U.S, government. Sal becomes his main source of this information, but it isn’t long before this dual life and subtle series of betrayals take their toll on Leo.
 
It doesn’t take much to see that Fusilli’s NARROWS GATE is a fictional stand-in for Hoboken, N.J. Hence, before much of the book’s first section is over, it is easy to see that Marsala is the author’s “warts and all” retelling of the Frank Sinatra story. As such, it makes a full third of the novel’s events unfortunately predicable.
 
By far the more compelling portions deal with Sal and Leo, as the mob world around them fights for power and dominance, carrying these two men in its wake. Sal wonders if he will ever be fully trusted by the men he serves under, men he has known all of his life. Leo knows the inevitable danger in store for his closest friend, but he also knows that there is just so much he can reveal to Sal without risking his cover.
 
Fusilli’s prose is low-key and subtle, giving a haunting ambience to the violence that often occurs as the various players shift their rankings within the mob. But it is his knowledge and insight of popular music that truly distinguish the Marsala portions. We see and understand the influences to Marsala’s music and how he tried to work these influences into an unmistakable style of phrasing and melody. We may already know where this story is headed, but these moments remind us of the talent that was too often overshadowed by the insecurities and self-damaging behavioral antics.
 
NARROWS GATE can’t help but remind readers of Mario Puzo and the cinematic reinterpretations of his and other chroniclers of organized crime by the likes of Martin Scorsese. It is only when you look closer that you see the subtle narrative differences and emotional depth that separate Fulsilli from other stories covering these same times and events.
 
These differences, along with the indisputable pleasure of having Fusilli back in his storytelling mode, are why NARROWS GATE, at the end of the day, comes highly recommended. —Alan Cranis

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What’s been going on at our sister site, Flick Attack, “hitting you with one random movie a day … whether you like it or not”? Here’s just a sampling of what you’ve missed:

• COWBOYS & ALIENS & severe boredom
• Susan Lucci offers viewers an INVITATION TO HELL
• a 1960 adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s THE TELL-TALE HEART
• the holiday slasher DON’T OPEN TILL CHRISTMAS, which is like if PIECES had a Christmas special
• the hottest Natalie Wood has ever been, in the comedy PENELOPE
• THE WAY OF THE GUN, unfortunately featuring an emergency C-section of Juliette Lewis
• Mickey Rourke backflipping his way out of Danny Trejo’s line of fire in POINT BLANK
• another PARANORMAL ACTIVITY knock-off in the lame GRAVE ENCOUNTERS
• another PARANORMAL ACTIVITY knock-off in Spain’s decent ATROCIOUS
• TUCKER & DALE VS. EVIL, and you win!
• Lucio Fulci’s HOUSE OF CLOCKS, where an early scene depicts a woman being stabbed in the hoohah, and her baby-making parts — looking not unlike bait-shop wares — spill out
• Tony Danza being out-acted by orangutans in GOING APE!

How many more reasons do you need?

Damn you, Danny Shipka! Damn you and your new book, PERVERSE TITILLATION!

I mean, the book is a fantastic read, but it really added to my already too-long list of movies that I need to see and/or buy. For a book on films, threatening to take up much of future free time is the highest compliment I can give. And I’m going to be killing a lot of hours consuming these titles. So, again, damn you!

This one delivers on its subtitle as a journey through the revolutionary “Eurocult” genre of (in descending order of influence) Italy, Spain and France, with particular attention paid to its respective directorial titans, such as Mario Bava, Jess Franco and Jean Rollin. Italy’s reign comprises the first half.

Whether you’re a cover-to-cover reader or more of a reference looker-upper, TITILLATION should satisfy both, as Shipka’s sub-chapters for each country first give a lively, lengthy historical overview, then end with capsule reviews for the titles discussed. Note this is not a definitive video guide, but an excellent, big-picture look.

While not as outré or global-encompassing as Pete Tombs’ seminal MONDO MACABRO or IMMORAL TALES, Shipka’s book is one blast of an overseas trip. Don’t expect it to be academic, since it bears the McFarland & Company Inc. name — yes, it has footnotes and a healthy bibliography, but it is fun above all else. The wealth of poster art helps justify the admittedly high price, but this is one I’ll never get rid of. —Rod Lott

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True reading, as the late Jorge Luis Borges once observed, is actually re-reading. This is a crucial part of the criteria I use when considering my list of favorite readings from the past year: not only how much I enjoyed reading it the first time, but more importantly, if it is among those select titles that I look forward to reading again. With that in mind, in no particular order:
 
THE CUT by George Pelecanos — This introduced a new series character and recalled the vigor missed in some recent stand-alone works.
 
HEADSTONE by Ken Bruen — To date, this is the darkest of the Jack Taylor series, just when you thought they couldn’t get any darker.
 
FUN & GAMES / HELL & GONE by Duane Swierczynski — I’m cheating a bit here with two titles in a single entry, but these two-thirds of Swierczynski’s madcap, relentlessly paced Charlie Hardie trilogy were undeniable delights.
 
A LITTLE TOO MUCH by John Shannon — Jack Liffey may be getting older, but his professional and private life shows no signs of easing up — nor does this excellent series by this unforgivably overlooked author.
 
THE OUTLAW ALBUM by Daniel Woodrell — Various criminal activities and the weight of family highlight this first collection of short fiction by the renowned novelist of WINTER’S BONE.
 
THE GENTLEMAN’S HOUR by Don Winslow — The combination of dark and light elements displayed so expertly in his standout SAVAGES actually has its basis in this DAWN PATROL sequel, finally published in the U.S. this past year.
 
A DROP OF THE HARD STUFF by Lawrence Block — This maestro of crime fiction can still move us as he proves in this recalling of Matt Scudder’s early years of hard-fought sobriety.
 
THE END OF EVERYTHING by Megan Abbott — Proves conclusively that Abbott, along with Laura Lippman, is one of the few crime-fiction authors bound for acclaim by mainstream literature critics and readers.
 
THE URBAN FANTASY ANTHOLOGY edited by Peter S. Beagle and Joe R. Lansdale — Perhaps the oddest editorial paring results in a collection of stories that is as surprisingly illustrative as it is entertaining in this highly misunderstood, but potent subgenre.

COWBOYS by Gary Phillips and Brian Hurtt — Demonstrates how a graphic novel can effectively and memorably present a complex and involving story when using the talents of one of crime fiction’s finest and most underrated authors, along with an artist who knows the cinematic potential of the medium. —Alan Cranis

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Best Nonfiction 
A ROCKET IN MY POCKET, Max Decharne’s energetic, in-depth appreciation of rockabilly manages to cover the genre from both personal and historical angle. It roams from detailing one-shot curios like Jerry “The Phantom” Lott to excavating the genius of Charlie Feathers. That it spends time appreciating the Tav Falco and The Cramps is just icing on the BBQ. Superbly paced and deeply appreciative of the more eccentric side of the field, this book is all killer, no filler.

Also, given my interest in the oddball fringe sciences and forteana, there’s no time like now to mention the book I’m currently reading: Jeffrey J. Kripal’s MUTANTS & MYSTICS: SCIENCE FICTION, SUPERHERO COMICS, AND THE PARANORMAL. It spends a dozen pages on Philip K. Dick’s pink-beam experience, hops over to compare John Keel to Jack Kirby with uncanny insights, wanders about into psychedelic research and Ray Palmer’s connection to the UFO subculture while pondering on the connective tissue between paranormal and religious experiences and how they often are linked to creative genius (Dick, Barry Windsor-Smith, Grant Morrison and Alan Moore, to name just a few). I’ll be spending quality time with this beautifully designed tome, but it’s by far the most fascinating book on any subject I’ve had a chance to read this year.

Best Euro Comics
More than anything else, I read comic books and graphic novels this year. Among the many greats out this year, Luke Pearson’s delightful HILDA AND THE MIDNIGHT GIANT stands on the top of the heap. This large-size hardcover from Nobrow is, whether it sells a million copies or not, a rare case of an instant all-ages classic. If you enjoy Miyazaki-style whimsy and can find a copy, grab it.

Cinebook kept its pace of publishing an array of classic bandes-dessinees in affordable editions. THE EMPIRE OF A THOUSAND PLANETS by Jean-Claude Mezieres and Pierre Christin was one of the many highlights of the season, eclipsed only by the latest Blake & Mortimer adventure, GONDWANA SHRINE, (which may be the best episode yet in this 65-year old series!) from Yves Sante and Andre Juillard.

Fantagraphics continued its Jacques Tardi lineup, and I was particularly delighted by the proto-steampunk THE ARCTIC MARAUDER, although I think one should own every single book in the series. I was also happy to see some less well-known artists get their chance, and both SIBYL-ANNE VS. RATTICUS by R. Macherot and MURDER BY HIGH TIDE by Maurice Tilleux were wonderful surprises in the classic Franco-Belgian “bigfoot” style. Fantagraphics is quickly becoming the Criterion Collection of comics publishing.

Humanoids spearheaded its METAL HURLANT-inspired lineup with a reprint of THE COMPLETE INCAL by Moebius and Alexandro Jodorowsky, but the new Jodo-penned Western, BOUNCER, was almost equally wonderful. I couldn’t afford some of Humanoids’ ultra-deluxe reprints and am waiting for some trade-edition treats out next year.

Finally, Rebellion brought several classic 2000 AD books to the US market, including the JUDGE DREDD COMPLETE CASE FILES series. As wonderful as those were, I was taken off-guard by HONDO-CITY LAW which compiled numerous adventures set in the Japanese equivalent of Dredd’s Mega City. Despite having numerous different artists, the contents were uniformly great and give me enduring hope for the future of this long-standing UK publication.

All of these publishers, except for Fantagraphics, seem to be coming in under the radar in the U.S., and I’d urge you to seek out and investigate each and every one.

Best e-books
I’m biased. Go Blasted Heath. So sue me.

And the WORST of the year?
All the books I didn’t bother finishing. You know who you are. —JT Lindroos

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I know my column has been dormant for a while. You can post all the blame on all the great reissues that have come out this past year. Once again, it’s time to pick out books and other items for the holiday season — not for friends and family, but you, for all the gift cards and money you got as presents.

1. WALT DISNEY’S DONALD DUCK: LOST IN THE ANDES by Carl Barks — Bar none, this is the one book that should be bought by all. This is the first in what Fantagraphics promises will be the definitive reissue line. All you need to know is this: Carl Barks. The man who is Donald Duck comics. Everyone in the family will enjoy this one.

2. KAMANDI, THE LAST BOY ON EARTH OMNIBUS: VOLUME ONE / THE STEVE DITKO OMNIBUS: VOLUME ONE — These two books are part of DC Comics’ never-ending reissue series of classic material. First up, you get KAMANDI, Jack Kirby’s post-apocalyptic tale of the last boy on the planet Earth. The book collects the first 20 issues of Kirby’s run of this truly out-there series. Hopefully, we won’t have to wait for a VOLUME TWO. The second book is all Steve Ditko, collecting his work on SHADE, THE CHANGING MAN and his foray into sword and sorcery in the series THE STALKER. Ditko’s OMNIBUS VOLUME TWO comes out mid-January and will serve as a great complement.

3. CAPTAIN PHILIP STRANGE: STRANGE WAR by Donald E. Keyhoe — For the pulp lovers out there, this novel is a no-brainer. I’ll just leave it at this description: biplanes vs. dinosaurs. ‘Nuff said.

4. SHOWCASE PRESENTS: DOC SAVAGE — Part of DC’s budget line of reprints, this book collects all the Marvel Magazine stories from the 1970s in one big, 448-page paperback. Note that it only collects the comics, and none of the accompanying articles that were part of the original magazine.

5. KISS ME DEADLY / THE KILLING — Ah, Criterion Collection: You rarely disappoint. It’s also put out two noir classics this past year. First up is the best of all the movies made from a Mickey Spillane novel, KISS ME DEADLY. Second, THE KILLING is one of the earlier efforts from Stanley Kubrick and one that truly holds up with its tight-knit storytelling and plot. Both are packed with plenty of extras to keep a viewer coming back for more.

6. THE OUTFIT — Probably one of the better adaptations of a Richard Stark (aka Donald E. Westlake) book. This one is filled with a who’s who of B-movie wonders, including who Westlake considered the best performance of a Parker-like character in Robert Duvall. This is a straight-up crime film which does not cater to the artsy-fartsy crowd. I like POINT BLANK, but let’s be honest: THE OUTFIT is far superior. Our editor, Rod, likes it, too.

7. MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000, VOL. XXI: MST3K VS. GAMERA — All the GAMERA films that were given the MST3K treatment in one handy box set. Sadly, the DELUXE EDITION tin is already out-of-print. But the standard edition still has all five films together — fun for all movie monster-loving fans. And, of course, Mike Nelson’s impression of a certain piano player is classic:

8. THOR BY WALTER SIMONSON OMNIBUS / X-STATIX OMNIBUS — So you’ve got some money burning in your pocket and you love comics? These two Marvel Comics hardcovers are worth the time and wait for them to be collected in such a fashion. First up is probably the greatest run of THOR ever, all of Simonson’s work, which introduced us to fan favorites Beta Ray Bill and Frog Thor. Meanwhile, X-STATIX is the complete run of the comic which went out on a limb in all senses. Imagine a team of mutants more concerned with fame and fortune than saving the day. The book is filled with Mike Allred’s Pop Art-like comic work with fill-ins by the likes of Darwyn Cooke and Paul Pope.

9. THE DARK TOWER OMNIBUS by Peter David, Robin Furth and Anthony Flamini — On that note, our editor, Rod, weighs in with this pick: “Based on arguably Stephen King’s most popular work, Marvel Comics’ THE DARK TOWER OMNIBUS certainly will appeal most to those who have digested the man’s series, although doing so is not required (I’m stuck on the third novel myself). This hardcover collection is so absolutely massive at nearly 900 pages that it’s broken up into two volumes, which stand snug in their own slipcase. On their own, the two miniseries runs I’d read previously (like the prequel THE GUNSLINGER BORN) didn’t impress me much, but together like this, their sheer size (not to mention Richard Isanove and Jae Lee’s art) pulls you into the fantasy world like a magnet to the fillings in your teeth. The spider imagery in the SORCERER storyline, in particular, really creeps me out. As these issues fill in the holes and/or expand the mythology of King’s books, Roland Deschain emerges as such a rich character, you can’t wait for HBO to get a hold of this thing. Like a Western dipped in lysergic acid, these lively illustrated tales come chock-full of mutants, killer wolves, nuns, witches and a big ol’ shiny Grapefruit. And that’s just the first book! The second, even bigger volume collects sketches, stories and other miscellaneous material to act like sealant to the new tile flooring.”

10. Captain America hoodie — Okay, so this is not a book or a movie based on a book, but it’s one of the coolest items out there. No one was happier then I when CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER hit the screens. As I sat in the theater waving my “Hail Hydra!” pennant, I wished I was wearing this ultra-cool hoodie. Personally, I’d also like to see an A.I.M. or a Hyrda one done, too. —Bruce Grossman

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Robert Kirkman’s THE WALKING DEAD has grown from an independent comic book series to a mini-industry spawning spin-off novels, action figures, national best-selling graphic novel compilations, and, of course, the hit cable TV series now halfway into its second series (and already renewed for a third). Not surprising then that editor James Lowder and Smart Pop Books have gathered a collection of critical essays to this popular series in its two main forms.
 
What is surprising is how much fun and informative the essays are that comprise TRIUMPH OF THE WALKING DEAD.

Several of the contributions are from academics. But these are professors who obviously spend a good deal of time away from the ivory tower and have observed and written often about the goings-on in popular culture. Thus, Kyle William Bishop of Southern Utah University effectively demonstrates how the use of pathos highlights the terror of the zombies in his essay “The Pathos of THE WALKING DEAD” without a trace of pompous stuffiness.

Likewise, Steven Schlozman, assistant professor at the Harvard Medical School, insightfully shows how science — often the last the bastion of hope in an anxious world — comes up short in the desperate search for what caused the zombie pandemic and its possible cure in “Feel better?”
 
There are also contributions from those who work more directly in the world of genre fiction. Most notable of these is “Take Me to Your Leader,” by novelist Jonathan Maberry — certainly no slouch when it comes to zombie stories. He traces the progression of Rick Grimes, the main protagonist of the series, from a man frantically searching for his family at the outset of the zombie apocalypse to the reliable but often reluctant leader of a tribe of fellow survivors.

Jay Bonansinga reveals his experiences of collaborating with series creator Kirkman while co-authoring the spin-off novels in his “A Novelist and a Zombie Walk into a Bar.” These and several other topics — 15 essays in all — are led off by an appreciative, but all-too-brief foreword by Joe R. Lansdale.
 
TRIUMPH OF THE WALKING DEAD successfully manages to do what any collection of its sort intends: Help us understand why the series is so good (and successful), while enhancing our enjoyment at the same time.
 
It’s highly recommended, with one caveat: Those just now immersing themselves in the graphic novels on which the series is based should be warned that some of the examples used in these essays are unintended spoilers.
 
Then again, think of how impressed your friends will be next time you argue about either the TV or comic series, and you draw references from some of the literary and esoteric sources used in this collection. —Alan Cranis

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I’m a fan of Westerns crossed with fantasy and horror elements. Some people salivate over cyberpunk. Some get giddy over steampunk. Me, I’m a fan of “cowpunk.” (And no, I didn’t coin that phrase. But I’ll certainly take credit if no one else will.)

Joe R. Lansdale is particularly adept at mashing the Western genre with horror, as anyone who has read his JONAH HEX stories from the ’90s can attest. Unfortunately, the filmmakers of the 2010 movie didn’t stick close to that template, deciding instead to do a mash-up of Hex with THE CROW, PUSHING DAISIES and MAXIM lingerie spreads of Megan Fox … but that’s a rant for another time.

My point is, if it’s done well, cowpunk can be a lot of fun. If it’s not done well, you get stuff that looks geared for the made-for-Syfy crowd. Edward M. Erdelac, author of the MERKABAH RIDER series, does it well. However, I must admit, initially there was trepidation on my part.

The series is about a Jewish mystic gunfighter on the trail of his former teacher turned murderous traitor, who encounters various supernatural menaces throughout the west as he struggles to catch up with his old mentor and get his revenge. It’s equal parts KUNG FU, DR. STRANGE and just about every Western ever filmed starring Clint Eastwood (but not the one where he sings).

It sounded both derivative and original at the same time, which is an entirely new mash-up all unto itself, but the thought of a Hasidic Jewish holy man traversing the saloons and brothels of the old Wild West immediately conjured up unpleasant memories of the Gene Wilder film THE FRISCO KID. Fortunately, Erdelac doesn’t play the concept for laughs.

“The Rider,” as he is simply known, is as much of a badass with firearms as he is with ancient scrolls and mystical talismans. If he can’t shoot his demonic opponents, he’s just as quick to cast a spell to stop them.

TALES OF A HIGH PLANES DRIFTER — so called for not only the homage to the Eastwood film, but also because the Rider is capable of “extraplanar travel” — is a collection of four novellas, each self-contained, but each also moving the title character’s story further along in his epic quest for revenge.

In the first novella, “Blood Libel,” the Rider comes to an Arizona mining town where violence is threatening to erupt over the disappearance of children being blamed on the Jewish population. If the Rider doesn’t act, many innocents will die.

There’s a cool dual plotline as the Rider must battle demonic minions on the spiritual plane while his unguarded body is at the mercy of a lynch mob.

In “The Dust Devils,” the Rider discovers a town surrounded by a deadly dust storm and most of the inhabitants under the sway of a hypnotic sorcerer whose powers rival his own. In “Hell’s Hired Gun,” the Rider comes upon a trail of corpses leading to Medgar Tooms, a former gunfighter lost in the despair of his dead wife and child, who now has become a demonic angel of death.

Finally, in “The Nightjar Women,” we are treated to more of the Rider’s backstory and learn interesting tidbits about where his travels may ultimately lead. There’s a supernatural menace to be dealt with, of course, and a surprising alliance, but the real surprise is the hint of a romance (given the strict religious tenets he adheres to) between the Rider and an unlikely assistant.

I enjoyed each of the stories, and if I had to make a comparison to another adventurer, I would say that the Rider is reminiscent of Robert E. Howard’s Puritan hero, Solomon Kane. Like Kane, the Rider is single-minded in his quest, is devout in his religious beliefs, and is fearless in the face of an otherworldly menace.

THE MENSCH WITH NO NAME continues the Rider’s quest with four more novellas. Again, each is self-contained, but still moves the character along in an overarching story. Don’t be fooled by the punny title: These stories are just as gritty as the first volume —perhaps more so.

More backstory is revealed, along with team-ups with real figures from the American Southwest and revelations about where the Rider’s story will culminate. Erdelac is an expert at weaving historical personalities and bits of Jewish faith and folklore into his fictional universe, and yet, he never strays into didacticism.

Note: There’s a list of Jewish terms and their definitions in the back of each volume, but the stories are easily enjoyed without constantly flipping to the back of the book. I looked up words more out of curiosity rather than necessity.

Sure, there are instances where the Rider falls too easily into an obvious trap, and more than once is able to escape certain death by pure luck and outrageous coincidence. But you’re not supposed to read these stories for a true account of life on the Western frontier, much the same way that you don’t read Howard for a realistic look at a 16th-century Puritan. You read it for the pure pulpy goodness of an action story featuring a hero unafflicted with fear and self-doubt, women who are beautiful or dangerous (and usually both), and villains straight from the fiery pits of Hell.

THE MERKABAH RIDER is published by Damnation Books, and I see that a third volume of stories, HAVE GLYPHS WILL TRAVEL, is now available. I definitely will have to see where Erdalac takes his unlikely Western hero … and there’s no greater compliment I can pay a fellow writer than that.

Mazel tov! —Slade Grayson

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Crack open THE HAMMER VAULT — assuming you’re already a hardcore Hammer fan, that is. Having already covered the legendary British-based horror film company in other books, from its poster art to its hot actresses, author Marcus Hearn now assembles a chronological, visual-driven journey through the label’s genre greats (and gaffes), from 1954′s cult classic THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT to last year’s underappreciated LET ME IN.

Because each film merits one to two pages a piece, all dotted with photos, posters and promotional material, not much room is left for words, so if you don’t already know the plot for, say, PARANOIAC, you’re not going to learn it here. (If that’s the kind of thing you seek, perhaps you should try Hearn’s THE HAMMER STORY.)

Told in blood-red color — and even in widescreen! — the gouged eyeball-ready tale in THE HAMMER VAULT is a sumptuous one, designed so well, I wasn’t sure what to look at first. I wanted to take it all in at once, no matter whether I had seen the film in question already, or never had heard of it.

Most interesting, however, is a six-page chapter, pre-revival, on the Hammer films that never were. From NESSIE and VAMPIRELLA to KALI … BRIDE OF DRACULA and THE RELUCTANT VIRGIN, announcement art and concept drawings tease and tantalize with images of What Could Have Been. —Rod Lott

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A RIVER IN THE SKY is Elizabeth Peters’ 19th (!) novel featuring the archaeologist Amelia Peabody; her irascible husband, Emerson; and a barely controllable family that includes her biological son, Ramses; her acquired “daughter,” Nefret; and a number of others who protect and love the Peabody family body and soul.

Set in mid-1910 in Palestine, this outing involves the Peabody clan with the British government. They suspect an amateur archaeologist has plans to unearth the Ark of the Covenant, and to do so in an area that will arouse intense political and religious animosity. The government also suspects this amateur to be a spy.

So they draw the Peabody family into the intrigue and insist that they keep a watch over this mysterious man. Meanwhile, Ramses, while working on a different dig, manages to get himself kidnapped, and his efforts at escape and the family’s efforts to recover him, take up a significant portion of the book. Of course, his abduction is also tied to this mysterious spy/amateur archaeologist.

Peters, a synonym for respected Egyptologist Barbara Mertz, has a light and breezy style that meshes well with the delightfully silly family dynamic of the Peabodys. Amelia and Emerson bicker and flirt and tease and manipulate like any long-married loving couple, and the entourage reminds me of the nonfiction stories of Gerald Durrell and his eccentric family. This is all fun and frothy, and fans of the series will be immensely pleased by this addition.

For a first-time reader to the series, however, it is perhaps a little too light. I would have preferred more historical background and even — gasp! — some actual archaeology instead of the rather flighty story of the family moving around while Ramses tries to escape his captors.

The series is a strong one with a huge number of fans, so if you’re interested in the time and location (1880s to 1920s Egypt and Palestine) then you should definitely take a look, but maybe start with the first book in the series, both in the series timeframe and by publication date, CROCODILE ON THE SANDBANK. —Mark Rose

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Devoted followers of Terry Pratchett’s wonderful Discworld series know that it contains several different narrative threads following various characters (human and otherwise) on this satirical fantasy world. These include novels devoted to witches, wizards and the foundation of various industries like banking, the postal service and the news media. One such thread follows the coppers who make up the City Watch, and it’s here that Pratchett gleefully skewers the numerous themes and techniques of crime fiction.
 
SNUFF, the latest Discworld novel (in a series now numbering more than 30 titles), is another in the City Watch thread. This time, the well-worn theme is the urban investigator who goes on vacation and becomes the proverbial fish out of water.

Sam Vimes, Commander of the City Watch of Ankh-Morpork, the main metropolis of Discworld, is a devoted copper to the very marrow of his bones. It’s the life he loves and knows best. So when he agrees to take some time off to visit the stately country house and grounds owned by his wife, Lady Sybil, it’s with more than a little reluctance.
 
Sure enough, the moment he arrives, Vimes finds that the behavior and customs expected of him as Lord of the Manor are completely foreign and baffling. Fortunately, Vimes’ faithful manservant, Willikins, is there to assist him.
 
Then, just as Vimes is settling in, a dead body is discovered in a wooded area not far from the house. To complicate matters, it is the mutilated body of a goblin. But goblin or not, murder is murder, so Vimes sets out to find the killer with the aid of the less than experienced (and equally less competent) local constable. The trail leads him to a clandestine smuggling ring moving dangerous drugs and hordes of goblins forced into slavery.

The Discworld novels have never been distinguished for breakneck pacing. This latest, however, is probably the most deliberately paced of the bunch. Indeed, it is well over 75 pages (in a work just under 400) before the dead body and motivating crime is uncovered.

On the other hand, part of the enduring charm of Pratchett’s series is his relaxed but relentlessly satiric style. He often goes slightly off the narrative track for a bit of background detail or interior observation that usually concludes with hilarious zingers. Here, Pratchett seems to extend his tangents, sometimes taking as long as three or four paragraphs, before reaching his point. It’s challenging, but worth the effort as the author always manages to make us laugh out loud while reading.
 
Along the way, Pratchett imparts a great deal of information about goblins, much like he did with dwarfs and trolls in previous books. Here, the satire becomes particularly pointed as we see how these smelly, creepy little creatures are, in his world, an intelligent, skilled but painfully exploited minority.
 
Pratchett’s millions of fans will need no prompting to take up SNUFF. Occasional visitors to Discworld would do well to first read one of the earlier City Watch titles (like GUARDS! GUARDS! or MEN AT ARMS) when Vimes was still single … and noticeably less sober. Fortunately for all of us, these and most all of the franchise, as far back as THE COLOR OF MAGIC, are still in print. —Alan Cranis

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When we left our heroes at the end of Richard K. Morgan’s fantasy debut, THE STEEL REMAINS, there was a sense that something big was coming, something far more sinister than the tentative invasion that was repelled at the end of that book.

The sequel, THE COLD COMMANDS, picks up some time after its precursor, and while it improves on many of the faults of Morgan’s initial foray into fantasy, readers once again are left holding the bag, with the promise of epic conflict still looming in the future.

All the survivors are back: Ringil the antihero, Elric-with-PTSD warrior fighting a Quixotic battle against slavery; Archeth, a half-breed remnant of an advanced race that has long abandoned the world; and Egar, the hilltribe berserker who fills his free time with troublemaking and visions of his own death. Their stories eventually converge, but just as you get the sense that Something Really Awesome is going to happen, you realize that there aren’t that many pages left in the book — that this, like its predecessor are prequels to the Real Story that should come along any time now.
 
This flawed promise of epicness would be fatal if Morgan were a lesser writer, but his characters, prose and dialogue are as sharp as ever, funny, grim and dark. The violence is gory, the sex is super-sexy, and nobody’s actions come out of left field.

Morgan’s created a great world in THE STEEL REMAINS and THE COLD COMMANDS; my biggest wish is that an epic conflict emerges (hopefully by the next installment) that befits Morgan’s creations. —Ryun Patterson

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With the Farrelly brothers bringing THE THREE STOOGES to screen next spring, the beloved slapstick troupe is primed for a resurgence of fandom. Sensing this, Applause Books has released THREE STOOGES FAQ: EVERYTHING LEFT TO KNOW ABOUT THE EYE-POKING, FACE-SLAPPING, HEAD-THUMPING GENIUSES.

David Hogan’s book is not quite that. For one thing, it ignores the movies; it’s only concerned with their comedy shorts. Of course, that’s mainly what they were and are known for, so that’s really just a quibble. Nor is it a reference work, but like one giant essay.

What Hogan does here is examine in detail — emphasis on the word “detail” — the Stooges’ work, not just recounting the plots and gags of every short, but analyzing them, too, and their place in the world at that time. To underline that last bit, the book is not arranged chronologically, but in themes, such as their dealings with the opposite sex, their adventures in the old West, their encounters with monsters, and so on. It’s a daunting way to tackle such a huge body of work, but he pulls it off.

That said, this isn’t the book that newbies like myself should reach for in order to get a crash course in the gang. It’s written on the level of those who have digested and perhaps even memorized the two-reelers and want a larger, big-picture perspective. It’s not badly written by any means; it simply references things in a shorthand that is best read by the well-versed in the “nyuk.”

Profiles on supporting players pepper the sections, as do plenty of production stills and posters. —Rod Lott

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Prolific thriller author John Lescroart reveals more personal background about Wyatt Hunt in THE HUNTER than any of the two previous novels starring the San Francisco-based P.I. But there’s also plenty of mystery, suspense and unsolved murder to keep Hunt busy. Fans need not worry; his latest is not an attempt to go completely mainstream.
 
Wyatt Hunt has just finished a lunch meeting with a friend from the SFPD when he receives a cryptic text message on his cell phone from an unidentified sender asking, “How did your mother die?”

Orphaned as a child, Hunt never thought much about his birth parents, thanks to the love and support he got for so many years from Bob and Charlene Hunt. But the text message nags at his conscious, so he decides to research his early life.
 
Hunt learns that his name was originally Carson. What’s more, he discovers his biological mother was murdered and that his father was the prime suspect. After two hung juries, however, the man was never convicted. Not long after the second trial, the father left his son to the civil authorities and went off in search of a new beginning and a new life.
 
Hunt follows the story of his true parents though the many boxes of court records and interviews with those still alive who had anything to do with the case, or who might have known them. All the while, he continues to receive texts from the sender who refuses to reveal his/her identity or reason for suddenly invading Hunt’s life.
 
For an author celebrated more for his inventive plots, Lescroart almost seems to want to make up for all the years of missed character development with the opening chapters of this novel. Not only does Hunt spend a great deal of time pondering his past, but his present life is complicated by the break-up of a long-term relationship and his confusing attraction to the woman who works as his investigative assistant.

But the author has been at this game too long to completely forget what his readers expect. So before the novel reaches the midpoint, the plot intricacies kick in, including an intriguing connection between his parents and Jim Jones, who founded his Peoples Temple in San Francisco before moving his congregation to Guyana and the mass suicide that shocked the nation.
 
Lescroart’s prose is as easy-going and unpretentious as ever, even with all the newfound self reflection and introspection. As always, his writing truly sings when he describes his beloved San Francisco locale with its varied neighborhoods and altering weather patterns.
 
After all these years, and with more than 20 titles to his credit, Lescroart is commended for trying something a little deeper and different. It may not be indicative of a new direction, but if nothing else it proves he can get inside the skin of his characters as effectively as any other author out there — so long as there is also a good story to tell. —Alan Cranis

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Because everybody else in I WANT MY MTV does, I’ll share my first glimpse of the world’s first all-music cable network: Our parents didn’t want us watching it, so one night while they went out to dinner with friends, I switched our cable dial over and saw a commercial for a Rush album with a dog peeing on a fire hydrant, followed by videos for Supertramp’s “It’s Raining Again” and Billy Joel’s “Pressure.”

I was hooked, so naturally, my parents canceled our cable service soon after, and the early teenage me had to get my video fix through friends with cooler folks, not to mention NBC’s FRIDAY NIGHT VIDEOS.

For anyone who grew up with MTV in their lives, Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum’s I WANT MY MTV is a deliriously fun read — a blast of nostalgia, a history lesson and a generation’s worth of gossip columns rolled into one hefty book. Luckily, it’s an oral history, so its 608 pages zoom by. Unluckily, it’s an oral history, so you’re so entertained for the length of the brief ride that you’re disappointed that it has to come to an end.

Charting the channel’s entire history from the unheard-of and unpopular idea of a 24/7 visual jukebox to today’s vehicle of insipid reality shows and hardly any music at all, Marks and Tannenbaum make judicious use of choice quotes from behind-the-scenes players and on-camera talent. We’re talking network execs, VJs, musicians, directors and even video eye candy, like Tawny Kitaen and the teacher in Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher.”

It’s captivating not only to see what a force the network would come to wield on music and eventually pop culture as a whole (and even politics), but that nobody believed in it. Bands hated making videos and their record companies didn’t think the clips had any value, so they were all too happy to give them to MTV for free — after all, they thought nothing would come of the experiment.

We all know something huge came out of the experiment, but that path is paved with an immense amount of mistakes and battles, made worse by enormous egos. Luckily for readers, I WANT MY MTV names names. If you were a “cocky bugger” (Sting), “kind of a bitch” (Madonna) or “a pain in the ass” (John Cougar Mellencamp), someone is now quoted in black ink, calling you out on your shit.

You’ll find anecdotes of Rod Stewart’s bathroom containing a bowl of cocaine, Keith Richards taking a sword to director Julien Temple’s throat, Russell Mulcahy bearing witness to the incestuous mess known as Fletwood Mac, Missing Persons’ Dale Bozzio blowing an MTV exec in the offices, Colin Quinn exposing himself regularly on the game show REMOTE CONTROL, Gerardo’s foot fetish, and Mike Tyson’s general unprofessionalism: punching all the guys, groping all the girls.

There are hundreds more great stories in store.

But the overall one seems to be how the once-rebellious outlet became a sad parody of itself, which it certainly remains today. Part of that is due to MTV morphing into the victim of its own success, after which it was more than happy to suck that corporate teet. It’s not that I didn’t think such a thing existed, but to what degree is stupefying. For example, a VJ once made a joke about Michael Jackson becoming so white, that he soon would be florescent, and the self-appointed “King of Pop” was so offended, he demanded MTV dedicate an entire weekend to his videos. They did.

Who’s laughing now? Me, for one. I loved I WANT MY MTV. —Rod Lott

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Best-selling author Steve Alten knows about the Mayan Calendar and its doomsday prophecy. His DOMAIN series has sold millions of copies worldwide. But it is Alten’s new release through Tor/Forge, PHOBOS: MAYAN FEAR, that he says provides details of an actual threat to humanity that could have many readers hiding under the covers on the Dec. 21, 2012, date … not that it will matter. Here’s more from the author on the theories that fuel his new novel.

The Mayan culture began around 500 BC, and is believed to be an off shoot of the Olmec, which lived in Central America and MesoAmerica. The apex of Mayan society occurred around 900 AD in the Yucatan Peninsula. This was the time of Kukulcan, a mysterious wise man and teacher who arrived in Chichen Itza possessing a wealth of knowledge of astronomy, engineering and agriculture.

The Kukulcan pyramid is a testament to his knowledge. The four-sided temple has ninety-one steps on each side; add the platform on top and you get 365 — as in the days of the year. Erected precisely to the equinox, the shadow of a serpent appears on the northern balustrade each fall and spring equinox as an ancient warning pertaining to the calendar’s prophecy.

In 1519, Hernan Cortez invaded the Yucatan Peninsula for Spain and within 50 years over 90% of Mayan people were obliterated. This event was predicted by the Mayan calendar. Cortez, a bearded white man, was mistaken for Kukulcan by the Maya and Quetzalcoatl by the Aztecs.
 
ABOUT THE MAYAN CALENDAR:
The Maya were obsessed with time, they believed time was cyclical, and that nature possesses its own rhythms. The Calendar itself consists of three calendars built in one, like the working gears of a clock. Added to this was one more means of charting time — the Long Count Calendar. Composed of five great cycles, the Long Count calculates back to a date equating to August 13, 3114 BC, and ends on the winter solstice of 2012. December 21st in 2012 — Doomsday.

The Long Count calendar is made up of Katums —20 year epochs that repeat or recycle every 260 years. It is these Katums that they used to predict the future. KATUM 5 predicted the assassination of Lincoln. KATUM 10 encompassed WWII — a time of great sadness. Our present Katum, KATUM 4, began in 1993 and ends on December 21st in 2012. It predicts great change. Katum 4 encompasses 9/11, a day known as 6 IMOX…referring to great change. On the day of 6 KEY, the US invaded Afghanistan, a day that translated into a time to settle ones debt.
 
DEC. 21, 2012: DOES A THREAT EXIST?
In PHOBOS: MAYAN FEAR, Steve Alten introduces readers to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a $10 billion science experiment located underground in Geneva, Switzerland, designed to smash protons together at near-light speed. While the experiment will provide physicists with a means to recreate the early moments following the Big Bang, it also creates miniature black holes, which could grow in size as they pass through the LHC chamber into Earth’s core. One of the side effects are seismic event — earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions.

PHOBOS: MAYAN FEAR describes two frightening events: the eruption of the Yellowstone caldera (think 2,000 Mount St. Helens) and a thousand-foot-high mega-tsunami unleashed by the landslide eruption of a volcano in the Canary Islands that some scientists believe poses a catastrophic threat to the Eastern Seaboard of the United States.

As bad as these things sound, Alten saves the very worst for Dec. 21, 2012. —Steve Alten

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What’s been going on at our sister site, Flick Attack, “hitting you with one random movie a day … whether you like it or not”? Here’s what you’ve missed:

• Italy’s THE FRENCH SEX MURDERS, which pretty much makes good on that title
• MAXIMUM RISK, just one of many Jean-Claude Van Damme flicks in which he plays twins
• SALVAGE, a cinéma vérité-style horror movie made with a typically bleak European aesthetic — that’s a compliment
• What’s Tina Fey doing a BEER LEAGUE, a lowbrow comedy whose idea of funny is “Practice is for fags”?
• MAHAKAAL, India’s version of A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (read: with musical numbers)
• the 1970s’ swingin’, sex-filled THE SECRET OF DORIAN GRAY
• Ti West’s über-grainy bat flick, THE ROOST
• MACHETE MAIDENS UNLEASHED!, the best documentary ever made on the Filipino film industry
• Pia Zadora’s Depression-era, depression-inducing BUTTERFLY
• the spaghetti Western/slasher/sci-fi combo known as the cult fave HARDWARE
• RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD III, the most Shakespearean of the franchise
• the virginity-losing teen comedy LITTLE DARLINGS
• Fisty Hardcheese starring in DELTA FORCE 2
• Pinhead returns to make frat douches’ faces look like strips of uncooked meat at a Mongolian barbecue, in HELLRAISER: REVELATIONS
• Donkey Wang

How many more reasons do you need?

With SUPERNATURAL NOIR, prolific and award-winning editor Ellen Datlow set out to find stories that would combine the characteristics of her two favorite types of genre literature. So, per her brief introduction to this original anthology, she put the word out for “smart, edgy, complex, harder-than-nails stories of the supernatural with at least a few of the trademarks of noir.”

The challenge is a lot harder than it seems. Noir, as Datlow herself notes, is “an attitude” — that is, a mostly interior-oriented, cynical and pessimistic view of the world, most often incorporated in crime fiction. Stories of the supernatural, both horror and fantasy, are mostly about external forces — an extraordinary being, power or imagined world.

Combining these two seemingly opposite elements results is what most readers will recognize as dark fantasy, especially considering the authors Datlow approached are known mostly for horror/fantasy/science-fiction works, as opposed to those in crime fiction. Still, the 16 stories presented here do an admirable job and are all worth reading.

A few contributors give in to the temptation to recreate a classic noir crime setting. In “The Dingus,” Gregory Frost presents the gritty world of boxing in the 1940s in his story of a former trainer who investigates the strange, horrific death of his former protégé. Joe R. Lansdale takes a slightly lighter tone in “Dead Sister,” where a wisecracking, Chandler-styled private eye in Lansdale’s fictional Mud Creek, Texas, is hired by a woman to look into the desecration of the title girl’s grave.
 
“The Getaway,” by Paul G. Tremblay, is a modern-day tale of a robbery that takes an unexpected turn when the perpetrators begin to die mysteriously as they flee the pawn shop they just held up. Jeffrey Ford’s “The Last Triangle” is told by a homeless drug addict taken in by elderly, retired school teacher who employs him in a search for an ancient, protective curse surrounding the skid-row section of the city.
 
Perhaps the most memorable story here is “But for Scars” by Tom Piccirilli, where a deranged young girl escapes from a brutal mental institution and returns to the house where her outlaw biker parents were murdered. The narrator, a former gang member now living in the house, helps the girl discover who killed her parents — whom he knew intimately while alive. The supernatural component is mostly hinted at here, but Piccirilli’s unwaveringly creepy characters and mood make this one of the darkest stories of the bunch.
 
The other contributions, including works by Elizabeth Bear, Laird Barron and Brian Evenson, are all well-written, but vary in their attempts to unite the two required elements.
 
Still, SUPERNATURAL NOIR is recommended to all genre fans, but especially to crime-fiction fans who otherwise avoid horror, and horror/fantasy readers unfamiliar with noir’s allure. If you enjoy the intended effect of these stories, proceed immediately to the SANDMAN SLIM novels by Richard Kadrey for an accelerated course on how these two rudiments are sustained in longer forms. —Alan Cranis

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PHOBOS: MAYAN FEAR, Steve Alten’s third book in his “Mayan Prophecy” series, is a doomsday rollercoaster ride of adventure that follows Immanuel Gabriel to the end of the world and back again for one last shot at salvation. During Immanuel’s journey with his deceased grandfather, archaeologist Julius Gabriel, Julius reveals everything the Mayans knew and feared — from the secrets of creation that predate the Big Bang to the existence of extraterrestrials that have come to Earth to save our species.

We have five copies to give away, going to:
• Lisa McNulty of Chanhassen, Minn.
• Page Inman of Asheville, N.C.
• Mark Justice of Flatwoods, Ky.
• Sharon Berger of Albuquerque, N.M.
• Sam Cranes of Los Angeles, Calif.

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