Comments on: The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death

By: vatobeto

vatobeto — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 05:54:56 +0000

Oh BTW, two of the Joe Pitt casebook series (Already Dead, No Dominion) a r e available as audiobooks via newsgroups in alt.binaries.mp3.audiobooks. But your newsgroup server must have a save time > 99 days.

By: vatobeto

vatobeto — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 05:39:36 +0000

Em dashes or not, I love Huston’s work. Anyway the em dashes aren’t that expeimental – they’ve been around for a while. Not so much in English fiction, but plenty of Latin American authors use them, from mainstream Mexican writer Fuentes to avant-garde ‘Boom’ writers like Argentinean Cortázar to on-the-edge writers like Cuban Pedro Juan Gutierrez. They definitely change the pacing up.

By: RP

RP — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 21:10:21 +0000

Yep, CAUGHT STEALING, SIX BAD THINGS, and A DANGEROUS MAN are all free on Fictionwise, and Stanza has a couple you can reap on the Ipod touch/iPhone, too. It’s too bad the first Joe Pitt casebook isn’t available as a free download–it would be a great lead-in to the whole awesome series.

By: Leah

Leah — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 20:50:17 +0000

I think there are a few Huston ebooks still being offered at Fictionwise and BooksOnBoard for free. I downloaded them a while ago–I’ll have to bump them up on the TBR list.

By: Michael

Michael — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 22:53:34 +0000

Huston is one of those writers I’ve been meaning to get around to for a while, but there are lots of them and you know how that goes. But this got such great reviews I decided to take the plunge, and now reading the other eight Huston novels has shot to the top of my list. I always find myself irritated at first when a writer uses dashes in place of quotation marks, but after a few pages I get over it. The strangest thing about this novel is how fucking entertaining it is despite the fact that it’s not exactly eventful. Virtually nothing happens in the first half, and not all that much in the entire novel. Yet I found it just abut impossible to put down. A real treat and a great discovery.

By: Eric

Eric — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 21:05:13 +0000

Huston’s best book? I dunno. I still think The Shotgun Rule trumps everything he’s written. This one’s good tho. I bet he gives us a masterpiece in a couple of years.

By: RP

RP — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 16:51:36 +0000

I don’t think there’s a need to be absolutist about it–if it’s done well there’s no problem. Cormac McCarthy’s managed to eke out a living despite a totaly disdain for the quotation mark, and there are probably tens, if not dozens, of people who enjoy his books.
I’ve read books where this kind of experimentation is totally foiled by bad writing, but that’s a kind of literary Darwinism–if you write a book that nobody can make sense of, you probably won’t get many more chances to write a book.

By: R

Thu, 05 Feb 2009 16:35:14 +0000

I think it’s time to get rid of the em dashes for dialogue. A lot of authors seem to be doing that now, trying to be cool or different or something. As for eliminating the “he saids,” I’m for that whenever possible, but there’s nothing about quotation marks that means you have to stick in extra “he saids.”