Reviewing the Mail: Week of 5/10

Yet another slow week; it may be time to wonder if the publicists have abandoned me for younger, hipper, flashier bloggers. But I will soldier on with what I have, and drag in some other stuff to fill out this column as well...

Both of the books that came in the mail this week were from the mighty Ballantine group (of the far-flung Random House empire) -- first was Daryl Gregory's first novel Pandemonium. Pandemonium is coming in trade paperback in September, and it sounds like an odd contemporary fantasy -- for the last fifty years or so, random people have been possessed by "pop-cultural avatars that some call demons." One possessee -- former possessee, or so he thought -- is the main character of the book. That seems odd enough, but the back cover copy also promises that the novel contains Philip K. Dick and a group called the Human League. So Pandemonium is clearly something out of the ordinary -- and I remember Gregory from his fine story "Second Person, Present Tense" of a couple years back, so he can be very good when he's on top of his game.

The other actual submission this week was Jennifer Stevenson's The Brass Bed, which has a very paperback-romance cover. I won't say that I was about to ignore it, but it didn't look like any of the things I usually read -- until I realized the author's name was oddly familiar. Stevenson's first novel was Trash Sex Magic, which Small Beer published back in 2004 and which is still sitting on my gosh-I'd-like-to-read-these-someday pile. So suddenly Brass Bed became an object lesson in the different ways of packaging (or maybe even of writing) fantasy novels set in the modern world and featuring a lot of sex -- Trash was aimed at the "classy" end of the market, in trade paperback from a small press and with a subdued cover design. Brass Bed, on the other hand, screams mass-market, from its bright colors to the reading line quote: "More fun than pillow fighting naked!" And sometimes we assume "not published in a classy way" equals "trashy book," but that is only an assumption. Brass Bed is the first in what will be a paranormal romance series about Jewel Heiss, a consumer investigator in a Chicago filled with odd, inexplicable magic. I might just have to read this one -- I don't think I've read anything explicitly published as paranormal romance before, and I'd like to see how the romance genre accommodates a series in which the heroine (apparently) deals with some kind of sex magic in each book. Brass Bed was published on April 29th.

I also made a trip to the library this week, so I'll stretch this post (and give you a preview of some other things I hope to review soon) by listing some of the books I picked up there.

Mary Roach's Bonk has been a bestseller recently, but I really picked it up because one of my colleagues just read it and really enjoyed it -- and her highest praise is that Bonk is a book all about sex, but she didn't find any of it creepy. (I suspect I have a much higher tolerance for creepiness than she does, so I might find it a bit tame.) Roach is the author of Stiff (about dead bodies) and Spook (about ideas of the afterlife), both of which have sounded interesting but neither of which I've read. It takes sex, I guess, to drag people like me in the front door. Bonk is all about the scientific investigation of sex, rather than being a sociological look at different sexual "weirdos" (like so many book in this same general publishing area), so I hope to learn something.

Vampire Loves is a graphic novel by Joann Sfar; I've read his Little Vampire and some of his work on the Dungeon series. This is also published by First Second, who have been bringing out a lot of good work lately. I grabbed it partly for those two reasons, and partly because I think I need to be better-read in French cartoonists in general.

I know I read about Shinjuku Shark (by Arimasa Osawa) somewhere recently, but I can't remember where. This is the first novel in a Japanese hard-boiled police procedural series about a tough detective in a seamy Tokyo district -- the series has been wildly popular over there, and this book won the Japan Mystery Writers Association Award, which looks like the Japanese equivalent of the Edgar. Shark is from 1990, but it only made it into English sometime late last year. And it's published by Vertical -- I've been impressed by their publishing choices in manga, so I figured I should see what they're doing in fiction.

And last is Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow, which I first got three weeks ago and just renewed, since I still want to find time to read it. It's a modern werewolf novel set in L.A. and told in verse, with great quotes from Michael Moorcock, Gregory Maguire, David Mamet, and Nick Hornby. How could I not read a book like that?