Reviewing the Mail: Week of 1/31

It's Monday morning again, time for another one of my posts about what I saw in the mail for review last week. As always, I haven't yet read any of these books; actual reviews may be forthcoming (or may not, depending on all sorts of factors, including my not being hit by a bus).

Pascal Girard's Nicolas, a semi-autobiographical short graphic novel about the death of Girard's younger brother when he was a boy. Drawn & Quarterly published it in December. It's one of their "Petite Livres" series, which are all short books -- also, I think, all also translations.

Also from D&Q, and another "Petite Livre," is Kaspar by Diane Obomsawin, a retelling of the story of Kaspar Hauser, the mysterious young man who appeared in Nuremberg, Germany in 1828. It was just published in January.

And the third recent "Petit Livre" (I scent a great excuse to review three books together for ComicMix) from D&Q is Pascal Blanchet's Baloney, which was published in December. Baloney is subtitled "A Tale in 3 Symphonic Acts," and is very hard to describe, particularly without having read it. It has symphonic accompaniment, is indeed organized into acts, and looks very formalist -- both theatrically and in terms of the comics page.

I'd also like to mention one book I spent my own money on this week: Journey: The Adventures of Wolverine MacAlistaire, Vol. 2 by William Messner-Loebs, which IDW just published. It's the reprint of the second half of the classic frontier adventure series from the 1980s -- I reviewed the first half some time ago -- and I'm greatly looking forward to reading it.

Peter S. Beagle's new short story collection is We Never Talk About My Brother, which Tachyon is publishing in March. It contains nine stories, all from 2007 and 2008 -- I'm not sure what happened to suddenly make Beagle so prolific, this far into his career, but I'm certainly not complaining. (This is his fourth short-story collection in the last twelve years -- that might not sound like much, but his first few novels novels were published in 1960, 1968, 1986, and 1993! It used to be that getting two Beagle books in one decade was a surprise.)

Remember the "muckers" from John Brunner's classic novel Stand on Zanzibar? Driven mad by modern society, they just snapped and went on killing sprees. It was a background detail in Zanzibar (which was set in 2010, for an added bit of irony), but David Moody's new novel Hater takes a similar idea -- people suddenly and inexplicably becoming murderously violent -- and turns it into a very near-future horror novel. Hater was self-published in 2006, but, when Moody managed to sell the film rights to Guillermo del Toro, interest picked up -- and now St. Martin's Press (probably best known to my readers as the parent company of Tor Books) has picked it up and will publish a new hardcover edition on February 19th. (And how ironic is it that Hater is by a man named "Moody?" I love a world that includes touches like that.)

The biggest book I've seen in quite a while is the new novel from Dan Simmons, Drood. It's nearly eight hundred pages, but looks even bigger than that. (I recall a discussion at a recent production meeting at my publishing company, when a very fat book was discussed -- there I learned that our standard is to use a lower-bulk paper if the book would otherwise be over two inches thick. I don't have a ruler here, but I think Drood well exceeds that, which implies that its publisher Little, Brown has different standards.) I haven't read Simmons in a while -- though I heard great things about his last novel, The Terror, which was equally fat and which I think I still have around here somewhere -- but I may have to find a way to shoehorn this brick into my reading schedule. It's a historical novel about Charles Dickens, with Wilkie Collins as narrator. (A similar connection got me to read Peter Carey's excellent Jack Maggs.) And it sounds like it has some of the qualities of a Tim Powers novel -- twisting a story in between the goalposts of known history, and trying to explain things that don't quite make sense in the established record. So it's aimed right at me as a reader, and I'll have to examine my reading budget very closely. Little, Brown will publish Drood as a doorstopper of a hardcover on February 9th.

I mentioned Eric Nylund's new novel Mortal Coils when I saw a bound galley a month or so ago, and now I'll mention it again, because I've got a finished trade paperback. (Which reminds me that one of the more interesting retronyms of publishing is "finished book," which we used constantly at the clubs -- for most people outside of publishing, all books are finished, but it's different when you're inside the sausage factory.) Mortal Coils is the first in an ambitious five-book contemporary fantasy series (it sounds more Tim Powers than Laurell Hamilton), and his first "personal" novel since he wrote three bestselling novels based on the Halo videogame. Mortal Coils will be published by Tor on February 3rd.

Michael Crowley and Dan Goldman have created a "Making of the President" for the modern era in 08: A Graphic Diary of the Campaign Trail, a graphic-novel retelling of the race that saw Barack Obama win the presidency last year. It's a very bold-looking book, with inky blacks, obvious background patterns, and a very in-your-face bold sans serif type used throughout. And Three Rivers Press published it on January 27th.

Tom Pomplun's Graphic Classics series, which puts out one or two trade paperback collections of new comics adaptations of the work of classic writers, by a usually very diverse and quirky set of creators, has turned to Oscar Wilde for its sixteenth volume. (I've previously reviewed Fantasy Classics, Mark Twain, and Bram Stoker.) Pomplun edits this one as usual, and contributes an adaptation of Salome, which was then illustrated by Moly Kiely -- who's perfect for the job, and who I wish would do more comics that I could mention in public. There are also substantial adaptations of The Picture of Dorian Gray, "The Canterville Ghost," and "Lord Arthur Saville's Crime" -- a slightly odd choice, since it leaves out all of Wilde's iconic humorous plays. Eureka Productions is sending out to stores for publication this month.