Every week I get mail, and every Monday I write about it here. This time around, I only got two packages all week, for whatever reason. (The mail is always unpredictable, and I don't really mind, because I have too many books to read no matter how I get them.)Darren Shan is a familiar name to teenage readers (not to mention their librarians, teachers, and parents) from his "Cirque du Freak" series (about a half-vampire boy also named Darren Shan) and its successors, but his books haven't been aimed at adults previously. But his new novel Procession of the Dead
-- coming as a YA-priced $19.99 hardcover from Grand Central on June 4th -- will be in the adult section of bookstores, either chasing a new audience or following the readers who read his first novel, Cirque du Freak, nine years ago. Procession is the first book in a new trilogy, "The City," in which an amnesiac young man, Capac Raimi, arrives in a darkly magical city that is ruled -- and even more closely connected to -- The Cardinal, who may hold the secrets of Capac's past.
Shan is busy this year -- he also has a novel for teens, The Thin Executioner
, coming out in August. It's a standalone novel somehow inspired by Huckleberry Finn -- though it seems to be about a boy "on an eight-month journey to petition the fire god for invincibility...to return and claim the post of executioner from his father." (Which doesn't sound much like the Huck Finn I know.) Thin Executioner is also hardcover, but will be even cheaper, at $17.99. Novels for teenagers are a great bargain, aren't they? I should read more of them to stretch my book budget....The other package this week came from the good folks at Tokyopop, containing a variety of manga projects publishing in June:
Tachibana Higuchi's Portrait of M & N Volume 2
continues the story of teenage masochist Mitsuru and narcissist Natsuhiko, as they continue to try to hide their proclivities (which, I assume, are nearly uncontrollable, in best manga fashion) from the rest of the world. This series still sounds very weird, and I hope to read some of it before long.Isle of Forbidden Love
is a yaoi story from Duo Brand (and that doesn't sound like a pseudonym, oh no!), with an Edo-era murder mystery and the world of the theater as the background to this stylized gay love story.Also on the yaoi side is Madness, Vol. 2
by Kairi Shimotsuki, finishing up this story about assassins, mind-controlling microchips, gunplay, and lots of man-on-man love. (With the latter man drawn as hugely effeminate for genre-convention reasons.)There's also a second volume of Jinsei Kataoka and Kazuma Kondou's Deadman Wonderland
-- I reviewed the first one a few months back.And there's a third volume of Alice in the Country of Hearts
by Soumei Hoshino and Quinrose, which is -- as you might guess from the title -- a manga-tized reimagining of Alice in Wonderland.
Last from Tokyopop is the least manga-ish book, World of Warcraft: Mage
, written by Richard A. Knaak and illustrated by Ryo Kawakami. According to the back cover, it's part on an "ongoing class series," which may be of interest to hardcore WoWheads.----------------
Listening to: Kate Miller-Heidke - God's Gift To Women
via FoxyTunes
1 comment:
I am reasonably that the "new" Shan book, is actually something he published (at least in the UK) under his real name more than a decade ago. At least, I've got a book with the same title, and a plot that matches the Amazon summary, written by Darren O'Shaughnessy that I picked up in the UK around the turn of the millenium.
(I actually hope this "leverage YA notoriety to sell adult books" strategy works out... there are quite a few authors focused on YA right now--and producing excellent books--who I would love to have write some more books outside of the YA constraints.)
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