Reviewing the Mail: Week of 3/21

I'm still here, in case you were wondering.

Things other than blogging have been taking up too much of my time and energy -- mostly the latter, to be honest, since I have a lot of time on my hands these days, and I'm not as efficient in using it as I want to be. (Know the saying "if you want something done, give it to a busy man"? Well, the reverse is also sadly true.)

Anyway, none of that stops the mail -- nothing stops the mail. This week I have three books to write about, slightly marred by a sneaking suspicion that one of them was meant to go to a different Andrew Wheeler entirely. (The other comics Andrew Wheeler isn't my nemesis, since we've never met -- but, if we ever do, maybe we can work out a mutually agreeable pact of nemesis-itude.) As always, I haven't read them yet. But here they are:

Harrison Squared is a new contemporary fantasy novel by Daryl Gregory, author of Pandaemonium and Afterparty. It's the story of young Harrison Harrison, deathly afraid of water after a supernatural sea creature capsized their boat and disappeared his father, who now lives with his marine biologist mother in the small, eerie Massachusetts town of Dunnsmouth, perched on the edge of a dark and mysterious sea. It's a first person Lovecraftian book, and appears to have been hand-crafted to appeal directly to me -- so I hope I can find time to read it. Harrison Squared is a Tor hardcover, officially arriving in stores tomorrow.

Another Tor hardcover hitting stores tomorrow is Gillian Philip's Icefall, the fourth and last book in her "Rebel Angels" fantasy series about alternate worlds and the various Scottish hunks in all of them. (I may be misrepresenting the series horribly.)

And my third book this week is a big slab of comics from DC's "New 52" initiative, which I've pretty much entirely avoided up to now. (I don't read much in the way of mainstream superheroes, since I'm no longer fifteen and self-aware enough to realize that.) It apparently is a very big fight with Doomsday, the alien monster that "killed" a previous version of Superman about twenty years ago. (He got better. Well, first four other people got better, then he did -- it was complicated.) I don't think the cover is meant to depict Bizarro -- one of the best characters of all time, and I don't care who knows it -- which is good, since it would be sad if it did. The book is called Superman: Doomed, it's credited to the law firm of Greg Pak, Charles Soule, Scott Lobdell, Tony S. Daniel, Aaron Kuder, and Ken Lashley, and it's available as a big fat hardcover right now.

(SPOILER ALERT: Superman is not actually doomed.)

Note that this book does actually have words on the cover, but, as usual for comics publishers, finding the real final cover online is nearly impossible and finding the dark and foreboding art by itself is dead easy. Comics people have a distant and strained relationship with words.