The Back Half of Scary Go Round by John Allison

John Allison has spent most of the past twenty years chronicling an ever-proliferating series of strange events in and around the small British town of Tackleford, somewhere in darkest Yorkshire. More impressively, he's done all of this in public, on the Internet, most days of the week, for free. And he's done it in comics form.

First up was Bobbins, which I haven't made a serious study of yet, but was in the traditional newspaper strip-comic format and focused on the staff of Tackleford's City Lights magazine, with perhaps some supernatural eruptions. After Allison closed that down around the turn of the millennium, he launched a new series with a somewhat overlapping cast of characters called Scary Go Round, which itself ended in 2009. SGR was formatted like a comics page, which made it easier to collect in book form and (possibly) allowed Allison to write more complex stories and include more of his quirky humor and details in each update. It also was clearly fantasy: characters visited Hell, were turned into zombies, and battled giant monsters to save the world. (Though Allison's offhand tone and character-based plotting turned all of those elements into something very different from what you'd expect.) That strip was entirely collected into eight volumes, though -- in the way of the webcomic -- it's also still all available online, as are Allison's other strips.

For the next round of stories, Allison switched format again, to a double-tier newspaper style, which gave him a similar number of panels per page to SGR but with a more compact feel. That strip was called Bad Machinery, and it followed up the end of SGR to focus on two "teams" of tweens at the local school, who solve mysteries in competition with each other. Allison still includes supernatural elements, but they tend to be more subdued in Machinery than they were in SGR, making his stories better controlled and more focused on characters. He also clearly designed Machinery for eventual book publication, with long story arcs that each fit cleanly into a single book. (See my reviews of the three Machinery books to date: one, two, and three.)

Allison has also made a number of related print comics in various formats over the years -- including Expecting to Fly, which appeared online first -- and there's a 2013-2015 run of Bobbins, just to confuse things even more. Since Machinery in its turn ended last year, he produced a transitional story called "Space Is the Place" (with part of the Machinery cast going to a space camp in Wales). And he's also been writing a monthly comic called Giant Days -- confusingly, this is also the title of a major SGR storyline, plus an earlier sidebar print project -- for a different art team, which may or may not have a Tackleford connection. (I haven't seen it yet, since it's only in floppy form so far.)

So Tackleford is a place that Allison knows well, and has been telling stories about in a variety of ways for a long time. It's his Yoknapatawpha County or Castle Rock -- the core of a world that extends out to many places. With that said, though, Machinery feels more focused on Tackleford than SGR did -- maybe because the main characters of Machinery were kids, and limited in their ability to go other places and do other things.

I've been a fan of Machinery for a while, but only recently started diving back into Allison's archives. The first four SGR collections are currently unavailable to most readers in book form -- I believe ebooks are still obtainable in the UK, but not elsewhere due to a stupid recent tax law in that backwards country -- but books five through eight are still out there, most easily obtainable in the US from Topatco. And so that's how I got those books -- Great Aches, Ahoy Hoy!, Peloton, and Recklessly Yours -- and finally read a big wodge of SGR for myself.

What strikes me most about this slightly-less-formed version of Allison's world is how consistent he's been in his concerns: his stories have focused on smart, sarcastic women with a goal in mind -- Shelley Winters as the exemplar for SGR, Charlotte Grote for Machinery, with plenty of others including Amy Chilton and Dark Esther -- in a world of slightly slower, bemused men who end up along for the ride.

Unlike the Machinery books, each SGR volume collects a number of stories, adding up to about eleven months for each book. (More or less, to allow for full stories in each one.) Allison also includes notes on each storyline and some sketches and similar material at the end of each book, in the old way to entice freebie online readers to actually pay money for something.

These books, covering the strips from early 2006 through the end in late 2009, show serious growth in Allison's art style, from a cleaner version of the look he began SGR with in 2002, drawn on a computer, through a hand-drawn middle period and a brief "hand-drawn, but much bigger originals" period before settling back onto the computer. (Where I think he's stayed ever since.) The first story of Great Aches is in that early, flat-computer-color style, but everything else has a energetic hand-drawn look which well suites Allison's frenetic characters and zigzag pacing.

The stories are a bit sillier and more anarchic than Machinery, and Allison's notes make it clear that he spent this period making it up as he went along, diving into long stories without necessarily having a clear idea of how he'd get to the end. But even if the stories are somewhat shaggier and less formed, they're still Allison stories, with unlikely turns of plot and deflation always waiting in the wings. And his dialogue was whip-smart from well before this period, full of witty asides and great cross-talk that always feels plausible enough while still not conforming to the way real people ever did or would talk. (That is a good thing: people talk badly almost all of the time. Fiction is to make things better and more interesting.)

So, in conclusion: John Allison is awesome. Buy his books, read his comics, enrich him with your dollars and pounds and more exotic currencies. Start here, start with Bad Machinery, go crazy and drop all the way back to the beginning of Bobbins in 1998 to get the full John Allison experience from the beginning. It's all good. 


Note: I'm not including the usual Amazon links this time, because that's a very bad way to read and/or buy Allison's older work. You can get the Bad Machinery books there if you want, but the others are available other places more easily. And, honestly, for a webcomic you should just read a bunch of it online first -- surely we understand that by now?

Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle

I don't know when Wolf in White Van: takes place. I don't know how old the main character is. I don't know how much time has passed since the shattering events that changed his life. And I'm not sure if Darnielle knows those things either, or cares: he's always been an instinctual writer, driven by images and quick phrases. (Though that's obviously more germane when writing songs than novels; Darnielle is the force behind the band The Mountain Goats and for long periods of time the only member.)

Sean is a man, perhaps still young and perhaps middle aged. Something horrible happened to him -- to his face in particular -- when he was seventeen, and he's been a hermit on disability payments since then, however long that was. (My best guess is that his accident happened around twenty years before, and that this novel takes place in the first decade of the 21st century -- the Internet exists and has affected Sean, but it still feels somewhat new. That would make Sean about Darnielle's age, and about mine.) Sean now runs play-by-mail role-playing games, all of which he created himself, to supplement his disability income. His major game is a post-apocalyptic survival story called Trace Italian, in which the individual players try to reach the one safe place in future America, the legendary fortress of the title -- but, of course, the nature of a game like this is that there's never any end.

Darnielle tells Sean's story in slow spirals, circling around both a recent tragic event that led to Sean being sued and Sean's own teenage tragedy, telling us a little more about each of those events each time they come back around. This is a short novel, but a deep one: Darnielle isn't interested in external action and driving a plot, but in the deep exploration of Sean's mind and the ways that he interacts with other people, or avoids doing so. It's also really a novel, and not an overgrown song idea, and Darniell's prose is clear and crisp and precise, rolling out inevitably as he gradually lets us see all the things Sean has done and all the things that were done to Sean. He's much more of a natural novelist than most songwriters: his feel for character and situation scales up beautifully to this larger canvas and makes Wolf in White Van something like a huge, impressive Mountain Goats song.

A Perfect Day to Die

History doesn't exactly repeat, but it does rhyme. And that's even more true for the history of music, which is supposed to rhyme a lot of the time anyway.

Which is to say: I've recently found a newish band that sounds like they could have come right out of some mid-80s club, a lost Goth powerhouse that could have shared a bill in some grimy venue with Bauhaus or the early Cure or Sisters of Mercy.

(And I mean that all as a good thing -- strong keyboard lines, ominous atmosphere, a singer with a great declamatory tone, a tendency to long and intricate songs, mysterious spoken-word quotes setting the tone -- and as a signpost to identify folks like me who might not have realized they would be happy discovering a new band in that idiom.)

These guys are Knifight, and while it looks like they've been around for a few years, I discovered them with their new album V.

And it looks like I can stick a widget in here that will let you listen to that whole record, so how about less of me talking about music, and more experiencing music? If this is the kind of thing you like, you'll know pretty quickly, and then you can pay for it in whatever method you prefer these days.

Read in June

I'm writing and posting this late, but you'll only realize that if you're me or if you're paying way too much attention to my blog. (Seriously: get a life, buddy!)

As usual, this is a list of books I read this past month. And my methodology is pretty much what's it's been for a while: I list everything here, link to any posts I've already written, and then start writing about the books that haven't gotten posts yet. If that writing gets to the vague "substantial enough" standard, I pull it out and set it to post separately. If I get too tired or distracted, I might post this before I've managed to write something about every book. But, eventually, there will be at least a sentence or three about every one of these books, so, if you're reading this sufficiently far in the future, you will have an opinion you can argue with. (Because what else are opinions for?)

This was the first full month of the new job, so there's a lot of train reading -- though my new line into NYC is more crowded and hectic than the Hoboken train was, because everything must become worse over time. I've been trying to read batches of things and then write about them that way, but I've also been tired and unmotivated (a 2-hour commute each way can do that to you), so there's another large stack of books staring at me at the end of this month.

Mike Mignola, John Arcudi, and Tyler Crook, B.P.R.D.: Hell on Earth, Vol. 8: Lake of Fire (6/1)

Mike Mignola, John Arcudi, and James Harren, B.P.R.D.: Hell on Earth, Vol. 9: The Reign of the Black Flame (6/2)

Mike Mignola, John Arcudi, Laurence Campbell, Joe Querio, and Tyler Crook, B.P.R.D.: Hell on Earth, Vol. 10: The Devil's Wings (6/3)

Mike Mignola, John Arcudi, Sebastian Fiumara, Tonci Zonjic, Kevin Nowlan, Joe Querio, and Wilfredo Torres, Lobster Johnson, Vol. 3: Satan Smells a Rat (6/4)

Richard Ford, A Piece of My Heart (6/4)

Mike Mignola, John Arcudi, and Tonci Zonjic, Lobster Johnson, Vol. 4: Get the Lobster! (6/5)

Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover, Bandette, Vol. 2: Stealers, Keepers! (6/8)

The BD-influenced Parisian thief is back with another lovely souffle of an adventure, following Bandette Presto! This one threatens to become more serious, with a deadly hitman called the Strangler stalking our sunny heroine, but the tone stays light-hearted and there's no sign that anything in the world could ever harm or even more than mildly deter either Bandette or her great friend/rival in thievery, Monsieur. This is a deeply artificial world, in which victims meekly wait for the Strangler to kill them one at a time even though they are supposedly tough gangsters with guns and in which a rough-hewn police detective endlessly and fruitlessly pursues Bandette, but all of its artificialities work well together: it's a particular kind of fictional world that doesn't pretend to be real, and is all the more lovely and enchanting for that.

Andi Watson, Princess Decomposia and Count Spatula (6/9)

This one is a graphic novel for younger readers -- the world Watson has been working in for close to a decade, probably because that audience is interested in stories about wider topics than which long-underweared steroid case is punching which psychotic murderer this week -- but it's longer and somewhat deeper than his last few books for the pre-adult set. As the cover suggests, there is a hint of romance between the harried Princess Decomposia and her new chef, Count Spatula, though it's all entirely above-board and very chaste. Decomposia is the heir to a great kingdom in the underworld, supposedly run by her hypochondriac father, King Wulfrun, who clearly has not done any real work in years and whose capricious dietary requirements have just driven off yet another chef on the day of a major banquet. She hires Spatula, who also teaches her how to relax and enjoy life, as the loved one in a romantic comedy always does. Wulfrun objects to what he thinks is a romance -- though it isn't actually anywhere within country miles of a romance at that point -- overreacts, causes huge problems, and ends up sparking that aforementioned very genteel romance at the very end. Watson has done deeper and more thoughtful books than this, but his panels are full of expressive close-ups and great quirky character designs and his dialogue is joyful and real as ever. Huge Watson fans might be slightly disappointed, but I hope this will help solidify him in the minds of a million younger comics-readers -- and I still think he could have a Raina Telegemeier-level great book for that audience in him.

John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van (6/9)

G. Willow Wilson, Jacob Wyatt, and Adrian Alphona, Ms. Marvel, Vol. 2: Generation Why (6/10)

The second major plot arc continues the tone and style of the first, in good and bad ways. (See my review of the first book for some unpacking of that.) The attempts at relevance can be a bit cringe-inducing -- the evil mastermind of the moment, The Inventor, is brainwashing local teens to power his machines Matrix-style with their brains by telling them he's going to fix global warming and the evil grownups aren't -- and the required Marvel Universe Synergy Moments slow down the story and steal focus from Kamala. (Especially when we learn that she's an Inhuman, because that's the hobbyhorse Marvel is riding this decade.) But Kamala is a great character, even if she is basically a distaff Peter Parker with a few details changed up. (Or maybe more a female Richard Rider, since Kamala is reasonably smart but not the Braniac nerd Peter is.) And the art team continues to present her stories in a style that can function in the Marvel Universe but looks distinctive, as if it doesn't quite belong with all of those shiny men in skintight spandex.


John Allison, Great Aches (6/15)

John Allison, Ahoy Hoy! (6/16)

The Art of Doug Sneyd (6/17)

Sneyd is a gag cartoonist, whose work is usually in gorgeous watercolors. He's probably worked for other outlets -- who hasn't? -- but this book focuses entirely on his work for Playboy, where's he's had a full-page color piece nearly every issue since 1965. He's the one of the sleek women with big toothy grins, and the rat-faced men always on the prowl. Given Sneyd's style and the source -- all Playboy, all the time -- one would expect there to be a certain similarity of gags here, and one would be entirely correct. (One gets a cookie. Good one!) But Sneyd and his gag writers ring a lot of interesting changes on the standard setup, and Sneyd, in line with the Playboy philosophy, generally has his women as interested in and happy about sex as the men, which makes them sunny gags rather than mean ones. It's also amusing as a series of time capsules about the manias and fads of the last forty years, since Sneyd wasn't shy about using the newest hot idea as the hooks for his gags. (And there's an index detailing where each cartoon originally appeared for those who want to pinpoint each fad, or work through Sneyd's career in chronological order.) Interestingly, this book also has an introduction from Lynn (For Better or For Worse) Johnston, who is about the last cartoonist I'd expect to have been influenced by Sneyd -- but I think she knows him from their mutual Canadian-ness, and wrote the intro out of fellow-feeling for a brother toiler in the realms of frozen tundra and Bristol board.

John Allison, Peloton (6/18)

John Allison, Recklessly Yours (6/19)

Mike Mignola, Scott Allie, John Arcudi, Sebastian Fiumara, and Max Fiumara, Abe Sapien, Vol. 3: Dark and Terrible & The New Race of Man (6/22)

Mike Mignola, Scott Allie, Sebastian Fiumara, and Max Fiumara, Abe Sapien, Vol. 4: The Shape of Things to Come (6/23)

Mike Mignola, Scott Allie, Sebastian Fiumara, and Max Fiumara, Abe Sapien, Vol. 5: Sacred Places (6/24)

Daniel Handler, We Are Pirates (6/24)

Mike Mignola & Richard Corben, Hellboy: House of The Living Dead (6/25)

Hellboy goes to Mexico in the '50s, in a short but stuffed story that seems to exist mostly so Corben can drawn masked wrestlers, vampires, werewolves, and Frankenstein monsters in their requisite busy laboratories filled with mysterious machinery. (Or, more specifically, because Mignola wants to see Corben draw all of those things -- Mignola's stories have always been driven by the things he wants to draw as much as anything else.) I've warmed up to Corben's art over the years -- seeing it with Dave Stewart's coloring helps a lot, unlike the jaundiced look his work had in Heavy Metal thirty-some years ago -- and he is definitely a good artist for a Hellboy story. I could wish this one was more substantial, or connected to other pieces of the larger saga, but this is fine for what it is, and I'd honestly be happy with a series of mostly one-shot stories about a young Hellboy wandering around and punching monsters, drawn by Mignola or Corben or whoever.

Mike Mignola, Gabriel Ba, and Fabio Moon, B.P.R.D.: Vampire (6/26)

Ted McKeever, Eddy Current, Vol. 1 (6/29)
 
Ted McKeever, Eddy Current, Vol. 2 (6/30)

 
And after that comes July, in which there will be more books. It's a good world that has so many books in it.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 6/27

Yep, it's the same ol' thing once again: books in the mail, I write about 'em here, yadda yadda yadda. And so I'll dive directly into the probably vaguely accurate description of things I will take my first serious look at in about five seconds:

The Philosopher Kings get to go first because it's the new Jo Walton novel, and she's an interesting and quirky writer who does different things each time out and has written a number of excellent novels (e.g.: Among Others, Half a Crown and the rest of that loose trilogy) in recent years. This one is the sequel to last year's The Just City, in which the goddess Athena set up a city in the distant past as a utopia to educate intelligent youngsters from all of history, with a faculty of robots and philosophers. Things apparently did not go entirely to plan in that first book -- if things did got to plan all of the time, our novels would be very boring -- and so now the situation is much more complex and dangerous back in that supposedly perfect city. And there's at least one book to go -- I read Walton's blog, where she's been talking about writing the third book -- so this will not be the end of the story. I've still got The Just City on my shelf to read, but I would recommend not waiting as long as me. Philosopher Kings is a Tor hardcover coming June 30th, and I hope I don't have to try to spell "philosopher" again for ten years.

Changing gears entirely, how about a graphic novel for kids? Judd Winick, who would probably prefer if people like me didn't point out that he began his media-figure career as a contestant on the show that spawned the entire hideous "reality" genre, and so is partially responsible for the horrible state of the world today, is back with Hilo Book 1: The Boy Who Crashed to Earth. The title character is a Zot-ish blond-haired innocent with some manner of superpowers, but a few years younger and vastly more innocent than Scott McCloud's '80s hero. He arrives on Earth, meets the obligatory completely normal kid, and wacky hijinks ensue. There will clearly be more of these -- the numeral "1" in the title is the big clue there -- but this first one is coming from Random House's Young Readers operation in hardcover on the first of September.

Chris Willich is back with the third novel about the poet Persimmon Gaunt and the thief Imago Bone -- and, from the cover, the Viking-looking guys with big axes that want to kill them -- in The Chart of Tomorrows. The previous books in the series were The Scroll of Years and The Silk Map, our married heroes are still trying to keep their baby son from being the locus of all evil on their particular secondary world -- as you do -- and this book promises to have war-balloons in it. How can you turn aside a book with war-balloons, I ask you? This one is a Pyr trade paperback, available July 7th.

Who says steampunk is just for adults? Certainly not Alan Gratz, who is back with the second novel in his "League of Seven" series (after the eponymous first book), The Dragon Lantern, which comes complete with extensive illustrations by Brett Helquist (whom some of us remember fondly from Lemony Snicket's "Series of Unfortunate Events" and others probably remember fondly from other stuff). This series is set in an alternate 1875 powered by steam and where Native Americans seem to be at least nominally in charge of the United Nations of America, and whose world is periodically threatened by the evil Mangleborn and then in turn saved by the resurgent of a League of Seven, who always follow exactly the same template, because this is a book for middle-school kids, and they love specific rules and details. This is from the Tor Starscape imprint, and should be already available from your favorite retailer. (If not, why are they your favorite, exactly? It came out on June 9th.)

What the Hell?

From this post by Zara Sternberg at the Melville House Blog, interviewing Prof Daniel Donoghue of Harvard:

Donoghue: If you are ever reading out loud, there is a time lag – your reading is about 2 words behind the uttering of the word, and as long as there is a time lag, you have a moment of silent reading. Do you hear a little voice in your head when you read silently?

Sternberg: Yes.

Donoghue: Most people do. They also often move their lips as well, especially when trying to absorb difficult material.

Let me pull out the essential part of that: "Do you hear a little voice in your head when you read silently?" "Yes." "Most people do."

What the everlasting fuck? I've never heard a voice in my head while reading, and never even considered that anyone might. Is this actually a real thing? Am I some sort of weird outlier because I actually read instead of listen to things?

You know what -- this calls for a poll. Folks, let me know if I'm crazy or not:

Do you hear a little voice in your head when you read?

Yes -- all the time, my own voice

Yes -- all the time, another voice

Yes, sometimes, but not always

No, and I agree with you that this is utterly insane.

Poll Maker

If you have any trouble using the poll as an embed, this link should take you to cast your vote, and this one should link to the results.

Edit: I thought this poll would show results within the widget, but the "Results" button opens a new window on the host's site. I guess that's what happens when you use free web content without investigating too closely. Anyway, if you're having trouble seeing results, check your pop-up blocker.

Posing for Vengeance

So this here new Avengers cover hit the intertubes this week, revealing the new team that apparently is exactly the same one everyone assumed it would be. (I don't pay close attention to long-underwear comics these days.)

I'm not here to berate or praise the racial/gender mix of the team -- there are plenty of other places filled with people who have scarily strong opinions on the subject -- but I do have a question.

Where are they?

They seem to be standing in a cloudbank, and I'm pretty sure several of those characters don't fly -- Spidey and Ms. Marvel, in particular. I don't know if the current Thor can hover, either, though I wouldn't be surprised if Vision, Nova, and ol' Shellhead can do so. They're also strangely crowded around the camera, though at very different levels -- are they on cloud risers?

Also, while I'm at it, what the heck is Captain America doing? Is he supposed to be coming in for a landing on his cloud riser, or just showing off his muscles?

Yes, I know it looks cool: they're all glowering menacingly at the assumed reader, and Cap gives it some movement. But what does it have to do with anything, and why should we care that they're giving us the stink-eye?

Memories and Memes

So I noticed that a book cover I was responsible for was memed recently -- that's it at the top of this post.

I say "I," but Jim Butcher wrote the actual books, and Dan Dos Santos did that great cover -- and I think it was Toby Schwartz who was the art director at the time, so she contacted Dan, negotiated the deal, and worked with him to develop the cover. I did make the deal for the omnibus -- Wizard at Large, the third Butcher omni I did, back in 2006, collecting books seven and eight -- and had the idea for the cover, though.

(I can't claim much credit for that, though. I think my brief to Toby was pretty much "Dan's done two of these already, and he knows what he's doing. But there's a scene where Harry rides a zombie T-Rex, and I think Dan would do a killer job on that. But you and he might have other ideas.")

Still, it was a hoot to see my old life pop up unexpectedly: that is a great cover, and I hope Dan is selling a lot of prints of it. Who knows? Maybe some day I'll be lucky enough to walk by it on the side of a van.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 6/20

Do I need to explain this all every week? I doubt the audience changes much.

But the Internet is wide and lasts forever, so context is always useful. At this point, I've been doing these weekly posts for around eight years -- each time listing the books that came in the mail and attempting to make sense of them. As always, I haven't read any of them, and anything I write below about them is subject to being entirely wrong.

But, with that danger in mind, let's see what I have for you this morning....

Falling in Love with Hominids is the third short-story collection from Nalo Hopkinson, collecting eighteen stories from the last dozen years. It's a trade paperback from Tachyon, coming on August 15th.

Also from Tachyon -- but publishing sooner, on July 14th -- is Peter V. Brett's The Great Bazaar & Brayan's Gold, collecting two sidebar novelettes to Brett's Demon Cycle novels that were each originally published as pricey limited-edition hardcovers in the UK.

(Tachyon seems to be concentrating on writers that I've met and feel guilty about not reading more of -- probably not on purpose!)

And I also have what I think is a first novel this week: Robert Brockway's The Unnoticeables, a contemporary fantasy that comes more out of the mainstream than the genre. There is a supernatural world, but they operate like a really nasty consulting firm: their own job is to find and eliminate "problems," and make the universe operate more efficiently. And every human being has a problem of one kind of another -- everyone is inefficient. Unnoticeables is the story of a punk in 1977 and a would-be stuntwoman in 2013 who each discover the truth of the universe, and what they do about it. This one is a Tor hardcover, available July 7th.

Goal?

Picture this: a world were most of the people are obsessed with a particular game, with quirky rules that forbid the use of hands except in special situations. Teams wear distinctive colors adorned with the logos of commercial enterprises that want to harness their popularity, and are beloved in their communities -- and, in some cases, worldwide. Individual players are often larger than life, drawing massive media attention and adulation for their elan and skill.

And the whole enterprise is organized into a complex structure of leagues within leagues, all carefully orchestrated and managed to benefit a small elite of managers, who, it is rumored, are deeply corrupt and have gained massive fortunes from their positions.

The head of this world-spanning game, the man with his hands in all of the pies and his whims translated into instant action, is smooth and deeply personable in public, but ruthless behind the scenes. No reforms can take place as long as this charismatic figure is in place, and he's cruising to an easy re-election even in the face of proof of massive scandals. His name is Sepp Blatter.

...

We're living in a Jack Vance novel, aren't we? Some tough agent of an interstellar polity is going to smash this system, on his way to killing the fiend that torched his planet thirty years ago, right?

It's the only explanation I can see: it all looks too Vancean to be the real world.

Charlotte Grote Is My Spirit Animal

And this is why:

That's only one-third of today's Space Is the Place comic from John Allison.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 6/13

I'm back again with a few books that showed up on my doorstep this week, like foundlings of the publishing world. I didn't expect any of these, which makes them more interesting, and it's entirely possible that one of them will turn out to be your favorites book of the year.

As usual, I haven't read any of these yet, but here's what looks interesting and/or amusing about them to me:

The Stellow Project is, I believe, the first novel from Shari Becker, who has written picture books and done other things related to the entertainment world. It's from Amazon's newish YA imprint, Skyscape, and is available June 23rd in trade paperback and electronic formats. Unexpectedly, it seems to be set in the modern world and not a dystopian hellhole, which is refreshing. Our heroine is sent away from the family's Manhattan home in an unexpected "killer storm" (which reminds me of the song "Wildfire" and its tragically killing frost, because I am old) with her younger sister, and left without the experimental drug that keeps her alive. This is a YA book, so I'm sure she both survives and learns that Everything She Knows Is Wrong -- primarily concerning the evil and duplicity of adults.

My next book here is for slightly younger folks: Life of Zarf: The Troll Who Cried Wolf continues Rob Harrell's middle-grade series (after The Trouble With Weasels) about a troll kid trying to survive in a fairy-tale school. Harrell is the creator of the syndicated Adam@home newspaper strip, as well as the graphic novel Monster on the Hill, and he makes this book into something in between a novel and a graphic novel: each page has at least one spot illustration, which are part of the flow of the story, usually showing a line of dialogue or a moment of action. Troll Who Cried Wolf is coming in September -- just in time for a new crop of anxious middle-schoolers -- from Dial Books for Young Readers.

Nick Harkaway is a British writer who works with SFnal and spy-story ideas but gets published mostly on the "general fiction" lists -- possibly because his father is the writer John le Carre, so he knows how the business works from the inside -- and his third novel, Tigerman, is hitting paperback here in the US on June 23 from the good people at Vintage. Tigerman, unlike his first two books, doesn't seem to have any fantastic elements: it's about a British soldier given a quiet last job before retirement, watching over things on the backwater ex-colony of Mancreau. But, of course, books about quiet tropical paradises always turn out to be really about the things lurking beneath the surfaces of those seeming paradises, don't they?

And last for this week is an unabashed fantasy novel, The Hollow Queen, coming from Tor in hardcover on June 30. It's the eighth in the "Symphony of Ages" series by Elizabeth Haydon, and finishes up the current trilogy. (There was a long gap between books two and three, which I looked up after seeing Haydon thank her original editor, my old SFWA-party buddy Jim Minz, in her acknowledgements -- that surprised me, since Minz left Tor a good decade ago.) I haven't read Haydon in a while, but I have good memories of the first trilogy in this series -- starting with Rhapsody back in 1999 -- since I read and bought them for the SFBC back in those days of the earth's youth. This is big fantasy in a world where magic relies, at least some of the time, on music, and Haydon, as I recall, was good at characters and relationships and actually had a number of important women in her books.

Lobster Johnson, Vols. 3 & 4 by Mignola, Arcudi, Zonjic & guests

I still suspect the whole point of the Lobster Johnson series is so that Mike Mignola can have his own version of Doc Savage to play around with whenever he wants to. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but, four volumes in, the Lobster -- if there was an in-comics explanation of "Johnson," I've missed it -- is still deeply enigmatic, a guy who we only ever see in costume and who has no interior life. He does his job of fighting evil, he has a crew of oddball agents, and that's about it.

The Mignola/Hellboy universe is punching-centric, yes; it features a whole host of problems, nearly all of which can be solved by a big red fist to a face or a judiciously applied dose of purifying flame and/or high-caliber bullets. But the other pieces of it, from the original core Hellboy series (though that's amusingly a sidebar to the larger universe, now) to the continuity-drunk B.P.R.D. manifold to Abe Sapien's solo stories, are about the strange people as much as the strange situations. The Lobster's stories, though, are about what's mostly a '30s stock company -- spunky girl reporter, smart black mechanic, not-as-smart-as-he-thinks-he-is gang boss and his creepy omnicompetent henchman, plus the inevitable army of cannon fodder in hats -- performing the stories we expect, as the still unknown Lobster smashes crime and leaves behind his inevitable calling card.

Satan Smells a Rat collects five stories clustering around the single-issue size (one longer, one shorter), all written by Mignola and his longtime collaborator John Arcudi, with art from series artist Tonci Zonjic in one case and others (Sebastian Fiumara, Kevin Nowlan, Joe Querio,  and Wilfredo Torres) on the remaining stories. They're all very punch-happy, and good pulpy fun -- though, personally, I don't think Nowlan's art style is a good match for the Hellboy universe. [1] Since this universe is made up of tiny details that turn out to be important later, I won't say that these are all minor sidebar stories -- something here may set up a major villain in 2020 -- but, for right now, they're little, individual stories.

Get the Lobster!, on the other hand, is more of a "mythology" storyline, as much as those exist for the Lobster. The gangster and his henchman from Burning Hand are back, and there's a fiendish scheme involving mind-control and a giant killer gorilla. (The Hellboy universe has always been very strongly driven by whatever Mignola and his collaborators think would be really cool to draw.)

This is all, as I said, good pulpy fun, and Zonjic in particular has a real flair for drawing '30s-style action. It is a bit thinner than the main Hellboy or B.P.R.D. stories, and definitely only slightly connected to their world. But there are very few comics these days about a pulp hero punching out a remote-controlled dwarf in a devil mask, and you have to respect it for being there for us.


[1] You can take that with a grain of salt, if you want, since my brother and I have been jokingly calling him Kevin "rat-faced git" Nowlan since the late '80s because of the distinctive faces he draws. He's good at what he does, but I've never really warmed up to it. So I have a tendency to say he doesn't match well with anything I see him do.

Incoming Books: Week of June 9

I got two clumps of books over the past week, and since I love posting lists of books here, I'm going to inflict them on you.

First, I got another clump of Vintage Contemporaries for my monthly reading series. I'm now at the point where there's only four books left in the crucial 1984-1988 timeframe, so I'm nearly completely organized for at least one book to read a month for the next three years. (Some of you may understand why I find that comforting; I pity the rest of you.)

Those books are:

• James Crumley's One to Count Cadence, his first novel, a realistic fictionalized account of his time as a soldier in Vietnam. I had a copy of this pre-flood (this very edition), but never managed to read it.
• Jill Eisenstadt's From Rockaway, which looks like a very '80s novel about sensitive young people growing up in a world tougher than they are. I could be wrong; that's why I'll read it.
• Kaye Gibbons's Ellen Foster, about which I know basically nothing.
• Barry Hannah's Airships, a hugely influential collection of stories originally published in the mid-70s. This was talked about a lot when I was in college, but I managed to avoid it then. I've probably spent too much of my life trying to avoid things, honestly.
• Denis Johnson's Fiskadoro, which I think is a modern white-man-among-the-heathens novel. (Though I'm not sure how far Johnson deformed the definition of "heathens," which could make all the difference.) It's the kind of book that has lots of quotes to say how wonderful it is and not a whisper about the plot and characters.
• Susanna Kaysen, Asa, as I Knew Him, a slim novel with the bold line "the voice of a new generation" on the cover. Kaysen is probably best-known for the memoir Girl, Interrupted, which came out a decade later (though it was about her time in a psychiatric ward in the late '60s).
• Jerzy Kosinski's Steps, a late '60s novel from the author of Being There -- and who I think was a fairly major literary figure while he was alive, though he seems to have dropped off precipitously since.
• Joy Williams's Taking Care, a book of short stories
• Joy Williams's Breaking and Entering, which was an original in this series and seems to be her second novel. Williams's is not a name I've heard in literary circles for these past twenty years; I wonder what happened to her? (I'll have to look into it when I read her books.)

And I also broke down and bought the four physical books available from John Allison's defunct Scary Go Round comic -- Great Aches, Ahoy Hoy!, Peloton, and Recklessly Yours. If I hadn't dithered so long, I could have bought the first four in digital form before that stupid new UK tax law came into place and knocked out a lot of small ebooksellers from the international marketplace.

Yes, I know the whole thing is still available online, and I might read the first half online. But I like to pay for things I enjoy, so as to keep them coming. And I like having books on my shelves. Someday there will be a vast John Allison Library, including all of his oddly interlinked series, with a loving large-format concordance and all of those little fiddly bits, but I don't want to wait that long.