by Anthony Lovett and Matt Maranian

Shaun let us borrow his copy of LA Bizarro for our recent action-packed trip to LA (of which you’ll be hearing about over the next few weeks here) and it certainly made for a more interesting adventure; as you’ll discover after a quick flip through the pages, it’s no G-rated family vacation guide.

One entire section is devoted to all things porn and another to locations where horrific crimes took place. Laura, who was reading it in the back seat, punctuated our drive with exclamations of horror induced by the unnecessary and constant references to glory holes.

But beyond the beyond the pale, there’s a lot in these pages worth checking out from magic spell components to sailor-themed bars, and enough recommendations that I still have many saved up for my next trip.

by E.E. Cummings (1931)

There are few poems that I’ll carry with me through my entire life and somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond by ee cummings is one of them.

I can recall copying this down in a junior high journal (“nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands” still makes me sigh inside). I was very, very romantic back then, as I’m sure most girls were at that age. Strangely, now that I live with the love of my life, my interest in things romantic has dwindled… I guess reality is just too good to compare to fiction. The poem was published in the collection Viva.

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

Click here to see the rest of somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond

by John Franklin Bardin (1946)

Surrealism, psychology and noir have been friends before in popular fiction (see the Hitchcock and Dali collab Spellbound, which came out around the same time) but in John Franklin Bardin’s The Deadly Percheron, it gets a little quirkier and less artful than that. Leprechauns, multiple states of amnesia, Coney Island freaks, stolen identities, giant horses and forced electric shock therapy all come into play. Is it all cohesive and believable? Of course not! But it’s a quick pleasure to read and a unique entry in the over crowded genre of pulp novels written in the forties.

Bardin was a native Ohioan turned New Yorker (as so many Ohioans tend to be) who is most known for this novel and two others (The Last of Philip Banter and Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly) though none have exactly made him a household name.

by Justin Evans (2007)

Psychiatry and demonic possession collide brilliantly in Justin Evans’s debut thriller, A Good and Happy Child. Partially set in modern day New York, where a young father is seeking help for the crippling fear of loving his baby son and partially set in that man’s youth spent in a Virginia college town, the novel swings back and forth between adulthood and childhood; faith and reason – Evans’s greatest achievement is that you can enjoy the book no matter where your personal beliefs fall.

The back of the paperback would lead you to draw comparisons to The Exorcist and The Little Friend,  but I consider those masterpieces, and A Good and Happy Child didn’t draw me in quite as much – still, it’s well written, often tense and would, in the right hands, make for a pretty great movie in the tradition of The Omen. Imagine character actor extraordinaire Tom Noonan as Tom Harris.

Evans did a lot of research on cases of demon possession and drew from his own childhood in Virginia growing up with a belief in and experiences with ghosts to create a rich story that is leaps and bounds above your average demon filled paperback out for quick and easy thrills. Well worth the five years it took to write. I look forward to reading more by this author.

Click here to see the rest of A Good and Happy Child

by Shel Silverstein (1964)

While I may not believe in the religious specifics of the holiday, it’s the spirit that moves me: love, kindness, giving… and no book tells the story of selflessness better than The Giving Tree. Like all of Silverstein’s books that played a large formative part in my younger days, it’s a seemingly simple book expressing complex things with quirky line drawings to match.

I remember the book as a very touching one, but as an adult I also find it as quietly sad as it is lovely. The unclear point of view (is self sacrifice a good or bad thing? is the boy bad in all his demands?) leaves many readers at the very least confused and sometimes up in arms with words of controversy.

Click here to see the rest of The Giving Tree

by Gene Wolfe (1980 – 1983)

Gene Wolfe’s imagination is truly formidable. A industrial engineer (and devoted Catholic) who has become a living SF legend, Wolfe’s work is rich, dense, and not always exactly what I’m looking for. But that’s no slight: when Wolfe’s writing what I want to read, it’s amazing; when he’s not, it’s still fine, it just tends to get a bit… overly complicated and less than satisfying – but a return to form is always just a few pages away.

Brittany will be posting her impressions of Wolfe’s early short story compilation, The Island of Dr. Death and Other Stories and Other Stories (not a typo, FYI), and I imagine her take on Wolfe will be equally conflicted.

But the Book of the New Sun is the big one: the magnum opus (he’s since spun off a coda and two additional series, the Book of the Long Sun and the Book of the Short Sun).

The four novels that make up the tetralogy are packed so densely with episodes alternately incredibly compelling and kind of… kind of like you just want to get through them as quickly as you can, that, sitting here now recalling the bits I remember, I’m truly astounded at the way the story is so compartmentalized in my brain.

The plot unfolds in a distant future inspired by the work of the writer who has appeared more times then any other on this blog, the great Jack Vance. The first novel, the Shadow of the Torturer, opens with its protag, Severian (who is blessed/cursed with a perfect memory), serving as an apprentice in the guild of torturers. His kind of weirdly idyllic childhood is interrupted by a key chance meeting in the nearby necropolis and the professional discipline he’ll expertly develop over the next few years is kind of slow-burn compromised.

While I suppose I could offer a more comprehensive plot synopsis, I’d really be doing everyone (particularly you, dear reader) a disservice. Suffice to say, a lot happens very quickly: Severian makes a judgement call that ultimately results in his exile from Nessus (the capital city), is challenged to an alien poison flower duel, demolishes a church, meets a young lady who’s been submerged in (for lack of a better description) internment water for who knows how long, meets another young lady who’s definitely hiding something, gets a crazy note from a bus boy, and becomes aquatinted with a fairly unique traveling acting troupe. Oh, and he’s given an awesome sword called Terminus Est and dispatched to a place called Thrax: the city of windowless rooms.

Click here to see the rest of The Book of the New Sun

By Lisa Reardon (2004)

Lisa Reardon is known as the queen of redneck noir and Mercy Killers is actually the second novel of her’s that I’ve read – Billy Dead being the first – and, like Billy Dead, it’s no cake walk. The world she creates is a grim one rife with abuse, death, drugs, poverty, alcoholism and hopelessness around every corner.

The time is the late sixties and the novel follows a group of trashy friends from early tragedy to the Vietnam years. Some of them go into combat, none come back the same. I won’t give too much of the plot away but, suffice to say, bad things happen to bad people.

What makes the book so readable (albeit depressing) is Reardon’s voice, which somehow makes the characters compelling and sympathetic or, if not exactly sympathetic, at least understandable in their rottenness. After doing some research on the author after finishing the book, I may have figured out why she’s so in tune with the sordid world she depicts!

Just a few months ago, Reardon was jailed for attempting to murder her father with a shotgun. He survived the attack, a fact that prompted her to say “I just cannot believe I missed. I will never get another chance.” Read the full article here.

Click here to see the rest of The Mercy Killers

Here's what I said back on December 28th:

Shirley Jackson is a vivid horror writer, not vivid as in blood and gore, but like her most famous short story, The Lottery, her depictions of the horrors of human cruelty are ones that stick in your imagination forever. Since reading that short story way back in junior high, I'd never tried anything else that Jackson had written and was happy to have finally rediscovered her work with the short novel We Have Always Lived In the Castle, a chilling, twisted, smart, haunting book about a family rocked by murder, insanity, suspicion and class warfare.

Merricat Blackwood (named by Book Magazine as one of The 100 Best Fictional Characters Since 1900) is your narrator, a strange child of eighteen and one of the only surviving members of a prominent family that was killed at breakfast when someone put arsenic in their sugar. Constance, her older sister was acquitted of the murders and poor Uncle Julian's body and mind were permanently warped by his non lethal dosage. Together the three of them, along with Jonas, the cat, live in an old mansion apart from the rest of the village. They are completely sheltered from the outside world except for the two days a week Merricat goes into the village for goods and must endure the stares and laughter of the villagers, and Sundays when members of other prominent families bravely take tea with the two mysterious girls.

Their beloved castle is under the protection of Merricat's sympathetic magic described by wikipedia as:

“a type of magic based on imitation or correspondence. Imitation involves using effigies or poppets to affect the environment of people, or occasionally people themselves. Correspondence is based on the idea that one can influence something based on its relationship to another thing.”

For example, she buries items like a box of silver coins and nails her father's books to the surrounding trees to keep out strangers; once that book falls, she knows danger is imminent.

That danger comes in the form of Cousin Charles, a thieving manipulator who can fool the frail Constance, but not so easily the equally manipulative Merricat who envisions different ways he could die (turning him into a fly and leaving him in a spiders web, or perhaps just stomping him to death in the garden…) during a rather unappreciated visit. His presence sparks a chain of events that breaks down their odd routines and concludes in an eruption of fire and violence which marks the beginning of a new and far weirder way of life for the two sisters.

It's part Grey Gardens, part Tim Burton (who would have a grand time adapting this), part old timey Gaslight thriller, and I loved it. It was interesting to find out that Jackson was an agoraphobic herself, which is probably why the extremely eccentric but happy sisters are sympathetic and oddly relatable while all the outsiders are depicted as cruel or petty.

While Jackson isn't as well known today as she deserves to be, this, her last novel did come out in a new edition in 2007 with a smart looking cover featuring an illustration by Thomas Ott (pictured) but the original cover is also pretty wonderful and both adorn an equally great read.

RUNNERS UP:
The Demon Princes
Random Family
Code of the Woosters
Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets
A Friend of the Earth
Please Don't Promise Me Forever