needs more demons?

As the name might suggest, Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works takes a breezy, irreverent approach to introducing typography to the lay reader. It does a good job of explaining the vocabulary of the field. It demonstrates how elements of of a typeface contribute to legibility in various contexts. And it introduces [...]

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The twelve stories comprising Plots and Misadventures span nearly twenty years of Gallagher’s career and encompass horror, dark fantasy, noirish suspense, and dark science fiction. The newer material generally stuck me as among the strongest, a circumstance I’m always happy to report. The collection opens audaciously: the story “Little Dead Girl Singing,” which certainly sounds [...]

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Walking the Labyrinth doesn’t sound like it should work anywhere near as well as it does. Molly Travers, a young woman in the modern day Bay area, finds herself investigating her ancestors, a loose-knit family troupe of illusionists who may have commanded powers beyond mere illusion. In addition to structuring the novel around a well-worn [...]

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Lisa Goldstein has long been on the list of writers I thought I should read something by sometime, and now she’s on the list of writers I want to read everything by.
The set up for Dark Cities Underground reads like something from the manual of how to write a novel that appeals to me: Ruthie [...]

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I’m probably waaay over thinking my reaction to Gunn’s Golden Rules. I was entertained and amused, even a little bit edified. But it still strikes me as an odd, even inconsistent book.
Presumably the draw for most fans of Project Runway’s congenial but incisive mentor figure Tim Gunn (certainly for me) is the promise of some [...]

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I think the marketing of Shining City does it a mild disservice — it’s positioned as a story in which a more-or-less normal guy inherits a small business from his estranged brother that is not what it at first seems. Really, it’s a story about a more-or-less normal guy whose life is repeatedly jostled out [...]

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How to Buy a Love of Reading is hard to pigeonhole, since it combines disparate elements and themes: there’s the more-or-less naturalistic coming-of-age story of chronic underachiever Carley Wells, some generalized satire of New York’s upper crust, and some more specific satire of trends in literature-with-the-second-syllable-elided. These facets are drawn together when Carley’s dad commissions [...]

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On the whole I liked Glen David Gold’s Sunnyside, even if I’m not quite sure what to make of it. It shares only superficial similarities with Gold’s debut novel, Carter Beats the Devil: like the earlier book it seamlessly blends historical and invented characters in a story fully of derring-do, heartbreak, and coincidence-fueled plot twists. [...]

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I loved the film Coraline although I expected not to (I’m not a Nightmare Before Christmas fan). I started reading Coraline the novel expecting additional richness and strangeness that had not fit into the film, and instead discovered that with one interesting (and somewhat controversial) exception, Coraline the film is one of the most faithful [...]

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Pretty much ever since the genres science fiction, fantasy, and horror have existed as distinct marketing categories, there have been periodic movements seeking to un-define them as such. In the 60’s there was “The New Wave.” In the 80’s some bruited about the awkward, demi-hemispherist phrase “North American magical realism.” And more recently, an unruly [...]

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