needs more demons?

I liked Harwood’s previous novel The Ghost Writer very much. The Séance shares several of The Ghost Writer’s hallmarks: reserved, chilly, almost 19th-century flavored prose*; dark, complex and secret-spiked family histories; an elaborate, almost meta-textual, structure with multiple layers of nested stories; a brooding, slow-growing aura of menace; and lingering questions about which — if [...]

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I didn’t read any of the jacket copy before starting The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death, so all I knew about it to start was second-hand information that it had received a lukewarm response from Huston’s fans. And admittedly it was the first of the Huston novels I’ve read that didn’t snag [...]

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Watching Baseball Smarter touches on so many aspects of the sport that it invites facile criticism for the many things it doesn’t cover. But I think this is missing the point. Watching Baseball Smarter would arguably be improved by graphics showing the typical path of various pitches — but there are plenty of other sources [...]

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I had an educated guess as to how A Dangerous Man would bring Huston’s Hank Thompson trilogy to full circle: some naif would bumble into Hank’s way in much the same way Hank stumbled into some nasty heavies in Caught Stealing; Hank would understimate the noob as he himself was once underestimated. Hank might manage [...]

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I’m still enjoying the Harris’ southern vampire series more than enough to keep reading, but in this third entry in the series, the genre-defying elements that appealed to me so much in the first novel are definitely on the wane. Club Dead does not equally blend waitress Sookie Stackhouse dealing with both normal and supernatural [...]

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When writing about Huston I have to resist the temptation of tired metaphors: electricity, velocity, whips, blisters. They’re especially inappropriate, because one of Huston’s tricks for avoiding noir clichés is to avoid metaphor and simile almost completely. Huston’s crafts terse, almost reportorial, prose enlivened by a practiced eye for the telling detail, and an ear [...]

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I liked Six Bad Things, but not nearly as much as its predecessor Caught Stealing. In first novel Hank Thompson is a basically ordinary guy abruptly thrust into an over-the-top noir situation; by the time the second novel opens, Thompson isn’t so much a regular Joe anymore, so the book lacks the charm of the [...]

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What if somebody had a heart attack reading an exciting novel, and the Surgeon General determined that some novels ought to have medical warnings, and an MPAA-like board — the Literary Medical Review Committee, say — was formed to review and rate books? Then Caught Stealing would have a banner on the front cover that [...]

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I’m embarassed about it, but over the past few years I’ve read several books in the burgeoning “paranormal romance” sub-genre (and returned several more to the library when I decided they really weren’t worth my time). I’m perversely intrigued by the extent to which the genre has calcifyied around a single template, Laurell Hamilton’s “Anita [...]

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The Raw Shark Texts is an out-of-the-park homerun of a book for me, soaring over the Monster, bound for who knows where. My friend Marty convinced me to read it with enigmatic remarks about how he didn’t want to tell me anything about it, but thought I’d like it. That seems like a wise strategy. [...]

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