needs more demons?

The short version: Brain Thief absolutely floored me. If you think you’d like a post-modern noir that’s dark and funny, packed with quirky characters and hair-raising thrills, and has some near-future science fiction flavor, it’s run-do-not-walk time. Bernal Hayden-Rumi works for a wealthy eccentric who funds oddball research projects, something is going identifiably wonky with [...]

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I hoped The Bizarro Starter Kit would help me figure out if I’d like bizarro fiction, a genre self-defined by a loose collective of writers with a shared love of cult/trash cinema. It didn’t. The Bizarro Starter Kit makes the case that there’s too much going on for me to dismiss it, and too much [...]

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About a quarter of the way through Evil Genius I was pretty sure I had it sussed: a dark parody of the Harry Potter series. By then titular genius Cadel Piggott, who by early adolescence is well down the path leading to an eventual Antisocial Personality Disorder diagnosis, has been packed off to the Axis [...]

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Harlot Charlotte finds herself catapulted from late 19th-century Denmark to 21st-century England in Liz Jensen’s odd fantasy. Charlotte is a mildly unreliable narrator somewhat given to giddiness and entirely given to elaborately structured sentences:
When Franz finally departed for a place he referred to mysteriously a the Halfway Club, I resolved to confront Professor Krak [...]

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I thought You Are So Undead to Me was fluffy in a fun way, but by the end of Undead Much, I was mostly just annoyed — enough so that it makes me retroactively question my response to the previous book.
This time around, what impressed me most was the density of repurposing elements [...]

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So here’s the elevator pitch for The Year of Living Biblically: this guy, technically Jewish, but secular — an avowed agnostic, actually — decides that for one full year he will follow the laws and commandments of the Bible. All of them. Literally. (Except for those it would be criminal to follow.)
(He also ignores some [...]

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In his introduction, Jacobs lays asserts that his participatory journalism draws on the tradition of writers like Nellie Bly and John Howard Griffin (the author of Black Like Me). But I would assert that he also belongs somewhere along the continuum of writers like Dave Barry and Mark Leyner, who blur the lines between the [...]

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The Reformed Vampire Support Group is maybe the most original vampire novel I’ve ever read that actually uses the word “vampire.” With a few deft twists to the rules of the legend, Jinks inverts the dynamic of the modern sexy, super-strong bloodsucker. Her vamps don’t have super strength or magically accelerated healing. They can’t fly, [...]

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If the title didn’t already clue you in, the final sentence of the back cover blurb perfectly telegraphs You Are So Undead to Me’s tone: “Her life — and more importantly, the homecoming dance — depends on it.”
In the first volume of Jay’s post-Buffy zombie franchise, reluctant zombie “Settler” Megan Berry is at least as [...]

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Steven Johnson opens his whirlwind tour of modern brain science asserting his intent to deliver a “long-decay” idea in each chapter: the sort of thought that will resonate with you after you finish the book, even possibly altering your behavior.
And he delivers at least a few that stick for me. I learned things about the [...]

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