needs more demons?

I think the combination of the current young adult publishing climate and the packaging of Generation Dead do Daniel Waters’ novel a disservice.
For better or worse, in the wake of Twilight’s success (not to mention Harry Potter’s, Buffy’s and the more explicit books of Hamilton’s, Harris’s, et al) there’s a lot of supernaturally-themed young adult [...]

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If you take its core plot at face-value, John Dies at the End is at least superficially a xenophobic horror story in the Cthulhu mythos mode. Wong gives his Big Nasties different names from Cthulhu and his crowd, but he specifically borrows a key concept from Lovecraft’s “From Beyond” — if you do something special [...]

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A week after visiting three bookstores to score a copy of Larbalestier’s Liar on its release day, I was preparing a multi-book store itinerary to buy her husband’s new novel, Leviathan on its first day of sale. I’ve been awaiting this book since at least June of 2006, when Westerfeld first started mentioning an in-progress [...]

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The Half Life of Stars is the novel with which I officially stop thinking of Wener as a the former front person of a band I liked who’s now writing books, and start thinking of her as a novelist who used to be in a band I liked.
It’s certainly not perfect — two chapters of [...]

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The Perfect Play is a novel about a young woman coming to terms with her abandonment issues via a quest for her vanished professional gambler dad. Audrey Unger is a mathematical genius, but her penchant for periodic drastic upheavals of her life has left her a chronic underachiever. As the clock seems to be running [...]

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Dennis Wheatley’s supernatural thriller The Satanist is so ugly and offensive that I often found it unintentionally hilarious. It revolves primarily around the attempts of a special branch of British intelligence to unravel the schemes of a cult of communist Satanists (some of whom are also, no joke, ex-Nazis).
The novel was first published in [...]

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Apex Hides the Hurt is a slippery little book. On its surface, it’s the story of a nomenclature consultant — tellingly, he himself goes un-named — who is summoned to a small town to break the unlikely deadlock of its triumvirate City Council: the young (white) technology tycoon in the Gates/Bezos mold wants to rechristen [...]

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If Wener’s name seems familiar other than as a novelist, it’s probably because she led the 90’s britpop outfit Sleeper. I’m generally skeptical of songwriter-to-prose-slinger transitions — the skillsets involved have little overlap, it seems to me. But Wener’s songs often had such a strong narrative sense that they were almost short-story like, and my [...]

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It was Leslie What’s contributions to Small Beer Press’s pretty-much-mostly slipstream zine, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet that made me really take note of her name. Her stories for that magazine fit what I think of as the general mode of slipstream (or interstitial, or new-wave fabulist, or whatever you want to call it) fiction.
My [...]

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