needs more demons?

Lyga’s descriptions of what it’s like to be an unpopular, un-sporty, picked-on high school sophomore match so many specific details of my own memories that it’s uncanny. Big ugly bruises on the arm where punches land every day? Check. Lurid homicidal revenge fantasies? Check. Narrator Donnie has an escape hatch, though: he’s secretly working [...]

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High school: Noah loves Lily, Lily loves Simon, Simon loves pot; Noah deals pot. I was lucky enough to never be a vertex in a warped little quadrilateral precisely like this, but the geometry of misery feels plenty familiar and accurate anyway. Brezenoff lays it out in first-person narration from the three principles, with [...]

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A couple of Derek Sivers stories:
My first CD Baby order was #17697, for 8 discs, in 2000. When I got the now-famous colorful shipment notice I thought I’d actually been the first brand new customer to order as many as 8 albums. I thought the email had been crafted for me, in particular. I [...]

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World’s End felt throughout like a book I expected to like, and I wonder if I might’ve liked it better if I’d encountered it earlier. It’s a heroic fantasy of the magic-returns-to-the-modern-world variety. Chadbourn clearly knows a lot about the myths and legends of the British Isles, and this was what I enjoyed most in [...]

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Wow. There are so many things I love about this book. There’s careful prose like this:
Ry’s grandfather, Lloyd, took his first cup of coffee out onto the screened porch, sat down on a glider, and waited in the dark for the birds to start chirping. Between him and the sun, there was a thin bit [...]

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This sequel to Rampant is not the sort of book to make a lot of concessions. The opening scene, in which narrator/hereditary-unicorn-slayer Astrid Llewellyn matter-of-factly harvests her dead prey, serves as a litmus test for Peterfreund’s dark, historically informed take on unicorn legends. I imagine that more than a few gentle souls will decide [...]

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Sutcliffe’s history of rock’s Down Under bad boys is lucidly written, with a rather reportorial remove. (Sutcliffe for instance is always careful to note whenever the attribution of a quote is difficult to definitively establish.) The book is clearly marked as “not licensed or approved by AC/DC,” but it’s scarcely adversarial. Sutcliffe will occasionally note [...]

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Like John Connolly’s The Gates, The Accidental Demon Slayer made me think a lot about my preferred ratio of novelty and familiarity in straightforward escapist genre fiction. The Accidental Demon Slayer’s mix is a bit too calculated for my taste — Lizzie’s struggle with her suddenly revealed identity as a chosen “slayer” and its accompanying [...]

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I had very mixed feelings about All About Lulu. There’s a lot to like: Evison’s prose is fresh and vivid, with lots of unusual metaphors (the first chapter, “The World Is Made of Meat,” is a stunner). The dialogue is crisp and credible, and Evison gets compellingly deep into his narrator’s head. I loved [...]

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I enjoyed these books more when I stopped thinking of them as literal, factual memoirs, and more as fiction in the uncomfortable-funny vein of Michael Scott or David Brent. Handler’s character is less a poster-girl for bad decision-making (although there’s some of that for sure) than a celebration of unchecked id. I suspect for [...]

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