The Re-Return ofTrash Lit From Hell: Vengeance Is... These Guys'

Back into one of my obsessions - those trashy "adventure series" paperbacks that only a few of us (including this guy - one of my favorite blogs, and if you like this post you can get happily lost reading back-entries there for days) still care about, much less remember. They were basically what the pulps of the 30's and 40's turned into during the 70's and 80's. I discussed that earlier, with a bit more here, if you missed it and are interested).

Anyway, I scanned some covers, 'cuz, really, that's the funnest part of these posts, ain't it? I haven't read some of these series yet, so the information will be pretty superficial, but whenever I get around to reading 'em I'll probably revisit them; this'll just be a "did you know these things exist?" post. Here goes...


1. The Bounty Hunter - Tiny Boyles and Hank Nuwer


Real-life bounty hunter Tiny Boyles (that's him sweatin' Seagrams on the cover) supposedly recounted some of his real-life adventures to Hank Nuwer (who probably did the heavy lifting when it came to the writing) and published four (I think) books as the adventures of a bounty hunter named Tiny Ryder. He's 6'6", 389 pounds, and rides a Harley (because a Suzuki's suspension just wouldn't handle that kind of bulk). And he deals out countrified justice with a .45 and a .357. I can't wait to read these, I'm totally expecting something Shakespearian. Vicar of Wakefield, with unfiltered Luckies.

2. The Lone Wolf - Mike Barry



Burt Wulff (not to be confused with the chef... or, what the hell, go ahead and confuse 'em, that'd be hilarious!) is another one of those cops who gets fed up with the system after a loved one dies, so he goes renegade vigilante and declares war on organized crime, specifically the drug trade that led to his girlfriend's O.D. I started one of these once and quit early because I hated the writing style... and only recently did I figure out why: it's written by noted sci-fi writer Barry N. Malzberg, and I almost always hate sci-fi writers. Your mileage may vary, of course, and I do know that despite their bloody-afro covers (this is the only one I've seen that looks like it's a race-war book, promise) these books are marked by self-impressed poetical digressions on things (read one at this review) and are kinda weird because this Wulff guy isn't a hero so much as an obsessed lunatic. It's also one of the few action series (and I'd say only, but I think it also happened in the last Penetrator book) where the hero actually gets killed eventually.


3. Stryker - William Crawford



I'm currently reading this book, and all I can say is, wheeeeeee! You could never publish this thing now because it's so politically-incorrect and offensive, which is Crawford's idea of talking tough, I guess. "Spics," "spades," and "queers" all get dumped on; the two hit-men after lead cop Stryker and his partner (who's Latino just so the author won't be called racist for all the slurs flying around) are gay and are reacted to by everyone with revulsion, especially the stereotyped "guinea" (which Crawford doesn't even spell correctly) Mafia goons who hired them. If you can get around the closed-mindedness-as-a-literary-device (and if you read this kind of book, you probably can, because the 70's books were full of such stuff), as well as a big preoccupation with graphic scenes of people defecating (seriously, it's like scat-porn! Unless you're the hero you're going to shit your pants at some point if you're in this book), it's pretty well-written and the writing's not quite as trashy as most series paperbacks; it's kinda like if Joseph Wambaugh decided to do some slumming. I scanned the back of the book, too, because that prose cracked me up. The coffee stain (at least, jeez, I hope it's coffee) that was on the book when I bought it kind of adds to the gutter-level reading experience. And what exciting cover art, eh? "I'm going to put this gun away now because it's too heavy for the deformed dwarf-arm I have, and anyway, I'm sleepy now."

4. The Ashes series - William R. Johnstone



Here's a bizarre one from the guy who I've always considered the absolute worst writer of all time. Advice to any aspiring writers out there: go get some William W. Johnstone books and read them if you ever feel discouraged; trust me, whatever you're writing is waaaaaaaaaay-ass better than this guy's crapspasm prose, and he's one of the most widely-published people in the business! There is hope! Your napkin-scribbles may be publishable! Anyway, if you're an ultra-right-wing conservative, this is a wank-book for you. In the "future" year 1999, America has been destroyed by nuclear and bio-warfare between the U.S., Russia, and China. A Vietnam vet named Ben Raines sets up a free zone called the Tri-States, where only conservatives are allowed because everybody else is stupid and bad and criminal and stinky anyway, nyaaaaah. Oddly, these staunch right-wingers live by pretty much of a Communist system, because Johnstone was a complete idiot who didn't understand his own politics -- he just knew he hated "liberals" (who are hilariously stereotyped in his books; even Michael Moore would want to smack these guys). Anyway, Johnstone's only method of moving a story is to get someone shot on almost every page, so there are reams of characters who haven't been developed at all being gunned down like cardboard standups, and you couldn't possibly care. Offensive racial and gay caricatures abound and are mocked with a dullard's aplomb. Also, he talks a lot about having great morality and values, but his books are extremely preoccupied with sadistic rapes, sodomy, and every kind of depraved graphic gruesomeness. If you combined a John Birch Society speech with a 12 year old boy's armymen fantasies and then had a pervert recount it to you, you'd get something like this book. And I've read better prose in the captions of coloring books. It's just dumb, dumb, dumb stuff, but it could be funny if the prose weren't so painfully awful.

This is one of the few pulp action-adventure series that have been widely made into audio books, for the simple reason that a lot of Johnstone's core audience can't read! If you doubt that, here's a really fun thing you can do: go to Amazon and look up Johnstone's books and look at the grammar and spelling in the positive reviews. If you can find one that doesn't read like the work of a second grader, you may have a cookie. They all read like the product of great labor with a dull crayon. Durrrg!

5. The Lady From Lust - Rod Gray



Action of a different kind... the bomp-chika-bow-wow kind. Like the action pulps of the 30's spawned "spicy" versions, so did the action series of the 70's. These are the adventures of Eve Drum, Agent Oh Oh Sex, who goes on seduce-and-destroy missions to save the U.S. of A. Haven't read any of the porn parodies yet because it's kind of a big time investment for satire, but I guess they could be funny. "L.U.S.T.," by the way, stands for "League of Undercover Spies and Terrorists." I know the curiosity was just killin' ya.

6. Cherry Delight: The Sexecutioner - Glen Chase



Another porn-action parody, this stars "Sexecutioner" Cherry Delight, Agent for N.Y.M.P.H.O. (New York Mafia Prosecution and Harassment Organization), who, I guess, uses her vagina to fight crime as often as she uses her gun. Or, probably, even more often. The suggestive titles of the books in this series are pretty funny, stuff like Treasure Chest, Over The Hump, Fire In The Hole, Chuck You Farley!, Crack Shot, Up Your Ante, Tong in Cheek, etc. might give you a hint of the snickering juvenalia to be found within. Weird thing about these and the "Lady from L.U.S.T." books - they're written in first person from a female point of view, by supposedly male authors. That had to be strange, writing those...

These books are so sleazy the model in the cover photo has a big herpes on her chin. Nice.

7. The Man From O.R.G.Y. - Ted Mark



Also written first person, by "Ted Mark," these are comedic sexual takes on Man From U.N.C.L.E. type adventures. O.R.G.Y ("Organization for the Rational Guidance of You") battles rival organizations such as S.M.U.T. ("Society for Moral Uplift Today") who try to censor porn. Again, I can't really picture devoting hours to reading this, but I suppose I could be missing something hilarious.

8. Dennison's War - Adam Lassiter



This was a short-lived but higher-class series about a team of trained experts fighting crime and terrorism outside of the confines of the law. I didn't read many of these, but I really loved the one I've got pictured here. How could you not: a badass chick declares one-woman war on outlaw motorcycle gangs, infiltrating them and then gunning 'em down with mighty mighty firepower. This series was such a step up from average that it gave you extra cover art on the next page, just to fit in more paintings of Special-Agent Scooterfox smokin' badguy hog-jockeys with her .12 gauge. Check it out:



Sha-weeeeeet! Might be time to re-read this 'un.

9. The Black Samurai - Marc Olden



One of the best-written action series (along with The Narc, which Olden wrote under the pseudonym Robert Hawke), these books were done by a black author and were one of the few series to get a movie adaptation, Black Samurai starring Jim Kelly (although since it was directed by Al Adamson, it didn't do the books justice). They're well-paced, intelligent, and effectively written martial arts books.

10. The Last Ranger - Craig Sargent



These are good friendly violent fun, even if they do get a bit ridiculous. In a post-nuclear world, a highly-trained warrior named Martin Stone emerges to battle mutants and warlords with is pitbull Excaliber, while trying to retrieve his sister from gangs of depraved bastards. It's been a while since I read any of these, but I remember liking them a lot even though they were a bit lunk-headed. Whoever painted the covers thought that having goggles on your forehead was a pretty good tough-guy look (he was wrong), and it's interesting that Martin Stone is depicted with crooked teeth. He looks vaguely like cornball wrestler The Ultimate Warrior. He and the pit bull are making the same face, which I find gigglesome. Anyway, as the post-nuke adventure books went, this was my favorite, and one of the few (along with The Doomsday Warrior series) to actually completely destroy the world eventually.

11. Mutants Amok - Mark Grant



I really need to make time to try reading one of these, because they look crazy. Apparently mankind engineers some mutant warriors by creating Dr. Moreau-style hybrids of humans and other creatures... but this brilliant idea backfires on them, and after a holocaust of some sort, the mutants hunt down humans, who must band together and become guerrilla fighters to save themselves from annihilation! I wanted to scan in the covers of all four that I have, because they're some crazy shit. Check out the one I did scan... the one guy has a bunch of little faces growing on the back of his head, like warts! And they're screaming! And then you have this Lovecraftian horror (in blue jeans and a vest he stole from the bassist for Foghat) about to get his piranha-face smashed in by Mark Trail himself! Hoohah! How could this not be a work of genius? Answer: it couldn't! It simply must be brilliant! One day I'll read 'em and find out instead of just gushing away in gleeful ignorance.

12. Omega Sub - J. D. Cameron



Still haven't read any of these yet, either, although I love the premise: the world is annihilated in a nuclear exchange, but an American nuclear submarine is spared, and it sails the oceans trying to find any pockets of survival... and, apparently, getting in fights with any survivors they do find. Sounds good. The cover paintings aren't so hot, though, because they feature this gooby-lookin' dude who always has his mouth open, yelling while he fires some weapon. He looks scared out of his mind, or possibly like a baby bird straining for a dangling worm, but definitely not badass. Mack Bolan always looks grim. Learn from that, you action-book-cover-painting fellas.

13. Crockett - Brad Lang



Definitely a product of its time, I had to scan the front and back of this one just because it's so 1975. "He's young, hip, long haired - a private detective." Yeah, baby, yeah! And look at the cover - is that really long hair? He looks like he was maybe patterned on Peter Fonda. Haven't read any of these yet (I think there are only 3, and I've got 2) but they look kind of interesting. This particular book is so cheap that it was cut all wonky -- all trapezoidal and off-center. That just makes it more funkyfied!

14. Mafia - Don Romano



With all these war-against-the-mafia heroes running around, it was inevitable that somebody decide to grant the bad guys equal time, so these books are (I think) the stories of Mafia torpedoes and such. Each title was "Operation something-or-other." Operation Porno sounds promising. And was that the author's name... or his rank? Hmmmm.

15. Israeli Commandos - Andrew Sugar



The author of the body-hopping-clone series, The Enforcer, turns his attention to butt-kickin' Jews for this series about a team of highly-trained commandos protecting Israel from Arab terrorists. Decently-written and unusual. Note that the guy on the cover has his goggles around his neck. He needs to confer with Martin Stone, The Last Ranger, to learn the cool way to wear 'em. On second thought, this guy's got a beautiful woman on the cover with him, while all The Last Ranger's got is a pit bull... so maybe around-your-neck is the way to go for goggles-wear.

16. Death Squad - Frank Colter



Why have one fed-up-with-rules vigilante cop when you can have three of 'em? And make it a rainbow coalition of a white guy, a Latino guy, and a black guy. Criminals are in trouble now, you betcha! The series was short-lived, though.

17. Kiai! - Piers Anthony and Roberto Fuentes



Okay, back there we had Barry N. Malzberg writing Lone Wolf books, and here's another sci-fi writer, Piers Anthony, turning out adventures of "Jason Striker, Master of Martial Arts." And I'll be damned if he doesn't look exactly like the guy on the Lone Wolf covers, too! Add some "wolf ear" grey streaks in his hair and it's the same dude. I never realized that you could name a whole series after a sound a guy makes when he yells. This makes me want to go out and write a series called "Yeeeaarrgggh!" Or the guy who wrote the Stryker series could up his descriptions of bowel activity and put out the "Frrrraccck, Plunk!" action series. A lot of these books probably got read in the bathroom, anyway, so why not? Anyway, this Jason Striker guy has apparently mastered all the martial arts, and is a peaceful guy... when he's not stomping ninja's faces into hamburger. Which is good, because action series about peaceful guys wouldn't be very interesting. And that's why there's nothing like Ghandi: Bombay Barbecue out there.

18. Overload - Bob Ham



Yeee-haw, somebody finally done done it: married vigilante vengeance to the world of big-rig trucking! A couple of Special Forces buddies (one black, one white, both badass) fight back against the mob to save one of 'em's family trucking business... and decide, why stop there? Why not fight crime using eighteen wheelers and submachine guns and ATV's and such? Makes sense to me! This series ran for a pretty good while. I read one and it was pretty average, but not bad.


That's enough for now, but I do have more series in my hoarded piles o' trash-lit (and I'm always looking for more, although they're getting harder to find in used bookstores these days) so one day I'll probably delve back into 'em.

Thomas Ligotti Short Stories Checklist!

Following zwolf's most recent post about horrible horror covers, I thought it timely to go ahead + post this checklist of Thomas Ligotti's collected short stories. Ligotti is an excellent horror writer, current + modern - maybe even post-modern - but with a vibe reminiscent of H.P. Lovecraft, or the parable/fable-style deliveries of some of Jorge Luis Borges' fantasies, and an overwhelming paranoia that'd shame Philip K. Dick.

In any case, Ligotti's short stories are plentiful, but they tend to show up in numerous collected editions of his work. As such, I put together a quick checklist of the stories available in each of his mass-market published collections + present it here as an aid to fans of his writings. The fantastic fiction website already has a checklist of his available published works, but I couldn't find a story checklist anywhere... This list does not include any of his work published through small-press / limited editions, or appearances of his stories in anthologies or zines.

The books included herein are: Grimscribe, My Work Is Not Yet Done, The Nightmare Factory, Noctuary, The Shadow at the Bottom of the World, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Teatro Grottesco

 

Darn You, Thomas Pynchon...

So, having received a stack of books from the prolific zwolf over the years, I thought I'd comment on some of my recent reading, since some of these choices were actually his. (I assume this cuz he sent em to me... He might've just thought I needed some stuff here at the haus to make people think I'm smart... S-M-R-T!)

Anyway, I started this most recent reading jag with
Jack London's The Jacket (or The Star-Rover)
If you're only familiar with London from his dog-alicious tales of the Great White North, this will certainly be a digression. And a worthy one, as it details the story of a condemned-to-deathrow inmate who learns how to astrally project his consciousness across the very gulfs of time + space... Interspersed with these remembrances of his past lives lived throughout history are his detailed descriptions of the woeful state of the penal system in the U.S. at the end of the 19th Century. Quite a good + enthralling read.

When I finished The Jacket, I grabbed the next book in the stack, which happened to be Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker.

This one was more of a challenge to actually get through, as the language of the novel is that of the post-nuclear-holocaust society that has forgotten almost all of the scientific advances of mankind's relatively recent past and the story hinges on the philosophical question confronting this future: should we even attempt to recreate the technology that destroyed our race? And Punch + Judy show up for the fun, as well. This was a weird book; the expanded edition features some appendices that illuminate some of the more obscure stuff + also help with some of the Anglo-specific stuff that means little to my not-so-worldly frame of reference... A neat read + good, but be up for a little struggle early on to get into the rhythm of the language. The language is so well-crafted that it gets easier soon, in the same way as Alan Moore's Voice of the Fire. I recommend this for those linguistics fans out there, too. (If such things as linguistics fans exist...)

After wading through Riddley Walker's thick, soupy nu-language, I was up for the streamlined narrative of a good hardboiled crime novel. And there, waiting for me, sat David Goodis' Shoot the Piano Player.

This is an incredibly fast-paced novel, which was adapted as Tirez sur le pianiste in 1960 by the legendary Frenchie filmmaker François Truffaut. Ain't seen it, but if it's anything like the novel, it's OK with me. The novel is fast-paced like few others. It's one thing to eagerly anticipate finding out what happens in the next chapter, and totally something else to find your breathing + your pulse have sped up from the on-the-edge-of-yo'-seat tempo of this book, about a talented piano player with 2 brothers, 1 girl, and a whole pile of trouble standing between him + doin' his thing.

After that, I decided to check out an author whose work has come up numerous times in reference to the magical realist movement, Haruki Murakami, starting with his novel Kafka on the Shore. Mind you, when I think of magical realism as a literary movement (and not as my current lifestyle choice...), Japan is not the place that comes to mind. And yet, Murakami has crafted a weirding world that melds the supernatural with the mundane, not unlike Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Jorge Luis Borges (who is - hands down - my favorite writer, period). A teenager runs away from his home - and possibly the long arm of the law - to find a new home of sorts with a pair of very strange characters in the private library that they maintain... and an old man with a very strange talent searches for a missing cat. This was absolutely excellent + inspired me to grab another Murakami novel...

...which would've been no problem normally, but I finished Kafka... late on a Saturday night, after the bookstores here have long closed. So, rather than go bookless til Monday morning or afternoon, I snatched the copy of Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon that I bought my wife during her recent jag of Tom Clancy / John Birmingham / Ken Follett / Clive Cussler novels + dug right in.

Stephenson's earlier work was some straight-up science fiction, in the same vein as William Gibson. And I'd just read Gibson's Pattern Recognition + Spook Country prior to starting The Jacket at the beginning of this jag, noting that his recent work was less about the future of a decade or so down the road + more about the day after tomorrow or next week. Stephenson achieves much the same with Cryptonomicon, reaching some conclusions about current technology + the directions it might take very, very soon. At the same time, though, there's another storyline to the novel, focussing on the codebreakers of World War II + spending a lot of time lasing in on the near-future + past of the Phillipines. This is a classic summer read, thick + complicated, with plot twists, good guys, bad guys, some of those gray guys (but no little grey men), and above all, fun.

At which point I turn to my newly-snagged Murakami novel, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. This one is very freaky, and again pairs + juxtaposes the mundane + the sublime, looking upon both as roughly the same. And in this novel, as in Kafka on the Shore, a missing cat figures heavily in the story, which centers on an unemployed man whose wife leaves him just as he meets some very interesting women (including a psychic prostitute - she only sees clients in their dreams - , a cat-findress + a young girl with a limp + a penchant for leaving people at the bottoms of wells) and some odd fellows as well, like a passive-aggressive mob enforcer + a man mute by choice since his youth...

Oddly enough, both Cryptonomicon + The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle detail a good bit of WWII-era "secret" history of the Japanese campaigns in China + Mongolia. That detail, combined with all of the codebreakery in Cryptonomicon, made me certain that I was experiencing some odd synchronicity, almost like I was being steered by some strange force into re-attempting to read Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow... But I remember my last run at that one, + decided to veer off-course for a bit first. And waiting for me at Barnes+Noble that day was...

Chuck Palahniuk's newest novel, Tell-All. Chuck's a great writer, + I thoroughly enjoyed this fast read, which skewers Hollywood nicely. That being said, though, I saw the "Wad A. Tweest" climax coming from the dustjacket. One of my favorite things about Palahniuk is that his narrators are always such unmitigated fucking liars... and that they lie most of all to themselves (+, being privy to their internal dialogues, to us the readers). That makes his characters, like, breathing real. I also wonder how much Palahniuk is screaming "fuck you!" to all of us, since the hardcover of his new one has fucking glitter all over the cover, and, once you touch it, all over you, too... Thanks, Chuck! Here I am, buying a book, trying to expand my mind through literature... and you gotta put glitter all over the covers of your book, so that my wife's gonna think I was staring down the cleavage of some strippers instead! "Honest, honey... it's from a book I was reading..." just doesn't sound too plausible. Unless you were reading a book about strippers...

Then I watched La Jetée, a 28 minute French film...(thank you, IFC!)
It's actually less of a film + more of a photomontage with narration. There is a moving picture shot at one point + some mumbled, barely audible German dialogue, but otherwise it most resembles a short comics story.

In a post-nuke future (seems to be a lot of that going around...), the people who've survived in France live underground. A group of scientists (who mutter in German + look ominous + malevolent) are experimenting with time-travel on subjects that seem at best barely willing. They finally center their efforts around a man who has a vivid half-memory of a beautiful woman + some sort of violent incident. Her face continues to haunt him, making him an ideal candidate for the time-travel-trials. After a bunch of botched attempts to visit the past, it is decided that he should instead be sent into the future, where he meets a race of future-men who send him back to his present, where/when he discovers that he is now a target of the scientists who have been experimenting on him + must escape immediately or be killed... This was extremely reminiscent of classic EC Comics stories + the short speculative fiction of The Planet of the Apes author Pierre Boulle. Wicked good, yo!

Well, then... I've read my way right up to it + should be well-prepared for tackling Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, right? Wrong. Just like before, I got started well, finding some incredible little chunks of verbage that sang off of the page...

"...alienists in black seven button suits..."

 

...and then it somehow just fell away from me. Again. By somewhere around page 90, I was struggling to even read a full page before going narcoleptic. What the fuck am I gonna do when I go back to re-read Ulysses?!?

Darn you, Thomas Pynchon!!!

So I laid it aside + went for the rural horror of Thomas Tryon's The Other. And what a great choice. The central concept of the novel has been plumbed by subsequent writers + filmmakers, but this early variation still packs a solid wallop. I still need to see the film, but the book - in a lovely new illustrated edition by Millipede Press - is engaging + powerful. As with the new Palahniuk novel above, I saw the twist coming from the git-go, but so what?! Knowing that a boxer won the fight still ain't the same as seeing that fight, even if it's a replay. This one is written in a very no-frills style, almost conversational, and that style lends itself well to the slooooooow reveal that culminates in the novel's climax. Now I have to go find a copy of Tryon's Harvest Home, which is s'posed to be somewhere in the vein of HPL + The Wicker Man (the original, schmucks! Not the shitty remake!), cuz it's reputedly also excellent!

And, because reading scary stories about little kids is a sure recipe for bad dreams, I put The Other aside in the late evening + turned to What If Our World Is Their Heaven? The Final Conversations of Philip K. Dick, a transcript of conversations PKD had with some of his close friends shortly before his terminal stroke. PKD was clearly enthused about the early roughs he'd seen of the then-upcoming film Blade Runner, based on his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, as well as excited about his ideas for an intended but never completed novel. In a nice piece of synchronicity, Blade Runner aired on cable this week, giving me a chance to look at it immediately after reading PKD's excited descriptions of the film's perfect portrayal of the dirty dystopian future he envisioned in the novel, even though some important parts of the novel - like Mercerism + android animals - had to be left out.

The real meat of this book, though, comes when PKD explains the events of 2-3/74, which convinced him that he was being enlightened by an information source from outside himself that informed him of his son's life-threatening illness + the 'fact' that the world as we know it is a complete lie, fabricated to obfuscate the true teachings + meanings of Christ + to mask Jesus' second coming...

(who could do something like that, hmmm? Could it be... Satan?!?)

...cuz none of that'd cause bad dreams, right?

More Used Bookstore Joys...

Hooray! A pair of really snappy old Harlan Ellison paperbacks were hidden away at my local used bookstore...  Sure, Harlan's public image is that of an irascible curmudgeon, but who cares?! He's an amazing writer with a disturbing + fertile imagination. In case you're wondering, Earthman, Go Home! was originally issued as Ellison Wonderland. It woulda been worth the purchase price just for its wacky cover art, too!

And, since Christmas is on its way, here's a disturbing gift for that special someone: a portrait of video game superstar Mario, made of genetically-engineered fluorescent bacteria... for more about this scientific wackiness, check out boingboing.net, a regularly enthralling blog devoted to something or other... usually cool pix of homemade robots or octopii using tools or somesuch. And a major contributor is snappy sci-fi writer Cory Doctorow, whose works now encompass at least two different future-Disneys (both of which are very cleverly thought-out) in Down + Out in the Magic Kingdom and in his newest one, Makers, both highly recommended!

The Three Rules of Life...

"Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own."

These words of wisdom come from Nelson Algren's 1956 novel A Walk on the Wild Side, which details the hard-ass lives of pimps, drunks, whores and hoboes in Depression-era N'Awlins.

Like a rasslin' match between Jim Thompson and Jack Keroauc with William S. Burroughs in the ring as the referee, Walk... treats the reader to some extremely shady characters and criminals, serving them up with some nice moments of musicality and poetry, and revealing their humanity (or remnants thereof).

Algren's characters are well-developed, displaying layers of humor and humanity that contrast (or stand in doomed defiance against) the bleakness of their situations and surroundings, and his prose is rife with internal rhymes and rhythms, as well as moments of utter hilarity. Ostensibly a road novel, following Dove Linkhorn from home to N'Awlins to home... Of course, there's a bit more to it than that, but that's in the reading... There was a film adaptation as well, but the story is very different than the novel... (Why don't you post us a review, zwolf?)

Fuckin' recommended! (Algren also penned The Man with the Golden Arm, went to jail for five months and had a highly-publicized affair with Simone de Beauvoir back in the day, just so's ya knows...)

Amazing wireless reading devices will eat our children!

If you wanna skip a crazyperson rant and just read book reviews, scroll on down to the dotted line. Otherwise indulge me as I puke forth venom from my acrimonious craw.

I’m sure that everyone’s now aware that Amazon.com is selling something called the Kindle, a “wireless reading device.” It’s being hailed as “revolutionary,” “simple to use,” doesn’t require monthly wireless bills, holds 200 titles, is light enough to hold up with the crack of your ass if you have moderately strong glutes and a disposition toward weird behavior, and all kinds of other gizmo-freak-pleasing features. They’re pushing this thing so aggressively that you can’t look up any regular book without them cramming “Hey, y’know, this thing is available for the Kindle, the Amazing New Wireless Reading Device!” right down your throat. Amazon is touting this product with all the misplaced pride of a lunatic gloating over a bucket of dung. And, like baby sparrows, the public (most of whom seldom actually read) seems to be opening wide their throbbing little gullets for this thing as if a “wireless reading device” actually is a new and revolutionary product.

Does anyone really need me to point out that we’ve had wireless reading devices pretty much since, ohhhhh, bipedalism? A cave painting is a wireless reading device! Every paperback you own is a wireless reading device! Simple to use, no monthly fees… and guess what, budreaux, if you drop one of those mamajamas on the street you’ll still be able to read the motherfucker and won’t be out $359, plus however much money you’ve pumped into it buying titles. And for that base price you can buy a whole ton of books, especially if you hit library sales. And you’ll still be able to read ‘em in 10 years, by which time the Kindle will have been replaced by the next Gizmo O’ The Month (probably the SegwayKindle, The Book You Can Ride!)

If I can indulge my inner Unabomber for just a minute, let me lay out a pet conspiracy theory of mine (and, kinda, George Orwell’s, although I hate to implicate him for what might just be some old-man, things-were-better-in-my-day, get-off-my-lawn paranoia on my part).

One of the great tragedies of mankind was the burning of the library at Alexandria, and frankly I think we’re on the cusp of a repeat. This time, the fire will be dimmer and slower… only as bright as a cathode ray tube. And things like the Kindle are, appropriately enough, kindling. Short-sighted and trend-happy humans are investing way too much faith in e-books, Kindle versions, and an upcoming Google project that’s gonna bitchsmack the publishing world like something bubonic. Yeah, it’s “convenient,” it’s nifty gimmick-wise, it’s probably even fun, but there are so many drawbacks to this, it’s insane.

First and most obvious, the incredible impermanence of computer-based stuff. Ever try to retrieve something off of one of those old-school five-inch floppies? If you can find working hardware to load the disc anymore, then good luck finding the software to read it. Even 3.5’s aren’t standard equipment anymore. Still got Atari cartridges laying around? Yeah, I bet. But your Atari doesn’t work anymore, does it? You can but gaze whistfully at that Blasteroid cartridge and remember what fun was like. Well, the same thing’s going to happen to most of these e-books and e-journals in a decade or so. The media will change (CD-Roms are already quaint now, and hey, remember the zip-disk?) and the web will change and all that shit will be inaccessible. If you’d’ve gotten paper, though, you’d still have it. I’ve got pulp magazines from the ‘30’s, printed on the cheapest paper possible, and you can still read ‘em, no problem. Here's proof I scanned myself. Wireless reading device, no batteries required, will still work after society crumbles and the zombies take over.

Second, and more sinister, is the “Winston Smith Factor.” With e-books and e-journals there need be only one master copy on a hard drive somewhere that everyone will access. This makes it easy to change history, just by dicking with the master copy. If some agenda-driven fanatic wants to say the Holocaust never happened, or erase Charles Darwin’s facts, now they can. It’ll be a Wikipedia-world, where Big Brother is a convenient download.

To top all of this off, Kindle books and e-books are still expensive, even though you’re getting NOTHING. No product - you’re just paying for “access” which they can take away whenever they want in the case of e-books - and yet they charge you like it’s costing them something beyond author royalties and “publisher” profit. No ink, no paper, no transport, no distribution, no brick & mortar storage space, minimal staff (hey, it eliminates jobs, too - no wonder corporations are pushing this junk) and yet it costs you almost as much (or more if you count paperbacks) as the real thing.

While undeniably the height of human advancement technologically, this is still all part of the new dark ages. How much of history comes from letters people wrote, diaries they kept, contemporary newspapers and periodicals, etc.? Now we’ve got e-mail and websites that have the shelf-life of yogurt. It’s convenient, it’s fun, you can do some neat things with it (like this-here thing I’m writin’ - yes, I’m aware of the irony of posting an anti-technology rant on a blog, but I never said I wasn‘t an ass), but it’s all robbing from future historians and, therefore, everyone else. Those who don’t - or can’t - learn from the past… will get its old tricks pulled on them by those who did.

On the good side, though, by 2100 we’ll have found the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (they’ll probably have turned up sometime in 2004), and our grandchildren won’t have to be embarrassed. Whew! Forget I said anything.

Anyway, here are some reviews of books you might want to check out… ON PAPER, goddamnit.

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Here Comes A Candle - Frederic Brown. (Millipede Press, 1950)
Oddly-constructed, brilliant crime novel in which a disturbed loser named Joe Bailey is racked by internal conflict as he tries to choose between his romance with a nice girl and a life of crime that could make him rich, but also ruin him morally. On top of this dilemma, Joe is plagued by the idea that he caused the death of his father, and also a morbid fear connected with the nursery rhyme “Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head.” Eventually Joe has to make some tough decisions, but whatever choice he makes will still leave him vulnerable to his own quirks, as well as the forces of fate. Brown intersperses interludes of “mixed media” into the novel, telling certain sections in the form of radio, film, or stage play scripts, or even sportscasts and newspaper clippings. An interesting experiment, and masterfully handled. It works as a crime novel on one level, but is also a metaphorical, literary novel exploring the psychological conflicts in mankind - good vs. evil, love vs. sex, ambition vs. morality, what’s really most crucial toward satisfaction and fulfillment, and how the past (or at least perceptions of it, which aren’t always valid) can shape (or warp) the present and future. Brown handles all this complexity without even a hint of pretension; in fact, it feels a bit like he’s playing it all as a very black joke. Recommended. ****

Gun Work - David J. Schow (Hard Case Crime, 2008)
Horror novelist Schow turns to hardboiled crime in this action-packed post-Tarrantino novel, in which a gun expert named Barney tries to repay his old friend Carl, who once saved his life. Carl calls Barney down to Mexico to help free his wife, who’s been kidnapped. Barney provides excellent and expert assistance, but unluckily for him the whole shmear is a set up and Barney is captured, tortured for months, and nearly killed. He survives and, with the aid of some luchadores, seeks vengeance. Schow’s typically-hip prose is sometimes too smugly impressed with itself and some of what’s supposed to be badass just comes across as geeky. Some of the gun-worship, for instance, reads as much like a woman describing a Dior gown as it does a guy describing a firearm, and you’ll likely roll your eyes at some of the faux-macho prose-posturing, because he’s just trying too dadgum hard. Other times, though, it works exactly the way Schow wants it to, and sections of the book are intense and unputdownable. Others are comic-bookish action blitzes that feel like the climax of a Mack Bolan Executioner novel… but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Some of Schow’s strange obsessions pop up again and I got a little déjà vu (he has a thing about people with modified, missing-finger hands), but mostly I was glad to have something to read from a guy I wish was more prolific. Despite a few shortcomings, it’s a great (and very harsh and harrowing) revenge tale with a good cinematic feel (if Robert Rodriquez hasn’t already bought the screen rights, he should) and a reminiscent-of-Spillane climax. It’s also probably the most violent Hard Case Crime book to date. *** ½

The Woods Are Dark - Richard Laymon (Leisure, 2008, originally 1981)
Richard Laymon’s second novel (now finally complete instead of the heavily-edited version released in 1981) is a chaotic backwoods horror piece in the Hills Have Eyes vein. Unwary visitors to a small town are abducted and chained to trees in the woods, to appease a tribe of cannibalistic savages called Krulls. The Krulls eat anyone (even each other), wear human skin and use bones as tools, and (because this is a Laymon novel after all) are preoccupied with violent, nasty sex. Laymon doesn’t flinch from rape scenes, and even the civilized people we’re supposed to be rooting for quickly give in to primitive urges and start raping and slaughtering. There’s not much plot or even much suspense to this; it’s an experiment in seeing how much gore and depravity he can fit into a brief amount of pages, kind of like a story from an old shudder pulp. Laymon pours it on thick, but somehow it doesn’t work quite as effectively as most of his later novels, even though it’s still well within his formula. Still, Laymon fans will be happy to have this author’s-intended version available, and it’s a good, fast read for anyone into hardcore horror. ***

Duma Key - Stephen King (Scribner, 2008)
Decent King horror in which a man who lost an arm and suffered a brain injury in an accident moves to an island in Florida to recover. He discovers that he has an amazing talent for painting… and that his paintings have some amazing powers. And it’s all tied to something that happened to one of his neighbors (now an Alzheimer’s patient in her 80’s) when she was a little girl. And the thing responsible is stirring to life again… and it’s incredibly evil. This is perhaps King’s best work since Bag of Bones, but it does still have a few of the traits that taint his later works -- a bit too much repetition, too much cheesiness and schmaltz in the characters, too much “magic,” and it could be improved by shedding about 200 pages (which could probably be done by taking out all the references to the "shells talking under the house")… but for the most part, it’s a good story and for the first half or so it’s un-put-down able… and even when it starts to flag it’s not painful or anything. The ending, however, is the most incredibly stupid thing he’s done since It. I actually get a little concerned about him when he can’t realize that such ideas are just idiotic. You feel a little bit cheated when you’ve read all those pages and then you get handed this oh-Jesus-Christ climax. But the first 2/3rds of the book were good enough to make me glad I gave Big Steve another chance, after not reading him for a few years.

Broken Summers - Henry Rollins (2.13.61 - 2004)
Absorbing journal entries chronicling Henry’s 2002 tour, then his plan to do a benefit CD of Black Flag cover songs to benefit the West Memphis Three, how he got the CD together, and the subsequent tour supporting it. Not only was this an excellent read, it sounds like there’s a CD and a couple of WM3 documentaries I need to seek out. Mission accomplished, Hank, and well done. *** ½

House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski (Parthenon, 2000)
Utterly obnoxious experimental literary work that takes tricks from The Blair Witch Project and Nabokov’s Pale Fire, runs them through a process of typographic weirdness that’s not quite form-over-content but sometimes comes damn close, and spits it out as a symbol-rich, begging-to-be-interpreted horror story/object d’art that has just enough sex, profanity, and drug use to avoid being pretentious. Basically, a not-terribly-well-balanced guy named Johnny Truant finds a manuscript in the house of a dead old man and becomes so obsessed with editing it that he becomes insane. The manuscript - also obsessive, also possibly insane - is a study of a documentary called The Navidson Record, which is about a filmmaker’s house that contains shifting, infinitely-large, freezing dark rooms, stairways, and hallways, despite the fact that the outside of the house is small. He films explorations into these rooms, which become nightmarish. The problem is, the documentary doesn’t actually exist, and even if it had, the author couldn’t have seen it because he was blind. The book itself takes on characteristics of the house, expanding in some sections so only one or two words are on each page, or the words are printed at odd angles, in boxes, or backwards. There are also pictures, poems, letters, and words in color, and there are at least two stories going on -- the story of the film, and the story of Johnny’s editing, drinking, getting laid, becoming crazy, etc. Parts of it are interesting, and other parts are so boring and pointless they defy you to read them. Much of the book is about obsession, which is appropriate enough because reading it requires obsession as well, since it’s 700 pages of sometimes-technical detail. It’s sometimes brilliant, sometimes maddeningly tiresome, but (usually) worth the effort, since it will make you think. ***

Salad Days - Charles Romalotti (Layman Books, 2000)
Epic novel about a small town misfit who finds an identity in punk rock, manages to influence a few similarly-disaffected classmates, starts a band, joins another band, tours, gets somewhat famous, and then moves on (but not totally). It’s a great book for those of us who were small town punks (the first half being much better than the second - I wasn’t all that intrigued by the being-in-a-band stuff, but then I was never in a band, so, that’s probably why-for). There’s lots of familiar band-name-dropping to give you warm fuzzies. It's weird to have nostalgia evoked by a scene in which members of The Descendents fart in a restaurant, but, it happens. The book is overlong (it’s only 300 pages, but with wall-to-wall 9-point type) with too much time devoted to the tedious details of tour diaries (those can be fascinating, but only when it’s a real band). Also, the first-person narrator, Frank, is sometimes a pretentious wuss who spends too much time obsessing about chasing dreams and such. But, flaws aside, it’s pretty compelling reading for the most part, if you have a punk background. I’m not sure a regular solid citizen would get much out of it or understand Frank at all. Anyway, it’s a good read, and better than Romalotti’s Rash, which also wasn’t bad. The writing is sometimes a bit clunky and self-impressed, but there are also lines good enough to make you want to copy them down somewhere. ***

Recommended reading...

Black Hole - Charles Burns

This striking + powerful graphic novel was originally released in comic book form, over an agonizing ten-year span. Waiting for each new issue was always frustrating... and always rewarding. Presented in a very stark black and white, Black Hole eerily implies a John Hughes teen-flick script rewritten + produced by David Lynch and directed by Tod Browning. Heavy use of black on the pages and thick lines reminiscent of scratchboard add uneasy weight to Burns' story as it rounds the curve into full-fledged horror.

It's the '70s in suburban Washington state and the teenagers are being suburban teens: hanging out, screwing, getting loaded... catching a sexually-transmitted disease that causes (usually grotesque) physical mutations. An excellent metaphor for the isolation + alienation of teen angst, these physical changes make runaways + outcasts of the afflicted teens. And there's no cure. And then... murder.

Now being adapted to film, with director David Fincher and Brad Pitt as producer. Neil Gaiman was working on the screenplay, but has reportedly now left the project. I've heard no word on Burns' level of involvement or his thoughts on the film adaptation... the people involved have done some great stuff in their careers, but that's no guarantee. Hopefully, Burns is getting a great payday from it!

Check out the artwork here!

Unrelated note: Pin-up queen Betty Page has been hospitalized after an apparent heart attack!
More here

Recommended Reading...

Voice of the Fire - Alan Moore

The first novel by magician, comics legend + pop-culture icon Alan Moore builds on some of the same foundations as Moore's excellent script for From Hell - which are, in turn, based at least in part on Iain Sinclair's concepts of psychogeography, by which the storyteller can imbue the location of the tale with its own personality + history.

The tale spans roughly 6000 years, but the setting remains the same: Northampton, England. As Moore himself has related, his use of psychogeography often reveals an underlying pattern that bolsters the direction of his work. There's a pulse inherent in this book, one that returns again + again to violence and subterfuge... resulting in a slowly-unfolding vision of Time's gyric nature. And Moore's clever research brings this pulse to the forefront.

Told in 12 chapters, the novel is narrated from a different first-person perspective in each chapter, presenting the peculiar authorial challenge of crafting a dozen individual internal voices, each with its own vocabulary, mindset, tics, etc... For the most part, Moore succeeds incredibly at this, especially in the first two chapters which present prehistoric parables about trust + truth, and the final chapter, narrated in first-person by Moore as himself.

This is a good, solid read + an excellent first novel. Highly recommended.

Used + new copies available here...

Here's a bonus list of recommended comics-work written by the always-entertaining Alan Moore:

• Miracleman (out-of-print, but there are collected editions)
• Swamp Thing (available in collected editions)
• Watchmen (available in a single collected volume - read it before you see the film, OK?)
• From Hell (available in a single collected volume)
• Promethea (available in collected editions)
• The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (available in collected editions)
• Lost Girls (available in a three-book slipcased edition)

Recommended Reading...

Crooked Little Vein - Warren Ellis

(Paperback ISBN: 978-0-06-125205-1)

This is the first novel by Warren Ellis, best-known for his top-notch comics writing (Transmetropolitan, Global Frequency, Planetary and The Authority, to name a few), and it does not disappoint! Crooked Little Vein is a post-modern hardboiled detective novel; a 21st-Century beatnik road novel, though neither description quite does it justice...

Without giving away too much, down-and-out P.I. Mike McGill is hired by the White House Chief of Staff to find a very important book. Sounds simple + straightforward, but instead, McGill is dragged through disturbing + eye-opening spins on the American Dream... sliding deeper + deeper into depravity on his way to finishing this freaky job.

Ellis' clever story + dialogue are spot-on, somehow creating real characters from some very surreal circumstances. (And McGill at one point refers to his balls as his "dadpaste factory" - which might be the most disturbing and hilarious thing I've read in months...)

Absolutely recommended!

Used and new copies here