Life hasn’t been easy for Jim Stark, the protagonist of Richard Kadrey’s Sandman Slim. His old apartment isn’t his anymore, his lover Alice has been murdered, and, oh, yeah, he’s just spent the last 11 years in hell. Returning to Los Angeles to murder the cohorts who sent him to hell, Stark finds himself in the middle of something bigger, with the fate of the world at stake. In this showdown, the bad guys are terrifying and the good guys are only good by comparison. And Stark?
Second in the Walter Day series, The Black Country finds Scotland Yard’s Murder Squad called to a small mining town to investigate the disappearance of a child and his parents.
James Swain has written a series of novels featuring Tony Valentine as the main character. Mr. Lucky is the fifth in a series that has been one enjoyable read after another.
Caitlin Moran, The Times (London that is, not New York) columnist who is known primarily for her non-fiction writing (How to Be a Woman, Moranthology), excessive eyeliner, and very big hair, has published a novel for the first time since she was 16.
Morgan measures her likeability by how many Twitter followers she has. Her goal is to reach 5000 and she is getting very close. If she has 5000 followers, she has to be likeable, right? Even if she doesn't have any real life friends, even if the father she's never known didn't like her enough to stick around and help raise her. She is currently tweeting about things she thought were true.
Mysti Murphy is not having a good 7th grade year. Her only friend, Anibal Gomez, has developed a crush on a Cheer Squad girl and has decided to change his image in an effort to be noticed. Part of Anibal's "social experiment" is to develop a hipster persona that he thinks his new crush will admire. To see if his experiment works, he needs to ditch Mysti. Anibal decides that he and Mysti can talk and text in the evenings and on weekends, but they must have NO contact during school. Mysti has no other friends, so she now sits alone at the Loser Island in the cafeteria at lunchtime.
Edie and Richard Middlestein have been married for over 30 years, enjoying their family life in Chicago. But as their relationship stops growing and Richard decides to leave, all Edie can seem to do is grow. She is obsessed with food and eating. Will the family save her from herself? Will Richard come back and continue loving every ounce of her?
Things have been complicated for Hannah Wagnor since her best friend Lillian died six months ago, because her best friends ghost still haunts her, and because someone in their sleepy town is killing girls and leaving their bodies in the woods behind Hannah’s house. Lillian has become obsessed with the murders and to appease her friend’s spirit, Hannah begins to investigate the crime scene photos developed at the photo store where she works.
I thought this was a lovely book. Clean and thoughtful.
Full disclosure: I've spent time as an existentialist (Camus said he was not existentialist, but others claim he was) and a nihilist and an absurdist. That's part of the reason I found this book neither shocking nor depressing. The whole middle of the book involves prison and a "why bother" attitude. Instead, the modernist prose was a fresh breath after the musty classics and period fiction I've been reading recently, and the solitude was a relaxing diversion from my busy and loud life.
