Need someone to slay your Personal Demons?
Dr. Megan Chase, trained psychologist, has just started a radio program which announces the somewhat corny phase,”Let me slay your personal demons”? This is the beginning of some serious zombie, demon problems; an improbable demon romance with Dante Greyson; bosses and co-workers who aren’t quite what they seem and a great start to a new series by Stacia Kane.
Stacia Kane throws many twists and turns in this book. It’s not just your standard, girl meets demon, girl makes love to demon, girl lives happier ever after. Even her minor characters, Malleus, Maleficarum and Spud, demon bodyguards are clever and endearing. Megan has to confront her own personal demons, save her lover, learn to be friends with a witch and stay true to her real self.
I’m sure you can tell I thought this was a very good debut novel. Looking forward to the next in the series, Demon Inside. My bad self borrowed this from the interlibrary loan stack of a fellow co-worker (my own personal demon made me do it) and I promised her I would get us both the next in the series.
There seems to be this controversy about the book whether it falls under Urban Fantasy or Paranormal Romance. I think we all get a little crazy with these subjective category labels. Does it really matter? I mean are there some hard and fast rules which is which. I just went to an event in Tulsa presented by nine romance writers and it seemed clear from the discussion they feel comfortable using elements of any category that work for the novel at hand. (See previous post by Young Bill Young)
Just the facts:
Author: Stacia Kane
Publisher: Juno Books
Date of Publication: 2008
Series: Megan Chase
For a complete list of other titles by Stacia Kane, go over to her website, http://www.staciakane.net/books/printable-list/
Author blog: http://www.staciakane.net/blog/
At Your Service
Young Bill Young here again for the out-of-town, but on-the-job, Kitty Pittman. An interesting thing about working in a library, is that some friends expect you to become their personal librarian. And that’s OK. Gosh, after all, that’s what we’re all about in the library world — connecting people to information, resources and books.
A good friend of mine has decided to rediscover the works of novelist George V. Higgins (1939-1999), and he has solicited my help in tracking down some of the titles no longer carried in his local library. This is easy to do with a service called Interlibrary Loan. He could easily have requested these books via ILL at his local library, but, ya know, I’m his personal librarian, so I was happy to oblige.
My friend is such a fan of Higgins, he believes the author should have won a Nobel Prize. Sounds like I need to find out more about this Mr. Higgins. So, lets. . .
The New York Times‘ Featured Author Page on Higgins
The Google Book Search Page: Books by George V. Higgins
Info on the George V. Higgins Collection at the University of South Carolina
The Who’s Dating Who Page for George V. Higgins (Looks like no one has been dating this dead guy.)
The proverbial Wikipedia Page on Higgins
And, finally, here’s a photo of the gentleman:
Any of you out there Higgins fans? Drop us a comment!
2009 Edgar® Awards
Tonight at the Grand Hyatt in New York City, there’s the 63rd Annual Edgar®Award banquet. Wow, James Lee Burke and Sue Grafton are the 2009 Grand Masters. I just searched twitter and can’t find anyone giving out the winners. Maybe they’re still eating dinner.
Here’s the nominees. http://www.theedgars.com/nominees.html
My predictions, Best Novel, Blue Heaven by C.J. Box (St. Martin’s Minotaur)
Best Novels at the Edgars
Best First Novel by an American Author for the Edgars
Best Paperback Original
Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York City
and someone remembers to twitter the winners we’ll know who got these awards.
Finding your own demon, Pandemonium by Daryl Gregory
When a first time novelist hits his mark, then it’s one well worth reading, and Gregory hit his mark with Pandemonium. I just read his book and apparently really good reviews have already hit the internet by those lucky first readers. It’s one of those books where I wish I was a lot smarter and could pick up on all this references to “collective unconscious”, Jungian psychology and archetypes, A.E. Van Vogt and everything Philip K. Dick. I do know about Rock ‘em Sock ‘em Robots, Nixon, Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel and mashups, so I feel I’ve crossed several generational divides in the book.
Del Pierce is “possessed” by a demon. As a young child Del, became possessed by the demon, “Hellion”. Beginning in the 1950’s there began a recurring phenomena that involved certain people being possessed by demons, the demons doing the possessing included; “The Captain”, “The Truth”, the “Little Angel” ,and the “Painter”. Throughout the book you’ll meet these demons up close and personal. Unfortunately Del’s demon attached itself to young male blond haired children and he fit the bill. Subsequent accidents in Del’s life seem to have revived his “demon”.
The story revolves around Del’s ability to deal with his problem, his family’s reactions and interactions with him, the outsiders who apply various measures to “fix the problem”, which range from an attempt to do away with him by the “Human Leaguers” in Harmonia Lake (absolutely not so harmonious), Mother Mariette O’Connell and the “Red Book” clan applying Jungian psychology and hypnosis on him and a final tornadic climax in Kansas.
Hopefully something in this review will stir you to read Pandemonium, you’ll be glad you did.
Gregory recently picked up the very tasty Crawford Award for a new fantasy writer with a first book, presented at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. And best yet has a new book in the works.
What’s growing by your bed?
My Bedside stack of books grows and grows and grows. It’s now starting to look like this aging, slightly moldy pile in this picture. I want to read everything and occasionally I come to the realization that is impossible. Now that I can’t find a library book and I’ve reached desperation I’m starting to sort through what I’m going to read and what is probably going to keep going to the bottom of the stack.
The other bad quality I harbor is to have 3 or 4 books going at the same time. Right now it’s Watchmen (almost done). We’ve already talked about that. Simon R. Green’s Drinking Midnight Wine. (Metro book sale buy). If you like Jim Butcher you’ll like Simon Green. And I do. And just borrowed on Interlibrary Loan, Thumbprint, by Friedrich Glauser, any author who started his book while he was an inmate at a Swiss insane asylum and then gets a crime fiction award named after him, must be good.
For Lent, I’m trying not to be a book hog. Time to turn in those overdues, get realistic about reading goals. Even if there is a large stack hiding in the closet, ah out of sight …..
Watchmen, Alan Moore, am I just too old
I’m reading Watchmen,
okay, I feel a little quilty because everyone I know at work is re-reading it to get ready for the movie. Somehow I have yet again missed that moment of reading what’s important at the time everyone else is. I’m going to blame it on my age, except I just looked and Alan Moore is just a year younger than me. (I hope I look a lot younger)
And along with my aging process, I’m not sure if I like my heroes as flawed as Watchmen. I like those guys/gals with super powers, the good vs. evil caricatures, and the sides are clearly delineated. Flawed, old, crazy is how I feel why do I want my superheroes to be the same, I think fantasy is a good thing. Am I totally against the grain with this thinking.
But I do get the angry, cynicism, irritation with the, forgive the word, “establishment”. So I’ll read on even if I’m a day late and a dollar short as my grandmother would say.
Circular reading, Tim Farrington comes around to me again
Sometimes reading is such a scary circular thing, a long time ago I read a fiction book called The Monk Downstairs by Tim Farrington. Actually given to me by a colleague who thought I would enjoy it. How did she know? Anyway I really enjoyed the book, spiritually, romantically and just a good read. A disheartened graphic artist meets and eventually falls for a monk who has left his monastery and maybe his faith behind.
I didn’t even realize I had picked up another book by him, this time on the subject of depression and the dark night of the soul, called A Hell of Mercy,
until I began to read a review and it mentioned A Monk Downstairs.
I wonder when he writes, in this new book, about the bad novels he wrote if he’s talking about the novel I found very good.
Hell of Mercy is an interesting consideration of depression and the “dark night of the soul”. Farrington has been able to give his spirituality many test spins and live a life of creative endeavors that many of us forging lives of “quiet desperation” and holding jobs with insurance and caring for families with 9-5 incomes, could not experience. But he does recognize that you don’t have to follow a particular spiritual path to experience a true dark night.
“Raising a challenged child, or caring for a failing parent for years on end, is at least as purgative as donning robes and shaving one’s head; to endure a mediocre work situation for the sake of the paycheck that sustains a family demands at least as much in the way of daily surrender as years of pristine silence in a monastery.”
So the dark night comes to each of us in a variety of forms, the recognition of surrender is the complexity that brings us to a wholeness of faith. I find this book comforting in the negation of the belief that ”if we are good, bad things will not happen; if we are good enough, our suffering will end”, recognizing this as a false comfort. Bad things happen, and really bad things happen to really good people. At the same time I’m not entirely sure he makes the connection with depression and the “dark night”. He suffered with depression his whole life but the horrific reality of his mother’s death took him to a completely different reality. His despair over her death and pain it caused generated a true suffering within himself. I don’t think this essay convincingly linked his lifetime depression with his grief over his mother and his “dark night”.
Anyway, whether I totally agree with his premise in this book or not, perhaps I’ll happen on him again. I obviously enjoy his ideas and discourse.
Scissortail Creative Writing Festival, 2009
Scissortail Creative Writing Conference 2009
Oklahoma Authors to present at 4th annual Scissortail Creative Writing Festival
The fourth annual Scissortail Creative Writing Festival will be April 2 – 4 [2009] at the Estep Multimedia Center, located on the campus of East Central
University. This event is free and open to the public. In addition to the three featured authors, Rilla Askew, Elmer Kelton and LeAnne Howe, the festival will showcase an additional fifty regional authors.
Askew graduated from the University of Tulsa in 1980 and went on to study creative writing at Brooklyn
College, where she received her master of fine arts degree in 1989. Askew’s first novel, The Mercy Seat, received the Oklahoma Book Award and the Western Heritage Award in 1998. Her novel, Fire in Beulah, received the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation and the Myers Book Award from the Gustavus Myers
Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights. Askew’s latest novel, Harpsong, won the 2008 Oklahoma Book Award and Western Heritage Award for Best Novel.
Elmer Kelton is the author of over 40 novels. Four of Kelton’s novels have won the Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame and seven have won the Spur award from Western Writers of America. In 1998 he received the first Lone Star award for lifetime Achievement from the Larry McMurtry Center for Arts and Humanities at
Midwestern State University, Wichita Falls, Texas. He also received honorary doctorates from Hardin-Simmons University and Texas Tech University. He was given a lifetime achievement award by the National Cowboy Symposium in Lubbock, Texas. His book, The Good Old Boys, was made into a 1995 TV movie starring Tommy Lee Jones for the TNT cable network.
LeAnne Howe is a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and is an American Indian author, playwright, and scholar. Her work primarily deals with American Indian experiences. She attended Oklahoma State University, majoring in English. She obtained her master of fine arts degree in Creative Writing from Vermont College in 2000. Howe’s first novel, Shell Shaker received an American Book Award in 2002 from the Before Columbus Foundation. The novel was a finalist for the 2003 Oklahoma Book Award, and awarded Wordcraft Circle Writer of the Year, 2002, Creative Prose. Evidence of Red received the Oklahoma Book Award for Poetry in 2006.
The Darryl Fisher High School Creative Writing Contest winners will also be awarded during the festival. For more information contact Dr. Ken Hada at 580-559-5557. To view the schedule of readers, visit http://www.ecok.edu/scissortail/Creative_Writing_Festival.asp
SKIM, time out for a great graphic novel
I’ve been doing nasty statistic reports at work, my brain is fried, so I decided I needed a diversion. I used to do this in college when I should have been studying for a final or doing a report. All of a sudden I would start some book that was not what I needed to be reading but wanted to read. I read the “Fire Next Time” by James Baldwin doing that, and can still remember it vividly.
I digress.
Skim
words by Mariko Tamaki
drawings by Jillian Tamaki
Groundwood Books/House of Anansi Press
143 pages
Anyway I picked up Skim on Sadie’s recommendation
and I had a library hold on it and it just got back. It really is good. I’ve also discovered I like black and white graphic novels rather than color. The color distracts me from the writing.
(Copyright of this image belongs to Jillian Tamaki)
Jillian Tamaki is the illustrator, Mariko Tamaki the author. It is the teen angst novel, but carried out with subtlety, good dialogue, empathy for the characters, and experiences we’ve all had through the horrifics of growing up. I’m glad the ALA (American Library Association )Great Graphic Novels for Teens List, put this one on it.
Another graphic I read with black & white illustrations was kimmie66 by Aaron Alexovich. Telly’s adventures in virtual reality to find her friend Kimmie. Might want to give that one a try.
While I like these graphics, my disclaimer for parents would be, if you want to know what your child is reading, then read some of their books, and it’s up to you to determine what’s right at what age for your child, I’m not their parent.
Sad news on a Cold day, John Updike has died
Pulitzer Prize winning author John Updike has passed away at age 76 from lung cancer. Our literary bestseller. His latest book Widows of Eastwick, is a followup to the Witches of Eastwick. Here’s an interesting take on his life and works from Salon.com.
Here’s a link to all things Updike.
Bookmarking by Chris Carroll provides additional information and sources for Updike devotees.
