What I Found at BEA! Part II
Fugue State by Brain Evenson, art by Zak Sally, US/CAN $14.95, Coffee House Press
Oh, now this looks good. From the back cover:
Hallucinatory and darkly comic, these tales of paranoia, pursuit, sensory deprivation, amnesia and retribution [sounds like my life, says Dissident Books editor Nicholas Towasser] rattle the cages of the psyche. And through the illustrations of graphic novelist Zak Sally, this unsettling world is brought to life.
From sadistic bosses with secret fears to a woman trapped in a mime’s imaginary box, and from a post-apocalyptic misidentified messiah to unwitting portraitits of the dead, Brian Evenson’s mind-bending fiction peers fearlessly into the shadows.
You better believe I’m looking foward to reading this! Sounds like this generation’s H. P. Lovecraft! And Sally’s illustrations are excellent. See http://www.amazon.com/Fugue-State-Brian-Evenson/dp/1566892252 and http://www.brianevenson.com/fugue.html
Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong by Terry Teachout, $30, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Terry Teachout is one cool guy. He wrote a The Skeptic, great bio of Mencken, and was kind enough to pen some words of praise for the back cover of Notes on Democracy: A New Edition. I caught him at his autograph signing and gave him three copies of Notes plus a copy of Don’t Call Me a Crook! Did I ask him to sign a Pops ARC? You better believe I did. And I’m looking forward to reading it. See http://www.amazon.com/Pops-Louis-Armstrong-Terry-Teachout/dp/0151010897 and http://www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/
Undone by Karin Slaughter, US$26/CAN$30, Delacorte Press
The opening caught my attention:
They had been married forty years to the day and Judith still felt like she didn’t know everything about her husband. Forty years of cooking Henry’s dinner, forty years of ironing his shirts, forty years of sleeping in his bed, and he was still a mystery. Maybe that was why she kept doing all these things for him with little or no complaint. There was a lot to be said for a man who, after forty years, still managed to hold your attention.
I’m reminded a line from from Henry Hill’s wife in Goodfellas: “All the other girls would’ve gotten outta there the minute their boyfriend gave them a gun to hide. But I didn’t. I have to admit, it turned me on.” This is a sequel to Slaughter’s Faithless and Fractured. See http://www.amazon.com/Undone-Grant-County-Karin-Slaughter/dp/0385341962 and http://www.karinslaughter.com/undone.shtml.
Tags: Book Expo America, Don't Call Me a Crook!, horror, Louis Armstrong, Notes on Democracy, publishing, Terry Teachout, thrillers