Category Archives: Reading List
Read This! – Operation Arcana
Swords and sorcery! Assault rifles and arcana! Elves and evil! Wizards and weaponry! Military maneuvers and eldritch evasions! What more do you want out of an anthology?
Just finished the fine Shakespeare’s Rebel by CC Humphreys and now I’m off to interview him about what it was like to write the character of Shakespeare into his book. It’s a challenge, as I know all too well….
Read This! – The Devil You Know
The Devil You Know follows Evie, a young reporter working on the breaking Paul Bernardo story. (For those of you who don’t remember Bernardo, he was a serial killer and rapist who terrorized the Scarborough area in the 1980s.) Evie is haunted by the memories of a childhood friend who was murdered — which parallels author de Mariaffi’s own life. She spends her time researching other murdered and missing girls, to the point where she spends more time with the dead than the living.
Evie is also being stalked by a man who lurks on her fire escape, just outside her kitchen window. Or is she? The stalker is a phantom, never truly seen. He may be a killer waiting for the right moment to strike or he may just be someone she’s dreamed up. To say any more would be to give away too much of the story.
The settings of The Devil You Know are modern-day gothic: a newspaper vault that bears more than a passing resemblance to a tomb, the eerily empty cottage at the edge of civilization — hell, the man on the fire escape invokes the spirit of the vampire at the window. It’s a creepy, eerie book, one that’s made all the more powerful because it makes you realize that this is simply the daily life for many women around the world. The Devil You Know is the devil we all know.
B.C.’s bookish blades
I’ve published a piece called B.C.’s Bookish Blades over at the Province. It features three insanely talented writers from B.C. talking about their new books: CC Humphreys, Sebastien de Castell and Ian Weir. These are the writers who make other writers insane with jealousy because they have both the commercial chops and the literary language. Great stuff. Check out their books today!
Historical thrillers are nothing new. In fact, they’ve been around since we started recording history. What are The Odyssey and Beowulf if not their era’s version of Dan Brown or Andrew Pyper?
But a trio of B.C. authors are writing a new chapter for the historical thriller genre, and they’re turning to past masterpieces for inspiration. C.C. Humphreys, Sebastien de Castell and Ian Weir are also breaking down some of the walls between genre fiction and literary fiction to write perhaps the most literary thrillers yet.
Why YA?
Lots of people have been arguing online about whether or not adults should read YA books, so I decided to chime in over at The Province.
Admit it. You’ve done it. You’ve read a YA book and you liked it.
That’s YA as in young adult. And the odds are that if you’re reading this, you’re a fully grown adult. Maybe even a senior citizen.
So why are you reading books meant for teens?
Join Team Squid!
Help fund the first all-women Lovecraftian anthology, edited by editors extraordinaire Silvia Morena-Garcia and Paula Stiles. Why a woman Lovecraft tome? Silvia explains:
Why did you decide to do this?
Do girls just not like to play with squids? That’s the question an editor asked on Facebook, wondering about the lack of female writers in his TOC. What followed was a long discussion on Lovecraftian fiction and women, and the need for an answer.
At first I threw the idea of collaborating on a book of Lovecraftian fiction by women on Facebook and it seemed like it could be a small project between friends. But somehow the word spread and suddenly I was getting dozens of messages and e-mails from women asking if they could contribute to the project. I realized that there were a lot of women who were suddenly very interested in getting together. These responses prompted me to crowdfund an anthology.
Earth, we have a problem
I’ve been trying to catch up on my reading lately. Between writing and trying to parent a three-year-old boy (note the “trying”), I’ve had little time to read. I think I may have to schedule an hour each day, like they used to do in elementary school back in the day. My mind is feeling malnourished, as if I have some form of literary scurvy.
I did recently manage to finish one of the strangest books I’ve ever read though: Tony Burgess’s The n-Body Problem. I posted a little review of it over at The Province. If you like crazy, insane zombie stories, then this is the book for you!
Also, is it a coincidence that I developed the man flu the day after I posted the review?
What I'm reading: Easy to Like
I discuss Edward Riche’s Easy to Like over at The Province. Spoiler: I like it.
What I'm reading: Rust and Bone
I just finished Craig Davidson’s Rust and Bone, after reading his Sarah Court a little while ago. I don’t have much more to say than my Amazon review — “Davidson writes like a madman possessed by a drunken saint” — other than to mention that if you liked Please, you’ll love Rust and Bone. There are many moments in Davidson’s book that I wish I’d thought of for Please, but he plucked them out of the ether and laid them on the page first. He’s a rare breed: a writer’s writer that regular readers will enjoy too.
peter darbyshire 