Book Review: Elegantly Naked in My Sexy Mental Illness

Read 4/10/14 - 4/22/14
4 Stars - Strongly Recommended to readers who fancy stories about individuals who are just the right amount of fucked up
--- Pages
Publisher: Queen's Ferry Press
Released: 2014


The fine line between what is considered normal and what is actually fucked up is so fine that sometimes we walk back and forth across the damn thing and don't even realize. We live in a world where dysfunction has become a social norm. The distinction between what is acceptable and what is not, what is "normal" and what is not, is not so clear to us anymore. We become numb. We become expectant. We become acceptant. And in this way, we leave ourselves open to unfortunate and sometimes unavoidably unwelcome situations.

The stories in Elegantly Naked in My Sexy Mental Illness, Heather Fowler's fourth collection, hold a scalpel to the brain of each of its protagonists, in an attempt to differentiate true mental illness from what is natural and normal. When does a simple crush become an obsessive desire? At what point do we decide that these paranoid thoughts in our head are no longer innocent, no longer healthy?

In the opening story "Hand Licker", we meet a heartbroken mental case who sees his ex girlfriend's face everywhere he looks - in a burger and fries someone is eating, in other people's faces. His irresistible urge to lick their palms leads him to the redhead Claire, where he finds acceptance in a form he never knew before. In "Losing Married Women", our narrator unabashedly states "I am an unrepentant harvester of other people’s marriages", clearly not to blame for her insatiable appetite and eventual, habitual loss of interest.

There's a story about a women who becomes so fascinated with a co-worker's strange methods of hitting on her that even her own therapist tells her to shit or get off the pot; a relationship gone sour with a guy who's a confessed obsessive and the mental havoc it reeks on his paramour ; a doctor who can't keep his penis in his pants around one of his patients and why she allows it; a man who is abnormally attached to an old raggedy doll and his housekeeper; a good ole country girl with a club fist who gets a visit from a flirty little boy peddling bibles, only when he tries to take her on, she decides she won't go down without a fight.

And on and on.

The thing I love about Fowler and her characters is how they could be anybody. People you know, people you've accepted into your home, people who shoot the shit with you at work. Sure, they're a little weird, a little creepy at times, you all talk about them when their backs are turned, but they're nothing you haven't seen before, nothing to go to running to HR about. Her stories make you wonder, make you think, maybe even scare you a bit, give you those big ole goosebumps when you realize, shit, could have been me. How close am I standing to a situation like this right now? Could I ever be the object of someone's obsession and not even notice until it's too late?

After you read her stories, your guard will be up. Your eyes will turn their suspicious gaze left and right, left and right, all day long. You'll automatically diagnose everyone around you, and begin to keep your distance. But I promise it won't last long. Because the unease will wear off. The routine will suck you back in. The familiarity with these people, the trust, it will all return. And in a few week's time, it'll be as if you never looked at them any differently. And that's ok. Because it's the norm. And because sometimes, we find mental illness a little thrilling, a little sexy.

Heads up to those of you who'd like to learn a little bit more about Heather Fowler and this collection. Melanie, founder of Grab the Lapels (and TNBBC review contributor), has organized a blog tour and it'll be running around the internet all next week!

Here's the tour roster so you can follow along.

Drew Reviews: The Last Policeman

The Last Policeman by Ben Winters
4 Stars - Strongly Recommended
316 Pages
Publisher: Quirk Books
Released: 2012


Guest review by Drew Broussard 

The Short Version: After the discovery of Maia (formerly known as asteroid 2011GV1) and it's impending impact with our fair planet, a lot of people have pretty much given up on normality - jobs, socio-cultural stuff, even sometimes their lives.  But not Detective Hank Palace.  And when a suspicious suicide crosses his desk, he's on the case - but what could be worth killing for when we're all doomed anyway?

The Review: I read pretty much this whole book over the course of a lovely, sunny Sunday afternoon in the middle of Washington Square Park.  There were people everywhere - children, students, old folks, yuppies, artists, tourists... if you wanted to check out a pretty decent slice of the folks who make up Manhattan on any given day, you only had to look at Washington Square.  And as I read this book, I was wondering about just how fragile our social constructs actually are.

The novel is, for the most part, just a traditional noir-styled mystery: there is a crime that nobody believes to be a crime except for one dogged cop, there's a dame, there's an injury to the dogged cop, there's naysayers on the force and The Man mucking things up, etc etc.  All of the traditional trappings.  What makes this novel an exceptional twist on those themes is that it isn't really so much about the mystery at all or even about any of those noirish trappings: it's about humanity and what we might well do in the face of certain destruction.  And honestly I think it's the genre stuff that allows Winters to really get into the nitty-gritty (pun slightly intended) of human nature.

Karen Thompson Walker's The Age of Miracles and Tom Perrotta's The Leftovers both deal with apocalyptic scenarios and with humanity's reactions to them - but neither of those books deal with the absolute end of everything.  Which, let's face it, a massive asteroid strike would probably be.  I mean, there'd be some who'd survive and be plunged into a massive, ash-induced winter.  So honestly, I'm not sure which would be better - dying right away or dying later - but that's not the point.  What would you do, would you actually do, if you and everyone you knew had ten months to live.  Six months to live.  Three months to live.  And Winters' depiction of it looks... well, pretty much like I might expect it to look.  Plenty of people doing their "Bucket List", plenty of people finding God, plenty of people killing themselves.

And yet, would law and order remain?  Would we still have an economy, a traditionally run society?  For a time, probably - but these things would fall apart and Winters drops us right in the midst of that falling-apart period.  Cell service is spotty at best, ditto internet.  The economy, in a larger sense, is kaput as are a large majority of things like fine dining.  Movies still play and Panera is still around... but it's all starting to get pretty bleak.  And so you have to ask yourself what you'd do in that situation.  For Hank, it's obvious - and he's so... not even squeaky-clean, it's just that he's a good guy.  He wants to do right, not for some higher power but for himself and for anybody who might've been affected by something bad.  It's a form of goodness that's almost too simplistic to understand - and he is, by most, misunderstood.  People just... don't get it.

But we do.  The reader does.  We are grateful that Hank is there, a beacon not of 'goodness' so much as of 'normalcy'.  Of the way things were.  Because this is a deeply scary, unsettling book and it's nice to know that there's a good guy there when the lights go out.  Here I am joking about reading this book in the midst of a crowded New York park on a blissful Sunday afternoon - but seriously, there was something about looking up and taking in the crowd and just... wondering.  Winters does a nice job of setting the stage for the rest of his trilogy - the book ends with six months to go until the big day and there are rumblings of strange government conspiracies that I'll be curious to see play out over the next books - but really he did something more impressive by taking a pretty typical genre story and dropping it in the middle of a setting that we, as human beings, don't particularly want to think about.  We'll take our dystopias, our post-apocalypses, thank you - but to imagine the waiting period before the terror... it takes a true existential mind to stare into that unstoppable, immovable abyss and keep on going.  But, then, I really loved Melancholiatoo.

Rating: 4 out of 5.  I was actually weighing giving this a higher grade but, upon reflection, the case itself actually wraps up a little too messy for me.  The resolution, that is, was just a bit... unclear.  I think that might be my failure as a reader (and/or sunstroke) but I was watching the whole thing wrap up and wondering "Wait, really? That's it?" because it just seemed so... Well, I just didn't follow Hank's final jump in logic.  But the conclusion itself made sense once we got there - and it was a stark reminder of just how the world might look if/when this all goes down.  And that psychological impact far outweighs any issues I might've had with the story, because I will not sleep well tonight for having read this book... and that's kind of great.

Drew Broussard reads, a lot. When not doing that, he's writing stories or playing music or acting or producing or coming up with other ways to make trouble.  He also has a day job at The Public Theater in New York City.

Indie Ink Runs Deep: Tim Chapman

Every now and then I manage to talk a small press author into showing us a little skin... tattooed skin, that is. I know there are websites and books out there that have been-there-done-that already, but I hadn't seen one with a specific focus on the authors and publishers of the small press community. Whether it's the influence for their book, influenced by their book, or completely unrelated to the book, we get to hear the story behind their indie ink....


Today's ink story comes from Tim Chapman. 

Tim is a former forensic scientist for the Chicago police department who currently teaches English composition and Chinese martial arts. He holds a Master's degree in Creative Writing from Northwestern University. His fiction has been published in The Southeast Review, the Chicago Reader, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and the anthology, "The Rich and the Dead." His first novel, "Bright and Yellow, Hard and Cold," was recently released by Allium Press. In his spare time he paints pretty pictures and makes an annoying noise with his saxophone that he claims is music. He lives in Chicago with his lovely and patient wife, Ellen and Mia, the squirrel-chasingest dog in town.

I have a tattoo of a dragon wrapped around a yin/yang symbol on my shoulder. Why I have any tattoo, and this tattoo in particular, is a bit convoluted. Back in the late 1970s a woman I loved was killed in a car accident. This kind of pulled the rug out from under me, both emotionally and intellectually. I sort of drifted around the country for a while, and I was angry—really angry. I was like a clenched fist looking for someone to hit. Whenever I walked anywhere I punched street signs and parking meters. Other pedestrians crossed the street to avoid me. Once a cop yelled at me for punching a no parking sign.

One hot day I drifted into a movie theatre in downtown Los Angeles. I think I went in just because it was air conditioned. There was a Bruce Lee movie showing. As soon as I saw his balletic, stylized violence, I was hooked. I started a lifelong practice of martial arts in order to rid myself of my anger. The martial arts led me to a study of Buddhism. Buddhism is what helped me understand and eventually extinguish my rage. Life isn't fair? Loss is painful? I get it.

The other thing I got from my martial arts training was kung fu. Kung fu translates as effort or hard work. I had been a terrible student in high school, but eighteen years later I earned a degree in forensic science and went to work for a crime lab. Ten years after that I decided I wanted to write, so I went back for an MA in writing and have since produced a novel, Bright and Yellow, Hard and Cold, and an upcoming short story collection. I currently teach writing and tai chi chuan at a Chicago city college. My wife and I have been together for over twenty years, and we couldn't be happier.

I designed the tattoo as a reminder of my personal philosophy. The dragon reminds me that, though I am not naturally talented, I can accomplish goals that are important to me through hard work and perseverance. The yin/yang symbol reminds me that nature and circumstance will often play a part in changing those goals and, rather than whine about the changes, I will be happier if I embrace them.

Lavinia Reviews: My Name Is Hate

My Name is Hate by Dave K

100 pages

Self-published: Banners of Death

Released: April 2014

Guest Reviewed by Lavinia Ludlow

Dave K’sMy Name is Hate is a steampunk-y and compelling depiction of a pregnant woman’s dismal hunt for her deadbeat husband, Jesse. A social commentary of sorts, Dave sheds light on how selfish and cowardly humanity can be when under duress to step up to the plate:

When the doctor told us I was pregnant, [Jesse] said that he couldn’t believe it, that he never thought I’d be able to have a baby. I told him I wouldn’t have, if I’d had his attitude. We live in America, after all. Anything is possible here. Jesse laughed until the doctor told him he’d have to quit smoking on account of our baby. Maybe that’s why he ran off.

Packed with sinister imagery, the beautiful and moving yet morbid and dark narrative voice evokes chills:

Last time I cut open a horse, its guts rushed out like that, just happy to meet the day.

Simultaneously, Dave’s simplistic choice of words and rhythmic delivery inspires a deep sympathy and concern for the conflicted and emotional protagonist: an abandoned pregnant woman straining to trek across a barren landscape of horse chips and flies in search of her baby daddy.

I don’t want to think about Jesse, either. I don’t want to remember him. I want him here.

Though a quick read, Dave more than just sets the scene, maintains the conflict, and conveys an immense amount of detail in his short micro-fiction sprints. He does a phenomenal job of portraying a fragile woman’s state of mind, and the agony and humiliation of walking into town searching the bars for her husband. Passages such as this still brought me to my proverbial knees:

The heart is a pair of saloon doors, swinging open and shut as people enter and leave.

My only qualm would be over the title. I’m not sure it did justice to such a heartbreaking story, and may lead book cover-judgers astray. That aside, Dave K’s released one of the most dynamite flash novellas of 2014. 5 stars means get your hands on it now.

Lavinia Ludlow is a musician, writer, and occasional contortionist. Her debut novel alt.punk can be purchased through major online retailers as well as Casperian Books’ website. Her sophomore novel Single Stroke Seven was signed to Casperian Books and will release in the distant future. In her free time, she is a reviewer at Small Press Reviews, The Nervous Breakdown, American Book Review, and now The Next Best Book Blog. 

We, Monsters Blog Tour

Welcome to day one of the We, Monsters blog tour. This tour was organized by Melanie over at Grab The Lapels ( you should totally check them out. They focus on reviewing books written by female authors.), and we're thrilled to kick it all off!

In the novel We, Monsters (2014, Numina Press) by Zarina Zabrisky, clinical psychologist Dr. Michael H. Strong receives a manuscript from a woman he’s never met. She calls herself Mistress Rose, and she wants him to publish the notes of her life and experiences as a dominatrix. Dr. Strong feels certain that Mistress Rose is no longer alive, but he is intrigued by her story and analyzes its contents. Dive into a world of sex, psychology, reality undone, and a past so mysterious you may not believe it...

An Excerpt from We, Monsters:

For our traditional Sunday dinner I made Luke’s favorites, Ukrainian vareniki(small dim-sum-like pockets stuffed with potatoes or cheese), his mom’s secret seven-ingredient lasagna, and an apple pie with vanilla-custard ice cream.

“Feels like Christmas, Honey,” said Luke after dinner.

He was comfortably slumped in his favorite place: the sunken green armchair in the living room, an open bottle of beer in one hand, the remote in the other, the Economist on his lap, and a football game on. I sat on the carpet by his knee. Our cat Potemkin, a miniature female tabby with delusions of grandeur and a short stub for a tail, settled by his other knee and pretended to doze off.

“Good game,” I said. “Honey?”

“Mhm…”

“Honey, I’m working on a new book.”

“Sure.”

“You want to hear what the book is about?”

“Sure.”

“It’s—it’s about sex workers.”

“Sure.”

“Did you hear me?”

“Sure. Your book… I’m listening…”

I stood up and screamed into his ear, “Sex!”

That got his attention. Both Potemkin and Luke stared at me. Luke’s round, water-grey eyes and fluffy, pinkish eyelashes hadn’t changed throughout our fifteen years together, and although he’d lost most of his dull orange curls, he, as always, reminded me of a little boy—over six feet tall—about to go on a roller-coaster ride, curious and frightened at the same time.

“What?” he said.

“Honey, I am writing a book about sex workers.”

“Who?”

“God! Prostitutes. About prostitutes…” I said. “A book.”

“Okay. Weird. And?”

I wanted to tell Luke that I had spent the whole winter in a freezing library trying to capture that last chapter, that I’d developed carpal-tunnel pain browsing the Web, that the facts I had learned about escorts were the most useless facts ever—for instance, I had discovered that clients often threw cheesecakes at working girls—that I had to write this novel, that I’d been having nightmares every night, and so much more. Instead, I said: “Ehh… It’s kind of hard to explain, but basically I need to do some research. I mean… hands-on research.”

“What, you want to be a hooker?”

“No, Honey. Just a temporary job, a dominatrix. At a dungeon. Bondage, spanking, that kind of stuff. No actual sex…”

My husband drank some beer and then looked at the bottle as if the answer was spelled out on its green label. Then he looked up at me. Potemkin was looking at me, too. Together they made a tough jury.

“Why, again, are you doing it?”

I should have told him: “Because of my past.”

Like a maniac with a razor, the past kept chasing me. It raged in my nightmares and in my daydreams. I would get up, have my oatmeal, and move on. But ignoring the past is ignoring a bomb—no, a nuclear reactor. Ignore it and it might explode.

I could never have told Luke any of that; I didn’t know it myself.

Instead, I said, “I told you…material for my book. Why, are you prejudiced?”

Beyond anything, Luke, the former captain of the Tufts football team, valued freedom, justice, and independence. We had assigned shifts for changing diapers and taking garbage out. I was free to go out on Saturday with the neighbors for a girls’ night out—if I gave him a week’s notice.

Luke stared at his bottle again. I picked a sliver of a cheese cracker from the bluish carpet; the house needed vacuuming. Potemkin scratched behind her ear with her hind paw for what seemed like an eternity. Finally, Luke cleared his throat.

“How about you write about parenting? Lisa just got her book published, you know. Or children’s stories, you know, like the stories you tell Nick—about a little crocodile—”

“Armadillo.”

“Sure. Those are good. I mean, why hookers?”

“Don’t call them that.”

I stood up and walked to the window. The street looked empty at first, but then I saw Vanessa, our neighbor, in her eggplant kimono, dragging an oversized green recycling bin out into the street. I forgot it was garbage night. I sighed.

“I don’t know what’s in your mind,” Luke said. “I know you, though. You’ve already decided everything. You’ll do what you want no matter what I say. Go ahead, it’s your life.”

“Yeah, but it’s your life, too. I want you to be okay with it!”

“Like, can I be? Really? But—What am I going to do, divorce you?” He sighed, too. “You’re a grownup, a free person in a free country. Can I watch my game now? And would you mind bringing me another beer?” (1)

             I got him a beer from the fridge and started to take empty beer bottles and Diet Coke cans out from the kitchen. It was my garbage shift.

(1) From clinical psychologist Dr. Michael H. Strong: Luke’s reaction demonstrates the unvoiced conflicts in this marriage. He is in denial or rationalizing; it is possible he has been unfaithful and his guilt is now absolved in the unconscious by his understanding attitude towards his wife’s research. He also “buys” himself more freedom in the future—Rose’s transgression will justify his own inappropriate or questionable actions and behaviors. Couples often enter into unspoken agreements of this sort; for example, “I will close my eyes to your infidelities, and you will forgive my shopping addiction.”

To buy We, Monsters click here 

Zarina Zabrisky is the author of short story collections IRON (2012, Epic Rites Press), A CUTE TOMBSTONE (2013, Epic Rites Press), a novel We, Monsters (2014, Numina Press), and a book of poetry co-authored with Simon Rogghe (forthcoming in 2014 from Numina Press). Zabrisky started to write at six. She earned her MFA from St. Petersburg University, Russia, and wrote while traveling around the world as a street artist, translator, and a kickboxing instructor. Her work appeared in over thirty literary magazines and anthologies in the US, UK, Canada, Ireland, Hong Kong, and Nepal. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee and a recipient of 2013 Acker Award for Achievement in The Avant Garde, Zabrisky is also known for her experimental Word and Music Fusion performances.

Tomorrow, hit up The Book Cove to follow the tour and read about Zarina's concerns regarding women and publishing, what defines "erotica," and why it's so important to her that she transcend being known as a "woman writer"

Book Review: You Lost Me There

Read 3/19/14 - 3/26/14
3 Stars - Recommended for readers who don't mind a slow story that turns and churns over loss and regret and misunderstanding
Pages: 304
Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover
Released: 2010


I bought this book as a hardcover yeaaaaars ago at a book sale for a couple of bucks, drawn to it by the title and cover, less so by the jacket copy. The blurb refers to the book as " at turns funny, charming, and tragic". We'll get back to this in a moment.

I left it shelved with the countless other unread book-sale-binge-buys I've amassed over the years (god knows how many I have... enough to overstuff two entire bookshelves and then some), and didn't have an urge to pull it down and crack it open until my husband's work related three-week-long absence from home last month.

I was mopey and not thrilled that he was going to be gone from home for so long, and I needed to lose myself in a book that matched my current mood. And You Lost Me There sounded as though it would fit the bill nicely. The main character is a neuroscientist who's having a hard time getting over the loss of his wife. Rather than properly grieve her when she first passed away, he's been sort of casually dating his very-much-younger co-worker and sort of strangely lending himself out as a non-sexual boy-toy to his wife's very-much-older aunt. Until he discovers a bunch of index cards written out in his wife's handwriting, outlining her thoughts on their marriage... as part of a homework assignment given to them during a brief stint of couples counseling.

So here it comes, the big ah-ha moment. Our neuroscientist, who prides himself on his keen memory, since, well, you know, he STUDIES it for a living, is suddenly thrown into shock at the fact that his wife remembered their life together very differently than he did. Where he was wedded in ignorant bliss and struggles to separate one moment from another, his beloved Sara writes about specific, defining moments in their lives. Moments that had a major impact on her. Moments that he remembers quite differently, or worse, simply cannot recall at all.

So the question that chews at him, and so, in turn, should be chewing at us, is how two people can live their lives together and experience their time together so differently. Well, I don't need to read a three hundred page novel to be able to tell you that hey, guess what, people experience shit differently dude, suck it up and move on, be happy you found those cards because of the better-late-than-never insight it gives you into who you are when viewed from other people's perspectives, and just move on. Geesh.

And yeah, so I get it, he's a study-er of brains and memory and is totally weirded out by the unpredictable ways in which people experience, remember, and mentally file away moments. This part of it, I admit, fed right into a thing I've always found myself obsessing over - more so since I've had kids, but I've been doing it since I was in high school - which is (and you might think I'm a little bit crazy when I tell you this, but really, what do I care?) how we've got to come to terms with the fact that we will never, ever, really, truly know what it is like to be anyone other than ourselves. We won't ever really understand how other people see us, hear us, perceive us... we'll never feel how much they might hate us or love us, never know how much they think of us, or WHAT they think when they do think of us. And that's part of life. I might not like that my kids and husband have thoughts and feelings that are independent of me, but if I sit there and dwell on it I'm likely to drive myself bat-shit crazy.

But enough about me and my weird-ass mental games, right? Let's get back to Rosencrans and his failure to write a book that made me grip the pages with a fierce and sisterly sense of sameness. This book was soooo not the companion-to-my-misery I had hoped it would be. It went down a road I wasn't really interested in going down but followed reluctantly because, hell, I was already so many pages into it and I needed to finish it so it'd count against my goodreads challenge. (well, no not really.) I actually kept reading to see if it would get any better. I was still holding out hope for the whole "at turns funny, charming, and tragic" stuff. But no deal.

I didn't find it funny - it was actually kind of boring and sad in a "dude, please, just let it go" sort of way. I didn't find it charming - I actually had a great dislike for our protag and his self-centeredness and I was annoyed by his girl-friday and really had a hard time buying into the horny old broad. And tragic? Well, ok, I'll give Rosencrans that. It was a tragic in this sense - our poor neuroscientist was happy remembering his wife and their perfect marriage while bopping a chick that could have been his granddaughter. Those cards should have been left the hell alone. Watching him literally disintegrate right before our eyes was tragic. Tiresome, yes. But also tragic.

Ah, me. A mild disappointment, yet one that, as I sit here one month later, composing this review, I can still feel... I can remember how I felt as I read it, and that must mean something, yes?

Book Giveaway: There Is No End To This Slope

Since July 2010, TNBBC has been bringing authors and readers together every month to get behind the book! This unique experience wouldn't be possible without the generous donations of the authors and publishers involved.

It's the first of the month and you know what that means.

It's time to bring you June's Author/Reader Discussion book!

We will be reading and discussing There is No End to This Slope

with author Richard Fulco.

Richard and his publisher Wampus Multimedia are giving us 10 copies to give away:

A mix of print (for US residents) and digital formats (open internationally)!

Here is the goodreads description to whet your appetite:

He writes letters to a dead girl—John Lenza, an aspiring writer from Brooklyn, New York, hasn’t written a novel, a play, or any other potentially publishable project. His obsession with his part in the death of his best friend Stephanie in high school, is a metaphorical brick wall—blocking him from a fulfilling life. Lenza’s struggles to reconcile his guilt from the past and to enjoy the present sets the tone for Brooklyn native and playwright Richard Fulco’s emotionally charged debut THERE IS NO END TO THIS SLOPE.

1st century Willy Loman, Lenza drifts, letting things happen to him rather than figuring out what he really wants from his work-life and his relationships. At Cobble Hill High School he meets his future wife Emma Rue, an impulsive alcoholic. At a “writerly” coffee shop near his new digs in Park Slope he meets Teeny, an overweight gay man, who mines Lenza’s life for his own material. Richard, a homeless man becomes a voice of reason and a roommate, while Pete the landlord worries mostly about whether Lenza is truly taking special care of those beautiful wood floors in the apartment and, when Lenza loses his job, if the rent will be paid.

At one point in THERE IS NO END TO THIS SLOPE John Lenza describes himself as intelligent, perhaps too intelligent to do anything. For him and many of the characters in Fulco’s novel it is hard to find a way to navigate the day-to-day while nurturing a sensitive and creative spirit. Does John Lenza deserve to be tortured by something that happened so many years ago? Or is the event really a safety net that he allows to prevent him from finding out what his true creative potential might be?

Through deeply wrought characters and scenes that mirror the angst everyone faces as life happens and years pass, Fulco touches on a fundamental issue that drives great artists to self-destruct. Ironically when Lenza has wrung all he can out of his pained self, it may be the mundane day-to-day that ultimately saves him. 

This giveaway will run through May 8th. 

Winners will be announced here and via email on May 9th.

Here's how to enter:

1 - Leave a comment here or in the giveaway thread over at TNBBC on goodreads, stating why you'd like to receive a copy of the book, what format you prefer, and where you reside (remember, only US residents can win a paper copy!).

ONLY COMMENT ONCE. MULTIPLE COMMENTS DO NOT GAIN YOU ADDITIONAL CHANCES TO WIN.

2 - State that you agree to participate in the group read book discussion that will run from June 15th through June 21st. Richard Fulco has agreed to participate in the discussion and will be available to answer any questions you may have for him. 

 *If you are chosen as a winner, by accepting the copy you are agreeing to read the book and join the group discussion at TNBBC on Goodreads (the thread for the discussion will be emailed to you before the discussion begins). 

 3 - Your comment must have a way to contact you (email is preferred). 

GOOD LUCK!!

Indie Spotlight: Joshua Young

Earlier this month, TNBBC took a step out of our comfort zone and reviewed our very first play - Joshua Young's The Holy Ghost People. Drew of Raging Biblioholism, our resident thespian review contributor, enjoyed it so much and discovered so much to chew on within its pages, that he found himself reading it multiple times!

Today, we're thrilled to share this essay from Joshua about how The Holy Ghost People found its way out of his head and into the world, shaped from his past and formed in the present:

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THE HOLY GHOST PEOPLE started out as pages and pages of aphorisms and notes that I didn’t know what to do with. At first I had all these little scraps of paper, and ripped out pages, stacked in this notebook, and I decided to type them up. I had been thinking a lot about my past in the church—now apostate—and how I felt about my friends and family who were still believers, I was thinking about the rhetoric of the church, and of faith: I thought a lot about what I told kids and non-believers, when I was a youth leader—shit I look at now and feel ashamed of. I had been thinking a lot about space travel and how the universe functions—space stuff. Growing up, I was taught that evolution was a lie. At one point a youth pastor told me that if there was a question on a science test about evolution I should write in “I don’t believe in this.” I did that, even though I didn’t want to, because I felt guilty about answering what the teacher taught us. He came up to me the next day at school and said, “Just tell the correct answer to these questions, please?” I felt guilty, but I told him what I had learned and he said, “Thanks,” paused, then said something like, “You know, this is real life I’m teaching. We didn’t make it up. Believe what you want, but this is science.” As you can imagine, I didn’t learn a lot about how the universe was made, and what I did learn I shuffled out for strange explanations my youth leaders gave me about carbon dating being messed up from the flood, about all things being possible through god, and a lot of other justifications for my beliefs. So, there I was simultaneously watching Battlestar Galactica and How the Universe Works, and learning so much about Science Fiction and well, real science. These two things were weaving through all these images and notes about neighborhoods . I hadn’t made any progress on another project I was working on and felt like I needed space from it, so I started looking at all these notes I had typed up and saw a conversation forming. Initially the conversations were these little lyric moments that sort of riffed off each other. I kept putting them together. At first they were just these little blocks of verse that were sort of placed in no particular order, but certain threads of conversation were starting to form. I could see two different voices speaking. I saw the believers and the non-believers.

So I had all these pieces and I knew that it needed structure. My first book, When the Wolves Quit used the stage/play as its structure. That worked because there were these moments that needed to happen offstage. I needed an actual stage to make the narratives work. But it only happened because my second book To the Chapel of Light (which was actually written before Wolves) used film/ screenplay format as structure, and it just hit me that this needed to be tied to a narrative form that situated it in some kind of expectation. So, here was this project that needed a form, but I didn’t want to force anything—it needed to come organically. I just couldn’t see what it wanted to be. It felt cinematic at times (the space stuff) and dramatic at others (the preaching, biblical stuff). I also didn’t want to do something I had done before. I had just finished a sort-of Symphony-in-Verse, and I knew that these pieces had to be something other than poems. It needed form and structure that existed outside of poetry. I don’t know if that makes sense.  It had to be more than a collection of poems.

I sent it to my friend and poet Daniel Scott Parker he said, “This wants to be a play, dude. Just make it play. It makes sense.” Begrudgingly, I tried that. I could see these two groups of people talking, arguing about faith and God and morals. I could see the stage coming together. As I started to put these pieces to dialogue, the scenes and settings filled in. Once I started building this into a dialogue, I knew that there would be believers and non-believers—the fragments already reflected this tension, these conflicting voices.  I had all these crazy logical fallacies and lies all over the manuscript and as I started really bringing them to the surface, exposing them for what they were, I saw these people preaching. I had this stray line about white-throats and clothing whipping in the wind, and it happened. THE HOLY GHOST PEOPLE rose. It was/is important to me that while we doubt the logic and truth behind the Holy Ghost People, we doubt our doubts. We see and hear things that make sense, or seem to, that the science-fiction, the fantasy of these interactions of their claims gain ground and begin to seem plausible in this world. In fact, we should begin to question our own understanding of what’s real.

When Tyler from Plays Inverse first starting talking about his press to me, I didn’t know that this would be ready by the time he was ready—so THE HOLY GHOST PEOPLE (which was still rough and not what it is now) was at another press. I sent Tyler a section of THGP and he wrote back immediately and said he wanted it. I had to tell him that someone else was considering it, but they passed a couple days later. I immediately sent it to Tyler. Let me be clear, THGP is the play/book it is because of Tyler’s work as an editor. He fucking GRILLED me with questions about the characters, about the setting, about the structure and form, about the logic of The Holy Ghost People. We did at least ten drafts. I think. Maybe I’m exaggerating. Maybe not. Every time, Tyler’s notes would pull on something that would either lead to a decision to cut or uncover something sort of blurred by me trying to overwrite something, me trying to be a “poet.” He would say, “Why are you writing it like this? Don’t you mean this?” And I would say, “Yes.” And he would say, “Well just say it.” So I would cut the ornamental language and just say what it is to say.

Tyler also gave me a reading list. I read plays. In fact during the editing of THGP I only read plays. I just went to the library with my family and I’d leave my wife and kid in the play area for ten minutes, run over to where the plays were grab all the plays I could find that Tyler recommended, and grab a few more random ones.

I could be wrong, because I misremember things, but I think that the violence came to the surface because of Tyler’s notes, the Sylvia character became a major part of the play because of Tyler, the flawed logic of the The Holy Ghost People became consistent and evolving because of Tyler’s questions. But we didn’t just talk about the book. We talked about faith, my frustration with religion, our own backgrounds, how shitty logic and fucked up rhetoric can lead even intelligent people into a shitty situation. Tyler wanted context and I couldn’t just bullshit him. I had to really think about my answers, and I had to be willing to say, “I don’t know.” In fact, we both embraced this idea that sometimes we didn’t know what The Holy Ghost People were saying, sometimes, when we thought their logic was asinine, we had to let it go and let the characters do what they needed to.

In terms of plays, what lacked in Wolves was a realistic format and structure—it didn’t look like a play. THGP would look like a play. We knew it had to. But it also had to read like poems. Wolves would be nearly impossible to stage as is (maybe it can be done—challenge?—but it’s hybrid in the sense that there are letters, offstage happenings—key things, dream sequences, and underworld, and songs, and this entire town in the Pacific Northwest with its vegetation and the Ghost Woods), whereas THGP is doable (with resources). Right? It’s totally doable. At least that’s what I’ve been told.

I thought this post was gonna be about my process writing, my thinking, about what THE HOLY GHOST PEOPLE is about and how it functions, but it turned into something about how a project/book can change with collaboration, with peers who know your work, and an editor who digs in and asks difficult questions. I love collaboration. And I know most of my books wouldn’t be what they are without my mentors, friends, peers, and editors. In the same way, I think a staging of this play would mutate my expectations and understand of these characters. Editing did that. I don’t see why the stage wouldn’t do it too. I’m not gonna lie, I hope someone puts THE HOLY GHOST PEOPLE on, stages it, brings something new to it. I’d like to see what other people see in this play. I want to see what these characters look like to others.

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Joshua Young is the author of THE HOLY GHOST PEOPLE (Plays Inverse Press), 2014); The Diegesis (Gold Wake Press, 2013), co-written with Chas Hoppe; To the Chapel of Light (Mud Luscious Press/Nephew 2012) and When the Wolves Quit: A Play-in-Verse (Gold Wake Press 2012). His latest feature film, Do You See Colors When You Close Your Eyes? was official selection at Seattle International Film Festival, Athens International Film Festival, and Montreal International Black Film Festival (2011). He is Associate Director of Poetry & Nonfiction at Columbia College Chicago where he teaches Poetry and writing. He lives in the Wicker Park neighborhood with his family.

Audio Review: The Troop

Listened 4/8/14 - 4/16/14
5 Stars - Highly Recommended / The Next Best Book - this book is felt as much as it is read
Audio CD (uncertain of length)
Publisher: Simon and Schuster Audio
Released: February 2014


If you're familiar with TNBBC, you know I typically don't review the 'big publishers' on this blog. Heck, I don't usually read the big publishers. But in the rare instances where one of their books catch my attention, I have no qualms with taking it up on audio and giving it a listen on my commute to and from work.

When Simon and Schuster initially pitched THE TROOP my way, I couldn't say no. It simply sounded too amazing to pass up. I explained my audio preference and within weeks (due to some issues I was having with the audio downloading from their site onto my pc) their publicist had burned a copy onto CD and shipped it over.

THE TROOP is a slow-burn horror novel that grows in the deepest, darkest parts of your gut. It sneaks up on you from behind, like the villain in a monster movie, tickling the hairs on the back of your neck with its rancid breath, sending horrible shivers down your spine. And the very moment you become aware of its presence is the moment you realize it's already too late...

Think Lord of the Flies meets The Ruins and you'll begin to understand the nightmare that is THE TROOP.

It all begins with five teenaged boys and their scout master, Tim, as they embark on a camping trip out on Prince Edward Island - an uninhabited body of land, complete with a cabin and very little else. At first, the group of boys get along fine, forgiving each other their differences under the friendly guidance of Tim. There's Ephriam and Max, BFF's for as long as they can remember; Kent, one of the most popular kids in school, who enjoys bossing the rest of the group around; Newton, the nerdiest of the bunch; and Shelly, quite possibly the most disturbed. As the boys settle in and prepare for their first night on the island, scout master Tim discovers someone else is there with them - an incredibly thin, incredibly ill, and insatiably hungry man. He knows there is something unnaturally wrong with the unwelcome visitor but is unable to stop himself from offering him help. Bringing the stranger back to the cabin kickstarts what is quite possibly the most mentally tormenting and physically assaulting book I've read in years.

As the unwell man infects the troop with the bioengineered horrors his body contains, life on the little island takes a turn towards survival-of-the what? The smartest? The fittest? With no means of escape, the boys begin to quickly turn on each other, and some even turn on themselves.

As I listened to the audio, I found myself driving my car with one hand wrapped around my throat, or covering my mouth, in horrified reaction to what was happening as narrator Corey Brill read Nick Cutter's words aloud. There were even moments where my finger hovered over the pause button, so close to ending the whole ordeal because I didn't think my stomach could handle it, but unable to do it because I had to know what would happen next.

Cutter did a great job of stretching out the tension by interspersing the main story with court hearing transcripts and scientific experiment logs that gave us a peek into the history (and future) of what, exactly, our troop was dealing with.

While not a book for the extremely sensitive or weak-stomached, I highly recommend this novel to anyone who craves a well written, gut wrenching horror story - one that will challenge them, one that will push them to their very limits, and stretch those limits further than they ever thought possible.

Nik Korpon's Guide To Books & Booze

Time to grab a book and get tipsy!

Back by popular demand, Books & Booze, originally a mini-series of sorts here on TNBBC challenges participating authors to make up their own drinks, name and all, or create a drink list for their characters and/or readers using drinks that already exist. 

Today, Nik Korpon assigns each of his books a drink. Bottoms up!

Drinking in Baltimore: A Functioning Alcoholic’s Guide to the Books of Nik Korpon.

A lot of my writing is set in bars. I don’t know what that says about me. Or maybe I do, but I don’t want to admit it. I worked as a bartender for a couple years, saving up money to put myself through grad school. Met my wife while standing behind that same bar. The way I like to frame it is that I’m a naturally curious person, as all writers probably are, and I enjoy watching people, seeing what mask they put on in front of a specific person, or if they even feel the need to wear one. As a crime writer, there is an untold amount of stories to be lifted from day laborers after their third Turkey with a Boh back, and nothing’s more unbelievable than real life.

If I was to get philosophical about it, as I am wont to do about trivial things, I’d say that—at least in Baltimore, a city that clings to its working class roots as fiercely as it tries to gentrify its neighborhoods—bars are as much a representation of a block as they are a cross-section of the various socioeconomic group that inhabit that street, and the same could be said for how a drink order displays someone’s personality. In that spirit, I thought I’d draw up a drink menu for a couple of my books. It shines a little light on the disposition of each one. Might make it a little easier to get through as well.

Old Ghosts­ (Snubnose Press)

Presidente Beer

This novella is all about trying to outrun the—ahem—ghosts of your past. Cole is trying to restart his life after having to flee Boston. He’s got a pretty wife, Amy, and a cozy apartment that his construction wage barely manages to pay for. When his ghosts catch up with him—it wouldn’t be dramatic if they didn’t—havoc ensues. A lot of this novel takes place in the Butcher’s Hill neighborhood of east Baltimore. When I lived there, my wife and I drank a lot of Dominican beer because there were a ton of bodegas around and it was hot and this beer was tasty.

By the Nails of the Warpriest (Outsider Writers Press)

Budweiser or Abita Beer

I debated putting this novella on the list because I’m currently turning it into a novel, but fuck it, I guess. Warpreistfollows an unnamed thief who steals memories and sells them on the black market. Along the way there are preachers who bloodlet, a one-eyed assassin and numerous manifestations of the Catholic Guilt I’ve lived with for thirty-odd years. It’s sort of a future dystopian, gritty crime stories about fathers and sons and the past we can’t outrun (sense a theme here?) and I printed out photos of post-Katrina New Orleans as inspiration for the setting. I read an interview with David Simon once about the importance of having locals on set, because everyone in Treme initially drank New Orleans-based Abita beer. Locals, though, they informed Mr. Simon that only white folks drank Abita, and the rest kept to regular old Budweiser. I thought that was an interesting distinction.

Bar Scars: Stories (Snubnose Press)

Natty Boh and Wild Turkey

I stole the title from a great column Anna Ditkoff used to write in Baltimore’s City Paper, and stole the stories from a range of people I met while at bars, whether behind the bar or leaning against it. With one exception, these are the stories most real to me, because I see these people every day.

Punching Paradise (Fight Card Pulps)
Boharita

A Boharita is a true Baltimore drink that tries to make the intolerable manageable, which is pretty much what Neckbone tries to do for most of the novella. He’s nothing if not honorable, something that’s hard to come by in the underground boxing circuit. He’ll take a fall if it earns him a little scratch on the side but he makes damn sure everyone knows he doesn’t go down unless he wants. Then he loses his temper and knocks a man down too early, inadvertently throwing a young boy into the crosshairs of Bill Stokes, the local promoter and aspiring gangster. Like most everything else I write, it all gets worse from there. Kind of like a Boharita. Open a can of Natty Boh and sip off the top, then pour in Jack Daniels until it crests the top. Sprinkle on a little Old Bay and sip to your liver’s content. Or until you get a waking hangover.

Stay God, Sweet Angel (Perfect Edge Books)

Yuengling, Jameson, Murphy’s

Stay God, the original novel, was a strange experience for me. Above being my first book, I wrote it in a six-week fever dream between grad school semesters. I was living in London and missing Baltimore like hell. Incidentally, I think that’s the best representation of Baltimore: I’d been scheming for seven years to get out of there and three weeks after landing in London, one of the most exciting cities in the world, I almost spent two months’ worth of my living expenses to buy a ticket back because I missed the place so damn bad. After my girlfriend—now wife—talked me out of it, I decided instead to write a book about my friends back home. Though their quirks are slightly exaggerated and criminal tendencies (mostly) invented, I’m pretty proud of the way they came out. All the weirdness, the random run-ins, the bordering-on-suffocating intimacy of the city, it’s all Baltimore. They don’t call it Smalltimore for nothing. So why the drinks? Not as esoteric a reason as you might think. Yuengling is a great $5/6-pack beer. Nothing special, but if you don’t want to drink Natty Boh here, you drink Yuengling. At least I did. And Jameson is just good. Those were the two go-tos when I lived and bartended here, and damn it, I missed them. If I wasn’t able to procure (not to mention afford) them in London, then that’s what Damon would drink in the book. Murphy’s, on the other hand, was a revelation in England, not because it’s a great stout, but because it was less than £2.50 a four-pack. No way in hell I’d pay that stateside, so I got my money’s worth while I was living there. Not bad for student living. Doing more with less.

Actually, I think that about sums up my books.

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Nik Korpon is the author of Stay God, Sweet Angel; Fight Card: Punching Paradise; Bar Scars: Stories; By the Nails of the Warpriest; and Old Ghosts. His stories have ruined the reputation of Needle, Noir Nation, Out of the Gutter, Shotgun Honey, and Yellow Mama, among others, and he is an associate editor at Dark House Press. He lives in Baltimore with his wife and kids. Give him some danger, little stranger, at nikkorpon.com.