A TNBBC Twist on "Top 2014" Lists

We've been putting our own little spin on Top End-of-the-Year Lists for three years running. In the past, we had asked small press authors to share some of their favorite reads from the year. This year, we're shaking things up again and asking our review contributors to share theirs....

TNBBC Review Contributor Series: Top Reads of 2014

Lavinia Ludlow (author)

Ludlow’s Top 3 Books Read in 2014

If you’ve been (un)fortunate enough to know me up close and personal this year, you probably know I am lucky on many fronts: to be alive, to be alive with all parts intact, to have been well enough to write this, and to have been well enough to have read some phenomenal books by a few writers I have always respected, and new writers I’ve come to respect just the same.

Rope by Matty Byloos
Full review at The Collagist

A must-read. Unconventional story telling and storyline, and not without Byloos’ notorious dark humor. This book will knock you out, and when you regain consciousness, you’ll secretly be asking for more.

The Collected Works of Scott McClanahan Volume I
Full review at Nailed Magazine

McClanahan’s small-town stories are life-lessons embedded in dark-humored, jaw-dropping tales. You feel sorry for his protagonists (in most cases, it’s McClanahan himself) but you’re also laughing and simultaneously enlightened by the painful yet hilarious conundrums.

Love Songs of the Revolution by Bronwyn Mauldin
Full review pending

Don’t let the title turn you off, this is an amazing and well-written novella about a seventy-year-old man reflecting on his life as a political refugee. A heart-breaking and humbling thriller, and I quote, “Read this story as your passport demands: a love story, a murder mystery, a story of political intrigue. Perhaps by the final page, those stories will converge.”

2015 is going to be a big year. I’m thankful for the opportunity to kick it off in style at The Next Best Book Blog. Thanks Mrs. Hettler for keeping the faith, and for keeping me going. Here’s to many more.

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Drew Broussard (Raging Biblioholism)

4 Favorite Overlooked Reads:

* The Supernatural Enhancements by Edgar Cantero 

A really fun adventure story, using just about every gimmick or affectation it could think of (from things like video transcripts in the text to character tropes like the sassy female sidekick) and somehow ending up super-successful instead of frustrating.  Cantero's imagination just goes bonkers and I can't remember the last time I had so much fun reading a book.

* Tigerman by Nick Harkaway 

Harkaway continues to be relentlessly inventive, writing one of the best superhero origin stories in a long time.  He comes armed with humor, heart, and a savvy geopolitical eye to boot.  And the UK cover is just the most beautiful thing.

* See You in Paradise by J. Robert Lennon 

An excellent collection exploring the malaise of the middle American suburb.  Smart, well-crafted, and just vaguely unsettling - just like the suburbs...

* The Lobster Kings by Alexi Zentner 

Flying way under the radar comes this well-crafted tale about a clan of lobster-catchers in Maine.  It takes a lot of inspiration from King Lear (down to the names and some of the character traits) but it's also a celebration of local American mythology - both the truly magical and the self-made magic of self-made men (and women).

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Melanie Page (Grab The Lapel)

Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life by Tom Robbins

Because Robbins was born long before TV (in 1932), storytelling is a vital part of who he is, and Tibetan Peach Pie demonstrates the oral tradition in a way that makes you want to read the vignettes aloud to those around you. Robbins may be 82 now, but he’s kept up on pop culture just fine. He makes fun of Sarah Palin and e-books (how can his writing be reduced to those tiny 0s and 1s??). This is not a guy frozen in time wishing for “the good old days.” Each day is a new adventure, a new challenge, and I’m not even sure Robbins suggests he’s ready to slow down. Robbins is hilarious, yet slows life down so that you can enjoy it.

Scoot Over Skinny: The Fat Nonfiction Anthology edited by Donna Jarrell & Ira Sukrungruang

The editors of this anthology, self-proclaimed “Fat Americans,” choose pieces that explore the love of fat, the disgust and guilt; the essays are written from the perspective of the fat and the skinny; the entries are humorous, serious, and sad. In an ever-fatter America, this collection is great to gain some perspective from all voices.

Off Courseby Michelle Huneven

The setting of Off Course is the Reagan-era recession, but how is that different from the 2010s? People study and work hard, and as the end of that schooling nears, reality becomes an abstract thing, a toothless monster that makes moving forward seem impossible and bends adulthood into an undesirable shape. Because Off Course is so long (and the pages are densely packed), there is so much for each reader to take from this book. It’ s a novel that made me look at the pieces, picking each one up and turning it over for inspection.

Limberby Angela Pelster

A whole book of essays about trees; how is that even possible? Angela Pelster makes it happen in her sleek collection containing 17 essays, usually around 5 pages each. With titles like “Temple” and “Ethan Lockwood” and “Artifacts,” you may not immediately get the connection to trees. More so, you may not have a sense of direction with the content. But Pelster leads readers along and takes us to unknown territory that opens up like the door through which Dorothy crosses from black-and-white into a color-filled world in Oz.

Her Own Vietnam by Lynn Kanter

A young woman volunteers for Vietnam to go in her brother’s place in the hopes that being a nurse will be awful, but not deadly. Kanter captures the brutal details of war, including the graphic descriptions and unimaginable feelings. She craftily sidesteps clichés and predictable territory and instead focuses on the female perspective, one that is sorely underrepresented.

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Lori Hettler (TNBBC)

The Best Small Press Books I've Read in 2014

Above All Men - Eric Shonkwiler

It's a bleak tale of the beginning of the end of the world. Of a family man who feels the weight of everyone's worries on his shoulders. Of this man who, regardless of consequence, is determined to make sure everyone is alright, even if it means hurting the ones he cares about most. It's a tale of survival as much as it is one of destruction. And Shonkwiler pulls it off effortlessly. It's a killer read. It does all of the things you want it to and some of the things you don't. And that's what makes it so powerful. That's what makes it THE one.

Elegantly Naked in My Sexy Mental Illness - Heather Fowler

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? 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. And that's ok. Because it's the norm. And because sometimes, we find mental illness a little thrilling, a little sexy.

Deep Ellum - Brandon Hobson

Brandon Hobson's Deep Ellum is very much a sentimental look back at that broken childhood, at family relationships gone bad (and getting worse), at why they say "you can't go home again", and rightly, who the fuck wants to? It also details, more specifically, a reluctant last-gasp attempt to pull the pieces back together when three siblings are called back home after their mother's most recent failed suicide. Hobson is at his best when creating wholly uncomfortable familial situations and is also a master at word economy, expressing only what's necessary and trusting, or simply allowing, his readers to infer the rest. He isn't afraid to hold a mirror up to all the ugly shit families are famous for pulling on each other, either. Whether you've lived a similarly messed up life or not, you certainly know someone who has, or can relate to some of the circumstances here.

Apocalypticon - Clayton Smith

A post-apocalyptic novel that makes fun of itself and every book or film that's ever come before it? Uh, yes please! Clayton Smith knocks it out of the park - The Magic Kingdom's parking lot, to be exact - with this hilarious tale of two BFF's who've managed to survive the apocalypse (which was brought about by Jamaican 'Flying Monkey Missiles' if you can believe it) by apparent sheer dumb luck. Time and time again I found myself wishing I could hop inside Clayton's world and tag along with these guys. Their "laugh in the face of danger" attitude and incredibly poorly timed curiosity made APOCALYPTICON an edge-of-your-seat fun house ride. Sprinkled throughout with pop culture references and served with a heaping dose of well written dialogue, I'm naming APOCALYPTICON the must-read book for fans of post-apoc literature.

Hold the Dark - William Giraldi

Set in an Alaskan village so far off the map you'd never know it existed unless you were born there or beckoned there, during the teeth-chattering and snot-freezing dead of winter, Hold the Dark is a twisted, chilling thriller of a story. It is an extremely dark and violent, slow moving, tension-filled tale that's meant to mess with your mind. William Giraldi's careful prose and simplistic world-building go a long way to pulling the reader in, despite it's slow place. His willful withholding is actually part of the book's charm. And the near-tender descriptions of his characters' violent acts render them almost beautiful. Kudos also to Blackstone Audio, for finding a reader capable of conveying the quiet fierceness of Giraldi's words.

Honorable Mentions:

Suckers - Z. Rider

Winterswim - Ryan W Bradley

The Poor Man's Guide to an Affordable, Painless Suicide - Schuler Benson

The Last Horror Novel in the History of the World - Brian Allen Carr

Starship Grifters - Robert Kroese

Romance For Delinquents - Michael Wayne Hampton

Sarah Yaw Takes it to the Toilet

Oh yes! We are absolutely running a series on bathroom reading! So long as it's taking place behind the closed  (or open, if that's the way you swing) bathroom door, we want to know what it is. It can be a book, the back of the shampoo bottle, the newspaper, or Twitter on your cell phone - whatever helps you pass the time...

Today, Sarah Yaw takes it to the toilet. Sarah Yaw’s novel YOU ARE FREE TO GO (Engine Books, 2014) was selected by Robin Black as the winner of the 2013 Engine Books Novel Prize; her short work has appeared in Salt Hill. Sarah received an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College, and is an assistant professor at Cayuga Community College. She’s the mother of Jed and Ella, the best bathroom invaders ever. She lives in Central New York.

Confessions of a Bathroom Reader

My View

In the bathroom over the last five and a half years, I have started and not finished the following: Eat the Document, The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel, The Pale King, The Burgess Boys, that really brilliant article in The Atlantic about race in America, Ulysses, Transatlantic, Swann’s Way, Love Medicine, The Pale King, that other really cool Atlantic article about kindness, Salvage the Bones, The Presence Process, Absence of Mind, Mountains of the Moon, The Pale King, myriad New York Times pieces (forget the New Yorker), and any article you posted on Facebook that I thought, Ooh! I want to read that.

I have 5 ½-year-old twins. The bathroom is a refuge where for the length of my twins’ lives I have read the first pages of books or a tease of each interesting article trending in my social networks, but almost never a whole anything. I try to finish. I decide, I’ll take my reading to the couch, flanked by watchers of that curious monkey or that cute tiger or those morons on Kickin’ It, so that I can finish what I started in the bathroom. It almost never works. They always ask for juice. It’s all fits and starts. The bathroom remains my best hope. And yet…

their view

Have you ever tried to go to the bathroom with young kids around? I have used the potty, a word I now reflexively use because I’ve become an idiot in certain aspects of my life, with not one but two babies on my lap. Never have I ever gone to the bathroom and not told my kids where I was going. Never have I ever arrived in the bathroom and not been asked in a yelling voice from a very far corner of the house, “Mama, where are you?” “Mama, what are you doing?” “Mama, are you done?” “Mama, mama, mama, mama, mama. I forgot what I was going to say, but where are you?”

I always spend too long. You posted something wildly exciting, and I got lost in it or I made it to page two in Swan’s Way, and then the thundering footsteps, the busting open door and…

I'm semi-informed. I know just enough to know what's going on, but not enough to feel included in deeper cultural conversations. This has lead to a general sense of interruption. This has lead to an ongoing lack of satisfaction. This has resulted in a state of stoppage, which I can tell you is no way to leave the bathroom.

The best days are poetry days, when one of you reposts a poem of the day and I have the time to read it, reread it, let it resonate and lift me up before, well, you know. On those days, my daily constitution is given a rare sense of completion, and I’m told I have a spring in my step, a certain glimmer in my eye.

Audio Series: Stewart Dudley

Our audio series "The Authors Read. We Listen."  was hatched in a NYC club during BEA back in 2012. This feature requires more time and patience of the author than any of the ones that have come before. And that makes it all the more sweeter when you see, or rather, hear them read excerpts from their own novels, in their own voices, the way their stories were meant to be heard.


Today, Stewart Dudley reads an excerpt from The Cutting Room. He spent more than 20 years as a film and video director, scriptwriter, cameraman and editor before leaving the industry to focus exclusively on writing. His credits include hundreds of scripts, ads, speeches and websites. The Cutting Room, his first novel, was named to Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of 2014. He lives in Ottawa, Canada.

Click on the soundcloud link below to hear Stewart reading from The Cutting Room:

The word on The Cutting Room:

Jeff Whittaker has been a trusted communications advisor at the highest levels of government and industry. Now, no one seems to want his advice. Unemployed at fifty-five, Whittaker volunteers at the Jamieson International Documentary Film Festival, where greater value is placed on his clean driving record than his strategic public relations expertise. He is assigned to chauffer one of the festival’s biggest draws—Margaret “Terror” Torrance, a Hollywood star at the top of her game and the bottom of most casting lists. Although inhabitants of different worlds, Whittaker and Torrance share the scars inflicted by personal and professional slings and arrows: Torrance self-reinvented by sheer force of will; Whittaker an unapologetic introvert still scouring his life for meaning. Across five days of film screenings, media interviews, workshops and parties, the actor and the communications expert clash and click, challenging each other to stave off the entropy of middle age.
*Lifted with love from goodreads

Where Writers Write: Greg Boose

Welcome to another installment of TNBBC's Where Writers Write!

 

Where Writers Write is a series that features authors as they showcase their writing spaces using short form essay, photos, and/or video. As a lover of books and all of the hard work that goes into creating them, I thought it would be fun to see where the authors roll up their sleeves and make the magic happen. 

This is Greg Boose.

His Young Adult novel The Red Bishop was published by Full Fathom Five Digital in November, 2014. Greg is the former Los Angeles and Chicago editor of BlackBook Magazine, and his work has appeared on/in Chicago Public Radio, NFL.com, Time Out Chicago, The Huffington Post, McSweeney’s, The Believer, and others. He ghostwrote two New York Times best-selling YA novels in 2011 and 2012. He received his MFA from Minnesota State University Moorhead, and now lives in Santa Monica, CA, with his two young daughters. You can find out more at www.gregboose.com.

Where Greg Boose Writes

I admit to being one of those coffee shop rat guys who secures the best table the moment the OPEN sign is flipped around on the door. And, yeah, I’m one of those coffee shop rat guys who often overstays his welcome, but also one who orders something substantial and always tips. I’ve written at least half my books at these wobbly, sticky tables, and that’s because the hustle and bustle of customers and espresso machines make me feel like I’m a true part of the workforce somehow. Because everyone knows how lonely and unseen writing can be. Being a writer can often feel like being a ghost.

The first draft of The Red Bishop--a book that takes place entirely on Cape Cod--was written in a dozen different coffee shops in north Chicago: nice ones, divey ones, ones with an inch of slush melting across the scuffed tiles. These coffee shops were such a huge part of my book-writing process that they ended up infiltrating the pages of the book: 95% of the characters in the novel were named after Chicago train stations: names like Lake, Logan, Madison, Halsted, Kimball, Cermak, Rosemont, Racine, Laramie, etc. (See the little red boxes?)

But there’s always a closing time, or a barista giving me the “You’ve been here long enough, dude-with-the-patchy-beard” eye, so I eventually have to make my way home to my chipped West Elm desk and craigslist chair and still try to feel like I’m a part of the hustle and bustle.

I’m no longer in Chicago. Moved to sunny Santa Monica three years ago where the only slush is on some editor’s desk in the form of a wobbly pile of manuscripts. (Note to the editor sitting at that desk: READ MINE NEXT COME ON.) And the thing about being in Southern California is that there’s rarely a good reason to stay indoors. Because, let me tell you, it’s pretty nice out. Yesterday was nice, today is nice, tomorrow will be nice. So, to stay inside for a block of hours and toil away on a novel that no one has asked for or knows about, is kind of difficult. I can’t exactly look at a Midwestern blizzard of “thunder snow” raging out the window and tell myself it’s the perfect time to stay inside and write.

So, this is what I do: I turn off my wifi, turn on some spooky-yet-energizing Trent Reznor instrumental albums like the soundtracks for The Social Network and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and I take a deep breath and shut the blinds. (Because palm trees.) And then I turn my wifi back on and mess around for a bit until either inspiration or desperation hits. This is where and how I write.

James Tadd Adcox Recommends The Illuminatus! Trilogy

And so we continue our Writers Recommend - a newish series where we ask writers to, well, you know.. recommend things. Like the books that they've enjoyed. To you. Because who doesn't like being recommended new and interesting books, right?! Think of it as a PSA. Only it's more like an LSA -Literary Service Announcement. And this one comes along as a part of the blog tour for James Tadd Adcox's newest, Does Not Love. You're doubly welcome.

James Tadd Adcox recommends The Illuminatus! Trilogy

Several years ago I went to see an interview with the science fiction writer William Gibson at the Chicago Humanities Festival. The interviewer asked him about his influences, and he made the comment that if you ask a writer who his or her influences are, the writer is most likely to answer with a list of people he or she would like to have as influences. The books that influence us the most deeply, he said, are those we read before we had any conception of what we “ought” to be reading, those books that we pick up because they’re around or because they have a cool cover or whatever and which we fall intensely in love with as kids before we know we’re not supposed to. A writer’s real influences are the ones that he or she is embarrassed to talk about.

I’ve been thinking about those early influences, the books that I stumbled upon and loved before I knew enough to care about what I was supposed to love. One of those books— or perhaps the book that supplied the bridge between those embarrassing ur-books and the “literary” stuff I’d read later on—is The Illuminatus! Trilogy, originally published, as the name implies, as three books, but really a single novel. I first read Illuminatus! towards the end of middle school, when I was maybe twelve or thirteen years old, too young to understand a lot of things in the book and just barely old enough to understand some other things. Bizarre sexual practices play a pivotal role at several key points in the plot, if I remember correctly (and I am almost certain that I do—for a couple of those scenes I’ve got the sort of so-called “flashbulb” memory people talk about having the moment they learned Kennedy died). Politics, too, featured heavily; not as exciting as the sex, okay sure, but I was always strangely interested in politics as a kid, as I tried on one set of political beliefs after another, from Rush Limbaugh conservative to Marxist to anarchist to God-only- knows.

I’m tempted to look this book up on Wikipedia, to tell you, for example, that it is described there as “a satirical, postmodern, science fiction-influenced adventure story; a drug-, sex-, and magic-laden trek through a number of conspiracy theories, both historical and imaginary, related to the authors’ version of the Illuminati,” covering themes such as “counterculture, numerology, and Discordianism,” the latter being a religion that may or may not, but probably was, made up by the authors and which spread in subsequent years to the world outside the book. But I would prefer not to do that. I would prefer to rely here on my

memory of the book, accepting that I’m going to get certain things wrong. Illuminatus! was a thousand-some page book (one of the longest, possibly the longest, that I had read up to that point in my life) written by a pair of ex-hippies and then-anarchists, both named Bob, Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. At that time I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy novels, and I found this book in the science fiction section of my hometown library. God knows whether it makes sense to classify the book as science fiction or whatever else at all. What deeply impressed me about the book was its approach to the real world.

Previous novels I’d read always seemed really clear on what parts of the book were of the real world, or were intended to be, and what parts were the novelist’s additions to it. In a typical science fiction novel, for example, there are some scientific theories or facts that are posited as real, such as the existence and basic science relating to black holes, and some fictitious extrapolation from these facts, such as the use of black holes to travel through space. Or, in literary fiction, certain facts about the world will be posited—such as the

structure of racism in the American south—to which will be added certain fictitious elements, such as the existence of a lawyer named Atticus or a recluse named Boo.

This clear division didn’t hold in Illuminatus! Certain elements, clearly, were fictional—the main characters, or most of them, anyhow, were probably made up, and the authors probably didn’t have any direct knowledge of how long it took for various world leaders to get off during encounters with skilled prostitutes (rounded, if I’m not mistaken, to the nearest half-minute). Other parts were clearly based on fact—the aforementioned world leaders seemed to be clearly based on their real world counterparts, for example. But a wonderfully broad swath of the book seemed to inhabit a shadow space between these categories, things that might be true, things that might be mostly true, things that the authors might believe to be true regardless of their real-world status, things that people besides the authors thought were true that the authors were willing to go along with. But you would never know which was which without doing outside research—and what good would that do you, really? How would you ever know that you’d researched enough? Just because you couldn’t find one of the sources the authors cited (because of course they cited their sources)

doesn’t mean that the authors made it up. Just because you found a book that said such-and-such never happened, that such-and-such happened instead—well, you could find books that said all kinds of things, couldn’t you? There were books that said that the pilgrims and the Indians were friends and that colonialism was glorious and that human beings really did, honest to God, land on the moon.

Reading Illuminatus!, you got a sense of something like vertigo, a sensation of falling even as you were sure (weren’t you?) that you were standing on solid ground. It’s the first book that I can remember ever giving me this sensation, and it’s in large part responsible— I’m eighty-nine percent sure of this—for the path my taste in books and movies and possibly even music would eventually take. I am forever looking to be overwhelmed. I’m reading a book right now, a very good book, called The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing by Nicholas Rombes. I’m reading it for a review, so I won’t say much about it, to make sure I still have something to say when it comes time to review it. But there’s a moment when the narrator is describing some avant-garde films the protagonist is watching, and he says that they’re “the sort of films that poisoned you if you saw them at the wrong (or right) age.” I don’t think it’s going too far to say that something like this occurred when I read Illuminatus!: I was precisely the wrong or right age, and I am poisoned.

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James Tadd Adcox is the author of a novel, Does Not Love, and a collection of stories, The Map of the System of Human Knowledge. He lives in Chicago.

Set in an archly comedic, alternate-reality Indianapolis that is completely overrun by Big Pharma, James Tadd Adcox's debut novel chronicles Robert and Viola's attempts to overcome loss through the miracles of modern pharmaceuticals. Their marriage crumbling after a series of miscarriages, Viola finds herself in an affair with the FBI agent who has recently appeared at her workplace, while her husband Robert becomes enmeshed in an elaborate conspiracy designed to look like a drug study.

Audio Series: Guy J Jackson

Our audio series "The Authors Read. We Listen."  was hatched in a NYC club during BEA back in 2012. This feature requires more time and patience of the author than any of the ones that have come before. And that makes it all the more sweeter when you see, or rather, hear them read excerpts from their own novels, in their own voices, the way their stories were meant to be heard.


Today, Guy J. Jackson reads an excerpt from his book Drink The Rest Of That. Currently living in Los Angeles, Guy is a writer, performer and moviemaker.

Click on the soundcloud link below to listen to Guy as he reads an excerpt from Drink the Rest of That:

The word on Drink the Rest of That:

In this collection of rare, hard-to-find, and often too-short short stories, Guy J. Jackson wields his not particularly helpful but still relatively charming (at least compared to being chased) worldview in order to pretty much study and correct all of humanity's foibles, or at least the ones that need correcting by the end of this year.
*lifted from goodreads with love

Christopher Brooks' Would You Rather

Bored with the same old fashioned author interviews you see all around the blogosphere? Well, TNBBC's newest series is a fun, new, literary spin on the ole Would You Rather game. Get to know the authors we love to read in ways no other interviewer has. I've asked them to pick sides against the same 20 odd bookish scenarios. And just to spice it up a bit, each author gets to ask their own Would You Rather question to the author who appears after them....

Christopher Brooks'

Would You Rather 

Would you rather write an entire book with your feet or with your tongue?

Tongue. Either way, the book would be 220 pages of...jieoa rjelaiejhk, fjd feuihakrh anfuiajberu fjkadyrjkekanfmdna

Would you rather have one giant bestseller or a long string of moderate sellers?

I’d rather write a long string of moderate sellers, which is arguably more difficult anyway. The slow and steady approach worked guys like Richard Linklater. M Night Shyamalan...not so much.

Would you rather be a well-known author now or be considered a literary genius after you’re dead?

I’d prefer to be well known now. With social media and communities like Goodreads, authors have so many chances to connect with their readers. It’d be a shame to miss out on those opportunities.

Would you rather write a book without using conjunctions or have every sentence of your book begin with one?

I’d rather write a book without conjunctions. Especially if I’ve committed to writing with my tongue, I better start cutting out as many words as possible.

Would you rather have every word of your favorite novel tattooed on your skin or always playing as an audio in the background for the rest of your life?

Tattooed on my skin, preferably in 5 point font.

Would you rather write a book you truly believe in and have no one read it or write a crappy book that comprises everything you believe in and have it become an overnight success?

I can’t imagine success out of insincerity would feel like true success at all. I’d rather write with conviction and give up the extra cash. After all, I’m only selling my ebook for $0.99 anyway.

Would you rather write a plot twist you hated or write a character you hated?

I’d rather write about a character I hated. After a while, they might win me over. It’d be kind of like learning to love Kale after it systematically worked its way onto every restaurant menu.

Would you rather use your skin as paper or your blood as ink?

Blood as ink, which means I’m now only writing in haiku.

Would you rather become a character in your novel or have your characters escape the page and reenact the novel in real life?

Since my novel takes place on the last day on Earth, I’m not too eager to become a character in it. But, I guess I’ll take one for the team rather than bring about the world’s demise by reenacting my novel in real life.

Would you rather write without using punctuation and capitalization or without using words that contained the letter E?

Writing without punctuation or capitalization would make for a maddening read. Either way, you could probably market it as a concept book.

Would you rather have schools teach your book or ban your book?

Having a book you wrote taught in school would be a huge honor, but I’d rather not have a novel of mine associated with multiple choice questions or assignments with mandatory word counts.

Would you rather be forced to listen to Ayn Rand bloviate for an hour or be hit on by an angry Dylan Thomas?

I’ve already read Atlas Shrugged, and after suffering through John Galt’s seemingly endless speech, I think I’ve hit my Ayn Rand quota for this decade. Bring on Dylan Thomas.

Would you rather be reduced to speaking only in haiku or be capable of only writing in haiku?

I’ve already planned on writing haiku in blood. If I agree to only speak in haiku, too, can I at least get away with not having to announce my line breaks?

Would you rather be stuck on an island with only the 50 Shades Series or a series in a language you couldn’t read?

I’d take the 50 Shades series and turn it into a choose-your-own-adventure story. At each juncture, you’d be presented with two choices: “stop reading” and “please, please stop reading.”

Would you rather critics rip your book apart publicly or never talk about it at all?

I’d rather have people saying something than nothing at all.

Would you rather have everything you think automatically appear on your Twitter feed or have a voice in your head narrate your every move?

Much to former roommates’ and my girlfriend’s chagrin, I already narrate my every move.

Would you rather give up your computer or pens and paper?

My pens and paper can’t check BuzzFeed, and I’m too lazy to draw my own flip-book GIFs to entertain myself.

Would you rather write an entire novel standing on your tippy-toes or laying down flat on your back?

I spend most of my work day sitting down. Maybe my body would thank me if I at least wrote standing up on my tippy-toes.

Would you rather read naked in front of a packed room or have no one show up to your reading?

Naked - when else am I going to get the perfect opportunity to show off the amazing calves I got from writing an entire novel on my tippy-toes?

Would you rather read a book that is written poorly but has an excellent story, or read one with weak content but is written well? 

I’d rather read a book that is written poorly but has an excellent story. If nothing else, maybe someone will make a good movie out of it, unless it’s directed by M Night Shyamalan.

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Christopher Brooks is the author of The Gertrude Threshold. He was born and raised in the suburbs of Chicago. Christopher graduated from Illinois Wesleyan University. Originally, he set out to study biology and become a doctor. Organic chemistry and a love of writing convinced him to study English-writing instead. Christopher now works at Edelman, a public relations firm, at its headquarters in Chicago. You can follow him on Facebook and Twitter or send him an email at ChristopherBrooks@RaggedRightMedia.com.

Melanie Reviews: After the People Lights Have Gone Off

After the People LightsHave Gone Off by Stephen Graham Jones

Pages: 310

Publisher: Dark House Press

Released: September 2014

Guest review by Melanie Page

Stephen Graham Jones is at again, writing faster than fans can read and publishers would like. This time, SGJ gives us a collection of 16 stories coming from various scary persuasions: ghosts, vampires, werewolves, haunted houses, and even some aliens. The title alone creeped me out; “people lights” imply something looking at your house, something that isn’t “people.” The cover image, too, is frightening--we see a person through a broken window, so the image creates a fore-, middle-, and background. Ingenious for a book cover, really, as the perspective makes readers wonder who’s looking at whom.

Before I started People Lights, my most recent SGJ experience was this summer when I picked up Growing Up Dead in Texas (MP Publishing, 2012), a nonfiction work that read like fiction: things too weird to be true, people who are larger than life. I didn’t finish SGJ’s memoir, though, because it seemed like he forgot someone was reading. Settings I couldn’t picture, people I couldn’t remember, farming terms I didn’t know, and perspectives that were missing. Occasionally, SGJ appears to write for an audience of one.

Although fiction, the first few stories in After the People Lights Have Gone Off read in the same confusing manner. SGJ provides a feedback at the end of the collection where readers can see what inspired each story. The first story, “Thirteen,” based on the author’s childhood, is about “some bad stuff that happened in the bathroom of the Big Chief movie theater in Midland, Texas, bad stuff that made us all so scared to go there that it finally just shut down.” In the Big Chief theater in the story, what exactly characters are afraid of is unclear. It has something to do with holding their breath during certain parts of movies and possibly disappearing. I don’t know what happened in Midland, but the story doesn’t capture the fear that SGJ felt (and, admittedly, still feels).

The second story, “Brushdogs,” was also confusing. It’s unclear whether the father’s son disappears or is actually the real son. There is a disappearing/reappearing glove. All readers know is that the father and son find a carion pile and weird things happen that make the father feel uncertain. Again, the story is based on a real experience, but SGJ fails to provide the pegs on which we hang meaning. At this point, I was disappointed that I bought the book.

Almost as soon as I thought the negatives, my faith was restored: the majority of the collection was brilliant, inventive, and truly scary. Boyfriends Jonathan and Lucas try to make it work in a time warp that sends them around one another in “This is Love.” Grandpa’s secret murderous past as a werewolf--and a human--comes home to roost in “Doc’s Story.” A husband cares for his wife after an accident in their new home leaves her paralyzed, but something haunted interferes with their lives in the title story. In “Uncle” the narrator admits, “There wasn’t even a muted scream from down the hall. Just the sound of forever. In it, I aimed the [handheld laser infrared thermometer] gun into my mouth, pulled the trigger. The readout said I was still alive, still human. As far as it knew, anyway.”

SGJ’s stories aren’t easy; in most cases the end isn’t clear, and readers are left to infer what happened. The challenge is one I want to meet, but putting the most abstract stories in the front nearly put me off the collection. Overall, After the People Lights Have Gone Off is a satisfying, terrifying read.

Melanie Page is a MFA graduate, adjunct instructor, and recent founder of Grab the Lapels, a site that only reviews books written by women (www.grabthelapels.weebly.com).

Indie Spotlight: Jeannine Hall Gailey

Here at TNBBC, we love to tug at the sleeves of the authors who pitch us, suggesting they tell us the story behind the books they wrote, the inspiration for it...

The essay I'm about to share with you, by Jeannine Hall Gailey, author of the upcoming collection of poems titled The Robot Scientist's Daughter, is probably by far the most sad and lovely, and also probably my most favorite. Read it to find out why.

Growing Up in the Atomic City

This is the story of how The Robot Scientist’s Daughter was born.  (The Robot Scientist's Daughter will be published by Mayapple Press in March 2015.)

Growing up five miles downwind of Oak Ridge National Labs outside of Knoxville, Tennessee could seem to some like an “exotic, picturesque” childhood. I spent hours roaming the several acres of mossy woods on our property, digging up peanuts and picking strawberries we grew in a large dirt patch in the back of the house, riding rescued ponies, canning pickles and apples with my mother. The spring was full of mockingbirds, lilacs, crepe myrtle. I went to a summer camp at the local private school where we had a talent show, crafts, and art classes, along with learning to shoot a rifle and a bow and arrow – I was seven years old for my first shooting lesson, and I was so proud to bring home the bulls-eyed paper target to my parents!

It was a beautiful place, full of fossil rocks and old oak trees and steep banks of daffodils along the rural road. But it was also ominous – the little pond across from our house had a sign that said “Don’t eat the fish” with a slash across a picture of a fish – even while I watched my older brothers and their friends splash around in it. A lot of the neighbor boys got in trouble and went to prison, and there were incidents down the street – a wife stabbing a husband, a husband shooting at a wife – and whole families living in ramshackle houses that seemed on the verge of falling over. We lived out in the country, even for Tennessee, in an area that was mostly trailers, family farms, and forest.

My father, trying to make enough income for four children while my mother went back to college to get her degree, decided to augment his engineering professor’s salary by consulting for nearby Oak Ridge National Labs (ORNL) in nuclear cleanup. It was here that he made a switch from a deep interest in radiation-based medical technology – he had worked with early versions of CTscan machines at Yale before moving to work at the University of Tennessee – to robotics, at the encouragement of ORNL, who needed a solution for workers (especially janitors, who came into a lot of contact with contaminated objects) who continued to get sick from nuclear waste at their location.

So our basement became a repository for all kinds of wonderful machinery – a robot arm that played chess, a Geiger counter, and some large box with large knobs that never was specifically identified. I do remember my father showing me how to use a Geiger counter by measuring the clicks on a snowman I built, and he warned me not to eat the snow – that it wasn’t safe. That was my first lesson in the dangers of radiation. I thought this was fairly normal – after all, the kids at my school were the children of physicists and specialist physicians, engineers, and I read books like The Wrinkle in Time trilogy where the parents were scientists. My father bought me radio kits that required fine motors skills and circuitry skills and brought home trinkets and books for me from Japan, where he went for robotics conferences. I watched Hayao Miyazaki's movie Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, about a young girl who lives in a poisoned forest and fights to protect the environment from human war machines and the animals that had mutated to survive what was (even to me at ten, an obvious metaphor) for nuclear radiation poisoning.

The years I spent in Tennessee were some of the happiest I ever had – though no one would call those years perfect – and I always looked forward to visiting Tennessee after we moved away. I spent fifteen years in Ohio and can barely remember any scenery, but I can still remember the exact shape and smell of certain flowers in our yard, the way I built nests for birds out of sticks and violets and mud. When I went to college at the University of Cincinnati, I majored in Biology, and took a class called “Ecological Toxicology” – rumored to be a difficult class with a demanding teacher – and a class for engineers (that I got a special exception to attend) called “Environmental Law.” I was fascinated by these two classes, which, along with learning about mutation, DNA, and environmental impact in my regular biology classes, made me think differently about my childhood in Oak Ridge. Had I been impacted? What might still exist in my body, artifact of the produce and milk I ingested (from local farms,) the mud I played with and the grass I rolled around in? Radioactive cesium, in particular, was said to linger in the bones, hair, and fingernails of children who were exposed long into their adulthood, causing mysterious illnesses, neurological symptoms.

I didn’t know then that twenty years into the future, I’d be investigating those same questions, after years of enduring medical test after test for mysterious autoimmune problems, neurological symptoms, thyroid problems. I’d be looking into EPA reports about childhood leukemia rates in the Tennessee Valley, reports on radioactive trout in my local rivers, reading books by safety physicists about the early years of Oak Ridge National Labs and their experiments with radioactive material near my house. Or that I’d write a book of poetry about the whole thing – my dad’s mission to bring robots to save humans from radioactive poisoning, the beautiful woods and gardens I grew up on (later paved over with concrete and left alone, under questionable circumstances, like a dark joke about how you can't go home again), my own early struggle to live up to my father’s expectations and my struggle with my sometimes uncooperative, unhealthy body, my love of science and nature mixed with an understanding of the dark side of science, the dark side of nature.  

This is how my fourth book, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, was born. She is still a sort of cyborg, half-robot, half-human, waiting for someone to unlock her secrets.

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Jeannine Hall Gailey recently served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington. She is the author of four books of poetry: Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, and The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, out in March 2015 from Mayapple Press. Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily, and in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review and Prairie Schooner. Her web site is www.webbish6.com. 

Audiobook Review: Ugly Girls

Listened 11/17/14 - 11/24/14

3 Stars - Recommended to fans of edgy, straight up trailer trash fiction

Audio: 8.3 hours

Publisher: FSG

Narrator: Kathleen Early

Released: November 2014

Typical teenage girls getting into typical teenage girl stuff, only so much worse. In Ugly Girls, the writing was always on the wall of what ultimately boils down to the story of two incredibly incompatible BFF's who test one another, pushing each another from bad decision to bad decision, eschewing the consequences in lieu of the thrill of the moment, until that one final moment. The moment neither can take back though they wish like hell they could. 

Though you don't want to, you'll find the edgy, hard-core trashiness of the girls intoxicating. Baby Girl has made herself physically ugly, shaving her head, outlining her lips in a grotesque clown's mouth, donning her brother's old clothes, while Perry's ugliness is more behavioral, emotional, using her physical loveliness as a weapon. 

Home's nothing to get all worked up over. Both live boring, dead-end lives. Baby Girl lives with her uncle and struggles with the fact that her once handsome and devilish older brother has been reduced to a drooling, temper-tantrum-throwing five-year-old as the result of a tragic bike accident. Perry, she lives with her drunk-as-a-skunk mother, who never seems to care where she is or what she's up to and her step-father, a saint of a man for being able to put up with the two of 'em.

Oh god, how this book brought the memories of my teenage years rushing back to me. For all intents and purposes, I was a fairly "good girl". I'd sneak around with the boys in the middle of the night, sure, slipping out the bedroom window like Perry did, my father never the wiser. I skipped school and chilled at friends' houses listening to music and watching them get high. A group of us would hang out in the local trailer park - skin heads and hippies talking about the ways they were gonna change the world, gawking at the strung out pregnant girls shoving ice cream and pickles into their junkie mouths. Making nuisances of ourselves at the local coffee shop, batting our under-aged eyelashes at the cute college boys who worked here. Cruising the main streets by the beach with the windows down, radio blasting, the wind in our ears, like nothing could touch us, just passing the time till something better came along. 

Unlike us though, to get even with the world for the bum deck they were dealt, Perry and Baby Girl get off on having fun at other peoples expense, joyriding in the middle of the night, stealing cars, skipping school and cutting classes. They even end up in the dunk-tank overnight for attempting to steal stuff from the local pharmacy. But all that becomes child's play when the two of them discover that they're both being chatted up by the same guy - a guy who has a serious crush on Perry. When the girls finally agree to meet up and show him what's what, that's where the real trouble starts brewing. And once they start that ball rolling, there's no stopping its momentum. 

From slow start to awkward and abrupt ending, Lindsay's multi-charactered novel is all about the ugly. The ugliness inside of us, how feeling ugly makes you act ugly, like there's no other way to be. Ugly Girls is a hopeless, grimy, gritty sort of novel that leaves you feeling as unwashed and skanky as its characters do and makes you thankful that you aren't raising teenage girls. Though now I feel I have to go and warn my teenage son about girls like them.