(Seriously? You don’t have any of these? Okay, well, you’d better have started acquiring them by the time I get back from the gym, or I’ll beat the reading into ya…)

I just posted a new Omnivoracious feature on four excellent collections that I think deserve your attention, possibly even your love. I’d also note all four publishers produce excellent books in general.

Apparently, it was my week to read and then blog about it. Have I made up for the Godzilla poop post yet?

Excerpts:

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My review of Chuck Palahniuk’s Pygmy just appeared in the Washington Post. Here’s the opening:

Sloppy yet smart, Chuck Palahniuk’s “Pygmy” veers from sublimely ridiculous to just plain ridiculous, sometimes within a single paragraph. An infiltrating agent from a nameless authoritarian country, Pygmy poses as a high school exchange student and joins the Midwestern family of Donald Cedar. “Host father,” as Pygmy calls him, works for the Radiological Institute of Medicine and has access to biotoxins. Pygmy and his fellow undersize operatives hope to unleash a biochemical Operation Havoc on an unsuspecting United States.

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(This was on some booktv show for like 10 minutes before it changed. No wonder people think books on TV be borin’.)

Cat sitter walks in the door. “Um, there’s got to be a story behind those.” Points to the giant blow-up penguin and the huge dragon head. Me: “We’ve got a friend in Australia….sent us penguin…penguin wars…then bought dragon head…at daughter’s place but now we have it. Er, at night people outside think they’re humans.” A kind of suspicious, confused look from cat sitter…but that’s not what I want to talk about today. (Nor do I want to talk about Bib-stalk making my cheeks turn red.)

No, some slightly weird books done come in the door. Like, for example, this one:

It looks like a bone, but it must be a book. ‘Cause I review books, not bones. Caitlin R. Kiernan can do both, I believe, but not me. And how did they get my home address? That’s a little weird…

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Click here for my thoughts on the first four Factory novels.

“Killers are like mushrooms; the deadly ones look like the ones you have for breakfast, unless you happen to have the sense to turn them over and look at the funny underneath.”

Dead Man Upright, the fifth and final volume of Derek Raymond’s Factory series is altogether a different beast than its precedessors. It inverts the structure and intent of most of the prior volumes by focusing more on the killer than the victims; in this respect, it most closely resembles The Devil’s Home on Leave, but with more variation and more interesting situations. Dead Man Upright also presumes a lot. There’s not much of our nameless detective’s personal life, mined to such effect in the other four novels, and as a result the killer assumes even more significance, especially for readers who haven’t encountered the other cases related by our Unexplained Deaths detective.

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(Update: Just added a review of Raymond’s Dead Man Upright.)

“I put down the book stunned. I was sitting outside and, suddenly, quite ordinary traffic along Camp Bowie Boulevard seemed fraught with meaning. Streetlamps came on, dim and trembling in early twilight. I realized that this novel on the bistro table…had carved its way into me the way relentless pain etches itself indelibly upon the body..Five or six times in a life you come across a book that sends electric shocks skittering and scorching through the whole of you and radically alters the way in which you perceive the world.” - James Sallis, about I Was Dora Suarez

The first four Factory novels by Derek Raymond–He Died with His Eyes Open, The Devil’s Home on Leave, How the Dead Live, and I Was Dora Suarez–have long been hailed as classics of noir mystery, with the new Serpent’s Tail editions featuring introductions by the likes of Will Self and James Sallis. Reviewers often reference the seeming contradictions of the series, for example the Daily Telegraph’s observation that the novels contain “a bizarre mix of Chandleresque elegance…and naked brutality.” But life gives us order and elegance in equal measure with betrayal and brutality. Some of us are lucky enough to just experience the order, but Raymond knew that most of us experience some form of disorder or upheaval during our lives, and the most extreme version of this situation exists in the form of murder and murder investigations.

In the Factory series, the nameless narrator works as a detective in the Department of Unexplained Deaths. He often clashes with his superior, Bowman, and has turned down promotion at every turn. His wife is in a lunatic asylum and is responsible for the central tragedy of the detective’s life–as is an earlier relationship with a woman who will always retain a gravitational pull on his heart but who can never be brought back to him. He has a sister he wishes he were closer to, but otherwise, at the time of the cases related in the novels, the detective is utterly alone.

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I just did a long feature on Dungeon for Omnivoracious. Love this series.

Excerpt:
Each of these characters, and many supporting players, are fleshed out over the course of the series to an astounding degree. One masterstroke by Sfar and Trondheim in mapping out the narrative was to create different story “threads.” Thus, you get three main series–the dungeon’s Early Years, Zenith, and Twilight–with minor stories that still support the main narrative collected in the parallel series Monstres and Parade. Not only does this allow the creators, and a series of guest artists, to work on whatever parts of the narrative interest them at any particular time, it makes the effect truly three-dimensional. Further, you can, more or less, begin with any particular thread you want, and then read through the others–every point of entry creates a different experience of situation and character.

This is like trainspotting, isn’t it, except more fun? A few select photos, including an old friend, Mr. Nocturnum. And what the hell is that first critter? (Or the second and third, for that matter.)

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A small but cool haul today, including Matt Bell’s The Collectors, which I’m looking forward to reading along with the winner of the Caketrain contest. You can order these books directly from Caketrain. The Collectors looks a little bit like pseudo-Gothic sprinkled with a little Evenson and Danielewski (I could be wrong). Bell’s one to watch. Er, but not like from his lawn or looking in on him from an apartment window or nuthin. That wouldn’t be cool. (His address is 1234 Uranium Lane, New Flangiers, IA 45003, though, if you want to try.)

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UPDATE: Review in the Guardian, which reads in part, “The author’s compassion for his fellow humans comes through in every story, from the wrenching study of a mad rock star’s long-suffering girlfriend in ‘The Opium General’ to a gentle vignette of sword and sorcery hero Elric in ‘A Portrait in Ivory’. A long-overdue retrospective.”

The cover, and interior detail, from Tachyon’s The Best of Michael Moorcock, edited by John Davey with assistance from Ann and me. As I discuss in the afterword, it’s nearly impossible to do a 150,000-word best-of for Mike’s short fiction, but we were helped out by Del Rey’s Elric series. It seemed ridiculous to reproduce much Elric material, given that series. So think of this as the best of Moorcock mostly minus Elric–but including a lot of his best mainstream and non-series material–that makes a nice volume to sit alongside the Del Rey volumes. I really love much of the less fantastical stuff, too. Only thing I would’ve wanted to include is “Casablanca,” but it was way too long, and not truly part of the core World War III cycle, since it’s a prequel. John Coulthart did the brilliant interior design.

A couple additional really cool books below…

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I just got a lovely print-out of an unbound advance copy of Boilerplate: History’s Mechanical Marvel, and wrote about it on the Amazon book blog. It’s really quite cool stuff, and very reasonably priced. Kinda retro-Steampunk. Good fun.

Here are some interiors I didn’t use in the Amazon piece.

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