Thanksgiving is a greeting card holiday, right? (Front: Picture of sad turkey. Inside: “Hope your Thanksgiving isn’t a turkey!” General guffaws.) So it must be an appropriate time for a greeting-card-themed book review.

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When Hallmark lured David Ellis Dickerson to a Kansas City interview, they offered him a potential starting salary of $27,000. After interviewing him in person, they upped their offer to $32,000. “To this day,” writes Dickerson, “I am convinced that in person, I am $5,000 more charming than I am on paper.” (p 49)

I suspect this motivates the choice to promote Dickerson’s new book, House of Cards: Love, Faith, and Other Social Expressions (Riverhead Books, 2009), with a series of videos called Greeting Card Emergency. Dickerson’s audience provides him with a decidedly un-Hallmark-like greeting card scenario, such as breaking a friend’s toilet or letting your snake eat someone else’s hamster. Dickerson then documents the process of creating a suitable card.

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Centipede Press…words fail me. I’ve never seen a publisher, outside of the brazen brilliance of Savoy, tackle such stunning projects—and whereas Savoy works within a set format of regular-sized hardcovers collecting uncompromising, edgy outsiders that William Burroughs would laud, Centipede Press often creates oversized hardcovers of the more outsider horror writers. (The two presses are like cousins with a subset of similar interests.)

These projects by Centipede Press are, to me, insane in the best possible way. They seem, from the outside anyway, to require staggering resources and time to create, and they are always made with an eye to detail and a sophisticated aesthetic that doesn’t shy away from the pulp origins of the material.

Now Centipede Press has come out with a book fully the equal of the Lovecraft art volume from last year, this time collecting the work of William Hope Hodgson in a slipcased oversized hardcover featuring the art of Stephen Fabian. Every element of this book has been chosen with care, all possible options weighed before execution. From the full-page bleeds of Fabian’s visionary art to the lovely half-translucent page that balances the marvelous title page art by Ian Miller, from the choice of type to the introduction by Sam Moskowitz, this edition of Hodgson may never be matched.

See the slideshow above for some highlights–and feel free to share it. Honestly, if you’re a collector you need this book. Wow.

First off, just to catch up, two new features on Amazon: an interview with Caitlin R. Kiernan about her new novel The Red Tree and a short appreciation of The Collected Stories of J.G. Ballard, complete with a selection of first lines from the book.

In addition, I’m pleased to note that I just turned in the introduction to Kiernan’s forthcoming 2010 collection The Ammonite Violin & Others, which reads in part:

Part of this authenticity—part of the reason I find them disturbing—comes from the simple fact that the people in these stories don’t really survive their encounter with the supernatural. Whether in, among others, “Madonna Littoralis” or the two “Metamorphosis” stories, this inability to survive can be literal or figurative, or both—and it occurs because the supernatural isn’t so much something terrifying in Kiernan’s view—it can be, but that’s not the true point. The supernatural to Kiernan is also something beautiful and unknowable in intent, and often wedded to the natural world. In a sense, trying to know something unknowable will always destroy the seeker.

(Also, I must mention Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s ongoing brilliant freelancer survival guide series, this time focusing on emotional setbacks.)

Now, on to books received. You want coffee table books, I’ve got coffee table books. Comics? Check. Novels. Yep. Story collections? Yessir, including two from Ramsey Campbell and the debut from Deborah Biancotti, A Book of Endings, which is presented in a sweet design from one of my new favorite publishers, Twelfth Planet Press (watch them–they’re smart, savvy, and when you get one of their books, you just know from the look-and-feel that they’ve got that extra little something that makes a publisher special). Pull back the veil and, voila! Books, for you. (And while you look at that, it’s time for me to go hike in a thunderstorm…)

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I don’t know if the Barnes & Noble Review is getting its due, but it deserves your consideration (readers, I’m curious: do you regularly check out the B&N Review?). They’ve been publishing some first-rate reviews and commentary on books. The latest piece to catch my eye is Ward Sutton’s comics-version review of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice. It’s lovely stuff, with colors that burst off of the page. Check it out.

(So, like, what’s with the beer in the photo? Over on Omnivoracious, I’m soliciting suggestions for books to feature with Stone Brewing’s latest act of genius–said act included sending us two bottles of amazing beer. So, here, your fav nonfic crazy books. There, your fav books to pair with beer. Go to it, my peoples!)

I love eccentric nonfiction, in part because I get some of my funniest fictional ideas from such books. In the past, I’ve enjoyed the heck out of any number of slightly “off” texts, including a book on penguins where the author went off on long rants about misclassifications and the backstabbing that goes on in the penguin studies community. There’s something about eccentric nonfiction that points out the inherent absurdity of our situation as living beings. Which is to say, we establish these parameters for reality and we abide by them, the data reinforced by the evidence of our five senses and our brain’s ability to process and analyze information. We tell ourselves that certain things are more real than others—for example, chemistry is more real, based on more facts, as a branch of science than, say, a soft science like sociology. And yet, when it comes down to it, everything is still processed through our slightly illogical, definitely subjective, maybe-having-a-bad-day brains.

So, you wind up with a lovely subset of nonfiction that often reads like Kinbote from Pale Fire is your narrator. Sometimes this is because the writer is truly a bit cracked. Sometimes it’s because even a decade can turn a serious nonfiction book into…fiction.

Then, there are books that you can’t not take seriously and yet also seem full of crazy in the best possible way. For example, I’ve recently been reading the two-volume set Paradigms & Fairy Tales: An Introduction to the Science of Meanings by Julienne Ford (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975)

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(Taken from this interesting webpage about Raymond, with many book covers.)

Having read or re-read all of Derek Raymond’s novels, save one, I am turning my attention to his autobiography, The Hidden Files–a somewhat difficult out-of-print book to get a copy of, and not particularly cheap, either.

The descriptions on the dust jacket of The Hidden Files includes this insight, rather more sensationalistic than his actual fiction:

A memoir on [Raymond's] writing techques and inspiration, peppered with autobiographical vignettes, it provides a unique insight into the dark recesses of a writer’s mind. And in charting his own erratic career, Raymond reveals impeccable credentials as a chronicler of the high-life and low-life sleaze. Born into a wealthy, eccentric, upper-middle class family and educated at Eton, he soon dropped out–a traitor to his class–and immersed himself in London’s criminal underworld of the 1960s. His acquaintance with crime has served him well as a novelist; his bleak, violent accounts of psychopaths, his cynical, cold-blooded detective, his musings about tormented, cold-blooded killers and meditations on the nature of evil paint chillingly real portraits of the demons at the heart of society.

Although I’ve only just started in on The Hidden Files, I thought I’d give you a taste of it by typing up the introduction, which you can find below the cut. In it, Raymond talks about the origins of the title–the fact there are parts of ourselves we keep hidden from other people, and suggesting that in part this is because those hidden files feed into the fiction. His description of the immersive aspect of writing fiction rings very true to me–and is making me increasingly wary of an unthinking embrace of social media and the resulting fragmentation of our attention spans, the wholesale creation of not just open channels but open thoroughfares through which other people’s personalities, ideas, and ephemera smash into our consciousnesses. Is there damage to the hidden files as a result? Even, perhaps, corruption that we don’t notice? Is it connectivity or assault? Anyway, this is a tangent to Raymond’s point, I’m sure, but something that struck me.

I’ll report back on The Hidden Files when I finish it. In the meantime, here’re the links to my prior Derek Raymond post and, of course, Raymond’s introduction, British spellings preserved.

Derek Raymond’s Factory Novels

The Pathology of Derek Raymond’s Dead Man Upright

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It’s been a whirlwind few weeks, but just to catch up with some recent features I did for Amazon…

Kage Baker is one of my favorite writers, and she’s got a new kid’s book out from Tachyon, The Hotel Under the Sand. I did an interview with Baker for Amazon, about the book. Don’t miss this one.

Amazon.com: What sparked The Hotel Under the Sand? Had you wanted to write a book for kids for awhile?
Baker: No…What happened was that we had a really bad year in my family and my eight-year-old niece had to endure some personal tragedies. I wrote her the story in chapters, mailed out weekly, in fancy fonts and with stickers and all… just hoping to help her through that time, because she was being so brave. God knows it helped me. She had more or less lived with us from the time she was born until she was four, and used to play on the beach and in the Dunes, which are quite real. So it was set in the Dunes. And she liked pirates, so there had to be a pirate in the story, and she used to have a little dog, which also went in the story. And once on the beach all these little cobalt blue jellyfish washed up inexplicably, and we found out they were called By-The-Wind-Sailors, which she thought was funny, so that became the name of the pirate ship.

Archaia publishes some wonderful comics and graphic novels. I’ve done mini-reviews of three of them for Graphic Novel Friday. I have to say that the second volume of Mouse Guard took me by surprise. I liked the first one, but the art in this second volume seems even better. It’s amazing stuff.

Some detractors say the Mouse Guard series is just standard medieval adventure with talking mice. I’m not sure I agree with them after experiencing this second volume. First of all, Petersen’s artwork is just stunning. I really didn’t much care about the words, although they were pretty good, too. The visual of a mouse in a cape sleeping atop a field of bones that prefaces chapter four is one of the most incredible full-page bleeds I’ve seen all year. The subsequent renderings of mice with icicles forming on their fur is palpably tactile and leaves a lasting impression.

The New York Times Book Review just ran my review of Marcel Theroux’s Far North. It’s a really interesting novel that has some flaws, but it’s one of the few novels I’ve read this year that stuck with me, and the main character is a miraculous creation.

Doing work for the NYTBR was a very pleasant experience–in fact, the review passed through the editing process with no real changes and I should have another assignment soonish.

Here’s a short excerpt:

The harrowing account of Makepeace’s journey to the work camp has the full weight and context of 20th-century history behind it. But when she reaches the camp, personal revelations again dominate. Transferred from hard labor to garden work, Makepeace is unable to bear “the ghost of what might have been” and is “mired in the shame of what I’d become.” If shackles can break you when you’ve suffered, then small pleasures, like gardening, can also break you — by making you foolishly believe you have a chance at normal life.

Mark Chadbourne’s fascinating Age of Misrule series has just been published in the U.S. by Pyr, and he’s contributed three guest posts to the Amazon book blog, the last one going up today. Really interesting stuff. Anyone who mentions Colin Wilson is aces in my book.

And: OMG, those John Picacio covers are to die for.

The Real-Life Roots of Fantasy

Mysterious Britain

The Invisible Hand of the God of Writing

The Ultra Casual VanderMeer Books Received Podcast for Ea…

Jeff VanderMeer’s Podcast

Right, so to give these books received posts a little more firepower, I’m going to start podcasting my initial thoughts about the books–basically providing context and reading a paragraph from each. I’m talking about them in the same order in which the images appear below. Yep, soon this will all be the rage. Probably already is all the rage somewhere I haven’t seen it yet. And, yep, this is the first rough stab at this; everything will get better as I continue to do these: the audio quality, the quality of discourse, the quality of the readings, and making the podcast itself more self-contained. I might even just go to video, but that takes a lot longer to put together. So, for now, we’ll try this experimental retro idea of you puttin’ the images and the audio together in your mind by yer lonesome…

1 – Best SF/F magazine evah: Taltivaeltaja

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