Editors at Amazon have picked THE MYSTIC ART OF ERASING ALL SIGNS OF DEATH as the spotlight title in their January Significant Seven. “If you love crime fiction–preferably wickedly profane, unabashedly grisly, and laugh-out-loud funny “pulp” fiction–your number one New Year’s resolution needs to be to read Charlie Huston.”
Look, I gave fair warning that I’d be shilling the new book hear for a few week, so no one can say I didn’t give them a shot at tuning out. Anyway, in the good-things-to-wake-up-to column we have Janet Maslin in this morning’s New York Times reviewing THE MYSTIC ARTS OF ERASING ALL SIGNS OF DEATH. “…Mr. Huston, whose own brain matter is as much on display as the stuff that gets spattered here, finally delivers a book that anyone can admire. No strong stomach required. This novel is far more rarefied than its trappings, even if “we vacuum maggot shells” is a line it can deliver in a perfectly businesslike way.”
ECHO PARK, January 2 - And, oh yes, I am still trying to make a living at this stuff. That’s a little misleading. It suggests that I’m struggling to make a living as a writer. Certainly I work very hard. Hard in terms of a writer as opposed to someone who makes a living digging bottles from trash cans. And certainly I am not, by any material measure, a rich man. I do however make a living. And I do it without some of the considerable sweat that the majority of other writers ooze from their pores as they restlessly sleep. This is due to the good fortune I’ve had in terms of signing new contracts. Since signing my first contract with Ballantine I have never been been without one. Each new contract has expired as a new one has been negotiated. In the writing game that’s some pretty damn good job security. As with most jobs, that security last only so long as it is associated with productivity that results in profitability. I score pretty high on productivity. As for the other, I’m not making anyone over at Ballantine rich. But the books are in the black. And here it is, the selling season. Just in time for economic armageddon and post-holiday credit card bill hangovers, I have not one, but two books coming out this month. First, and foremost in my mind, is THE MYSTIC ARTS OF ERASING ALL SIGNS OF DEATH. While I’ve tended to refer to MYSTIC ARTS as a stand alone, I’ve always had it in mind as the first in an open-ended series. Whether that end will actually be ended will depend on whether people like the damn thing. My first book set in LA, it concerns Web Goodhue, a smartass piece of damaged goods who spends the bulk of his time slacking on the couch in his roommate’s tattoo parlor. Said slacking is interrupted by the unexpected appearance of a job cleaning trauma scenes. What’s a trauma scene? Pretty much anyplace there’s been trauma. Physical, fluid spraying, trauma. There’s a girl with a problem. Some heavies. The angel of death as manifested as an ex-gang banger corpse-hauler, a Hollywood casualty case with a porn star mom, past infidelities, misadventure and accidental death, and a pipe bomb inserted in an asshole. The orifice, not some jerk. It’s a nice family book. Here’s what Stephen King says about it on Amazon: “There are some things you never wonder about until someone–usually someone whose mind lives on Weird Street–brings them to your attention. Who cuts the barber’s hair? How does a guy wind up with the job of test-smelling armpits for a deoderant company? Or de-wrinkling dress shoes before they’re put on sale? Why does one kid become a college dean while another grows up to be a key grip? And just what is a key grip, anyway?Here’s another one. Who scrubs down the scene after a spectacularly messy death–a guy who shoots himself in the head, let’s say, or dies of natural causes in a hot back room and then goes undiscovered for a couple of weeks? What sort of janitorial problems would such work entail? It turns out there are firms that specialize in those problems, and in the Weird Street world of Charlie Huston, a couple of these companies might even do battle over the smelly, maggoty spoils of war.“Trauma scene and waste cleaning is a growth industry,” remarks Po Sin, the owner/operator of Clean Team. The observation comes early in Charlie Huston’s terrific new novel, which is about just what the title suggests: getting rid of the messy stuff after the deal goes down.When The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death opens, Webster Fillmore Goodhue–another in a long line of likeably slack Huston protagonists–is sponging off his friend Chev, who runs a sleazier-than-thou tattoo parlor. Enter the proprietor of Clean Team, who knows Web from Web’s previous life as an elementary school teacher (a career that ended badly). Po Sin needs help in his particular growth-industry. Web agrees to a little blood- and brain-scrubbing not because he particularly wants a job but because he’s suffered his own trauma and finds cleaning up other people’s end-of-life messes strangely soothing.Enter Soledad, a beautiful young girl whose father just aired out his brains with a 9mm. Also enter Jaime, her half-bright half-brother who imagines himself a Hollywood playa but can’t get out of his own way. There are many things to love about Charlie Huston’s fiction–he’s a brilliant storyteller, and writes the best dialogue since George V. Higgins–but what pushes my personal happy-button is his morbid sense of humor and seemingly effortless ability to create scary/funny bad guys who make Beavis and Butthead look like Rhodes Scholars.There are a lot of those in this book, and several I-can’t-believe-I-laughed-at-that scenes of grue (I can’t even talk about the pipe-bomb thing, not on a family website), but the best thing about Mystic Arts is how decency and heroism rise to the top in spite of everyone’s best efforts to crush them under heel.Web wanders from the nightmarish underworld of body clean-up into the equally nightmarish worlds of hijacking and smuggling; he endures cross, double-cross, and triple-cross; he pees his pants while trying to shield his girlfriend from a bullet. He’s scared but never cowardly, down but never completely out. He is, in short, a guy worth watching.So’s Charlie Huston. He’s written several very good books (including the Caught Stealing trilogy and the Joe Pitt novels, which concern a PI who’s also a vampire), but this is the first authentically great one, a runaway freight that feels like a combination of William Burroughs and James Ellroy. Mystic Arts is, however, fiercely original–very much its own thing.Besides, admit it: you’ve always wanted to know how to get blood out of a deep-pile carpet.” Yes, that was me bragging again. As for the second book, that’s just the paperback version of THE SHOTGUN RULE come home to roost for those folks who like their literature to be flexible enough to fit the contours of their ass when stuffed in a back pocket. So, new books. A living to be made. Profitability to prove. Filthy lucre, filthy lucre, filthy lucre. Expect to hear much more of this kind of crap the next several weeks. Oh, burying the lead here: BOTH BOOKS GO ON SALE JANUARY 13th. Thanks for reading, -c (formatting: yeah, um, I’m doing this from a computer with a different operating system than I have in the past and things are a little sloppy. Bear with.)
There are little things in life that let you know that you have married well. Occasionally, it is a gift, perfectly matched to your tastes and sense of wrongness that tips the deal. Like this one: 
Ho, now, Riddle Afield just come in the door.
Remember that? Course you do. That man come through any door, no one can forget it. Block out the sun with hisself, block out the chill in the air with the heat that comes off him. That heat stored up inside from all them years plying his trade on the steam gun.
That man, come there to swap one of his eyes, eyes so sharp they cut when they run across your face, sawp that eye to the old voodoo man for somethin regular folks don’t want to talk on.
But he forgot that swap. That swap slipped right from his ugly mind and out the back door and never was nothin so glad to be got from a place than was anything that got from Riddle Afield’s mind.
But a new swap, not knowin no better, ambled in the front.
Necrotic Culver.
Nothin but a babe, swaddled an all, shock of black hair over green eyes, pale, pale skin. An a murderer’s soul inside.
Not that you need to know that part yet. But it’s true. Necrotic had a soul for killin. She’d come to do it natural enough.
But first a girl has to learn.
Old voodoo man had no fear of nothin. Nothin vexed him true, nothing mayhaps but the sound of a violin bein scraped by someone who knew whathow to do it right. But of men, he had nothin to care about. Riddle didn’t spook him none at all. Just a man. A big man, yed. An ugly man, yes. A man who joyed on misery, yes. An evil man, yes. But the old voodoo man knew there was worse things than a big, ugly, evil man who joyed on misery. He knew there was worse because he looked every morning at himself in the mirror and saw it right there.
So, Riddle came in and the old voodoo man just jabbed him with a stick he carried around sometimes when he was in an especially jabbin mood. Say when his piles was botherin him. (piles is like hemerhoids, which is like nothin you want to know about anyways)
He jabbed at Riddle Afield and asked him whatafter he was. An Riddle, he never took his eyes off Necrotic Culver, just pulled off his goggles, showed em sharp and cutting, and gave with his gunner’s rumble, “Come to swap.”
Across the room, Shadding Lyttle, still recovering from the wound Necrotic put in his heart when he set eyes on her, felt that voice shiver his ribcage, and watched as two tiny twin cuts appears on Necrotic’s cheek. Thin and red, beads welling at the end of each.
Old voodoo man, he smiled.
Talk about a smile, mostly you’re talkin about somethin happy. Someone happy. True enough, old voodoo man was happy, but not in any way me and you would want to feel happy. He was happy like a spider maybe is happy. Happy to feel a vibration on teh threads of its web. To know it’s gonna be wrappin a meal up tight soon enough. Suckin the melted entrails from somthin still warm.
It was that kind of smile.
Sharp as Riddle Afield’s eyes were, he’d have been payin attention to that smile, he’d have got the message. An even a man as fearsome as himself would have taken that message and gone right out the door.
But he was still all eyes on Necrotic.
An he said, “C’mon, old man, lets you an me swap. Got an eye here, you can see halfway to China an back again with it. An all I want,” an here he licked his lips, “an all I want is a little somethin you got just lyin around the place.”
Old voodoo man didn’t look where Riddle was lookin, didn’t need to. He just pulled a whittlin knife from inside that vest coat of his and shaved a point on the end of his jabbin stick. Sayin, “Yes, Mr. Afield, I think we can make a swap, indeed. First now, let us see about getting that eye out.”
Shadding Lyttle knew there was bad business about to come to play. Knew it cause he was born into it an all. Pulled Necrotic Culver closer to his chest, nodded at something only he could hear, and was intimately grateful for the honed piece of onyx he kept tucked in the top of his boot. Thought about that stone edge, and looked at Riddle Afield’s pocked cheek.
There’s violence comin in this tale soon enough. That sort of thing can always wait.
-c
As I hinted in the previous post, the Hank Thompson trilogy is now available in a digital format that pretty much anyone with a computer and an Internet connection can access.
Starting today the entire trilogy is being hosted on Scribd.
The books can be read directly from the site over a live connection, or they may be downloaded as DRM free PDFs and kept on your desktop, laptop, notebook, netbook or any handheld with an app that reads PDFs.
Don’t know if you have a PDF reader? Download one for free HERE.
The book downloads on Scribd do require that you set up a user account. These accounts are free and only ask for an email and password, with a privacy policy that covers the usual territory.
Here’s where you find the books:
You can read them right from those pages, or set up an account, click download, chose SAVE A COPY from the toolbar, and a copy will be dropped wherever you direct it to. Once it’s on your computer you can print it and put it in your backpack to read on the bus, move it to your handheld, or delete it. You can even share it if you like. Email it to a friend, or an enemy. You can’t make money off it, but that’s for lawyers to deal with.
I think this is pretty fucking cool.
I expressed displeasure to Random House about what I felt was the exclusionary nature of their previous free ebook offers, and they came back with this idea. It’s not small cheese. It’s big cheese.
The previous offers also still apply.
iPhone and iTouch owners can find the Henry Thompson trilogy preinstalled in their library when they download Stanza from the app store. (I had a middling experience with Stanza’s beta reader for windows desktop, but I hear the iPhone/iTouch version works very well. )
Kindle owners can find the Hank Thompson trilogy available for free at Amazon’s Kindle store, along with free books by Alan Furst, David Liss, and some other great writers. An offer that expires on February 28th.
Free books. Read ‘em.
Yes, about the free ebook downloads of the Hank Thompson trilogy. A few things.
First, I’m aware that none of them has been ideal. The Monsters and Critics downloads are tidy pdf formats that require a single click and no account setups or hardware purchases. But each book has only been available for a brief period of time and we’re down to A DANGEROUS MAN. (just checked that M&C download and the page has disappeared. So…)
The Stanza offer is apparently pretty slick, if you have an iPhone or an iTouch. You download Stanza from the app store, and the trilogy, along with several other titles, comes preinstalled in your library. But you have to have a pretty expensive piece of hardware and, in the case of the iPhone, a steep service contract.
The Kindle offer expands the reach for digital reader enthusiasts, but it also requires an expensive piece of hardware, and it will also expire after several weeks. (For the sake of clarity, it’s the download offer that expires, not the downloads themselves. Once you have the book, you have the book.)
Still, free books. Which is no small thing these days.
And there is more to come.
The free downloads for ereaders will expand to at least one more device. I will post details when I have them.
And I should be clear about something.
Random House has taken the lead on making these offers. Which, when you think about it, is kind of remarkable. One does not expect a large publishing house to call one day and ask, “Hey, what do you think about giving away your books?” Indeed, some writers would take such a thing amiss. I just thought it was cool. But seeing as this is a commercial enterprise, it shouldn’t come as any shock that the act of giving things away has a few kinks in it.
When I give things away I like to do it with an open hand. Take it, it’s yours, no strings. RH hasn’t attached too many strings, but one can feel them still getting comfortable with the idea.
Truth be told, I’m one of a small batch of guinea pigs upon whom experiments are being conducted. We are all volunteers, of varying levels of enthusiasm, who are having our copyright DNA tinkered with so someone can find out if there are better ways to generate cash from a backlist. Particularly from the backlist of a midlist writer.
And I don’t mind.
Which doesn’t mean that I don’t make any money off these books when they are sold in the old fashioned way. Royalties don’t play a large part in our household finances, but those twice-a-year checks certainly loosen the belt a little when they comes around. And there is a part of me that wonders if offering these titles for free will shave a digit off next year’s checks.
But it’s worth finding out. And I believe it will also be worth losing that digit.
Times are toughl.
In case you missed the headlines.
We don’t live high, but we have enough. A few free downloads is little to offer as appreciation to the people who keep me in business.
But I wish it came with fewer limitations.
I’d like free digital versions of the Hank Thompson trilogy that could be read online by anyone, or downloaded as DRM free PDFs. There might be a legal hurdle with the downloads that would require readers to set up a free account, but otherwise they would be open-hand free.
And that might just happen.
Very soon.
The Hank Thompson trilogy giveaway continues.
You can now download CAUGHT STEALING, SIX BAD THINGS, and A DANGEROUS MAN onto your Kindle for free HERE.
This is a DRM free download, but the offer expires Febuary 28th.
No, I don’t mean jailbreak a murderer, I mean that the Monsters and Critics free Hank Thompson trilogy offer is on the home stretch with A DANGEROUS MAN now available as a DRM free pdf download that you can find HERE. Scroll down after the link, past the ads, and you’ll find the button.
(just checked that M&C download and the page has disappeared. So…)
Random House announced today that they’re making a number of backlist books available in free digital format to users of the Lexcycle’s Stanza reader. Included among the titles is the entirety of my own Hank Thompson trilogy: CAUGHT STEALING, SIX BAD THINGS, and A DANGEROUS MAN.
Please note that Stanza is a reader app designed for Apple handheld devices. There is a desktop version for PC, but the free books are only accessible through an Apple handheld.
My personal experience with the PC desktop version of Stanze was middling. It requires an account setup to download the software, followed by a redirect to shop for books at Fictionwise, where another account is required before books can be downloaded. That experience was crap. And, let me say it again, you will not find the free versions of the Hank Thompson trilogy without an Apple handheld running Stanza.
However, I am told that downloading and using Stanza on an Apple handheld works quite well and that accessing the free books is smoothly accomplished.
If you think you detect a note of ambivalence, you are correct. I did not ask enough questions when I agreed to join this offering, and did so thinking the free books would be universally available to anyone who downloaded any version of Stanza. My bad.
If and when the offer expands to other versions of Stanza, or other readers, I’ll post right away.
If and when I get a chance to try it out on an Apple handheld, I’ll write something about how it works.
In the meantime: in it’s desktop PC version, Stanza works just fine. The Fictionwise site seems quite awful.
I’m not sure where one should expect to find the bereaved daughter of a
wealthy Malibu suicide in need of a trauma cleaner long after midnight,
but safe to say a trucker motel down the 405 industrial corridor of oil refineries
and chem plants in Carson was not on my list of likely locales.
—Ouch. That looks painful.
I touched the bandage on my forehead.
—And if that’s what it feels like to look at it, imagine how it feels to actually
have it happen to you.
The half of her face that I could see in the chained gap between the
edge of the door and the frame nodded up and down.
—Yeah, I’d imagine that sucks.
Cars whipped past on the highway across the parking lot, taking full advantage
of the few hours in any given Los Angeles county twenty-fourhour
period when you might get the needle on the high side of sixty. I
watched a couple of them attempting to set a new land speed record.
I looked back at Soledad’s face, bisected by the door.
—So?
—Uh huh?
I hefted the plastic carrier full of cleaning supplies I’d brought from the
van.
—Someone called for maid service?
—Yeah. That was me.
—I know.
She fingered the slack in the door chain, set it swinging back and forth.
—I didn’t really think you’d come.
—Well, I like to surprise.
She stopped playing with the chain.
—Terrible habit. Don’t you know most people don’t like surprises?
I looked over at the highway and watched a couple more cars.
—Can I ask a silly question?
—Sure.
I looked back at her.
—What the fuck am I doing here?
She ran a hand through her hair, let it fall back over her forehead.3
—You sure you want to do this, Web?
That being the kind of question that tips most people off to a fucked up
situation, I could very easily have taken it as my cue to go downstairs, get
back in the van and get the hell gone. But it’s not like I hadn’t already been
clued to things being fucked up when she called in the middle of the night
and asked me to come to a motel to clean a room. And there I was anyway.
So who was I fooling?
Exactly no one.
—Just let me in and show me the problem.
—Think you can fix it, do you?
I shook my head.
—No, probably not. But it’s cold out here. And I came all this way.
She showed me half her smile, the other half hidden behind the door.
—And you’re still clinging to some hope that a girl asking you to come
clean something is some kind of booty call code, right?
I rubbed the top of my head. But I didn’t say anything. Not feeling like
saying no and lying to her so early in our relationship. There would be time
for that kind of thing later. There’s always time for lying.
She inhaled, let it out slow.
—OK.
The door closed. I heard the chain unhook. The door opened and I
walked in, my feet crunching on something hard.
—This the asshole?
I looked at the young dude standing at the bathroom door with a meticulously
crafted fauxhawk. I looked at bleached teeth and handcrafted tan.
I looked at the bloodstains on his designer-distressed jeans and his artfully
faded reproduction Rolling Stones concert T from a show that took place
well before he was conceived. Then I looked at much larger bloodstains
on the sheets of the queen-size bed and the flecks of blood spattered on
the wall. I looked at the floor to see what I’d crushed underfoot, half expecting
cockroaches, and found dozens of scattered almonds instead. I listened
as the door closed behind me and locked. I watched as Soledad
walked toward the bathroom and the dude snagged her by the hand before
she could go in.
—I asked, Is this the asshole.
I pointed at myself.
—Honestly, in most circumstances, in any given room on any given day,
I’d say, Yeah, I’m the asshole here. But in this particular scenario, and I
know we just met and all, but in this room here?
I pointed at him.
—I’m more than willing to give you the benefit of the doubt and say that
you’re the asshole.
He looked at Soledad.
—So, yeah, he’s the asshole then?
She twisted her hand free and went into the bathroom.
—He’s the guy I told you about.
She closed the door behind her.
He looked at me.
—Yeah, you’re the asshole alright.
I held up a hand.
—Hey, look, if you’re gonna insist, I can only accept the title. But seriously,
don’t sell yourself short. You got the asshole thing locked up if you
want it.
He came down the room in a loose strut I imagine had been meticulously
assembled from endless repeat viewings of Tom Cruise’s greatest
hits.
—Yeah, I can tell by the way you’re talking. You’re the one fucked with her
today. Made jokes about her dad killing himself. You’re the asshole alright.
The toilet flushed, Soledad yelled over it.
—He didn’t make jokes!
The dude looked at the closed door.
—You said he made jokes.
He looked at me.
—Asshole. Fucking go in someone’s home, there’s been a tragedy, go in
and try to make money off that. Fucking vulture. Fucking ghoul. Who
does that, who comes up with that for a job? That your dream job, man?
Cleaning up dead people? Other kids were hoping to grow up to be movie
stars and you were having fantasies about scooping people’s guts off the
floor?
I shifted, crushing a few more almonds.
—Truth is, mostly I had fantasies about doing your mom.
He slipped a lozenge of perforated steel from his back pocket, flicked
his wrist and thumb in an elaborate show of coordination, and displayed
the open butterfly knife resting in on his palm.
—Say what, asshole?
Say nothing, actually. Except say that maybe he was right and I was the
asshole in the room. Certainly being an asshole was how I came to be
there in the first place.
My appearance schedule for THE MYSTIC ARTS OF ERASING ALL SIGNS OF DEATH is set. There are are some details yet to be filled in, and there are always last minute changes, so if you plan on coming to say hi please check the appearances page first.
Monday, January 19
7:00pm
Release Party
Where:
At Secret Headquarters
3817 West Sunset
LA, CA 90026
323-666-2228
What:
A veeery brief reading from the tome. Followed by traditional stupid trivia and prizes. All preceded by cheap beer and good bourbon whiskey. The combination of which improves greatly the entertainment value of the reading and trivia.
How:
How do you get drunker after you’re kicked out of Secret Headquarters at 8pm? Simple, you go across the street to 4100 Bar.
That’s my plan.
4100 West Sunset
LA, CA 90026
323-666-4460
Please join us.
Tuesday, January 20
7:00 PM
Reading & Signing
695 E. Colorado Blvd
Pasadena, CA 91101
Phone: 626/449-5320
Thursday, January 22
Noon
Signing
117 Cherry St.Seattle, WA 98104
Phone: 206/587-5737
7:00 PM
Reading & Signing
17171 Bothell Way NE
Lake Forest Park, WA 98155
Phone : 206-366-3316
Saturday, January 24, 2008
1:00 PM
Reading & Signing
2940 Thousand Oaks Blvd.
Thousand Oaks, CA 91362
Phone: 805/374-0084
5:00 PM
Talk & Signing
1036 Broxton Avenue, Unit C
Westwood, CA 90024
Phone: 310/209-0415
Saturday, February 7
Jacob K. Javits Center
655 West 34th Street
New York, NY
Signing at Del Ray booth. Time TBA.
Giving away copies of ALREADY DEAD
6:30-7:30 PM
The Vampire, Werewolf, and Zombie Round Table
Room 1A21
Sunday, February 8
12:15 PM - 1:15 PM
Writers on Writing: Books, Comics, TV, Movies, and Games panel
Room 1A14
What do these items have in common?
They will all be prizes in the traditional stupid trivia game at the MYSTIC ARTS release party.
When:
Monday January 19th at 7pm (Monday? Yes, Monday. Why? Because many of my people work Friday and Saturday nights, and Sunday the 18th is NFL Conference Championship Day. Oh. Duh.)
Where:
At Secret Headquarters
3817 West Sunset
LA, CA 90026
323-666-2228
What:
A veeery brief reading from the tome. Followed by traditional stupid trivia and prizes. All preceded by cheap beer and good bourbon whiskey. The combination of which improves greatly the entertainment value of the reading and trivia.
How:
How do you get drunker after you’re kicked out of Secret Headquarters at 8pm? Simple, you go across the street to 4100 Bar.
That’s my plan.
4100 West Sunset
LA, CA 90026
323-666-4460
Please join us.
Ever Been to the Mystery Bookstore in Westwood? Well, if you haven’t you’ll have more time to go. Brave souls have bought the Mystery Bookstore. Here’s the press release.
NEW OWNERSHIP FOR MYSTERY BOOKSTORE
(LOS ANGELES) November 14, 2008 – While other independent
bookstores in Los Angeles and around the country are struggling or
closing, Westwood’s The Mystery Bookstore has new life under new
owners. Kirk Pasich and Pam Woods, voracious readers who have been lawyers
for most of their adult lives, purchased the bookstore this month from
the consortium that owned the store since 2000.
“We are big book lovers,” said Woods. “We love the idea of continuing an
independent book store with ties to our local community–where we live
and our children have grown up and are growing up.”
The Mystery Bookstore Los Angeles, as the store is officially known, will
continue to bring internationally famous authors to Westwood, as well as
introducing new writers to the store’s devoted clients. Bobby McCue and
Linda Brown are staying on as the store’s general manager and assistant
manager, respectively, but Pasich and Woods say they plan to be handson
owners. “We expect more special events, more outreach to our
regular customers and friends, more promotion, and more community
involvement, with a higher profile,” said Pasich.
“Los Angeles is the birthplace of the American crime novel,” said general
manager McCue. “We couldn’t imagine the city without a mystery
bookstore.” The store has had a presence in Los Angeles since 1988,
when it first opened as a branch of New York’s Mysterious Bookshop. A
group of loyal customers took the store independent in 2000. Since
then, the store has been a major presence at the Los Angeles Times
Festival of Books, and has hosted more than 100 book-related events
each year, including visits from adult authors such as Michael Connelly,
Robert Crais, James Ellroy, Martha Grimes, and Anne Perry, and
children’s authors such as Eoin Colfer and Cornelia Funke.
The Mystery Bookstore is located in the heart of Westwood Village, at
1036-C Broxton Avenue, and is open seven days a week. It maintains an
online presence at www.mystery-bookstore.com.
The download madness continues.
Currently available over at Monsters and Critics is a free download of SIX BAD THINGS.
Get some.
Also, I was asked by my publisher to provide some thoughts about free digital books in general. They were looking for a line or two that might be included in a press release. Silly rabbits, they should have known better than to ask for a sentence or two.
I like free stuff. I particularly like free books. I like the idea of free books that don’t requite trees being cut down. Free things that I like make me feel good, and they make me think good thoughts about the people who give them to me. I feel that way more ever more strongly the fewer strings are attached to a free thing. Throw it out there will no limits on how much I can have or when I can get it and don’t ask me for my name or my email address or my profession and I will like you very much indeed. It’s called good will. useful free stuff creates good will. As opposed to free crap, which just irritates people. Or free stuff that is clearly offered only because you want to pry my mailing address out of my ass, which just pisses people off. A free digital download of a book that asks no more of one than that they click a button is useful. It is also vastly different than a physical book that one pays money for. A book is a tactile experience. It is a fetish object. It is a gift. It is a trophy one can place on a shelf that says, “I read that.” Someday, not too long from now, most people will read text all but exclusively on screens. But for the nonce, the exclusively digital book reader is a rare beast. Which means that most serious readers still do it with a book. They may dabble in digital, but between the covers is where they like it best. For these people, a free ebook is a great opportunity to play with a new gadget and software, to get some slap and tickle. But they’re unlikely to read more than a book or two on a glowing screen. For them, a free ebook is a great way to sample a new writer, or to load up on an extra-portable edition of a favorite book. For some readers, for the many to whom 20+ bucks is a lot of coin to drop anything they can’t eat, a free ebook is a way to keep reading until their purse strings loosen up. Free ebooks spread the word. They spread good feelings. They get a writer’s foot in the ebook door in advance of a tidal change that will eventually sweep through our business as surely as it swept through the music business. In the process, free ebooks, in my opinion, probably take little or nothing from the sales of solid books. And, while it’s hard to argue that they will increase sales of the book being offered for free in digital format, they certainly help to spread the name of the writer and help funnel readers toward their new books. Besides, it’s good to give things away. They’re books. We write them for people to read them.
-c
Some things transcend weird. Reading Stephen King’s guest review of THE MYSTIC ARTS OF ERASING ALL SIGNS OF DEATH on Amazon ranks as very tall tree in my personal forest of freaky shit.
“There are a lot of those in this book, and several I-can’t-believe-I-laughed-at-that scenes of grue (I can’t even talk about the pipe-bomb thing, not on a family website), but the best thing about Mystic Arts is how decency and heroism rise to the top in spite of everyone’s best efforts to crush them under heel.”
More HERE.
Thanks, Mr. King.
ECHO PARK, November 16 - The sky is orange.
An unpleasant brownish orange. There’s a thin sprinkle of ash on the cars that were parked overnight. My eyes sting and my nasal passages burn.
For the record, I am nowhere near the current batch of fires consuming the southland. I am many miles away. Still, a haze of smoke floats in front of trees not two hundred yards down my street.
Those are some big fucking fires.
Bad things seem only to come in large sizes these days.
A general compounding of all that is fucked up.
A few weeks ago, about the time Henry Paulson came running down the corridors of the Capital keening and screaming that the end was nigh and that he knew this for a fact because all his bestest buddies were gushing money out of gaping wounds their free markets were carving in their hearts, I had a vision.
I’d been, like many, a wee bit depressed at the state of things. The effects of watching huge institutions crash to the ground and crush innocent people beneath them was wearing me down. I wanted desperately for something to be done. Something other than what I was told was going to be done. As with so many horrible disasters and missteps in the last several years, I wanted to grab the wheel and wrench it in a different direction.
Huge forces were at play that would decisively change the world, and i could do nothing to affect them.
That’s when the vision occurred.
I saw myself standing in a vast canyon of skyscrapers. Above me, superheroes and villains battled. Building tumbled, lives were ruined and ended, and they continued to fight, oblivious to the destruction.
Yes, OK, banal and silly, I know.
But essentially dead on.
People whose power and influence set them apart from the vast majority, struggle with dangers that threaten their immediate well being, and in the process ravage everyfuckingbodyelse.
The scale is literally unthinkable. Which is part of the problem. No one can get full grasp of the danger because it looms so large that it eclipses everything.
The perversity of the accumulating disasters and threats reached a personal mental apex: war, climate, natural calamity, economy, energy, and a rising tide of violence had aggregated to a mass that no longer fit in my head. Being a reader of comic books, my mind suddenly translated my emotional state into a context that I could understand as something other than despair.
It was, believe me, a very weird moment.
And oddly profound.
It was only in that moment that I was able to articulate, finally, to myself what I had been feeling for so very long a time.
Powerlessness.
I was powerless in the face of these threats and dangers. And the people empowered to deal with them did so with little or no regard for the collateral damage they inflicted. Not out of callousness, but out of ignorance. At a certain point, power only understands itself. It loses a grasp on what it is to live without power. It relates only to itself. What is good for power is good for all.
And you get trickle down economics. And other such bull shit.
Tell me a fire is a natural disaster and I’ll bring up consumer-culture-driven climate change that leads to freakish heat waves, drought and denuded hillsides. I look at the smoke outside my window and I see a vapor of greedy short-sightedness floating in it.
I long for gunfire some nights.
A rattle of bullets raking the motherfuckers as they are lined up against the wall to gather their due.
But I know that kind of thing never ends well.
Still.
Disasters vast, they attract violence. They draw bloodshed and revolution. They do this by hurting people and creating want.
The sky is full of ash and smoke, and so am I.
I wish to hold down those responsible and belch it into their faces. Burn their nostrils, throat and lungs, sting their eyes till they bleed.
I am angry, and there is burning.
-c
ECHO PARK, November 11 - No, really, I do, I work here.
I also live here. Which, if you pay attention to the byline, you will see is someplace new.
Clarification: Echo Park is a neighborhood within Los Angeles. But it’s so much cooler to live in Echo Park than it is to live in Los Angeles. Or it sounds cooler anyway. In truth, living in Echo Park means one lives in the literal shadow of Dodger Stadium.
Anyone who has endured one of my rants regarding my SF Giants will have a sense of just how painful that geography is for me. So painful that I consulted with several fans as to whether they felt I would be damaging my karma by making this move. So painful that when I heard that the LA city council had passed a motion to rename the area around the stadium Dodger Town, I checked the borders of said dark kingdom to be certain my prospective new address did not fall within it’s dread perimeter.
There was no fucking way in heaven or hell I was going to be living in Dodger Town. I’m in spitting distance, but still in free America.
My Daughter will learn to hate and to fight the enemy from close proximity.
I quote Melville (as quoted by Khan): “From hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.”
Such will be my last words when I die at the hands of rabid Dodgers fans as I take my morning run through their turf wearing my Giants t and cap.
BEAT LA!
And so, been awhile, yes?
You may have noticed a couple things I mentioned earlier, the new address and the daughter. Those two things, moving and a child, a really small child, they go together not good.
Moving sucks, moving with a one-year-old is ill advised.
I’m talking grown up moving here, with a moving company. Short range, just across town. And not too many possessions.
Still sucked.
So, BOOM, two weeks swallowed by packing, moving, unpacking, and keeping the baby alive during the process.
This, these words, are the only writing I have yet done in my new home. So when I say that I work here, that may be something of a misstatement. What I’ve done here so far as regards work is blow steam out my ears and spin in tiny mental circles as I watch the days peel off the calendar and flap away in the breeze whilst I unpack and screw things into the walls.
That will now change.
I have my office up and running. The wireless is on. The Johnny Cash Blood Sweat and Tears album cover is over my desk. I have a stack of fresh comp books standing by. I have the first draft of my next crime novel waiting to be edited. I have Joe Pitt five on deck and waiting to be started. I am surrounded by my books and my grandfather’s Underwood and I can see my Bruce Lee bookend by turning my head just slightly to the right. My wife and daughter are on the lawn and I can see them from my window.
Well, writing can wait another twenty minutes, can’t it. Surely it can.
-c
