Boo-yah, baby!

Well, I gotta say, while I'm sure the rug will soon be yanked out from under me, I'm really enjoying the reviews for Husk thus far.

I've already listed a few (here), but there's a few more I'd like to draw your attention to:

First, the venerable American publication BookList (which many libraries and such consult for ideas on orders), gave me this sterling nugget of awesome:

Redekop follows up his 2007 debut, the very funky Shelf Monkey, with the story of Sheldon Funk, a struggling actor, who wakes up during his own autopsy. Undead but still functional, Funk looks for a way to keep himself out of the wrong people’s hands, land a plum acting job, and (eventually) weather the storm of zombie superstardom before decomposition inevitably gets the best of him. Featuring Funk’s ambitious agent and an unsavory doctor who finds gruesomely clever ways to keep Sheldon’s body from falling apart too quickly, the story is a lesson in practical zombieing: what to do when you become a member of the walking dead, how to pass yourself off as (relatively) normal, how to learn to speak and walk again, and how to deal with your new meatcentric dietary requirements. Very funny and full of nifty surprises, the story has a big heart, too, presenting Sheldon as an ordinary fella trying to come to terms with his extraordinary new situation. The ending is appropriate and packs a serious emotional wallop. Highly recommendable—perhaps to more than zombie geeks.

And now, on the eve of actual publication (October 1!), The Toronto Star, which had already labelled Husk as one of their Top 20 Fall Reads of 2012, weighs in with a full review that completely and utterly gets me:

There's a point near the end of Husk where the narrator, long dead and without much of a body left to drag around, decides to embrace his "pop culture heritage" and start acting more like a traditional zombie...That heritage isn't essential to enjoying Corey Redekop’s book, his second novel, but some background helps...Redekop tosses so much into this zombie stew that instead of wearing out his premise quickly it almost seems as though he needs a bigger pot. By the time we get to the end, which involves a reclusive billionaire's bid for immortality and an apocalypse that stirs together pages torn from Philip K. Dick and H. P. Lovecraft, one feels there's no more ground to cover. Zombiedom's entire pop culture heritage has been thrown against the wall in bleeding chunks, where much of it sticks.

Feeling pretty warm in the belly right now. Hmmmm. Warm.

Some early reviews of HUSK

The book is still warm from the printers, and bookshelf appearances are weeks away. Nevertheless, Husk has already garnered a few remarkably positive reviews (I say remarkably because I have some issues with self-loathing which cloud my judgement on such things).

From Quill & Quire:

• “Despite all the violence and jokes about viscera, what gradually emerges is a tender portrait of a profoundly lonely man who finds love and acceptance only after his body has betrayed him . . . an enormously funny book that has real emotional heft underneath all the blood.”

Now that's a review, no? I slept very well after reading this, quite content with my place in the cosmos. Then, as the days crept by, my good vibes began to curdle in the lime juice of my low self-esteem. "Must have been a fluke," I thought.

Then, the Toronto Star saw fit to include my crazy ramblings as one of their Top 20 Reads of the Fall. Please check out the list, it's very likely the only time you'll ever see 'Corey Redekop' on the same honoured list as Alice Munro, Rawi Hage, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, and Orhan Pamuk.

And then, there's these wonderful blurbs that'll appear on the final cover, accolades from some of my favourite authors who were way too kind in their praise.

• “A superb blood-splattered comedy. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll puke!” — Andrew Kaufman, author of All My Friends Are Superheroes and The Waterproof Bible
• “A wild vicious romp through pop culture, Husk rips the heart out of the rotting zombie genre and shoves it down your throat. Infection never hurt so good.” — Peter Darbyshire, author of The Warhol Gang and Please
• “Camus meets Palahniuk in a darkly comic, but surprisingly light-hearted, mind-meld in Corey Redekop’s Husk. Sure, the protagonist is a zombie, but this is 2012, and as Redekop rightly observes, we’re all zombies now.” — Andrew Pyper, author of The Killing Circle and The Guardians

I gotta say, I'm feelin' pretty fine right now. I'm sure it'll pass, so I'm going to do my best to enjoy the moment.

Posted with Blogsy

An octopod of reviews for your pleasure

Oh, woe is me, I am late again with reviews. So lax. So lazy. I humbly beseech thee, prithee, forgive me.

I have been rather busy, actually, what with the job, the second novel coming out, the book trailers I am working on, etc. But tonight, I am all yours, with one caveat; I have an abundance of novels already read this year, and simply cannot give the time I normally would to each title (worthy though many of them may be). So, here now, a whole slew of novels, each reviewed in three to four devastatingly incisive sentences.

The Last Hunt - Cliff Burns

• I'm not a big fan of western novels (my knowledge of such limited to Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove quartet [yay!] and Chuck Norris' The Justice Riders [retching noise]). But I am a fan of Cliff Burns, here straying from his usual sci-fi/cyberpunk/fantasy-noir settings to attempt a serious old-fashioned horse opera. He doesn't reinvent the genre a la Patrick DeWitt (ah, I knew there was another western I've read), but The Last Hunt is a solid oater, with clean, spare prose, conflicted heroes, interesting characters and caricatures, and hefty dollops of gunplay. I'd say it's sure to please fans of Louis L'Amour, but I'm guessing at that.

The Complete Lockpick Pornography - Joey Comeau

• Comeau has become a favourite of late (check out his brilliantly strange One Bloody Thing After Another), and Lockpick Pornography continues along the same lines, delivering a pair of weird, odd, funny, and very original takes on homosexuality, relationships, thefts, public sex, abuse, vigilantism, kidnappings, and more. I wouldn't call the two novellas burdened with plot; these are shaggy, rambling tales that charm the reader even as their wincing at some of the graphic descriptions (the title does contain the word pornography, so I don't know what else I was expecting). As Comeau's protagonists amble through a world they aren't really a part of, we grow to understand the effortless alienation that the LGBT community faces, and the strong sense of humour that can help people survive such bigotry. It's also remarkably sweet-natured and giving.

Bedtime Story - Robert J. Wiersema

• Wiersema has always had a hint of the magical in his stories up until now, but Bedtime Story pushes him into epic new territory. A story about a boy trapped in a fantasy novel and the father seeking clues to free him, it treads a fine line between realism and the fantastic that would trip up lesser novelists. Weirsema keeps his story straight and his style clear, capturing the feel of Tolkien-like epics on one hand while delivering an affecting portrait of grief and loss on the other. Pair this one up with Lev Grossman's The Magicians.

Katja from the Punk Band - Simon Logan

• You want weird? Katja is Elmore Leonard via William Gibson, a fast-paced cyberpunk thriller that commands attention with great dialogue, twisted characters, and a fine sense of place. Set on an unnamed urban island and following a woman delivering an unnamed vial of something, Logan traipses back and forth through time and POVs, keeping the reader off-balance and filling in the blanks later with a precision that would do Christopher Nolan proud. This is a grimy, gritty, terribly unpleasant world, and I'd go back in a second.

Voluptuous Pleasure: The Truth About the Writing Life - Marianne Apostolides

• This unusual set of nonfiction stories is ostensibly drawn from the author's real life, yet Apostolides twists each tale to blur the lines, leaving the reader wondering what, if anything, is real. What is real is her gorgeous writing style, her command of detail, and her daring take on the flexibility of memory. Presenting stories of her father, her relationships, and a fascinating visit to a brothel, Apostolides is fearless in revealing herself and masterful in ability. If you want stories that leave you sated yet wanting more, Voluptuous Pleasure fits the bill.

Pirate Therapy and Other Cures - Mark A. Rayner

• In a collection of short stories, essays, and flash fiction, Rayner fits himself snugly into the eternally off-kilter worlds of Monty Python, The Goon Squad, and Douglas Adams. In Rayner's warped imagination, Jesus contends with dinosaurs, Batman reveals a bout of insecurity, an alien overlord mans an advice column, and Anne of Green Gables eventually destroys the world. If one story doesn't tickle your fancy, the next one will. As with Monty Python's television series, I advise reading only a few stories at a time, as the non-stop punnery can be overwhelming, and taking pauses to savour Rayner's sardonic wit is a pleasure.

In Plain Sight - Mike Knowles

• Sometimes, with crime novels in particular, you can tell when an author is 'faking' it, i.e. the author really doesn't have a clue about the realities of crime. Knowles has no such problem, and his increasingly dark and violent tales of former mob enforcer Wilson reek of someone who knows the game; if Knowles is faking it, he's better than I realized. Almost unremittingly bleak, utterly nasty, yet compulsively readable, Knowles' Wilson series is a dive into the depths of humanity's own hell. In Plain Sight is as harsh as sandpaper (think Andrew Vachss before his Burke series descended into self-parody), and unless you're the sort that enjoys gruesome vengeance against irredeemable people (and I am), stay clear away.

Osama - Lavie Tidhar

• Osama qualifies as one of the greatest mindjobs I've come across, a metaphysical detective story that loops in and around itself like a mobius strip. Set in an alternate reality where global terrorism does not exist, Osama follows a private detective hired to find an obscure pulp author who writes of a vigilante named Osama bin Laden. What follows, in one of the best meta-fiction narratives I've read since Paul Auster's City of Glass, is an atmospheric descent into multiple realities that fractures the sanity of the detective as he confronts the realities of war and chaos. I really enjoy Tidhar's Bookman series of steampunk novels, but I was truly unprepared for the genius of this.

And there you have it, eight reviews to sate your appetite. Get though all of them, and win a t-shirt!

What to expect in 2012 (before the endtimes commeth, of course)

There are two ways to go in 2012, as I see it.

1. Succumb to Fox News hysteria, dig myself a large hole in my backyard, line it with concrete, make a bulk run to Costco, and hole up with piles of Glenn Beck/Ron Paul literature to wait out the 2012 Mayan apocalypse, only venturing forth to meet our inevitable alien overlords when I can reasonably expect to assert my new position as king of the mole people (after I've battled and vanquished Pat Robertson for the title); or
2. as I've already survived two (2!) raptures in 2011 using nothing but cynicism and common sense, consider myself well-nigh argmageddon-proof, and soldier on.

As per usual, the answer lies somewhere in-between (although if we were scaling this on a horizontal line, I'd definitely fall far closer to option 2).

2011 was a busy year for me. I read voraciously, watched movies fanatically, finished and submitted a new manuscript, went to work every day, and even started working out on a semi-regular basis. Now, having surpassed 100 books read and achieving a personal best of 25 push-ups in a row without vomiting, I look at my 2012 prospects and get instantly fatigued.

First, I'm going to divide myself in two, Internetally-speaking. Shelf-monkey.blogspot.com was initially intended to promote the publications of my debut novel (coincidentally titled Shelf Monkey), but has somewhere along the line transformed itself into more of an all-purpose literary review site. Not that I'm complaining, the site has kept me sane for some time, and has fostered an unexpected ability to gain free books for review purposes. Yet now, with the impending release of my sophomore effort Husk, I have decided to create a new site devoted entirely to my personal efforts, and leave Shelf Monkey (the blog) open as a continuing review site for whatever books and occasional movies capture my fancy. The new site is still a work in progress, but it's a public one, and I hope that you'll bookmark www.coreyredekop.ca and visit regularly for news and events relating to Corey Redekop the professional author. I've already imported most of my blogposts from here that relate to me, me, me, and the site is only going to get bigger when I win the Giller (*not a guarantee).

So shelf-monkey.blogspot.com will now solely become a review site, one I maintain purely for personal reasons. I like books, I like talking about books, I like recommending books, and occasionally I like trashing books. I'll be streamlining this site somewhat, ridding the blog of certain posts, perhaps altering the look. But rest assured, the content will be of the same middling calibre you've come to expect and tolerate from a low-rent Canadian author such as yours truly. I'll make occasional cross-over posts, but I feel I need to separate the professional me from the blogger me. This new blogger-me will be known online as Tasha Chestnut (not really).

But what about reading in 2012, Corey? What will you read? What will you review? How can we be expected to live out our normal lives not knowing your every move?

I think I'll cut back. I went for broke last year, and while I don't regret it, I didn't stop and smell the pages enough. So while I'm going to still read new books and review them (hopefully more regularly than of late), I'm planning to go back to my stacks and luxuriate in some past favourites. Rereading a novel is always a treat, because while the book has not changed, the reader has. I've already gained new insights into Jim Dodge's Stone Junction. I was in my mid-twenties when I first read it (taken from a bargain bin on a whim, became one of my absolute favourites, don't you love it when that happens?), and while I fell in love instantly, I lacked the knowledge to judge it on more than surface grounds. Now, a lifetime later, I am catching the freewheeling seeds of its progenitors in the text, the styles of Tom Robbins, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, and Richard Brautigan that were unknown to me at the time, but have since served to evolve my personality.

After Stone Junction, I'm going to dance my fingers across the shelves and see what strikes my fancy. I've already put aside The World According to Garp (I estimate I've read this ten times already), The Iowa Baseball Confederacy (estimate: six times), Henderson the Rain King (four), and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (twelve). Perhaps I'll make a contest of it, a la my past Critical Monkey series devoted to the novels we were all avoiding. Haven't decided yet, although I will review them all here.

And beyond that, who knows? There's a cornucopia of awesomeness always on the horizon, some with buzz, some surprises. I've already read a few upcoming releases (a perk of the position), and while I won't review them yet, I will say keep a close eye out for Christopher Meades' The Last Hiccup and Scott Fotheringham's The Rest is Silence.

So bring it on, 2012! Ancient Mayans be damned! We have nothing to fear but fear itself, and the 2012 general U.S. election!

Monkey droppings - A triumphant triad of delights

It has been a while since I've last posted. Apologies, all seven of you. I have no excuse save laziness. And I am working on a new book, so there's that. There's only so many words I can use in a day.

But today, a cornucopia! Three (3!) semi-short reviews of a magical bent, guaranteed* to provide you with endless hours of top-notch entertainment.
*not a guarantee

The Magician King (Viking, 2011)
Lev Grossman

He liked the dryads, the mysterious nymphs who watched over oak trees. You really knew you were in a magical fantasy otherworld when a beautiful woman wearing a skimpy dress made of leaves suddenly jumped out of a tree.

In 2009, Lev Grossman combined an intense fervor for the fantasy genre with a talented imagination to his novel The Magicians, an ode to the Harry Potter/Chronicles of Narnia books sheathed in adult post-modern sensibilities. Following his fallible young 'hero' Quentin Coldwater through the rigours of (for lack of a better description) magicians college Brakebills, Grossman posited a finely-hued world made up of the realities of today and the possibilities of true magic. It ended on a note of melancholy, as Quentin — older, slightly wiser, and hardened through combat — re-entered the fictional world of Fillory to find what he sought: true adventure. It was a bold, absorbing work that left as all good novels of the genre do, on an uncertain note, as if there are further exploits to tell.

Two years later, and here we are, presented with The Magician King, an immensely worthy follow-up that expands upon the themes of the original while further laying out a world many will desperately yearn to be true. If the Potter fanatics, now grown, are looking for a new sensation to whet their starving imaginations, this is the series to do it.

King begins where most fantasy novels end: Quentin and his friends are kings and queens of the land of Fillory, growing fat, lazy, and bored. Unsatisfied, Quentin decides to explore beyond the limits of Fillory, to the rarely visited Outer Island, which was owing his new kingdom in back taxes. "It wasn't the Fellowship of the Ring, but then again he wasn't trying to save the world from Sauron, he was attempting to perform a tax audit on a bunch of hick islanders." Taking a cue from The Voyage from the Dawn Treader, Quentin commandeers the ship Muntjac, and sets out with Julia (his friend from Magicians who was denied entry to Brakebills) to see how far the limits of his royal powers can take him.

To better keep the story grounded for the reader, Grossman also relates the tale of Julia, a secondary character in Magicians who proves herself a darker and arguably more interesting specimen than Quentin. Julia, denied a proper magicians education, takes to the back alleys and side streets of the world to learn magic the hard way. Her adventures, grim, gritty, and sexual, balance against the wondrous fantasy world which (as my experiences with Ed Greenwood have proved) can be a bit of a chore to read after a while.

As always, the subtext of maturation weaves through the stories, Quentin coming to understand that wisdom and maturity do not simply come with age. The ending, as fantastical in setting as it is emotionally devastating in impact, comes through Grossman's expert handling of character (from my perspective, a true rarity in such novels). The Magician King is a work of maturity as well, an acceptance that there are gray areas to the human experience that cannot be resolved either through magical summonings or acts of heroism. Its only drawback is that I will now have to wait years for the promised finale.

Low Town (Doubleday, 2011)
Daniel Polansky

I awoke with a headache that made my swollen ankle feel like a hand-job from a ten-ochre-an-hour hooker.

It is such a simple idea: take the tenets of the hard-boiled detective novel and apply them to a middle-ages fantasy world a la Middle Earth. It's a bold concept, and easy to completely screw up, so it's a relief when Daniel Polansky debut novel Low Town turns out to be fun. It's icing on the cake when it turns out to be fantastic, a mix of Mickey Spillane and J.R.R. Tolkien that goes down as smooth as a vial of pixie's breath.

The 'hero' is a nameless gent known only as The Warden, once an enforcer of law, now a drug-dealing low life in Low Town, the harshest district of the city of Rigus of the Thirteen Lands. Life is hardly easy, but The Warden has been able to carve a niche for himself through a keen mind and a judicious use of physical violence. When a small girl goes missing, it is only another hardship to ignore, but when The Warden discovers the girl's mutilated corpse, he finds himself unwillingly placed in charge of hunting down the killer.

Polansky layers his tale with all the tropes of the classic pulps; casual racism (here mostly represented by a race known as the Kiren), stool pigeons, drug use, flashes of vivid violence, both men and women of loose morals, and moments of gloriously over-the-top prose such as "Its voice was shattered porcelain and bruises on a woman." The Warden is an anti-hero straight from Andrew Vachss' Burke school of brutal enforcers with rarely-exposed glimpses of moral outrage.

All this would be fine (and I'm sure, based on what's on the page, that Polansky could deliver a hell of a classic pulp novel should he wish), but the author pushes the story into delirious WTF territory with his setting, as well as as the liberal doses of sorcery, wizards, and otherworldly monsters. What's most interesting, however, is not this unusual setting, but Polansky's refusal to rely on magic as a crutch, instead crafting the tale as a true mystery. The Warden may understand the perils of magic, but he's no practitioner of the dark arts; he doggedly pursues leads and suspects through clues and informers, not through, say, a magical portal that reveals all to those who are pure of heart. The world may have access to magic, but The Warden is a creature of the real.

While there may be other examples of fantasy noir, I can't say I'm too familiar with them, Jeff Vandermeer's brilliant Finch and China Mieville's astonishing The City and the City being the exceptions. Low Town may not be in quite the same league, being closer in spirit to John Meaney's flawed but inherently interesting fantasy police procedural Bone Song. Yet Low Town is a confident debut from a new talent, and I await further exploits of Polansky and The Warden with real excitement.

The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities (Harper Voyager, 2011)
Ann & Jeff Vandermeer (eds.)

His one, platonic, relationship seems to have been with a young mathematician and computer scientists named Alan Turing. Their dalliance let to the latter's formulation of his famous Wykeham-Rackham Test, which raised the question of whether it would be possible to devise a robot so lifelike that it would be impossible to tell it apart from a human being while making love to it.

There's a fair amount of geeky in-joking in the above two sentences. If you don't quite get it, then you may find The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities to be quite odd. If you do get it, then you'll find the Cabinet to be right up your alley.

Cabinet, a companion to The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases (now out of print, but I'm going to definitely track down a copy for myself), is a brilliantly imagined conceit, an examination of the strangest collection of antiques, oddities, and stories assembled by the genius Thackery T. Lambshead, a man who "existed on the fringes of medical science." After his death of "banal pulmonary failure" at his house in Whimpering-on-the-Brook, England, his vast accumulation of artifacts and curios has been catalogued, and careful selections are presented here, along with stories penned by some of the modern genre greats.

As befits the fictional collection, Cabinet harbours a myriad of delights, along with gorgeous paintings, sketches, and photographs (the book itself is gorgeous). Luminaries such as Michael Moorcock, China Mieville, Mike Mignola, Alan Moore, Lev Grossman, Tad Williams, Minister Faust, and dozens beside contribute tales, descriptions, and more, resulting in an anthology of vastly differing styles and themes. The entries, bearing titles such as Dunkelblau's Meistergarten, The Electrical Neurheographiton, the Clockroach, and The Thing in the Jar, are wondrous and strange, completely original, and sadly fictional (I want an Automatic Nanny).

The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities is an anthology of prodigious brilliance, bizarre wit, and expansive imaginations. As evidenced by this, alongside their amazing anthologies Steampunk, Steampunk II, and Bestiary (cross your fingers on that one, and yes, I am a contributor), Mr. and Mrs. Vandermeer are purveyors of the weird of the highest order.

VERDICT ON ALL THREE: YOU CANNOT POSSIBLY GO WRONG

A lesson in the art of spin; or, I didn't say that, did I?

Yesterday, I was schooled in the art of spin. Owned. Pwned, as the kids say, bless their unable to spell hearts. And while I am fairly angry about it, a part of me can't help but admire the cojones of all involved.

A little background:

In my wanderings through the literary landscape, I have had the opportunity to, once in awhile, espouse my views on certain written works for sums of money i.e. I write book reviews for publications. I have always tried to give such reviews my best attention to detail, trying to do more than simply summarize a plot and giving a thumbs up/down. I make no claims to greatness, but I take the work seriously, and try to give every author I read the benefit of a doubt. I have praised books I've admired, and when confronted with the occasional shall we say less-than-stellar offering, I usually do try to put the best face on a bad situation. The authors have presumably worked hard to bring their vision to print, and although I may not enjoy the result, I appreciate the effort.

Ah, but I am human, and flawed. Sometimes a book hits me below the belt, and I cannot help but to respond in kind. In the pages of The Winnipeg Free Press, I laid waste in five hundred words to such destroyers of trees/hope as Michael Slade's Bed of Nails and Paulo Coelho's Eleven Minutes, barely containing my rage at how such authors managed to scuttle away with vital hours from my life with their horrible prose, insipid characters, and limp narratives. We all have read such books, and cannot help but rail even when public opinion is against you, or if your own common sense tells you to back off, that you are making a fool of yourself.

Such it was with Chuck Palahniuk's Tell-All. My review was not so much an incisive dissection of a novel as it was a rant against an author I deeply admired for foisting upon his abundant fanbase a novel so lazy, so flaccid, and so dreary. In the past, I had forgiven Palahniuk for lesser efforts such as Snuff, knowing that even the greatest authors had off days. A man who gave me the gruesome, obscene satirical pleasures of Fight Club and Rant and Choke had earned some leeway. But Tell-All is atrocious, a novel that would likely never have been published save for his name on the cover. I place it in the same terrain as the gut-wrenchingly awful books of James Patterson, the flavourless spewings of Stephanie Meyer, the utter stupidity of Tim LaHaye. In the annals of disappointing releases from authors I deeply admire and respect, it belongs in the same category as Ira Levin's dismal Son of Rosemary, Richard Matheson's inane Seven Steps to Midnight, and Robert A. Heinlein's lamentable The Number of the Beast. I condemn it to the basest reaches of my filth-laden soul, and continue to do so, even as I begrudgingly admit that I'm looking forward to Palahniuk's next novel, it sounds like all sorts of awesome.

So, I trashed Tell-All in the Arts section of the Winnipeg Free Press, and I stand by my words. So it was with no small amount of surprise that I picked up the recent Canadian paperback release (to see who, if anyone, had actually praised it), and read the following on the back cover, just underneath the plot summary:

"A devastating dissection of celebrity . . . classic Palahniuk fare." — Winnipeg Free Press

Huh.

I checked my original review, and found the sentence in question:

Written in a style akin to gossip tabloids of the time (complete with boldface font for every name mentioned), the novel promises on its surface to be a devastating dissection of celebrity, classic Palahniuk fare.

Of course, this sentence handily ignores the rest of the review, including the following nuggets:

But with Tell-All, his fourth novel in as many years, Palahniuk simply gives up, delivering a novel as negligible in size as it is in ambition.

and

Tell-All is the effort of an author who has utterly given up. It is a soggy, misshapen mess of half-baked parody and puddle-shallow inspiration.

and

Tell-All is an insulting shrug of indifference from an author who once actually mattered on the literary scene.

Wow, that was harsh. I may have forgotten to take my happy pills that day.

Now, in addition to working as a reviewer and author, I earn a living as a publicist for a highly-regarded independent Canadian publisher. So I am intimately familiar with the concept of 'spin.' I have had opportunity to scour reviews for phrases I can employ to highlight my books in press releases and advertising. And occasionally, I have lifted chunks of wordage and used them slightly out of context, so that a review that rates a book as average can be used to highlight a novel's marvelous atmosphere or rich characters. It's part of the job. Not lying, exactly, but tweaking the truth in a certain way to achieve an intended result.

But this . . . this is complete falsity. They are using a review specifically designed to keep people as far away as possible from their book as a tool to lure people in. They've taken a spray can to a sign labelled DO NOT SWIM, SHARKS IN THE AREA, leaving it blaring to the public, SWIM AREA.

I do admire the ability to make chicken salad out of chicken shit, no question. But when faced with Tell-All, the proof is in the quotes; they did not have many to choose from. Check out the screenshot of the praise page above: most of them are fairly quiet on the novel itself, concerning themselves with Palahniuk and his reputation rather than the merits of the book. I've looked around; critical praise for Tell-All was fairly lacking. The page looks good, but when you come down to it, it doesn't tell you anything more than the praise pages for most of James Patterson's recent books, pages made up of glorious plaudits from bloggers and bloggers only. Yes, I'm being a little snobbish here, but my point is, there is no critical praise from reputable sources to be had. Some show it obviously (Patterson) and some hide it expertly (Palahniuk).

Who to blame? It's all the publishing company, and the publicists. They're trying to sell a product here, the art is left to the artists. I don't blame Palahniuk for the manner in which his company markets him, I only blame him for the product itself.

My point? Could it be, don't believe everything you read? That'll do, I guess. But the real point here is:

I did not praise Tell-All. The Winnipeg Free Press did not praise Tell-All. The quotation is a bald-faced distortion, a lie through and through. If you must read Tell-All, don't blame me if you feel used afterwards.