The Suicide Motor Club

She saw them with true eyes, saw what they were. Saw the catlike reflection in their eyes, saw the driver’s smile, his foxlike canines, the wolfish teeth on the one wrestling with her. Saw the sharp red hole that was the woman’s mouth, the teeth in it the teeth of biting gar.

They like fast cars. They like the nighttime. They prowl the lonely highways of America, headlights off, hunting. Always hunting. They are the Suicide Motor Club, and you should pray very hard that you never meet them.

Judith Lamb wasn’t so lucky. She first met the Suicide Motor Club one night in 1967, on the road to Amarillo with her husband and her son. One minute, things were normal, the next, a carful of monsters with human faces pulled up out of nowhere and dragged her boy right out of the car. Then, to leave no witnesses, they ran Judith and her husband off the road and vanished into the night.

The dead ride quickly, indeed.

Flash forward two years. Judith is the sole survivor, her husband dead from his injuries, her son’s whereabouts unknown. Only she can tell the tale of what happened that night in 1967, but who would believe that monsters with shining eyes had ambushed them and taken her son? No one save a clandestine group calling themselves the Bereaved. And they offer her the one thing no police officer, therapist, or holy order can: revenge.  
Good luck, Judith.

Fasten your seatbelt, dear reader, because The Suicide Motor Club is a ride to hell and back you won’t soon forget. Christopher Buehlman (Those Across the River, The Lesser Dead) continues to impress as a top-caliber horror writer, so if horror is your preferred genre, do yourself a favor and add him to your reading list right now.

And stay off the road at night.

Crazy for Graphic Novels?

Graphic Novels Are For Everyone!

During the month of March, we are encouraging everyone to checkout our graphic novel collection. We have titles for kids, teens, and adults—something for everyone. To do our part, Fine Print writers will be reviewing their favorites all through March. We hope you enjoy our selections and come see more of what your Library has to offer.

 

 

I do not typically read graphic novels, which means I have not read any graphic novels unless you count Captain Underpants.  I was coerced into reading Captain Underpants by my son.  Yes, it's true I read whatever he wanted to read. If he was interested in a book, even if I was inwardly cringing, I read it with him. I am a firm believer in reading anything that increases a child's willingness to read. For my son (in second and third grade) Captain Underpants was the way to go. Not only was my child interested in reading captain underpants, but it increased his willingness and fervor to read everything! So, even if it meant reading about Captain Underpants and the Perilous Plot of Professor Poopypants, I was all in. 

Flash forward many years and I am reading another graphic novel. However this time I have selected a more adult graphic novel. I read the Sandman by Neil Gaiman, because I love his novels. He has not written anything I do not enjoy so I figured this was a great place to start. I began with The Sandman vol. 1 Preludes and Nocturnes.  The first thing that struck me was it took me much longer to read than I thought it would.  For me the artwork was distracting.  It took me awhile to get a feel for reading a graphic novel. It does not read the same as a regular book.  I expected a quick easy ready, but this was no easy read.  I found myself rereading passages to make sure I interpreted the passages correctly and then when a passage troubled me...this is a dark graphic novel, I would look at the pictures and reread the text. It was an intense read. 

I like the way Neil Gaiman weaves the past together with the present including the mythic with modern day.  The Sandman is not a comic book. In my opinion it is more than a graphic novel or perhaps all these years I have done a disservice to graphic novels.  Please note that although I am not crazy about graphic novels, that once I finished Preludes and Nocturnes, I needed to know what happens next for Morpheus,... so I checked out the next several volumes in the series. 

I urge you to give graphic novels a try... if you like lighter reading perhaps try Unshelved. It is a hilarious laugh out loud graphic novel, which takes place inside a library. Some of the stories are made up, some of them are based on real life, and some are true stories sent to the writers from readers. Believe it or not the stranger the story, the more likely it is to be true.  

No One Gets Out Alive

For the past six months, nineteen-year-old Stephanie Booth’s just been scraping by, bouncing from one demeaning and low-paying temp job to another and just shy of being homeless altogether. But going home to her psycho stepmother is not an option, nor is running back to her ex-boyfriend, Ryan, which would just be awkward considering she dumped him. So it’s a stroke of badly needed luck when she finds a cheap room for rent in an old Victorian at 82 Edgehill Road in North Birmingham, England. Sure, the landlord, Mr. “Knacker” McGuire, with his age-inappropriate attire and odd manner of speech, seems harmless enough, eccentric even. Evasive though, that Knacker, regarding his stewardship of his “muvver’s house.” But this is only temporary, Stephanie tells herself, pushing aside the bad vibes scratching at the back of her mind. The minute she makes enough money to move herself into a better situation, she’s gone. 

Oh, how quickly things go wrong.

First, the voices. Strange voices coming from strange places—behind the fireplace, beneath the shower, across the hall—saying nonsensical things. Are these the voices of other tenants? Stephanie has yet to see any. Then, the noises: the scratching on the floorboards beneath her bed, the crinkling of polythene, the clomping of clumsy feet up the stairs and down the hall. What on earth is going on here? And what of the cryptic advice Knacker’s “cousin” and business partner, a six-foot-seven brute named Fergal, gives Stephanie? “Don’t worry about them. They can’t hurt you.” Mm, okay. It’s only after the arrival of two new tenants, Svetlana and Margaret, that Stephanie realizes too late why Knacker only “rents” rooms to women, and now she’s expected to perform. But if you think things are bad for Stephanie now, they’re about to get a whole lot worse.

Let me just get this out of the way: author Adam Nevill can write. Seriously. This guy’s like the literary lovechild of Stephen King and Peter Straub, and he just seems to get better and better with each book he writes (The Ritual, The House of Small Shadows). No One Gets Out Alive is no exception. Yes, it’s got the heft of a classic King novel, but you won’t be skipping past any pages. Warning: this is not a book for the squeamish. It’s dark. It’s violent. It may make you flinch as you read it. It may even give you bad dreams. But it is good, and if you’re a horror-lover, this one needs to be at the top of your reading list. Truthfully, I think Adam Nevill has just become my favorite horror writer.

The Scarlet Gospels

Since the early nineties, there have been rumors, mere whisperings perhaps, that a mysterious tome known as The Scarlet Gospels was being written. It’s author? Well, there could only be one author of such a thing: Clive Barker. But what exactly would comprise these other gospels? At one point, erotic poetry. At another, a collection of dark fiction. And then this: a sequel to the novella that birthed the Hellraiser movies, The Hellbound Heart. Ah, what reader of The Hellbound Heart can easily forget it? The Lemarchand box. The Order of the Gash. The Cenobites. Pinhead. This is what Clive Barker fans have been waiting for, a sequel, and that is exactly what you’ll find when you read The Scarlet Gospels. This time, though, Pinhead (a moniker the Hellpriest despises, by the way) shares the stage with that beleaguered, demon-killing detective of the dark arts, Harry d’Amour, and when these two meet, it won’t be pretty. No punches are pulled here. There will be blood. There will be a harrowing journey through the bowels of hell. And there will be a final showdown between good and evil. Like The Hellbound Heart, this story doesn’t sit still, it moves. But, disappointingly, it lacks the poetic eloquence of its predecessor and the depth of Barker’s earlier imaginative masterpieces. (If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times: there is nothing in the canon of dark fantasy that can top Barker's Imajica.) Regardless, if you’ve been reading Clive Barker for as long as I have, The Scarlet Gospels is well worth your time. 

So tell me, are you ready to take a trip to hell? Mr. Barker has such sights to show you.

We Are All Completely Fine

But are they really?

Welcome to Dr. Jan Sayer's "Very Special Trauma" group, whose members are all survivors of horrific and incomprehensible crimes. They've agreed to come together to help each other cope--at least, that's Dr. Sayer's plan. But when you've suffered as they have and seen the things that they've seen, is there really any hope for a normal existence? You be the judge. Take, for example, Stan, the oldest member of the group. He lost his limbs to the notorious Weaver family, otherwise known as the Arkansas Cannibals. Then there's Barbara, who seems the most normal of them all but who was once a victim of the Scrimshander, an entity that peeled back her flesh and left carvings on her bones. And what of Google Glass-wearing Martin, the youngest? He sees things through those dark lenses, bad things, and they're everywhere. Harrison, another group member, is well-acquainted with what Martin sees, for he is the so-called Monster Detective. As a teenager, Harrison once saved the town of Dunnsmouth from its doom--just barely, as he'd put it--but he now wants nothing to do with his monster-hunting past and spends his days in a drunken oblivion if he can help it. Rounding out the group is Greta, the tight-lipped, white-haired Goth girl, commune escapee and demon vessel.

Daryl Gregory's We Are All Completely Fine is a slim novel with a darkly entertaining narrative that will keep the pages turning. Really, half the fun is observing how these very different characters interact with one another throughout each therapy session, and how, when a group member is threatened, they finally come to trust and help one another. If you're looking for a quick excursion into the literary landscape Ray Bradbury once called the October Country, We Are All Completely Fine will get you there and back safely in a single afternoon.