another un-review: bzrk

Maybe a week ago, I un-reviewed S.A. Bodeen's summer 2012 release The Raft.

So if you need to know what an un-review is, you can check that one out. Basically, I think that authors don't have any business reviewing other authors' works. Not unless they really want to get into a public pissing match -- which is always quite enjoyable -- or perhaps get into an overly-salivated public display of face-sucking -- which is always kind of gross.

Anyway, I am going to un-review Bodeen's novel again in August, which is when the book comes out.

But this one, BZRK, by Michael Grant, comes out on Tuesday.

You must get this book. That is all.

What is it with my writer friends getting all good and matured in their writing? I mean I get it and everything, but I so rarely see writers actually developing their chops over the course of their publication. This is true: Most writers keep churning out the same level of stuff (and usually the same plots and themes) over the course of their careers.

Yawn.

That's just not for me as a reader. As I said last time:

I once saw a man eat a fluorescent light tube!

He appeared to enjoy himself tremendously!

That's probably why I wanted to un-review both of these books. I have read Michael's earlier books (and S.A. Bodeen's, too), and I think Mr. Grant has really poured something deeper and more darkly grotesque from his black, twisted soul directly onto the pages of BZRK.

Read this book with latex gloves on.

Trust me.

Here's what you know from the cover: There is a little bug thingy, and it is inside an eyeball of what looks like an insane person.

That is really all I need to say.

Now I will tell you a story about Michael Grant.

This is a true story.

I believe we first met in 2008. I could be wrong. So much of the road behind me is distorted in the vibrations from the loose rear-view mirror attached to the windshield of my life.

It was at a writer's thing where there were lots of authors, librarians, booksellers, and bloggers.

That meant we were the only two men in the room.

[Anecdotal observation: In 2012, given the same environment, I think there would be four men in the room now.]

We have come a long way, baby!

Usually in these situations, I have to attach myself invisibly to someone's elbow. I did this to Jackie Kessler and A.S. King when I was in Chicago. I get so desperately paralyzed in these situations!

But at this particular event in 2008 I was absolutely alone, an orphan.

And it was in, like, this big hall of cheese.

Seriously.

It was desperate!

I was alone in a hall of cheese. There were all these fancy tables that looked like fantasy cities with towering spires of cheese cascades -- with currants and flatbreads and brie, brie, brie!

Oh.

And there was an open bar, too.

Anyway, I kept my eyes down. I was terrified and alone, and the only time I'd made eye contact that evening was with a matronly bookseller who'd assumed I had to have been a waiter, so she asked me to bring her a basket of fresh rolls.

What could I do?

I had to bring her some bread!

And she didn't even tip!

Okay. So Michael Grant was there. Towering against the wall, watching my pathetic performance art, poised beside a stack of his novel Gone, and ARCs of Hunger. I believe he held a glass -- Scotch with ice.

When he came up to me, I was nearly convinced he was going to ask me to bring him a fruit bowl or slip me a fiver and ask me to do a card trick, or shit like that, but I was wrong. Michael Grant actually knew who I was. His wife, who is such an amazingly talented writer -- Katherine Applegate -- had actually read my book.

Grant and Applegate -- that's some serious writer shit going on.

Anyway, he said something along the lines of how I looked immeasurably pathetic and didn't I think I should go have a whiskey with him and talk about guy stuff?

Michael Grant saved me!

He will always be my hero!

Mission for Monday: Go buy some latex gloves.

Tuesday: Go get BZRK.

My apologies to my usual book borrowers. I won't be lending out BZRK. There's something inside it.

Besides all the gross stuff.

It is this:

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at least mitt romney's dog came back from canada!

flap copy

I did it.

I wrote a book for which it is impossible to write flap copy.

Even a moleskine can have flap copy.

But not this thing.

I will tell you about it as soon as I come up with something.

Here is what else I did: I saw the draft cover for Passenger, the sequel to The Marbury Lens.

My head exploded.

Poor Jack. He gets so messed up in Passenger. Everyone does.

A few days ago, when I wrote about S.A. Bodeen's The Raft, I mentioned something about the cover for The Marbury Lens. That cover is the only cover of all my books that I have had enlarged and framed, and it is currently hanging on the wall in my living room.

I had intended to get my other covers done that way too, but for some reason I never got around to it.

I am definitely going to do this with the cover of Passenger.

It is perfect.

Disturbing.

Kind of scary.

Just so you know, the cover for Passenger will not be revealed here on this blog. There are four bloggers out there who are going to do something special for the run-up to the book. They know who they are. They get to peek into the messed up worlds of Passenger first.

Not too long now.

October.

By that time -- actually pretty soon -- when I come up with flap copy for this new book for which flap copy and descriptions cannot be made, I will tell you all about it.

There is new news in the Andrew Smith library, and I can't wait to share it.

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great big jar

I live in a very strange place.

It's kind of like the Wild West with a bunch of old guys wearing fezzes.

Yesterday, I was driving down the mountain and I passed a small house that had a big sign lashed to a tree right at the roadside.

The sign says this:

DON'T BELIEVE THE LIBERAL MEDIA

Just like that. All caps. Red text for the last two words.

Punchy.

I thought, wow. How thoughtful. If I hadn't seen that sign, who knows what I might believe this morning?

I thought about taking a picture of the sign to post on my blog, but I was confused. I didn't know what to do. And people who put signs in all-caps and red ink in their yards probably tilt more along the end of the spectrum indicating people who would beat a guy up for snapping a picture of their yard admonitions with his iPhone.

I'm more than a little disappointed, though, because I was counting on someone out there in the media to help me sort out my feelings about Lana Del Rey.

Now I just don't know what to do.

I am so confused.

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why do they make purple skittles?

I read an awful lot.

I rarely talk about what I read, because I almost never read "current releases."

Nobody cares what I think about books, anyway.

Guess what? Nobody cares what almost anyone thinks about books.

Most books are horrible. It's funny, but it is my experience that it is easier for someone to stop reading a horrible book than it is for someone to walk out of a horrible movie, or stop watching an entire fucking season of a horrible television series. But what do I know?

I also don't talk about what I read because I am an author, NOT a reviewer or book blogger. I do not believe I could be both author and reviewer or book critic without feeling deeply troubled about my personal ethics.

Before anyone gets ticked off at me for saying that, note the use of the pronouns in the preceding paragraph. I am not making fun of you or talking about you, I am talking about someone who quite clearly is not you.

Same thing always comes up if I write about how I never watch television, can't recognize or name Hollywood celebrities, and have the inability to sit through a movie. People think I'm condemning their behavior or values. I am not.

I once saw a man eat a fluorescent light tube!

He seemed to like it!

Now that I have cleared that up, I am NOT going to write a critical review of S.A. Bodeen's upcoming release, The Raft. I am just going to explain why I liked this book very, very much.

But first, a side note: I really LOVE the cover of my book, The Marbury Lens.

[I know. You're probably saying to yourself: Is he really making this about HIM? Yes. Yes, I am.]

I can't even begin to tell you how many emails I received, complaining that the kid on the cover of The Marbury Lens didn't look like the way I described Jack (the main character) and how the glasses didn't look like the ones in the book.

I say this because there will be at least one absolute tool who will express outrage over Robie's hair on the cover of The Raft. I am never going to use this word publicly again, but the cover of The Raft is gorgeous.

Ewww.

I actually used that word.

The main character's name is Robie. It is pronounced Row-bee. I asked the author. I "hear" words when I read, so I needed to be sure.

Here's all I will say about the story part of this book: Robie gets stuck on a raft in the middle of the ocean with a guy who has a massive head wound.

Except for the head wound part, you could tell all that from the cover, anyway.

But things get worse. Not only that, but this book has a couple honest-to-God-I-never-saw-that-coming twists in it, too, which confirms my suspicion that S.A. Bodeen doesn't waste a lot of brain space memorizing goddamned email passwords and shit like that, so has adequate territory remaining to think up stuff that is really, really smart.

I have read all of S.A. Bodeen's YA books, beginning with The Compound. Here is my story about The Compound: I picked up an ARC of it right after signing my first publishing contract (squee.) when I traveled back to New York to meet Liz Szabla and Jean Feiwel. Maybe this was in 2006. I can't remember. I gave the book to my son, who was 12 or so at the time. I remember him sitting next to me, reading it, and he got to THAT ONE PART and he actually gasped out loud. So I had to read it, too.

The thing is, with The Raft, S.A. Bodeen's craft and technique have matured so much. The prose is at times poetic and often jangling; and the story jumps off the pages and grabs you by the throat.

Some of the first chapters are so short and punchy, you just can't stop turning pages.

Attention: Any parent who complains this summer about their kid watching too much television or playing too many hours of video games, shove this book into their twitchy little hands.

I promise.

This is a book for summer. It comes out in August.

I recommend that you do not do what I did and read it on a very turbulent airplane. If you are a real thrill-seeker,  you may want to read it on a hot beach. Um. Maybe not.

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as seen on facebook...

counting down

Having a book come out is kind of like being pregnant.

Um.

I watched my kids being born. It looked like it hurt.

Just think: If you got pregnant last month, you could be reading Passenger in the delivery room!

If you got pregnant last month, and you were reading Passenger in the delivery room, the earth will have traveled 450 million miles through space from where you were at the moment of conception.

I'll bet you did not say to yourself, "I think I will travel 450 million miles and then deliver a child."

And the way the universe is going, it is getting harder and harder to crash into shit. Sorry to dampen the anticipation of the big asteroid hitting us two months after Passenger comes out.

A while back, I listened to a cosmologist speak about the existence of alternate universes and what is actually real. It was kind of research on Marbury. He said something like, every time you get out of bed in the morning, there is another you in another universe who sleeps in, and other yous in other universes who have not been born yet.

He was smoking some real top-notch weed!

But seriously, I feel like I've been kind of neglecting Jack and the kids because of all this other book stuff that's been going on. And I realized, after having made corrections and approvals to all the final little hyphenations, word mutations, and punctuation marks in the 540 pages of Passenger, how much I missed being in Marbury after all this time and so many miles of space travel.

Passenger will be here sooner than you think.

I had a dream last night that I received the artwork for the cover. I can still picture what it looked like. It was just a dream, though. The cover, as far as I know, is still millions of miles away.

But I thought I'd tell you a little bit about the story.

You want to know, don't you?

Here goes. Jack and Conner try to "fix" things, so all the boys (Jack, Conner, Ben, and Griffin) won't feel so lost and hopeless when Jack and Conner go back to England to attend school.

Things get messed up. Big time.

Marbury and the kids' California hometown blend together. The kids are all dumped in different places at different times. They don't even know each other. When Jack gets back home to Glenbrook, his best friend doesn't know a thing about what's been happening, Ben and Griffin are gone forever, and the police are investigating why Jack Whitmore has something to do with the murder of a doctor whose body was found abandoned on a country road.

And it gets even more messed up than that.

8 months to go.

Happy space travels.

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