Volume 6, Issue 2
February 24, 2010

The Latest

In addition to the obligatory tax prep, we've been busy clearing out some of our lower priced items (grab up these clearance items while you still can).

Don't forget to mark your calendars! We've been confirmed as dealers at BayCon 2010 (May 28-31, Santa Clara, CA).

In the past month we've added over 150 photos (browse newly photographed items here), attended 15 signings/events (see our Just Arrived page), and posted countless new items to our inventory.

We now have over 11000 items available through Biblio and over 7000 through Amazon.

Scott & Tammie
Handee Books, LLC

• Horns - Hill
• The Magician's Elephant - DiCamillo
• The Drowning City - Downum
• Escape from Hell! - Duncan
• Confessions of a Blabbermouth - Carey & Alexovich
• Stacks of magazines and scads of comics

• The Long Man - Englehart
• Four Freedoms - Crowley
• The Somnambulist - Barnes
• The Word of God - Disch
• Innocents Aboard - Wolfe
• Blackout - Willis
• The Museum of Innocence - Pamuk
• The Child Buyer - Hersey
• Stacks of magazines and scads of comics

What Scott's Been Reading

Continuing my mission to at least sample every book or magazine given to me at this year’s World Fantasy Convention (WFC), I started Matthew Hughes’ Majestrum, published by our friends at Night Shade Books. I started Amanda Downum’s first novel, The Drowning City. When I had a free moment I picked up Gene Wolfe’s collection, Innocents Aboard. Then I came across an advance copy of Joe Hill’s forthcoming second novel, Horns, and everything was pushed aside.

Hill’s first novel, Heart-Shaped Box was one of my favorite books of 2007. The ending didn’t deliver on the promise of the first third, but it was a logical, reasonable conclusion to a great setup. [Read the April 9, 2007 edition (vol 3, issue 4) of our newsletter for Scott's full review].

Horns also has a great setup. Iggy Perrish wakes after a night of drinking to find he’s grown horns. Having spent the previous year dealing with the unsolved rape and murder of his girlfriend, Merrin, Ig first believes he’s had a mental breakdown. But aside from the cosmetic inconvenience of the horns, Ig finds they have a mystical property: virtually anyone in his presence is compelled to confess their deepest secrets and vilest deeds.

Ig soon learns who is responsible for Merrin’s death and embarks on a mission of revenge. His mission is complicated by the unending stream of confessions from anyone with whom he comes into contact and the belief of everyone in his town, the members of his family included, that he was responsible for Merrin’s death.

With the exception of the final 25 pages, Heart-Shaped Box was a tightly plotted, well-constructed novel. The narrative threads of Horns are all over the place and additionally have problems in the first third as Hill wanders off the plot and into young adult romance territory with the story of Ig’s and Merrin’s first love. While their story provides important back story, Hill devotes too much space to their adolescent love affair. In the end it’s a distraction.

Verging into Christopher Moore territory, Horns is a fun enough read, and my dissatisfaction with it won’t prevent me from picking up Hill’s next book.

I tried to get back to Majestrum, but after 50 pages just couldn’t get into it. I’ve read, and enjoyed, one other novel by him so I suspect it wasn’t what I wanted to be reading at the time.

I’ve liked several of Kate DiCamillo’s books, and I think I enjoyed her newest, The Magician’s Elephant, most of all.

In deceptively simple prose DiCamillo tells the story of Peter Augustus Duchene, a war orphan in the care of a retired military officer who forces military discipline on the ten-year-old. One day, instead of buying fish for which the old man has given Peter money, he spends it on a fortuneteller who tells him his sister is alive and that an elephant will lead him to her. That night, an untalented magician accidentally conjures an elephant which falls through the roof of the opera house where he’s performing, crushing the legs of an aristocrat.
From this point Peter’s life entwines with those of a policeman and his wife, a beggar and his dog, a crippled sculptor and a nun in events set in motion by the appearance of the elephant.

I loved the setting, vaguely suggestive of early 20th Century Eastern Europe, and the theme of interconnectedness. As always, I loved DiCamillo’s clear, precise prose. Highly recommended.

Moving back to the WFC stuff, I picked up Escape from Hell! by Hal Duncan. It’s a short novel, and the title tells it all.

The best thing I can say about this is that I enjoyed the setting - hell as modeled on New York City. Duncan has a gift for satire, and I liked his take on the media in general and “Vox News” in particular. I don’t pick up books with titles like Escape from Hell! expecting Jane Austen, so maybe I wasn’t in the mood for this, either. I’ll recommend Duncan’s earlier books, Vellum and Ink and look forward to his next book, whenever it arrives.

Amanda Downum’s The Drowning City is all about setting, a fascinating melange of European, Middle Eastern and Far Eastern elements.

Isyllt, spy and necromancer, comes to Symir, the drowning city, to incite civil disorder and undermine the Assari Empire before it can invade her homeland. Her task is complicated by her attraction to a government official and actions of a group of guerillas. Meanwhile, her traveling companions struggle with dilemmas of their own.

My major criticism of this book is that Downum doesn’t yet know how to tell a complex story. There are far too many characters and tangential plot threads to follow. That said, she has an interesting take on magic and there’s that wonderfully vivid world she’s created. Recommended, with reservations, for the setting.

The book I read this month which brought me the most pleasure was Confessions of a Blabbermouth by Mike Carey, Louise Carey and Aaron Alexovich. A volume in DC Comics ill-fated (and under supported) Minx line of manga-size graphic novels for teenage girls, it tells the story of Tasha Flanagan, whose life revolves around her blog. Tasha’s life is thrown into disarray when her mother brings home a new, patronizing boyfriend. Further complicating matters is the boyfriend’s daughter, Chloe, who is transferring to Tasha’s school and who writes a monthly column for the local newspaper. Tasha’s celebrity is challenged by Chloe and demeaned by the boyfriend, Jed, a writer of bodice rippers.

The cartooning is cluttered but still easy to follow, the main characters are well-delineated (except for Jed, who’s just a jerk) and likable. The story takes a dark turn about 2/3 of the way through but the writers recover and keep the story going in a breezy manner to a satisfying conclusion. Not my favorite Minx book - that’s still Cecil Castellucci and Jim Rugg’s The Plain Janes - but very enjoyable. Highly recommended.