Volume 6, Issue 5
July 13, 2010

The Latest

It's been a busy couple of months...

BayCon, the San Francisco Bay Area science fiction convention, was held over Memorial Day Weekend.  This year's Guests of Honor were Peter S. Beagle, one of our favorite authors, and the artist Lee Moyer.  Also present were Mercedes Lackey and Larry Dixon, BayCon 2009 Guests of Honor who were unable to last year's convention due to illness.  We had fun, met interesting people, and sold lots of books. As an added bonus, we returned from BayCon with TONS of books signed by the guests, as well as Diana Paxson, Dani Kollin, Eytan Kollin, Hank Stine and many others. Check out our BayCon 2010 photo album.

We're still clearing out some of our lower priced items (grab up these clearance items while you still can).

In the past two months we've added over 350 photos (browse newly photographed items here and here), attended 7 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

• Model Home - Puchner
• The Dead Man's Brother - Zelazny
• The Woman Between Worlds - MacIntyre
• Hitler's Holy Relics - Kirkpatrick
• Weathercraft - Woodring
• Red Rover - Houser
• Stacks of magazines and scads of comics

• The Passage - Cronin
• Four Freedoms - Crowley
• The Word of God - Disch
• The Carpet Makers - Eschbach
• Japanese Short Stories - Akutagawa
• Stacks of magazines and scads of comics

What Scott's Been Reading

Eric Puchner is responsible for a collection of short stories, Music Through the Floor, which I came across when one of his stories, “Essay No. 2: Leda and the Swan” was reprinted in the Sun magazine. He recently published his first novel, Model Home, and it’s one of the best of the year so far.

Set in the mid-’80s, Model Home is a portrait of a family coming apart. That said, despite the various tragedies and missteps the family endures there is a lightness of tone at work.

Warren Ziller , a moderately successful real estate developer, has uprooted his family from their comfortable middle-class existence in Wisconsin to follow his dream of making it big in the Southern California market. His supportive wife, Camille has found employment making educational films and his kids are beginning to assimilate. Soon after their arrival in California Warren’s opportunity goes belly-up, taking his family’s last cent with it. With no way to support his family he tries to keep his reversal of fortune from his wife and maintain a “normal” life for his kids. Things go from bad to worse when the rented furniture is repossessed and the bill collectors come calling.

Having grown up in the ‘80s I enjoyed the setting, but I didn’t find it oppressively nostalgic. The characters are all genuinely likable, if a bit off-kilter. And Jonas’ experience wandering through a parking lot full of Deadheads is worth the price of admission. If you enjoy Anne Tyler’s or Alice Hoffman’s books, you’ll like this.

“You’ve got to read this!” is the most common phrase in any conversation of which I am a part. Frequently recommended to me are books of which I’m unaware or titles that wouldn’t usually interest me. I tend to read a lot in the SF, mystery, horror and contemporary lit genres, so it always surprises and occasionally delights me when someone tells me I have to read, say, a regency romance. I’ve made it a mission to read some of these recommended books. Thanks in advance to those who provided the following suggestions:

Thomas suggested The Dead Man’s Brother, a “trunk” novel by the late Roger Zelazny. Zelazny wrote in several genres but is best known for his Hugo Award-winning novels and short stories, most notably Lord of Light and the ten-volume “The Chronicles of Amber”. The Dead Man’s Brother is a novel of international intrigue. It’s a spy novel very much in the late ‘60s mold, the era in which it was likely written.

Ovid Wiley, the wonderfully named hero of the book, is a well-educated (this is a Zelazny story), reformed art thief. When his former partner-in-crime shows up dead on the floor of his NYC gallery, the CIA uses his apparent guilt to force Ovid into an investigation into missing Vatican funds. The investigation draws him back into the criminal circles he’d left behind and into the arms of Maria Borsini, his former partner’s beautiful girlfriend.

According to Zelazny’s son Trent, who penned the afterword, this book was written in the late ‘60s or early ‘70s. My only criticism of The Dead Man’s Brother is that as a trunk novel by a dead author, he isn’t around to help edit and the editors apparently didn’t want to alter the manuscript. It compares favorably to other such books of the time, so if you enjoy Lawrence Block, Donald Hamilton or Richard Prather you’ll like this.

Sue enjoyed Sidney D. Kirkpatrick’s Hitler’s Holy Relics, and though I don’t read a lot of nonfiction, I did too.

The Nazis were notorious plunderers of art and collectors of religious and occult artifacts. Under the direction of Heinrich Himmler, a gigantic vault was constructed beneath Nurnberg castle to house various treasures including the crown jewels of the Holy Roman Empire. Just prior to the invasion of Nurnberg by the Allies in 1945, the jewels vanished from the vault. The central character of this book, Walter Horn, was an Allied interrogator originally charged with extracting information from German POWs. During the course of a routine interview with a German soldier, Horn learned of the vault and the antiquities it contained and filed a report, expecting it to be buried. He was surprised when orders coming directly from Eisenhower tasked him with recovering the jewels.

As the story progresses it becomes apparent to Horn that the importance of the Crown Jewels lies not in their value as works of art but rather as symbols which could potentially motivate a postwar Nazi resistance. This book is filled with fascinating stuff, not just about the aftermath of World War 2 but about the Holy Roman Empire as well. Particularly striking to me were the postwar conditions civilians were forced to endure and the deals the Allies had to cut with some very bad people to maintain order. The writing is sometimes dryly academic, but Walter Horn is a sympathetic protagonist and the period of history detailed is often ignored in favor of the more crowd-pleasing focus on individual battles.

Nik Houser suggested two books, the first of which he wrote. Nik’s published a number of short stories, one of which appears in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 2007. Red Rover is a short novel and a preview is currently available on Nik’s website.

It’s an anthropomorphic mystery story involving a dog and cat, Goldie and Medusa investigating the disappearance of an infant from his backyard.

Nick takes a simple story and expands it by creating a philosophy and mythology which maintain order amongst the beasts of the neighborhood. It has the qualities of some of Neil Gaiman’s stories, in particular, “A Dream of Cats”. A very enjoyable story, well worth printing out if you’re not comfortable reading an entire novel on a computer screen.

Also recommended by Nick was The Carpet Makers by Andreas Eschbach which I’ve just started.

Last is a book recommended by a customer from my Crown Books days more than 15 years ago. The Woman Between the Worlds is, to the best of my knowledge, the late F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre’s only novel under his own name. He’s written a number of short stories and makes regular appearances in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Set in late Victorian-era London, The Woman Between the Worlds begins with the invisible woman Vanessa entering the unnamed protagonist’s shop and contracting him to give her a whole body tattoo so that she might be visible again. The story quickly changes direction, but to describe it further would ruin the mystery of who or what Vanessa is.

MacIntyre makes good use of his setting, touching on the technological marvels of the day (electric cars) and utilizing Aleister Crowley as a main character. A. Conan Doyle, William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw and Bram Stoker, among others, make appearances. MacIntyre occasionally overdoes it, having his characters describe likely common things in un-coversational detail. But on the whole this is an excellent book which will appeal to those who enjoyed Jonathan Barnes’ or Mark Frost’s books.

Reading now: Joel Cronin’s The Passage, which has received an extraordinary amount of press since its publication in June.