Dave's Book List for 2021

1.  A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers

2. Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes To a Tribe Called Quest by Hanif Abdurraqib

3. Mooncop by Tom Gaul

4. Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh

5. Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker

6. Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers

7. Action Park: Fast Times, Wild Rides, and the Untold Story of America's Most Dangerous Amusement Park by Andy Mulvihill (with Jake Rosen)

8. Solutions and Other Problems by Allie Brosh

9. Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder

10. A Children's Bible by Lydia Millet

11) Who Gets in and Why: A Year Inside College Admissions by Jeffrey Selingo

12) Dead Land by Sara Paretsky

13) Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America by Kurt Andersen

14) Coyote America by Dan Flores

15) Waste Tide by Qiufan Chen

16) One by One by Ruth Ware

17) The Searcher by Tana French

18) No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood

19) Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

20) In the Woods by Tana French

21) Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, A 500 Year History by Kurt Andersen

22) We Are Satellites by Sarah Pinsker

23) Horrorstör by Grady Hendrix

24) We Sold Our Souls by Grady Hendrix

25) My Best Friend's Exorcism by Grady Hendrix

26) The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix

27) The Guest List by Lucy Foley

28) The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win by Maria Konnikova

29) The Auctioneer

30) Paperbacks from Hell by Grady Hendrix

31) Phil Gordon's Little Gold Book by Phil Gordon

32) Maynard's House by Herman Raucher

33) When Darkness Loves Us by Elizabeth Engstrom

34) CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties by Tom O'Neill

35) The Humans by Matt Haig

36) Moxyland by Lauren Beukes

37) Susan Wise Bauer's The History of the Medieval World 

38) The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix

39) Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About His Past and Future by James Shapiro

40)  Killing Floor by Lee Child

41) Mallory's Oracle by Carol O'Connell

42) Soccer IQ vol 1 and 2 by Dan Blank

43) The Monkey's Raincoat by Robert Crais

44) The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War by Malcolm Gladwell

45) The Man Who Cast Two Shadows by Carol O'Connor

46) The Last Policeman by Ben H. Winters

47) The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

48) Countdown City by Ben H. Winters

49) World of Trouble by Ben H. Winters

50) The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-centered Planet by John Green

51) The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides

52) The Premonition: A Pandemic Story by Michale Lewis

53) Fall or Dodge in Hell by Neal Stephenson

54) Lazarus vol 1 by Greg Rucka and Michael Lark

Almost (but not quite)  . . . War and Peace and War by Peter Turchin and The Crusades by Thomas Asbridge

Grady Hendrix = Weird Al?

Grady Hendrix may just be the Weird Al of graphic horror literature-- at his best, Hendrix is magical and satirical and very funny, with an exceptional eye for detail . . . but--like Weird Al-- he can be a bit gimmicky; We Sold Our Souls is a heavy metal horror story, and while it's a bit heavy on the fictitious metal lyrics of a prophetic unreleased album called Troglodyte, the plot is a magnificent mix of making-ends-meet America, conspiracy theories, metalheads, festival rock, soul-sucking demons, and the rock'n'roll biz . . .  six-hundred and thirteen pentagrams out of a possible six hundred and sixty-six.

El Orfanato plus Being John Malkovich Equals?

If you're looking for a horror novel with serious puppetry, Being John Malkovich level marionette skills, then check out the new Grady Hendrix novel How to Sell a Haunted House . . . some of the scenes get a little long winded, but the book is very scary, very funny, and very Southern gothic (and once again, set in Charleston) AND there is an amazing bonus flashback set piece chapter set in Boston back when one of the main characters dropped out of college and joined a radical puppet collective with demonic and anarchic tendencies-- brilliant stuff . . . and Pupkin is a worthy villain and the book has a satisfying (and fairly logical, considering the subject matter) resolution . . . Grady Hendrix is a national treasure.

What Happens to Those Final Girls After the Movie Ends?

The new Grady Hendrix horror novel, The Final Girl Support Group, is both more surreal and meta than his previous novels but also more profound and serious-- the conceit of this fictional world is that the events depicted in the classic slasher flicks of the '80s and '90s actually happened-- Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, etc-- and then the stories were bought by film studios and made into movie franchises-- but the actual girls who survived these horrific events exist long after the slasher genre's popularity-- and these "final girls" have to deal with the trauma of their own lives, and the trauma of seeing their stories used as a disposable art form with (mostly) disposable women being murdered by monstrous men . . . and the book is also a thriller, with plot twists and wild violence and an unreliable narrator and interesting characters, but it's also a take on the objectification of women and the veneration of violence . . . nine axe-splintered doors out of ten.

Horrorstör!

Horrorstör, by Grady Hendrix, is a winner; my son and I both read it in the span of five days . . . it's about a haunted IKEA-like store (called ORSK) and the book is, by turns, funny, satirical, gross, creepy, endearing, and aesthetically pleasing . . . I learned a lot about retail and a lot about the desultory effect of a 19th-century panopticon style workhouse prison on the souls of the penitents incarcerated within (the story takes the classic Poltergeist-trope . . . this house was built on an Indian burial ground? and enlarges it . . . this ORSK was built on the remnants of an old prison-house?)

Your Next Book Club Selection

Grady Hendrix's The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires is his best book yet; it reminded me of the wonderful feeling I got in high school when I read a new Stephen King novel: you meet a cast of interesting fully-fleshed out modern characters and then terrible things happen to them . . . really fun and addictive.

The Books Dave Read in 2023

1) The Candy House by Jennifer Egan

2) The House Across the Lake by Riley Sager

3) Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton

4) Hark! A Vagrant by Kate Beaton

5) Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

6) Death by Video Game: Danger, Pleasure, and Obsession on the Virtual Frontline by Simon Parkin

7) The Quiet Boy by Ben H. Winters

8) Flight by Lynn Steger Strong

9) The Revolutionary: Sam Adams by Stacy Schiff

10) How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix

11) South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation by Imani Perry

12) Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction by Derek Thompson

13) This Is What It Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You by Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas

14) The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War by Jeff Sharlet

15) Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State by Kerry Howley

16) The Other Side of Night by Adam Hamdy

17) The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton

18) Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton

19) The Little Friend by Donna Tartt

20) Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It by Daniel Knowles

21) The Ghosts of Belfast by Stuart Neville

22) Shakespeare: The World as a Stage by Bill Bryson

23) 1215: The Year of Magna Carta by Danny Danziger and John Gillingham

24) If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio

25) Ringworld by Larry Niven

26) My Murder by Katie Williams

27) Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead

28) The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley

29) The Godwulf Manuscript by Robert B. Parker 

30) God Save the Child by Robert B. Parker

31) Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century by J. Bradford DeLong

32) Mortal Stakes by Robert B. Parker

33) Promised Land by Robert B. Parker

34) Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy by Colin Dickey

35) Counterweight by Djuna

36) Judas Goat by Robert B. Parker

37) The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

38) Pet by Catherine Chidgey

39) Let's Talk About Love: Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste by Carl Wilson

40) Tourist Season by Carl Hiaasen

41) The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe

42) Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith

43) Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild.

44) Wellness by Nathan Hill

45) Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Carse

46) All the Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby

47) When No One is Watching by Alyssa Cole.

The Auctioneer: A Good Book for Independence Day

The Auctioneer was a brief bestseller in1975 and then promptly forgotten-- perhaps because the youngish author, Joan Samson, soon after died of cancer-- but it's been reissued (with a Grady Hendrix intro) and it's more appropriate than ever; it's about Harlowe-- a small town in New Hampshire experiencing change-- there was a back-to-the - movement in the 60s and 70s that brought new people and culture to rural America, city slickers . . . and the city slicker in this novel is a menacing, Trump-like auctioneer who becomes very close with the chief of police . . . and then bad things start to happen, very bad things; it's allegorical like Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" and the prose is spare like later Cormac McCarthy books; it's the opposite of Jack Ketchum's Off Season-- which is about not messing with the locals-- in this book, the locals are messed with and messed with, not unlike what's happened in current rural America-- and there's eventually going to be some sort of falling out and it might be liberating but it also might be ugly.

Best Exorcism Ever!

If you're looking for a tale of 80s high school nostalgia and demonic possession, couched in a wonderful-- but grossly graphic-- story of a life-long friendship, then check out My Best Friend's Exorcism by Grady Hendrix.