Welcome, folks, to the biggest book haul this blog has ever seen.
I don't normally go on book-shopping sprees, but every now and then I feel like I'm allowed to splurge a little - and sometimes books I ordered separately all arrive at the same time and bury me with a very welcome avalanche. This time, I got five books within a week of each other! I've been very excited to get to these babies for different reasons, and they look quite nice on the Shelf, too. Four out of five I've ordered from Better World Books, which I very much recommend for you folks to check out - they have an excellent horror and genre fiction selection, offer free shipping on many titles, and they do a lot of good work with nonprofits and donated books with the money they get from book purchases, so you're doing something good while scoring great finds for your own shelf. Win-win scenario!
The fifth book is from my trusty Thriftbooks - a pricier venture shipping-wise, but one whose selection has never disappointed me. And as to what those books are? Well...
First of all, the greats - King and Matheson. I really dig the cover of Thinner, although the premise of the book is a little... uh... we'll burn that bridge when we get to it. I Am Legend, on the other hand, is a book I've been looking forward to for a while. I find both the shouting Will Smith sticker and the praise from Dean Koontz, hackmaster extraordinaire, a little comical; but the rest of the cover is very atmospheric, and I've heard nothing but good about the book itself. We shall see whether it holds up to that praise, but I've read from Matheson before and I trust his writing a whole lot.
Next is this great little find: a YA horror from the 80's, and one with the true rarity of having gay characters, even in the main cast if my memory doesn't fail me. I have mixed feelings about the YA phenomenon, but I've read a lot of great YA books - some even in the horror and thriller genre, and they were delightful -, and between the premise of YA horror, the gay characters and this awesome cover, The Lake is a book I'm very eager to check out.
Poppy Z. Brite is one of those slightly lesser-known (to non-horror lit fans anyway) authors who were the powerhouses of horror publishing in the 1990's, known for being fresh, daring and original; and he in particular was known for featuring queer people and outcasts in a genre heavily dominated by straight white men as protagonists. That alone would win my undying respect, but then he also came out as trans - nowadays he goes by Billy Martin, although he still uses Poppy Z. Brite, his pre-transition pen name, professionally. (Correct me if I'm wrong.) And since I'm always up for reading more from minority authors, especially in horror, I've been glad to find this much-praised short story collection, from the famed Dell/Abyss line, at a pretty good price. I've only ever read one short story by Brite before, but unlike Clive Barker's writing (Hellbound Heart, the novella Hellraiser is based on, is an awkward book to say the least), I really liked what I'd seen of him so far.
And finally, this well-loved, but still wonderful copy of Borderlands, a boundary-pushing horror anthology from genre greats like Harlan Ellison and Joe R. Lansdale, with one hell of a cover. Fantastic work by Dave McKean (the title is on the black part, but it's done in transparent reflective foil, so it's only visible in a certain lighting). As for whether the stories inside are just as great... well, other horror blogs tell me a very resounding YES.
Thus concludes the book haul - I have two more on the way, and then the book-shopping shall stop for a while; both because I have enough stuff to read for a year, and because the Shelf is getting rather full. (But worry not, gentle reader! I have a bigger bookshelf on my other wall.) As for the friend I mentioned...
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