Book Explosion!

I went to the library today and walked out with eight books: ELECTRIC FLESH (Claro), THOUSAND CRANES (Yasunari Kawabata), EVERYTHING HERE IS THE BEST THING EVER (Justin Taylor), CONTAGION (Brian Evenson), BLEED INTO ME (Stephen Graham Jones), FOUR IN AMERICA (Gertrude Stein), a collection of essays on Edgar Allan Poe (ed. Harold Bloom), and SHADOWY WATERS (W.B. Yeats).

The Portland library carries a lot of limited small press stuff, which is great.

I finished GHOST MACHINE by Ben Mirov last night. I had read a lot of it in Powell's and online, but I'm glad I own it. It's really good.

After the library, I ate Thai food from a cart called "I like Thai food." If you're in downtown Portland and you want good Thai, go to I like Thai food.

Now I'm finishing up the final edits on my fifth book, ABORTION ARCADE.

AA is a three novella collection containing No Children, The Roadkill Quarterback of Heavy Metal High, and The Destroyed Room. Here is a description of each novella:

NO CHILDREN: The apocalypse is over. Now zombies farm humans for their brains. As the imprisoned human cattle drift further from their humanity, the zombies flourish in a primitive renaissance, flying around in helicopters and living in smart houses made of human brains.

THE ROADKILL QUARTERBACK OF HEAVY METAL HIGH: After Heavy Metal High's star quarterback dies in a car accident, Danny the Dio-worshipping werewolf must transform from loser to gridiron star in this surreal pulp tragedy about teenage anxiety, high school violence, and heavy fucking metal.

THE DESTROYED ROOM: In a near-future city where automobiles have been outlawed and exotic animals roam the streets, a man wakes up one morning to discover that everyone in the world is a marionette. Now his wife is dead and he must find the answer, or else lose everything to the Great Shark Head in the Sky.

Expect ABORTION ARCADE to come out really soon, like in April.

The March 31st deadline for my sixth book (short novel called CAPTAIN CTHULHU) is fast approaching, so after I send the final version of AA to the publisher, I'll be jumping right back into the novel.

Plans are coming together for a massive Lazy Fascist reading in Portland on May 7th, headlined by Kris Saknussemm (author of SINISTER MINIATURES), who is flying in from Australia for an April/May reading tour.

In non-book or Thai food news, I watched Dinocroc last week and it fucking sucked, but at least some kid got his head bitten off.