Red Hook, by Gabriel Cohen *****

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seattlebookmama's avatarSeattle Book Mama

redhookI am generally a six-book-at-a-time reader. I have different books in different rooms; books on my e-reader, paperbacks, and hard covers. Red Hook is one of those unusual books, though, that has kept me from my other reading. Once Net Galley gifted me with a free copy, the story picked me up by the front of my shirt and kept me reading, even when the normal demands of daily living beckoned. So you say it was nominated for the Edgar Award? Why am I not surprised?

No, there are no ghosties or hobgoblins or other supernatural things that go bump in the night, but the story packs enough goose pimples in the plot alone to make it an October-worthy read.

The story is police procedural in format, and bounces between two points of view, that of the protagonist, a New York City cop named Jack, and his son Ben, who…

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The Stand, by Stephen King *****

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thestandOctober spooky stories continue! I am nearing the end of some interesting galleys, but until I have new material to review, I am posting some old and creepy favorites. And who better than Stephen King? If this book were published today, it might get categorized as post-apocalyptic fiction rather than horror (or fantasy; it was nominated for the World Fantasy Award in 1979). By now, it’s legendary. If you haven’t gone there yet, what are you waiting for? It will surely keep you off the streets and out of trouble for quite some time. Here’s my take on it.

In the two part introduction, King tells the reader not to buy the book unless they either have never read it, or wish to reread it with the bits he really thought made the story stronger, but that in his less prominent days had been edited out for marketing reasons. And I thought oh hell yes. I love King’s work, and I trust his judgment.

What I didn’t think about was the copyright date and the fact that I am no longer young. Three quarters of the way through, I went back to the prefaces again to see if I could ascertain what was new here. And it was then that I realized that I had already read this version–only the cover was really new, it’s been out for quite some time–and by then I was so far along, remembered so little of the original plot anyway, that I decided to go ahead and finish it. It’s entirely  worth reading twice.

He refers to it (again in part 2 of the intro)as a “tale of dark Christianity”. And that it is. It’s really well done. If you are a Christian and take the bible quite literally, you may not appreciate the liberties he has taken. From a literary point of view though, this is a beautifully integrated plot. His memoir says that he pretty much just pounds his novels out, start to finish, and given the complexity and number of characters, I can’t believe he didn’t start this one with a flow chart. It boggles the mind.

So without ruining the ending, let me ask you: if hell were going to be in the continental USA, which major city would you choose? Among the major US cities you have visited, which one screams to you of wrongness most clearly?

I think King chose well. When the devil takes a major hit because his prisoner refuses to be impressed and laughs at him, it rings absolutely true.

I have changed my mind many times about which Stephen King novel I love best. This one is definitely a contender.

(A caveat: read it first before you give it to your precocious reader. Some Stephen King books work just fine for the clever 6th or 7th grade mind; personally, I’d save this one for high school, given my preferences for my own family).

Burning Angel, by James Lee Burke *****

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I’ve enjoyed and reviewed the whole Robicheaux series over the course of the last year and a half, burningangeland began with a much more recent one that I read out of sequence because it found its way into my home. So now that I’ve commented multiple times upon the brilliance and eloquence of this writer, I just have to get this off my chest:

Does this protagonist EVER eat VEGETABLES? (Onions on a sandwich don’t count!)

We move through the plot lines with a steady series of meals, & this makes it realistic. Some crime/mystery writers have protagonists who appear to never eat or sleep, & at some point one starts to notice. This writer uses food to evoke a sense of setting, constantly parading before us his begniets, his boudin, his po’ boy sandwiches. He fries fish and gobbles that up, too.

In one of his novels his narrative mentions a bad guy as being among those who let their bodies get vastly overweight because they eat wrong and don’t care what they look like, and I want to say, maybe they didn’t get your excellent DNA, pal, because even though you jog and work out, your diet is a walking heart attack. Coffee, Dr. Pepper, fried fish, dairy, and starch. Holy crap.

Okay, I just had to rant this once about that, because I’ve been thinking about it awhile.

The story line itself is like others, except that it isn’t; by this time he has established a following, and the series is consistent in its approach and has characters we see again, and others that are hauntingly real, but that we probably won’t see. As always, Burke uses his characters to show us the ambiguity in humanity, and that sometimes the people you expect to be good guys aren’t all that good, and that sometimes the archetypical bad guy has some good in him, too. In this story, a gangster gives his life to save Dave’s. This also gives him one more dead person to talk to and dream about. But it isn’t stale; it makes me snuggle a bit more deeply under the comforter at night and think, “Ah yes! Here we go!”

If you are a reader of Burke’s who fancies Clete Purcel, as my spouse and I do (and my guy, who is almost always strictly a nonfiction reader, is completely hooked on this series and is reading ahead of me now, chuckling happily whenever he runs across Cletus), be assured he is an integral part of this particular story, and he’s in fine form.

The constant struggle Robicheaux finds throughout his career is that when you are a cop, you have a decent paycheck, the authority to do things that a private citizen cannot, and a certain amount of personal protection, especially in dealing with mobsters. But the problem with being a cop is that you’re working for an apparatus that is not set up to defend those who need it most:

“The big trade-off is one’s humanity…you start your career with the moral clarity of the youthful altruist, then gradually you begin to feel betrayed by those you supposedly protect and serve. You’re not welcome in their part of town…the most venal bondsman can walk with immunity through neighborhoods where you’ll be shot at by snipers. You begin to believe that there are those in our midst who are not part of the same gene pool. You think of them as subhuman…whom you treat in custody as you would humorous circus animals.”

From there, he describes the quick, slippery slope in which a cop may shoot a suspect who held something out that glinted in the very dark night and which the cop thought to be a weapon. After shooting the man with the screwdriver or car keys in his hand, a weapon with a filed serial number gets wrapped in the guy’s hand, then dropped nearby. And cops stand by one another in these cases. The corruption has solidified, and you are no longer on the side of the angels.

He does a nice job with character development here. His wife Bootsie is not the frightened and easily horrified woman she once was; when he launches himself out into the darkness to do something dangerous, she sends him off with the reminder: “Watch your ass, kiddo.”

Alafair, an enchanting toddler when the series started, has begun dating. She won’t let him call her ‘little guy’ anymore. And she learns how to use a gun, because it seems as if bad guys are always lurking around, waiting to exact revenge either on her father, or against him by harming her family. She wants to be ready.

He’s on the force; he’s off it. The bait shop/cafe doesn’t make more than 15K a year; the family can’t live off that. The private detective business Clete recruits him into doesn’t make good money either. The only takers are the bad guys they don’t want to deal with.

At one point, someone reminds him that having his badge means he gets to walk on the curb instead of in the gutter. But he is ambivalent, because being the enforcement arm of the US government isn’t pretty, and there’s no way to turn that around. Being a rural deputy rather than a city cop is the compromise he has made at this point, but it’s still a nasty business, and as usual, the ending is bittersweet.

I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Heart-Shaped Box, by Joe Hill *****

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In the spirit of October, I am using days when I have no newly released or about to be released books to cover creepy stories with ghosts, demons, or just really creepy people in them. I read Heart-Shaped Box a year ago, and it remains one of my favorite horror titles. It’s is an outstanding piece of work, and it also answers a question I held for a long time.

Okay, so here I start talking about the author’s father, heart-shapedboxSteve King, which is dreadful, because Hill is such a fine writer in his own right, and his style and King’s share nothing but the genre, and the assumption at the core of it, which is what I was idly reaching for, and not finding, for decades. It answers the question as to why I always took King for a good human being, long before his memoir was written. Before this, I would have guessed at his obvious distaste and anger toward domestic violence and objectification of women, for example. But Hill’s narration gives it to us in a nutshell, and he does it in this book:

Sympathy lies at the heart of horror.

Forehead slap! OF COURSE! Why didn’t I get that before now? Even as we read faster, flip those damn pages, we do it because we care about the protagonist, or at least about someone there in the story. We want the very best for them in the midst of all the horror. Ultimately, so does the writer.

As for this novel itself, the pacing and characterizations were splendid, flawless to my eye. I could have done without the brief part played by the snuff film, but one can skim through these parts and come out in time for the build up, climax, and resolution. There is tremendous originality even as the writer also draws upon tradition. Fascinating.

Hill has an edgy writing style, and he has guts. Long may he write!

Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley, by Peter Guralnick *****

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lasttraintomemphis I belong to the generation that came about a decade after Elvis was king, and so for a lot of years I tended to avoid his music. It was not my music. And that was my mistake.

Whether or not you are an Elvis fan, this biography is best read with internet access to his music, and better still with access to film footage of him performing (and it does exist). It is hard to understand much of what Guralnick writes about unless you can see the body language in the performance. Even if Elvis’s work has served as background music that you’ve never listened to very much, a review is in order to understand any of the tumult that his work created.

Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and garnered other awards and praise as well. It is justified. So much research, so many interviews, so much data has been crammed into an easy-flowing, readable narrative that he makes it look almost easy. Almost.

Presley was not a song writer, he was a performer. It was the style with which he interpreted songs that were already popular and well-known, such as Blue Moon Kentucky, as well as to lesser-known hits that came from the Black community, that rocketed him to fame. It’s hard to get a bead on the man, even with everything the writer has ferreted out from all possible sources. A pair of musicians he worked with referred to him as an “idiot savant”. If he were alive today, he might be diagnosed as OCD (my own conclusion); though his family was poor enough to qualify for the first public housing, he has his very own plate, his very own knife, and his very own fork, and if anyone else had used it, no matter how many times it had been washed, he would not eat. His closer-than-average relationship with his mother probably was the saving factor here. She accommodated this and more, and between this and the fact that there were no other children in the family (apart from his twin, who was stillborn), no diagnosis was necessary. He was ostracized at school, but found his greatest love was not in the halls of academia anyway. He began with a child’s guitar that his mother scrimped and saved to buy for him, and worked his way up the ladder. (He later said that he had found some of his ideas by sneaking out of the church his parents took him to on Sundays and sneaking over to the “Negro” church service, where he could listen at the door. He went for the music.)

His dance style had never been seen  by any wide audience. His hair and clothing, while fodder for a whole lot of jokes up the road, had found their time and place. Somehow he knew exactly what would work, and those who worked with him also said that he was always aware of what individual components of his act resonated with his audience, and which fell flat. He wore makeup on stage to enhance his features before any other known male American musician did; some of his fellow musicians wondered what that was about. Someone else asked him why he put glop in his hair; he said it was so that a lock of it would fall forward in a particular manner when he snapped his head. Once he got the opportunity to make a movie–an opportunity he actively sought–he spoke with hairdressers about its color. One of them told him black would look wonderful on film against his pale skin tones, and so he dyed his blond hair black from then on. (I had always thought that was his natural hair color.)

As a young woman, I often heard about how tragic Elvis Presley’s life had been. I was not yet twenty, clerking in a convenience store nights to augment my student financial aid, when the newspaper delivery van came with the evening newspaper and there was the headline. Elvis–the older, heavier Elvis–was dead. I was young enough that most adults seemed pretty ancient, but I mused, “Huh. He wasn’t THAT old yet.” My boss came over to look, and was surprised also.

But in reading this biography, I am more struck by how many dreams came true for this young man. He got to do exactly what he wanted to do for a living, and he loved having fans scream out his name. He wanted a Cadillac; he had half a dozen of them. He was able to provide well for his parents, and he built his dream home, complete with a real soda fountain. He had women on his arm everywhere he went.

…and he scared conservative America half to death! Oh, the panic! “New York congressman Emmanuel Celler, chairman of the Antitrust Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee” labeled Elvis Presley and his “animal gyrations…violative of all that I know to be to good taste.” He and several other prominent politicians managed to work some racist demagogy into the mix as well. Elvis later let everyone know exactly what he thought of that by showing up at the fairgrounds in the Jim Crow south on the one day of the month designated as ‘Colored Day’ and buying a ticket. He was the only white boy at the fair. He was allowed to attend and widely welcomed, though there was some push-back later in the local Black press complaining that too many young ladies at that same fair had been screaming after him instead of young men of their own skin tone. Ah well.

This marvelous book is volume one of two. It ends when he is drafted and goes to Germany (a peacetime draft that his agents decided it would look bad for him to avoid). Maybe it is just as well. We send young Elvis off to Europe still full of youth, joy, and hope. (Your reviewer confesses that she has ferreted out the second volume, gently used, from her personal book temple, Powell’s City of Books, and will read it when time allows.)

Highly recommended to anyone who enjoys biographies of famous musicians. I loved it!

Chancellorsville, by Stephen Sears ****

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chancellorsvilleSears won the Fletcher-Pratt award for his retelling of the battle of Chancellorsville, which is meticulously researched. In fact, about 100 of the 600 pages of this mighty tome are footnotes and Index.

If you are waiting for the excitement to start, don’t hold your breath. For one thing, if you are sufficiently interested in the American Civil War to read 500 pages about just one battle, you already know how this one ended, so there is no magic in terms of waiting for the end. The value here is for the die-hard researcher or military theorist, who either wants to examine why the battle turned one way or another, what could have prevented it, etc. Picking apart the miniscule parts of each battle and seeing how they are different in the eyes of one historian from another (usually in small ways) is interesting, for those of us sufficiently obsessed.

In a nutshell, if you are interested in the most minute details of this particular battle, having had your fill of books on Gettysburg and Antietam, this man has done a good job of putting it all together. Sometimes it is compelling, even amusing, and other times dry, but there was no time when I did not feel he had carefully laid the groundwork for what he was describing.

Folly, by Laurie R King *****

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follyWhoa Nellie! King is one of my favorite authors, and I like her best when she gets away from the Holmes’ wife series and into strong contemporary fiction like this.

Rae Newborn is our protagonist, and she’s been having some mental health issues. She takes herself off to do a project on a remote island, property owned by her uncle. She has a feeling she is watched all the time, and so she is glad she is somewhere that she knows she has all to herself. Who the hell would come all the way out here? There’s no ferry service. You’d have to go to a lot of effort to get there, and there’s really nothing on the island beyond her uncle’s house, which needs a lot of work.

Unfortunately, that creepy feeling intensifies once she is on the island.

I started reading and an invisible hand reached out of the pages, grabbed me by my shirt’s front and yanked me in. I was on that island, and let me tell you, it got smaller, and smaller, and smaller…heart-pounding and absorbing, I could not stop till it was done.

I gave it to a friend to read when I was finished. When she had finished it, she asked me not to give her any others by this writer, because it was so adrenaline-pounding that “it was a little much for me.” And it is a lot. It is a psychological thriller by a master of the genre.

Often by now I acknowledge whoever gave me the galley to read free, but not this time. I bought this book at cover price from my own pocket, and I am telling you, it was worth every cent.

If you have a low threshold for really gripping prose, (or if, like my friend, you have recently experienced a loss and are tender around the edges), get something a little bit tamer. But if, like me, your favorite roller coasters are between book covers, this one is for you. Brilliantly plotted with a story line that accelerates and whips you around until it’s over.

Pleasantville, by Attica Locke *****

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pleasantvilleJay Porter has a full plate, and so his legal career has been set on cruise control. Money is the least of his worries; he is successful, and has won a very large case, though it hasn’t paid yet. No, his issues have to do with family, and with grieving. And with grieving. And with grieving. His wife Bernie died young and fast due to an illness that she knew she had, but had chosen not to share. She pushed him to follow through on his enormous case against the oil company that had sickened, even killed people in their own close-knit, middle class African-American suburb outside Houston, Texas. It was important to everyone that the families affected experienced justice. But now he wishes he had spent more time by his wife’s bedside and less in the courtroom. His self-hatred for the time spent away from his wife and two children during that final crisis has left him determined not to set foot in another court room. Not ever.

And so this sequel to Black Water Rising, the red-hot hit by this author, starts out ominously, as a vulnerable teen waiting at a bus stop wonders whether she should run from the car that is watching her, even though she is so far from home that she doesn’t know how to get back, or wait for that bus. Next thing we know, she’s been murdered.

But Jay Porter is still too caught up in his own personal situation to pay much attention at first. Bernie’s sister Evelyn helped him get Bernie’s clothes packed up and moved out, but he can’t look at her car. Can’t look. And the holidays coming around the corner, all the gut-punching emotion with which they are fraught, that stinks too.

At this point, I should let you know that you can’t read this yet. It won’t come out till April, but I got my ARC from edelweiss books a week ago, and I’ve been reading it obsessively, so now is the time to review it. I will post this again when the book comes out, but for now, you can pre-order it, or put it on your Christmas list. After the holidays have come, gone, been cleaned up and winter survived, wouldn’t it be nice to come home and find this heart-pounding thriller waiting in the mailbox to make your weekend better? And what a story it is!

And so, back to Jay Porter. Porter is holding Cole Oil to the award the courts granted to the many citizens he represented. His fee, 20 million dollars, will be enough for him to retire on. He can send his secretary into the retirement she longs for, and he can put his feet up and be a father to his kids. But oh, how he wishes Bernie could be there.

Meanwhile, his friends and neighbors are growing agitated about Alicia Nowell’s disappearance. She is the third girl from the community to go missing in the past few years. The first two were kept alive for a few days; their bodies were found on day 6, and the coroner ruled they had been dead for only 24 hours or less. So they figure that girl is out there, alive, somewhere. Volunteer crews are searching fields after the cops have been there, squaring off grids in professional fashion while others knock on doors, try to get information that the local cop shop hasn’t found. And in the midst of a mayoral race, hay is being made by the opponent of the traditional Black candidate. Because the neighborhood has been slowly, insidiously (to some) changing since the death of Jim Crow. Now young Black kids from strong families don’t have to live in Pleasantville to find a good house. They can move wherever they want. That’s good, right? But Latino families looking for good schools and good housing find reception that is sometimes tense as they ease into town, and the old guard realizes they may no longer be a unified force politically.

Disbelief and horror take hold when the grandson of the community’s most venerated elder is arrested for the murder of Alicia Nowell. Assuming that an error has been made and without a second thought, Jay, who by coincidence happens to be at the police station while Neal Hathorne is being questioned, strides into the interrogation room and announces that he is Neal’s attorney. He has no idea what a firestorm he has unleashed upon himself, and upon his family.

I am retired, and have the luxury of several hours of designated reading time every evening. It’s pretty sweet. But this book caught me by the hair and made me stay with it, modifying my schedule so I could see just what the hell is happening here. My e-reader followed me down to the kitchen. It followed me into the laundry room. I was cranky when the phone rang and interrupted my time with Jay. Because after all, we had to get him out of this mess, and what the hell is going on with his daughter Ellie? Good thing he is being a careful father so that we won’t have to deal with that old, hackneyed now-they’re-after-his-own-kid plot line. Jay is smart enough to realize his daughter fits the profile of the kidnapped and murdered girls, and he is looking out for his girl. We respect him for it, and I nodded with approval at the e-reader as I fed the dog, went out to get the mail. I broke or spilled things four times because I wasn’t looking at what I was doing; I was reading this book, because the book couldn’t wait.

If Locke’s fingernail-biter of a tale reminds me of the style of any other writer, it is of James Lee Burke, now an octogenarian who is unlikely to write much more. And although only Locke knows whether it is intended as a nod to that bayou living legend, she names the bereaved parents Robicheaux. I rather liked the touch, if that’s what it was.

So whether you order this book, request it as a gift, or buy it when it comes out, consider it a must read. This book is already creating a buzz six months prior to publication, and it is going to be a monster. Don’t let yourself be left out!

“Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?”: A Psychologist Explains the Development of Racial Identity, by Beverly Daniel Tatum *****

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whyare all the black kidsThis is a wonderful volume, legendary and still current after over a decade, both for teachers and parents of Black youth. It’s not a bad read for everyone else either. For those who have felt uneasy watching African-American students group together (this is written for a US audience, but I suspect the principles apply in almost every developed nation with any sizable dark-skinned and disenfranchised population), take heart. It’s good for them to do that, at least for awhile.

I am retired from teaching now, but I can recall uneasily wondering, at first, whether I was doing something wrong when my Black kids would all land together in the same work group, when my students did group work and chose who they’d work with. Was I creating a little Apartheid in my classroom without knowing it? Were my Caucasian students making my Black students uncomfortable? What was I doing wrong?

I got a clue from two places, and they were both at home. I noticed that my then-teenage son, who is Black, mostly hung out with other Black kids. When I married my husband, who is a Japanese citizen, he asked me to look for a house in a heavily Asian area, and if I couldn’t find one, to go to the Black community rather than an all-white neighborhood. So by the time I read this book, I had the pieces, and Tatum helped me put them in the right places for a better picture. I breathed a lot easier after I read her book.

Turns out that when Black kids have what Tatum calls an “immersion experience” it improves their self esteem. They need, for awhile at least, to be around kids who look like them. It’s a healthy thing for them to do. If you are Caucasian, it isn’t about you. You aren’t being rejected; its just that African-American kids (or sometimes it’s all dark-skinned kids, with a subtle but distinct shift somewhere along the pigment gradation line) need each other. And if you are a teacher who isn’t African-American, it isn’t that you have created an unhealthy classroom atmosphere, as long as you are providing choices.

But as much as I enjoyed teaching, my family is where my heart is, and so I paid closer attention to this phenomenon when the family from two states gathered, which we do about once a year, sometimes more. At whole family gatherings, I have noticed that in our multiracial family, all the African-American kids clump together, usually sooner rather than later. Cousins from three different families converge into a block, walking away from their paler sibs. There’s an age gap of about a decade, but it doesn’t matter.

There’s nothing exclusionary or unfriendly about it; others who join them are greeted warmly, and sometimes the working class Caucasian siblings land over there with them sooner or later, as the professional Caucasian siblings merge with the older white folk. It’s almost eerie. It is as if there were a magnetic force field that calls only to pigmentation.

Tatum makes sense of all this. She lets us know that this is normal, and that it’s not only okay, it’s great.

This book is a classic must-read for teachers for all the right reasons. Parents of Black kids may benefit, and anyone else out there who worries or feels excluded may enjoy having the mystery erased. If you’re not Black, it’s not about you. Relax. And if you are African-American, maybe you already knew, at some level, but still might like to see what an African-American academic has discovered over the course of her research.

Interesting and extremely useful to a lot of folks on a lot of levels.

A Penny for the Hangman, by Tom Savage *****

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a penny for the hangmanTom Savage is not new to the scary-book biz, but he was new to me. Maybe that is why I fell for the formulaic-looking beginning to this book. Ho hum. Been there, read that. Since it was obviously a fast read, I figured I would get it over with, write my review, poor fellow, and move on.

That was my mistake.

Here’s the premise: Karen Tyler is a journalist just looking for the meaty, headline-grabbing story that will launch her career. Her editor isn’t giving her much to work with. Then comes the phantom phone call. It relates to an infamous historical murder, and it is too tempting for a journalist with any kind of moxie to walk away from.

See, many years ago, a pair of juvenile delinquents had murdered their entire household. It was an unthinkable killing spree. One of the youngsters was found at the scene of the crime; the other had painted himself in the blood of his family (and that of an innocent servant who was in the way) and made a break for it. The coast guard picked him up. Both boys went away to serve long sentences; when they were released, neither was young anymore.

Tyler, our journalist, gets a phone call from one of the two killers, and he offers her an exclusive interview, swears there is more to the story than anyone knew. He will even pay her plane fare to St. Thomas, adding a free tropical vacation to his offer.

We, the readers, chant that same refrain we have chanted during so many scary books and movies: Don’t do it! Don’t get on that plane! Don’t get on that boat! Don’t go to that island! It’s a trap!

To reinforce our fears, the narrative is punctuated with journal entries by various characters in the story. And oh my my my, it sure doesn’t look good for our gutsy but perhaps imprudent reporter.

But nothing, no nothing, is the way it seems. I caught onto one plot trick, but then by the time I caught on, Savage had pretty much given me all the puzzle pieces, and it wasn’t a major plot point that I sleuthed out, it was fairly incidental. Savage is a magician with story, and he has more hidden up his sleeve than any reader can possibly guess!

So for Halloween this year, give yourself a gift that will keep those shadows jumping on the wall as you read in your favorite book by the fire…or the space heater…or…well, you get the idea. This story, which will be released October 7, has more twists, turns, uphill battles and plunges than Space Mountain, and more bodies than a slasher flick (but without the excessive gore, at least on my own personal ick-meter).

Thank you and thank you again to Net Galley and Random House for treating me to Savage’s work. His most successful book before this one, they say, is Valentine, and it goes onto my to-read shelf.

Why do we read these terrifying tales with blood on the stones and body parts in places they don’t belong? I think it is because they make us feel so much safer and more secure in our own little nooks and crannies. When there’s a killer thundering around every corner, it makes our own problems seem so small.

If you are in need of that sort of pick-me-up, or if you just adore a book in which things and people unknown lurk in the shadows—or not—well maybe so, actually—then you just have to get Savage’s book. If you aren’t up for reading it all by yourself, then you can read it with your friend or partner, and it will be twice the thrill.

Highly recommended!