Tuesday, October 25, 2011

What is Geoff Hyatt reading?

Today's featured contributor at Writers Read: Geoff Hyatt, author of Birch Hills at World’s End.

His entry begins:
Crooked Little Vein by Warren Ellis

“You know what it’s like, finding eight middle-aged guys having tantric sex with ostriches? ...My girlfriend came to bed one night in a feather boa and I started crying.”

I read the above couple of lines in the bookstore and then walked to the counter and bought the book. Guess I’m a cheap date. Even though this detective novel sends up what is perhaps already the most satirized popular genre, Ellis is a witty and gleefully vulgar writer whose narrator recalls a hybrid of Phillip Marlowe and...[read on]
About Birch Hills at World’s End, from the publisher:
Birch Hills at World’s End begins between Detroit and nowhere, in 1999, when high school senior Josh Reilly senses an apocalypse approaching. Josh's unease increases as his privileged but disturbed friend Erik schemes in a journal he calls "The Doomsday Book," where he plots revenge against the suburbia he's learned to despise. When Lindsay, a sixteen-year-old famed for dramatic self-mutilation and questionable poetry, becomes Josh's girlfriend, Erik finds companionship in a circle of bikers and small-time meth traffickers. Josh, suspecting his friend Erik has become a competitor for Lindsay's affections, peeks into the Doomsday Book and is shocked by what he learns. A web of domestic strife, romantic rivalry, and millennial anxiety challenges two boys to stand together as their youth comes apart.

Columbine... Y2K... can friendships survive the end of the world?
Learn more about the book and author at Geoff Hyatt's website, and read an excerpt from Birch Hills at World’s End.

Writers Read: Geoff Hyatt.

--Marshal Zeringue