Tuesday, January 01, 2013

What is Jesse Bullington reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Jesse Bullington, author of The Folly of the World.

His entry begins:
I’ve been up to my eyebrows in research reading for most of the autumn, which doesn’t always make for the most thrilling recommendations, but now that I’ve wrapped up a few projects I’ve been able to pick up some more entertaining titles. Most of what I’ve currently got on-deck are short story anthologies or collections, as I find those are more agreeable to being set aside for extended periods as I’ve juggled pleasure reading with research. That said, there is one novel I’ve been very much enjoying, too…

It’s funny, because the previous time I penned one of these columns I was reading a Stephen Graham Jones title, and I’m once again under his literary thrall. This time it’s The Last Final Girl, a sort-of post-modern send-up of slasher movies. As with Demon Theory, an earlier novel of his, he’s written it as a highly stylized screenplay of sorts, though I think here he has improved upon the structure, as it’s more prose and less script, if that makes sense. The book really...[read on]
About The Folly of the World, from the publisher:
On a stormy night in 1421, the North Sea delivers a devastating blow to Holland: the Saint Elizabeth Flood, a deluge of biblical proportions that drowns hundreds of towns, thousands of people, and forever alters the geography of the Low Countries. Where the factions of the noble Hooks and the merchant Cods waged a literal class war but weeks before, there is now only a nigh-endless expanse of grey water, a desolate inland sea with moldering church spires jutting up like sunken tombstones. For a land already beleaguered by generations of civil war, a worse disaster could scarce be imagined.

Yet even disaster can be profitable, for the right sort of individual, and into this flooded realm sail three conspirators: a deranged thug at the edge of madness, a ruthless conman on the cusp of fortune, and a half-feral girl balanced between them. If they work together they may find reward beyond reckoning, but such promise is no guarantee against betrayals born of greed, rage, and lust.

In a topsy-turvey world where peasants feast while noblemen starve, these three uneasy confederates will learn that theft, fraud, and even murder are simply part of politics as usual in the island-city of Dordrecht, and even if their scheme succeeds they may not live long enough to enjoy it...
Learn more about the book and author at Jesse Bullington's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart.

The Page 69 Test: The Enterprise of Death.

Writers Read: Jesse Bullington.

My Book, The Movie: The Enterprise of Death.

The Page 69 Test: The Folly of the World.

Writers Read: Jesse Bullington.

--Marshal Zeringue