Danielle Banas's "The Supervillain and Me," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: The Supervillain and Me by Danielle Banas.

The entry begins:

When I write I always imagine the scene playing out as if it were part of a movie, however, I don’t picture specific actors as my characters until either very late in the first draft or until the first draft has been completed. I flip-flopped between many actors while I was writing and editing The Supervillain and Me, but finally I settled on Lili Reinhart for my main character, Abby. I love watching her play Betty Cooper on Riverdale, and she definitely has the right look for Abby. The version of Betty that she plays is a total badass, and Abby has many badass qualities as well, so I think she would knock it out of the park.

To play the accused supervillain Iron Phantom, I hands down choose Casey...[read on]

Visit Danielle Banas's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Danielle Banas & Cooper.

My Book, The Movie: The Supervillain and Me.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Baldacci's six favorite books with an element of mystery

David Baldacci's newest novel is The Fallen.

One of his six favorite books with an element of mystery, as shared at The Week magazine:

The Shetland Island Mysteries by Ann Cleeves

Cleeves' tales, set on islands off the northern coast of Scotland, star local police detective Jimmy Perez. If you crave atmosphere in your mystery novels, especially craggy, gloomy, windswept, and solitary, you have come to the right series.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Page 99 Test: Raven Black.

The Page 99 Test: White Nights.

The Page 99 Test: Red Bones.

The Page 69 Test: Blue Lightning.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Erin Bowman's "Contagion"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Contagion by Erin Bowman.

About the book, from the publisher:

After receiving a distress call from a drill team on a distant planet, a skeleton crew is sent into deep space to perform a standard search-and-rescue mission.

When they arrive, they find the planet littered with the remains of the project—including its members’ dead bodies. As they try to piece together what could have possibly decimated an entire project, they discover that some things are best left buried—and some monsters are only too ready to awaken.

Visit Erin Bowman's website.

The Page 69 Test: Contagion.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Kenneth A. Reinert's "No Small Hope"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: No Small Hope: Towards the Universal Provision of Basic Goods by Kenneth A. Reinert.

About the book, from the publisher:

With headlines focused on human suffering-civil wars, refugee flows, the spread of disease due to hunger and poor sanitation, population growth, climate change-it is easy to dive into despair. What is needed, instead, is a radical rethinking of global policy to realize the potential for improving the human condition.

This book provides hope by examining the basic needs for a fundamental shift in thinking about development and human security for both practical and ethical reasons. Kenneth A. Reinert calls for a basic goods approach that focuses on the provision of nutritious food, clean water, sanitation, health services, education services, housing, electricity, and human security services. This approach bridges two perspectives: that of standard growth, which emphasizes increasing GDP per capita, and that of capabilities/human development, which puts priority on the realization of human potential. Reinert argues that only when growth leads to an increase in the broad-based provision of basic goods and services will the hoped-for expansion of human capabilities and development be achieved.

No Small Hope places the basic goods approach on the firm foundation of objective human needs and subsistence rights. It offers a practical agenda for making progress towards human development by focusing on the real determinants of human well-being in an ethical system of moral minimalism. In a world of climate change, increased risk of natural disasters and increased refugee flows, the basic goods approach promises to help alleviate ongoing suffering and address vast deprivations in basic needs fulfillment.

Learn more about No Small Hope at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: No Small Hope.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Carola Dunn reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Carola Dunn, author of The Corpse at the Crystal Palace: A Daisy Dalrymple Mystery (Volume 23).

Her entry begins:

The Prague Sonata, by Bradford Morrow

Many aspects of The Prague Sonata appealed to me. The theme is classical music. It's a mystery, the genre I write, though a murderless one: Who wrote the brilliant sonata, and where are the two missing movements, if they still exist? Can the young female musicologist outwit the old men who are trying to steal her discovery? The setting, Prague, is a city I've visited all too briefly and would love to revisit. The history, from WWI through the Nazi occupation of Prague and flight of the Jews, the Prague Spring and the resistance to the Soviet reoccupation, all is familiar but from new perspectives. There's even an understated romance, between the musicologist and...[read on]

About The Corpse at the Crystal Palace, from the publisher:

A casual outing to the Crystal Palace in London takes a mysterious and murderous turn in The Corpse at the Crystal Palace, the latest mystery in Carola Dunn’s beloved Daisy Dalrymple series.

April 1928: Daisy Dalrymple Fletcher is visited in London by her young cousins. On the list of must-see sites is the Crystal Palace. Discovering that her children's nanny, Nanny Gilpin, has never seen the Palace, Daisy decides to make a day of it—bringing her cousins, her 3-year-old twins, her step-daughter Belinda, the nurserymaid, and Nanny Gilpin. Yet this ordinary outing goes wrong when Mrs. Gilpin goes off to the ladies’ room and fails to return. When Daisy goes to look for her, she doesn't find her nanny but instead the body of another woman dressed in a nanny's uniform.

Meanwhile, Belinda and the cousins spot Mrs. Gilpin chasing after yet another nanny. Intrigued, they trail the two through the vast Crystal Palace and into the park. After briefly losing sight of their quarry, they stumble across Mrs. Gilpin lying unconscious in a small lake inhabited by huge concrete dinosaurs.

When she comes to, Mrs. Gilpin can't remember what happened after leaving the twins in the nurserymaid's care. Daisy's husband, Detective Chief Inspector Alec Fletcher of Scotland Yard, finds himself embroiled in the investigation of the murdered nanny. Worried about her children's own injured nanny, Daisy is determined to help. First she has to discover the identity of the third nanny, the presumed murderer, and to do so, Daisy must uncover why the amnesic Mrs. Gilpin deserted her charges to follow the missing third nanny.

Learn more about the book and author at Carola Dunn's website and blog.

Coffee with a Canine: Carola Dunn and Trillian.

The Page 69 Test: Heirs of the Body.

The Page 69 Test: Superfluous Women.

The Page 69 Test: The Corpse at the Crystal Palace.

Writers Read: Carola Dunn.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five novels to inspire you to imagine a better future

Kameron Hurley is the author of The Stars Are Legion, the award-winning essay collection The Geek Feminist Revolution, the God’s War trilogy, and the Worldbreaker Saga. Her newest book is Apocalypse Nyx.

At Tor.com Hurley tagged five works "of uplifting speculative fiction that emphasize our collaborative greatness over our despair. Our passion for creation over destruction. Our struggle to become better together than we are individually." One title on the list:

The Cloud Roads by Martha Wells

Wells has been consistently writing exceptional novels for decades (I started reading her when I was a teen! Egads). Yet, it’s only in the last few years that her work finally seems to be getting the greater recognition that it deserves. Her novella All Systems Red hit the New York Times bestseller list, won a Nebula Award, and has been shortlisted for a Hugo (if I was going to list six books here, I’d list All Systems Red, even though the protagonist is a robot. It is a delightful robot). The Cloud Roads is the first in Wells’s Raksura series about an outcast shapeshifter who can transform into a winged creature. Like many of Wells’s protagonists, he’s an immediately likable loner searching for his place in the world. His journey leads him deep into the unknown of a shapeshifter colony, where his presence upsets the balance of power for the entire community.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Derek Milman's "Scream All Night"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Scream All Night by Derek Milman.

About the book, from the publisher:

DARIO HEYWARD KNOWS ONE THING: He’s never going back to Moldavia Studios, the iconic castle that served as the set, studio, and home to the cast and crew of dozens of cult classic B-horror movies. It’s been three years since Dario’s even seen the place, after getting legally emancipated from his father, the infamous director of Moldavia’s creature features.

But then Dario’s brother invites him home to a mysterious ceremony involving his father and a tribute to his first film—The Curse of the Mummy’s Tongue. Dario swears his homecoming will be a one-time visit. A way for him to get closure on his past—and reunite with Hayley, his first love and costar of Zombie Children of the Harvest Sun, a production fraught with real-life tragedy—and say good-bye for good. But the unthinkable happens—Dario gets sucked back into the twisted world of Moldavia and the horrors, both real and imagined, he’s left there.

With only months to rescue the sinking studio and everyone who has built their lives there, Dario must confront the demons of his past—and the uncertainties of his future. But can he escape the place that’s haunted him his whole life?

Visit Derek Milman's website.

My Book, The Movie: Scream All Night.

The Page 69 Test: Scream All Night.

--Marshal Zeringue

Susan McBride's "Walk A Crooked Line," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Walk a Crooked Line by Susan McBride.

The entry begins:

Oh, how I would love to see Jo Larsen come to life! She’s the protagonist of both Walk A Crooked Line and Walk Into Silence, my police procedurals that tiptoe on the dark side. Jo is kind of a mystery herself, and, as I peel back the layers of her family history, I can see several actresses who could walk in her shoes. When I first wrote Walk Into Silence, I envisioned Jennifer Beals, the actress from Flashdance, who’s physically pretty much the perfect Jo. The only drawback is Ms. Beals is a little older than I am, and, for that reason, perhaps too seasoned to play Jo Larsen now, since Jo is in her mid-thirties. Still, I think she could pull it off. Age is just a number, right?

My next pick would have been Meg…[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Susan McBride's website.

The Page 69 Test: Little Black Dress.

The Page 69 Test: Very Bad Things.

My Book, The Movie: Very Bad Things.

My Book, The Movie: Walk Into Silence.

The Page 69 Test: Walk Into Silence.

My Book, The Movie: Walk a Crooked Line.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six YA novels featuring dangerous waters

At the BN Teen blog Samantha Randolph tagged six YA novels set in dangerous waters, including:

The November Girl, by Lydia Kang

Kang delivers a highly original and dark tale with The November Girl. Anda is the daughter of the lake and controller of the November storms that wreck ships. Until now, she has managed to channel her half-human side enough to keep her destruction limited to November. But as each day of the new storm season passes, she feels her mother’s call to sink into the lake forever. As if she wasn’t battling enough demons, human boy Hector has decided to hide out on the island, away from the system, and person, that hurt him. As the storms rage around them, they each must decide who they will choose to be.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Ruthanna Emrys reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Ruthanna Emrys, author of Deep Roots.

Her entry begins:

I’ve just started Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Calculating Stars, in which a dinosaur-level asteroid impact on Washington DC in 1952 kicks off a no-holds-barred program to colonize space. The opening made me cry about five times—it probably didn’t help that I was reading it on the DC metro. It perfectly captures the weirdness of how people respond to crises. The protagonist is Jewish, and about the same level of observant that I am; there’s this point where she’s finally made it to safety, and found a place to stay, and her generous, well-meaning hosts offer her eggs cooked in bacon grease and of course you can’t say anything… Kowal gets the way trivial things push you over the edge in the middle of world-shaking events. The rest of the book is...[read on]

About Deep Roots, from the publisher:

Ruthanna Emrys’ Innsmouth Legacy, which began with Winter Tide and continues with Deep Roots, confronts H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos head-on, boldly upturning his fear of the unknown with a heart-warming story of found family, acceptance, and perseverance in the face of human cruelty and the cosmic apathy of the universe. Emrys brings together a family of outsiders, bridging the gaps between the many people marginalized by the homogenizing pressure of 1940s America.

Aphra Marsh, descendant of the People of the Water, has survived Deep One internment camps and made a grudging peace with the government that destroyed her home and exterminated her people on land. Deep Roots continues Aphra’s journey to rebuild her life and family on land, as she tracks down long-lost relatives. She must repopulate Innsmouth or risk seeing it torn down by greedy developers, but as she searches she discovers that people have been going missing. She will have to unravel the mystery, or risk seeing her way of life slip away.

Visit Ruthanna Emrys's website.

The Page 69 Test: Deep Roots.

Writers Read: Ruthanna Emrys.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Sibel Hodge's "Into the Darkness"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Into the Darkness by Sibel Hodge.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Missing…

In a hidden basement, eighteen-year-old Toni is held captive and no one can hear her screams. She’s been abducted after investigating unspeakable things in the darkest corners of the Internet.

The Vigilante…

Fearing the worst, Toni’s mother turns to ex-SAS operative Mitchell to help find her missing daughter. And when Mitchell discovers Toni’s fate rests in the hands of pure evil, he races against the clock to find Toni and bring her out alive. But even that might not be enough to save her.

The Detective…

DS Warren Carter is looking forward to a new job and a simpler life. But when he’s called in to investigate the brutal murder of a seemingly normal couple, he becomes entangled in lives that are anything but simple. And as he digs deeper, he uncovers a crime more twisted than he could ever have imagined.

Visit Sibel Hodge's website.

My Book, The Movie: Untouchable.

My Book, The Movie: Into the Darkness.

The Page 69 Test: Into the Darkness.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Sheila Murnaghan & Deborah H. Roberts's "Childhood and the Classics"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Childhood and the Classics: Britain and America, 1850-1965 by Sheila Murnaghan and Deborah H. Roberts.

About the book, from the publisher:

The dissemination of classical material to children has long been a major form of popularization with far-reaching effects, although until very recently it has received almost no attention within the growing field of classical reception studies. This volume explores the ways in which children encountered the world of ancient Greece and Rome in Britain and the United States over a century-long period beginning in the 1850s, as well as adults' literary responses to their own childhood encounters with antiquity. Rather than discussing the role of classics in education, it focuses on books read for enjoyment, and on two genres of children's literature in particular: the myth collection and the historical novel. The tradition of myths retold as children's stories is traced in the work of writers and illustrators from Nathaniel Hawthorne and Charles Kingsley to Roger Lancelyn Green and Ingri and Edgar Parin D'Aulaire, while the discussion of historical fiction focuses particularly on the roles of nationality and gender in the construction of an ancient world for modern children. The book concludes with an investigation of the connections between childhood and antiquity made by writers for adults, including James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and H.D. Recognition of the fundamental role in children's literature of adults' ideas about what children want or need is balanced throughout by attention to the ways in which child readers have made such works their own. The formative experiences of antiquity discussed throughout help to explain why despite growing uncertainty about the appeal of antiquity to modern children, the classical past remains perennially interesting and inspiring.

Learn more about Childhood and the Classics at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Childhood and the Classics.

--Marshal Zeringue

Four books that changed Pamela Hart

Pamela Hart is the author of The Soldier’s Wife, The War Bride, A Letter from Italy, and The Desert Nurse. As Pamela Freeman, she's written children’s fiction, epic fantasy, crime fiction and children’s poetry.

One of four books that changed the author, as shared at the Sydney Morning Herald:

NATIVE TONGUE
Suzette Haden Elgin

I'm picking this as representative of a whole lot of dystopian science fiction written by women in the '60s and '70s. It deserves to be read alongside The Handmaid's Tale. It centres on a group of women linguists who are developing a women's language. It started me thinking about the development of the self and violence and language and connections between women and romantic love … ideas I'm still playing with in my fiction today.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Rob Hart reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Rob Hart, author of Potter’s Field.

His entry begins:

I recently finished There There by Tommy Orange, which is about a dozen Native Americans living in Oakland and converging on a powwow. Some of them are planning to rob it but it’s not a heist novel—it’s more about the Native American experience in this country, and it’s really thoughtful and beautifully-written and just slams...[read on]

About Potter's Field, from the publisher:

The final book in Rob Hart's acclaimed Ash McKenna series shows that Ash can go home again...but it might cost him everything.

Amateur private investigator Ash McKenna is home. After more than a year on the road he's ready to face the demons he ran away from in New York City. And he’s decided what he wants to do with his life: Become a private investigator, for real. Licensed and everything. No more working as a thug for hire. But within moments of stepping off the plane, Ginny Tonic, the drag queen crime lord who once employed him―and then tried to have him killed―asks to see him.

One of her newest drag queen soldiers has gone missing, and Ginny suspects she’s been ensnared by the burgeoning heroin scene on Staten Island. Ginny wants Ash to find her. Because he’s the best, and because he knows Staten Island, his home borough. Ash is hesitant―but Ginny’s offer of $10,000 is enough to get him on his feet. And the thought of a lost kid and a bereft family is too much for him to bear.

He accepts, and quickly learns there’s something much bigger at play. Some very dangerous people are vying for control of the heroin trade on Staten Island, which is recording the highest rate of overdose deaths in the city. As Ash navigates deadly terrain, he find his most dangerous adversary might be his own past. Because those demons he ran away from have been waiting for him to come back.

Visit Rob Hart's website.

My Book, The Movie: Potter's Field.

The Page 69 Test: Potter's Field.

Writers Read: Rob Hart.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Carola Dunn's "The Corpse at the Crystal Palace"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: The Corpse at the Crystal Palace: A Daisy Dalrymple Mystery (Volume 23) by Carola Dunn.

About the book, from the publisher:

A casual outing to the Crystal Palace in London takes a mysterious and murderous turn in The Corpse at the Crystal Palace, the latest mystery in Carola Dunn’s beloved Daisy Dalrymple series.

April 1928: Daisy Dalrymple Fletcher is visited in London by her young cousins. On the list of must-see sites is the Crystal Palace. Discovering that her children's nanny, Nanny Gilpin, has never seen the Palace, Daisy decides to make a day of it—bringing her cousins, her 3-year-old twins, her step-daughter Belinda, the nurserymaid, and Nanny Gilpin. Yet this ordinary outing goes wrong when Mrs. Gilpin goes off to the ladies’ room and fails to return. When Daisy goes to look for her, she doesn't find her nanny but instead the body of another woman dressed in a nanny's uniform.

Meanwhile, Belinda and the cousins spot Mrs. Gilpin chasing after yet another nanny. Intrigued, they trail the two through the vast Crystal Palace and into the park. After briefly losing sight of their quarry, they stumble across Mrs. Gilpin lying unconscious in a small lake inhabited by huge concrete dinosaurs.

When she comes to, Mrs. Gilpin can't remember what happened after leaving the twins in the nurserymaid's care. Daisy's husband, Detective Chief Inspector Alec Fletcher of Scotland Yard, finds himself embroiled in the investigation of the murdered nanny. Worried about her children's own injured nanny, Daisy is determined to help. First she has to discover the identity of the third nanny, the presumed murderer, and to do so, Daisy must uncover why the amnesic Mrs. Gilpin deserted her charges to follow the missing third nanny.

Learn more about the book and author at Carola Dunn's website and blog.

Coffee with a Canine: Carola Dunn and Trillian.

The Page 69 Test: Heirs of the Body.

The Page 69 Test: Superfluous Women.

The Page 69 Test: The Corpse at the Crystal Palace.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tiffany Brownlee's "Wrong in All the Right Ways," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Wrong in All the Right Ways: A Novel by Tiffany Brownlee.

The entry begins:

When I wrote Wrong in All the Right Ways, I didn’t have any specific actors or actresses in mind. It wasn’t until I turned in the final edits for this novel that my friends got me to think about who the dream cast would be in a film adaptation. I’ve probably given this casting way more thought than I should have, but here goes:

Emma Ellenburg: Sabrina Carpenter

Dylan McAndrews: Nick Robinson

Karmin Ortega: Victoria...[read on]

Visit Tiffany Brownlee's website.

My Book, The Movie: Wrong in All the Right Ways.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Amy Carney's "Marriage and Fatherhood in the Nazi SS"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Marriage and Fatherhood in the Nazi SS by Amy Carney.

About the book, from the publisher:

From 1931 to 1945, leaders of the SS, a paramilitary group under the Nazi party, sought to transform their organization into a racially-elite family community that would serve as the Third Reich’s new aristocracy. They utilized the science of eugenics to convince SS men to marry suitable wives and have many children.

Marriage and Fatherhood in the Nazi SS by Amy Carney is the first work to significantly assess the role of SS men as husbands and fathers during the Third Reich. The family community, and the place of men in this community, started with one simple order issued by SS leader Heinrich Himmler. He and other SS leaders continued to develop the family community throughout the 1930s, and not even the Second World War deterred them from pursuing their racial ambitions.

Carney’s insight into the eugenic-based measures used to encourage SS men to marry and to establish families sheds new light on their responsibilities not only as soldiers, but as husbands and fathers as well.

Learn more about Marriage and Fatherhood in the Nazi SS at the University of Toronto Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Marriage and Fatherhood in the Nazi SS.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Randi Hutter Epstein reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Randi Hutter Epstein, author of Aroused: The History of Hormones and How They Control Just About Everything.

Her entry begins:

I have a stack of books on my night table that balloon until my husband complains when I flail my arm and they go flying off in a noisy avalanche in the middle of the night. Then I have to prune—weeding out the ones I’m not really reading at the moment and putting them back on the bookshelf. I read a mix of non-fiction and fiction, saving the novels for bedtime reading. That’s so I can drift off to sleep mulling over the lives of the imaginary characters rather than worry about the minutiae of my own forthcoming schedule.

I recently pulled out a weathered copy of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov [image, right] that I bought and read in 1981. Dostoyevsky is the perfect antidote whenever I feel that I overthink about overthinking. (Am I thinking too much? Worrying too much?) No, his characters overthink. But this time around...[read on]

About Aroused, from the publisher:

A guided tour through the strange science of hormones and the age-old quest to control them.

Metabolism, behavior, sleep, mood swings, the immune system, fighting, fleeing, puberty, and sex: these are just a few of the things our bodies control with hormones. Armed with a healthy dose of wit and curiosity, medical journalist Randi Hutter Epstein takes us on a journey through the unusual history of these potent chemicals from a basement filled with jarred nineteenth-century brains to a twenty-first-century hormone clinic in Los Angeles.

Brimming with fascinating anecdotes, illuminating new medical research, and humorous details, Aroused introduces the leading scientists who made life-changing discoveries about the hormone imbalances that ail us, as well as the charlatans who used those discoveries to peddle false remedies. Epstein exposes the humanity at the heart of hormone science with her rich cast of characters, including a 1920s doctor promoting vasectomies as a way to boost libido, a female medical student who discovered a pregnancy hormone in the 1940s, and a mother who collected pituitaries, a brain gland, from cadavers as a source of growth hormone to treat her son. Along the way, Epstein explores the functions of hormones such as leptin, oxytocin, estrogen, and testosterone, demystifying the science of endocrinology.

A fascinating look at the history and science of some of medicine’s most important discoveries, Aroused reveals the shocking history of hormones through the back rooms, basements, and labs where endocrinology began.

Visit Randi Hutter Epstein's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Randi Hutter Epstein, Ellie and Dexter.

The Page 99 Test: Aroused.

Writers Read: Randi Hutter Epstein.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Lisa Jensen's "Beast"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Beast: A Tale of Love and Revenge by Lisa Jensen.

About Beast: A Tale of Love and Revenge, from the publisher:

They say Château Beaumont is cursed. But servant-girl Lucie can’t believe such foolishness about handsome Jean-Loup Christian Henri LeNoir, Chevalier de Beaumont, master of the estate. But when the chevalier's cruelty is revealed, Lucie vows to see him suffer. A wisewoman grants her wish, with a spell that transforms Jean-Loup into monstrous-looking Beast, reflecting the monster he is inside. But Beast is nothing like the chevalier. Jean-Loup would never patiently tend his roses; Jean-Loup would never attempt poetry; Jean-Loup would never express remorse for the wrong done to Lucie. Gradually, Lucie realizes that Beast is an entirely different creature from the handsome chevalier, with a heart more human than Jean-Loup’s ever was. Lucie dares to hope that noble Beast has permanently replaced the cruel Jean-Loup — until an innocent beauty arrives at Beast’s château with the power to break the spell.

Filled with magic and fierce emotion, Lisa Jensen's multilayered novel will make you question all you think you know about beauty, beastliness, and happily ever after.

Visit Lisa Jensen's website.

Writers Read: Lisa Jensen.

The Page 69 Test: Beast.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best fantasy books steeped in the Southern Gothic

Craig DiLouie’s new fantasy novel is One of Us.

One of the author's ten top fantasy books steeped in the Southern Gothic, as shared at the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy blog:

Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy

In 1849, a boy joins a scalp hunting gang whose spiritual leader (the Judge) may be God or the Devil, taking him through a hellish Wild West landscape filled with violence.

Read about another entry on the list.

Blood Meridian is one authority's pick for the Great Texas novel; it is among Graham McTavish's six best books, ShortList's roundup of literature's forty greatest villains, Brian Boone's five great novels that will probably never be made into movies, Sarah Porter's five best books with unusual demons and devils, Chet Williamson's top ten novels about deranged killers, Callan Wink's ten best books set in the American West, Simon Sebag Montefiore's six favorite books, Richard Kadrey's five books about awful, awful people, Jason Sizemore's top five books that will entertain and drop you into the depths of despair, Robert Allison's top ten novels of desert war, Alexandra Silverman's top fourteen wrathful stories, James Franco's six favorite books, Philipp Meyer's five best books that explain America, Peter Murphy's top ten literary preachers, David Vann's six favorite books, Robert Olmstead's six favorite books, Michael Crummey's top ten literary feuds, Philip Connors's top ten wilderness books, six books that made a difference to Kazuo Ishiguro, Clive Sinclair's top 10 westerns, Maile Meloy's six best books, and David Foster Wallace's five direly underappreciated post-1960 U.S. novels. It appears on the New York Times list of the best American fiction of the last 25 years and among the top ten works of literature according to Stephen King.

--Marshal Zeringue