protean depravity

Yesterday was one of those wonderful days when wonderful surprises happen and anything seems possible. I had an afternoon shift at the Hammett and when I arrived there the word was already circulating around that in the morning the renowned SF author Peter F. Hamilton had been at the Otherland Bookstore, asking if he can sign his books on the shelves.

It is a rare talent for an author to be able to perfectly balance the weird elements in their writing with the mundane; to scatter into what is deceivingly like our lives that which decisively is unlike it, and to do so just to the right degree. This is a delicate craft, and it's one Michael Wehunt masters in his latest short story collection The Inconsolables . The title already implies it: All Wehunt's characters are in a state of uneasiness, they are looking for comfort and for solace, whether by reviving childhood interests after a separation, by adopting a stray dog after the death of a child, in hypochondriasis, or whether it's about a married couple who simultaneously reaches the midlife crisis, or a woman, lead by a crooked and scary cupid, confronting in a room all the men who have sexually assaulted her throughout her life, or the last man on Earth who will die, because he was born thirty-seven days before the dealine for immortality in a new world where it h...

Hello everyone, I hope you are doing well and the stormy summer doesn't frustrate you much - it does me. Here's something to read when the rain floods the city again (incidentally my first short review is about exactly a book about that), enjoy!

What comes to your mind when you think of the “Wild West”? Horses, bandits, desperados, cowboys, wise natives, prostitutes in petticoats dancing to piano songs in wooden saloons, rangers, scorching heat, guns, dust, grave diggers, Sheriffs and Reverends, public hangings, even Chinese railroad workers and wandering medicine men? Well, Hot Iron and Cold Blood adds flesh eating birds, vampires, worshipers of Yog-Sothoth, revenge spells, headless warriors, ghost dinosaurs, spirits, crazy pimps, and speaking holes to that, and so here we have one of the most original and well-done anthologies of the past decade which absolutely succeeds in wonderfully integrating the weird, the unsettling as well as the horror and terror into this intrinsically surreal and hostile, but at the same time free and hopeful environment. The idea of living in a time without my dentist and Nine Inch Nails is terrifying to me. Any historical story set in a time without these is principally uninteresti...

Oops! I almost forgot the blog's birthday (yet again)... 

  Mid-year has come and gone and it is again time for looking back at this year's reading and draw a balance. There's a bitter-sweet feeling though, there haven't been too many good books that impressed me greatly, though I have to admit, because I have been struggling a little bit privately, I have read a lot of non-fiction and self-help books which don't really flow into this balance. And in the end, they didn't really help a great deal, so they were kind of wasted reading time. So, my friends, here's this year's mid-year freakout, in the hope that the really good stuff is yet to come!

The first month of working at the murder mystery bookshop Hammett behind me, I naturally have been focusing on reading thrillers and mysteries, since my new colleagues have lots of good recommendations and I too need to have a few good books up my sleeve to recommend to customers. It is both similar and very different to working in Otherland as the reading habits of crime fiction readers are quite something else. For instance, there's no such thing as second reading in this genre. Once you know who the murder is it's done, you neither need to re-read nor really own that book anymore. Serializing crime stories for Netflix and other streaming platforms interestingly works against this genre, since, here too, once you know how the story ends, you don't really need to read it anymore. That's completely the opposite for Science Fiction and Fantasy, as once an SF/F story is filmed, that's where it grabs the audience's attention. After the first episode they come to bo...

Full of spoilers, as always! Make Room! Make Room! , one of the best predictive science fiction works of its time, and one of the most underrated too, foresaw in 1966 that the end of the century would be a time out of hell for New York City, opening the flood gates to an even more hellish new millennium: Climate change and scorching heat burning the planet down; the world bursting at its seems with extreme overpopulation; serious food and housing shortages; barely any water to drink and as a consequence, the lack of a vital infrastructure pushing the masses into crime... Not an ideal place at all. The book shows how people from different backgrounds cope under these utterly dire living conditions. Against this hellish backdrop we focus on Andy, a police detective tasked with investigating the seemingly mysterious death of the ultra rich mobster Mike O'Brien, Big Mike, who in fact has been killed by Taiwanese-American street boy Billie Chung in an attempted robbery. During the inves...

  For crime readers who like it a little harder and darker: Berlin's first Horror-Crime corner has opened in the Hammett Bookstore!