Books

Neon Angel: A Memoir of a Runaway by Cherie Currie is about to hit bookshelves tomorrow, March 16th, 2010. Cherie Currie, with her signature Bowie haircut and fishnet stockings, was the groundbreaking lead singer of ’70s teenage all-girl rock band The Runaways. At the tender age of fifteen, she joined a group of talented girls — Joan Jett and Lita Ford on guitar, Jackie Fox on bass, and Sandy West on drums—who could play rock like no one else.

Arriving on the Los Angeles music scene in 1975, they catapulted from playing small clubs to selling out major stadiums, headlining shows with opening acts like the Ramones, Van Halen, Cheap Trick, and Blondie. Currie lit up the stage with the provocative teen-rebellion songs “Cherry Bomb,” “Queens of Noise,” and “Born to Be Bad,” riding a wave of hit songs and platinum albums, all while touring around the world...

SFSite (the 'home page for science fiction and fantasy literature') and Locus Magazine (the website for the 'leading news and review magazine for science fiction and fantasy') have posted lists of sci-fi and fantasy literature they decided were the 'best' of 2009. Not surprisingly, SFSite mostly chose titles written by men. Locus did a little better.

SFSite had only one novel, "Boneshaker" by Cherie Priest, on their top ten list. There were 21 Honorable Mentions, three of which were by women, including Catherynne M. Valente's "Palimpset", "Year of the Flood" by Margaret Atwood and "The Red Tree" by Caitlin R. Kiernan. You can see them all here...

Helene Hegemann, of Berlin, just wrote her first novel which has become a finalist for a major book prize. At the tender age of 17. Her dystopian vision of Berlin's drug culture and club scene, through the eyes of her 16-year-old protagonist, is called Axolotl Roadkill, and is No. 5 on the magazine Spiegel’s hardcover best-seller list. So why aren't we celebrating?

Because Helene has plagiarized from the almost unknown novel Strobo by blogger Airen published last year by SuKuLTuR, a small publishing house in Berlin, to the tune of entire unchanged pages...

Interview by Alan Kelly

Sarah Pinborough is primarily a horror writer with forays into science-fiction, thrillers, media tie-ins and more personal tales of magic realism and mortality. To date she has written six paperback originals for Leisure books, a novella for PS Publishing and a series of short stories for numerous anthologies. The content of her work is as it comes, sick, funny and nastier than a sack full of burning ferrets on a bonfire. I was greatly impressed by her stab at the creature feature subgenre with Feeding Ground – set in the same universe as Breeding Ground (On my own TBR list) – women suddenly become grotesquely obese and give birth to ravenous giant spider, and a Kingpin discovers a way to control some of them, with crack cocaine...

Featuring stories from by Paul Kane, Marie O'Regan, Clive Barker, Neil Gaiman, Dave McKean, Mike Mignola, Kelley Armstrong, Barbie Wilde, Sarah Langan, Mick Garris, Steve Niles
Reviewed by Lis Fies

I do have something new to ask Mick and Cynthia Garris at horror functions. "Hi Mick and Cynthia. So Mick, when your washed-up British-director character was suspended in the air while mid-insertion into his cute female PA and the cenobites filmed them while they had their skin and bones ripped apart by machines, was that a metaphor for how you have no privacy? Mick? Where are you going? Can we watch?"...

Faithless: Book One of the Alyce Kerr, Faith Healer Trilogy
Written by Yolanda Sfetsos
Damnation Books
Reviewed by Alan Kelly

Someone forgot to tell the heroine of Yolanda Sfetsos' new horror novella Faithless, Alyce Kerr, that the road to the New Age success story is one that’s always been paved with bad intentions. It is clear from the outset that the character has never rented out The Craft or seen an episode of Buffy which features Willow...

Written by Joan De La Haye
Review by Sue Gabel
Rebel e Publishers

Can the living be physically or mentally tortured? In Sarah’s world, it definitely seems possible. Sarah is a single girl, pretty and well liked by her few friends and what family she has left. She is quite the loner though, seemingly unable to trust anyone completely.

Soon after her father’s unexpected suicide, Sarah begins to believe she’s going completely mad. She keeps having horrific hallucinations, and can’t tell if they are becoming real or if it’s all just in her mind...

Review by: Alan Kelly
Author: Danny Hogan

It’s hardly a surprise that Miramax looked at the buying options for Danny Hogan’s brazen novella Killer Tease. At a mere 23,000 words, this little book would make the perfect template for a film. A compact little book which is guaranteed to never let your attention waver.

Killer Tease has as its center-piece Eloise Murphy. She isn’t pleasant, she is a down and dirty dangerous woman whose been pissed off once to often. This slim little book should be handed out as a how-to-crush-a-potential-rapists-nuts-manual to every naive 16 year old girl (and boy!) – Eloise is a burlesque star at a sleazy seaside resort until a punter chances his arm and near loses it. Shortly thereafter Eloise is exiting stage left, blackmailed into working for a ferrety pimp who happens to have in his possession some unsavory pictures from her past, she inexorably drawn into a trafficking racket.

Interview by Alan Kelly

Vaudeville, veiled hats, doppelgangers, clowns, macabre, destruction, deformities, ghosts, insane asylums, cut throat razors, creepy dolls, blood baths, Kathy Acker, Sartre, b/w crime photography, oddities, gas masks, medical curiosities, prosthetic limbs, existentialism, surrealism, Bataille, shiny sharp toys, tod browning, cannibalism, serial killers, philia; each word more or less sums up Rachel Kendall’s Sein und Werden (Being and Becoming). Rachel Kendall, the editor of Sein und Werden has agreed to sit down for a few words on the weirdest print/online magazine currently doing the rounds. A magazine that is going from strength to strength...

Featuring stories by: Loren Rhoads, Maria Alexander, Mehitobel Wilson, and Christa Faust
2008, Dark Arts Books

Horror and erotica go together quite a bit in this genre (that being, 'horror') but sometimes erotica can miss out on one of the most important parts of what is sexy: desire. These stories are not about cold or nameless desire, poetry, or making the disgusting palatable. They're about some very real people (most of them women) who crave love, flesh, and other less normal aspects of human sexuality. The authors of Sins of the Sirens have gone out of their way to write stories that are not the usual fare in horrorotica. In fact, some of the stories hardly qualify as horror, being more like series of one-act dramas, albeit with a dark slant. Rarely does the supernatural rear its head, (it does in a few, like Rhoads Last Born and The Angel's Lair) Sins deals mostly with relatable characters and fetishes...