The Taken by Vicki Pettersson

Griffin “Grif” Shaw is a Centurion, an angel who helps souls cross into the Everlast, especially those who died violently – just as he did fifty years ago. Grif still wants to find out who killed his wife, Evie, the love of his life. One day he comes to collect the soul of a prostitute, and against his better judgment he grants her a few brief minutes of life again before taking her away. That was enough time for the woman (who was actually an undercover news photographer) to leave a message pointing to her killer and endanger her best friend’s life.

Katherine “Kit” Craig is a newspaper reporter for her family-owned paper who dresses and lives the rockabilly lifestyle. She is full of life and always in search of the truth. She’s waiting outside the motel where her best friend has gone undercover when she sees a man dressed as if he was one of the Rat Pack staring out the window. Within mere hours she would be brutally attacked – with the intent to rape and kill – in her own her home.

Grif is supposed to collect Kit’s soul before leaving earth. Fortunately for Kit, he acts on impulse and saves her by beating up her attackers. Now Grif’s in some real trouble with the heavenly host, and has been banished to earth to once again don weak and sinful flesh until he is able to let Kit Craig die and bring her soul home. Only he decides to protect her and help her figure out who murdered her best friend and why in exchange for the ace reporter’s help in solving his wife’s fifty year old murder case.

I really liked this book because the characters are fully drawn and believable and provide some great dialogue, Vicki Pettersson’s world building of Sin City and the rockabilly culture, the whole angel / urban fantasy premise and the story itself was gripping and kept me turning pages. One warning though, there are some slightly disturbing scenes involving forced prostitution of underage girls and there’s a fair helping of violence toward women (by the bad guys). Still, it was very enjoyable and highly recommended for fans of Jim Butcher, Laurell K. Hamilton, Kim Harrison, or Tad Williams‘ newest book The Dirty Streets of Heaven. The next in the Celestial Blues series, The Lost, came out this spring.

Find and reserve this book in our catalog.

Greatest Hits: The Dirty Streets of Heaven by Tad Williams

Join us the next five days and kick off the new year with The Book-A-Day Blog’s most popular posts of 2012!

Tad Williams is a well known Fantasy & Science Fiction writer (see The Dragonbone Chair & City of Golden Shadow), but this novel is set in a modern, real world setting (a fictional city in Northern California). Our narrator and main character is Bobby Dollar, a wise-cracking angel who lives on Earth and is an advocate for souls of the recently departed. In Williams’ world, when a person dies there is a trial and an angel and a demon each advocate for the soul to go to Heaven or Hell based on that person’s actions during life. The judge is one of the much higher levels of angels, and all of this naturally occurs outside of our perceived reality. It’s a pretty straight forward system – until one day when a soul goes missing before it can be assigned to Heaven, Hell or Purgatory for all eternity.

Bobby is not like any other angel I’ve ever read about – he drinks, curses and indulges his carnal desires when on Earth, and while he’s good at his job, his behavior means that he’s not exactly held in high esteem by his superiors up in Heaven. Then there’s the opposition: in addition to the demon advocates, Bobby is soon also mixed up with the likes of a higher level demoness known as the Countess of Cold Hands. She and her hellish companions make life – or is it afterlife? – very difficult for Bobby, who just wants to find out where the missing souls (yes, there have been more since that first one) have disappeared to. To make matters worse, a very powerful demon lord believes that Bobby has stolen something from him and has sent an ancient and practically unstoppable monster after him.

This novel is filled with action as Bobby races to find out what’s happened to the missing souls, evades the ancient monstrosity that’s hunting him, falls in lust with the Countess, and tries to avoid getting his friends – fellow angels on Earth – hurt. He’s also periodically “called upstairs” to be questioned by angels much higher than him on the celestial ladder. Even though Bobby is assured by everyone in Heaven that “God loves you,” he gets the distinct feeling that his superiors aren’t telling him everything they know.

Williams’ world building is first rate and he really made me feel like I was right there with Bobby, both in the Bay area and up in Heaven. Tad has also created some wonderfully relatable and highly entertaining characters for Bobby Dollar to interact with and play off of, with tons of memorable dialogue. I’d recommend this book for those who like paranormal detectives, especially the Harry Dresden series by Jim Butcher, as well as anyone who liked Piers Anthony’s Incarnations of Immortality series, starting with On a Pale Horse.

Find and reserve this book in our catalog.

How They Croaked: The Awful Ends of the Awfully Famous by Georgia Bragg

Are you interested in the lives and deaths of major historical figures? Did you used to be a big fan of MAD Magazine? If you answered “yes” to both these questions, then How They Croaked is the book for you.

Each person discussed in the book, from King Tut through Albert Einstein, either died in some horrific way, or their bodies were treated in some horrific way—sometimes both.  For instance, Beethoven had dropsy, a disease that caused his body to become bloated with rotting fluid. Doctors treated it by drilling a hole in his stomach to drain the fluid. They used this hole to drain fluid four times and each time plugged the hole with a piece of cloth afterwards. (There were no stitches back then, no anesthesia, and no pain killers.) Of course, the hole became infected. And that was just the beginning.  After the poor guy finally died, an autopsy was performed and pieces of his skull were stolen. His body has been dug up multiple times over the years in order to try to figure out what killed him. (It was lead poisoning.)

It’s time to point out that How They Croaked was written for young people. Thus, the emphasis on gore and the snarky style of writing. Here’s a sample from the chapter on Edgar Allen Poe:

Poe attended a lot of funerals. When he wasn’t going to funerals, he wrote stories about dead people (or soon-to-be-dead people) living in torture chambers, haunted houses, and other creepy locales with zero chance of escape. His stories start out with lines like “I was sick—sick unto death with that long agony,” and that’s the cheery part. Misery, loneliness, and death are the grim themes of this work … and of his life. Lots of bad stuff happened to him, and then he died.

I have to admit I was highly entertained. I listened to the audio of this book and the narrator, L.J. Ganser, injected even more snark into the narrative.  Maybe this means my sense of humor never matured past the MAD Magazine stage. That’s okay. What, me worry?

Find and reserve this book in our catalog.

The Gendarme by Mark Mustian

Part mystery, part historical fiction and part love story, The Gendarme is a short book about many things.  The story takes place in two timelines as the 92- year- old protagonist endures the short remainder of his life following the removal of a brain tumor.  Emmet is an American Turkish immigrant who lost all prior memory of his life after a head injury sustained during WWI. When his brain tumor is removed, Emmet’s memory seems to slowly return.

In his dreams, he is transported to the past where he appears as a gendarme forcing a group of Armenians into Syria during a grueling and violent death march. Emmet relives his crime, but also his unlikely romance with a young Armenian girl. This girl, forgotten in the aftermath of his injury, obsesses him once more in his old age, and as more is successively experienced in his dreams, he is driven to find out her fate.

While Emmet is pursuing his dream life, his real life continues in the contemporary world. As his mental state deteriorates, he eventually needs to be institutionalized, and his daughters are forced to make arrangements for his day to day care and support. In this timeline, readers experience his confusion in the sense that we, too, are unable to decipher what is real and what is dream or hallucination. Emmet’s fear and paranoia increase the more his dream life develops until he can no longer distinguish one from the other.

Mustian does not always make clear distinctions for the reader either. After finishing the book, I would periodically have to call yet another part of the plot into question until it was no longer possible to depend on any part of it. Even the events in the contemporary timeline are questionable. Reality deteriorates for Emmet while we’ve been following him, so we are drawn into his illusions just as he is. We know there is something from his past that has been unlocked in his memory, but we don’t know how much of it is real and how much of it is construction. The conclusion satisfies, but by then readers will feel themselves at the mercy of the same feverish impulse controlling Emmet in his increasingly irrational push to find what he remembers as the love of his life – and perhaps a type of redemption.

We can’t call Emmet an unreliable narrator because he isn’t the one telling story. However, the narration does objectively follow his perceptions and emotions, so we experience the story as Emmet does. You’ll just have to decide what to believe and whether questioning reality is always worthwhile.

Find and reserve this book in our catalog.

The Dirty Streets of Heaven by Tad Williams

Tad Williams is a well known Fantasy & Science Fiction writer (see The Dragonbone Chair & City of Golden Shadow), but this novel is set in a modern, real world setting (a fictional city in Northern California). Our narrator and main character is Bobby Dollar, a wise-cracking angel who lives on Earth and is an advocate for souls of the recently departed. In Williams’ world, when a person dies there is a trial and an angel and a demon each advocate for the soul to go to Heaven or Hell based on that person’s actions during life. The judge is one of the much higher levels of angels, and all of this naturally occurs outside of our perceived reality. It’s a pretty straight forward system – until one day when a soul goes missing before it can be assigned to Heaven, Hell or Purgatory for all eternity.

Bobby is not like any other angel I’ve ever read about – he drinks, curses and indulges his carnal desires when on Earth, and while he’s good at his job, his behavior means that he’s not exactly held in high esteem by his superiors up in Heaven. Then there’s the opposition: in addition to the demon advocates, Bobby is soon also mixed up with the likes of a higher level demoness known as the Countess of Cold Hands. She and her hellish companions make life – or is it afterlife? – very difficult for Bobby, who just wants to find out where the missing souls (yes, there have been more since that first one) have disappeared to. To make matters worse, a very powerful demon lord believes that Bobby has stolen something from him and has sent an ancient and practically unstoppable monster after him.

This novel is filled with action as Bobby races to find out what’s happened to the missing souls, evades the ancient monstrosity that’s hunting him, falls in lust with the Countess, and tries to avoid getting his friends – fellow angels on Earth – hurt. He’s also periodically “called upstairs” to be questioned by angels much higher than him on the celestial ladder. Even though Bobby is assured by everyone in Heaven that “God loves you,” he gets the distinct feeling that his superiors aren’t telling him everything they know.

Williams’ world building is first rate and he really made me feel like I was right there with Bobby, both in the Bay area and up in Heaven. Tad has also created some wonderfully relatable and highly entertaining characters for Bobby Dollar to interact with and play off of, with tons of memorable dialogue. I’d recommend this book for those who like paranormal detectives, especially the Harry Dresden series by Jim Butcher, as well as anyone who liked Piers Anthony’s Incarnations of Immortality series, starting with On a Pale Horse.

Find and reserve this book in our catalog.

Greatest Hits: As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

This week we’re featuring some of our “greatest hits” – the most popular Book-a-Day blog posts since we started this almost three years ago. Today’s is As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, reviewed by Clare B.

Story telling is considered a Southern tradition, and perhaps one of the greatest of Southern storytellers is William Faulkner.  I often hear people say that Faulkner is too difficult to read.  He can be difficult. As I Lay Dying is certainly is not.

As the novel opens Addie Bundren is dying.  Outside her window, her son Cash is building her coffin.  Addie has had a difficult life.  Her husband is no count; her children are hardly better.  She has made her husband promise that he will bury her body in Jefferson, a neighboring town where she grew up.  This simple request is actually anything but simple.

Sons Jewel and Darl are away with the wagon, and return two days after Addie is dead.  Floods wash out two bridges, further delaying the trip.  Two days into the trip, an accident while they are attempting to ford the flooded river leaves Cash seriously injured and the mules dead.  In the mean time, buzzards are following them, and the smell of the Addie’s body is overwhelming.

As I Lay Dying is funny, horrifying and fascinating.  Each chapter is told in the voice of a different family member or friend.  We see this journey in the bewilderment of young Vardaman, who cannot understand his mother’s death; of Dewey Dell who is too absorbed in her own unplanned pregnancy to grieve, and Anse Bundren, whose main goal, besides burying his wife, is to buy false teeth.

I think the key to reading and enjoying Faulkner is to not think about it too much.   We read him in English class, and spend hours examining what he was trying to say.  Instead, perhaps, we should just read him.  Enjoy the language and loose ourselves in the humor, satire and train of thought.

Find and reserve this book in our catalog.

Daytripper by Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá

The lyrics of The Wailers’ song “Get Up, Stand Up” goes something like this (depending on the version), “Most people think / Great God will come from the sky / Take away everything / Make everybody feel high / But if you know what life is worth / You will look for yours on earth / And now you see the light / You stand up for your right.”

The song claims that you should not wait for justice until the afterlife. Life is right here, right now, created by the Most High and thus holy, and therefore social injustice should be fought wherever it is encountered (as injustice is a violation of life and hence a violation of God). In short: this life is what you have – use it wisely.

Which is easier said than done. Contemporary postmodern life can be a mind-numbing whirlwind and life and its precious moments may pass us by if we are not living the present moment, if we are instead living in an imagined future, a place and time where everything will be just right, where everything will fall into place. A sense of fulfillment is hardly possible if we are constantly looking ahead, planning for the next stage of the journey – fulfillment can perhaps only be experienced when we realize that this, the here and now, is all we have, and that it is all we will every have as the past is gone, the future hasn’t even occurred yet.

Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá’s graphic novel Daytripper is a ingenious contemplation on life and the preciousness of every day that we receive. The art work may remind the audience of Jean-Pierre Autheman, it’s as vivid as his graphic novels but not as raw; instead the art of Daytripper is rather tender and gentle.

And the tale of Moon and Bá is compassionate. The duo basically asks, What is important? And they suggest that every moment, every encounter, every social initiative is significant; they claim that it is important to dream, to follow dreams and visions, and to love whatever the world offers – its magic and its profanities. As in many tales about life, death plays a major role in Daytripper. For death is the price we pay for being alive – without death there would be no life.

To face death can be hard, but it can also be liberating. In the words of Steven P. Jobs: “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”  This is what Daytripper is saying, too.

Find and reserve this graphic novel in our catalog.

Life After Life by Raymond Moody

Controversial as it undoubtedly is, there is a great deal of evidence for some sort of life, or at least consciousness, after the point of clinical death.  The subjects Moody studied describe out-of-body experiences in which they are aware of what is going on around them and are watching from outside their bodies.  These events are often corroborated with an amazing degree of accuracy by the living persons who were also on the scene.

Furthermore, Moody has found from accounts of the 150 or so persons he interviewed that there emerges a certain pattern of events after the “death.”  The person may be at first unsure what is happening, and may travel along a dark tunnel.  People they knew who have already died assist them, and they encounter a “being of light” so radiant with love that they never want to leave its presence.

All this would seem to confirm religious beliefs in an afterlife, yet many of these people state that they were surprised by how different their experiences were from what they had been taught to believe about “heaven” and “hell.”  Some people, notably those who nearly died from suicide attempts, reported feeling regret that they did not persevere with their life’s work.  However, no one reported anything like the traditional idea of pearly gates or a hell full of fire.  Many of the people were required by the being of light to undergo a sort of “life review,” but in nearly every case they report that it was presented not with a sense of judgment, but rather as a learning experience.

Moody has a Ph.D. in philosophy as well as an M.D. in psychiatry, and the material in his book is very logically presented.  He begins with describing in detail the common elements of the near-death experiences, frequently quoting from his interviews with those who have had these experiences.  He then discusses parallels in literary sources such as The Bible, Plato, Emanuel Swedenborg, and The Tibetan Book of the Dead.  Next, he examines one by one the various questions and arguments that he has encountered most often whenever he speaks or writes about near-death experiences, such as “How do you know these people aren’t lying?” and “Couldn’t it have been some sort of neurological activity in the brain?”  He concludes with a chapter called “Impressions” in which he describes the personal effect his studies have had on him.

I found this a very compelling book.  Moody’s tone is calm and reasonable, and he is clear throughout that he is not attempting to “prove” anything, but to present what he has found.  It is worthwhile to read this book and draw our own conclusions about what it may reveal about life after life.

Find and reserve this book in our catalog.

On a Pale Horse by Piers Anthony

What if there really were a “Grim Reaper” who rode a pale horse and collected and judged the souls of the dead? What if the same were true for other “immortal concepts” – Time, Fate, War, Nature, as well as Evil and Good? And what if the “people” performing the duties of these abstract concepts were only holding an office or job and the office-holder periodically changed? How would you do in your first day on the job as the new “Death”?

That’s the problem that Zane faces in this book. He was just a down on his luck schlub with money problems, then, suddenly, he’s Thanatos, a.k.a. Death with a Capitol D. How each of these “Incarnations of Immortality” change the person doing the job is different and unique to each one, but don’t worry, I won’t spoil how Zane gets the job. One he has it, however, he must not only learn how to collect the souls of the deceased – all over the planet – but he’s also getting to know his fellow incarnations, and must then foil a master plot by Satan himself to take over the world. Satan, not known for playing by the rules, try to tip Zane’s decision by threatening the life and soul of the woman he loves. The climax of the story is a showdown between Death and Satan not just for the soul of Zane’s beloved, but for the souls of all mankind and whether or not Satan will be able to unleash Hell on Earth – literally.

I first read this book back in college in the early ’90′s and soon devoured the rest of the series (Bearing an Hourglass – about the incarnation of Time – is the next one). I enjoyed them and what the author had to say about how the spiritual world may exist so much that I convinced my Mom and grandmother to read them too (the closest they usually got to Fantasy was Michael Crichton) just so we could talk about them. Many years later I greatly enjoyed this novel and discussing it again, this time with my Sci-Fi & Fantasy book club.

Anthony – best known for his long-running Xanth Series – creates a realistic world where you or I might live, but which is also home to these immortal incarnations, living and working in it, unseen by mortal humans. This entertaining yet thought-provoking Fantasy novel is also available as an audio book, read by the highly acclaimed George Guidall.

Explore Anthony’s unique version of death by finding and requesting this book in our catalog.

The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier

“The Blinks,” a worldwide epidemic, has infected the human population. Its origin is unknown – only that it is the product of a Coca-Cola promotion gone horribly wrong. And as humanity ends all that remains is the solitary Laura Byrd, struggling to survive alone in Antarctica, with only her memories to keep her company.

Brockmeier weaves a most original tale of a plausible and not-so-distant future, in which the apocalypse is a manmade occurrence. Also unique in Brockmeier’s work is the integration of the City, a place where the “living-dead,” (those who have died, but can still be recalled in memory by the living who knew them), reside after they have passed on. The living-dead’s lives continue as normal in the City, and they receive, in a sense, a second chance at life. Eventually, the only people left in the City are those remembered by Laura, due to the fact that she is the last person alive on earth. The chapters switch back and forth between Laura’s lonely ordeal and the confusion of the City’s denizens, who find their world to be, quite literally, shrinking.

Overall, this book is engaging; easy to read, but steeped in philosophical meaning. It explores the question of true death; if we leave an impression on those we left behind, have we truly left at all? Brockmeier’s work can be viewed as a new-age classic, serving as a window to a prospective, believable world. A fresh, original plot makes The Brief History of the Dead the perfect addition to any summer reading list.

Find and request this book in our catalog.