I love me some hit men. I don’t know what it is about professional assassins that make them so captivating, but there’s nothing like a good hit man story. And Lawrence Block has taken this to almost Seinfeldian levels of hilarity and glory. The humor comes from the mundane and the practical, sharp dialogue exchanges and a desert dry wit, without ever descending into slapstick or over-the-top setups.

In the third installment of the short story collection series starring everyone’s favorite snuff artist, Keller is looking to retire. He’s getting old, and it’s becoming too much trouble to keep killing. His stamp collection still holds his interest, but he wants out of the game. So he teams up with his trusty booking agent Dot, taking practically every job that comes along with reckless disregard for his usual meticulous control, all so he can get that final big score.

Hit Parade is comprised of several short stories that all share a general arc. Think graphic novel series. They all interconnect, some characters in earlier stories paying off in the later pieces, and all framed around the same overall goal of Keller and his big cashout. What fascinated me about this novel is that it dealt primarily with the events of 9/11. Keller lives in New York, and watching the impact of the towers falling adds such a layer of depth and wistful beauty to the stories that I absolutely did not expect. Aside from the concerns for heightened security — Keller can no longer pay cash for flights, getting weapons on the plane is virtually impossible — it has a personal impact on Keller. He ends up volunteering at the food service lines, spooning food to the fireman working at Ground Zero. It’s terrifically honest, and amazingly selfish in it’s portrayal.

The casual back and forth between Dot and Keller is still the bread and butter of this novel. I’m rarely one for asking for novels to be turned into cinema, but this begs for it. It’s beyond the whole Moneypenny/Bond innuendo, as there’s never even the thought of a romantic interaction between Dot and Keller. It’s a business arrangement, but the personal relationship is so strangely intimate without being sexual. Dot cares about Keller, because he makes her money, but because also because he’s her top guy.

There are attempts on Keller’s life, threats, screw-ups, sour deals, and the usual, but it never goes for that ridiculous hyped-up finish: nobody breaks into Dot’s White Plains home to take her hostage to get to Keller. Nobody is hunting Keller for sport. Everything is so casually put together, so matter-of-fact, and yet there are plenty of exquisite twists and plot points. If Garrison Keillor ever decided to write episodes for the Sopranos, this is how they would have turned out.

I’ll probably be reviewing the most recent book, Hit and Run, in the coming months, but you can definitely get copies of the first two books, Hit Man and Hit List. I cannot recommend this series highly enough, as it’s quick, refreshing, and has never disappointed yet.

Fucking vampires. I’ve about had it up to here with fucking vampires. Because I read them “off season” (see: after I finished my first hundred books), you were spared my thoughts on The Twilight Series. Which basically amount to this: if you cut out all the bullshit twee Romeo and Juliet by way of Wentz and Simpson professions of desperate emo love, you’d have a pretty solid novel. Instead, we’ve got kids wandering around the malls in black eyeliner drinking Clamato juice out of silver goblets they bought at Hot Topic. Worse yet are the adults who are fawning over this tepid repackaged kiddie-porn. I can understand a fucking teen falling for this shit, but really, shame on you. Tell me you read it for the articles.

What the fuck does this have to do with the price of tea in China? Nothing. Only to say this. Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan are intent on taking it back. They haven’t, not by a long shot, but they’re goddamn trying. Because the two men have created what amounts to a really well-done Sci-Fi Channel movie about biohazards that turn people into motherfucking real vampires. These cocksuckers sure as shit don’t sparkle in sunlight: they burst into flames as God intended.

A plane touches down on a runway after losing contact with the tower, and everyone save four random folks — a pilot, a rocker, a lawyer, and a computer programmer — are all dead from some mysterious unexplainable malady. The tension of the novel would have worked so much better if — similar ironically to the first Twilight novel — they hadn’t given away that it was a vampire novel. It’s set up like a 28 Days Later, where nobody has any damn idea what’s happened, if the virus is contagious, if it even is a virus, only they pepper it with a combination of old school Dracula type shit (a sinister black coffin) and some really shameful Lifetime melodrama.

The Strain takes it’s time to get into the action, kind of stumbling through the narrative set-up to get to the meaty vampire action. There are a shitton of characters to introduce: from the bioscientist hero to the rat-killing exterminator to the creepy old Eastern European man who portends ill omens when the creatures are unleashed. The characters do feel a little prepackaged, but Del Toro and Hogan give them just enough backstory and depth to raise them above mere cannon fodder or cardboard cutouts. Do I care about these folks? Eh, a little bit. But not really. It’s kind of like Heroes towards the second season. Just as you’re starting to really give a damn, someone else is introduced, and so it’s quite a bit to keep track of. But you quickly figure out who’s gonna stick it out, and who’s not long for this world.

Who you do care about are the vampires. Setting up the mythology of your supernatural is critical to any sort of zombie/vampire novel — even if the story is “we have no idea”. The vampires of the Strain are more like biological oddities, and since we’re dealing with medical professionals, there are plenty of autopsies and scientific data to make it really squishy. Rather than fangs and lack of tan, the vampires essentially develop a cancer that eats the host, turning them into a feeding machine. They develop stinger lashing tongues that shoot out and suck the life out of their victims, infecting them with the virus. They’re susceptible to ultra-violet rays and silver.

Since this is coming to us from one of the forgers of the Blade Trilogy, Del Toro knows what he’s doing. And it’s pretty disgusting and visceral and awesome. It’s a little cheesy and the dialogue gets painful — particularly their insistence on including a subplot involving a painful divorce proceeding and the custody battle. I don’t want people cramming a goddamn Ally McBeal episode into my killfest, you dig? At times, the novel feels a bit like the Jurassic Park sequels, when you want a little more Jurassic Park. There’s nothing going on in the novels that couldn’t have just been as easily set up in script form first. Del Toro’s a talented director, if a bit too overly sentimental for his own good. And since there are two authors, I’m not sure who’s really to blame for which lacks.

I’ll definitely stick with the series, as it’s popcorn fun. And it’s refreshing to remember that you don’t have to be some sort of douchey desperate teenage to be hurt by a vampire you love. It hurts even worse when your family member wants to eat you.

I’m in.

I wasn’t going to do the Cannonball Read again this year.  After we lost Amanda, my heart wasn’t in it.  Nicole took to torch from my sweaty hands and is running strong and keeping the spirit alive.  She’s taken the total from 100 books to 52 (one a week).  But she’s upped the review rules.

I’m less interested in defending my title as I am about the new reward.  Dustin at www.pajiba.com has promised to donate to Lil A’s (Amanda’s Son) College Fund.  I can’t pass that up.

So I’m back on the wagon.  I’m pretty sure I can do the 52.  It’s going to start up November 1st.  Once again, please, please, please join this year.  ANYONE who crosses the finish line earns this sweet young boy some cashola.  He will more than likely get a degree in asskickology or advanced necrolimination.

Plus, Amanda’d totally fuck me up if I pussed out.  Please join up on the Facebook Group or through Pajiba.

To all my Cannonball Participants, I am insanely proud of what we’ve all accomplished. And I’ve decided to handsomely reward participants.

For the sake of my own sanity, the special prize will only be given to someone who has completed 25 books by September 1st. My reasoning is thus: I have to get everyone’s addresses so the special prize can be rewarded, so I need at least some sort of timeline to find out how many to mail, and also, I figure, to have read two books a months show that you were at least in the game. Fair enough? Doesn’t have to be, it’s my game.

If you read 25 books by Sept. 1st, but didn’t get a review up, I trust you. It’s like we’re giving away cars or some shit. Just write to me, or better yet placeholder it on your blog, saying “I read these 25 books!” And then message me on here or at priscogospel at hotmail dot come and I’ll get you your prize. I’m cross posting this on the blog as well so everyone can participate.

It looks like we’re going to have three more in the Champeen club. To those of you that make it to 100, I’ll come up with some sort of gorgeous reward, I assure you. But not much, I ain’t exactly rolling in the dough. Oh, and what is your special prize? Your very own, rare collectable, The Pajibrary Card. Nobody but you and the other Cannonball Readers will ever get one. So now, when you admit that you enjoyed Delta Farce, or you have a secret crush on Robert Pattinson, you have something to set aflame!

I don’t know if I will be continuing the Cannonball Read in the next year. If someone would like to take over the hosting duties and tallies, please contact me. Thanks for playing! Prisco

It’s about that time, kiddos! We’re announcing another 5K for July. We’re going to start it up July 3rd and run it until July 17th.

The incredibly beautiful SaBrina — champion of our last 5K — has chosen our contest. The premise is simple: all five books should be set in towns you’ve lived in or plan on living in. We’ll make it “in or around abouts” just to make it fair. There’s plenty of books set in Philadelphia but none for scenic downtown Quakertown. So if I were competing, my five would be from Virginia, Boston, Philadelphia, or Los Angeles. I could also chose Italy, as I will have my own villa there. Eventually.

As always, the 5K is open to EVERYONE, not just participants in the Cannonball Read. Rules are the same: 200 pages or more is a book, you must start and finish the 5 books (with reviews posted) by the end of the 5K. Winner gets to set the limiter for the next 5K, which I’m feeling for late August.

Enjoy, and get to reading!

I done it.

September 1st seems so far away.  In just a scant 296, I managed to complete 100 books, varying in page length from 202 to well over 1300.  This means on average, I completed 1 book every three days.  To even complete the Cannonball Read meant you’d have to average at least 2 books a week.  There were some weekends where I banged out four books over the course of two days.  Others seemed to take me forever.  I think I finished ten books while in the course of reading Book 5 of the Wheel of Time.

When I took up the mantle of my friend Marci’s challenge, to see if I too could read 100 books in the course of a year, I just did it to see if I could.  Pink and I decided to pull a Kenny vs. Spenny on it, which quickly spiraled out of control, and by the time December rolled around, we had almost 60 participants, with people STILL trying to leap on the bandwagon as it rolled.  I read faster than Manda, but she kicked my ass in the reviews.  I must admit, I hate writing reviews.  Unlike my movie tastes, I’m pretty forgiving when it comes to a book.  It takes a lot for me to hate a book outright.  But thanks to the awful recommendations of some of you, I finally found books I could loathe.  Amazingly, I only threw aside two books in the course of reading this: Donna Tartt’s odious The Little Friend, and Dostoefvsky’s Demons, which I will complete on my own time.

I finally knocked down a bunch of the books that were sitting on my shelf of “To Be Read” for damn near a decade now, like East of Eden and Infinite Jest.  I still have to get to Don Quixote, Pnin and Pale Fire, and The Old Curiosity Shop — which finally surpassed Crime and Punishment as the book I’ve started more times and put aside.  I was introduced to a slough of new authors, who now fill the ever gaping capacity of my new Kindle.  Seriously, the motherfucker has 156 books on it, only four of which aren’t mine, and that only includes the first four of the thirty-some-odd Discworld books I have yet to read.  I’ve only managed to The Colour of Magic, much to the disgust and chagrin of my friends and well-wishers.

What I hoped would happen with the Cannonball Read happened: that people would share books and authors they loved with each other.  It was something I loved about working in a bookstore — giving people a new book to love.  There was nothing better than discovering a new author and telling people about it.  I handsold like a bastard, because I’m passionate about books I love.  And now I have a ton of new scribes to shill.  I’m looking at you, Swiercynzski and Huston.

It was a tough year.  I knew obstacles would arise.  That was part of the challenge.  If I didn’t have to go to work, be social, pay attention to my girlfriend, or go to stupid Bacons, then I would easily knock out two-hundred.  But life gets in the way.  When I went into the hospital with heart problems — stress and poor diet skyrocketed my blood pressure to around 212/113 — I got jammed up.  I was too scared about dying to bother with reading.  And let me tell you, holed up in a hospital bed with crushing melancholy and suicidal thoughts is no fucking time to be reading Infinite Jest.  How that unwieldy tome didn’t end up soaking up my slit wrists is beyond me.

I lost two people I care about to cancer this year, and didn’t manage to raise a single damn dollar for the cause as Pink and I had pontificated.  The point wasn’t to turn this into a fundraiser or a contest.  It was about challenging ourselves to see if we could pull off a pretty daring feat.  It wasn’t the immediate glorious vomit-violence of a wingeating championship, or a fist pumping dance on the steps of the art museum.  It was a slow plod, a marathon, and I crossed the line.  Now, I’m waiting on the rest of my contenders.

As I approached the upper echelons of the hundred, I could hear my fellow Cannonballers lamenting.  Oh, man, I’m never going to reach one hundred.  I’m only at thirty or forty.  But what they fail to realize is that holy shit, you read thirty books!  That’s thirty one more than most people read in a lifetime.  Even if they only manage to crack fifty, that’s still one book a week for an entire year.  That’s no small feat.

I don’t know if I’ll do this again next year.  I’ve been hemming and hawing about it for a while.  Writing the blog entries is a bitch.  Getting snarled at by fucktard bitchass literary snobs with their library cards so far up their asses they can’t smell their diplomas isn’t really much fun either.  I certainly won’t do the recommendation requirement again.  It would have been more fun to just pick as I went along the way.  I won’t stop reading, but I don’t know if I feel the spirit of this event anymore.  It became about Pink, and well, we lost her.  And I don’t want this to become some sort of memorial to her.  I don’t want this to be another cancer contest.  I never did.  It was supposed to just be me and my pal Manda taking shots at each other as we made our way to 100.

I told her I’d win.

I’m giving the trophy, the Bea Arthur Justice — a pink machete — to her husband.  I’m still trying to figure out what to do for participant prizes and rewards for those who cross the finish line behind me.  I’m still trying to sort out 5K vindicators and the like.  It’s a lonely task, because originally, Pink and I were brainstorming, but now, I have to do it alone, and it’s not nearly as much fun.  I made it, and I’m proud of myself, because it’s really the only task I set for myself this year that I accomplished.  But it’s kind of sad, crossing the finish line, looking back, and realizing that’s it.  The one you started running with lost it on Heartbreak Hill.

So thank you for following us on our journey.  You’ll still get to enjoy the other Cannonballers reviews, as I’m through.  Thank you for the recommendations, and the compliments, and the encouragement.  Thank you and fuck you to those who gave us shit for our reviews.  Yours was the fire that kept me wanting to write worse and worse, bending the laws of grammar over a table and unlubricatingly having my way with them.   We started some fires with our reads, we started some jokes with others.  It was a wild ride, and for me, it’s come to an end.  My blog gets to return to the former nonsensical ramblings and egomaniacal headtrip it once was.  I’ll get to rant about hipsters, and what’s pissing me off today, and how much I hate you all while secretly loving you while openly loathing you.  It’s finally over.  I celebrated with a pizza.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to A Storm of Swords.  What?  You thought I’d stop reading after 100?  Bitch, please.

What a way to go.  This was a brilliant fucking novel.  It’s like an amazing combination of Catch-22 and The Office.  It’s dangerous to tread the waters of cubicle politics without getting droll and stupid.  Just like everyone thinks THEIR office is so much like Dunder Mifflin.  But Ferris creates a whipcrack tome that will ring true to anyone who’s ever toiled in the bitter halls of corporate hell.

What’s even more phenomenal is that his narrator is a “we”.  Never named or identified, it instantly draws the reader into the story as if they’ve always been a part of it.  As if they were one of the office drones populating the cubes.

It treats the atmosphere like a high school, lunches together, best frenemies, deadlines, pranks, hating the bosses.  Never once does Ferris go for wacky setups or try to push jokey ideas.  And he covers some pretty insane territory, involving homicidal clowns and totem poles.  But it all feels natural.

I’ve toiled for years in shitty desk job that I loathe but I need.  At times I’ve threatened the lives of all of my co-workers and bosses.  I still tell stories of the people who’ve left, as if they were heroes of lore.  How my one co-worker used to buy everyone food, and how we had Smiths dance parties when everyone else left the office.  We talk shit on each other, we console each other.  We love and hate simultaneously.  I spend more time with these people than the people I love, so they become like a family.

Ferris is an excellent author, and I look forward to his next book.  As soon as I finished this, I decided to give it to my coworker to read.  Even though he’s a fucking idiot.  And my favorite person in the office.

Aaaaaaaaggggh!  I couldn’t wait any longer!  With serious apologies to Fyodor Dosteofvsky, especially since I can never spell his fucking name right, I had to put aside Demons so that I could read the latest Harry Dresden.  I’ve never been one to put off delights, and frankly this came out almost two months ago.  It didn’t help matters that Lizzieborden’s been pushing me.

Butcher’s outstanding.  Again, another amazing novel where he advances the entire mythos and series while still keeping a solid buttoned down story intact.  And he’s got no easy task.  He’s juggling about seventeen flavors of supernatural, and in this one he basically says, “Throw me another flaming chainsaw, kid.”  He’s doing magic, werewolves, vampires, faeries, angels and demons, with a cast of at least twelve solid characters, and he decides to center this novel around a skinwalker — so let’s add Native American folklore to the stack.  I know, after the dreadful film Skinwalkers, I was nervous, but it fucking killed.

The book starts off with a motherfucking punch in the face.  Morgan, Dresden’s archnemesis on the Wardens, who’s been waiting for him to screw up so he could decapitate him for crimes against wizardry, essentially shows up on his doorstep covered in blood asking for sanctuary from his own people.  Essentially, Morgan’s been framed for the murder of one of the White Council, and Dresden’s gotta figure out what happened.  In two days.  Or Morgan, and quite possibly Harry, are dead meat.

What follows is almost boilerplate murder mystery, but it’s totally couched in the tension of the entire overarching supernatural civil war waiting to erupt.  Butcher’s at the top of his game, and this was a sound and killer book this deep in the mythos.  According to Butcher, he’s going into the deep twenties, and at this rate, he has established that he can pretty much go anywhere with this.  It’s like a great television drama which you know can still run another three or four seasons easy.  The only other book series that I feel has managed to stay as fresh is probably the Sookie Stackhouse stuff — even though I hate the living fuck out of the television series.

But this raises an interesting point.  How do you make a television series based on a series that’s still in print and active?  Does the television stuff start to influence the progression of the books?  If the TV series craps out, does that mean the books will go the way of the buffalo as well?  Thankfully, the terrible fucked-up series they made out of the Dresden Files is dead, and can possibly be revived later down the road.  I’m more curious about something like Dexter, which diverges so strongly from Jeff Lindsay’s shitty books.  Are they going to just go wherever they want and ignore the books?  And even more so with the Sookie Stackhouse books?  For those of you who’ve read the novels deep in the series, do you see where this is quite possibly going to fuck junk up?

Regardless, Butcher’s still kicking ass, and Turn Coat was terrific.  If you’ve been waiting to read this series, get the fuck on it.  You’re missing out, kids.

Man, I so wished this was a better book.  It’s like watching a friend in a track meet come in fourth place.  You don’t even get a medal or points, but you still beat the hell out of most everyone else.  And Clarke’s novel is just that, a hell of an effort that just barely falls short of being unbearably awesome.

Sam Pulsifer did a bad bad thing.  He burned down the Emily Dickinson house when he was 18, accidentally killing two people.  He spent ten years in prison, was released, couldn’t return to his old life in Amherst, Mass, where he was hounded by outraged academians, so he attempted to start over.  Sam’s a terrible narrator, who seems vaguely autistic, but unlike the brilliance of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident… here, the narrator’s just coming across as socially inept and awkward and ridiculous.  Most of the novel I found myself clutching a fist and shaking it with frustration, which makes it hard to hold the pages open.  Sam’s such a fucking idiot, and he keeps fucking up and making things worth for himself.

Because Sam never told his current wife about his former life, going so far as to even pretend his parents are dead instead of alcoholic ex-academics.  So naturally, his life comes back to haunt him.  Former prisoners, the son of the people he murdered, and the looming spectre of a person trying to burn down other author’s homes follow him everywhere, destroying his life.  And Sam seems reluctantly content with fucking up things to offer the assist.

My biggest issue with the novel was the use of memoir style.  I don’t mind flashbacks, but I fucking hate it where authors do that lingering cluedrop. Where events are unfolding, and the author will mention what’s going to happen next.  He keeps ruining the next event, with comments like “And it would be the last time I saw my parents again” or “And I should have known better, because the Twain house would be burned next.”  It’s distracting, and aggravating.  If he had just let the events unfold instead of trying to pull off some sort of bullshit Brechtian attempt at contemplative narration, it’d be so much better.

While the scathing commentary on the intelligentsia and academics in general are amusing, it sort of falls apart around the frustrating hump of a narrator.  It’s not a terrible novel, but you can see where with a few minor adjustments it could have been fucking brilliant.

F. Paul Wilson indeed.  This was the first of the Repairman Jack novels, the concept of which gave me an instant boner.  You see, Repairman Jack fixes things that other people can’t.  He finds things, he hurts things, he’s pure rage.  So it says on the package.  Then you get into the novel.

The Tomb reads like the worst combination of Childs: the supernatural retardation of Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child sewn drunkenly to the thug justice of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher.  Repairman Jack spends most of his time pining awkwardly for the girl that got away.  Most of his time.  The rest of the time, he’s fighting weird Indian shadow demons.  He’s not nearly as creative or badass as I had hoped.  The dialogue, especially the internal monologues of all the characters, is fucking embarrassing.  You read it, and you’re like, “Really?  You wrote ten fucking books of this?”

The villains aren’t that impressive, nor are the bad guys.  It’s like a less fun version of Drag Me To Hell, with a one-armed Hindi religious fanatic trying to raise a vendetta against the rich Brit who killed his family over a century ago.  The dramatic twists are boring at best, trite and dreadful at worst.  The biggest mistake is that the Jack’s attached to the lady pal.  It’s the Bond dilemma: if Bond found monogamy, it’d be really boring.  Even Jason Bourne lost the girl he loved.  Repairman Jack’s coming off more like a family man.  A family man who goes on rampages.  And when a character goes apeshit on a freighter with a flamethrower and it’s unexciting, you know you’ve made a terrible mistake.

I’ll stick this series out a few more books, but otherwise, this is going the way of the buffalo.