Category Archives: books

EVERWHEN now available!

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My young adult novel Everwhen is now available in the format of your choice! Here is the cover and the blurb (click the cover image for a much larger version):

Everwhen_cover_ebook_apple

Fifteen-year-old Dan Kerlin’s life is pretty ordinary: hanging out with his buddy Brian, putting up with the losers his friend Maddie dates, and avoiding the school bully. He’s haunted by nightmares about a demon hunting him in the dark, but he’s had nightmares since his mom died a year ago, so it’s easy to ignore the signs that these might be more than simple dreams.

But when Dan and his new neighbor Sophia have a chance meeting, his world turns upside down in ways he can’t explain. First it’s little things, like strange dreams about a mountain of black glass and a secret key locked away inside him. Things become even stranger—and increasingly dangerous—when Sophia confesses that she’s an angel in human form and tells Dan he has a part to play in a war that is literally as old as time itself.

Soon Dan finds himself surrounded by dogs that can turn human, reanimated corpses, armies of spiders, and a host of demonic entities that seem to want him dead. He needs answers before he and his friends end up as casualties in a conflict they barely understand. But the more he learns the less sure he is of whom to trust, or what he should do.

Dan has powers of his own, and they may prove to be his only hope for survival … but he has no idea how to use them. All he knows is they’re tied to an almost unknowable dimension called Everwhen—a place where all of time exists in a single, eternal moment. There’s an ancient secret at the heart of Everwhen, one which both sides will stop at nothing to uncover, even if it means the universe itself goes up in flames.

He needs to figure out his abilities or he could find himself used as a weapon in an epic, everlasting war. A war where Dan isn’t so sure he wants either side to win.

For your format of choice, follow one of the links below:

Trade paperback

Kindle ebook

Nook ebook

Apple ebook (for iPads and iPhones the easiest method of purchase is to visit the iBookstore and do a search for either my name or Everwhen).

David Mitchell basks in ‘Cloud Atlas’ boost

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No strangers approach David Mitchell for an autograph as he eats lunch at a Japanese restaurant on Sawtelle Boulevard. Nor does anyone bother him when he stops by Diesel Books in Brentwood to sign copies of his novel. The acclaimed British author of “Cloud Atlas” looks like a slightly hip literature professor, a lean 43-year-old in a wide-wale corduroy jacket.

The $102-million movie version of “Cloud Atlas,” directed by the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer, might just take Mitchell from well-regarded to widely known. He even makes a cameo in the film, playing a futuristic double agent.

The movie has already provided a considerable boost for the book, a labyrinthine literary novel first published in the U.S. in 2004. When the five-minute trailer was posted online in late July, orders for the book cascaded in; publisher Random House rushed an extra 125,000 copies into production.

“Random House was surprised, people all over the world who think about the marketing effects of trailers were surprised,” Mitchell says. “I’m still surprised.”

Loved the book, and can’t wait for the film. I’m trying to keep my expectations in check but I have this sense that it’s going to be just a shattering experience.

The movie is out this Friday. Do yourself a favor and go see it opening weekend to show support for a thoughtful, intelligent film for adults. Maybe that way we’ll get more of them.

Great interview. Read the rest at latimes.com.

WOOL, by Hugh Howey

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Wool is a dystopian science fiction novel self-published by Hugh Howey in 2011 on the Amazon Kindle publishing platform. It began as a short story that grew in popularity, with readers clamoring for more information about the world of the Silo. Howey obliged them by writing four more stories, each progressively longer than the last, that when read together function more like a novel than a collection of related stories.

And boy, what a novel it is.

Wool is an incredible book. The characters are deftly drawn and defy any conventional or genre stereotypes. The writing is crisp and confident. And the world-building is excellent.

Wool occurs in a post-apocalyptic future in which a group of humans lives completely underground in a massive Silo that is hundreds of stories deep. The world outside is a barren, lifeless wasteland, incapable of supporting life. The one great sin in the Silo is to want to go Outside. Even thinking such a thing is considered to be dangerous.

The novel is constructed as a series of layered mysteries: what happened to the world, and when? Why doesn’t anyone remember what happened? What is the world outside really like? And why is the secret worth murdering for?

I really don’t want to say too much more about the plot. It’s not an action-heavy story (though there is action, especially in the later parts), so if you’re looking for something whiz-bang this may not be for you. It is a thoughtful, well written, meticulously plotted book with a cast of terrific characters and a level of tension that ratchets up to an almost unbearable level before a very satisfying conclusion.

Highly recommended.

P.S. The book was recently picked up by 20th Century Fox for development under Ridley Scott’s production company. (Let’s hope Sir Ridley makes a better movie from Wool than the great looking but dreadful Prometheus.)

DARK PLACES, by Gillian Flynn

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After finishing Sharp Objects, Gillian Flynn’s first novel, I immediately started Dark Places. I’m really torn between which of the two is not just my favorite Flynn book, but my favorite book of the year (so far).

Dark Places lives up to its title. It is unrelentingly grim. It’s not completely hopeless, but it is bleak, and dark, and overflowing with despair and desperation.

I loved every word of it.

The jacket blurb is below, with my commentary after.

“I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ.”

Libby Day was seven when her mother and two sisters were murdered in “The Satan Sacrifice of Kinnakee, Kansas.” As her family lay dying, little Libby fled their tiny farmhouse into the freezing January snow. She lost some fingers and toes, but she survived–and famously testified that her fifteen-year-old brother, Ben, was the killer. Twenty-five years later, Ben sits in prison, and troubled Libby lives off the dregs of a trust created by well-wishers who’ve long forgotten her.

The Kill Club is a macabre secret society obsessed with notorious crimes. When they locate Libby and pump her for details––roof they hope may free Ben––Libby hatches a plan to profit off her tragic history. For a fee, she’ll reconnect with the players from that night and report her findings to the club… and maybe she’ll admit her testimony wasn’t so solid after all.

As Libby’s search takes her from shabby Missouri strip clubs to abandoned Oklahoma tourist towns, the narrative flashes back to January 2, 1985. The events of that day are relayed through the eyes of Libby’s doomed family members––including Ben, a loner whose rage over his shiftless father and their failing farm have driven him into a disturbing friendship with the new girl in town. Piece by piece, the unimaginable truth emerges, and Libby finds herself right back where she started––on the run from a killer.

We know about Libby’s murdered family right away, although the story quickly calls into question the exact role her brother did or did not have in the killings. The chapters alternate between Libby in the present, told in the first person, and her brother Ben and her mother back in 1985, in the days and hours leading up to the murders. We get to know them both intimately, understand their hopes as well as their pain and anguish. It makes knowing the gruesome deaths that are coming for Patty and two of her daughters all the more horrible.

Ben is a lost boy, forever on the outside, whether it’s his family full of girls or the kids at  high school. A loner who feels like a coward, he’s drawn to drugs and Satanic death metal as a way of both rebelling and desperately fitting in.

His mother Patty loves her children but is completely overwhelmed trying to raise them on a failing farm she has no idea how to run. The farm had once belonged to her parents, who left it to her and her truly sleazy ex-husband Runner. With creditors closing in and foreclosure looming on the horizon, she grows increasingly frantic to find any way out of her dilemma.

I thought I’d had the mystery figured out pretty early on, but Flynn is a master of misdirection, and I ended up completely wrong. I was glad about that. I love being surprised in that way.

It was an exhausting, emotional read, but one I will recommend highly.

SHARP OBJECTS, by Gillian Flynn

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I recently read Gillian Flynn’s third novel, Gone Girl, and while I loved most of it, I couldn’t help but be somewhat disappointed by the ending. (This seems to be the common complaint with the book.) Still, I liked it enough that I decided to go back and read her first two novels, Sharp Objects and Dark Places.

All I can say is, wow. Gillian Flynn is the real deal. Sharp Objects is the story of a deeply scarred young woman who returns to her hometown to report on the murders of two young girls for the small Chicago paper she works for. As usual, Flynn’s writing is top notch, her prose lyrical and gorgeous. But even more impressive is the psychological depths of her characters, all of them wounded and with secrets that are slowly unveiled throughout the course of the story. She meticulously details small town life in the south–the secrets, the class differences, the hidden (and not so hidden) cruelties that extend from high school into adult life. We are incapable of escaping our past, no matter how dark, no matter how much we may wish to.

From the jacket blurb:

WICKED above her hipbone, GIRL across her heart
Words are like a road map to reporter Camille Preaker’s troubled past. Fresh from a brief stay at a psych hospital, Camille’s first assignment from the second-rate daily paper where she works brings her reluctantly back to her hometown to cover the murders of two preteen girls.

NASTY on her kneecap, BABYDOLL on her leg
Since she left town eight years ago, Camille has hardly spoken to her neurotic, hypochondriac mother or to the half-sister she barely knows: a beautiful thirteen-year-old with an eerie grip on the town. Now, installed again in her family’s Victorian mansion, Camille is haunted by the childhood tragedy she has spent her whole life trying to cut from her memory.

HARMFUL on her wrist, WHORE on her ankle
As Camille works to uncover the truth about these violent crimes, she finds herself identifying with the young victims—a bit too strongly. Clues keep leading to dead ends, forcing Camille to unravel the psychological puzzle of her own past to get at the story. Dogged by her own demons, Camille will have to confront what happened to her years before if she wants to survive this homecoming.

Unlike Gone Girl, the ending of Sharp Objects does not disappoint. It grabs you by the throat and thrashes you around until all you can do is sit, stunned, at the power of her writing.

Highly recommended.

GONE GIRL, by Gillian Flynn. Buy this book NOW!!

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I recently finished Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, her third novel (I’m currently reading her first, Sharp Objects, and will read Dark Places, her second, after that).

Gone Girl is already my favorite book of the year. A dark, disturbing portrait of a husband and wife who know each other a little too well, and who have no doubts or hesitation about using their knowledge to both torment and support the other in ways both subtle and overt. Think Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe? mashed up with a Michael Connelly noir mystery and you’ll have some idea of what the book is like. It pulls no punches, leaves no psychological stone unturned.

It also has one of the most psychologically cunning villains to come along since Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs (we’ll conveniently forget the wretched sequels to that masterpiece).

From the jacket blurb:

On a warm summer morning in North Carthage, Missouri, it is Nick and Amy’s fifth wedding anniversary. Presents are being wrapped and reservations are being made when Nick Dunne’s clever and beautiful wife disappears from their rented McMansion on the Mississippi River. Husband-of-the-Year Nick Dunne isn’t doing himself any favors with cringe-worthy daydreams about the slope and shape of his wife’s head, but hearing from Amy through flashbacks in her diary reveal the perky perfectionist could have put anyone dangerously on edge. Under mounting pressure from the police and the media—as well as Amy’s fiercely doting parents—the town golden boy parades an endless series of lies, deceits, and inappropriate behavior. Nick is oddly evasive, and he’s definitely bitter—but is he really a killer? As the cops close in, every couple in town is soon wondering how well they know the one that they love. With his twin sister Margo at his side, Nick stands by his innocence. Trouble is, if Nick didn’t do it, where is that beautiful wife? And what was left in that silvery gift box hidden in the back of her bedroom closet?

This book is monstrous in many ways, yet still monstrously entertaining.

The ending has given some readers pause. It’s an ending that the story drives toward relentlessly, an almost necessary outcome based on everything that’s come before; but it’s not the ending the typical reader craves. I understood the logic behind the ending even as it left me rattled and disturbed. Still, it’s a magnificent work, at turns shocking and surprising. Highly recommended.

Review: MY LIFE AS A WHITE TRASH ZOMBIE

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I’ve had this book since it came out last year, but it only just now made it to the top of the reading pile. I’m sorry I waited so long!

Diana Rowland’s My Life as a White Trash Zombie is not the book I thought it was going to be. From the title, I expected a  humorous take on the zombie tale, something closer to Zombieland than Night of the Living Dead. But this book was nothing of the kind.

At its heart, My Life as a White Trash Zombie is a study of addiction. And not just the obvious addiction of a zombie to brains, but also alcohol and pills and even addiction to the poisonous people who can make our lives a living hell. Often these people are family members, who make us feel not only powerless but filled with guilt–guilt for being unable to help them to guilt for enabling their demons, there’s nothing like someone we love who’s caught in the throes of an addiction to mess up our lives as well as theirs.

Enter Angel, daughter of an alcoholic father and mentally ill mother who committed suicide when Angel was a teenager. She is understandably a mess: a high school dropout unable to hold down a job,  a pill-popping druggie who spends her time getting wasted so she doesn’t have to deal with the wreck of her life, involved with a guy who really doesn’t care about her other than as a chick to party with.

The story begins with Angel waking up in a hospital after an apparent drug overdose. She has no memory of the events that landed her in the ER, but that doesn’t surprise her much, though she is embarrassed by the manner in which one of the nurses treats her.

What does surprise her is the note she finds telling her that there is a job waiting for that she has to get and keep for at least one month. If she doesn’t, the note tells her she will die.

And so begins Angel’s process of discovery that she is, in fact, a zombie, and needs a steady supply of brains to keep her “alive.”

The job in question is as a van driver for the morgue. There are lots of great details about this job, and the overall running of the morgue itself. Since Rowland once worked in a morgue, we can assume most of the details are accurate. (And if they feel accurate in the story, and make it more believable, that’s really all we can ask.)

Rowland’s zombies aren’t cut from the same cloth as the classic George Romero zombies, or even the “fast” zombies of movies like 28 Days Later. Rowland’s zombies can think, feel, eat normal food (though it provides little nutritional value and isn’t enough to sustain them), and pass as a regular person when properly fed.

But here, “properly fed” means a steady diet of human brains. Animal brains won’t do. And if that steady diet gets broken, the zombie quickly begins to rot and decay, regressing to a feral state in which it might even commit murder to satisfy its hunger.

Fortunately, Angel figures out a clever scheme to acquire brains on the sly from the morgue. Unfortunately, someone out there is killing people and cutting off their heads. Angel thinks it might be another zombie who’s gone feral. But what, if anything, can she to about it?

Rowland’s writing has improved since her first book, Mark of the Demon. Her prose is steadier, and she has a sure hand with her characters. Angel is a wonderful creation (though I will pick one nit and say she’s far too young to remember the Wonder Twins from the cartoon Justice League!). The book also manages to have an incredibly cool and kick ass cover. You really can’t go wrong with cover art like that.

My Life as a White Trash Zombie is a great read that manages to bring something new to the increasingly tired zombie genre. Highly recommended.

Short review of TALES FROM THE TRANSIT SYSTEM

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Andrew Liptak, who’s done some freelance work with SF anthologist extraordinaire John Joseph Adams, posted a short review of my collection Tales from the Transit System on Amazon. He had this to say about the three stories contained within:

This was a really fun read: Forbes has sketched out three very cool worlds (two that I suspect are connected in One Term and Spindles) that harkens back to a sturdy space opera future for humanity. Each of the stories are character-driven: One Term follows an estranged father and daughter. The Merlin Plague looks at what happens when a third of humanity is suddenly endowed with magical powers while the best story of the group, Spindles, is a fantastic military SF short tale following a disgraced military officer and a game-changing discovery. This story has the most potential, in terms of worldbuilding, and I hope that we’ll see more stories like this soon. My only complaint? I’m left wanting for some more stories within this Transit System universe.

Tales from the Transit System is only $0.99 in the Kindle store! Why wait?

Publishers should give away ebooks with print books

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Readers today are forced to choose between buying a physical book or an ebook, but a lot of them would really like to have both on hand – so they’d be able, for instance, to curl up with the print edition while at home (and keep it on their shelves) but also be able to load the ebook onto their e-reader when they go on a trip. In fact, bundling a free electronic copy with a physical product would have a much bigger impact in the book business than in the music business. After all, in order to play vinyl you have to buy a turntable, and most people aren’t going to do that. So vinyl may be a bright spot for record companies, but it’s not likely to become an enormous bright spot. The only technology you need to read a print book is the eyes you were born with, and print continues, for the moment, to be the leading format for books. If you start giving away downloads with print copies, you shake things up in a pretty big way.

So why give away the bits? Well, traditional book publishers have three big imperatives today: (1) protect print sales for as long as possible (in order to fund a longer-term transition to a workable new business model); (2) help keep physical bookstores in business (for the reasons set out in this article by Julie Bosman); and (3) do anything possible to curb the power of Amazon.com, the publishers’ arch-frenemy. Bundling bits with atoms helps on all three fronts. First, you give people an added incentive to buy a print book. When it comes to paperbacks, in particular, a customer essentially gets the physical and electronic copies for the price they’d pay for an electronic copy alone. That changes the buying equation. Second, you do something that helps physical bookstores in their own end-of-days battle with Amazon. Suddenly, they have a strong new sales pitch. Third, by offering the ebooks in a standard, non-proprietary format (ePub, say), you make the Kindle, which doesn’t handle the ePub format, considerably less attractive, particularly for anyone buying their first e-reader. (Why buy one that’s not going to accept those free ebooks you’re going to get when you decide you want a print edition?) Either Amazon stands firm with its proprietary format, or it retools the Kindle as a general purpose reader that can handle ePub. If it chooses the former course, it loses e-reader market share. If it takes the latter course, it weakens its grip on sales of ebooks and weakens the rationale for subsidizing Kindle purchases. There’s also one other potential benefit for publishers, which could be very important in the long run: By setting up their own site where customers download free ebooks, they open a direct relationship with book readers, something they’ve never really had before.

I think the premise of this article is flawed from the outset, namely, that readers would like to have both an ebook and physical copy of a book. I don’t see any evidence of that anywhere. I know lots of people who’ve made the jump to ereading, and every single one of them, without exception, has said farewell to print. Once you get hooked on ereading, you come to realize just how cumbersome print reading really is. Physical books are awkward to hold with one hand (slim paperbacks, maybe, but hardcovers? No way), have no built in dictionary, no ability to resize or change fonts, no ability to instantly purchase a new book any time of the day or night.

I simply don’t see a groundswell clamoring for this option, regardless of its technical feasibility.

Read the rest at RoughType.com.