The Page 69 Test: THE BALLAD OF BUTTERY CAKE ASS

 

Disclaimer: The Page 69 Test is not mine. It has been around since 2007, asking authors to compare page 69 against the meat of the actual story it is a part of. I loved the whole idea of it and so I'm stealing it specifically to showcase small press titles - novels, novellas, short story collections, the works! So until the founder of The Page 69 Test calls a cease and desist, let's do this thing....

In this installment of Page 69, 

we put Aug Stone's The Ballad Of Buttery Cake Ass to the test

OK, Aug, set up page 69 for us.

 

Completely out of the blue, founding member and bit of a dictator Hans Floral Nightingale has quit the band, leaving the rest of them in a state of confusion and disarray. Rumors abound as to what has happened to him – he’s become a florist, triangle-obsessed carpenter, or a stone wall impersonator ‘inside unsuspecting pet stores’, the stories growing wilder as gossip in the music biz tends to do. Also floating around is the idea he’s heard tale of a mythical Ramones free jazz album that serves as a blueprint for the sound he wants to explore, encouraging his Buttery Cake Ass cohorts to do the same. The band are still trying to find their own sound, despite numerous technical difficulties, but here their sonic experiments begin to find focus. Followed by another wild rumor about what has become of Hans Floral Nightingale.

 

What The Ballad Of Buttery Cake Ass is about:

 

Two music obsessives embark on a hilarious quest to track down Buttery Cake Ass’ Live In Hungaria, an album as legendary as it is obscure. Their pursuit of one of the greatest bands ever unknown takes them down many a bizarre path teeming with grand ideas and grander egos in this ode to record shopping and what it’s like to be in your first band. Packed with puns, allusions, and references across a wide range of culture, both popular and not, the book offers up a big slice of the fun and frustration of playing rock n roll.

 

When we were 15, my best friend and I used to make up fake bands to ask for at record stores, and the day I heard him ask the clerk at Cutler’s in New Haven, CT if they had anything by Buttery Cake Ass was a moment of euphoric glee that I will never forget. Writing The Ballad Of Buttery Cake Ass was an attempt to capture the sheer joy and inventiveness of comedy back then, circa 1992, before irony seemed to set in everywhere a few short years later and the goal switched to making people groan instead of eliciting genuine full-on ecstatic laughter. In the process, I got to re-examine my own obsessive record collecting through a new lens as well as revisit the ridiculous aspects of playing in my first few bands, bringing me to a greater appreciation and love for both.  

 

 

Do you think this page gives our readers an accurate sense of what the book is about?

 

Amazingly, there are reverberations of other crucial plot points on page 69, ones that I don’t want to spoil. The page does show the band in the midst of transition to what they will later become. Style-wise, I do think it gives readers an accurate sense of the work. The second paragraph kicks off one of the book’s many digressions, which are part and parcel of discussing music, especially with a fanatic. You start talking about one album, and five minutes later you’ve jumped through about 20 others, a handful of singles, and soon you might find yourself debating the finer points of the records that feature Stooks McDougal on ‘jazz bagpipes’ (Like most of the book, this is a complete fabrication. Not only do I know of no ‘Stooks McDougal’, records featuring anyone credited with ‘jazz bagpipes’ must be in the single digits.)

 

People wouldn’t believe how much of my real life went into the writing of a book called The Ballad Of Buttery Cake Ass. A note on the whole aquarium bit, and feel free to cut this if it’s too much, but I did a tour of Sweden in 2003 with my ‘rock stone’ project. It was so much fun, one of the best weeks of my life. But there was something going on amongst the students of Gothenburg that, luckily, I was warned about before I got there. A game called ‘ta på penis’, which translates as ‘to tap the penis’. A sort of handshake between male members of the community. It was very strange at first to just have people grab your junk like that and give it a quick shake. Even stranger that I got used to it after a couple days. Anyway, when I asked whoever came up with such a thing, I was told that the man who invented it had since ‘disappeared from society and would spend days on end at home watching his giant aquarium’. I always loved this phrase and was glad to have the chance to use the idea in the book.

 

 

 

 

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PAGE 69

THE BALLAD OF BUTTERY CAKE ASS

 

Before he vanishes, Hans Floral Nightingale shares this vital information with Hans Floral Anderson, and the beginnings of a new direction for Buttery Cake Ass take root. HFN expressing to HFA that he wishes for them to carry it on, what they’d started together... Of course with their wide musical sensibilities, even when it does come close to sounding like free jazz, Hans Floral Anderson can be heard shouting interjections of ‘second verse, same as the first’. Despite there being no discernable framework to the tune. With the oblique smile on Hans Floral Anderson’s face, one can never tell if this is a joke on his part or just supreme pleasure in the music they are making, seeing designs no one else does. Word still circulates that if you had witnessed the band rehearsing around this time, it would’ve been the most mindblowing sonic attack you’d ever hope to encounter, but that the one time they tried to record this on a boombox in the garage, the tape came out completely blank. So in an effort to appease the spirits of audio technology, they revert to writing more structured, well, what might be thought of as ‘songs’.

  

What is Hans Floral Nightingale doin’ now? The question persists. Perhaps it seems obvious, in hindsight at least, that with -hyde and Hydro, Hans Floral Nightingale would go into hiding. Some say that he just sits in a room all day, living solely within its four walls, one of which is a giant aquarium. No one knows if there’s anything in it, not even water. Which gets us into the debate - can it be considered an aquarium if there’s no water, no aqua, in it? Beware Counterfeit Aquariums, ya know. I mean, fools, prophets, and philosophers have

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AUG STONE is a writer, musician, & comedian. Author of the comedy novels The Ballad Of Buttery Cake Ass and Off-License To Kill, as well as the memoir Nick Cave’s Bar, his journalism has appeared in The Quietus, The Comics Journal, Under The Radar, and many more sites and magazines. Aug was a founding member of H Bird and The Soft Close-Ups, and has played in countless other bands. He performs comedy as absurdist stream-of-consciousness raconteur, Young Southpaw.  

 

The 40 But 10 Interview Series: Gregory Crosby

 

I had retired the literary Would You Rather interview series, but didn't want to stop interviews on the site all together. Instead, I've pulled together 40ish questions - some bookish, some silly - and have asked authors to limit themselves to answering only 10 of them. That way, it keeps the interviews fresh and connectable for all of us!

We are joined today by Gregory Crosby. Gregory is the author of Said No One Ever (2021, Brooklyn Arts Press) and Walking Away From Explosions in Slow Motion (2018, The Operating System). He's just a song and dance man, really. 

If you could have a superpower, what would it be?

 In my callow youth, I would have said mind control; now I would settle for a cosmic Delete button.

 

 Describe your book in three words.

More goddamn poems.

  

What is your favorite book from childhood?

 Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

 

 What are you currently reading?

 A re-read of Don DeLillo’s Libra, in the new Library of America edition; Rae Armantrout’s Finalists; Bob Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song; Katherine Dunn, Toad

  

What’s the single best line you’ve ever read?

 From Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge: “I perceive I am to suffer.”

 

 What would you do if you could live forever?

 Die.

  

What’s the one thing you wish you knew when you were younger?

 To be less ambitious for myself and more ambitious for the work.

  

What are your bookish pet peeves?

 I can’t write in books; I am anti-marginalia, and won’t buy a used book if someone has written in it. Whenever I have to make notes about something I’m reading, I write them in a separate notebook. Further, I won’t even crack the spine on a paperback if I can help it. I have a vast library, but none of the books in it are mine—I’m only the trustee, taking care of them for whatever readers may find them long after I’m gone.

 

 What’s the weirdest thing you’ve given/received as a gift?

 My Brilliant Girlfriend (now My Brilliant Wife) once said to me, in all earnest, “I wish all books were written by you.”

What’s the one book someone else wrote that you wish you had written?

 Carole Maso, Ava

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Gregory Crosby is our go-to poet for cinematic deep-dives, apocalyptic parables, hot takes on century-old literary dustups, and lusty interludes of backlit longing. Said No One Ever collects a decades’ worth of breakneck verbal switchbacks and charged poetic insight—there is almost no subject pertinent to American culture that Crosby doesn’t square up. Here we are in the 21st Century, our lives balanced between myth and modernity, advertising and socializing, as Hollywood babbles on and our political scene skips through horrors like a creature feature on a busted reel—but still Crosby manages to plumb these depths without breaking stride or giving in, taking us on a memorable journey through art, language, history, and entertainment.

Buy a copy here: 

https://bookshop.org/p/books/said-no-one-ever-gregory-crosby/15813955?ean=9781936767649

The 40 But 10 Interview Series: Tyler McMahon

 

I had decided to retire the literary Would You Rather series, but didn't want to stop interviews on the site all together. Instead, I've pulled together 40ish questions - some bookish, some silly - and have asked authors to limit themselves to answering only 10 of them. That way, it keeps the interviews fresh and connectable for all of us!

Today, we are joined by Tyler McMahon, who is the author of the novels How the Mistakes Were Made, Kilometer 99, Dream of Another America, and One Potato. Tyler is a Professor of English at Hawai`i Pacific University and the editor of the Hawai`i Pacific Review. 

Describe your book in three words.

GMOs are complicated.

 

Summarize your book using only gifs or emojis.

🥔➕🧑‍🔬➕💰=😵‍💫4️⃣🧑‍🌾

 

If you could cast your characters in a movie, which actors would play them and why?

Good question. Maybe Jimmy Smits and Geena Davis? And the versions of them from my adolescence, if they’re available.

 

What is your favorite way to waste time?

I spend hours scrolling through the for-sale ads on craigslist and FB marketplace. Even when I’m not shopping for anything, I stare at old guitars, surfboards, bicycles, etc., thinking about whether or not they’re a good deal.

 

What are you currently reading?

A Children’s Bible by Lydia Mallet

 

What’s the single best line you’ve ever read?

It was in Patricia Lockwood’s Priestdaddy. I’m not sure if I remember exactly, but I believe it was: “Don Pablo’s was a fake Mexican restaurant that prided itself on the sizzling-ness of its food.”

 

What’s on your literary bucket list?

I’d love to write a murder mystery. It will likely never happen, but I wish I could do it. It seems like that’s what people love to read. Mystery writers are able to take on all sorts of cultural issues and big topics–while entertaining their readers. I have huge respect for those authors.

 

If you were stuck on a deserted island, what’s the one book you wish you had with you?

Probably Eduardo Galeano’s Century of the Wind. To me, it’s one of the most re-readable books ever.

 

Do you DNF books?

I feel like I finished nearly every book I started for the first 3 decades of my life–give or take. Now, I DNF all the time. Sometimes it’s not even a matter of disliking the book. I just lose the thread, or need to give it back to the library, or have something more urgent to read.

 

Are you a book hoarder or a book unhauler?

I hope you won’t think less of me, but I’ve definitely become an unhauler in my old age. I live in a small apartment, and am married to a voracious reader, so we’ve become very judicious about what books we keep around.

 

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 A satire set within the biotech industry, One Potato features a bumbling but well-intentioned food scientist forced to walk a crooked line between nature and technology. Eddie Morales is quite happy as a lowly R&D man at a Boise-based biotech firm called Tuberware. His aspirations don’t reach far beyond processed foods and a simple life in Idaho. It comes as a shock when the company’s head calls Eddie into the office to discuss a situation in Puerto Malogrado—a tiny but tumultuous country in South America—where lax regulations allow Tuberware to market experimental crops. Eddie—not an expert on GMOs or PR—is dispatched to the Andes to help avert a media circus.  

 

Buy a copy here: 

https://turnerbookstore.com/products/one-potato

The 40 but 10 Interview Series: Elizabeth (Betsy) Aoki

I had retired the literary Would You Rather interview series, but didn't want to stop interviews on the site all together. Instead, I've pulled together 40ish questions - some bookish, some silly - and have asked authors to limit themselves to answering only 10 of them. That way, it keeps the interviews fresh and connectable for all of us!

Joining us today is Elizabeth (Betsy) Aoki. She is a poet, fiction writer and game producer. Her first poetry collection, Breakpoint was a 2019 National Poetry Series Finalist  and published in March 2022 by Tebot Bach as the winner of the Patricia Bibby First Book Award.  Her poem “Slouching like a velvet rope” won the 2021 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize, selected by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Jericho Brown.

Aoki has received fellowships from the City of Seattle, Artist Trust Foundation, Jackstraw Writers Program, Clarion West Writers Workshop and Hedgebrook She serves on the board of Clarion West and as an assistant poetry editor for Terrain.org.

Her prior publications include Calyx, Hunger Mountain, Nassau Review (winner of the 2015 Writer Award), the Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry, Phoebe, Poetry Northwest, The Seattle Times, Seattle Review, Southern Humanities Review, terrain.org (Letters to America). You can find her tweeting at @baoki or contact her via her website at betsyaoki.com.

 

Why do you write?

 

I write because I devoured books as a kid and then of course as an adult with a wider access to different kinds of writing. All the joy of new worlds, immersion in language and emotional currents, all the excitement of experiencing new ways of thinking through reading compounded to make me want to give back in some way.

I also feel like my writing brain – because it has a chance to consider, versus whatever flies out of my mouth in the moment – has a better chance at getting at what matters.

Do you have any hidden talents?

I make amazing chocolate chip cookies.

What’s the best money you’ve ever spent as a writer?

I donated my Patricia Bibby First Book Award prize - $500 from Tebot Bach – to Black Girls Code.

I want a future with Black women in tech.

Describe your book in three words.

“Integral, functional, game face” is what Ms. Magazine used to describe Breakpoint (my poetry debut about women in technology) and I think those choices play homage to the computational language Breakpoint leans on as well as the ‘game face’ every woman in tech puts on when she goes to work in the morning.

Describe your book poorly.

Breakpoint is a lyrical homage to tech bros and their collective genius through the lens of the women who work with them … hahaha never mind, can’t do it. Sorry.

     What is your favorite way to waste time?  

-- Video games! I have to watch out or they take over all available time that I use for sleeping.  I think Hades was the last one to completely crush my ability to sleep, and so I have had to be wary of what I start playing or no writing, eating or sleeping gets done. I do notice when I do not have a game I am playing, I get more writing done (sad but true).

Which literary invention do you wish was real and why?

I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy so there are a ton of inventions to choose from. Probably magical portals or teleportation devices like they have on Star Trek – there are too many cool places in the world to see, and not enough time to get to most of them!

 What’s on your literary bucket list? 

I would love to camp out in a city for a year – London, Kyoto, Tokyo, New York City, New Orleans, Prague, Paris, etc. and just write poems and tales of that city. I need to save up for that, but definitely on my bucket list.

If you were on death row, what would your last meal be?

A variety of sushi, chocolate mousse cake, and Lappert’s Lilikoi (passionfruit) ice cream from Kauai. I would definitely skip the salad and have a Sauternes to go with the meal because as my Dad notes, “Sauternes goes with everything.”

      What’s the one thing you wish you knew when you were younger?

I wish I hadn’t been hunting for “the perfect writing lifestyle” and instead just gave myself permission to write as much as possible, in odd pockets of time. While vacations and residencies have been the best at giving me focused time, I could have done more for a weekly or daily routine that fit my biorhythms rather than thinking I had to do morning pages, take whole days off, etc. I have a friend who wrote a novel by banging away at it every lunch hour. Five hours a week is not shabby. I feel like I had more time than I thought to write, because I had this ideal notion of what ‘writing time’ really is.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 

Betsy Aoki has magically brought the technological — and in her hands, playful — language of computing into the realm of poetry: breakpoint, collide, return— and of course, code. Her poems using digital diction are quirky and adamant – here is a woman in a male-dominated field staking her territory in real life and in metaphor.

A second code, so to speak is Japanese American culture, hers. In these Aoki takes us to internment camps to anime to Japanese legends and beyond. Across this debut collection we come to see various dimensions of the poet and how what seems disparate collide and collude into unique poetry. No one else could write these marvelous poems – enjoy!

—- KIMIKO HAHN, AUTHOR OF FOREIGN BODIES

 

 

Of the book’s signature poem, “Slouching like a velvet rope”:

“This poem unwinds toward unexpected shifts and turns in just a few lines. And it manages a kind of lyric punch at the mention of each image.”

 

—- JERICHO BROWN, WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR THE TRADITION AND JUDGE FOR THE 2021 AUBURN WITNESS POETRY PRIZE

 

 

Breakpoint is an evocative mixture of sensual experiences, and mathematically infused linguistic patterns. Coding offers a way to store and retrieve details, a blueprint for narratives that link the poems to love, trust, and persistence/resilience.  Much like a word problem, the poems underscore the way we store and retrieve details.  Of the many ways we can remember – sound, taste, smell, texture – coding allows us to leave a trail in the chaos of random experiences where those details may be easily reached and reassembled.  Reminiscent of Alice Fulton’s Fractal Poetics, these poems assemble, conflate and arrange: what we know, what we feel, and what we remember.  You don’t have to be a coder to know it’s love when memory and language share the same equation.

 

—- COLLEEN J. MCELROY WHOSE LATEST COLLECTION OF POEMS, BLOOD MEMORY, WAS LISTED AS A PATERSON POETRY AWARD SELECTION

Links to Purchase:

Amazon

Small Press Distribution

Elliott Bay Book Co

Books I Read in February

 January was a killer month for reading. I completed a total of 11 books through some strange miracle. I don't know how I did it but I am certainly not complaining. I think that might be a record month, as I honestly don't see how I'll be able to beat that!

In February, I read a solid 9 books (two were for publicity consideration so I won't be including them here). 

Let's take a peek at what I read: 

The Merry Dredgers by Jeremy Shipp

Yowsers! I wasn't prepared for how much I was going to like this book. I mean, I love everything that Meerkat Press puts out, but dayumn! This was just soooo good.

Phina is a rent-me-by-the-party princess living her best life with her grouchy sidekick cat Heracles, until she receives a series of postcards from her sister Eff who appears to have joined a community that's definitely not a cult. She asks Phina to check on her ex-boyfriend because she's had visions that someone from the retreat-thats-not-a-cult may have hurt him and typically what Eff sees tends to come to pass. Phina does some sleuthing and discovers that, yup, the dude was banged up pretty good in a hit and run, and relays this back to her sister. A few days later, Phina receives a call that Eff is in a coma in the hospital due to bad fall that took place just outside the retreat's grounds.

Head spinning with all sorts of worst-case-scenarios, Phina decides to locate and inflitrate this community-thats-not-a-cult's retreat in order to figure out what sort of nefarious and life threatening things this group is up to.

Set in an abandoned goblin themed amusement park and run by a rich guy who appears to want to relive his childhood to its fullest, Phina must hide her true identify and befriend as many of these odd characters as possible to uncover the truth about Eff's accident, but can she get to the bottom of things before they realize what she's up to?

It's incredibly voice driven and was an absolute blast to read. I started it last night and ended up finishing today in practically one sitting. It sucked me right in and I have no doubt you will be too.

Sing With Me at the Edge of Paradise by Joe Bauman

Oh gosh you guys. Why aren't more of you reading this book?!

The first sentence of the book's description says it better than I can: The sixteen stories in this collection surround queer men of various ages―teenagers, young adults, men in middle age―trying to temper their expectations of the world with their lived experience. Using the lens of the bizarre and fantastic, these stories explore discontent, discomfort, and discovery.

The stories all contain people in slightly strange and extraordinary situations. A man who can slip through walls begins to pull his boyfriend in with him, another who can identify other queers by the blue glow eminating from their hands, and a lover who regrows his grieving boyfriend's recently deceased father in his backyard. Houses randomly vanish into thin air, taking the families who are inside with them. Heads of households begin to grow fruits and vegetables under their skin when the ground can no longer produce them. Garden of Eden's begin to appear in unexpected locations, complete with their own Trees of Knowledge.

In Joe's deft hands, we are thrust straight into the heart of each of these tender and somewhat fantasical stories, sharing the characters' fears and confusion, suffering their rejections, experiencing their joys...

It was just wow. The blurring of reality and fantasy was just * chef's kiss *. An early favorite for me, and if you're into queer magical realism, you've got to trust me, it will be a favorite of yours as well.

Dog on Fire by Terese Svoboda

Ok, first thing you need to know is that Dog on Fire is going to make you work for it, but I promise you, it's worth the read. If the opening scene isn't enough to draw you in, I don't know what would. In it, our unnamed narrator is driving through a dust storm and sees her dead brother on the side of the road, standing near a hole with a shovel. In life, he dug holes for a living. After a sudden and somewhat mysterious death, he seems to be haunting her but she can't manage to grasp the message he's trying to convey, if there even is one.

The chapters begin to alternate between our narrator, who has recently returned home post divorce as a single mother, and her dead brother's crazy ass pseudo girlfriend Aphra, who appears to be stalking her and her son. Both women are trying to understand and come to terms with their brother/lover's passing, and are, in their unique ways, also working through some family trauma drama dysfunction stuff.

It's quite beautifully written, though I am fully aware that I might be in the minority here - I've seen it referred to as experimental but it's really not. Svoboda writes without the use of quotes to identify when someone is speaking (a la Cormac Mccarthy and Jose Saramago - two of my favorite authors, btw). The story is quite lush and layered. It's chewy... you're going to spend some time playing with it before digesting it.

And everyone is pretty unlikable and jerky to one another, yet it doesn't detract or distract from anything. In fact, I think it does the opposite. I think it helps the reader home in on what's driving the behaviors. And can sometimes be a mirror. I mean, people are sometimes ugly to each other and feel justified in their reasons for it, right? I mean, hell. Let's start to normalize ugly lit. haha.

And yeah, in case you were wondering, there IS a dog who is briefly, partially, on fire. Does the dog die? Reader, we just don't know. But I promise you it's a very small piece of the book, though the title would have you believe otherwise.

Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam

This is definitely one of those books I would not have picked up on my own. The cover and the jacket copy just wasn't doing it for me, so big hugs to the bookish friends who thought I'd like it. I didn't just like it, you guys. I really loved it! You all know me so well!

Leave the World Behind is another slow burn of a novel. What is it with these lately? I mean, I'm not complaining. Honestly. I'm kinda into the whole prolonged tension thing and the twisty gut feeling of trying to figure out just what the fucking fuck is going on. This is a book that enjoys taking its time to get going but when it does, it really really does!

In it, a white Brooklyn couple, Amanda and Clay and their two kids, rent a house out in the middle of nowhere Long Island for the week. Things are off to a good start until one evening, there's a knock at the door. Who could it be? What might they want? Should they answer?

When they open the door, they meet George and Ruth, a black couple who introduce themselves as the owners of the house, and they have brought some strange news with them. There's been a blackout in New York, they were at the Opera when it happened, they decided to come here instead of braving the anticipated chaos in the City, and would feel much safer here, and could they please crash there for the night until they learn a little more about what is happening out there?

Of course, Amanda and Clay are suspicious. They have seen the movies and read the books... when a stranger knocks on the door at night, all kinds of bad things are bound to happen. Torture, murder, rape, you name it! But George and Ruth seem genuine and if something really is going on out there, shouldn't they band together until they know for sure?

They still have power, and water, and food. But the phones are dead, and the cable is out. The creeping fear of what might be happening around them keeps them rooted in the house the next day. What should they make of the hundreds of deer their daughter saw walking through the woods? What of that noise, that came out of nowhere, loud and horrible, that sounded like the sky cracking open, that sent hairline fractures through the windows and glass? What of their son's sudden onset of fever and vomiting?

The NPR review says it best: "Instead of a literary "beach novel" we've landed in an up-to-the-minute version of On The Beach, Nevil Shute's 1957 novel."

Leave the World Behind is a disaster story without the disaster. It's an apocalyptic story without an actual apocalypse. It's a horror story without any real horror. It's bound to get into your head. I mean, I keep tonguing my teeth, just in case.

The Pallbearers Club by Paul Tremblay

I am convinced that nothing Tremblay writes will outshine my feelings for Swallowing a Donkey's Eye, and I'm ok with that, I've come to terms with that.

In his lastest, we meet two unlikely friends - Art Barbara, who is authoring a memoir, and Mercy Brown, who has made footnotes in the margins of the memoir and adds her own version of the stories Art tells at end of each chapter. Which, imho, does not translate well into audiobook format (yes, I listened to this instead of reading it. yes, I regret it but only slightly because I am not a fan of footnotes and marginala in actual books).

The memoir/novel is set in the 1980's and in it, Art is basically writing about his awkward high school years and the student club he created called The Pallbearers Club - which was supposed to help dress up his resume and get colleges to consider him, but ended up being more a failed venture than anything else. It appears not many teenaged kids find hanging out at funeral homes "fun". Although one good thing seemed to come out of it, and that was meeting Mercy Brown or... so he initially thought.

Turns out that Mercy miiiiight actually be a vampire that is feeding off of him without his knowledge and to make matters worse, he thinks she miiiiiight actually be turning him into one as well.

It's a different spin on vampirism and toxic relationships and it's definitely more cutsey than horror. The first part of the book, the part that focused on the club and Art and Mercy's blossoming friendship was honestly much stronger than the second half. Once the supernatural started to snake its way in, things became a little repetitive and dare I say obnoxious? Though those last few pages... that ending... really was something.

Pine by Francine Toon

This book was on my wishlist for ages and I finally purchased it off @pangobooks a few months ago. Then it lingered, patiently waiting its turn on my TBR stack for a few more. If you know, you know (insert shrug emoji).

Pine is a haunting, atmospheric story set in Scotland involving a grieving, tormented man named Niall and his 10 year old daughter Lauren. They are both dealing with the loss of Lauren's mother, Niall's wife Christine, who disappeared right after Lauren was born, never to turn up again. Life has been difficult for both of them - they live in a small town and the townfolk have always suspected Niall of foul play. Neighbors give a helping hand with Lauren while Niall works hard to put food on the table, but the two are well aware of the whispers and concerns.

After a night of trick or treating, he and Lauren are driving home on a dark road when a woman in a white dressing gown throws herself in front of their truck. Niall scoops her up, brings her home, bathes her, and refuses to answer Lauren's questions about who she is and where she came from. In the morning, the strange woman is gone, and Lauren seems to be the only one who remembers her.

The woman begins to appear to Lauren, and other townfolk, with more frequency yet whenever she's gone, they forget her too, though they discover rocks and debris in the shape of a circle left in her wake. This mystery builds slowly as Toon sets us up for another disappearance that takes place later in the book, that of a college student who was last seen in Niall's truck one evening. Suddenly, Lauren's starting to question who she can trust, and both storylines come crashing together in the way these things tend to do.

Unsettling in its isolation, Pine is low-grade spooky with just the right amount of supernatural tension. The reader knows there's something strange going on but like the characters in the book, we're left grasping at straws the whole way through and I think we're ok with that.

The Last Beekeeper by Julie Carrick Dalton

This one's going towards the top of the list. I ate this book up! I didn't intend to read it in one day but I just did not want to put it down. It was so captivating.

Set in the near future where bees have gone extinct, the government is rationing out food and setting up hand pollenation sites to try to stave off mass starvation. It's a strange time in which people who report bee sightings regularly go missing and are deemed to suffer from hallucinations.

The daughter of the last beekeeper carries a secret, one that she's helped keep ever since her father was sent to jail eleven years ago, and she's finally ready to return home to dig up his hidden research. When she arrives, however, Sasha's surprised to find her old farmhouse populated by a group of four untrusting squatters. Desperate to hide her identify, but just as desperate to understand her father's (and her own) role in what became known as The Great Collapse, Sasha slowly wins them over and soon finds herself with much more than she bargained for - a new family and something she hasn't felt in a very long time... hope... not just for herself but for the world's future.

Don't let this one pass you by. It's going to captivate you too. I promise.

The Audio Series: Dog On Fire

 

Our audio series "The Authors Read. We Listen."  was originally hatched in a NYC club during BEA back in 2012. It's a fun little series, where authors record themselves reading an excerpt from their own novels, in their own voices, the way their stories were meant to be heard.

Today, Terese Svoboda reads from the first chapter of her book Dog on Fire. The author of 19 books of poetry, fiction, biography, memoir and translation, Terese has won the Guggenheim, the Bobst Prize in fiction, the Iowa Poetry Prize, an NEH translation grant, the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, a Jerome Foundation video prize, the O. Henry Award for the short story, and a Pushcart Prize for the essay. Her opera WET premiered at L.A.'s Disney Hall. Her most recent book, Theatrix: Poetry Plays was named one of the best of 2021. Roxy and Coco, my 20th book, 8th novel, will be published in 2024. Dog on Fire is the fourth book she's published in five years in four genres.

Click on the soundcloud bar below to hear Terese read an excerpt from the book:

Everyone likes ghost stories – except Dog on Fire isn't exactly that. Imagine a sad-funny elegy, Cather channeling Saunders, with infusions of sly wit. Imagine a sibling who is so inscrutable he seems to be from another family entirely, who dies before you get to know him. Of course the family in Dog on Fire's dysfunctional: an alcoholic mother who carves wax guns, a father whose passion is smoking anything vaguely edible, a sister who hears her dead brother in door molding. A dreadful dust storm gets the book off to a good start with the glimpse of the shovel-wielding ghost. What Dog on Fire does best is haunt, and its succinct almost-poetry seeks to enchant you.

"A contemporary “Dustbowl Gothic” novel.” – Rone Shavers, author of Silverfish
"Haunting and darkly witty reckoning.”-- Dawn Raffel, author of Boundless as the Sky
"Thrillingly alive to this bewildering moment."-- Rene Steinke, author of Friendswood