Cherie Priest's Boneshaker

By Holly Hibner and Mary Kelly — Steampunk is a sub-genre of science fiction.  The term was coined by K. W. Jeter, who was trying to categorize his own works and those of authors like H. G. Wells.  It often includes alternate history –usually of the Victorian era in Britain or the “Wild West” United States – and modified technology based on steam power and mechanical components like gears and levers.  Steampunk also incorporates Victorian-style fashion, architecture, and art, but modified to fit a speculative, or futuristic, vision from the Victorian perspective.  This genre has gained popularity in recent years, especially as video games like Final Fantasy, Myst, and Thief have become more main stream and movies like League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and The Prestige were nominated for various academy awards.  Steampunk is popular with those who associate with goth and punk lifestyles, and also industrial music fans.  It is a throwback to historic times, but re-imagined with technologies and even anti-establishment messages of the current times.

Classic titles like J. K. Jeter’s Infernal Devices (1987) and Tim Powers’ The Anubis Gates (1983) are standards in this genre.  Newer, but also established steampunk titles include China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station (2000), Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker (2009), and Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan (2009).

The Half-Made World

Here is a list of titles and series published in 2010 and 2011 for fans of steampunk:

The Half-Made World by Felix Gilman (2010)
Demonic spirits battle for supremacy.  Technology is created and humans are used as weapons.  One lone man knows how to save humanity: a senile, old General.  Based on a steampunk re-imagining of the American west.

The Hunter, Book 1 of Legend Chronicles by Theresa Meyers (2011)
This steampunk western includes vampire and demon hunters.  This is a great example of mixed genres: horror, fantasy, and science fiction with a futuristic western setting.

Ganymede, Book 4 of Clockwork Century series by Cherie Priest (2011)
This is the latest in a series of books set in the 1880s western United States.  The Civil War is raging, and this alternate history adds the technology of a submersible ship that could change the war’s outcome.  Airship pilot Andy Cly, who is trying to turn his shady, underworld life around, may be the man to figure out how the ship works.

The Iron Duke

The Iron Duke by Meljean Brook (2010)
A corpse is dropped from an airship, and found by Rhys Trahaearn.  Together with a detective, they find out that the victim was involved in a conspiracy and no one in England is safe.  Of course, there are zombies and infestations to be overcome while saving everyone from disaster.

Cold Magic, Book 1 of the Spiritwalker trilogy by Kate Elliott (2010)
Cold Fire, Book 2 of the Spiritwalker trilogy by Kate Elliott (2011)
Magic and science collide as an Industrial Revolution rages.  The mages believe that the scientists will bring civilization to an end.  One orphaned girl is caught in the middle.  This is a great read-alike for fans of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy.

-  Holly Hibner manages the Adult Services department at a public library in Michigan. She received an MLIS degree from Wayne State University in 1999. Since that time, she has published and spoken on a variety of topics, and received the 2007 Loleta Fyan award from the Michigan Library Association for innovation in library service. She loves all things techie and the challenge of a good reference question. Together with Mary Kelly, Holly created the popular blog “Awful Library Books,” which has led to an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live, and also co-authored the book Making a Collection Count: A Holistic Approach to Library Collection Management.

– Mary Kelly is a Youth Services Librarian at the Lyon Township Public Library in Michigan. She has worked in a variety of library jobs for more than ten years and has published and presented on topics such as computer instruction, reader’s advisory, and providing tech support. She received both an MBA and an MLIS from Wayne State University.  Mary is passionate about collection quality and technology. Together with Holly Hibner, Mary created the popular blog “Awful Library Books,” which led to an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live, and has also co-authored the book Making a Collection Count: A Holistic Approach to Library Collection Management.

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YALSA's Morris Award Seal

By Pam Spencer Holley – In December of each year, the Young Adult Library Services Association [YALSA], a division of the American Library Association, announces the five finalists in both the William C. Morris and Excellence in Nonfiction Awards. At the Midwinter meeting of ALA, the winners of these two awards, along with other youth media awards, will be announced on Monday, January 23rd. Titles of all winners can be found at www.ala.org/yma

The William C. Morris Award honors a debut book published by a first-time author who is writing for young adults, ages 12 to 18.

The five finalists for this award are listed below:

The Girl of Fire and Thorns

The Girl of Fire and Thorns, written by Rae Carson and published by Greenwillow Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

Elisa bears the Godstone indicating she’s a chosen one, but it’s unclear what she’s been chosen to do in a work that weaves together religion, politics and more in a fast-paced fantasy.

Paper Covers Rock, written by Jenny Hubbard and published by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books.

After a drowning at an exclusive boarding school, junior Alex journals the events that led to the death of his classmate in a story about a code of silence that compromises the code of honor.

Under the Mesquite, written by Guadalupe Garcia McCall and published by Lee and Low Books.

Following her mother’s cancer diagnosis, Lupita as oldest assumes more family responsibility yet never gives up her dream to attend college.

Between Shades of Gray

Between Shades of Gray, written by Ruta Sepetys and published by Philomel Books, an imprint of Penguin Young Readers Group USA.

In a little-known piece of history from World War II, 15-year-old Lithuanian Lina and her family are sent by Stalin to Siberia where it seems no one could possibly survive in the cold, bleak terrain.

Where Things Come Back, written by John Corey Whaley and published by Atheneum Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing.

Although it would seem that nothing ever happens in Lily, Arkansas, Cullen’s seventeenth summer proves otherwise as disconnected events collide.

The Excellence in Nonfiction Award honors the best nonfiction book published for young adults during a November 1 through October 31 publishing year. The five finalists for this award are listed below:

Sugar Changed the World

Sugar Changed the World: A Story of Magic, Spice, Slavery, Freedom and Science, written by Marc Aronson and Marina Budhos and published by Clarion Books, an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Blending facts with personal narrative, this true tale of the sugar trail provides readers an intimate and troubling portrait of the white grains that sweeten everything from coffee to bubblegum.

Bootleg: Murder, Moonshine, and the Lawless Years of Prohibition, written by Karen Blumenthal and published by Flash Point/Roaring Brook Press, an imprint of Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group.

The Temperance movement eventually led to the passage of the 18th Amendment, although no one ever thought it would result in gangsters, alcohol-related crimes, and bootlegging.

Wheels of Change: How Women Rode the Bicycle to Freedom (With a Few Flat Tires Along the Way), written by Sue Macy and published by National Geographic Children’s Books.

With the invention of the bicycle, women quickly left their restraining corsets and skirts for bloomers as young or old, African American or white, adventurer or activist, they all took to the road… and freedom.

Music Was IT: Young Leonard Bernstein, written by Susan Goldman Rubin and published by Charlesbridge.

This lively account of the passionate life of young Leonard Bernstein begins with his childhood in Boston and concludes with his brilliant conducting debut at Carnegie Hall when he was only 25-years-old.

The Notorious Benedict Arnold: A True Story of Adventure, Heroism, & Treachery, written by Steve Sheinkin and published by Flash Point/Roaring Brook Press, an imprint of Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group.

Treating history as mystery, Sheinkin takes readers through means, motive, and opportunity as he outlines Arnold’s path towards treason.

More complete information about these, and other YALSA awards, can be found at www.ala.org/yalsa

- A member of YALSA [Young Adult Library Services Association] for more than 25 years, Pam Spencer Holley is a Past President, chaired the 1987 Best Books for Young Adults, the 2004 Printz Committee and the 2009 Odyssey Committee. She authored the series What Do Children and Young Adults Read Next?, vol. 1-6 [The Gale Group, 1994-2004], and continues to write for their online product Books and Authors. She is a former biology teacher, middle and high school librarian, and coordinator of libraries for Fairfax County Public Schools, from which she retired in 1998.

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In the tradition of previous great mouse literary characters, like Kate DiCamillo's Despereaux, 2011 witnessed a wealth of amazing mice characters in kids' lit.

By Betty Carter – Every couple of years a strange phenomenon occurs within children’s publishing; a number of books will appear on the same subject without any identifiable trigger. This trend doesn’t include those near simultaneous publications one might expect: the full ballot of books about the presidency, voting, and famous presidents in 2008; the wide variety of books that examined Lincoln’s life for multiple age groups that marked his 200th birthday in 2009; and the flood of Titanic books that are beginning to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the disaster on April 15, 2012.

But in 2011, something different was appearing in the literary waters. This time it was middle grade books about mice. Now mice have a long literary heritage in novels for young people, beginning with Alice in Wonderland and including stalwart favorites such as Stuart Little; The Borrowers; Ben and Me; and a couple of Newbery Award Winners, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH and The Tale of Despereaux. This year, through some strange coincidence, three former Newbery Award recipients, Cynthia Voight, Lois Lowry, and Richard Peck, recently published decidedly different books with mice as the main characters. They are, respectively, Young Fredle, Bless This Mouse, and Secrets at Sea. All great books and all worth an extra look, or looks as the case may be.

Besides their rodent protagonists, these books do have two similarities. All lend themselves to reading aloud and all contain references from the pop-culture that will appeal (without interfering with their respective stories) to adult readers.

Young Fredle

Fredle is a house mouse and, like so many young readers, sometimes makes unwise choices and takes a few reckless risks. When he decides to nab a piece of candy, he’s spotted by the Missus and unceremoniously dumped outdoors, a fate he’s completely unprepared for but one that is much better than the alternative. Having never been outside, Fredle must adjust to all kinds of conditions and situations, all told believably from a mouse point of view. When he meets the field mice that surround his farm, Fredle learns a lesson straight out of George Orwell: All mice are equal but some more equal than others. The plot, of trying to find home, is familiar, but its execution gives the story a message all it’s own, and one that may resound strongly with readers seeking their own identities.

Lowry’s Bless This Mouse introduces readers to church mice, all living in Saint Bartholomew’s. Theirs is a gentle existence until Mouse Hildegarde realizes that it’s time for the Blessing of the Animals, an annual occurrence that brings – God forbid – cats into their sacred home. Good natured Father Murphy (who may remind older [OK, old] readers of Bing Crosby in Going My Way) is concerned when a nest of newborn mice seem to indicate an infestation, but Hildegarde handles the situation with a calm hand and a brave heart. This gentle story hits all the right notes without ever becoming over sentimentalized – a tribute to Lowry’s incredible strengths as a writer.

Think of the classic television series “Upstairs, Downstairs,” (or the more contemporary offering, “Downtown Abbey”) when slipping into Peck’s nineteenth-century setting. Helena, a “mouse of a certain age,” is the oldest (and most prim) member of a rodent family that lives undetected alongside the nouveau riche Cranstons, a family who desperately wants to marry off their dowdy daughter. The Cranstons decide to sail to England, hoping to find a suitable suitor; Helena realizes that she and her two younger sisters and irascible brother must accompany the Cranstons or they’ll starve. This fate is only slightly less appealing than an ocean voyage, but go they must, and Peck, with his sly humor in fine form here, never misses a trick in describing the social classes aboard (both human and rodent); employing clever word play; and laying out a romantic comedy of manners. But, being Peck, he lets larger themes emerge, including the importance of family, of being true to one’s self, and of courage.

The Cheshire Cheese Cat

Two other mouse tales bear mention here. The Cheshire Cheese Cat, by Carmen Agra Deedy and Randall Wright, takes place in London in a pub (Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese) frequented by Charles Dickens. Alley cat Skilley would love to abandon his hardscrabble life and reside there, and he gets his chance when the owners decide they need a good mouser. Problem is, Skilley doesn’t like mice, but, the mice that live there comfortably make a catch and release deal with him. Skilly will capture the mice, make a great show of carrying them around so the owner will think he’s doing his job, and then let them go to scurry around in the walls and feast on the tavern droppings. Dickens, who recognizes a good con when he sees one, is busy scribbling on a book about two cities, and doesn’t reveal the fakery. And how do these animals repay him? By recognizing his writer’s block and suggesting a suitable first sentence that begins: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

In Mousenet, Prudence Breitrose introduces a more modern colony of mice, with the head of the Mouse Nation, Big Cheese, living in Silicon Valley. These mice have mastered the Internet (even have their own webpage) but have trouble navigating those large computers, for it takes a chain of mice, attached tail to tail, to reach down to the awkward, human sized PCs. Enter one inventor of things in miniature who tries to make a thumb-sized computer, and the mice of Cleveland Clan know their future lies in his success. They only need to form an alliance with his niece, Megan, to help them on their way. Readers will discover that as the Mouse Nation goes, so goes the world in this engaging tale of courage and cleverness.

Clearly, 2011 may be the Chinese year of the Rabbit, but it’s the literary year of the mouse.

- Betty Carter is a former New Orleans, Louisiana reading teacher; Houston, Texas school librarian; and Texas Woman’s University professor of children’s and young adult literature. She’s been a member of the Newbery Committee, which annually selects the most distinguished book in children’s literature and the Sibert Committee which annually selects the most outstanding informational book in children’s literature. She’s also been a juror and chair of the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award and is a past coordinator of the Texas Bluebonnet Committee which oversees the selection and use of an annual reading list of books read by over two-hundred thousand school children in Texas. She presently works as a reviewer for The Horn Book Magazine.

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The Burning Soul

During a recent book tour to promote his 10th Charlie Parker novel, The Burning Soul, Irish author John Connolly mentioned a recurring theme in his conversations with readers that was starting to disturb him.

“More and more readers will come up to me and say, ‘You’re not going to kill Charlie Parker, are you? Oh, I hope you don’t kill Charlie Parker.’ They don’t care if I die,” he said. “But I’d better not kill Charlie Parker!”

Reader loyalty to characters is a staple of genre fiction. In 1893, angry fans protested at the offices of The Strand magazine after it published “The Final Problem,” in which Arthur Conan Doyle killed off Sherlock Holmes. Fans publicly mourned Holmes, set up a memorial at the site of his supposed death, and ultimately persuaded Doyle to bring Holmes back 10 years later in “The Adventure of the Empty House.”

118 years after his original death — and 81 years after the death of his creator — Sherlock Holmes continues to be one of crime fiction’s most enduring characters, making yet another appearance in this autumn’s The House of Silk by Anthony Horowitz, the first non-canonical Sherlock Holmes novel to be authorized by the Arthur Conan Doyle estate.

While Holmes is probably the best-known, he is far from the only fictional character to survive his creator’s death. In fact, an increasing number of mystery series are continuing under new authors.

Robert B. Parker's Killing the Blues

The most recent of these are Robert B. Parker‘s Spenser and Jesse Stone, whose series are being continued by Ace Atkins and Michael Brandman, respectively. Michael Brandman’s first Jesse Stone novel, Robert B. Parker’s Killing the Blues, was published in September 2011; Ace Atkins’s first Spenser novel, whose title has not yet been announced, will hit stores in Spring 2012. Parker’s widow, Joan, and his longtime agent, Helen Grann, both endorsed the series’ continuation when the deals were announced earlier this year. Joan Parker noted that Michael Brandman, having written several screenplays for the Jesse Stone character, knew “Jesse perhaps better than anyone other than Bob.” She said that Ace Atkins, author of nine crime novels set in the 1950s as well as in the present day, “possesses an extraordinary understanding and reverence for the characters Bob created.”

Do these posthumous revivals work? In strictly economic terms, they do. In fact, they work so well that a landmark U.S. District Court ruling, Estate of Virginia C. Andrews v. United States of America (1994), established that a bestselling author’s name is a valuable commercial asset, to be administered and taxed as any other part of the author’s estate. (V.C. Andrews, who published only six novels during her lifetime, has had what may be the most successful posthumous career in literary history, with 64 novels and counting published since her death in 1986.)

Robert B. Parker’s Killing the Blues has been a strong seller, with a current reader rating of 3.62 stars on Goodreads.com. Goodreads reviewers generally agreed that Brandman had captured Parker’s voice, though a few objected to the very idea, and found the book more like the TV movies than like earlier books in the series. Jeffery Deaver’s recent James Bond novel, Carte Blanche, was an instant bestseller; as discussed in an earlier column, James Bond has had more posthumous chroniclers than any fictional protagonist but Sherlock Holmes himself.

Don Winslow’s novel Satori, published this spring, continued the adventures of Nicholas Hel, an international agent/assassin created by Trevanian in the 1979 cult classic Shibumi. Jill Paton Walsh has now written three novels featuring Lord Peter Wimsey, whose creator, Dorothy L. Sayers, died in 1957. The first of these, Thrones, Dominations, was based on Sayers’s own unfinished manuscript, but the later books, A Presumption of Death and The Attenbury Emeralds, are original stories.

Death Comes to Pemberly

Nor is this phenomenon limited to crime fiction. Legendary mystery novelist P.D. James, at the age of 90, decided to write her own sequel to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. The result, Death Comes to Pemberley, will be released in the US on December 6. It joins dozens of non-canonical Pride and Prejudice sequels, including 2009′s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

Not all authors love the idea of their characters surviving them. John Connolly has said that his detective, Charlie Parker, will not survive him; Lee Child has said the same of Jack Reacher. Agatha Christie was so concerned about leaving Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple at the mercy of strangers that she left Curtain and Sleeping Murder to be published after her death, with endings designed to prevent anyone from continuing the series. When John D. MacDonald died in 1986, hopeful readers waited for a long-rumored final Travis McGee novel, with “Black” in the title; no such book ever emerged, but no one has dared to continue the Travis McGee adventures, either.

Robert B. Parker, however, almost certainly wouldn’t mind. A longtime student of the genre who wrote his doctoral dissertation on the literary roots of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, Parker accepted a commission from Raymond Chandler’s estate in 1988. They wanted him to complete Chandler’s unfinished manuscript, Poodle Springs — and write a sequel to The Big Sleep, which became Perchance to Dream, published in 1991.

– Written by Clair Lamb, writer for BookReporter.com

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By Holly Hibner–It can be tricky to give the gift of fiction, unless you are very clear on the reader’s tastes. Sometimes you read a book and you just know a special someone will love it. Other times you love a book and you’re dying to share it with someone, but aren’t sure who else might like it as much. Here are some fiction books that will make great gifts. They were all published in this decade, too, so they are fresh and new.

Lady Isabella's Scandalous Marriage

For the Romantic: Lady Isabella’s Scandalous Marriage by Jennifer Ashley, 2010

Jennifer Ashley is a best-selling author, known widely by romance readers. She writes historical and paranormal romances. In this book, Lady Isabella leaves her no-good husband, which inspires him to turn over a new leaf. He wants her back, and she fights it, but yearns for him as well. Romance, history, scandal, drama…all good things for the romantic in your life!

For the Adrenaline Junky: The Informationist by Taylor Stevens, 2011

A rich Texan hires Vanessa “Michael” Munroe to find his daughter, who went missing in Africa four years ago. She was born to missionary parents in Africa, and finds she can’t resist the challenge of the new job even if it means going back. Once there, she must face the demons of her past. This is a debut novel by a hot new author.

For the Jokester: Revenge of the Radioactive Lady by Elizabeth Stuckey-French, 2011

This darkly humorous story is about 77-year-old Marylou Ahearn, who was fed a radioactive cocktail as part of a government study 50 years ago. She’s out for revenge, and Dr. Wilson Spriggs is her target. He gave her, and other unsuspecting pregnant women, the cocktail that led to her child’s cancer death at age ten. This may not sound very funny so far, but then Marylou moves to Dr. Spriggs’ neighborhood, taking the persona of a B-movie actress. She intends to punish him and his family, but finds that she actually likes them and their dysfunctions. The characters and their antics are hilarious!

The Tiger’s Wife by Tea Obreht

For the Wordsmith: The Tiger’s Wife by Tea Obreht, 2011

Lovers of lyrical, literary fiction will soak up every word of this story. A doctor in an unnamed country searches for clues about her grandfather’s death. She remembers many stories he told her in her youth. “The tiger’s wife” refers to a deaf woman who befriended a tiger who escaped when a German bomb hit a zoo in the 1940s. Natalia, the doctor, shares many reminiscences about her youth in very poetic, descriptive language. Tea Obreht was named one of New Yorker’s “20 Under 40″ – she’s one to watch.

For the Magician: The Lost Gate by Orson Scott Card, 2011

Dan North grew up in a family where everyone had magical abilities. Everyone, that is, except for himself. Then he learned that he could gates between places – even between worlds. The problem was that this particular “gift” was forbidden and punishable by death. Dan left his family and went into the world on his own, looking for a way to be the first Gate Mage in a thousand years.

For the Worldly: Girl in Translation by Jean Kwok, 2010

Kimberly Chang and her mother enter the United States from Hong Kong with very little. They live in a squalid apartment with no heat and plenty of rats in New York City and work in a sweatshop. Kimberly is determined to make something of herself, though, and works very hard to learn English and excel in school. She does well, and even gets into a fancy private school. She has to hide the poor, sweat-shop side of her life from her school friends and her rich, privileged private school life from her Chinese family and co-workers.

Fuzzy Nation by John Scalzi

For the Other-Worldly: Fuzzy Nation by John Scalzi, 2011

When Jack Halloway finds a valuable cache of sunstone on another planet, he has visions of wealth. Then he realizes that the planet is inhabited by fuzzy, sentient beings. Jack’s company wants its sunstone at any cost, even if it means taking out the fuzzies. Action and drama abound in this re-telling of a 1962 award-winning novel (Little Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper.)

For the Hungry Sleuth: Crunch Time by Diane Mott Davidson, 2011

This is a fun culinary mystery. It is the most recent in the Goldy Schulz series, but can be picked up easily on its own. Goldy and her husband Tom invite their friend Yolanda (and Yolanda’s eccentric Cuban aunt) to stay with them after Yolanda’s private investigator boyfriend is killed and her home is burned by an arsonist. While keeping her catering business going, Goldy continues her usual sleuthing to find out “who done it.”

-  Holly Hibner manages the Adult Services department at a public library in Michigan. She received an MLIS degree from Wayne State University in 1999. Since that time, she has published and spoken on a variety of topics, and received the 2007 Loleta Fyan award from the Michigan Library Association for innovation in library service. She loves all things techie and the challenge of a good reference question. Together with Mary Kelly, Holly created the popular blog “Awful Library Books,” which has led to an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live, and also co-authored the book Making a Collection Count: A Holistic Approach to Library Collection Management.

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What's the current monster du jour in horror fiction?

By Don D’Ammassa – Like every other genre, horror fiction goes through occasional fads. When Stephen King wrote Salems’ Lot back in the 1970s, vampire novels were not unknown but they were certainly not very popular. If there was a dominant theme in supernatural fiction up until that point it was probably the traditional ghost story. Peter Straub’s Ghost Story (1975) stood out at least in part because it played games with the standard devices of the ghost story. His ghost could interact physically with the world and could actually pass as a living being. But the ghost story has declined in popularity ever since and the only writer consistently using ghosts to good purpose in recent years has been Rick Hautala.

Vampires grew increasingly popular during the 1980s and have remained so ever since, although the repulsive if sometimes charming Dracula has largely given way to vampire detectives, vampire lovers, angst ridden vampire teens, and suburban housewife vampires who are more concerned with their social obligations than in drinking blood or flitting through graveyards in the darkness. I recently had a conversation with a woman who was hired to lecture to high school students on vampire lore who discovered to her dismay that most of them didn’t even know that vampires were supposed to have risen from the dead.

Vampires have been partially supplanted by zombies during these past two years, the zombies of the George Romero movies rather those raised by voodoo. This new fascination will certainly run its course and something else will take its place. I was speculating about what new monster might catch on in the future and I realized that one of the major supernatural figures has been largely ignored in horror fiction – the werewolf.

Stephen King's Cycle of the Werewolf

There are werewolves and various other shapeshifters mixed in with vampire romances, but these aren’t really werewolves just as the vampires aren’t really vampires. The werewolf has always been more popular in movies than in fiction, and I suspect that part of the reason for this is that there aren’t – or at least haven’t been – as many variations of the werewolf story as there have been for vampires, ghosts, and even zombies.

Stephen King’s The Silver Bullet (1985) is a good example. A werewolf is killing random people in a small town and our protagonists have to figure out which of the people they know is responsible. It’s very well done, but the plot is replicated in many other werewolf novels. Robert Bloch once observed that in a sense, a considerable number of murder mysteries are essentially werewolf stories – the climax comes with the revelation of which of the various characters actually conceals the ruthless beast. Literal werewolves transform physically but the plot elements are very much the same. King’s story follows in the tradition of famous werewolf novels like The Wolf in the Garden (1931) by Alfred Bill, Wolf Tracks (1980) by David Case, Moondeath (1980) by Rick Hautala, and The Werewolf of Ponkert (1958) by H. Warner Munn. There have been a few dozen others which were certainly well written but most of them followed the same formula. I find this particularly surprising because the device of having an otherwise “good” person who is unable to contain the “evil” in their nature seems so promising.

This is not to say that there have not been innovative werewolf novels. The Werewolf of Paris (1933) by Guy Endore uses the werewolf as a source of dark satire. In Robert R. McCammon’s The Wolf’s Hour (1989) the shapechanger has limited control over his transformations and does not become evil when in the form of a wolf, which provides certain advantages as he conducts espionage missions during World War II. Melanie Tem’s Wilding (1992) and Wild Blood (1993) by Nancy Collins attempt to portray hidden societies of shapeshifters as social constructs.

Brian Stableford's The Werewolves of London

Brian Stableford uses werewolves as a kind of angelic intercessor in The Werewolves of London (1990) and Robert Stallman turned the entire concept on its head by creating a wolflike creature that occasionally transformed into a human being in The Orphan (1980) and its two sequels. Whitley Strieber also thought outside of the proverbial box in Wolfen (1978), presenting werewolves not as shapeshifting humans but as a second intelligent species living hidden within our own civilization, preying on the homeless and others who wouldn’t be missed. There have been a few other werewolf novels of note from writers like Ray Garton, Charles L. Grant, Gary Brandner, and John Farris, but with the possible exception of Brandner’s The Howling (1977), none of these represent the best work by their respective authors.

So why this comparative neglect? I suspect that in large part it results from the difficulty in having a satisfactory ending. Most werewolf stories are told from the viewpoint of a potential victim and end with the monster, however tormented, being destroyed. The potential of the conflict within the werewolf’s mind is rarely explored in depth because it is so difficult to find a way for the character to avoid his or her fate. Fairly or not, the shapechanger is cursed and becomes the agent of evil. Even if a plausible cure is introduced, the reader is unlikely to believe that the character could resume a normal life, or that surviving characters would be able to forgive and forget. There’s a kind of inevitability of doom that predisposes the reader to assume there will be a downbeat ending.

So my guess is that other than their role as romantic foil in paranormal romance novels, we aren’t going to see much experimentation with the werewolf in the near future. Unless, of course, someone comes up with a particularly clever idea that no one else has thought of and which everyone else will copy until the next monster gets its turn.

– Don D’Ammassa has been reading science fiction since 1960 and reviewing it since 1970.  He edited the Hugo nominated fan magazine Mythologies and has written scores of articles about the field for encyclopedias and other publications.  He is also the author of several science fiction novels and dozens of short stories, including Narcissus, Haven, and Scarab.  He has very eclectic tastes and savors the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, Robert A. Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, and H.P. Lovecraft, each in its own way.  He is also the author of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, The Encyclopedia of Fantasy and Horror, and The Encyclopedia of Adventure Fiction.

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Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

By Daniel S. Burt – Considered by many the greatest Russian novel of the twentieth century, Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago (1957) is certainly the most famous historical fictional treatment of the defining moments of modern Russian history at the outset of the twentieth century, inviting a comparison with Tolstoy’s similar effort in War and Peace to dramatize the crucial events of the Napoleonic era. Doctor Zhivago shares with War and Peace an epic tonality; both attempt to encapsulate a national history, culture, and philosophy of human nature and experience in the stories of individuals caught up in the maelstrom of history. Depicting pre-revolutionary Russian culture, the Revolution, and the ensuing civil war from a decidedly subjective viewpoint, Doctor Zhivago broke with the enforced literary dictates of socialist realism and party doctrine at a time when such a challenge demanded enormous courage and conviction.

“A miracle of nonconformity,” Russian scholar Victor Frank has called Pasternak’s novel, “full of supreme indifference to all the official taboos.” Refused publication in the Soviet Union, the novel was surreptitiously sent to an Italian publisher who brought it out in 1957, with an English translation appearing in 1958. Hailed by critic Edmund Wilson as “one of the great events in man’s literary and moral history . . . a great act of faith in art and the human spirit,” Doctor Zhivago became a worldwide popular and critical sensation that culminated in Pasternak being awarded the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature “for his notable achievement in both contemporary poetry and the field of the great Russian narrative tradition.” Regarded by the Soviet state as a political rather than a literary judgment on behalf of a novel it considered unpatriotic and subversive, Doctor Zhivago provoked a barrage of hostile reviews and resolutions in Russia that branded it “literary trash” and a “malicious lampoon of the socialist revolution.” Pasternak was expelled from the Writers’ Union and condemned as “worse than a pig” because “a pig never befouls where it eats or sleeps.” Pasternak’s deportation from the Soviet Union was averted only by the writer’s refusal of the Nobel Prize and by his impassioned appeal to Nikita Khrushchev in which Pasternak equated banishment from Russia to a death’s sentence. Doctor Zhivagowould not be officially published in Russia until 1988 to great acclaim and acceptance into the post-Soviet literary canon as a landmark and unavoidable masterpiece.

Poster from David Lean's 1965 film version of "Doctor Zhivago"

Despite its undisputed importance as a social document chronicling a crucial period in Russian and world history, Doctor Zhivago continues to divide critics at the most basic level of how it works, its affinity to the novel tradition in the nineteenth and twentieth century, and even the genre to which it belongs. Describe as both one of the greatest political novels and one of the literature’s great love stories, Doctor Zhivago has also been called “a fairy tale,” “a kind of morality play,” “an apocalyptic poem in the form of a novel,” “one of the most original works of modern times,” and “a nineteenth-century novel by a twentieth-century poet.” Compared to predecessors like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in the great nineteenth-century Russian realistic novel tradition, Pasternak has been found wanting in his failure to provide believable, rounded characters. Compared to modernist innovators like Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner, he has been viewed as old-fashioned and out-moded. To appreciate fully Pasternak’s achievement in Doctor Zhivago it is necessary to recognize that its nonconformity extends beyond its unorthodox and unsanctioned ideas to its formal challenges to established narrative assumptions. Doctor Zhivago is neither a failed nineteenth-century nor a disappointing modernist novel, but a radical synthesis of both traditions in a daringly original construct.

Aspects of Pasternak’s life and career provide crucial contexts for his single novel published three years before his death. Born in Moscow in 1890, Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was the eldest child of painter Leonid Pasternak and concert pianist Rosa Kaufman and was raised in the midst of Moscow’s intellectual and artistic community. Tolstoy was a household visitor, and the distinguished composer Alexander Scarabin encouraged the fourteen-year-old Pasternak in his study of music. Convinced that he lacked the necessary technical skills, at age nineteen, Pasternak abandoned music for poetry and philosophy, eventually enrolling in Germany’s prestigious Marburg University until 1912 when he returned to Russia and committed himself exclusively to poetry. Associated with the Russian symbolist and futurist movements, Pasternak began to gain a reputation as a leading figure of a new generation of Russian poets who sought a greater freedom of poetic subjects and expression, more closely tied to actual experience and colloquial language.

Boris Pasternak

Declared exempt from military service during World War I because of a childhood leg injury, Pasternak managed a draft board in the Urals. When the revolution came, Pasternak was largely sympathetic, embracing the promise of needed social reform and liberation of the spirit that his poetry advocated. As the new Soviet regime grew increasingly conservative in cultural matters and repressive in silencing dissent, Pasternak, throughout the 1930s, published little, perfecting the delicate art of survival under Stalin, of maintaining core principles while avoiding the fate of fellow writers and artistic colleagues who faced death sentences and banishment to labor camps.

Convinced that the Soviet state had betrayed the ideals of the revolution and that the drive for collectivism in Soviet society violated essential imperatives of human nature, sometime during the 1930s, Pasternak decided to turn from poetry to prose to tell the story of his generation and its historical fate under the tsar, during the Great War, and through the revolution and the establishment of the communist state, in part as an expression of survivor’s guilt. Writing in 1948, Pasternak admitted, “I am guilty before everyone. But what can I do? So here in the novel—it is part of this debt, proof that at least I tried.” Drawing on his earlier interests in musical composition, philosophy, and a career devoted to poetry, Pasternak conceived a novel capacious enough to contain his “views on art, the Gospels, human life in history and many other things.” Rejecting the “idiotic clichés” of socialist realism and an edited, sanitized view of the revolution and its aftermath, Pasternak embraced the role as truth teller in which “Everything is untangled, everything is named, simple, transparent, sad. Once again, afresh, in a new way, the most precious and important things, the earth and the sky, great warm feeling, the spirit of creation, life and death, have been delineated.”

Doctor Zhivago began to take final shape during the late 1940s as Pasternak faced increasing government hostility for his “anti-Soviet” views. To punish him indirectly, Pasternak’s mistress, Olga Vsevolodovna Ivinskaia, was arrested in 1949 and sentenced to five years in a hard-labor camp “for close contact with persons suspected of espionage.” Pasternak would later confess that Olga was the Lara of his novel, which was finally completed in early 1956.

Pasternak’s comments about his work in his letters reveal key points about his intentions and methods for Doctor Zhivago. Throughout his correspondence, Pasternak refers to his “novel in prose,” a nod to Pushkin’s “novel in verse,” Eugene Onegin, and a connection to Pasternak’s following the same literary trajectory of Russia’s literary fountainhead, Pushkin, from poetry to prose. Regarding his poetry as preparatory work and incapable of supporting his historical and philosophical aspirations, Pasternak claimed, “a poem is to prose as a sketch is to a painting.” Yet at the core of Doctor Zhivago is Pasternak’s insistent lyricism in which narrative elements are joined through imagery, counterpoint, and symbolism. Pasternak’s poetic method explains why Doctor Zhivago, measured against the standard of the realistic novel often falls short. Characters rather than appearing distinct and original tend to merge together, expressing shared preoccupations and feelings.

Defending himself against charges of “not sufficient tracing of characters,” Pasternak insisted that “more than to delineate them I tried to efface them.” To the charge of the novel’s many violations of probability with coincidence, Pasternak claimed, “Realism of genre and language doesn’t interest me. That’s not what I value. In the novel there is a grandeur of another kind.” Underlying the novel’s blending of elements from poetry and prose and a manipulation of events that lends a fairy tale or providential aura to the book is Pasternak’s contention that “existence was more original, extraordinary and inexplicable than any of its separate astonishing incidents and facts. I was attracted by the unusualness of the usual.”

Pasternak’s subjective, poeticized perspective aligns Doctor Zhivago in certain ways with magic realists like Márquez as much as with Tolstoy in his pursuit of “the atmosphere of being,” which he described as “the whole sequence of facts and beings and happenings like some moving entireness, like a developing, passing by, rolling and rushing inspiration, as if reality itself had freedom and choice and was composing itself out of numberless variants and versions.”

Pasternak’s “moving entireness” in Doctor Zhivago begins with the ten-year-old Yury Zhivago attending his mother’s funeral in a driving snow storm, imagistically uniting human destiny and the vitality and power of nature that threatens to engulf and overwhelm the individual. This theme of the survival of the individual will be orchestrated throughout the novel, embedded even in the title character’s family name, an older Russian form of the word “alive.” It is the first of many scenes in which Zhivago’s isolation and vulnerability to both natural forces and human events aligned against his aspirations toward selfhood will be emphasized. The novel relies on several traditional structural principles including the novel of development and education of the artist as well as the quest novel in which the artist Zhivago eventually emerges after a succession of tests. Yet Doctor Zhivago is a tragically-conceived modern Odyssey in which not home but isolation and separation from virtually every sustaining relationship and external consolation are his destination. Ultimately, Zhivago’s only reward or redemption is his art and the affirmation of the mystery and majesty of existence that his poems assert.

The first portion of the novel dramatizes the last decade of tsarist rule and the events leading up to World War I and the revolutions of 1917. Following the suicide death of his father over the loss of his fortune, Yury is raised in the professorial home of Alexander and Anna Gromeko and their daughter Tonya. The novel’s catalyst and moral touchstone is the “Girl from a Different World,” Lara Guishar, the teenaged daughter of a Belgian hatmaker, whose story connects the comfortable bourgeois world of the Gromekos with Moscow’s labor class and incipient revolutionaries. Her seduction by the rich lawyer, Komarovksy, establishes a connection with Yury who is on hand after Lara’s mother’s failed suicide attempt and at the Christmas party where Lara tries and fails to shoot her lover. They next meet at the front during World War I where Yury, having married Tonya, is serving as a doctor and Lara is working as a nurse, having gone to the front in search of her husband, Pasha Antipov, who has abandoned her and their child, unable to reconcile himself to his wife’s past with Komarovsky. As Yury and Lara’s attachment grows, news of the revolution reaches them, and both return to their respective homes—Yury to Moscow, and Lara to Yuryatin in Siberia.

Having experienced the dehumanizing conditions of war, Yury returns to similar conditions in Moscow under the Bolsheviks where his family’s privileged existence has been transformed to a struggle for survival in which Yury’s integrity, individualism, and artistic sensibility are not just valueless but dangerously subversive. Seeking relief, the family travels east to Tonya’s former family estate in Siberia, near Yuryatin, Lara’s home. The train journey is one of the triumphs of the novel in which the immense Russian landscape is brilliantly evoked and a rich collection of the various classes of Russian society displaced by the revolution are brought together during the dangerous and lawless days of the Civil War. Yury barely avoids execution in an encounter with the merciless revolutionary leader, Strelnikov, Lara’s renamed husband Antipov. Settling at the Varykino estate and subsisting off the land, the family thrives for a year before a chance reunion between Yury and Lara leads to their love affair. Guilt ridden and determined to reconcile with Tonya, Yury is kidnapped on his way home by Bolshevik partisan fighters in need of a doctor. Serving with them for over a year and experiencing the horrific violence and human debasement of the Civil War, Yury finally escapes back to Yuryatin where he is nursed back to health by Lara and learns that Tonya, her father, and their children have returned to Moscow before being deporting to the West.

The reunited lovers are interrupted by the appearance of Komarovsky who warns Lara of her danger as the wife of the now condemned Strelnikov. They respond by leaving Yuryatin for Varykino and two weeks of happiness in which Yury resumes his poetry, inspired by Lara. Komarovsky offers Lara and her child safe passage to the east, and Yury, to convince her to take it, lies that he will join them. Left alone, Yury is visited by the hunted Strelnikov who, in despair over the failure of his revolutionary ideals and his betrayal of Lara’s love, shoots himself. The novel concludes with Yury’s life in Moscow, having been stripped of everything he had formerly relied on to sustain him—his wife, family, and lover. Resuming his medical career and his writing, Yury finally dies of a heart attack, ultimately vindicated by the poems that close the book, testimony of both his heroic resistance to the forces of death and despair and affirmation of the value of life, embodied by the essential human qualities of his muse, Lara. She arrives in Moscow in time for the funeral before disappearing: “She must have been arrested in the street, as so often happened in those days, and she died or vanished somewhere, forgotten as nameless number on a list which later was mislaid, in one of the innumerable mixed or women’s concentration camps in the north.”

In the fates of both Lara and Yuri the reader feels an overwhelming sense of human waste, having been instructed by the author in the value their lives and living has, set beside the necessities of history and ideology that has diminished both. Doctor Zhivago attempts to redress the balance, translating the “nameless number on a list” into memorable human terms that never neglects the “unusualness of the usual.”

- Dr. Daniel S. Burt is a writer and college professor who teaches graduate literature courses at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, where he was a dean for nine years. He is the editor of The Chronology of American Literature (Houghton Mifflin, 2004), and the author of What Historical Novel Do I Read Next? Volumes 1-3 (Gale, 1997-2003), The Novel 100 (Facts on File, 2003), The Literary 100 (Facts on File, 2001), The Biography Book (Greenwood/Oryx, 2001), and Drama 100 (Facts on File, 2006). He lives with his wife on Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

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Science Fair Season: Twelve Kids, a Robot Named Scorch…and What It Takes to Win

By Pam Spencer Holley – Over the last few years there’s been an increasing concern on the part of scientists, government officials, and teachers about the decline of STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics] education in the United States. Two recent books offer hope that our teenagers do have an interest in the sciences, especially when given a purpose and an enthusiastic teacher or mentor to guide them.

In Science Fair Season: Twelve Kids, a Robot Named Scorch…and What It Takes to Win by Judy Dutton, each chapter focuses on a single student and his or her science fair project that enters the competition at the “Super Bowl of science fairs”: The Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. As many as 1500 high school students across America earn the right to participate and compete for more than $4 million in prizes.

Several of the dozen projects stand out as illustrations that a student doesn’t always need access to college laboratories or scientists as mentors to create a prize-winning project. Young Navajo Yazzie cobbled together a solar heater from a car radiator, some Plexiglass and more than 60 soda cans to warm his family’s unheated trailer. A special teacher at Eagle Point, a school for juvenile delinquents, inspired students to win honors at science fairs. One incarcerated student researched possible sites for water on Mars, pinpointed a location, and was validated when NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander drilled into the spot and found water a few inches below the surface.

The New Cool: A Visionary Teacher, His FIRST Robotics Team, and the Ultimate Battle of Smarts

Often students don’t think of themselves as scientists, or even pseudo-scientists, and feel out of place when in a class with students who have previous science fair experience. Eliza is the last person one would envision at a science fair competition and yet when her high school schedule left only one possible class, sandwiched between acting and French, she was placed in a hands-on research class. Eliza managed to overcome her fear of lab equipment, and overlook snickers from other students about her vintage clothes, and complete a project exploring pesticides in the environment that ultimately appear in bee honey.

Combine the enthusiastic, dedicated teacher Amir Abo-Shaeer with seniors in the Engineering Academy at Dos Pueblos High School in California, and the result is a competitive team for the FIRST [For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology] Competition. As illustrated in The New Cool: A Visionary Teacher, His FIRST Robotics Team, and the Ultimate Battle of Smarts by Neal Bascomb, Amir believes that students learn better when they create something. That something is a robot.

Requirements for the 2009 robot arrive and they learn their robot that will move along a slick polymer material while tossing “moon rocks” and “super cells” into the trailer of an opposing robot. Armed with their FIRST kit of parts, and a budget not to exceed $3500, the students lay out the regulation court on which their robot will operate, review the rules for the competition, design their robot to meet required dimensions, and learn the science they need to build their robot.

With only six weeks to complete their project, the students are continually in the robot room and, as deadline time approaches, literally live there. Heading off to their first competition, they learn all that can go wrong: a robot freezes in place, is unable to move one of its arms, or is boxed in by another team’s robot so that it can’t toss cargo into the trailer of another team. Strategy plays a big part in their competition as one student “drives” the robot with a controller and another student is deemed the payload specialist, the one who shoots the cargo into opposing trailers. Yet all students are part of the team the Dos Pueblos D’Penguineers. Check out one of the 2011 competitions here or the 2009 competitions here. Watching these matches that can be just as exciting as watching any other sports event.

- A member of YALSA [Young Adult Library Services Association] for more than 25 years, Pam Spencer Holley is a Past President, chaired the 1987 Best Books for Young Adults, the 2004 Printz Committee and the 2009 Odyssey Committee. She authored the series What Do Children and Young Adults Read Next?, vol. 1-6 [The Gale Group, 1994-2004], and continues to write for their online product Books and Authors. She is a former biology teacher, middle and high school librarian, and coordinator of libraries for Fairfax County Public Schools, from which she retired in 1998.

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Not sure why cooking and murder seem to go together so well. Maybe it's the knives...

By Holly Hibner – Cozy mysteries are very popular, and especially those that fall into the culinary mystery genre. People who enjoy food, cooking, and mystery flock to these books. Often, the main character is an amateur sleuth; perhaps a caterer or chef who ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Food is usually a main “ingredient” of the mystery. The ingredients, if you will, are metaphoric to the puzzle pieces of the mystery. The nature of a recipe is formulaic, as is solving a mystery.

Food is a double-edged sword. It is associated with nice things like home, family, wealth, hospitality, and contentment. It is also associated with over-indulgence, gluttony, temptation, and in Eve’s case with the apple in the Garden of Eden, evil. This is what makes food mysteries interesting. We recognize ourselves in food: the things we like to eat and drink (a sweet tooth, a tea drinker, or maybe a lover of baking), and also our cultures and even our religions. Everyone can recognize and relate to food themes, and it is fun to try to figure out the puzzle of “who done it” in these books.

These are usually gentle mysteries, with only implied violence. There is rarely any explicit description of the murder itself. These mysteries are often funny, set in quaint or exotic locations, run in series, and often include recipes. Here are some great culinary mysteries to start with.

Joanne Fluke – Hanna Swenson Series:
Hanna Swenson owns the Cookie Jar Bakery in Lake Eden, Minn. Her books include lots of odd characters and lots of great recipes.

The Culinary Mystery Genre: Home of the Bad Morbid Pun

Tamar Myers – Magdalena Yoder Pennsylvania Dutch Series:
Magdalene Yoder exploits her Mennonite heritage to run a bed and breakfast in Pennsylvania. When murder happens in her inn, she always tries to solve it herself to save her business’ reputation. These books are funny and fast-paced with an emphasis on home cooking. The first book in the series is Too Many Crooks Spoil the Broth (1994) and the most recent, number eighteen, is Butter Safe than Sorry (2010).

Diane Mott Davidson – Goldy Bear Series:
Goldy B. Schulz is a caterer in Colorado who seems to get caught up in solving murders. Davidson’s books are upbeat and funny. The first in the series is Catering to Nobody (2002) and the most current, number sixteen, is Crunch Time (2011).

Susan Wittig Albert – China Bayles Series:
The China Bayles series is based on an herb shop proprietor in a small town in Texas. Albert’s books have a very homespun, small town feel. The first in the series is Thyme of Death (1994), and the most current, number nineteen, is Mourning Gloria (2011).

Laura Childs – Tea Shop Mysteries Series:
Theodosia Browning is a tea shop owner in Charleston. These mysteries often revolve around small town secrets. They are charming, upbeat, and about as cozy as a mystery can be! The first book in the series is Death by Darjeeling (2001) and the most current, number twelve, is Scones and Bones (2011).

Katherine Hall Page – Faith Fairchild Mysteries Series:
Faith Fairchild was a famous New York caterer before she gave it all up to become a minister’s wife in Massachusetts. Now she finds excitement in solving the murders that always seem to crop up around her. These books have a relaxed pace and have a strong sense of place. The first in the series is The Body in the Big Apple (2001) and the most current, number nineteen, is The Body in the Gazebo (2011).

-  Holly Hibner manages the Adult Services department at a public library in Michigan. She received an MLIS degree from Wayne State University in 1999. Since that time, she has published and spoken on a variety of topics, and received the 2007 Loleta Fyan award from the Michigan Library Association for innovation in library service. She loves all things techie and the challenge of a good reference question. Together with Mary Kelly, Holly created the popular blog “Awful Library Books,” which has led to an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live, and also co-authored the book Making a Collection Count: A Holistic Approach to Library Collection Management.

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There's a long history of pulp fiction, long before Tarantino and Travolta got a hold of it.

By Clair Lamb – Pulp fiction. n. (Americanism). Fiction dealing with lurid or sensational subjects, often printed on rough, low-quality paper manufactured from wood pulp.

Before it was a Quentin Tarantino movie, “pulp fiction” was its own literary phenomenon, although “literary” might be overstating the case. The low-priced magazines and paperbacks made stories available to the masses, on cheap yellow stock that wasn’t expected to outlast its readers. The pulp magazines of the 1930s and ’40s, followed by dime novels in the ’40s and ’50s, covered the spectrum from science fiction to Westerns, with a little bit of everything in between: adventure, hard-boiled detective novels, horror, and the racy stories euphemistically called “men’s fiction.” In the days before television and Internet, pulp fiction offered the average American an escape into worlds they’d never experience, whether it was the Old West or a space colony.

Pulp fiction started as short stories and moved into novels, launching authors who later became known in more legitimate literary circles: Ray Bradbury, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Dashiell Hammett, H.P. Lovecraft, Donald Westlake. These authors were paid by the word, in sums that required vast quantities just to earn a living wage. And they produced: the so-called “king of the pulps,” Robert E. Howard, is reported to have written an average of 5,000 words a day, seven days a week, in the mid-1930s.

Across genres, pulp fiction had several recurring elements: a strong central character, usually male; an exotic setting, whether geographic or situational; love interests that offered danger as well as the possibility of pleasure; and non-stop action, portrayed so vividly that an earlier generation had called these “sensation” stories.

Pulp fiction’s popularity began to wane in the late 1940s, for reasons that included the return of soldiers from the Second World War (and later Korea) to the routine of family life and the introduction of television. But the stories survived, and paperback publishers such as Ace, Dell and Avon — which had started as publishers of pulp magazines — continued to bring readers books from authors such as Louis L’Amour, Lawrence Block, Donald Hamilton, Elmore Leonard, and John D. MacDonald.

A respectable percentage of these books have survived to become acknowledged classics, to be reprinted in more durable editions for new audiences. Black Lizard, a publishing imprint founded in 1984 by author Barry Gifford (himself a pulp author, best known for the Sailor and Lula series), reprinted dozens of overlooked or forgotten pulp fiction titles; its successor imprint, Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, has kept the works of pulp icons Jim Thompson, David Goodis, and Chester Himes in print, among others. In 2003 The Feminist Press of the City University of New York launched “Femmes Fatales: Women Write Pulp,” to reprint classics written by the tiny number of female pulp authors: Faith Baldwin, Vera Caspary, and Dorothy B. Hughes, among others.

Choke Hold, published by Hard Case Crime

In recent years, however, the pulp fiction flag has been carried highest and proudest by Hard Case Crime, an imprint founded in 2004 by authors Charles Ardai and Max Phillips, and dedicated, according to its website, “to reviving the vigor and excitement, the suspense and thrills — the sheer entertainment — of the golden age of paperback crime novels.” Ardai, previously best known as the founder of Juno Online Services, and Phillips were among the imprint’s first authors (Ardai under the pen name Richard Aleas), but Hard Case Crime’s first title, in September 2004, was Grifter’s Game, a reprint of a Lawrence Block novel originally published by Gold Medal in 1961 as Mona. After that, Hard Case published between 10 and 13 titles a year, a combination of new fiction and reprints, often from surprising sources.

Hard Case’s October 2005 release, The Colorado Kid by Stephen King, remains its bestselling title, but the list also includes Straight Cut by Southern literary novelist Madison Smartt Bell; Mickey Spillane’s last novel, Dead Street; and The Dead Man’s Brother, the first new work from legendary science fiction author Roger Zelazny in 15 years. All of its titles have covers that pay homage to the classics of pulp fiction, showcasing illustrators and painters such as Richard B. Farrell, Gregory Manchess, and the legendary Robert McGinness, who created the posters for the original Sean Connery James Bond movies and for the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Three Hard Case novels have won national awards: Domenic Stansberry’s The Confession won the 2005 Edgar for Best Paperback Original, Max Phillips’s Fade to Blonde won that year’s Shamus Award for Best Paperback, and Richard Aleas’s Songs of Innocence received the Shamus Award for Best Paperback of 2007.

Despite healthy sales and strong critical acclaim, Hard Case Crime went on involuntary hiatus in autumn 2010, after its partner Dorchester Publishing, which handled the imprint’s distribution, announced a move to an e-publishing, print-on-demand model. Fans were delighted when Hard Case Crime announced a new partnership with Titan Publishing, to include the imprint’s backlist, in October 2010.

It was not until September 2011 that Hard Case Crime celebrated its revival with a party at New York’s Mysterious Bookshop. After more than a year’s absence, the imprint returned to market with two new titles: Quarry’s Ex by Max Allan Collins and Getting Off: A Novel of Sex and Violence by Lawrence Block, the imprint’s first hardcover novel. Getting Off, an original novel, is credited to “Lawrence Block writing as Jill Emerson,” a pen name he used for seven novels in the 1960s. These books, in Block’s own words, ranged “from sensitive lesbian fiction (Enough of Sorrow) and candid erotica (Threesome) to mainstream contemporary fiction (A Week as Andrea Benstock). Getting Off is a serial killer novel with a female protagonist, and — it should go without saying — for adults only.

Hard Case Crime followed these books immediately with two October releases: The Consummata by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins (begun by Spillane in the 1960s, finished after his death by Max Allan Collins), and Christa Faust’s Choke Hold, a sequel to February 2008′s Money Shot. Faust is Hard Case Crime’s only female author, continuing the male-dominated tradition. Three additional titles have been announced for 2012: The Comedy is Finished by Donald Westlake, scheduled for February; Blood on the Mink by Robert Silverberg, in April; and False Negative by Joseph Koenig, scheduled for June.

And yes, if you’re wondering: While Hard Case Crime prides itself on its paperback originals, its titles are all available in electronic format as well. Because “pulp” isn’t just about the paper anymore.

– Written by Clair Lamb, writer for BookReporter.com

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