Random Books from the Bookshelf

Nice Girls Don’t Have Fangs by Molly Harper

The first page reads:

Vampirism: (n) 1. The condition of being a vampire, marked by the need to ingest blood and extreme vulnerability to sunlight. 2. The act of preying upon others for financial or emotional gain. 3. A gigantic pain in the butt.

I’ve always been a glass-half-full kind of girl.

The irritated look from Gary, the barrel-chested bartender at Shenanigans, told me that, one, I’d said that out loud, and, two, he just didn’t care. But at that point, I was the only person sitting at the pseudo-sports bar on a Wednesday afternoon, and I didn’t have the cognitive control required to stop talking. So he had no choice but to listen.

I picked up the remnants of my fourth (fifth? sixth?) electric lemonade. It glowed blue against the neon lights of Shenanigans’ insistently cheerful décor, casting a green shadow on Gary’s yellow-and-white-striped polo shirt. “See this glass? This morning, I would have said this glass isn’t half empty. It’s half full. And I was used to that. My whole life has been half full. Half-full family, half-full personal life, half-full career. But I settled for it. I was used to it. Did I already say that I was used to it?”

Gary, a gone-to-seed high-school football player with a gut like a deflated balloon, gave me a stern look over the pilsner he was polishing. “Are you done with that?”

Haunted Ground by Erin Hart

The first page reads:

With a  sodden rasp, Brendan McGann’s turf spade sliced into the bank of earth below his feet. Had he known all that he’d turn up with the winter’s fuel, perhaps he would have stopped that moment, climbed up onto the bank and filled his shed with the uniform sods of extruded turf that a person could order nowadays by the lorry-load.

But Brendan continued, loosening each sopping black brick with the square-bladed turf spade, tossing it over the bank, where it landed with a plump slap. He performed his task with a grace and facility that comes from repeating the same motion times without number. Though his father and grandfather and generations before had taken their turf from the same patch of bog, Brendan never thought of himself as carrying on an age-old tradition, any more than he considered the life cycles of all the ancient, primitive plants whose resting place he now disturbed. This annual chore was the only way he’d ever known to stave off the bitter cold that crept under his door each November.

Happy Hour of the Damned by Mark Henry

The first page reads:

A few hints: the damned of Seattle congregate at the Orphanage on Tuesday nights for half-price nibbles and cocktail specials, Convent on Thursdays, for Burlesque of the Living Dead, and Pharmacy on Fridays, which is brand new, and I have never been (don’t let that stop you, I hear it’s mind-blowing)…

-Otherworld Weekly

Saturday night is all about the Well of Souls – see and be seen is the rule – there is no excuse for absence, least of all a bad hair day. Shit, even if it looks like broom straw or the waxy coils plunged from drains, just throw on a hat, a wig, or whatever you have to do; the worst that could happen is public embarrassment and mockery. Nobody’s died from those. Fortunately, Wendy and I didn’t have to worry about that; we were looking hot as Hell, and ready to burn it down.

She wore her trademark mix of lush patterns in silk and wool, which she’s been cultivating for a decade like a rose hybrid. On this particular night, she was working it short-short-short in a devilish Galliano skull and crossbones print dress. She wrapped the frock in a constricting boucle sweater that cupped under her breasts and showed them off like a slutty European peasant girl. Her blond hair hunt in perfect esses, framing her fair skin in a glow of spun sugar.