Diversion Books

Cyber Monday

If you’ve got a bibliophile on your gift list, you know they can be hard to please. Hardcore readers don’t look to the best-seller lists any more than audiophiles pay attention to the Top 40 charts. Big-name publishers are fine, but impress the bookworm in your life by going independent on Cyber Monday.

It’s also, I admit, a self-serving suggestion.

In July, my debut novel, The Red Tags, was published by Comet Press, an independent publisher in New York City. If you’re shopping for someone with a taste for psychological horror or dark crime, I recommend this novel. Of course, I’m biased, but even if The Red Tags isn’t their (or your) cup of tea, I encourage you to check out these independent publishers and authors.

Comet Press

The must-have for horror aficionados this year is the anthology Necro Files: Two Decades of Extreme Horror. Featuring heavyweights such as George R.R. Martin, Joe R. Lansdale and Brian Hodge, this is a top-flight collection of disturbed visions. Originally published in 2011, it is now available for the first as an audiobook narrated by Eric A. Shelman. Or if you’re interested in something novel-length, choose from titles by authors Brett Williams, Adam Howe and Adam Millard.

Monkey Puzzle Press

Now based in Arkansas, Monkey Puzzle Press was founded in 2007 in Boulder, Colo. MPP publishes literary fiction that is dark, quirky and emotionally revealing. I highly recommend Justice, Inc., a short story collection from Dale Bridges. Other books to consider include The Boy in the Well by Nicholas B. Morris and The Whack-Job Girls by Bonnie ZoBell.

Diversion Books

Diversion publishes quality fiction and non-fiction across a spectrum of genres. Alex Dolan’s The Euthanist is one of the best books I’ve read all year, but you will find something for anyone on your gift list. Discover authors like Rachael Michael, Deborah Chester and Grant Blackwood.

Dundurn Press

Consider a trip north of the border with one of Canada’s largest independent publishers, Dundurn. My recommendation is R.J. Harlick’s A Cold White Fear, but there are also fine thrillers from Canadian authors like Janet Kellough, Brenda Chapman and Steve Burrows.

Of course, this is but a sampling of the independent presses publishing quality literature. While the big publishers recycle the same-old names, the indies can introduce you to fresh voices. They produce books that take chances because they’re more concerned with literary merit than market share.

Review: The Euthanist

The Euthanist

Alex Dolan

In one of the most promising debuts since Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects and Alice Blanchard’s Darkness Peering, The EuthanistThe Euthanist strikes like a suckerpunch and never lets up. Seriously, this book is freakin’ relentless.

On most days, Pamela Wonnacott is a kind-hearted firefighter and EMT with a troubled past, but as Kali, she provides a different kind of public service as an end-of-life caregiver. She is attending to Leland, a terminal patient who has requested assisted euthanasia, but in the first of many twists, Leland turns out to be an undercover agent.

The opening chapter of The Euthanist left me breathless, only to be one-upped by chapter two. The pacing is spry and the narration is delightfully disorienting in the manner unique to first-person POV. There is nobody Kali can trust, and even her allies turn on her when she unwittingly brings the FBI to their door.

Dolan manages all of this well, avoiding the usual traps of first-person narration (he keeps Kali disoriented, but not clueless) and managing his twists and reveals organically. Most impressively, he doesn’t manufacture a ridiculous romantic angle or give us a cavity with overwrought sentimentality.

On the whole, this is masterful storytelling that lets the characters, and not convention, dictate their actions. There is only one scene that feels over the top, in which Kali’s costume serves a theatrical purpose rather than a practical one. Beyond that, the characters and their motivations are authentic, and the tension in this novel is intoxicating.

As Kali says, “Fear isn’t pain, but it is the expectation of it.” Except with Kali, Chekhov’s gun is replaced with a syringe.

The Euthanist is particularly relevant as right-to-die issues have gone from hushed whispers to appropriate dinner conversation. Dolan doesn’t beat us over the head with social commentary, but allows the conversation to play out between Kali and Leland.

This is an exciting debut, and I look forward to more of Alex Dolan’s writing.

M.K. Wren, A Gift Upon the Shore

It’s interesting reading M.K. Wren’s classic novel nearly a quarter century since its release in 1990. For one thing, a nuclearGift apocalypse sounds downright quaint and makes me eerily nostalgic for my childhood fears of nuclear annihilation.

Aside from that, A Gift Upon the Shore is timeless—and even prescient. Following a wave of destruction, two women begin building a library in coastal Oregon, dedicated to preserving the great works of literature, history, and, by extension, civilization. Unfortunately, their only neighbors are a group of fundamentalist survivors who promote the destruction of all books other than the Bible.

In 2013, libraries and bookstores are struggling, Texas school boards are editing history and I downloaded the novel, in a matter of seconds, from a Web site onto my e-reader (unthinkable in 1990).

OK, Wren isn’t exactly Nostradamus. Folks were probably declaring the death of books within hours of Guttenberg’s invention, and fundamentalists have far less sway than they did during the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. Even Salman Rushdie has been able to come out of hiding.

But like Wren’s protagonists, digital publishing has guaranteed that our literary history will live on, from the freedom of publishing in the medium to noble endeavors like Project Guttenberg.

A Gift Upon the Shore remains a wondrously beautiful novel, whatever the era, and one worthy of a revisit or a first look.