The tiny fishing community of Deeper Harbour is in deep trouble-and so is fourteen-year-old Roland MacTavish. Roland's mom wants to move with him to Ottawa, away from his father, his weird friend Dulsie, and his even weirder grandfather, Angus. So Roland does what any sane teenager would do: he invents a sea monster. Unfortunately, the scheme quickly spins out of Roland's control, and he has to go to greater and greater lengths to keep up the illusion. And then Roland must deal with a situation far more terrifying than any sea monster. As moving as it is irresistibly funny, Steve Vernon's portrait of Roland and Deeper Harbour is perfect for anyone who's ever been stuck badly enough to do something awesomely, brilliantly, heroically stupid. Views: 24
Death witch and Detective Mallory Mors arrives at the scene of an out of control arson called by a victim who desperately wants to die. Using her powers, Mallory battles the strongest fire witch in town to help the woman cross over. When she's forced to work with the angry fire witch, she discovers their lives are linked in complicated ways. As all the other fire witches in the city mysteriously lose their powers, the heat is on to solve the case. Saddled with a vampire assault at the local supernatural brothel, a missing person who doesn't want to be found, and a mess of vampire politics, Mallory struggles to put together the pieces before the city burns. Views: 24
Count Geiger's Blues follows the adventures of Xavier Thaxton, arts editor at a major Southern daily called the Salonika Urbanite. Thaxton thinks himself a superior man. His aesthetic standards are so lofty that he regards superheroes as pop-culture cock-and-bull, rock music as audible rubbish, and soap operas as the contemptible spew of script-writing committees. While skinny-dipping in a pool polluted with radioactive waste, Thaxton is afflicted with superpowers all his own and becomes that which he most scorns. A radiation-induced ailment, the Philistine Syndrome, forces him to assume the persona of comic-book hero Count Geiger to allay its career- and indeed life-threatening symptoms. Michael Bishop's Count Geiger Blues, a novel of intellectual heft and self-spoofing kitsch, is a take on superheroes like no other: a rollicking foray into high and low culture that mines the vicissitudes and tragedies of everyday life for serious belly laughs and bona fide heartbreak.** Views: 24
