Greetings from Bookgasm

For those of you who aren't familiar with Bookgasm.com since our inception August before last, here's the Reader's Digest version: Reading material to get excited about. We cover genre fiction (with a little oddball nonfiction thrown in), which means horror, sci-fi, mystery, thrillers and even comics (or graphic novels, if you prefer to sound hip).

Usually our site is loaded with new content every day, but with me currently working about 18 hours a day, it's been a rough week. But we still published daily, but dammit, we love you.

And here's a sampling of what our staff reviewed this week (just click the links to read the whole review if you'd like, and we'd like if you do):

• THE CHEMISTRY OF DEATH by Simon Beckett – "Older readers may be familiar with the Had I But Known (HIBK) school of mystery writing, roundly castigated by many but still a school that sold millions of books from popular authors like Mary Roberts Rinehart and Mignon Eberhart. While this school fell out of favor in the ’70s and ’80s, it seems to have morphed into a somewhat different style: the Had I Only Acted Appropriately (HIOAA) school of mystery writing, equally infuriating and equally popular."

• SOMEONE COMES TO TOWN, SOMEONE LEAVES TOWN by Cory Doctorow – "Simultaneously combining fantastic fiction with total nerdcore network noodling a la Neal Stephenson’s CRYPTONOMICON, SOMEONE is so original, so groundbreaking and so heartbreaking."

• ACT OF TREASON by Vince Flynn – "The modern-day political thriller gets a bad reputation sometimes, with some authors awash in all these technobabble terms or, even worse, making a plot so overreaching that it loses its audience. Vince Flynn’s ACT OF TREASON is the complete antithesis to those kind of books."

• THE CHAMPIONS CLASSIC: VOL. 1 from Marvel Comics – "I’ve always been a sucker for comic-book supergroups, whether The Avengers or Justice League of America, but as I age, I find the weirder they are, the better. (And weirder usually means short-lived, as is the case here.) The lineup comprising The Champions seems more bric-a-brac than most: a mythological god, a Russian hottie, a skull-headed biker and two ex-X-Men – better known as Hercules, Black Widow, Ghost Rider, Iceman and Angel."

• HORRORWEEN by Al Sarrantonio – "Some may think Sarrantonio is cheating by packaging this as a A-to-Z narrative when it’s not, but I actually much prefer it this way. With stops and starts at unpredictable points, the book keeps you on your toes. He’s got a real gift for this genre, for injecting Americana with the supernatural and putting the evil back in a holiday known today for lollipops and candy corn."

We've also got a secret weapon in Ed Gorman – novelist and short storiest (is that a word?) extraordinaire – who occasionally pens a column for our pages, as he did today.

There's more, including our every-Tuesday-morning column of pulp fiction, BULLETS, BROADS, BLACKMAIL & BOMBS, which this week took a look at some Dell's old Alfred Hitchcock anthology paperbacks. And we're also giving away five copies of Elizabeth Kostova's THE HISTORIAN if you've wasted enough time in your life watching vampire movies.