Hunter up!

And Monday rolls around again. I can barely keep up.

Here's the latest from Gabe and The Hunter:

The Hunter page 7

Spilled a beer on my computer this weekend and fucked it all up, so that left plenty of time to catch up on the ol' book readin'!

I stumbled across some random internet recommendations for a book called Swan Song by Robert McCammon a while back.




















Word had it that this was a post-apocalyptic epic in the spirit of The Stand, only much, much better. Well, The Stand being my favorite book of all-time, I was intrigued. Swan Song, it appears, is out of print, so I tracked down a beat-up used copy off one of those Amazon marketplace links and ordered it on up. 8 bucks. Figgered it must be worth it for a book even better than The Stand! So I brought this book with me to enjoy on the plane ride southbound and got a little over a hundred pages into it. Turns out this book isn't just in the spirit of The Stand - it's a big honking rip-off of The Stand. As eagerly adapted by an "author" writing at about the level of a high school sophomore. Starts off with a big world-ending event - nuclear war instead of a plague this time. Then a Dark Man shows up looking for recruits for the dark side. A small band of survivors comes together in New York and has to escape through the Holland tunnel. One of them has strange dreams of a cornfield. Also there's a nerdy teenage boy named Roland who is driven to the dark side and a young girl with special powers. Anyway, I don't know what happens 'cause I gave up reading. It was just too badly written to even keep my curiosity engaged enough to see just how bad and unoriginal it could get. Swan Song is garbage. No wonder it's out of print. Guh! The internet lies!

Finally got a chance to read Already Dead, the first book in Charlie Huston's vampire private eye series.

























It is as great as Swan Song is lousy. Huston's got a very cool and gritty modern take on the vampire story. In this world, vampirism is caused by a virus. I swallowed the pseudo-science hook, line and sinker. The book is short, brutal and darkly comic. If you like crime novels and vampires, you will love this book. I read it in one day. I will now gobble up the rest in short order.

Yesterday, I read Born Standing Up, Steve Martin's autobio about his years as a standup comic.























I found it extremely interesting and well-written and I drove my wife nuts by howling with laughter and rolling around on the couch holding my stomach, just reading some of the descriptions of his standup jokes. I think Steve Martin is funny as shit. I even like his Pink Panther movies. Not the Disney family comedies though. I have my pride. Anyway, great book.

Here's the daily sketch. On the blog. The sketchblog.
























Whoomp! There it is!