Geoff Hyatt's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Midwestern Gothic, Knee-Jerk Magazine, Temenos, Night Terrors: An Anthology of Horror, Rock & Roll is Dead: Dark Tales Inspired by Music, and elsewhere. He has been a staff writer, editorial assistant, bookseller, activist, liquor store clerk, heavy metal guitarist, factory worker, and always a gentleman.Hyatt's most recent novel is Birch Hills at World’s End.
His reply to my recent query about what he was reading:
Crooked Little Vein by Warren EllisVisit Geoff Hyatt's website, and read an excerpt from Birch Hills at World’s End.“You know what it’s like, finding eight middle-aged guys having tantric sex with ostriches? ...My girlfriend came to bed one night in a feather boa and I started crying.”
I read the above couple of lines in the bookstore and then walked to the counter and bought the book. Guess I’m a cheap date. Even though this detective novel sends up what is perhaps already the most satirized popular genre, Ellis is a witty and gleefully vulgar writer whose narrator recalls a hybrid of Phillip Marlowe and Hunter S. Thompson (a style and attitude that should be familiar to those who have read Ellis’s Transmetropolitan).Jack o’ the Hills by C.S.E. Cooney
Cooney writes engaging manic prose while preserving folkloric/mythic structures that give her work such resonance. Not content to simply dust off old gems, she re-cuts and re-shapes them until they shine in a whole new way, reminding us of why the dark gleam of fairy tales and legends first seduced us. Jack o’ the Hills is a small book containing two of her stories, “Stone Shoes” and “Oubliette’s Egg.”
Townie: A Memoir by Andre Dubus III
I loved House of Sand and Fog, a brilliantly executed contemporary Hegelian tragedy. I’m currently in the midst of Townie on a friend’s recommendation and finding it to be excellent so far.Iron Council by China Miéville
China Miéville is a wildly original and hard-working English fantasy writer who is taller, better educated, and more muscular than I am. I’m currently reading Iron Council, a novel set in the same world as his genre-redefining Perdido Street Station, with a book club.
--Marshal Zeringue
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