Dobes Zone

 Recently I finished reading Baise-Moi, the controversial French novel by author Virginie Despentes (who also co-directed the film adaptation which was initially banned in France!) for the other book club I'm in. I hadn't seen the film yet and was unsure of how I'd respond to the book given its reputation- but as heavy as it gets, there's something grimly humorous and very cathartic about it. It is also, without a doubt, an incredibly feminist novel, which makes the experience very different. --- Just a heads up, my review involves discussions of rape and sexual violence, though not in graphic detail. The book is pretty intense!     Two women end up going on a rampage of murder and theft after life pushes them to a breaking point. The story follows each woman up to said breaking point and to their chance encounter, wherein they find each other to be kindred spirits. Both girls are from poor working class neighborhoods and are deeply interested in filth and self indul...

 Some years ago I thrifted a load of pulp horror and SF/F paperbacks in Idaho while visiting family. The Cats by Nick Sharman (an alias for Scott Grønmark) is a book I picked up based on the cover alone- the old adage about judging a book by its cover be damned, I love a cool illustration on a book cover. I will always buy editions of books with the best possible cover art. This shit is like catnip to me, pun intended.      The book cover for The Cats is by none other than Don Ivan Punchatz, the illustrator perhaps best known for his iconic Doom box art . A fun fact is that his son Gregor Punchatz worked on the monster models for Doom as well. In Don's prolific career he also illustrated for Heavy Metal, National Lampoon, Playboy, Time, as well as cover illustrations for Isaac Asimov and Harlan Ellison novels. Appropriately enough, here's a photo of Punchatz with a cat.     As for the novel itself, I'll start off by saying it's not high art, but it's a...

     I recently got my library card- something I'd been meaning to do and then a pandemic happened and I forgot that I wanted to get a library card until now. I decided to pick up two books on a whim, one a been-meaning to, and the other just something that caught my eye. Kira Jane Buxton's Feral Creatures seemed like a natural choice for me as I always have a soft spot for talking animal stories, especially if they're satirical and aimed at adults. The book cover design is quite pretty too. I've often felt contemporary publishing trends are lackluster so it's always a bonus to see a lovely cover. That old adage about not judging books by their covers can kiss my ass, I love seeing a beautiful illustration or at least some slick stylish design-work to pull me in.         The book tells the story of the last human being on earth and the animals taking care of her. A strange plague has swept the world, mutating all human beings into monstrous and ...

       My choice to read Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner started with my desire to re-read The Fall of the Kings, a book that I happened to pick up randomly at a book outlet when I was maybe 12 or 13. At this same outlet I'd also picked up Katie Waitman's The Merro Tree as well as The Essential Bordertown: A Traveler's Guide to the Edge of Faerie- a collection of short stories about the human world and the elfin world connecting. At this age I was totally rabid for anything SF/F and often brought home huge hauls of books from library book sales, where you could fill a bag for a couple dollars on the final days of the sale. It should probably surprise no one that a lot of my experiences with these books were formative and were some of my earliest experiences with queerness. Generally I was reading books that were only aimed at adults for the most part since I didn't really *do* YA except when I was quite little- barring some obvious furry bait choices like Redwall. The F...

 It's been a moment since I updated and also a moment since I finished reading a book- having been side-tracked with projects and other life matters. But as promised, I'm writing up a little review of Michael Peak's Catamount- a loose sequel to his first novel Cat House which I wrote about previously .                       My copy of Catamount, with another lovely cover illustrated by Dan Craig       Catamount picks up with Sarena, the mountain lion from Cat House who allied herself with the housecat protagonists of the first novel, and with reporter Laura Kay. The book follows Sarena and Laura as they both follow independent but interconnected paths. Sarena is looking for more mountain lions and befriends an equally lonely bald eagle. Laura is following both a story on a proposed mountain lion hunt put forth by the game commission and a story about some vicious guard dogs that escaped. It is also...

 I've been carrying around far too many science fiction and fantasy paperbacks for decades and that's a problem I'm not aiming to change any time soon. As usual, I'm also a sucker for talking animal fiction, especially when it's aimed at adult audiences. Not too long ago I learned about the novel Cat House (1989) from a friend, who mentioned the plot and it sounded weird enough to compel me to dig up a copy for myself. I also grabbed its sequel Catamount. More about that later. My copy of Cat House. Beautiful cover by illustrator Dan Craig     The hook of Cat House is a plot about bored spayed house-cats starting a cat brothel so they can mate with tomcats who aren't interested in having kittens. The females take prey animals as payment but that's more for fun than anything else, since they're all well-fed house-cats. This ends up angering some of the unfixed cats, who consider the whole thing unnatural. The broader story is about the conflict of human d...