Ubiquity and/or John Norman

[desperance]

Lots of media fun recently - and lots of LJ fun - about the discovery of a Gorean cult in Darlington (an industrial conurbation in northern England with very little obviously to recommend it; the word 'drab' comes readily to mind. And is doubtless unfair, etc etc, but hey, do I care? I don't have to live there. None of you people have to live there. Move, move...).

This afternoon, a carload of us went upcoast to Val McDermid's birthday party. In mid-conversation, what comes up? Gor in Darlington, and how life-imitating-art this is, running remarkably close to one of the storylines in the new series of 'Wire in the Blood' (shhh, I haven't told you this; it may still be under wraps and I could be in Big Trouble. Oops).

What is more fun and more pertinent, Val's partner Kelly is my newest publisher; she's launching a new crime imprint, Bloody Brits, to bring unregarded UK novelists into print in the US, and one of her early titles will be my novel 'Shelter'. I am so pleased about this; it's a book that was ridiculously difficult to write, and is certainly not easy to read. Well, no, I take that back; it is easy to read, it scoots along with a very light touch, but it's notoriously hard to be quite sure what has happened. It's the one I always get the questions on: "Chaz, did X do Y? ... and is it supernatural? ... and why did [Za and Zb] have to die, exactly?"

And so forth. I always say the same thing, which is that it repays a second reading. All the answers are there, but you don't spot them going by because the relevant questions don't arise till later; second time through, when you know what puzzles you, it's obvious.

And now many more Americans will have the chance to be frustrated, and hurl the book across the room, and retrieve it, and read it again, and be enlightened, and hurl the book across the room, and...

We came home via Barter Books in Alnwick, a retired railway station converted into a vast second-hand bookshop. I picked up a second-hand copy of The Samaritan, which is sufficiently hard to find nowadays that I do that as a matter of course, and a couple of early editions of Edgar Wallace, a writer I'm inordinately fond of. So was my father, but we discovered each other's fondness for him late; we did get to spend the last couple of years of Dad's life exchanging spares, and it's given the books a potency they never quite had before.

Comments

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Yup, it's the overhead railway that gets me too. And open fires in the winter (in a bookshop!). Like the Lit & Phil in Newcastle, it's one of those places that is special beyond its purpose. Also like the Lit & Phil, I always want to set stories there. In that grand tradition of the SF bar story - Spider Robinson, et al - tales told around an open fire, by a motley group with things to hide and things to learn...

[desperance.livejournal.com]

PS - tho' I do kind of wish that they used the overhead railway for something practical - to deliver books from the stacks to the catalogue room, say, on some cute automatic system. Or to reload the biscuit barrels, or whatever...