Picked up Charlie Huston's No Dominion, a sequel to Already Dead. This guy is just so freaking talented I can't stand it. It's a vampire novel! It's a crime novel! No, it's both, and better than anybody else is doing in either genre right now. Most of the time when I read a pulpy noir novel, I feel like I need a shower and a nice palate-cleanser of a novel to get the stench of nihilism off me, but when I finished No Dominion, I totally didn't want it to end. If you have any interest in vampires or crime novels, you need to be reading this guy's work.
For one dollar, I picked up a copy of the "uninhibited" stewardess memoir Coffee, Tea, or Me. It was originally published in 1967, and let me just say what passed for uninhibited in 1967 is really quite tame today. Basically it's the idea that women find sex pleasurable. Oooh, naughty! All I wanted out of this was a cheesy beach read, and it pretty much failed to deliver. Then there's the whole chapter about how the "normal" passengers are understandably upset when they have to sit next to someone "faggy." Then there are the numerous chapters padded with lists as the ghostwriter stretches for his contractual word count.
Still, there was something interesting--I have the 2003 edition, with an introduction where the ghostwriter makes no bones about the fact that he took a couple of anecdotes from a pair of stewardesses and padded them out with some of his own airplane experiences and his imagination to create this "memoir." So I guess the whole fictionalized memoir wasn't invented by James Frey. And, ultimately, who was harmed? Coffee Tea or Me was a bestseller that provided hours of entertainment to a lot of people who thought it was a memoir. So, ultimately, it delivered on its promise of entertainment (at least in 1967--as I said above, it's a bit of a snoozer these days), and the fact that much of it was invented by a ghostwriter doesn't seem like a big scandal.
I'm about halfway through Scott Smith's The Ruins, but I don't want to say anything about it yet,because I still feel stupid for raving about The Historian before I'd finished it and found out it completely falls apart in the last third. Well, okay. I'll say so far so good and leave it at that.
