Book Tour Virgin is Will Clarke.com

More Love From NPR for the little bastards at The Pentecostal Home for Flying Children

Critics' Lists: Summer 2008

Holy Bookworms! Superheroes Take To The Page
by Glen Weldon
It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a ... book?

NPR.org, July 3, 2008 · Quake in fear, puny humans! Spandex-clad superbeings have engineered a mass escape. From big screens and billboards, to bus ads and even bookshelves: this summer, nowhere is safe from superheroes.

Avengers, Assemble! Thematically!

Who Can Save Us Now? Brand New Superheroes and Their Amazing (Short) Stories, edited by Owen King and John McNally, paperback, 320 pages

Superhero tropes turn up in every short story of this new anthology, but its 22 authors eschew the tidy duality of hero/villain to stake out moral territory where the lines between good guys and bad fade to obscurity. As a result, Who Will Save Us Now? is a surprisingly varied read, by turns funny, creepy, melancholic and joyous.   

Editors Owen King and John McNally organize the collection around timeworn conventions — the origin story, the secret identity, etc. The strongest tales focus on supporting characters long denied an inner voice: the plucky girl reporter, the faithful butler, the sidekick — even the townsfolk who spend their days ducking the flying rubble of superbrawls. A standout, Will Clarke's "The Pentecostal Home for Flying Children," about a town under siege by the teenage offspring of an alien superhero, feels at once uncanny and utterly, hauntingly real.

TimeOut Chicago Loves The Losers

WHEN I WAS A LOSER gets serious strokes. Click here to read all about it.

Sweet Ink In The Dallas Morning News

Click here to read all about it.

Pretty Sweet Review from the Austinist

Oh, Brother Where Art Thou?

Very fun review from "The Picayune" click here to read it.

GIANT Breaks Hollywood News About THE WORTHY

"Mixing comedy with a heavy dose of criticism....esoteric like The Crow...Sony has already purchased the movie rights."

—Russel Brock, GIANT, The Ultimate Entertainment Magazine
 

BlogCritics.org Reviews LVLH

Click here to read it.

Nice Pre-Pub Ink

Click here to read it.

Review in The Gambit

Click here to read it. It's nice.

My Review Of A Recent Review

The Dallas Observer just reviewed Lord Vishnu's Love Handles this week. (Click here to read it.) Shannon Sutlief writes reviews the way I wish all book reviewers would write. She writes from a reader's perspective, not a snarky writer's perspective.

It's hard for a writer to enjoy a book as a reader, much less review one as such. That's because trying to make it as a writer can feel like someone else is constantly eating your piece of birthday cake; be it Dan Brown with his 75 million-dollar Da Vinci Code rainmaker or Susan Orlean with her wonderful sprawling New Yorker prose. And for writers, particulary writers who pen reviews, all this lost birthday cake can show up in their work. Hence, the glut of snarky, smartest-man-in-the-room reviews I see everywhere on every topic: food, books, movies, music, etc.

But Shannon Sutlief's not like that. She's a writer with tons of birthday cake of her own and she knows it. She was generous not only with me, but with her readers. She opened her review of my book with her personal musings on spies and The Gong Show host, Chuck Barris, and then went on to detail how she interacted with the work. Shannon was also very careful not to spoil the plot or the ending, but was still able to convey exactly what the book was about. Not only did she get what I was trying to do with the book but she was able to articulate it.   

This is of course a very biased review of Shannon's review. After all, Shannon seems to have liked my work. Which makes me like her. Not to get all McSweeney's on you, but what makes a good reviewer is someone who finds things that they like, and then they build a compelling argument for it.  After all, there is a world full of oyster flesh, and we don't need it pointed out to us. We are swimming in the stuff. What we need help finding, are the pearls. And that's what Shannon and reviewers of her ilk help us do.