And, in kind of the oddest and coolest news I got, if you listen right here, you can hear Bob Dylan introducing the Louvin Brothers song “Satan Is Real” on his radio show. Which is very cool, of course. But even cooler is that Mr. Dylan has requested a copy of the book Satan Is Real. I don’t know what that means, but I love that he has a copy in his hands.

Also, in Pike news, it looks like the French edition from Editions Gallmeister will be available in September. I won’t pretend I’m not blown away by joining an author list that includes Ed Abbey, Craig Johnson, Larry McMurtry, Tim O’Brien, and Tom Robbins.

We’ve also got some details on Noir at the Bar, which I’ll be attending in about three weeks. This from Mr. Bar, Jedidiah Ayres:

Oky-doke kiddos, here’s the official lineup for the N@B double header coming your way late in February. Two nights of walking on the dark side in St. Louis. First up, February 21st, Robert Randisi has been added to the the lineup alongside Benjamin Whitmer, Sonia Coney and Jason Makansi, so that’s fantastic. How many people do you know who’ve read over five hundred books, let alone written that many, let alone published that many? Sure, somebody in the near future will probably take a big ol’ dump all over the internets with their self-published titles and get up into the hundreds like that, but Randisi has done it the hard way, the ultimate pulp writer kids. That cat goes through keyboards faster than I go through underwear, and tossing ‘em when he’s worn the letters off the keys. Take that, James Patterson.

As I understand it, we’ll be meeting at the Meshuggah Cafe in St. Louis. Again, cannot wait.

And I think that brings me up to date on my doings. At least for the most part.

On the non-career related side, I’ve been getting back to doing a little shooting. 3×5 cards up at Left Hand Canyon. And I know I keep saying this, but I can’t get over how solid my 1911 has been since I put in the Ed Brown Hardcore extractor and tensioned it. I haven’t had a problem of any kind, not one, and it’s been well north of 1,000 rounds. (Probably more than 2,000.) I clean it about every 300-400 rounds, keep it oiled, and it just keeps banging along. I’m having so much fun.

And, of course, I’m reading and writing. I finally read Johnny Shaw’s Dove Season and highly recommend it. This is crime fiction the way I dig crime fiction: a strong, individual voice rooted in place and character. I loved it. And I gotta post the cover, because it’s just as great as the writing inside:

I also want to give a huge shout out to Matthew McBride, whose Frank Sinatra in a Blender was picked up by New Pulp Press this week. He gives the lowdown here in a wonderfully titled post, “How To Get A Book Deal In 3,285 Days.”

That’s all I got.

• It’s taken me awhile to get John Hiatt. But now I do. Got the complete catalogue, and I figure I’ll bother with someone else about this time next year.
• That is, if Leonard Cohen weren’t releasing a new album this year. Which you can hear streaming from NPR in its entirety.
• The patron saint of Slowboat Films.
• Thinking of Tim Tebow: “Sexual innocence, which can be charming in the young if not needlessly protracted, is positively corrosive and repulsive in the mature adult.”
• Self-punishment tools.
• I have one of these, only mine has wood stocks and was made by Winchester about 75 years ago. (File under: really stupid tactical shit.)
• Bleeding zombie targets I can get behind, however.

Satan is Real is still getting more press than I ever imagined it would have. The latest is that The Daily Beast picked it as one of This Week’s Top Reads, the Hartford Courant was very kind to it, the Associated Press published a great in-house review that ran in a ton of papers, and Mary Colurso of The Birmingham News wrote one of the best pieces yet.

It has been a very good run, and I know I’ve been incredibly fortunate. Noting that, a couple of people have asked me how I’ve been celebrating. Well, the answer is that I haven’t really. I’ve got another novel I’m working on, so I’ve been doing that. And I’ve been playing with a short story, which has been a lot of fun. But that’s what I’m always doing.

So I finally went out the other day and did something specifically to celebrate.

I bought a new knife.

Here’s a picture of it. With my carry gun, because, y’know, that’s how you’re supposed to do things.

It’s bigger than my usual Case knife, but not quite a tactical folder. I even went with the wood in hopes that it would look a little less tactical.

Frankly I don’t have much interest in carrying a knife for self defense. I don’t practice with a knife, and know next to nothing about fighting with one. Besides which, that’s why I have the big L-shaped thing above it. But I wanted something a little larger, with a clip and a lock, so now I have one.

So far it’s been hell on apples, cheese, sausage, and pencils — the staples of my diet.

• “‘It doesn’t appear she urinated on the painting or that the urine damaged it, so she’s not being charged with that,’ said Lynn Kimbrough, a spokeswoman for the Denver District Attorney’s Office.”
• The Lego Book of Job.
• “I’m not a scientist. I don’t hold any degrees. I just keep my mind open and take the time to do the research. I’ve tried to piece it all together for you with ‘Conspiracy Cards’ to help you understand the bigger picture. I remain optimistic and hopeful my Conspiracy Cards and Truther Toy concepts will be useful as a visual aid and help people discuss these uncomfortable subjects.”
• James Bond is a prick.
• “Tebowing is the act of kneeling down for a moment of silent prayer. It is what Tim Tebow does after he scores touchdowns, and what other people do when they want to mask the horror and alienation of modern life by participating in a meme.”
• My favorite Jersey bullshitter doing the Louvin Brothers’ “Satan’s Jeweled Crown.”
• “A man whose bid to become a police officer was rejected after he scored too high on an intelligence test has lost an appeal in his federal lawsuit against the city.”

In the meantime, a few things. First, huge thanks to Barry Graham for including Pike in his list of the ten best books he read this year, to Steve Weddle for putting it on his recommended shopping list, and to Elizabeth A. White for putting it in her top ten. I’ve can’t say enough about the kindness and generosity of the crime writers and readers I’ve come to know over the last year and a half. I’m incredibly grateful for all of it.

Second, the Kirkus review of Satan Is Real is in. Given the reputation Kirkus has, I won’t even pretend I’m not immensely relieved at how nice it is.

And third, Charlie Stella has posted the cover of his upcoming release, Rough Riders, coming next July from Stark House. I’m very much looking forward to that one and you should be too.

As I said above, the next month is going to be hectic. The release date for Satan Is Real is January 3rd, and the interest already shown by the press has far surpassed anything I imagined. I only wish Charlie could be around to enjoy it.

Anyway, until then, happy holidays (and thanks, Paul).

• Maybe just me, maybe just tonight, but I think this is the entire reason for the internet.
• “This is what life in the USA is like nowadays: shit happens and shit un-happens, and you find out about it years later. Only a desperate and hopelessly degenerate nation would choose to live this way, in a law-optional society, in which money means everything, and yet nobody even knows what money is (or where it goes, and what it does when it goes there.)”
• Interview with Josh T. Pearson, including news of an upcoming Christmas EP. Which I’m more excited about than I should probably admit.
• A high school symbolism survey, with answers from Jack Kerouac, Ayn Rand, Ralph Ellison, Ray Bradbury, John Updike, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer
• New Leonard Cohen song. And, holy shit.
• Woody Guthrie’s new year resolutions.
• “so the moral is don’t fuck William Faulkner.”

But a couple of things on my mind. The first being the new trend among firearm and ammunition manufacturers to tap into the current zombie hype. As I posted awhile back, Hornady is now producing a line of ammo called Zombie Max.

And Taurus, never a corporation to shy away from stupid marketing tricks, is selling a special version of one of their useless Judge pistols as a Zombie Responder.

Anyway, it’s not something I’ve put much thought into, except to think it was kind of stupid. But then Scott Gillette left this comment on my Zombie Max post:

Given that, in certain circles, ‘zombie’ is a euphemism for a homeless black person wandering the streets after a cataclysmic event, I’m not sure what to make of it, either.

It’s all well and good to indulge fantasies about the walking dead, but manufacturing a real world product to address a fictional problem is weird. Given that the product in question (rifle ammunition) has been used on real people (Danziger Bridge) that fit the euphemistic definition of zombie, I’m not sure what Hornady’s marketing department was thinking.

That lead me over to Urban Dictionary, where, sure enough, definition #8 read:

A synonym to the “n” word used usually by white people in a a “ghetto” area. The term is used out of fear of being stabbed, shot or raped.

1. Holy shit, this place is full of zombies.

2. That zombie has a gun, I just know it.

3. HELP! THERE ARE ZOMBIES EVERYWHERE!

So take that as you will. I know I’m a little less amused with the whole concept now.

Also, and entirely unrelated, the other night my eight-year-old daughter came up with an answer to a theological debate we’ve been having for about two years. It began when she asked me why I didn’t believe in God. I gave the standard answer: that I couldn’t believe in a God who would allow — or in Job’s case, cause — innocent people to suffer. To get sick, fall victim to disaster, etc.

Well, last night she figured that out. “Everybody has to be different,” she said. “That’s why God does what he does.”

“What do mean?” I asked.

“I mean, that’s why God lets people suffer. So they can be different than one another.”

“So that’s what causes people to be individuals? Suffering?”

She looked at me like I was stupid. “Of course.”

For which, of course, I had absolutely no response.

Anyway, speaking of suffering, there’s a new review from John Koenig of Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail! in which I have a new (and very long) short story:

Some pretty heavy hitters are included in this collection:  Michael Moorcock, Sara Paretsky, Cory Doctorow, and many others.  Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail reminds me of an era gone by, writers from a different time, and attitudes not often seen today. This isn’t pulp fiction; these are splendid wordsmiths.

And even cooler, the first review from Publishers Weekly is in, and calls out my favorite editor, Andrea Gibbons:

The 18 mostly original stories in this thought-provoking crime anthology offer gritty testament to the violence, cunning, and resilience of people pushed to the brink. Phillips and Gibbons showcase some major talent, notably Sara Paretsky (“Poster Child”), but less well-known authors also make solid contributions. In John A Imani’s moving “Nickels and Dimes,” a black observer of a confrontation between police and protestors in 1972 Los Angeles becomes a reluctant participant and de facto leader. Gibbons’s “The El Rey Bar” brilliantly conveys the chaos, the hopelessness, and the despair engendered during an L.A. riot. SF ace Kim Stanley Robinson’s exotic “The Lunatics” explores the issue of forced labor amid an attempted slave revolt on the moon. On the down side, Michael Moorcock’s lengthy “Gold Diggers of 1977,” first published in 1980, will be incomprehensible to those unfamiliar with the story of the Sex Pistols.

Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail! has also been chosen for the G20 reading week, which I thought was very cool.

Lastly, to that writing project I’ve been working on. This has been the soundtrack. And the content. Enjoy.

• What did Salvadore Dali’s Alice in Wonderland look like?
• “You know what the choices are in this country? Paper or plastic? Aisle or window? Smoking or non-smoking? Those are your real choices.”
• Colt 1911: One Hundred Years of Service.
• “It’s a proven fact that a single anal sex experience causes one to be homosexual. The hormones released by a sexual situation involving the anus being broached, are the same hormones found in large quantities in effeminate homosexual males. For example, when I was much younger I knew a young man who was for all intents and purposes, heterosexual. He was mugged, and involved in a rape situation involving a tent peg. This one event was enough to have him start on a road that eventually led to him becoming effeminate and gay.”
• Another excellent Keith Rawson interview. This time with Frank Bill.
• The umbrella man.
• ‎”I’m beginning to believe that anything I do to extend my life is just going to be outweighed by the agony of living it.”

Just as excited about the book, too. It is, as I understand it, an account of Harry Orchard and the Western Federation of Miners, particularly around Cripple Creek. Been meaning to hunt down a copy, as I kept seeing it cited in other books on the subject, and finally have.

One thing I’ve also been meaning to do for awhile now is say how much I enjoyed Choke Hold by Christa Faust. I finished it about a month ago (oddly enough while I was also reading DFW’s Consider the Lobster, meaning I went from not knowing anything about the AVN Awards to knowing a whole lot). There’s a whole lot going on, including some great commentary on the similarities between MMA and porn, which I won’t ruin for you. There’s also the best punchdrunk fighter since Mickey Rourke’s Homeboy. If you want a taste of Ms. Faust’s inestimable style and talent, she’s got an excerpt of her forthcoming novel, Butch Fatale; Dyke Dick — Double D Double Cross, on her site here.

I don’t think I’ve ever been quite as disappointed in a book as I was in Consider the Lobster, by the way. That was my first DFW, and I doubt there’ll be another. For all that I’ve read about his brilliance, the essays were kind of banal. The best example I can think of is the interminable piece about his time with John McCain, which can be boiled down to a slight variation on the old saw, “if you don’t vote, you can’t bitch.” Whether or not you agree with that line, it’s a pretty flimsy foundation upon which to stack thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of words. And most of the rest were just about as predictable. Likewise, maybe I’m missing something, but his much-vaunted linguistic play wore thin pretty quick. The first time “styptic” is used as an adjective unexpectedly it’s striking; the second time it makes you realize that it didn’t really make sense the first time either.

I also made it through exactly 75% of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano according to my Kindle, but, man, I couldn’t take any more. I was in love with the prose at the beginning, but felt like I was being suffocated under the flabby, alcoholic weight of the thing by the end. (Not that I’m opposed to alcohol or flab — except in prose.) I finally gave it up for Donald Ray Pollock’s Knockemstiff, and that’s been making me happier’n hell. As I kid, I actually lived up a holler about 30 miles on the Appalachian side of Pollock-country, and can attest that his characters are not entirely works of his imagination.

For some reason, I’ve been reading some mainstream American revolution stuff, too. I’m not sure why, except that it’s around. I polished off 1776 on my Kindle, and now I’m listening to Founding Brothers during my commute. Most of it’s exactly what you’d expect, but one factotum I really enjoyed was about the Hamilton/Burr duel. Turns out that when Hamilton provided the pistols — as the challenged, he got to choose the weapons — they were equipped with a secret set trigger that could drop the trigger pull weight from its norm of about 20 pounds to right around 1 pound. As anybody who has ever shot a handgun knows — and you can recall all my agonizing about the matter when configuring my carry gun — a 20 pound trigger pull would make it damn near impossible to shoot accurately. Of course, it didn’t do Hamilton a whole hell of a lot of good, but it was nice to know he was prepared to cheat.

My wife also brought me home a copy of Speaking Ill of the Dead: Jerks in Colorado History. There really are great advantages to being married to a librarian. It ain’t perfect — it’s way too kind to Chivington, for one thing, and it inexplicably doesn’t include William Byers — but it’s a whole lot of fun. At least, if your idea of fun is short essays on murder and mayhem.

Thinking about reading, this James Sallis interview struck a chord with me. Especially what he calls “the forty-page syndrome,” which sums up something that’s always nagged at me about most genre books.

What I call the forty-page syndrome, where you’re reading along, really getting into a novel, then the plot kicks in hard and all the coolest stuff – the textures, the messiness, the digressions – starts falling away. One doesn’t have to champion the plotless and wandering in order to decry the privileging of “story” (patterns imposed from without) over substance (eliciting patterns from within the narrative and characters themselves).

Also, the first review of Satan is Real: The Ballad of the Louvin Brothers just came in from Publishers Weekly:

Kris Kristofferston, who was employed as a janitor when he met Charlie Louvin, writes in his foreword, “The legendary Louvin Brothers’ hauntingly beautiful Appalachian blood-brothers harmony is truly one of the treasures of American music.” Now Charlie Louvin, who died January 26, 2011, at age 83, has written an engaging and entertaining look back at his gospel and country music career with his brother, Ira. The two grew up picking cotton and coon hunting in Alabama, and music became their escape route from rural chores to radio fame. They were in their teens when they began singing on Chattanooga radio, a showcase that led to paying gigs. They moved on to making music in Memphis, and by 1955, when they finally got to the Grand Ole Opry, their record sales soared. Ira’s heavy drinking and temper tantrums prompted Charlie to go solo; tragedy struck when Ira was killed in a 1965 auto accident. Packed with plenty of pictures, backstage gossip, and colorful anecdotes about the Louvins’ encounters with the great and near great, this memoir has a raw honesty, genuine grit, common sense and smokin’ down-home flavor that Louvin fans will relish. The fire-and-brimstone cover art and the book’s title are both taken from the duo’s 1959 gospel album, Satan Is Real.

I can’t say how nice is to have that done with. Here’s hoping the rest of them are half that kind.

Anyway, Thanksgiving, yep. And I’ll post what I always post this time of year, the official Whitmer Thanksgiving prayer, via Uncle Bill.

And speaking of lawmen, this has to be my favorite internet meme of all time.

That’s it. I’ll probably spend the long weekend reading and writing, with as little internet as possible, so I’ll see you next week.

• “My favorite melodramatic theme: the harried anarchist, a wounded wolf, struggling toward the green hills, or the black-white alpine mountains, or the purple-golden desert range and liberty.  Will he make it?  Or will the FBI shoot him down on the very threshold of wilderness and freedom?“
• Caught on Camera: 10 Shockingly Violent Police Assaults on Occupy Protesters.
• “But here are the numbers: In 2010, there were 403.6 violent crimes per 100,000 persons in the United States. (The good news: This is an overall decrease of 13.4 percent from the level in 2001.) Thus, the average American has a 1 in 250 chance of being robbed, assaulted, raped, or murdered each year. Actually, the chance is probably greater than this, because we know that certain crimes, such as assault and rape, are underreported.”
• Jesse James dime novel collection.
• “Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself. Finding one’s voice isn’t just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses. Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. Any artist knows these truths, no matter how deeply he or she submerges that knowing.”
• Dear gunnie internet.
• “Do you really believe that our lives are an effort to wring order from chaos – or that art is?  As artists, we’re compulsive pattern makers, nothing more. And we’re the same in our lives, forever adopting, discarding, and revising patterns – beliefs, ceremonies, communities – that make things seem more cohesive, less messy. Knowing these are lies, we choose to believe them. Or perhaps it’s just that I read Camus at too early an age.”