Fields spent several months during 1956 terrorizing the parking spots and lover's lanes of L.A., posing as an undercover police officer to separate the couples and assault the girls and young women. Because Fields is black and his victims white, Hispanic or Asian, and because Los Angeles in 1956 is as segregated as anywhere the Stars and Bars once flew, police can't get a lead on him. But they have another possibility, a former black LAPD officer fired for dating a white woman. The case is weak and Galindo knows it, but he also knows that the deck is stacked against the accused man unless he can find the real criminal. His growing affection for one of the witnesses in the case threatens to complicate things even more.
Even though it's a true-crime book, Engel manages to give L.A. '56 a hard-boiled, noirish feel and weave politics -- departmental and otherwise -- into his narrative to show as much as anyone could of what law enforcement and racial issues were like in southern California in the mid-1950s. He pulls few punches when assessing how easily the former officer is suspected, arrested and nearly railroaded into prison. He also gives full credit to the way the detectives, led by Galindo, went to work to try to find the real attacker once it was obvious they had the wrong man.
Engel tells L.A. '56 mostly in the present tense, but might have been stronger with the more ordinary third-person past. Either way, it's a thoughtful and thought-provoking examination of an incident in U.S. history that's probably not as much in the past yet as it should be.
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Technology has opened up a wide range of publishing options for people who have a book they would like to get in print, bridging the gap between the traditional royalty-based presses and self-publishing "vanity" presses that the author pays to print up copies of his or work. Tate Publishing is one of those bridgers, working like a little bit of both and through them, books like Adam Shahan's 2010 The Fall of the Four come into print.
In the Seven Provinces, young Aaron, his friend Anna and her father Oronus find themselves at odds with Eleazar Graff, the senior religious leader in the land's faith in the Four. Having found the mystical Chest of Worlds, Aaron and the others may have the key to unlocking the secrets of the Raujj, a kind of magic that has been unavailable in the world for a long long time. But Graff also seeks the Chest, with a plan to use it to overthrow faith in the Four and establish himself as God.
Fall would probably have benefited from processing at a more traditional publishing house, with tighter editing to smooth out and unknot several tricky passages in the story. Visualizing the physical world of the Provinces, let alone the political, social and religious organizations, takes a lot of work that a reader might rather spend following the characters and the story. The post-apocalyptic, steampunk-influenced semi-Edwardian world Shahan uses for his story feels like it's worth looking into, but it's as if the lens for doing so still needs another couple of good cleanings and we have trouble making out what we're looking at.
In fact, Fall might have been best served by being repurposed as a juvenile, a la Robert A. Heinlein's Scribner works, or young adult-oriented read like James Patterson's Maximum Ride novels. Tate, a Christian-oriented business, reins in anything too graphic in the fields of sex and violence and that sort of nudges Four's style into a more "family-friendly" worldview anyway. Add to that substantial disentanglement of the world of the Provinces, some editorial polishing to help lean up and bring out the grain of Shahan's good grasp on his narrative and characters, and we would have something that would in no way be the next Twilight. But that's a good thing. So is Fall, and if it still has room for improvement, it's more a sign than technology alone hasn't caught indie self-publishing up to what the major presses can do yet, bringing things to print without benefit of the full process.
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Moore's initial mix of mythology, humor, fantasy, whimsy and commentary was a kind of australopithecus from which work like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Zombieland and Warm Bodies evolved. "You'll have power. You'll be immortal," the book's tagline tells us. "But there's a Catch. And he eats people." That's because Catch is a demon, conjured up sort of unwillingly in the early decades of the 20th century by a now-defrocked priest named Travis. Catch gives Travis immortality and the power to sort of control the demon's actions, but he's still a demon, and his form of sustenance is people. Though Travis tries to steer Catch towards eating people who deserve it, he's not happy anymore with the cost of his immortality and power.
Travis and Catch come to Pine Cove, where they will face off against the Djinn, Catch's ancient foe, and the allies the Djinn recruits to his cause.
Moore excels at planting his fantastic elements in the middle of everyday life in a small California coastal town, weaving them together as well as Joss Whedon ever did in Sunnydale or Stephen King in Derry. His straight-man-styled narrative makes the quirks of the Djinn and dark humor of Catch stand out all the more and makes Practical Demonkeeping that much more fun.
What happened to Moore following this book is a mystery. Aside from a brief reanimation in Bloodsucking Fiends, nothing he's done in the nearly 20 years since comes anywhere close and much of it has been just awful, as the aforementioned Lust-Lizard and Island demonstrate. But every couple of years you can haul Practical Demonkeeping off the shelf and reread it for a few hours of supernatural chuckles and a little insightful commentary on what might make even good people seek evil...and what that choice will cost.
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