Book Reviews by Elizabeth A. White

Do not call up what you cannot put down. – The Little Book of Night

Things would have gone so much easier for Bull Ingram if only someone long ago had heeded that warning. Instead, when the WWII vet is hired to find a missing man in rural Arkansas things get really weird, really fast.

Turns out it’s not only a missing music scout that his employer, a Memphis DJ, wants Ingram to find. He’s also charged with tracking down a pirate radio station that plays the haunting music of a mysterious blues man known as Ramblin’ John Hastur.

Whispers and rumors hold that Hastur’s music is evil, the result of him selling his soul to the devil in exchange for his gift. A hard man and former Marine, Ingram isn’t daunted in the slightest by such mumbo jumbo and sets off to earn his pay.

Meanwhile, a woman, Sarah, and her young daughter have fled an abusive situation and found their way back to Sarah’s childhood home, a sprawling plantation in rural Gethsemane, Arkansas. It slowly becomes clear that something is very wrong in Gethsemane, and that the darkness shrouding the old plantation goes far beyond family secrets thought long hidden and buried.

Exactly how the darkness Ingram is following and the darkness following Sarah and her ancestral home are connected is expertly woven together by debut author John Hornor Jacobs in one of the most intense and enjoyable books I have read this year. (more…)

Tomorrow I’ll be reviewing Southern Gods, the powerful debut novel from author John Hornor Jacobs, but am very excited to welcome him today for an amazingly frank guest post about the creeping ambition that begins with the desire to write “a simple tale, well told.”

Audacity.

It’s funny, for a guy who claims to think no one can teach another person how to write, I sure do write about the act of writing a lot, like a snake devouring its own tail. What’s the point? Go write a manuscript and then we’ll talk.

But still. There are subjects that niggle, that pester. There are half-formed thoughts immaterialized in my haunted house of a noggin. And I feel like I should explore them, head up into that ghostly attic with a flashlight and poke around. And so I shall, at Elizabeth A. White’s expense.

Audacity.

When I first began writing, I was happy to just finish my first manuscript, SOUTHERN GODS. All I wanted to do was to see if I could complete a novel. And once I do, hey, I’ll be totally happy. That will be enough. That’s all I want. But, then, once the book was complete, something twisted in me, and the worm of ambition shifted and burrowed into my liver and I thought, I just want to SEE if I can get it published, because that’s how the worm of ambition works, it adjusts our goals only slightly as it seats itself firmly in the flesh, tugging at the fibers and sinew, sinking into the organs. All I want is to be published. It’s fine, even, if it’s a small press. I’ll be totally happy with that. Once that happens, I can die happy. But just having a stack of papers with a novel printed on them isn’t enough. And then, when the first publisher accepted my book, and my friend John Rector asked if I’d signed anything and I said no and he replied, “Let me introduce you to this agent I met and I think you’d be a good match,” the worm twisted in me again and suddenly new vistas opened before me to plunder. I wanted more, then, than just a small press deal. I wanted an agent. I wanted to my books to be in stores. (more…)