Fun with Fangs

Trade is slow today because of the snow. Low to the surprise of everyone, except Sam, has announced that he isn't coming in because he's going to spend a few months in his villa in Spain . This is akin to discovering that the nice old man you stopped to chat to about the weather as he bought the old Hayes manuals every Saturday was once a lead scientist in Nazi Germany's Rocket programme. I mean it doesn't change the fact that he seems like a nice bloke but you are left wondering what else is going on that you don't know about. (True story- ask Two, it happened him )

Anyway back to Low, apparent not only does he have a villa in Spain but a couple of vineyards, a small village or two, rather a lot of land and a hereditary title. It turns out that Low is actually a person of great importance slumming it here for a change of pace . When/if he comes back he has promised to bring me a few bottles of the rather nice red wine that his favourite vineyard produced a few years ago. See I said ages ago that Low was a dark horse.

Some new stock is going on the on-line shop tonight including an Anne Rice book called Master of the Bones. I guess Anne Rice is mother of the modern chick-bit-lit genre although to follow the metaphor Emily Bronte is a cousin at remove and Mary Shelley a grandmother from the Gothic novel side of the family. I read a lot from this genre and I must admit some of them are pretty dire. Anne Rice herself gets a little over-wrought and I believe I've had a mini rant about Laurell K Hamilton before. But occasionally you come across a little gem like Carrie Vaughn , writer of the Kitty Norville Series or the rather wonderful C. E. Murphy , The Walker Papers. The latter I particularly recommend and not just because the author was gracious enough to reply to a fan email I sent her.

So why are these kind of books so popular? I've always been a fan of the horror novel and I think in some ways this is just a feminization of that genre. This is not to say, Stephen King for example has not written some good female characters , I enjoyed the novel The Girl who loved Tom Jordan immensely. But this genre offers us something more, is it the romance elements , they are certainly enjoyable; or is it the episodic nature of many of the books which encourage a soap opera like addiction at worse and a real engagement with the characters at best? Well maybe. I know that I love the escapism of the what if .. elements in these books, what if the supernatural , the eerie, was real? What if werewolves really existed , how would they escape detection in our CCTV age ? If magic was real what jobs would witches and wizards do ? If vampires lived up the road from you what changes would society have to make ? And you know if you absolute had to kiss one, how the hell would you go about it ?

See we talked about books finally. Any comments you'd like to share, please do drop us a line. It would be great to hear from you.