VAMPIRE WEEKEND

I've been avoiding the vampire thing as much as possible. I saw Twilight because I had to review it for the paper last year (because no one else would go) but that's as far as I'm going to take it. I toyed with the notion of reading all of the books just so I could see if Breaking Dawn was as weird and laughably bad as I'd heard, but just couldn't bring myself to do it. Not even for a slightly funny blog post. Just wasn't worth the time.

I've never watched True Blood, either. Most of the shows on HBO are great, but I just never cared to try it out. The one vampire series I do read is Charlie Huston's Joe Pitt Casebooks. The first one is called Already Dead, then came No Dominion, Half The Blood of Brooklyn and the one I'm currently on, Every Last Drop. From the description, they sound like the cheesiest books ever written—Joe Pitt is basically a vampire private eye. But that's just where he starts. Charlie Huston has basically turned all of New York City into a vampire haven and created an entirely new world. That's the goal of most books, but this guy has actually planned out every minute detail from how they get the blood to the technical specifics of how the "Vyrus" as it's called, works. Good, hard-boiled crime fiction. Which I've always loved.

Started Every Last Drop a week ago and blazed right through it. Good stuff, but I'm kind of glad there's only one more book in the series. The broad themes seem to be repeating themselves which diminishes my interest a little bit.

On a side note, Googling "Every Last Drop" for a picture of the cover turned up a whole bunch of porn with that same title. That's some entertaining research, right there.

Also, yesterday I picked up a book called The Chill. It's a graphic novel—if you want to get all proper and pretentious—from Vertigo Crime. Vertigo usually puts out great stuff, but they just launched this new line that I'm really excited about. They're complete stories, but instead of the big pages like regular comics, they're the same size as the pulp hardcovers you might find at thrift stores or on the shelves of an antique shop.

I'm a huge fan of those kinds of books, but I'm more of a paperback guy. Every time I go to the D.I., Savers or any antique/consignment store I always look for those books and try to pick up at least one. They're usually only a dollar or two, but they're always great.

The Chill had some great quotes from a few of my favorite writers on the back, and even though I've never heard of the guy that wrote it I wanted to give it a shot. My goal for this year is to pick up a lot of comics that I've never heard of. Looking at my Best of '09 column (that's in City Weekly this week), I realized that most of the stuff I liked was from either Marvel or DC and I feel kind of bad for not checking out more unknown, indie stuff.

So you'll probably have a lot of comics-related posts to skip over in the next year. Or maybe you'll actually try a few of them out. I bet you'd like a couple.