My article "The Sidewalk: Notes from an Amateur Bookseller" is available now at the IROSF. It's about my experiences last year selling books at my neighborhood's local flea market. You have to register with IROSF to read it, but it's free.

A sample:

Of course, I hadn't read every book on the table, especially most of the horror titles. Those were the ones my friends had given me in order to thin out their own collections. Whenever a prospective customer held up a horror novel and asked me what it was about, I'd always say "It's about a man"—(or a woman, depending on the customer's gender)—"who returns to his/her hometown, and there are ghosts in it and a haunted carnival."

Enjoy!

All those subway Born Again Christians have you down?

Wouldn't you rather read more about evil?

How about the "Genius of Evil"?

My essay "Who? Fantomas! The Villain that Time Forgot" is now up and live at the Internet Review of Science Fiction. It's not only about the books themselves but also about the power reading pulp/trash fiction can have on the imagination.

"A woman found brutally murdered in a locked room. A chemically preserved corpse discovered in a steamer trunk. An audacious robbery committed by a masked and tuxedoed thief in a grand Paris hotel. Nothing connects these crimes, only the suspicion that the same perpetrator committed them all. Who? Fantômas!"

Read the rest here here...

It's especially fun if you replace the name "Fantômas" with the name "Fancypants".