In vein

Obviously the most anticipated novel of the summer of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. And we’re getting down to hours now until the book’s release. In preparation I’ve finished rereading Order of the Phoenix (actually not as bad as I thought, although my original assessment that 100 pages could have been cut from the book and it would be a better read still stands) and I’m going through the Half-Blood Prince as we speak. So I should be ready for The Deathly Hallows when I get it next week.

This should also serve as a mention that if anyone posts anything in the way of a spoiler to this blog about what happens in the book, I will hunt them down and do terrible things to them. Things that will make their mothers weep. Just so you know.

In fact, I think I'm going to kill the ability to anonymous post on the blog from the period of time between the book's release, until I finish it, just to be on the safe side.

However, the book that I’m looking forward to the most after Potter, and it’s a close second for me, is Warren Ellis’s Crooked Little Vein. You would be hard pressed to find a book more the opposite of Deathly Hallows. This is pretty much the anti-Christ to Potter. If possible this book would sodomize Harry Potter, piss on him, kick him in the balls wall while cracking his wand in half. And it would laugh while doing it.

Lord Volemort? Pussy.

That’s where this book is.

This might be disturbing to some of you, but I so thoroughly love most of Ellis’s comic book writing that I can’t help but look forward to see what he can do with straight prose. Which, despite what some of you might think, is a different kind of writing than what you would do in comic books.

The book comes out next Tuesday, mere days after Potter. Chapters is doing weird things about its availability, having gone from Pre-order now, to temporarily unavailable to order to takes 3-5 weeks to ship. So I'm holding back and see what is going on before ordering (they just cancelled an order I had been waiting a month for, so I'm right to be cautious). If they don’t get it straightened out, I’ll just look for it when I get home.

In the meantime, if you want to see what I’m writing about, Amazon has put the first chapter online here.

Favourite bit so far…

I smiled, shook my head. “It’s just what TV does to us. You say ‘chief of staff’ and I expect John Spencer from The West Wing, you know? I don’t suppose you’re a genial man of Chicago with a drinking problem, right?”

“Hell, no. I take heroin, son.”