Every once in a while, you take a chance on a book and it doesn’t pay off. That’s just the nature of the business of reading. If you only read the writers and genres you know, there’s no fun in that. Plus, you’ll never expand your horizons, which sort of defeats the purpose of reading in the first place. Still, relying on reviews (especially those of the Amazon variety), lists, and word of mouth will only get you so far. Sure, taste is subjective, but I can’t count the number of books I’ve started after hearing positive recommendations only to wonder “What were those reviewers thinking? Did they lose a…
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Howard Odentz’s Bottle Toss: An Unpredictable, Creepy Ride
Back in the ancient days of 2013, I came across a book called Dead (A Lot), from an unknown (to me) writer and playwright named Howard Odentz. This was during the salad days of AMC’s adaptation of The Walking Dead, so everyone who was anyone was writing about zombies, and a lot of the stories in the undead zeitgeist were cut from that pattern. That’s not to suggest they were all boring and derivative, but there just weren’t many that were interesting. I was skeptical. With Dead (A Lot), though, Odentz managed to produce something clever and unique, a zombie story unlike any I’d ever read. Since then, I’ve done…
