Alone and Unobserved

Underland Press recently sent me an advance copy of Martin Millar’s next novel, Curse of the Wolf Girl (coming out August 2010 in the UK and US), to read and review, and as soon as I got my hands on it I did nothing else but devour it whole. (Well, there might have been some Wii-playing in there somewhere, but otherwise it was STRICTLY DEVOURING.) And it is fantastic.

Curse of the Wolf Girl is the sequel to Millar’s Lonely Werewolf Girl, which I have plugged and gushed about previously, and it is a fitting follow-up to what turned out to be one of my favorite books ever. The best part: the ending of CotWG is left open, so there may be more stories about the MacRinnalch werewolf clan in the future!

Here’s my full review, which I cross-posted on my Goodreads account.

Curse of the Wolf Girl by Martin Millar
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
[Review of an advance review copy.]

I was introduced to Martin Millar two years ago when Neil Gaiman recommended Lonely Werewolf Girl to his fans. LWF was a revelation to me. Here was a book that was whimsical, violent, sad, funny and completely insane and off-kilter, and yet it was also one of the most readable books I’d picked up in a long time. I loved it with my whole being.

The sequel is more of the same, mostly in the best sense: Millar’s characters, their relationships and their dialogue are just as idiosyncratic and absurd as ever, and the plot careens all over the UK and across two separate dimensions, yet each of the characters is allowed to be real: to feel real emotions—love, hate, passion for fashion, greed, anxiety, depression and happiness—to confront real situations, and to feel real doubts. Millar is at his strongest when writing about people confronting their fears, regrets and weaknesses, and he certainly does not shy away from this here. Don’t worry, though—I spent far more time during CotWG laughing than crying, and I promise you will, too.

The question now becomes: when is Millar’s next werewolf book coming out???

View all my reviews on Goodreads >>

Martin Millar announced on his blog a couple weeks ago that the sequel to Lonely Werewolf Girl will be titled Curse of the Wolf Girl (not Queen Vex, as I had previously reported) and will be released later this year. I’m not sure when it’ll be coming out in the U.S., but Amazon.com already has a listing for it, so I’m hopeful it won’t be too long after the UK edition.

I’m sure you have no idea how excited you should be, but believe me: a new Martin Millar book is a BIG FUCKING DEAL. And there’s still plenty of time before the sequel comes out to read his entire backlist, which is quickly coming back into print, thanks to the nice folks over at Soft Skull Press.

Here’s a review I just posted on Goodreads of a Soft Skull reprint of one of his older books:

Ruby and the Stone Age Diet by Martin Millar

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is perhaps the characteristic Martin Millar tale: it stars (and is narrated by) a young man with a tenuous grasp on reality and chronology who has just lost his girlfriend, and whose friend—and squatting buddy—Ruby occasionally likes to slip LSD in his tea, regale him with stories of a lonely werewolf girl, and swear off food for weeks at a time. In Ruby and the Stone-age Diet, Millar has assembled a fractured mosaic of fact, near-fact, fancy and myth that confuses and delights in equal measure. Definitely a trip.

My other Martin Millar reviews:

• Little-Known Facts That You Should Know (blog post on The Good Fairies of New York and Lonely Werewolf Girl)
• Lonely Werewolf Girl
• The Good Fairies of New York
• Lux the Poet