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

Martin Millar is writing a sequel (tentatively named Queen Vex) to Lonely Werewolf Girl, a book whose awesomeness I have written about in the past. You should find Lonely Werewolf Girl and read it, and then you and I can both wait breathlessly for its sequel to be written and eventually released in the U.S. and wherever you live. (Which will hopefully be within both of our lifetimes.) And then we can squeal about how awesome/what a disappointment the sequel is and praise/abuse the name of Martin Millar together. I can’t wait! Can you?

In other news, I am reading H. P. Lovecraft for a class assignment. I am not finding his writing particularly scary or horrifying, but it is giving me lots of scary/horrifying story ideas. Is this normal?

Martin Millar is the funniest author you may never have heard of. I just finished Lonely Werewolf Girl and am halfway through The Good Fairies of New York, the only two of his books (currently) owned by my library, and I am plotting to get my hands on his earlier works through the magic of Interlibrary Loan.

From Neil Gaiman’s introduction to The Good Fairies of New York:

Millar writes like Kurt Vonnegut might have written, if he’d been born fifty years later in a different country and hung around with entirely the wrong sort of people. . . . The Good Fairies of New York is a story that starts when Morag and Heather, two eighteen-inch fairies with swords and green kilts and badly-dyed hair fly through the window of the worst violinist in New York, an overweight and antisocial type named Dinnie, and vomit on his carpet. Who they are, and how they came to New York, and what this has to do with the lovely Kerry, who lives across the street, and who has Crohn’s Disease and is making a flower alphabet, and what this as to do with the other fairies (of all nationalities) of New York, not to mention the poor repressed fairies of Britain, is the subject of this book. It has a war in it, and a most unusual production of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and Johnny Thunders’ New York Dolls guitar solos. What more could anyone desire from a book?

Lonely Werewolf Girl, on the other hand, is about a dysfunctional and murderous clan of Scottish werewolves struggling to remain relevant in a modern Britain filled with cable television, haute couture, thrash metal, army boots and T-shirts. It features: a fashion-obsessed Fire Queen; a deadly knife; a band named Yum Yum Sugary Snacks; a seventeen-year-old laudanum junkie werewolf; and a young human woman named Moonglow. It also features several deadly werewolf battles and a great deal of fine Scottish whiskey.

Both books are hilarious, brilliant, inventive and highly recommended.

P.S. The sweet potato fries last night were fabulous. I ended up roasting them for about 20 minutes in a 350-degree oven with some broccoli florets. Yummy.