Alone and Unobserved

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 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.