i love parentheses,

I love parentheses

(an aside, a secret, a shining coin of color or truth gleaming under a great lake of paragraph

[a luminous shell of electrons set valent about a dark core, the gravity of words nested within

{like a fine set of earrings framing the face of a girl you haven't confessed your heart to yet.
}]).

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him.

Chasing Magnus through the Norse Lore.

The unwritten criticism of young adult offerings (and it's not a genre, it's a market) is that none ever seem to pass the bar of its progenitor J.K. Rowling -- all else that follows Harry Potter's been derivative. Nor have they been able to strike such a grand balance between character & world-building as Rowling.

That bar still remains unapproached by Rick Riordan's latest trilogy series launch, Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard: The Sword of Summer, though you'd think with the richness of Norse Lore to draw from it might surpass the young wizard, but Magnus makes for a fun read.

Much like Riordan's Percy Jackson series, our titular protagonist has a mystery daddy, is a streetwise kid, has an important prophecy at age 16 event to propel their plot, and much internal thought reactions of sophomoric adolescent "smartness" in their texts for the teen reader & young-at-heart to identify with.

And our newly chosen hero & his varied party of gifted friends must accomplish a quest by a deadline for a lost object. Since Homer, or Tolkien, however, we never tire of this story's formula.

In contemporary fantasies our modern interpolations on ancient legends are where the humour's supposed to come from. Would today's modern man appreciate Valhalla? Maybe if it were turned into a hotel is Riordan's answer. And the pop culture references are meant to give enough perspective for a young & modern audience to see Riordan's pushing forward of the long-hidden denizens of the Nine Norse Worlds, but push the results of this technique ten years on and it might read more dated than classic. 

Where Magnus really shines is when it provides other unthought of specifics & fill-ins, such as an actual descriptor of the taste of Mimir's well of knowledge, or elaborating on the current results of Freya's bartering with the dwarven Brisings, adding to the list of "paradox ingredients", or the unique physics of Jotunheim.

"The smell of the giants' body odor -- a combination of wet clay and sour meat ..." [p.388]

These new imaginings give the reader some nice mythological extras.

Another cool hard copy reader extra (because real books will always rule!) is that depending where you buy your copy, you actually get something extra: If off a pallet at CostCo, it's a bookmark. If from the shelf of Barnes & Noble, it's a small pamphlet guide to the Norse Gods. If from the bestseller rack at Target, it's a mini-poster of the Nine Worlds. And there's even a limited edition slipcased version if you order yours from Amazon UK.

Points in the plot borrow many episodes in Norse Lore but instead place Magnus & Co within them, so if you've read the original stories you'll be the inside reader:

"We met at that party at Bilskirner -- the one where you were playing tug-of-war with Loki?" 

"Oh ... ." [He] shook his horns. "Yes. That was embarrassing." [p.343]

... but not so surprised, and if you haven't read the stories the narrative will be new ... but weirdly seeming a bit forced. There's a familiar eagle dragging a character, some fishing for a large sea monster, a deception by giantesses, et cetera. Some of the comparative situations are funny, while others fall flat from trying too hard.

For Rick Riordan fans, Annabeth Chase from Percy Jackson cameos, turning out to be Magnus' cousin. This also implies a shared universe which might lead to a conflict between the pantheons ... ? Maybe even a duel between Percy & Magnus? (A Red Gold on Magnus! Sumarbrander totally breaks Riptide.)

[Sumarbrander!] 

While in the Lore the monsters are universal forces of entropy & destruction, in Riordan's worlds they are external manifestations of our fears & anxieties amplified, reflections of fault & weakness & regret, giving the characters' encounters with them a more crushingly personal aspect.

And in an interesting setting decision, Texan Rick Riordan celebrates his own Boston transplantation by imbuing Beantown with a close connection to Yggdrasil, the World Tree, thus making the northeastern city a crossroads to getting from Midgard, our world, to the other Nine Worlds.

In contrast to the Lore, sometimes the book puts itself at odds with the lessons in the original stories. Odin teaches that knowledge sometimes requires levels of personal & impersonal sacrifice, but Magnus questions this and frequently whines & opines differently as he proceeds on his quest.

We would adore it if Magnus Chase were to give kids & adults new to the epic accounts of the Norse Gods the same wonder & fascination that we got from D'Aulaires' Norse Gods & Giants (which really still stands as the best [even if Magnus currently outsells it on Amazon]) when we were growing up, and enough to direct them to later go read the Eddas where they came from. In all, Riordan, previously a teacher by trade, has written an entertaining embroidery of the lore that hopefully opens this door to Asgardian narratives.

Part two of the Magnus Chase trilogy, The Hammer of Thor, is scheduled for release October 4th, 2016. We can only hold out a reader's hope that this upcoming literary Mjölnir can finally smash Potter's wand.

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him.

a note to ronda.

Ronda Rousey: All your victories, accumulated skills, experience, and inspiring story still outweigh this one setback. Whether you want the belt back or not's irrelevant. You're still the best on record, and we look forward to either more fights, or an awesome movie career, or both.

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him.

thanks for thinking about the math, Pima County citizens.

So relieved the majority (~60%) of Pima County voted down all the bond proposals. Vague language, pork belly contracts, short-term rubbish. And even if some of it managed to sound important (which it wasn't), you can't spend money you don't have on top of money you already owe. Bankrupt judgment doesn't solve bankruptcy.

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him.

on technological irrelevancies.

XBox or Playstation is Coke versus Pepsi ... and just as irrelevant. Don't offer me bread & circuses with your trillions. Give me a real paradigm shift. Domestic robots I can lease to my workplace so I can have more time off or program to plant food or make goat cheese while I'm away so we can get off this grocery bill food chain wage enslavement treadmill that goes to death and we can instead retire early. Flying cars with safe hive mind autopilots so we can travel, adopt grander perspectives, and free will engage more than the programmed post-cathode ray windows in our homes. Game change it already. Imagine harder, world. Put that on your to-do list.

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or in the comments below.

NorsePlay: ideas from the Odin Brotherhood.

When Professor Mark Mirabello published The Odin Brotherhood (1992) surely many dismissed the idea of a surviving secret society of religious Norse practitioners as an attractive fantasy, or thought the dialog in the book only an Edda-like delivery system for a revival.

Understandably any sort of unearthed esoteric knowledge revealed after hundreds of years using unconfirmable sources opens itself up to scrutiny & examination, especially by reconstructionists who've had to weed out and re-plant structures in their religion, and we leave it up for those better versed in the archaeology & attestations in Asatru lore to do so.

What can't be argued is that Mirabello serves up some interesting ideas & perspectives onto the Asatruar's table, which we will present & ourselves extrapolate on here from the 5th edition (we don't have the current 6th edition [but if the publisher wished to send us one, we'd be happy to examine & revise this survey in light of the additional 50 pages, and even comment on Jack Wolf's complimentary The Way of the Odin Brotherhood {2013}, if included]).

[Bifrost to Asgard backdrop in Richard Wagner’s "Das Rheingold", directed by Otto Schenk (1990).]

The gods are presented throughout the text with unheard of epithets & cognomen, so much like the lore in using metaphorical descriptors & narrative associations to speak about the Aesir, which makes for some new additions one could use in writing or ritual.

Unlike in the Eddas, where it's the death of only a few of the gods that are detailed during the cataclysmic Ragnarök, we get a very grim additional description of the deaths of Frigg & Iðunn: "Freya will slay several trolls before she herself is killed, Idun [sic] will be soiled and raped and murdered" (p.102). There always seemed to be the implication that frost giant Þjazi perhaps did more than hold the youth-giver for her apples, but here the brutality upon her is made explicit & final.

As per the Brotherhood's origin story, a lead tablet will communicate to a dead person if buried at their grave in the winter (p.17). It's the exception that the dead answer, and it was a reply that formed their secret society.

The OB claim there are three types of death that lead to three different afterlife realms: Death in battle, the straw death of old age/sickness, and death by sorcery. Death in battle is a requirement in order to psychologically face death again when Ragnarök comes. In stark contrast, death by magick is bad since that ending denies the final army better numbers, thus giving us a longterm applied reason to avoid using magick for fatalities in the first place, which the OB states is "killing with words" and used by "all who thrive on malice" (p.74). The need for battle death also makes a fitting justification for Odin's grand plan to prepare for Ragnarök.

"Some men become terrified and dizzy at great heights. According to an old legend, it is the proximity of the gods at great heights that makes people afraid." (p.50) This passing detail jibes with citations that meditations to seek clarifying visions took place on high places, much like Odin camping on high seat Hliðskjálf to gain the best perspective.

All the gods cast a "light shadow" more like a reflection, as opposed to our conventionally dark shadow; therefore they'll only visit Midgard at night so as to conceal themselves (p.33).

Time between Asgard & Midgard passes at different rates: "An instant in the reality of the gods is an epoch in the reality of men." (p.61) This temporal difference could account for divine superspeed, seeming multi-locatant, and the need for special apples to offset aging. If men enter the reality of the gods, aging occurs, a reversed principle similar to the fairyland tales where visiting/kidnapped mortals don't age, while time passes much faster back home.

As for other realms, the OB locates Alfheim "where every river begins": "Rain is where every river begins, so the Elf-World is somewhere in the architecture of the clouds" (p.67). 

Frost giants & fire giants "exist in oblique corridors" (p.43), implying a nearby plane or dimension where they lay in wait for those barriers to break down when the universe ends. Sort of Lovecraftian, yes?

Death is hands-on sexy:

"AUTHOR: From the Odinist perspective, what is death?

THE ODIN BROTHERHOOD: In poetic terms, death itself is personified as beautiful females who exist in an endless variety of exquisite forms. These females are called the valkyries.

AUTHOR: And these valkyries extinguish life?

THE ODIN BROTHERHOOD: Yes. The gentle hands of the valkyries softly and voluptuously do the work of killing." (p.71)

Well, if you're putting it like that, death is a welcome pornography.

Endtimes update: Baldur is already dead (p.82). As the forerunning prophecy for Ragnarök, this places a greater urgency on the current state of things as far as the OB see it.

The text also presents the idea of time as an eternal cycle, similar to science's oscillating cosmology theory where the universe big bangs out (like Niflheim's ice mixing with Muspelheim's fire to explode matter into being), then gravity stalls the expansion and draws it back to collapse onto itself, only to bang out again, but the gods return with every universal genesis, like the lore mentioning Baldur's return after the sturm und drang of the current world's end is finished and everything resets. 

As for fate, it is something that's already woven out for us (p.93): "We cannot choose the joys or the terrors we must face, but we can choose to face them calmly. That is our freedom." Ergo, the inevitable's going to happen, but how we deal with it makes the difference.

And finally, the OB claims that when honor & heroic action are no longer found on Midgard, the separate worlds will break down, and Ragnarök will happen. So in the very act of honouring the old gods, we stave off Ragnarök indefinitely, and that alone is reason enough to venerate the Aesir. It's in our interest & the gods' interest to blot, for these interests of preservation, celebration, and recognition are one in the same.

Whether one buys the Eddaic adornments of what the OB's secret lore says or not, they provoke us to rethink what we know, and their last and most important point reminds us that in honoring the gods, we also honor the potential for our best selves and the world around us, all in the same horn, and that alone is worth listening (and drinking) to. 

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+. 

don't forget your warhammer.

It appears Warhammer, the Forgotten Weapon: Its History Through Examples by James Roth, is the only volume exclusively featuring this weapon, so if you've just purchased a warhammer this would be the one choice you get.

Although a slim self-published 120 pages, which, when compared to the encyclopedias one finds on swords, is spartan, the style is succinct and says just what one needs to know in a well-reasoned historical survey.

Revealing that "James Roth"'s a pseudonym, one can deduce the author's protecting his/her stated professional fencing career, but any reader must question what's the shame in exploring other avenues of melee weaponry, when variations could only strengthen and add to any fencer's toolkit. 

Also, if the author/ess is a professional fencer, one should expect more practical guidance, say blocks, parrys, stances, positions, and contingencies versus differently armed opponents.

Instead most of the examples are based on remaining artifacts and intuitive explorations of period paintings, in particular this one:

[Niccolò Mauruzi da Tolentino at the Battle of San Romano (probably c. 1438–1440), from a triptych by Paolo Uccello. Egg tempera with walnut oil and linseed oil on poplar, 182 × 320 cm, National Gallery, London.]

There's a detailed beat-by-beat breakdown of what's happening with the three knights' melee at right which backs up the clear superiority of the warhammer's ready handiness versus formidable plate and the awkwardness of the lance or sword in this situation. This deep minutia more than implies the author's acumen, but the know-how of most martial arts manuals isn't given to the reader in the fencing chapter as one might greatly anticipate. Instead the book mainly features the reasons behind the technology of the weapon's build & variants.

Citing Wikipedia and drawing from online museum and weapons' collection pictures, the book surveys the warhammer's precursors, working up to the evolution of armor, and the need for and hammer-style armour busting close quarter weapon when regular swords failed, and other arms proved too awkward. Discussing medieval & renaissance versions from Poland, Ukraine, and Germany, the reader's expertly lead through all the whys of warhammering.

The book concludes by stating "The warhammer should not be remembered through games and fantasies." Odds are however that given the current prevalence of gamer & geek cultures, it's precisely these aspects which give Roth his readership, which should be respected for deciding to do their homework by purchasing his text.

So if you've come to the battlefield hammer in hand looking for a guide with step-by-step techniques like the ninja books of the 1980s, this isn't it, but it's the only book out there and worth reading to know why you bought that bad arse hammer in the first place, and why it still fascinates us centuries later.

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

dare you enter The Cemetery of Forgotten Books ... ?

We eagerly return to the Zafóniverse, a Gothic Barcelona founded upon secrets, unspeakable war tragedies, and mysterious legends, fueled by an unending hunger of Catalonian delectables, set in unforgettable residences, with a cast tossed about by masterfully plotted waves of hopeless hopes, impossible loves, and dark circumstances.

Yes, we are so bookdrunk on another double draught of Carlos Ruiz Zafón, this time the finishing two installments of The Cemetery of Forgotten Books trilogy.

[The Cemetery of Forgotten Books?
No, it's The Library of Parliament in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.]

The Angel's Game (2008) proves to be an illuminating prequel to The Shadow of the Wind (2001). Our young boy main character adjusts from Daniel Sempere to David Martin, who have similar voices, both having lost their mothers to tragic circumstances, and a narrative difference being that David much more fearlessly says what intelligent Daniel only has the insight to think, perhaps because David loses his father far earlier and then feels he has nothing to lose. In most instances this gives the dialogue a winningly zippy Tracy-Hepburn delivery, especially in his later "His Girl Friday" repartee with equally sassy assistant Isabella.

Adolescent David gets a chance to pen a Gothic potboiler, The City of the Damned, serialized on the back page of the newspaper he runs copy for, and it becomes a runaway hit, earning the adoration of the common reader and the scorn of the city's classicist green-eyed literati. Like the eponymous cursed book in The Shadow of the Wind, Zafón's compelling description of this serial makes one want to read this book within a book with its Feuillade's "Les Vampire" (1915 silent serial film) criminal stylings. David's success launches him into the pleasures & perils of authorship, and gains him the attention of an enigmatic would-be patron. (Cue suspense theme.)

When this plot thickens, David's opportunity's for publishing increases, and the novel takes on the larger meaning within the craft & process of writing a book. Zafón's world posits that books serve as vessels of persona & purpose, just as equal as the soul is to the body.

AG also boldly holds forth on religious faith & its invisible constructs, the story-church/chicken-egg causality, whether it's made from a historical messiah figure, or verisimilitudinal legend, or fill-in for a current societal need (almost an unintended comparative to L. Ron Hubbard's Scientology).

Whether commenting on the necessity of religion, the horror of civil war, or the glories of past architectures, Zafón adorns his ideas with a poetic hyperbole and a challenging exploration that is nothing short of transportive. We enjoy the peoples and city walks of bygone days, a fallen elegance that one thought gone but is held in the amber of Zafón's words.

One grim aspect that Zafón endows David's story with is that betrayal is the easy shadow cast by friendship as people turn out to be not what they steadfastly seemed, which makes for surprising (and woeful) reading.

AG also seems to contain a self-aware critique of the Gothic's tropes' effect on the reader, like Northanger Abbey (1817) -- but of course without all of Austen's ploddingly unreadable Regency twaddle. When David selects a long abandoned gargoyle crowned mansion to live in, the manse's dark charms are a dream come true to the writer's fevered imagination, yet as events progress, the house weighs heavy on its resident and possibly colours how he sees things happening to him. Yet the occult forces that are hinted in small details in SotW begin to be revealed, and plunges the book from noir mystery to seriously dark historical fantasy.

Between these last two books is The Rose of Fire, a small 2.5 short story installment that explains the mysterious medieval origins of The Cemetery of Forgotten Books!

But while AG takes it off the map into the unknown in an amazing way, The Prisoner of Heaven (2011) tells you the journey is a lie.

PoH Takes place after SotW, unlike the prequel placement of AG. While a forward states that The Cemetery of Forgotten Books series can be read in any order, in retrospect it unfolds best in order of publication as the third would definitely spoil aspects of the second.

The third installment picks up Daniel Sempere as main character, revealing bookstore clerk & bon vivant Fermín Romero de Torres' story and its consequences.

Fermín's nested flashback narrative honors Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo (1844) with a transposition of Zafon's characters which it makes no bones about reframing, but it's a long prison sentence of 82 pages out of 278 for the reader, and some may have hoped that having Prisoner in the title might have proved less literal.

PoH seems to retract the supernature of both SotW & AG as we find David Martin in prison, deluded & dialoging with his more-than-mysterious patron. This turn feels like a cheat that deflates as opposed to a quantum truth, and in questioning his own second novel's decisions Zafón undermines the darkly numinous occult forces in his world.

Zafón plays with the unreliable narrator which later comes across as a slight abuse of the reader/author compact. Yet it partly doesn't matter since by the time he unveils that trick's mechanics his story's momentum far outweighs most misgivings one might have for such an implied illusion versus reality twist. (And if the occult is unseen and the spiritual invisible, then there isn't a paradox to complain about -- but that's a semi-apologetic comfort this reviewer had to come up with, not the author.) Still, we feel this implied retraction shouldn't be there at all, that such a move feels cowardly, and this is our one large complaint about these otherwise brilliant books.

Not that a visual adaptation needs to even be made as the literary medium does quite well on its own, but if Zafón's work were serialized into a series, one would want the Russian network to give it a "The Master & Margarita" treatment. Or, if major motion picture, maybe best put in the hands of Guillermo Del Toro, who's Hispanic sensibilities would do the work's sinister mood justice.

Like an Alfred Hitchcock cameo, Zafón passingly references himself in the side character of Professor Alburquerque:

"‘You should write a book on the subject,’ I proposed. ‘A secret history of Barcelona seen through its accursed writers, those forbidden in the official version.’ The professor considered the idea, intrigued. [...]

‘You’d better, because cities have no memory and they need someone like me, a sage with his feet on the ground, to keep it alive.’" [p.211]

In this goal, Zafón succeeds. Dickens is to London as Zafón is to Barcelona, and that will be his immortal legacy that cheats death, the towering monolith that looms largest in the haunted center of The Cemetery of Forgotten Books.

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

join the Armada.

Honestly, we voraciously dove into Ernest Cline's new novel Armada (2015) in the sincere belief that it would be an even more awesome sequel to his 1980s inspired videogamepunked Ready Player One (2011).

While that expectation turned out to be wrong (rats!), Cline's literary coding runs a similar program. If one hadn't already read RP1, we'd be introduced to the same precocious classroom prisoner, the hero of all YA, a kid with issues, a too-cool-for-school geek girl love interest, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game that perhaps is more than it seems, and mad gaming skillz that just happen to turn a young nobody into a hero. 

References abound to John Hughes, Conan, Dune, The Twilight Zone, and of course the twin pillars of sci-fi fandom, Star Trek & Star Wars, keeping the dialogue witty and the prose retro-pop fun to read. There's even some guided playlist cassette culture mixtape love, if you actually wanted to soundtrack your reading experience at certain points of the story.

For his second novel, Cline's produced a winning ode in the key of space opera, a homage rewritten from Ender's Game (1985) & "The Last Starfighter" (1984), except set in the very near future, and with far higher stakes than RP1. High school gamer Zack Lightman one day sees a UFO hovering about his small hometown. Weird enough, but the cognitive dissonance is that it's straight out of his favourite game, "Armada", and after discovering his late father's secret journal full of paranoid notes, Zack questions his sanity and wonders if he should lay off the console until his head clears up.

At points the text reads like the best bits of MMORPG flight & ground future combat sims, so if you ever cockpit jocked dogfights in the classic "TIE Fighter Vs. X-Wing" PC game, it'll be especially delightful reading these white knuckle on joystick Earth Defense Alliance passages.

The winning characters elevate this book above a skeletal space action novel with it's central sins of the father-son dynamic, hilarious besties, compassionate mother, all in the shadow of a possible doomsday scenario.

In the inevitable comparison to RP1 many will complain the author's written the same book, or maybe suspect it was the version he didn't use, or even posit that it was an unpublished earlier novel. Yet others would've complained even more if he'd decided to instead write a cheese eating paranormal romance YA novel, a scandi noir pastiche, or something equally divergent instead.

Ernest Cline writes what he knows & loves, sci-fi fandom-inspired prose from the heart, and that honest center is what makes his writing shine. Woven around that, Armada's a mosaic of cult book & film & graphic novel sources, scripture, Tolkien, Shakespeare, and other winning DNA.

And it's more clever than mere adulation as it's a metaliterary "The Cabin In The Woods" (2012)-style examination of alien invasion scenarios. In doing this, however, the twist truncates the end into a Childhood's End (1953) a la Arthur C. Clarke that would seem less of a denouement than one might have expected after all the intensity. We'll see if the upcoming Universal Pictures version sticks with it.

At the end of the day it seems Cline again wants us to find the depth and life-in-art meaning in the medium that is the videogame: One can apply game theory to life, but it's too emotionally deep to pixelate it down into such a coded reduction. It means more than clearing a level or topping a high score, and you don't get three lives for a quarter, you only get one chance. By all means play, but play it like you mean it.

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

beware of the book.

There are points as readers where a text involves us, that thing we hold & read with intimate exploration interacts with us, and when we reach the end we are hopefully dazzled enough to wish it were more than just a book, and if successful, made to feel as if it really is.

But what if that pleasurable book were truly more? A malevolency lying in wait for you to open it? Something that meant to harm you, a thing with a life & sentience of its own? Yet, bibliophile that you are, you cannot resist turning the page ... .

From Chambers' mysterious French play, The King in Yellow, where once read a slow otherworldly incursion happens into reality, to the infamous Necronomicon, Lovecraft's forbidden tome that drives its reader mad with secrets man was never meant to know, three other cursed objets du nuit insidiously inch forward from shelves lurking probably very near you:

[Bookcraft by Zarono.]

Most are familiar with Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The Club Dumas (1993) from Roman Polanski's wonderfully satanic film adaptation "The Ninth Gate" (2000). While this is heretical for a literati to say, the ending on "The Ninth Gate" was more satisfying. One of course follows the other, and media comparatives' main objection was Polanski's disposal of the clever parallel literary metaplot because there really wasn't a way to carry that into a film, but in the book it backhands the reader, then kicks them in the face while they're down. (In a "yes, more please" way.)

The book within this book is The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows penned & printed by Aristide Torchia, in Venice (1666), pursued by unscrupulous book detective Richard Corso at the behest of sinister collector Varo Borja. The descriptions of libraries and their contents are nothing short of pornographic for the literarily inclined:

"He looked around at the books on the walls, at their dark, worn spines, and he seemed to hear a strange, distant murmur coming from them. Each of the closed books was a door, and behind it stirred shadows, voices, sounds, heading toward him from a deep, dark place.” (p. 246)

And like Corso, we are lured into finding out if The Nine Gates is just a forgery, or if it is the real deal ... .


Clive Barker's Mister B. Gone (2007) stands as the shortest and most direct of these three. Like a CYOA novel, or a Lemony Snicket ASOUE self-referential offering, the book from the get-go implores you to stop reading, put the book down, and just burn it before you come to a bad end. Which of course makes one want to keep reading. Comical in tone, yet visceral & tragic in parts, the book's own first-person narrator cajoles, threatens, begs, tempts, and bribes you, the reader, to destroy it ... before it somehow destroys you. While this book wasn't as literary as the other two, Barker's conceit is very clever, and he stays an intuitive step ahead of the reader with his living paper vessel in answering their unspoken questions about just what it is they might have gotten themselves in contact with.


Why one would wait nearly a decade & a half before reading The Shadow of the Wind is a question we hope to spare you, and are still beating ourselves up over. This Barcelona lovesong from 2001 is gothic noir at its most exceptional:

"'Didn't Julian have any brothers or sisters?'

The caretaker shrugged her shoulders and let out a sigh. 'I heard rumours that she miscarried once because of the beatings her husband gave her, but I don't know. People love to gossip, don't they? But not me. All I know is that once Julian told the other kids in the building that he had a sister only he could see. He said she came out of mirrors as if she were made of thin air and that she lived with Satan himself in a palace at the bottom of a lake. My Isabelita had nightmares for a whole month. That child could be really morbid at times.'" (p.119)

When young Daniel Sempere comes into possession of the eponymous The Shadow of the Wind, a dark nightmarish smoke scented stranger materializes in pursuit of what may be the last copy of this rare book.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón's dreamlike prose persists like a fog that won't lift, perfectly flowing, only to reveal the hint of a shadowy secret that implies the truth is far larger than one can comprehend. The plot takes our heroes into unavoidable damned-if-you-do investigations and they're swept along by inevitable consequences. The past & present dog all the characters, who're chewed upon by bittersweet yearnings & unrealized desires, only to fulfill them for a golden moment, which is then lost to circumstance. The book is a vault of dark magic that once unlocked will plunge you into its story, willing or no.


We drink the harmful, we smoke the cancerous, we love the undeserving, and we read the forbidden, because we cannot help ourselves. Enjoy & beware, unguarded readers.

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

why you're not invited to our wedding.

First off, we're going to lead and finish here with the fact that we love you all.

Love however is not currency, and even modest weddings prove to be expensive events. In order to defray costs and have enough for a honeymoon next year and a more sensible retirement, we're capping the guestlist to an intimate 40 people. More than that and it becomes ineffective and there's no way all of you can get to marry each other in the course of that time.

Yes, you, marry.

Face it: a wedding's not just two people, it's a whole group who marry, the two families, the longtime friends who meet & befriend, the individuals whose contexts are changed by a resetting into a now-larger whole when fates intertwine. That's how it should be, and that's how this will be.

That number also means we had to make some hard & fast decisions. Our families, friends, acquaintances, co-workers, club personalities, afterparty people, affluent gift-givers, drinking buddies, exes, and internet circles, all accrued over two lifetimes, literally number in the tens of thousands. So, if we've never met you in realspace, hung out with you outside of online/work/the club/a bar/an aunt's house, then it's a no-go. This doesn't mean it wasn't meaningful. But if you've never made time for us outside contexts, then this isn't the occasion where we're going to make time for you. Even if we have, if we haven't seen you inside a year, then that's a tell-tale criteria of irregularity.

Also distance sometimes makes the heart grow fonder, but it in turn makes it bloody expensive to come to things that are happening far away. One needs time off, buffer travel time, costly plane tickets, remote transportation arrangements, and extra money to cover food & expenses you wouldn't normally be spending if you were in your city. Ergo, we've only invited two family members who don't live in Tucson because we're posolutely certain that it's no great shakes or inconvenience for them to get here. Conversely, we wouldn't want an obligation put on us to get somewhere that's going to take half our year's savings for the sake of a few hours. See the caring there?

And we forget who said, "You can pick your friends, but can't pick your family", but there's certain truth in that. Given our Irish & Hispanic ancestry, there's whole branches of family to consider, but as per the above axiom, we've picked more friends by percentage because they've proactively picked us back. Plus we don't want the impossibility of having to decide who's blood is thicker than who's and where to draw that line. Is a second cousin more important than an uncle by marriage, or a step-aunt we see all the time less worthy than a brother we never see? We keep the peace by not making those calls and not having most of our blood relations ask each other why they were or were not invited. Such jilted feelings are a false standard of ego, having nothing to do with true caring for another, and we're doing you a kindness by sparing you even that irrelevant sting.

Semi-finally, we have every intention of renewing this most happy of conjoinings as soon as we can, whether that's just having a BBQ with a bit of ceremony, repeated all-night toasting with all y'all at our place, or somesuch, we'll want to repeat this ritual that gives our lives newfound meaning, so keep your notifications on in the coming years, and maybe invite us out for a drink in the interim so you can catch up with us that way, yes?

And finally, again, we love you.
Take that to the bank with interest.
Thanks for caring about us.

[Should you still insist on gifts, our registry is on Amazon.]

While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

the bow gallops.

Friction is what makes the magic happen, the draw & press of bow which sings the sighs we all sigh, the growl & scream. The hollow wood body is our body, the sounds we make to fill our own void, and that's why what Rasputina does is more than a gimmick with costumes because all that surface stuff is just a camouflage trick to lure you in. Here, in the friction, the killing is made, and the Hunter's Kiss delivered.

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him.