Well, if you do what you do on the last evening of the year every day of the new year, I'll be pleased to paste rave newspaper reviews of my novels into this LJ for twelve months. To wit, the San Francisco Chronicle has reviewed my latest, the US edition of The Last Weekend (published Tuesday, shipping from Amazon early though!) and it's great. It's also behind a paywall, so here's the whole thing!
The Last Weekend
By Nick Mamatas
(Night Shade Books; 256 pages; $15.99 paperback)
If you plan to weather the zombie apocalypse, San Francisco isn’t a bad place to do so, especially if you’re handy with power tools.
Such is the predicament of Vasilis “Billy” Kostopolis, would-be writer and experienced drunk, who has come to the West Coast from the Rust Belt to seek his literary fortune without much preparation beyond having sold a single story. With the rest of the U.S. having collapsed under the assault by the undead, he works for the city of San Francisco as a “driller” of reanimated corpses, punching a bit through their skulls before they become ambulatory and homicidal.
Faced with the end of the world, Billy is content, more or less, to drink himself to death, but he retains enough social skills to hook up with a pair of female revolutionaries with other plans. They want to know why San Francisco has chosen for so many years to bury all of its dead in Colma and what secret cache of information is hidden within San Francisco City Hall.
The author of “Love Is the Law,” Mamatas is fond of the genre mashup. He evoked the horrific side of Jack Kerouac and the Beats in “Move Under Ground.” In collaboration with Brian Keene, he brought together Hunter S. Thompson and H.P. Lovecraft for “The Damned Highway: Fear and Loathing in Arkham.”
Now in “The Last Weekend,” it is the shades of Charles Bukowski, Henry Miller, John Fante and other hard-drinking scribblers who haunt the pages. Mamatas knows how to the skewer the pretensions of tortured aspiring artists, but he clearly has a fondness for the masters of boozy fiction.
Mamatas finds new life in the old apocalyptic cliches, and even this late in the zombie craze, he manages to deliver a highly caustic and entertaining end-of-the-world satire. You don’t need to be a San Franciscan to appreciate “The Last Weekend,” but if you know the Bay Area, the jokes are that much funnier.
The Last Weekend
By Nick Mamatas
(Night Shade Books; 256 pages; $15.99 paperback)
If you plan to weather the zombie apocalypse, San Francisco isn’t a bad place to do so, especially if you’re handy with power tools.
Such is the predicament of Vasilis “Billy” Kostopolis, would-be writer and experienced drunk, who has come to the West Coast from the Rust Belt to seek his literary fortune without much preparation beyond having sold a single story. With the rest of the U.S. having collapsed under the assault by the undead, he works for the city of San Francisco as a “driller” of reanimated corpses, punching a bit through their skulls before they become ambulatory and homicidal.
Faced with the end of the world, Billy is content, more or less, to drink himself to death, but he retains enough social skills to hook up with a pair of female revolutionaries with other plans. They want to know why San Francisco has chosen for so many years to bury all of its dead in Colma and what secret cache of information is hidden within San Francisco City Hall.
The author of “Love Is the Law,” Mamatas is fond of the genre mashup. He evoked the horrific side of Jack Kerouac and the Beats in “Move Under Ground.” In collaboration with Brian Keene, he brought together Hunter S. Thompson and H.P. Lovecraft for “The Damned Highway: Fear and Loathing in Arkham.”
Now in “The Last Weekend,” it is the shades of Charles Bukowski, Henry Miller, John Fante and other hard-drinking scribblers who haunt the pages. Mamatas knows how to the skewer the pretensions of tortured aspiring artists, but he clearly has a fondness for the masters of boozy fiction.
Mamatas finds new life in the old apocalyptic cliches, and even this late in the zombie craze, he manages to deliver a highly caustic and entertaining end-of-the-world satire. You don’t need to be a San Franciscan to appreciate “The Last Weekend,” but if you know the Bay Area, the jokes are that much funnier.