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Tuesday, October 28, 2008
The Big Chiller: Books for Halloween
Posted by William McKeen on Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 12:37 AM
William McKeen is chairman of the University of Florida’s Department of Journalism and author of several books, including the Hunter S. Thompson biography Outlaw Journalist.
THE BIG CHILLER: Too bad that giving-gifts-for-Halloween thing never caught on. It was my personal childhood crusade, merely another pathetic attempt to maximize booty for the Kid. It didn’t work on my pop and it didn’t work on society at large.
But if it had caught on, what fun it would be to try to creep each other out with gory gifts every Oct. 31. The more literary minded might use the occasion to share stories of horror and suspense.
Imagine how cool it would be to go door-to-door and pick up some scary lit. People would hand out Edgar Allen Poe and Stephen King the way grannies toss that worthless candy corn into trick-or-treat bags.
Everyone has their favorite fright book, from the fantastic horror of The Stand to the real-life true crime of In Cold Blood, the sort of book that has you calling your folks in the middle of the night to make sure they’re still OK.
The novel’s central character isn’t Dracula but his creator, 
But the star here is the Ripper.
Readers love Jack. Probably because the crimes were unsolved, we’ve never gotten over that story. Nicholas Meyer pit Sherlock Holmes against Jack in The West End Horror and after he turned from novelist to filmmaker, Meyer revisited Jack and set a time-traveling H.G. Wells after him in Time After Time.
So there is precedent for this pairing. If the prospect of Jack the Ripper and Dracula’s creator together has you rubbing your hands in glee, Reese does not disappoint. This brilliantly written book is one of the best historical suspense novels since The Alienist by Caleb Carr.
If you missed Reese at last week’s Festival of Reading, he’s spending Halloween night signing at Books and Books in Coral Gables, if you’re in the mood for a drive.
SPEAKING OF SIGNINGS: As the publishing world gets ready for those December holidays more readily associated with gift-giving, the book-signing season heats up.
Area author James Swain will sign copies of The Night Stalker (Ballantine, $25) at Inkwood Books, 216 S. Armenia Ave., Tampa, at 7 p.m. on Thursday. If you miss that and don’t have a candy hangover on Saturday, Swain will appear at 3 p.m. at Haslam’s Book Store, 2025 Central Ave., St. Petersburg.
Swain’s hero is a former cop named Carpenter who’s crossed over to PI work, but keeps up his one-man mission to stop pedophiles, find missing kids and restore the possibilities of childhood.
Mark your calendar with these signings (all at Inkwood):
· Cody Fowler Davis, Implied Consent (Palari, $23.95), Thursday, Nov. 6. Fowler is a Tampa-based attorney and the action in this legal thriller takes place in the Bay Area. Lots of local color.
· Patrick McGrath, Trauma (Knopf, $24.95), Thursday, Nov. 13, 7 p.m. The literary action moves from Florida to Manhattan for another psychological thriller from McGrath, who usually sets his stories in his native Great Britain.
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