The Book Blogger Hop was originally created by Jennifer from Crazy-For-Books in March 2010 and ended on December 31, 2012. With Jennifer’s permission, Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer relaunched the meme on February 15, 2013. Check out the hop here!
Each week the hop will start on a Friday and end on Thursday. There will be a weekly prompt featuring a book related question. The hop’s purpose is to give bloggers a chance to follow other blogs, learn about new books, befriend other bloggers, and receive new followers to your own blog.
The Question of the week is: If you could recommend one overlooked book, what would it be and why?
Last week, I admitted that I don’t really pay enough attention to what’s popular to know what counts as flying under the radar. Judging by the number of “I’ve never heard of any of these books!” comments I get on some of my reading lists, apparently quite a lot of what I read is flying under everyone else’s radar anyway.
So naturally, this week I’m being asked to pick one overlooked book to recommend.
One.
I have four.
That’s close enough, right?
They’re also four wildly different recommendations, but the more I thought about them, the more I realised that each represents something different that I love about reading. So instead of forcing myself to choose, you’re getting all four.
Poppy Z. Brite – Lost Souls
If you’ve ever heard me flailing about Lost Souls, there’s a very good chance I’ve described it with the immortal words:
Gay incestuous vampires.
Which is wildly reductive and yet tells you quite a lot about what you’re getting yourself into.
Lost Souls very much shaped teenage me.
I read a lot of horror when I was younger – mostly Stephen King and Anne Rice – but there was something about Lost Souls that hit differently. It was dark and decadent and queer and messy, full of outsiders, musicians, bars, road trips, sex, blood and people making spectacularly terrible decisions.
Naturally, teenage me adored it.
And I still do.
There’s something almost feverish about the whole book. Its vampires are strange and beautiful and frequently horrible, and nobody is waiting around to be redeemed by the love of the right person. It was unlike anything I’d encountered at that point, and it lodged itself firmly in my brain.
It’s also impossible for me to separate the book from when I discovered it. If I encountered Lost Souls for the first time today, would it affect me in quite the same way? Probably not. But some books become tangled up in who you were at a particular moment in your life, and this is one of mine.
Given how much love there is now for vampires, queer horror and gothic fiction, I’m always a little surprised I don’t see Lost Souls talked about more.
So yes. My first recommendation is my dearly beloved, deeply problematic gay incestuous vampires.
A big content warning on this one: Lost Souls is very much not a recommendation I’d hand indiscriminately to everyone. It deals with some extremely dark material, including incest, sexual abuse and coercion, graphic sexual content, violence and blood, substance abuse, self-harm/suicidal themes and homophobic language. Definitely check detailed content warnings first if there are subjects you prefer to avoid.
Matthew Reilly. Just… Matthew Reilly
And now we encounter a problem.
How do I explain Matthew Reilly?
I genuinely don’t know.
Imagine someone writing an action movie.
And I don’t mean writing a novel that feels cinematic or something that could eventually be adapted into an action movie. I mean somehow taking the experience of watching an absolutely ridiculous, enormously expensive action movie and transferring it directly onto paper.
That’s Matthew Reilly.
Everything happens at approximately nine thousand miles an hour. There are explosions. There are conspiracies. There are impossible situations followed by even more impossible escapes. Something is probably on fire. Someone is probably falling off something. A helicopter has almost certainly had a very bad day.
And just when you think things cannot possibly get any more ridiculous, they do.
These are not books I pick up when I’m looking for a quiet meditation on the complexities of existence.
These are books I pick up when I want BOOM.
And sometimes that’s exactly what I want from a book.
I’d probably send a newcomer towards Ice Station or Temple, which is where I started. Strap yourself in, accept that subtlety has left the building and enjoy the ride.
I still cannot explain Matthew Reilly.
Perhaps Matthew Reilly should simply be experienced.
Ali McNamara – The St Felix Series
From gay incestuous vampires and enormous explosions, naturally we move on to a lovely Cornish seaside town.
Nobody said this list had to make sense.
The St Felix books are cosy romances, but there’s something else about them that makes this series particularly special to me.
St Felix always feels a little bit magical, a little bit enchanted and a little bit whimsical.
There’s this sense that something is bubbling just below the surface of ordinary life. Not necessarily enormous, dramatic magic with wizards running around throwing spells at one another. It’s much gentler than that. It’s the possibility that the world might be just a tiny bit stranger and more wonderful than you thought it was.
And apparently that’s catnip to me.
There’s also the pleasure of returning to St Felix itself. With each book, the place becomes more familiar. You recognise things. You know people. You feel as though you’re returning somewhere rather than starting completely afresh.
They’re warm and comforting and romantic, but it’s that little hint of enchantment that makes St Felix stand out for me.
They make me want to pack a bag, go to Cornwall (I’m a Devonshire llama so… that’s quite dramatic, you know?!) and find a little seaside town where something inexplicably lovely is definitely about to happen.
Christie Barlow – Love Heart Lane
And then there’s Heartcross.
I’ve been trying to explain what I particularly love about Christie Barlow’s Love Heart Lane series, and I think I’ve finally worked it out:
It gives me the same feeling as playing Stardew Valley.
Not because someone is going to hand me a hoe and tell me to go and plant twelve parsnips.
It’s the community.
Heartcross isn’t simply a backdrop for a succession of romances. The more books you read, the more the village fills in around you. People have families, friendships and businesses. Characters you’ve met before reappear. Someone who was important in one story might pop up in the background of another, getting on with their life.
Eventually, you know these people.
It’s that same feeling I get wandering around Pelican Town. You know where everyone lives. You know who’s connected to whom. You know their assorted dramas. You become invested in people even when they’re not currently the main character.
And there’s something wonderfully comforting about that.
Of course I want to know what happens with the romance in each book, but I also want to go back to Heartcross and see what everybody else is doing.
I’m not simply starting another story.
I’m going back to the village.
*****
One is a book that helped shape teenage me. One gives me several hundred pages of glorious BOOM. One lets me escape somewhere that feels as though a little bit of magic might be hiding around the next corner. And one gives me a fictional community I want to keep going home to.
And perhaps that’s why I don’t particularly care whether the books I read are currently popular, overlooked, hyped, underhyped or somewhere in between.
I care about what they give me.
Sometimes that’s finding a book at exactly the right moment in my life.
Sometimes it’s wonder.
Sometimes it’s belonging.
And sometimes I want a helicopter to explode.
So there you have it. The question asked for one overlooked book, and I’ve somehow given you gay incestuous vampires, several major explosions, enchanted Cornwall and Stardew Valley in Scottish-romance form.
I feel this tells you considerably more about my reading habits than choosing one book ever could.
What about you? What’s the book – or books, because clearly I’m not enforcing the rules here – that you wish more people would discover?