Book Tour and Psychic Book Club

A Field Guide for Heartbreakers - Kristen Tracy
Carter's Big Break - Brent Crawford
The Ghost and the Goth - Stacey Kade
Passing Strange: A Generation Dead Novel - Daniel Waters
Tweet Heart - Elizabeth Rudnick
The Half-Life of Planets - Emily Franklin and Brendan Halpin

Dates and times for the unRequired Reading Tour:



June 18: 6pm, Davis Kidd, Memphis (Waters, Rudnick, and Halpin)
- June 18: 7pm, Keplers, Menlo Park, CA (Tracy, Kade, and Crawford)

- June 19: 7pm, Books & Books, Coral Gabels, FL (Waters, Rudnick, Franklin, and Halpin)

- June 19: 1pm, “Meet & Greet” at Copperfields, Petaluma, CA (Tracy, Kade, and Crawford)

-June 20: stock signings tk

- June 21: 7pm, Little Shop of Stories, Decatur, GA (Waters, Rudnick, Franklin, and Halpin)

- June 21: 6:30pm, Pudd'nHead Books (Tracy, Kade, and Crawford)

-June 22: 7pm, Anderson’s Bookshop, Naperville, IL (all authors)

- June 23: 2pm, Watermark Books & Café, Wichita, KS (all authors)

- June 24: 6pm, Books of Wonder, New York, NY (all authors)

- June 25: 6pm, ALA Convention, Disney Book Group booth #2654 Washington, DC (all authors)

-June 26: 3:30pm, Politics & Prose, Washington, DC (all authors)


And now a chilling tale...sort of.

I’ve got kind of a long drive home so on Friday I call up my good friend Matt Smith, most recently of Dr. Who fame (Matthew Dow Smith, the artist on the Dr. Who comic book series, not Matt Smith the new Dr. Who). I’ve only known Matt for a few years, but he’s one of the few people who it seems I’ve known my entire life (as opposed to many people I have known practically my whole life, of whom I often think, ‘who are you?’), especially as we seem to share a brain on nearly everything and have the sort of finish each others’ sentences, start laughing before he says the punchline types of relationship. So we give each other the quick update on life, the universe and everything and then we start our inevitable discussion about books. We‘re both book junkies. Not just reading junkies, but actual book junkies, so the discussion ranges from what we’re reading to books we’ve picked up in our travels. Matt tells me he made a foray to a used bookstore and picked up a few things, and he starts telling me which ones he’s read. And then it gets weird. Listen:
Me: “Nice finds.” Then, remembering my own recent excursion to a used book store, “Hey, have you ever read anything by James Herbert?”
Matt: “Other than The Magic Cottage, you mean?” he says, reminding me of a conversation we had three or four years ago. We’d both really liked The Magic Cottage.
Me:“Yeah. Anything recently?”
Matt: “Funny you should mention it. I picked up one of his on that outing. That was one of the first ones I started reading.”
Me: “Really? When did you say you went to the book store?”
Matt: “About two weeks ago.”
I’d gone to the used bookstore near me two weeks ago.
Me: “Um, which one was it that you got? ‘Cause if you say…”
Matt: “Moon.”
Me: “…I might freak.”
Moon. The very James Herbert novel I’d picked up at a used bookstore two weeks ago.
Me: “How much did you get it for?”
“Three bucks.”
I told him I’d paid a dollar, but when I looked at my copy later that night, I saw the little 3—penciled in the upper right hand corner on the frontispiece.
Matt: “Well. That’s a little bizarre.”
Perhaps less bizarre, we’d reached pretty much the same conclusions about the book.

Now, understand, that Moon isn’t a current NYT Best Seller—it is a twenty-five year old horror novel. Now, you might say, “Well, Dan, both you and Matt are both horror fiction geeks, so it only makes sense that you could end up reading the same book.” But that, to me, only makes it weirder. True, we are horror fiction geeks—between us we’d read a good number of Herbert’s two dozen novels. He is a pretty big name in the horror field, and so the odds of neither of us having read the book prior would seem very slim—and then to decide to read it at the same time after buying the same twenty-five year-old edition (hardcover, Herbert’s first in the U.S.) at the same time, for the same amount of money, seems weeeeeiiiird to me.

I think maybe we should start “Matt & Dan’s Psychic Book Club”. The thing is, I already know which of you want to join.