[Dedicated to Alicia and Chris. Thanks for the excellent conversation tonight.]
I remember when I was a kid. I worked at the library for minimum wage, which was $4.75/hr. at the time. So I couldn't afford to buy new books. I haunted used book stores, and what a veritable feast they were back then! Most of my personal library I owe to those used book stores. My God, what beautiful covers! Even if the book sucked, those covers were worth the price of admission.
And then something happened. Now I can afford new books, but I always loved the used book stores, like Ye Olde Bookworm from the last entry. There was another good one in Berkeley, but it died when the old man who ran it died. I try to stick to indie used book stores, but Half Price took over. But! There's still the Frugal Muse in Darien.
But the thing that happened? Suddenly these used book stores dried up in the horror section. They only had King, Koontz, Rice, Saul and, occasionally, Barker. It got to the point where I wondered why I went into these places anymore. It depressed me, and I tried to figure out why this had happened.
And then I realized that this thing coincided with the publication of PAPERBACKS FROM HELL by Grady Hendrix. Damn you!
(Just kidding. I've never met him, but he seems like a pretty cool guy.)
Horror fans around here descended on these used book stores looking for lurid and astonishing horror books with excellent covers. More like vampires in From Dusk Till Dawn and Vampyrrihic than Lestat and his ilk. And I couldn't find jack shit in any of my usual places. Not even in that one Christian used books place, and that's where I got Stephen King's coffee table book about the gargoyles.
Grady Hendrix's book took so much of that magic away from me hunting for used horror books in the wild. Again, no offense to him. But I missed that world where I could find weird shit that would probably illicit gasps from my fellow train commuters. I will never forget when I had JF Gonzalez's Survivor on the train. I was on the second level, which I never liked being on. It was a crowded day. I was reading the book, and I got the sensation of someone watching me. I looked down to see a commuter standing in the aisle starring up at me in horror. It's the Leisure edition.
But maybe all those people who bought the books with the lurid covers hit the plague and realized they needed to sell them off. Like the ghoul that I am (not a Brian Keene reference, more of an old school Boris Karloff reference), I picked up the books they sold back to the used bookstores recently.
But still. I blame Grady Hendrix for putting me in this position in the first place. *sigh*
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