Review of Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend by Matthew Green

Budo is Max Delaney’s imaginary friend, and in fact, his only friend. Max dreamed him up when he was four and he’s nine now, so Budo worries that the boy will soon forget about him and leave him to fade away to whatever afterlife waits for the discarded. Budo is worried for himself but he’s also worried about Max, a “special” kid who is very smart but often gets emotionally “stuck” and acts out with screams and tantrums.

Budo doesn’t sleep but Max has imagined he can walk through walls, so at night, when the boy sleeps, he roams the city, visiting a corner gas station to watch the interaction among the humans and a hospital where other imaginary friends congregate.

Life isn’t easy for Max, who attends public school and has to cope with bullies like Tommy Swinden, who lives for the opportunity to beat him up. (Budo’s supposed to keep watch when Max is in the bathroom, but he can’t always be there.)

In fact, while Tommy is a threat, the biggest danger to Max is someone a lot closer to home and when he disappears from the school while separated from Budo, his imaginary friend panics.  What happens next is a heroic quest to save the boy, with Budo organizing a posse of imaginary friends to save the day.

Tales of the Misbegotten: Discipline Problem

Illustration by Mark Satchwill

Camilla Serra looked at the little boy sitting on the other side of her desk and sighed. She knew Benjy Prefontaine wasn’t a bad kid but she couldn’t allow his behavior to continue to disrupt her classroom. It wasn’t his fault that he didn’t fit in, but he should never have been mainstreamed with the normal kids.

Pretending he was just like everyone else was a joke.

Most of the faculty at John Glenn Elementary School felt the same way about the special needs kids but were too afraid of legal backlash to admit it. She’d complained to the principal after the first incident but Wylie Johnson had a soft spot for the special kids and told her she needed to find a way to deal with Benjy.

And now Haley Romano had a broken arm and a bloody nose because she’d tripped and fallen while he was chasing her around the yard at recess.

Her parents were talking about suing the school.

Camilla sighed again.

Benjy was staring at her with his big hazel eyes full of unshed tears.

He really didn’t understand what he’d done wrong and she could tell from her brief phone conversation with the boy’s mother that she didn’t get it either.

“So a little girl fell down and got a skinned knee and now you want to expel my kid?” she’d asked with disbelief.

“It’s not that simple Ms. Prefontaine,” Camilla had said. “He was chasing her around, being a Tyrannosaurus Rex and she was frightened.”

There was silence on the other end of the phone.

Brain Food up at Christopher Grant's Eaten Alive site

As you may know, Christopher Grant of A Twist of Noir has a new-ish site devoted completely to zombie stories. There are no zombies in the paranormal Los Angeles where I set most of my stories, but it's fun to write a zombie story every once in awhile just for a change of pace.  You can read "Brain Food" here.  And as long as you're clicking around, you should check out Christine Rains' story "Lady Blood" on ATON. She has perfectly channeled the pulpy voice of a period story. 

Coming Friday--Interview with Jennifer Parsons of LSQ

This week we're offering a very special Feminist Fiction Friday, an interview with Jennifer Parsons, the founding editor of Luna Station Quarterly, a speculative fiction magazine for women writers.  The March issue of the quarterly will be out Thursday, so treat yourself to some excellent entertainment and then come back for a great interview.

Illustration by Mark Satchwill

My friend Alex and I have a couple of projects we're pitching around town and one of them involves an extinction event hitting Los Angeles. Mark Satchwill, my partner in crime at NoHo Noir has provided us a terrific apocalyptic image of downtown being swallowed by darkness.  Forget the project--I want the t-shirt and it WILL be available. I just love this image. It looks like it ought to be on the cover of a graphic novel. Or a collection of short stories.
L.A. is such a perfect town for telling end of the world stories--Miracle Mile, Day of the Locust--almost as perfect as it is a setting for crime fiction.

Feminist Fiction Friday: Edna Buchanan

Photo by Jim Virga/courtesy of Simon & Schuster

In 1986, when I was a newly minted reporter covering total fluff, Edna Buchanan won a Pulitzer Prize for her general assignment reporting at the Miami Herald. The following year she published one of my all-time favorite true-crime books, The Corpse Had a Familiar Face, which was followed in 1992 by Never Let Them See You Cry. Corpse was turned into a television movie in 1994, with Elizabeth Montgomery playing Edna. A terrific reporter, Edna was also a style icon (and still is), rocking big hair and basic black. She covered more than 3,000 murders in her career while looking like the star of her own television series. I wanted to be Edna Buchanan when I grew up. (At the time, the only two women I knew who were writing true-crime were Edna and Ann Rule, also a terrific writer. Other women have since joined the team but the alphabetical list of women true crime writers begins with Ann and Buchanan.)
So I was already a fan of Buchanan's when she published her first novel, Nobody Lives Forever, I was onboard.  And then she created the character many people think is her alter-ego, Cuban-American newspaper reporter Britt Montero who made her debut in Contents Under Pressure.  Britt, with her take no prisoners attitude and deep suspicion of editors, is a terrific character. With Britt, Edna hit her stride as a novelist  The second book in the series, Miami, It's Murder, was nominated for an Edgar Award.
Her most recent book, A Dark and Lonely Place, came out in November of last year. It's based on a true story from Miami's history a century ago and is a change of pace for her, although it is crime fiction.
Edna's official website is here
She is @ednabmiami on Twitter (although she's not terribly active).

Book Review: The Technologists by Matthew Pearl

When a mad scientist terrorizes Boston, it’s up to a group of students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to stop him.  Matthew Pearl’s latest novel, The Technologists, returns to the 19^th century Boston setting of his novels The Last Dickens and The Dante Club and once again crafts a novel out of scraps of reality in a way that’s so seamless, you’ll swear you’re reading a beautifully written true crime book. (Erik Larson’s Devil in the White City comes to mind.)

The novel’s hero, Marcus Mansfield, is a working class senior at MIT, and much of the subtext of the story involves the “town and gown” tensions between the elitist Harvard students and those enrolled at the city’s newest establishment of higher learning (including a very smart woman who is the sole female member of “The Technologists” and instrumental in solving the mystery).

From the opening chaos of the deadly harbor incident, we’re drawn into a world where science and technology are beginning to emerge as forces that will shape the next century. Very soon after that the class lines between the Harvard students (particularly a snotty Harvard crew team member named Blaike) and the Institute of Technology students are drawn. We know that there’s going to be fierce competition between them in many ways before the story is over.