Tag: Quirk Books

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The Talented Ms. Mia: Sam Tschida’s Siri, Who Am I?

Though it rarely works like it does in books and movies, amnesia can be a useful storytelling trope. Like quicksand (remember the old Tarzan show?), it seemed to pop up with alarming frequency, until, presumably, audiences tired of it and it faded from the zeitgeist. Of course, everything comes back in vogue eventually, and memory loss makes for the ideal vehicle to explore ideas about identity in the digital age. Such is the case in the debut novel from Sam Tschida (pronounced “cheetah,” her website explains), Siri, Who Am I? (Quirk Books).

In Tschida’s novel, Mia comes to in a California hospital with a recently stapled-together head wound, a cracked phone, and no memory of who she is. Mia’s amnesia provides the central mystery of the book, the question of the protagonist’s identity, but the memory loss trope performs another useful function. Tschida’s novel is a mystery — maybe equal parts romance, mystery, and comedy — and with amnesia casting Mia in the role of the detective, Tschida neatly sidesteps the problem of providing a believable private eye. Those Sam Spade/Philip Marlowe types are a bit anachronistic in the 21st century, but a befuddled Millennial Californian trying to find herself in the places where her online persona and her instincts meet is a wholly plausible set of circumstances.

Sam Tschida

Mia’s social media presence is her best bet at figuring out who she is — and who might be responsible for the near-fatal wound on the back of her head. Her phone itself is little help — Mia’s contacts offer few leads, and her messages and emails are scrupulously deleted. Though that could be a cause for concern, Mia thinks (hopes?) she’s just something of a neat freak.

After she tracks down what she thinks might be her house, Mia begins to see reason to hope she’s won the just-woke-up-from-a-coma lottery. The little bungalow seems to belong to the fabulously wealthy (and handsome) French chocolate magnate, JP Howard. Or so says the house sitter, a neuroscience grad student named Max. And every indication is that JP and Mia are dating. (After all, she has a key to the place.)

Each new piece of information Mia learns offers a glimmer of hope — or another crack in the facade of the life Mia thinks she built. “Most likely I’m going to find credit card debt and a mountain of student loans the minute I figure out my social security number,” Mia muses. “I mean, I woke up in America.”

As the primary puzzle pieces begin to materialize, answers beget more questions. But who is the real Mia? Is she the arm candy of a French chocolatier or a scam artist? Is she an Instagram influencer? Are all social media influencers essentially scam artists? Is she a successful entrepreneur, or does she actually run an escort service? And who is Kobra, the man with the massive python tattoo who won’t stop texting her? Of course, front and center in the lineup of questions to be answered is who tried to murder her?

The whodunnit of it all provides stakes, and Tschida keeps the one-liners coming, leaving the audience to wonder if Mia is using humor as a coping mechanism or if she is, in fact, just a little unhinged. “The question of murder will have to wait,” Mia quips at one point. And: “I look pretty good except for the bloodstains.”

Like Christopher Nolan’s Memento by way of Ingrid Goes West, Tschida’s Siri, Who Am I? examines issues of identity, albeit with an irreverent comedic bent. It’s a quick read, and if it’s a little light on weighty considerations or poignant prose, so are most murder (or almost-murder) mysteries.

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J.W. Ocker’s Cursed Objects

Memphis-based fans of the strange and unusual have to have a healthy interest in curses. Flyer film editor Chris McCoy’s documentary about the beloved alternative music club Antenna begins with drummer Ross Johnson stating, plainly, that Memphis is cursed. Then there’s the allegedly haunted Ernestine & Hazel’s, the ghost girl of the Orpheum, and that giant-sized yellow fever mural at the Pink Palace that’s so spooky it looks like a Swedish death-metal album cover. Not to mention the crystal skull of the pyramid.

To refresh, a crystal skull was reported to have been installed in the Pyramid, and that bit of wild rumor was actually true. It turns out that the skull was installed under the direction of Isaac Tigrett, cofounder of the Hard Rock Cafe, New Age fan and disciple of guru Sri Baba, and son of Pyramid guiding light and patron John Tigrett. Isaac said the skull was intended to be part of a promotion called “The Egyptian Time Capsule.” Weird, right? Well, yes, but also, unexplainably, so very Memphis.

All this is a long way to say that when the kind folks at Quirk Books sent me a copy of Edgar Award-winning travel writer, novelist, and blogger J.W. Ocker’s new Cursed Objects, I was already primed to appreciate it.


Cursed Objects is broken into sections based on the location of the cursed object in question — in a museum, a private collection, or the world wide web (think chain emails). The chapters are titled things like “Lurking in Homes,” “Under Glass,” and “In the Graveyard”; and if that doesn’t get you ready for spooky season, what will?

“I hate to be the one to tell you this, but many seemingly innocuous objects will make your life suck,” Ocker writes in the book’s introduction. His tone throughout is one of the highlights — it’s what you might call “humorously journalistic.” Cursed Objects is well researched, but even the best-laid plans can fall apart with shoddy delivery. Luckily for the reader, that’s where the author shines. One gets the feeling that Ocker is sharing an inside joke — and marveling that people could be foolish enough to keep such a plainly cursed object in the home or workplace.

Ocker’s subjects range from the Hope Diamond to the Basano Vase and the Ring of Silvianus — a Roman artifact believed to have inspired J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. The entry about the Black Aggie statue in Druid Ridge Cemetery in Pikesville, Maryland, is especially chilling. “They say her eyes glow red at night and that if you look into them, you’ll go blind,” the author writes.

The extravagantly violent curses that grace the Björketoro Runestone, an Iron Age monolith in Sweden, are so vile they’re almost funny. The runestone is made even more interesting by the mystery surrounding it — no one knows quite what purpose it served or why it needed to be protected with such lavishly applied written curses. Was it a gravestone marking the grave of a proto-Viking? Or perhaps it was a cenotaph (a grave marker honoring someone whose remains are elsewhere), or a tribute to Odin. The only sure thing is that, superstitious or not, it probably isn’t worth the risk to mess with the thing.

The illustrations, rendered in a sickly sea green, tie the whole book together. They act as a kind of recurring visual motif, a complement to Ocker’s tone, that helps unite the disparate stories within Cursed Objects. The only question that remains is, who is courageous enough to brave the myriad scary (and true) stories within?

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Southern Book Club’s Guide Is More Than Guts, Gore, and Vampire Lore

Forgetting that stretch of time when Twilight and True Blood were in their heyday and vampire-themed anything sold faster than blood punch at a monster mash, there can be no better time to release a vampire novel than during a pandemic.

Vampires, in lore, have deep roots in plague. It’s no surprise that garlic, which boosts the immune system and can help cover the smell of sickness, wards off night-walking, bloodsucking fiends. And that whole blood thing, well, bodily fluids are certainly a vector for spreading disease. Which brings us to vampires’ oft-documented predilection for uninhibited sex with multiple partners, yet another way to spread disease.

So, after a manner of speaking, Grady Hendrix’s The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires (Quirk Books) could hardly be better timed. Though, maybe the New York-based, South Carolina-born author would have preferred his novel to come out at a time when book clubs could actually meet.

Grady Hendrix

Every vampire novel worth its holy water must pay homage to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the brilliant epistolary novel that condensed the span of bloodsucker folklore into one tome. Hendrix’s The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires does just that, while simultaneously making a case for itself as something notable in the horror genre.

Set in a nice neighborhood in a South Carolina suburb in the ’90s, The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires isn’t a typical tale of Transylvanian terror. Hendrix’s protagonist is Patricia Campbell, a youngish housewife whose hardworking psychiatrist husband is logging extra hours at work in an attempt to climb the ladder. Her kids are beginning to enter difficult ages, and her mother-in-law lives with them. Her care falls mainly to Patricia, at least until Patricia hires a part-time caretaker, Mrs. Greene. Patricia’s world is focused largely on her family and her community. She’s got a mile-long to-do list and very little in the way of diversion. Except her book club.

They meet once a month to discuss grisly paperback true crime accounts. It’s a rare source of excitement for Patricia, who carries her family and is, for the most part, taken for granted by them. Then James Harris moves to town, and everything gets really interesting, really quickly.

Grady Hendrix

Hendrix’s new novel underlines the disenfranchised in society by giving them first contact with the Old Village’s vampire — and then making sure no one with any power believes their warnings. James Harris takes his victims primarily from the low-income, majority-African-American part of town, and every year, when a young black child disappears, it’s chalked up to parental neglect or drugs and then shrugged off by most of the town’s blissfully ignorant inhabitants.

Hendrix, author of My Best Friend’s Exorcism and Horrorstör, has a firm grasp on — and he deftly exploits — the narrow band of believable reality that most adults inhabit. When Miss Mary “mistakes” James Harris for Hoyte Pickens, it’s attributed to a lapse in an old woman’s memory. Similarly, the kids couldn’t have seen a man on the roof; they imagined it, spurred on by the wind, nightmares, a copy of Salem’s Lot open on the nightstand.

The best example of this, though, is the book club itself. When Patricia and her fellow members, housewives all, suggest that there may be something strange about the stranger in town, their concerns are waved off as the imaginings of flighty women, the result of a mixture of boredom and the lurid books they read. There is some genius in Hendrix’s setting in this. The novel takes place between the women’s lib movement and #MeToo, between the civil rights struggle and the era of Black Lives Matter. And so much inequality in the novel is glossed over by a combination of manners, mind-your-business mentality, and a studied refusal to acknowledge obvious problems. Most of the people in the novel believe that inequality has been erased; they know society works for everyone because it works for them. It’s an excellent setup for a horror novel, where the ability to see past the status quo can mean the difference between life and death.

But Patricia is a little unconventional. She’s as guilty as the next Old Villager of taking her privileges for granted, but she’s willing to challenge herself and she’s got heart. “A woman had died. She needed to take something by the house. Grace was right: it made no sense, but sometimes you did a thing because that was just what you did, not because it was sensible.”

Hendrix excels at producing horror novels with a surfeit of humor and heart. That’s not to say there’s not plenty of creepiness in the pages of The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, but there’s more to the novel than guts and gore and vampire lore. Hendrix’ new novel is sharp, clever and creepy in just the right ratio. All in all, The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires is a delicious morsel for any fan of the genre to sink their fangs into.

More information about The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires at gradyhendrix.com.