For May's book club, we will be reading and discussing a couple of shorter reads — Buzzards and Bone: Western Tales of Terror by Christine Morgan and The Big Meat by Carlton Mellick III.
Publisher's description for Buzzards and Bone: Western Tales of Terror —
“They started in on eating him well before he died.” -- In a desolate little town, something vengeful and terrible has taken over, and woe to anyone who ventures there, for good reason or bad.
“Women are nothin’ but trouble, albeit trouble wrapped in a damn fine package.” -- While some so-called heroes are anything but heroic, as a cattle baron dispatches a gunslinger to track down his straying missus.
“Stagecoach a-comin’! Reckon it’s that there bounty hunter what they hired in!” -- Maybe it takes a killer to catch a killer, but what if that killer turns out to be something other than human?
“It ain’t the drop, but the stop.” -- A prisoner looking to escape the noose finds himself on the run from more than an ordinary posse, with more than just his life on the line.
“Momma said don’t look at them. Momma said don’t listen. Momma said ignore them and they’ll go away.” -- Only, sometimes, Momma’s wrong; especially after what happened to Pa ...
BUZZARDS AND BONE: five weird western tales from the pen of Christine Morgan, author of The Night Silver River Run Red.
Publisher's description for The Big Meat —
From the godfather of bizarro fiction, Carlton Mellick III, award-winning author of Quicksand House and Cuddly Holocaust, comes a "kaiju" tribute novel that explores the surreal aftermath of a giant monster attack.
The creature was finally dead. After months of fighting it, trying desperately to stop it as it rampaged across the American countryside, turning city after city into a landscape of rubble, we finally managed to beat the damned thing. We actually saved the human species. We survived.
But the corpse still lingers.
In the center of the city once known as Portland, Oregon, there lies a mountain of flesh. Hundreds of thousands of tons of rotting flesh. It has filled the city with disease and dead-lizard stench, contaminated the water supply with its greasy putrid fluids, clogged the air with toxic gasses so thick that you can't leave your house without the aid of a gas mask. And no one really knows quite what to do about it. A thousand-man demolition crew has been trying to clear it out one piece at a time, but after three months of work they've barely made a dent. And then there's the junkies who have started burrowing into the monster's guts, searching for a drug produced by its fire glands, setting back the excavation even longer.
It seems like the corpse will never go away. And with the quarantine still in place, we're not even allowed to leave. We're stuck in this disgusting rotten hell forever.
The Big Meat is a gut-wrenching, nerve-squirming survival story of loss, addiction, and claustrophobia.
I'm not sure that both of these are available at the Denver Public Library, but it looks like Buzzards and Bones is available as an inexpensive ebook and both are available for purchase in other formats.
This month, we will meet at the Ratio Beerworks Overland location on S Cherokee St. in South Denver. All are welcome to join us, whether you finish the books or not.
Hope to see you there!
