Spent 36 hours (12 of them driving) floating up the coast to the Bay to do a reading. I ate things I never do anymore and miss (hello, Zachary’s stuffed spinach and mushroom), drifted in the parks among the Easter egg hunters and the homeless, ghosted up and down Haight-Ashbury and the Castro (where my friend Andrew isn’t anymore) and in and out of record and bookshops with new stories coming, the way they always do when I’m drifting and ghosting.
When I went to the signing, I got met with hugs and stories from Jude and Alan, the owners of the resurrected Borderlands, and we swapped survivors’ stories like the survivors we really all are, I guess, now, and they seemed genuinely happy to see me, and the store looks terrific.
But only three people came, this time, one a former student from a decade ago (so great to see and talk to you again, Siena), plus another couple I managed to lure over with my reading, and Jude said it was the holiday weekend, and I told her you can’t predict these things, and it’s a long game, and all those things really are true, and they told me they want me back as soon as I want to come up.Still, I started home a little blue, despite the blue in the bay in the late afternoon.
Six hours later I was home with my family, and I found the review below. Which, did, I admit, chase what was left of the blue away. There hadn’t been so very much of it in the first place:
“…the novel hearkens back to great vampire novels of the past including Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot and even the brilliant Dracula by Bram Stoker’s. Good Girls manages to take some very heavy and dark topics and apply them to a collection of very real, very engaging characters….Good Girls is a reminder of what kind of literary quality it takes to make good suspense and horror. Good Girls returns to the defining elements which authors such as Poe, Lovecraft, and Shirley Jackson set up long ago while also staying true to the modern horror elements set up by masters like King and Straub.” N.C. Patterson, A Slice of Horror
