Take Cover Books

In just under two weeks, our summer reading club season concludes when we meet to discuss Prairie Edge by Conor Kerr!

🦬 Ezzy and Grey are two Métis cousins who spend most of their time blasting through games of cribbage in their uncle’s old trailer while pounding cans of Lucky. Grey has the heart for change but has been jaded by online activist culture. Ezzy is devoted to Grey and will do anything she does, but is eager to evade the authorities after a life spent in and out of jail. And yet, Grey convinces Ezzy to help her execute a wild plan: to capture a herd of bison from a northern national park and release it into the streets of downtown Edmonton. This act of protest is meant to upset the settler routine of everyday business, but threatens to endanger those they hold dear.

📣 There’s still enough time to read the book if you’re interested in joining on this round. We have copies remaining on hand if you’d like to grab one. You can also listen to the audiobook, bring your own copy, or take it out from the library. We meet on the last Wednesday of each month and the club is free to join—purchase isn’t necessary! Shoot us an email ([email protected]) to be added to the club roster.

Listen! We just gotta talk about this new crop of Olive Editions from Just in time for late summer, and with enough lead time to read ‘em all before the end of October, the series has repackaged some modern horror heavy hitters.

📕The Thief of Always by Clive Barker
📗The Excorcist by William Peter Blatty
📘The Between by Tananarive Due
📙Bird Box by Josh Malerman
📕When the Reckoning Comes by LaTanya McQueen
📗Classic Works of Horror by Edgar Allan Poe
📘Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff

🫒 The editions never last long and once they’re gone, they’re gone. So if you want ‘em you gotta act fast!

Here we see Sean trying to save his flaming stars and bars. But his pick o’ the week is just setting it alight once more! Read on to hear what Sean had to say about Peter Heller’s BURN.

🔥Burn is about a second American civil war. Wait wait wait! Hear me out: this is not some election-year pandering about the dangers of leaving Democratic presidential candidates unelected. The novel is focused on the human cost of pitting a nation against itself.

🔥The story follows two close friends who return home from a hunting trip in rural Maine to discover the US had reached its breaking point sometime during their off-grid holiday. Amid the chaos and violence, the two men are forced into survival mode, testing their friendship and, ultimately, their willingness to accept the sacrifices demanded of them.

🔥As an anti-war thriller, Burn is an impressive nailbiter. Similarly themed books like American War and Leave the World Behind have taken more philosophical approaches to the Civil War 2 question, using the speculated war as a backdrop to discuss class, race, and other ways in which capitalist nations lie to themselves (and what happens when those metanarratives can no longer hold a society together). With Burn, Heller takes a much more grounded approach, using gut-wrenching immediacy to show that, beyond cosmology, war is hell and anyone who wishes for it is a fool. It’s powerful stuff, and absolutely worth checking out.

📣 In just under two weeks, our summer reading club season continues when we meet to discuss The Field by Dave Lapp!

🌾 Over the course of the summer, while the town’s adults remain focused on their fractured marriages and neighbourly resentments, kids are allowed to run wild in the field, collecting caterpillars and tadpoles, catching field mice, and nursing a curious fascination with Dave’s mother’s matches and their potential for disaster. As the summer meanders on, Edward brings a new friend into the circle. But Jack’s got a mean streak that’s strong enough to flip Dave’s world–and his place in it - upside down.

📣 There’s still enough time to read the book if you’re interested in joining on this round. We have few copies remaining on hand if you’d like to grab one. You can also bring your own copy or take it out from the library. We meet on the last Wednesday of each month and the club is free to join—purchase isn’t necessary! Shoot us an email ([email protected]) to be added to the club roster.

I’ve been remiss these past few weeks that I have skipped the opportunity to highlight the incredible kids books arriving in the store. But last week was an embarrassment of riches in the children’s department, so I’m glad to report that today we’re taking a gander at a children’s literature!

🛸X. Fang’s WE ARE DEFINITELY HUMAN is the story of Mr. and Mrs. Li and their incredibly wary pup. The family hears a loud crash late at night and Mr. Li and his doggo go outside to investigate. They encounter three beings who insist that they are from…Europe…and that their…car…broke down.

🛸What follows is a silly and heartwarming tale about overcoming our differences and helping others who are in need, no matter where they’re from or who they are. The illustration style is simple and incredibly expressive, and I was laughing out loud (“lol”-ing) the whole time. This is a must-have for the whimsical or space obsessed child, or very grown up 33-year-old man, in your life. They won’t be disappointed!

Here we see Sean debating between two diametrically opposed choices: a manual from a helpful, jaunty little frog, or an exposé of America’s far right culture. Which do you think he chose for his Pick o’ the Week? Read on to find out:

💊 I’m pretty skeptical toward mainstream journalists’ takes on online cultures, especially those as egregious, inconsistent, and insular as Incels and the alt-right. This type of muckraking journalism has a tendency to be either too glib or too focused on the Trump Administration as the center of fascist activity. Both of these approaches fail to properly address the neo-fascist threat to contemporary society, too often hand-waving the online aesthetics away as unserious or absurdly documenting far right ideology as an aberration, rather than an outgrowth, of our political moment. So, when I heard that Elle Reeve, the documentarian that exposed Alt-Right chuds to mainstream daylight in her 2017 Charlottesville documentary for Vice, I was cautiously intrigued.

💊Black Pill predominantly functions as an oral history and memoir, rather than a definitive history of American Neo-Nazism in the 21st century. The book starts with Reeve recounting a harrowing event involving an unstable neighbour during her childhood in Tennessee. It ends with a heroic story about the author’s late father saving a man from a burning gas truck. In between, Reeve recounts conversations with repentant and unrepentant members of “The Movement” (the in-the-know umbrella term referring to the various factions of the far right). Those conversations are frustrating, elliptical, and frequently revelatory, revealing the ways in which some of the internet’s darkest ideas have invaded the “real world.”

💊I don’t think Black Pill will be for everyone. It’s far too dark and depressing to recommend as essential reading. But if you’re looking to be engaged and unnerved in equal measure, or you’re just looking to ruin your week, I recommend checking it out.

🎥 NEW SEASON ALERT 🎥

The Take Cover Film Club had such a wonderful first season, that we’re doing it again! We’re revelling in the rest of Summer with a celebration of digital video alongside a story of teachers behaving badly.

Here’s what’s on the spindle for Season 2:

🌞August 7th at 8pm: Aftersun, dir. Charlotte Wells

📹August 23rd at 8pm: Me and You and Everyone We Know, dir. Miranda July

🍻September 11th at 8pm: Another Round, dir. Thomas Vinterberg

Do you like your local bookstore? Then you are cordially invited to join the Take Cover Film Club! We meet monthly to watch a movie together in the shop, and then we have a chat about it.

Film Club screenings are free, and there is no membership fee. To join, send us an email ([email protected]) and let us know you’d like to be part of the club. That’s it!

See you in the clubhouse.

✌️

📣 In one week, our summer reading club season commences when we meet to discuss The Cure for Drowning by Loghan Paylor!

🦭The Cure for Drowning follows Kit McNair, their brother Landon, and Rebekah (the daughter of the town’s new doctor). The trio is navigating life in an Irish farming community just outside Orangeville, Ontario when WWII breaks out. They each enlist in different positions and ship off to Halifax to get to the front. The narrative is polyphonic, foregrounding q***r, trans, and nonbinary voices. This novel is remarkable, character-driven, and upends the conventions of the war story. With an incredible depth of feeling and a focus on those who have long been ignored, Loghan Paylor gives us hope that this all-important moment in history is far from wrung out. You definitely don’t want to miss this meeting, it’s going to be an excellent discussion!

📣 There’s still enough time to read the book if you’re interested in joining on this round. We have a few copies remaining on hand if you’d like to grab one. You can also bring your own copy, take it out from the library, or listen to the audiobook. We meet on the last Wednesday of each month and the club is free to join—purchase isn’t necessary! Shoot us an email ([email protected]) to be added to the club roster.

Here we see Sean committing an unspeakable act of bibliocide! But just wait until you hear what he has to say about his pick o’ the week, Stephen Graham Jones’s I was a Teenage Slasher:

🔪I swear, even when I commit myself to brightening up my reading habits, I can’t escape the horror. This vicious cycle probably demands a retreat, some soul-searching, and perhaps a redoubled zeal for a vegetable-based diet, but in the meantime, I’m gonna boost the new Stephan Graham Jones novel, I was a Teenage Slasher.

🔪If you’re familiar with the Stephen Graham Jones oeuvre, you are most likely aware that the man likes to play with genre conventions. Whether it’s werewolf bikers, cursed hunters, or teenage chosen-one supernatural thrillers, Jones has a proven track record of flipping hackneyed horror traditions on their heads. I was a Teenage Slasher is no different. Taking its cues from winking teen slashers like Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and My Bloody Valentine, as well as its name from a projectionist’s ransom of exploitationschlock, the novel knows what it is, and delivers on its premise.

🔪Viewed within the totality of Jones’ work, I doubt Slasher will be considered a high watermark for the writer. Slashers, even those of the revisionist and reflexive variety, are mainstays in horror storytelling (we’re still getting Scream sequels for crying out glaven!) and, in my opinion, the subgenre leaves little room for dramatic reinvention. Even adding the indigenous twist Jones applies to well-worn slasher precepts here, his efforts don’t reach the heights of, say, Jeff Barnaby’s zombie revisionism in Blood Quantum. All that being said, the book sees Jones at his most playful, most acerbic, and most villainous. It’s fun! Check it out and root for the bad guy.

Watch out! Sean’s coming for you with his pick o’ the week! He came screaming out of the back of the shop to tell you about Akira Otani’s The Night of Baba Yaga:

👀 How often have you started a book and immediately felt like you needed to catch your breath? Yea, it’s rare for me too. My losing streak in this department ended when I opened Akira Otani’s The Night of Baba Yaga (translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett). Within the first five pages, I was greeted with a collection of disorienting, violent, and engrossing images that made me feel like I stumbled on a mislabeled black list screenplay, not a new book.

👀 Set in 1979 Tokyo, Baba Yaga follows Yoshiko Shindo, a hardscrabble delivery driver who finds herself hired as the bodyguard of 18-year-old Yakuza Princess Shoko Naiki. Despite their differences, the pair become increasingly close as time and events progress. Shindo finds herself caring far more for the vulnerable Shoko than she expected, wanting to protect her ward from the violent world into which she was born — a daunting task in their trigger-happy milieu.

👀 You don’t need me to convince you that Japanesegenre fiction has been popping off lately. Baba Yaga is no exception. Taking cues from the cinema of Seijun Suzuki and Takashi Miike, as well as feminist revenge tales like Lady Snowblood and Audition, Otani spins a yarn that’s fast-paced, packed with bloody action, and surprisingly emotional. A sapphic crime story that kicks so much ass, check The Night of Baba Yaga out!

📯We’re officially on the other side of the solstice, and you know what that means: THE SUMMER READING CLUB LIST IS HERE!

📯The club has voted to select the next three titles for 2024. And this season is another fine one. Very fine indeed. Look out below!

🌊 July 31 @ 7pm: The Cure for Drowning by Loghan Paylor

🌱 August 28 @ 7pm: The Field by Dave Lapp

🦬 September 25 @ 7pm: Prairie Edge by Conor Kerr

📯The TCRC meets on Google Meets on the last Wednesday of each month at 7pm. The club is free to join and purchase isn’t necessary to attend. You can take a copy out from the library, bring your own copy, or listen to the audio book on .fm. Or, if you’re going to grab a copy, you can get it from us! To join, shoot us an email ([email protected]) to be added to the club roster.

See you in the clubhouse ✌️

We may be closed today and tomorrow, but Sean has locked himself in the basement, in the dark, to tuck in with his pick o’ the week, flashlight in hand. If you hear screams emanating from the shop, pay no heed. We assure you he’s fine. Here’s what he thinks about Incidents Around the House:

🔦 I’ve seemingly made it my mission this year to boost the numerous horror and dark genre books that have come screaming through the store. It’s no exaggeration to say that 2024 is an amazing year for horror fiction. Without discounting the books I’ve boosted before this week, Josh Malerman’s Incidents around the House is hands-down the scariest book I’ve read in a minute.

🔦 Josh Malerman has never really hit for me. Daphne, Bird Box, and A House at the Bottom of the Lake all came with critical acclaim and dedicated fan bases, but they seemed like pale imitations of stronger novels I’d read before. This book’s plot is a mash-up of A Head Full of Ghosts, The Conjuring, and The Shining (the cover itself is a direct homage to the Skinamarink poster), but the book’s references don’t detract the unpredictability of its plot or the relatability of its characters.

🔦 I was knocked flat by the story of Incidents around the House, which follows Bela, a six-year-old girl, who sees a spirit appear nightly from her closet and ask to “enter her heart.” As time goes on, the spirit expands its territory from Bela’s room to her neighbourhood at-large. Malerman elevates this simple premise by locking the reader in with Bela, who perceives events as a six-year-old would, seeing games where more sinister motives are at-play. As a result, when Bela’s fear increases, so does the paranoia of her parents, neighbours, and the audience. If you’re looking for a good summer read that moves and will keep you up at night, I highly recommend this book.

We may be closed today, but that’s not why Sean’s having such a good time! In fact, he’s quite tickled by the opportunity to suggest to you his pick o’ the week, Cicada Summer by Erica McKeen. Here’s what he had to say about this excellent book:

🪳If you’ve talked to me about books for more than five minutes, chances are I’ve brought up Erica McKeen’s 2022 novel Tear, which remains in my list of top books from this decade. So, it goes without saying that I would be very excited for McKeen’s follow-up, Cicada Summer, which is out this week. It doesn’t disappoint.

🪳In her new novel, McKeen returns to the subjects of grief and isolation, and their intersection with love and violence that were omnipresent in Tear. Isolating in the midst of COVID, a woman retreats to an isolated cabin in Northern Ontario with her grandfather, only to be inexplicably joined by her ex-lover. Upon discovery of a cache of the her mother’s writings, a dark universe opens up underneath the trio and plunges them into a metafictional nightmare.

🪳While certainly more complex and formally daring than Tear, Cicada Summer packs an emotional wallop. It’s melodrama, but it’s also literary fireworks. McKeen is a force to be reckoned with and this solidifies it!

Be very quiet! For here we see Sean birding. Or as close as he likes to get to birding: sneaking up on a good read. And what a good read! Here’s Sean’s thoughts on his pick o’ the week, Cuckoo by Gretchen Felker-Martin.

🪺Let’s get this out of the way early: Cuckoo’s title, theme, and subject are undeniably well-troddennarrative tropes. Now, with the familiar-sounding dust jacket synopsis appropriately lamp-shaded, I want to sing Gretchen Felker-Martin’s praises. The author has proven she’s no stranger to rekindlingthe embers of burned-out ideas. Cuckoo is no different.

🪺Without spoiling too much, Cuckoo immediately ups the ante on gay conversion camp narratives. While not denuding the novel of empathy, Felker-Martin refuses to sugarcoat the craven and hateful ideologies, social pressures, internalized hatred, religious zealotry, and other contributing infanticidal factors urging parents to submit their children to the psychological and physical torture of denying fundamental pieces of who they are.

🪺It’s not all dour, though: Cuckoo saves its empathy for the kids comprising its list of protagonists. These young characters are wonderful: flawed, funny, sympathetic, and sketched with efficient depth. Consequently, Felker-Martin makes you dread your genre expectations eventually being met.

🪺And this brings me to my final point: this book kicks ass. It’s well-paced, packed with unspeakable horrors, and poignantly insightful in its observations of the violence humans are only too happy to inflict upon one another. Seriously, just read it.

Here we see Sean with the only book he’s ever read. In fact, it may be the only book he owns, judging by the state of his shelves… But nonetheless, he’s adamant on sharing his opinion regarding this book, which happens to be his pick of the week!

💸 Sure to be the next Capitalist Realism or A Brief History of Neoliberalism, longtime British political commentator and theorist George Monbiot and American multi-hyphenate activist Peter Hutchison’s new book Invisible Doctrine is a clear-eyed definition, and readable, history of an all-too-misunderstood concept in contemporary political economy: neoliberalism. Monbiot and Hutchison begin with a simple premise: while neoliberalism was first introduced to modern capitalist countries and economies in the 1970s, it has since become the predominant economic model worldwide. Neoliberalism is so ubiquitous that it’s hardly named anymore, and its bromides are considered to be economic common sense.

💸 Invisible Doctrine defines neoliberalism so clearly, charts its history so comprehensively, and diagnoses its pathologies so convincingly that I would not hesitate to put the book in the hands of anyone wondering how we’ve plunged into the ecological, environmental, economic, political, and societal mess through which we’re now wading (incidentally, I just poorly paraphrased the title of another Monbiot book). This is a powerful text capable of changing minds, and it couldn’t have come soon enough.    

📣 At the end of the month, our spring reading club season concludes when we meet to discuss Last Woman by Carleigh Baker!

🐋 This short story collection is a relatable and irreverent look at our modern lives: floods and wildfires, toxic culture, billionaires in outer space, a purse-related disaster while on mushrooms. In today’s hellscape world, there’s no shortage of things to worry about, and these stories delve into fear for the future, intergenerational misunderstandings, and the complexities of belonging with sharp wit and boundless empathy. This is going to be a great discussion!

📣 There’s more than enough time to read the book if you’re interested in joining on this round. We have a few copies remaining on hand if you’d like to grab one. You can also bring your own copy, take it out from the library, or listen to the audiobook. We meet on the last Wednesday of each month and the club is free to join—purchase isn’t necessary! Shoot us an email ([email protected]) to be added to the club roster.

📺You’re likely screaming ”DID SEAN GET POLTERGEISTED!?” but hold yer horses and just calm down. He *almost* got poltergeisted but was saved by the miracle of literacy! Specifically because he was reading his pick of the week: Mister Magic by Kiersten White.

📺Tell me if you’ve heard this premise before: a group of estranged friends (who, incidentally, initially became close as the cast of a children’s TV show), reunite after 30 years under mysterious and tragic circumstances, only to have their rose-coloured glasses forcibly removed by revelations about the true nature of their pasts. We all know the rule: if it looks like King, walks like King, and tastes like King, then it’s probably just a King clone. However, despite the IT of it all, Kiersten White’s Mister Magic employs the well-worn Boys are Back in Town trope to meditate on the exploitative nature of children’s entertainment.

📺 Mister Magic feels incredibly relevant now, in the wake of I’m Glad My Mom Died and Quiet on Set. It’s hardly new information that the entertainment industry is full of creeps, especially where children are concerned, but abstracting the issue into a supernatural threat allows White to land a few unexpected, seemingly-effortless punches (e.g. the show’s host literally eats friendships). It’s a fast-moving, chilling combination of creepypasta, Peter Straub- and Stephen King-worship, and ripped-from-the-headlines tension. It’s a fun, creepy story that passes the refrigerator test, what more could you want in a horror novel?  

Yeeeeehaw! Sean’s riding in fast to share his pick of the week. If you can believe it, it’s BUCKAROO BANZAI AGAINST THE WORLD CRIME LEAGUE et al. Read on for his professional and thorough review:

🤠“Hey, hey, hey, hey-now. Don’t be mean; we don’t have to be mean, cuz, remember, no matter where you go, there you are.”

🤠“You can check your anatomy all you want, and even though there may be normal variation, when it comes right down to it, this far inside the head it all looks the same. No, no, no, don’t tug on that. You never know what it might be attached to.”

🤠“Shut up, Big-booty, you coward. You are the weakest individual I will ever know.”

🤠“They’re only monkey-boys. We can crush them here on earth.”

🤠“You remind me of someone I once knew… she was the Queen of the Netherlands.”

🤠These are all lines from the 1984 Buckaroo Banzai movie starting Peter Weller and John Lithgow. Likewise, the book does not disappoint.      

Sean may appear concerned, but he is merely intrigued by the medium of modern photography! He’s actually quite excited about his pick this week, Miranda July’s ALL FOURS. He had this to say about it:

🌞 Miranda July is handily one of the most fascinating North American storytellers that’s currently working. Her films Kajillionaire, The Future, and Me and You and Everyone We Know, as well as her debut novel The First Bad Man all explore contemporary human existence in all its quiet alienation, sexual frustration, destitution, and violence. Before the term became ubiquitous, July practiced her own gonzo version of autofiction: inserting herself into her stories as the narrator, love interest, or pet of the protagonists and layering in details from her personal life to confuse the boundary between art and memoir. All Fours, July’s highly-anticipated new novel, not only fits squarely into the author’s unique oeuvre, but also expands upon it in interesting ways.

🌞All Fours follows an unnamed narrator who resembles July in occupation, age, and overall demeanour, as she embarks on a solo road trip at 45 years old. As the narrator describes her middle age: “if you thought of it as two lives, then I was at the very start of my second life.” This wry, questioning, hilarious, and constantly ambivalent voice pervades the novel’s story of infidelity, love, sadness, mourning, emotional abuse, and so much more. It’s a bit too soon to say whether or not this is July’s best work, but it’s certainly her most affecting. All Fours will undoubtedly be listed among the top English-language novels of the year, so don’t miss it!