Book Author :: John Hornor Jacobs

I enjoyed John Hornor Jacobs’ THIS DARK EARTH (EBR Review) so much that I had to read more of his work. Fortunately Jacobs has two other published books on shelves – the southern gothic, Lovecraftian horror of SOUTHERN GODS (EBR Review), and the YA Horror THE TWELVE-FINGERED BOY (Amazon). I’m eager to start SOUTHERN GODS but I couldn’t pass the opportunity to read a Young Adult book about a kid with twelve fingers that has a form of telekinesis.
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If there is one thing you Elitist Book Reviews followers are aware of about me, it has got to be the number of things I don’t like in fiction–and how good authors can subvert these preferences and make me eat crow. So in another installment of “Things Nick Hates” I present you (drumroll please) zombies. I’m sorry, but they bore me. I used to like them and I still hold onto the belief that THE ZOMBIE SURVIVAL GUIDE (Amazon) and WORLD WAR Z (Amazon) are some of my favorite books of all time. Still, there is a saturation of zombies (sort of like the over abundance of vampires a couple years ago) and I find it tiring. There are only so many things you can do with zombies and it would take something different to interest me in another piece of undead fiction. THIS DARK EARTH by John Hornor Jacobs (Amazon) is that “something different” and it served to remind me how much I used to love the sub-genre.
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Every so often I buy a novel purely based on the cover. I don’t read the synopsis on back of the book. I don’t read any reviews. Nothing. Now granted, you can get a fairly decent idea of the type of novel from the cover art, but buying based purely on cover alone has made for some interesting reads in the past.  Usually they end up being novels I would normally avoid, but that please me nonetheless. So, real quick, look at the cover of John Hornor Jacobs’ SOUTHERN GODS (Amazon). Do you see what I see? Do you get the impression I got and say, “Huh, that looks cool”? Can you see why I bought the novel without knowing anything about it?

To me, it looks like the blending of Horror and 50’s music. Everything about the cover–from the pose, to the macabre figure, to the tentacles, to the night club look–literally forced me to buy the novel.

And then I started reading.
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