I’m one of those people who check the bookshelves at the supermarket. Yes, I freely confess it. I’m perverse like that. Fact is, though, every now and again, you’ll discover something that just makes your eyes pop. In this particular case it was Where The Dead Lay, by David Levien. I was so thrilled that I looked it up on Amazon when I got home. There I found some hired marketing gun tossing out all manner of superlatives in his effort to make me buy this paperback. What the review (so-called) didn’t ask – and it should have, really – was why I would want to buy a book that advertises its author’s (and editor’s) tenuous grasp on grammar in the title.
Nor did it ask – and it should have, really – what the hell it is that those dead lay. Eggs? Bathroom tiles? Groundwork?
Whatever it is, we’re looking at a bunch of uncannily industrious corpses, which strikes me as unusual enough to have rated a mention. ‘Cos them regular dead, well, they just lie…
