There's been a long-standing argument in rec.arts.sf.written about to what extent the aphorism "You can't judge a book by its cover" is true. Some believe it absolutely, but others (me included) think that it's only accurate in a qualitative sense -- you can't tell if a book's any good by looking at the cover, but you can tell if it's the sort of thing you're inclined to like. Different genres and sub-genres have their own unique iconographies, and if you can recognize them you can tell if a book belongs to a genre you like.
Exploding spaceships = space opera
A woman in a uniform on a spaceship's bridge = mil.sf
Bright, friendly colors with a single, simple symbol = comedy
An elf, a dwarf, and a handful of humans with swords = extruded fantasy product
It's a way to get you to notice books you'll like. And it works. Just the other week I was browsing in Barnes & Nobles and a book caught my eye just this way. Actually, what attracted me wasn't even the cover. It was the font used on the spine -- the sort of colorful, wild font you see on sci-fi posters from the 1950s. It just screamed, "If you love cheesy old movies, you should buy me." Then I actually saw the title:
Gil's All Fright Diner.
Oh man, I thought,
that'd dreadful. So dreadful I almost put it back on the shelf. Instead I opened up and gave the first page a read, and was instantly hooked.
Duke's a taciturn werewolf. Earl's a bad-ass vampire with an inferiority complex. Together ... they fight crime.
Or evil cults devoted to freeing the Old Gods.
As the novel opens, Duke and Earl pull into the titular diner in the rural south-west, only to be attacked by zombies in the middle of their meal. After they fend off the undead, the diner's proprietress offers them a job as supernatural exterminators. Seems this wasn't the first zombie attack the restaurant's experienced. Duke and Earl quickly discover that there's more going on than zombies -- someone in town is trying to free the Old Gods, and the diner is integral to the plan.
If the plot sounds like something out of
Buffy, that's appropriate because the tone is about the same too, a mixture of irreverence, action, and occasional serious drama. Unfortunately, the combination of humor and horror doesn't always work. There's one scene in particular, where Duke and some farmers are attacked by zombie cows. Now just the concept of zombie cows is comedy gold, but the amount of gore in the scene, as Duke takes a rock and bashes a cow's head in, is decidedly unfunny to the point that it undermines book's comic tone.
The novel's other major problem is that the author, A. Lee Martinez, has an annoying penchant for bad puns. There's the title. There're the characters of Duke and Earl. And there's the local sheriff named Marshall Kopp. But when he tries his hand at real humor, Martinez is as funny as Pratchett (though lacking Pratchett's deeper meaning):
Reality is like a fruitcake: Pretty enough to look at, but with all sorts of nasty things lurking just beneath the surface. Ancient things, older than time itself, smothered beneath the crushing interdimensional weight of what mortals, in their limited understanding, would call existence.
The book's good enough that I wanted to immediately run out and buy the sequel ... only to learn that Martinez hasn't written one, even though the story reads like the first part of a series.
