Weekend Reading Assignment

Weekend Reading Assignment posts feature book recommendations from Undertaker Books staff. These books are short enough to be read in a weekend, but give strong examples of how to execute important skills in writing.

This week’s Weekend Reading Assignment is from D.L. Winchester, recommending Tim Dorsey’s The Pope of Palm Beach.

For people interested in splatterpunk, Tim Dorsey’s off-his-meds antihero Serge A. Storms is a hell of a gateway drug. It’s not just that he kills people; it's the cold, calculated, deliberate way he ends lives that carries notes of the best Splatterpunk has to offer. A Storms killing, though not as graphically detailed as, say, a Steve Gerlach scene, still inspires that twist in your stomach and rising discomfort all Splatterpunk readers know and love.

Having said that, that’s not why I wanted to talk about The Pope of Palm Beach. The story revolves around a reclusive writer, Kenny Reese, who has stayed hidden inside his home since witnessing a brutal slaying thirty years before. Storms, following the writer’s mysterious disappearance, stumbles into his life and decides to bring Reese back into the public eye, kicking and screaming.

So, what do I want you to take away from The Pope of Palm Beach, aside from some creative ideas for your enemy?

Well…

Write constantly.

When Storms finally finds Kenny, he also finds thousands upon thousands of pages of work. While he’s been in hiding, he’s also been writing! If you’re a writer, you should be writing constantly, whatever you can spurt out (right now I’m working on a western novella and blog posts).

Drop-kick your characters out of their comfort zone.

While Dorsey’s novels are always zany and fast-paced, The Pope of Palm Beach kicks it up a notch when Serge demolishes Kenny’s carefully built life and the safety it provides. Mayhem, death, and the tangling of several storylines into a satisfying conclusion soon follow. But none of that would have happened if Kenny were allowed to continue his reclusive existence. 

Enjoy some book tour ideas.

I’m not saying you should pretend to be someone else and act like a three-year-old mainlining sugar to promote your book. But stepping out of the box isn’t a bad idea, and some of Serge’s ideas are interesting to say the least… I mean, if Chuck Palahniuk can hand out little plastic arms, surely there’s a world of interesting experiences artists can provide their readers…