Long Live (Weirdness Involving) the King

Lots of Elvis in the news these days – mainly thanks to those guys down in Tupelo (one of whom is an Elvis impersonator) who were being eyed as part of some weird plot to poison President Obama and a couple of other officials with ricin.

Weird? Yes. But as we all know, that’s nowhere near the extent of the weirdness that surrounds the late King of Rock n’ Roll.

Alien abduction plots? Check.

The real Elvis (maybe?) roaming the Southwest, doing good for anonymous strangers? Check.

Elvis in a nursing home with JFK, battling for the souls of residents while battling an ancient mummy? Check.

But this whole business with assassination plots is as weird as it gets, right?

Not really. Codorus Press author Mike Argento speculates in his novel Don’t Be Cruel that the King would make the perfect basis of a fake church. Too bad the lawyers for the real Elvis (Inc.) came down on the low-rent mobster who had the idea that all the potential profits were sucked away.

Want to see just how weird? Well, along with the First Church of Elvis, Scientist, you’ll also find a couple of pitifully unqualified hit men, a law student stripper (who works at a club called The Happy Beaver) and a not-very-motivated police detective who’s assigned the case.

It’s all tied up with a bow of insanity in the spirit of hilarious crime fiction by the likes of Carl Hiaasen and Elmore Leonard.

So if you like your Elvis-based conspiracies hilarious and improbable – just like in real life! – then you really need to give Don’t Be Cruel a spin in your literary jukebox.

Dispatches from the Codorus Universe

The holidays are hopping around the Codorus Press offices as our band of elves looks ahead to 2013 (assuming we don’t all die in a flaming apocalyptic ball later this week … if so: Waiter? Another pint, please?).

But we’re not really focusing on the end of the world. We’ve got too much going on to waste our time on silly things like extinction.

Want to get an idea of how busy we’ve been? Just take a poke around the Interwebs, my friend. There’s plenty of Codorus Press treasure to be found.

You know you’ve made an impression on a book reviewer when a few months after he’s reviewed your book he’s drawing upon it to make a point in a subsequent issue of his publication.

That’s the happy situation our founder, musical director and shaman, Wayne Lockwood, has found himself in this month. Andrew Andrews, publisher and editor of the blog True Review, gave Wayne an extensive shout-out, referencing our great and glorious leader’s essay collection, Acid Indigestion Eyes: Collected Essays and Musings on Generation X, in his column Tyranny of the Same.

In it, Andrews riffs on personal damage the devastation of Superstorm Sandy wrought and notes Wayne’s assertion that the Internet has made it possible for all things from all periods of culture to exist at once. We’re nothing if not deep around here.

Earlier in the fall, Mike Argento, author of Don’t Be Cruel, announced the release of the novel’s e-book version through our friends at Crossroad Press. That means the novel is now available for nearly every electronic reader device out there.

But Mike isn’t just an author of gut-bustingly hilarious crime fiction – he’s also a full-time (and highly regarded) newspaper columnist with some prestigious awards under his belt. You can always keep up on his latest work at the sight for his newspaper (and former employer of much of the Codorus crew), The York Daily Record.

We’re excited about the spring 2013 release of longtime Codorus Press team member Tom Joyce’s first novel, The Freak Foundation Operative’s Report. This multi-layered satirical occult thriller promises to appeal to fans of everything from H.P. Lovecraft to Stephen King to the Marx Brothers.

Over at Tom Joyce’s Chamber of the Bizarre, he’s been working away perpetrating his usual lunacy and taking some time out to post a favorable review of the new novel Pins by Jessica McHugh, a frequent flyer at many of the book festivals the Codorus crew attends and a valued friend of the press. Oh, and in case that isn’t incentive enough, her book is about strippers. Now, doesn’t that … Hey, where’d you go? Ah, never mind.

Those of you who haven’t abandoned us to go page through Pins looking for the good parts might also like to know that Scott B. Pruden, author of debut Codorus title Immaculate Deception, had a nice essay on his former boss Ray Daub published in the Philadelphia Inquirer on Dec. 12. He followed that up with a blog posting relating how Ray influenced a particular character from his novel.

It turns out Ray, who Scott worked for as he designed, built and installed a 3/4-scale walk through display of Charles Dickens‘ A Christmas Carol in the mid-1980s, served as the physical inspiration for William Z. Robert, a low-rent, chain smoking demon featured as a major secondary character in Scott’s novel.

Some Love for the Shaman

The Codorus Press gang just got word today of a great review of Wayne Lockwood’s Acid Indigestion Eyes: Musings and Essays on Generation X, courtesy of the fine folks at The Compulsive Reader.

Wayne, of course, is the founder and shaman of this happy tribe we call Codorus Press. Acid is a collection of 65 of his newspaper columns from his days as a nationally syndicated Generation X columnist in the early 1990s.

Reviewer Sara Hodon says:

“Lockwood’s writing is just the right mix of snark, sarcasm, and cynical observational humor to make it universally relatable to readers. He’s the type of writer that points out the common everyday occurrences that happen to all of us, and as you read you find yourself slowly realizing, “Hey…that happened to me, too!” All at once he is able to capture what makes us all more alike than we think at first. Who hasn’t had the horror of realizing that yes, we are becoming our parents? Or that (gasp!) we may have to find a job that has nothing to do with the successful career we always dreamed of or the schooling we paid thousands of dollars for?

“Lockwood is not pretentious—he doesn’t try to pass himself off as cooler than anyone else. I get the impression that what you read is what you get—he’s this writer earning a living putting sentences together about the world he’s living in.”

You can read the complete review here.

Thanks to Sara for the great review! Read more of her work here.