Because You Asked... New Secret Dead Blog HQ Revealed, Pt. 2!

And now here's the opposite side of the room: the book collection. As I mentioned earlier, this is the first time my books have been in one place; they used to be scattered all the hell over the house. This here is the meat of the collection. You can't see my graphic novel/nonfiction collection (behind me as I snapped this photo), and yes, I do have a dozen or more containers of books at a storage facility. But this is my favorite stuff, painstakingly gathered since high school, or purchased within the past year, and intended for near future reading. A quick tour of the highlights:

1. This is the horror bookshelf. Got my Kings, my Barkers, Koontzes, Laymons, Keenes, Littles, etc., along with a stack of horror paperbacks that were some of my earliest book purchases: Robert Dunbar's The Pines, Robert Cormier's Fade, Rex Miller's Slob, Nancy Collins' Sunglasses After Midnight, among others.

2. Let's see... this is kind of modern crime, for lack of a better description. An assortment of cool noir and hardboiled stuff, with a lot of Ellroy, Willeford, Block, Pelecanos, Connelly, Winslow, Starr... and some Cornell Woolrich, just to keep the rest of 'em in line.

3. Sci-Fi/Fantasy-land. Up top is Dick and Bester. Sturgeon. Matheson. Beaumont. Then another shelf of modern crime/noir before we hit Harlan Ellison, then Jim Thompson and Raymond Chandler. Hey, look, I just shelved these best I could as soon as the cases were assembled and balanced and shimmed. It's not perfect.

4. Just want to point out the bottom shelf, which contains my Fredric Brown collection. By no means complete, but pretty damn healthy. I love Brown.

5. My cat Holly, named for Buddy Holly. She's been around for 13 years now. A constant fixture in the office, but I never mention her, because I don't want to be the kind of guy who mentions his fucking cat all the time.

6. Another mixed collection. Up top is a ton of Westlake/Stark, then my Lansdales and Schows, followed by some Bruen and Huston, then James M. Cain, Goodis and Hammett, with other classic crime/noir mixed in there.

7. Ah, my babies. Up top: the complete Hard Case Crime collection, followed a nice stack of Black Lizards, followed by my vintage paperback collection. At the very bottom: my John D. MacDonald collection. So much good stuff in here, and I'm especially happy to have it on shelves finally; until recently, it lived in two plastic containers.

Finally, I must mention that my lovely Bride assembled every damn bookcase you see in this photo. I carried them into the house, but she did the heavy allen wrenching while I wrestled with a script deadline. If this isn't true love, I don't know what is.