Late last night, the Hedgebeast called me. She’d just bought a book at Dark Delicacies that was on their “Top 10” list and got 50 pages in, but could not go on.

“This is…shit!” she said. “It’s so bad, it’s depressing. I can’t believe someone published this! Do you know this guy?”

Hedgebeast is a professional writer and entertainment journalist. She’s patient beyond comprehension with the pecadillos of films, but mostly horror films, which she loves. She’s also a published fiction writer and she has a deal to direct a knock-em-dead, low-budget script she wrote that’s “Jumanji meets The Evil Dead.” Truly good stuff.

The book and author she named didn’t surprise me. I can’t fathom why anyone takes him seriously. One of the blurbs on the book heralded him as “the next Stephen King.” According to the Hedgebeast, “King would be embarrassed!”

Welcome to my world, where there is an unbearable amount of excrement being published.

I do have some hope, though. Sarah Langan’s first book is coming out in October from HarperCollins. It’s called The Keeper. We got an advanced copy in our World Horror goodie bags. I’ve just started reading it and — wow! — it’s very good. My pal Jon Evans, a good friend of Sarah’s, tells me it took Sarah a loooong time to find a publisher, and that it came in a roundabout way. Regardless, thank the gods that someone seems to have picked up the ball where so many other publishers have dropped it.

I hope to finish it before I leave for Middlebury at the end of June. I’ll give a review then.