The pulp and vampire genres are fairly well worn and it’s hard to find an original voice among the Raymond Chandler imitators and Anne Rice wannabes. Enter Charlie Huston, whose third book, “Already Dead,” injects the mean streets of New York with some vicious vampire action. It’s a promising start for a pulp series that pays respect to the old-school while taking a path all its own.

Now that Christmas is past, it’s time to start thinking about how you’re going to make it through the long, dark, cold, bitter winter. What you need is a good laugh and maybe some good conversation. No one is better suited to serve your needs than our friends McSweeney’s, a strange little concern that publishes both a quarterly magazine and some of the most original books around. Among their imprints are Believer Books (“H.P. Lovecraft, Against the World, Against Life” by Michel Houellebecq and “The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers” edited by Vendela Vida); Rectangulars (offering the novels “The People of Paper” by Salvador Plascencia and “The Facts of Winter” by Paul La Farge); McSweeney’s (offering a look at the pleasant and disturbing oddities of our culture with books like “Bicycles Locked to Poles” by John Glassie, “Dear New Girl” edited by Eli Horowitz, Trinie Dalton and Lisa Wagner, and “A Child Again” by Robert Coover); and Irregulars (“Baby Mix Me A Drink” and “Baby Make Me Breakfast” by Lisa Brown and “How to Dress for Every Occasion” by The Pope).
Here we review two of these books for your suggested pleasure, one for laughs and one for thinking.

In “The Pirates! In an Adventure with Ahab,” that suave sailor of the seven seas, the Pirate Captain, along with his glossy beard and distinctly named crew, embark on their latest adventure. After purchasing a new pirate boat on credit, the Pirate Captain and crew need to plunder 6,000 doubloons if they want to stay alive, or, worse yet, lose the Pirate Captain’s glossy beard to Cutlass Liz’s shears. So after trying their luck at treasure hunting, show business in Vegas, and some actual pirating gigs, the crew and captain turn to bounty hunting on behalf of their new business associate, the moody Captain Ahab. The bounty: the giganticus White Whale. The prize: 6,000 doubloons.  

When I arrive at the home of novelist Ernest Hebert in late fall, he’s outside splitting next winter’s firewood, holding up a chunk still bleeding sap for me to sniff before he even says hello. “It smells like wintergreen,” I say. “Black birch,” he answers, and leads me to his office in the garage, behind the woodpile.