Reviewing the Mail: Week of 9/8

Every month, there's a slow week. Some months -- the ones with a major holiday -- things can get so slow that there's no mail at all for me to write about. (And that makes me sad, because a lack of easy content is almost as bad as a lack of free books.) This week had a second-tier holiday, Labor Day, which meant the mail was light.

But I still have two books to write about, which means I get a post out of them. And, even though there's only two books here, I still didn't get the chance to read either of them. But I'll be able to tell you some things about them, such as:

Omamori Himari is a manga series about the usual "typical teenage boy" -- in this case named Yuuto Amakawa -- who gets involved with wacky supernatural hijinks, in this case a cat spirit in the form of a sexy girl, Himari, who is of course devoted to him and who defends him from the relentless attack of demons who want to kill him (and, I expect, also from the relentless attack of pretty human girls who want him to be their boyfriend, because that's how these kind of series go). There have been ten collections of the series so far (though the English version is lagging about two books behind, with #9 scheduled for later this year), and, I'm sad to say, that that excrescence of the US comics market, the "zero issue" has come to manga as well. Because the book I have here is Omamori Himari, Vol. 0, even though it doesn't collect prequels to the main story, but instead has a few regular sidebar stories (including a color opener that is that massive cliche, the get-all-the-girls-into-a-hot-spring-naked story), a prose story, some 4-koma, character sheets from the manga, and other miscellaneous stuff related to the series. I wish they hadn't numbered it "zero," but I expect fans of the series will enjoy it a lot -- and it's coming from Yen Press this month.

And the other book is This Book Is Full of Spiders, by David Wong, which I've already disposed of because, dude! it's full of spiders.

Ha ha! It is a joke! This book has a title that is meta and funny, and so I am funny, too! Ha ha!

Levity aside, this is the sequel to John Dies at the End features David Wong and John (who, I gather, either didn't die at the end, or got better) facing more horrifying and funny threats to mankind. Plus spiders. It's a hardcover from Thomas Dunne Books on October 2nd.

But I think Wong is completely ripping off Donald Dane, down to the conceit for Book Two: