Cover blurbs are funny things. I’m fairly sure that if (and sadly it’s a very big ‘if’) TAKE IT COOL had ever made it into the bricks and mortar shops, Ian Rankin’s ‘Lovely stuff!’ on the cover might have gone some way towards making a passing punter pick the thing up (although it’s also just struck me that what I really should have done was try to get a second blurb from Rankin’ Roger of The Beat – it was a book about reggae after all).
Anyway, sometimes you get a blurb from Ian Rankin. And sometimes you get one from me, like the lucky people from the excellent Unthank Books. Unthank have just launched THE END, a totally ace anthology of stories based on paintings, and this is what I said about it:
At the end of the book, you’ll probably want to go back and start reading it all over again.
Actually, what I said in full was:
All good things come to an end. All bad things do, too. In this remarkably varied collection, many different things, both good and bad, come to an end: situations, performances, relationships, childhoods, lives and sometimes the whole world. Some of the endings are unexpected and some are pre-destined. We read what happened before the ending and sometimes what happened afterwards. And at the end of the book, you’ll probably want to go back and start reading it all over again.
Less of a blurb than a whole bloody review, in fact, so it’s not surprising it got trimmed a little to fit on the cover. Still, as I said, it’s an ace book. There’s more about the project here and you can pre-order yourself a copy here. Go on.