Ask a bookseller: Left Bank Books in St. Louis
Every week, The Thread checks in with booksellers around the country about their favorite books of the moment. This week, we spoke with Shane Mullen of Left Bank Books in St. Louis.
Kea Wilson joins the grand tradition of booksellers-turned-authors with her debut novel, "We Eat Our Own."
(Critically acclaimed authors like Jonathan Lethem have put in time behind the counter at bookstores, and authors like Louise Erdrich and Ann Patchett even own their own shops.)
Shane Mullen, who works at Left Bank Books in St. Louis with Wilson, says "We Eat Our Own" is "a creepy, atmospheric, dark look at the Amazon and filmmaking."
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The novel is loosely based on a real horror movie where the filming went awry: "Cannibal Apocalypse." In the book, the actors and crew are dropped into an isolated village deep in the Amazon with little direction and, in some cases, not even a script. In addition to the insects and wildlife lurking in the dense foliage, there are also Colombian drug runners whose routes run perilously close to the set.
The line between what's staged and what's real gets erased in the chaos, and "whether people are innocent or not is quite a topic of debate," Mullen says.
Mullen is also excited about another Missouri-based author, Laura McHugh, and her eerie novel, "Arrowood."
McHugh's novel follows Arden, a woman who returns to her small hometown of Keokuk, Iowa, and is confronted with the tragedy that just won't stay in the past. When Arden was small, her younger twin sisters disappeared, and the case was never solved.
Arden "doesn't know what's going on, and has been told all these stories and has been followed by reporters for much of her life," Mullen said.
The book gives off that "small town feel of 'everybody knows you, everybody knows what you're doing, everybody's watching you at all times.' It's a really great mystery that I think encapsulates the Midwest experience."