Engagement is a tricky word. It’s a double-edged sword. You can hear about a film or an album or a book and find yourself thinking ‘that’s for me’. Or you read a review. Catch someone talking about it on a podcast. Their enthusiasm transfers over to you and, again, the same thought gets in your head.
That’s for me.
Or, with books, you can sometimes ignore the cardinal rule – you can pick one up and judge it by the cover alone. Don’t get me wrong, book cover designers, it’s a system which can work. After all, that’s how I first found Garth Ennis and Steve Dillion’s comic Preacher. Browsing through a little second hand bookshop in Tenterden, down in Kent, and there it was. The first Preacher collection. Buried in a box by a doorway. It’s also how I first got into the late Christopher Fowler’s fantastic Bryant and May crime novels. Wandering around Borders in Leicester, years ago, my eyes were caught by that first paperback cover for Full House Dark. Little did I realise how many books, and how many strange crimes and London folklore, that one glimpse of an art deco style cover was going to bring into my life over the next few years.
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