Image description: Two photos side by side. Left: the author, Katrina Carrasco, with a short asymmetrical haircut, wearing glasses, jeans, boots, and collared jacket standing on snowy ground before mountains and bare trees. Right: book cover of The Best Bad Things, with the title and author rendered in what looks like smeared blood. The central illustration, of the back of a gender-indeterminate figure holding a just-fired gun, is in the same colour and style.

In the US we don’t have Bonfire Night, but if you’re in or near Seattle on Monday night, and want fireworks, come to Elliott Bay Book Company. At 7 pm I’ll be talking with Katrina Carrasco about her debut novel, The Best Bad Things.

The Best Bad Things is a fabulous book. I talked about it earlier this year:

Gritty street fiction set in the lawless 19th century when Port Townsend was the Deadwood of the Pacific Northwest, The Best Bad Things is a bloody brawl of a book… Alma, dressed as Jack, sheds her impulse control along with her corsets, and the plot accelerates into a visceral, unexpected underworld of bare-knuckle fighting, opium smuggling, and genderqueer lust.

I promise you, this book is not like anything you’ve read before. I can also promise you a fantastic evening of conversation about gender, writing queer people and people of colour back into history, writing the body, and the opium-smuggling underworld of the nineteenth-century Pacific Northwest.

Join us—and bring friends, relatives, enemies you wish to make peace with, people you bump into on the street, bring everyone!—and help me help Catrina celebrate the publication of this lusty, exciting, thrillingly-written and ground breaking fiction.