Bad Juju & Other Tales of Madness and Mayhem - Softcover

Jonathan Woods is the author of a collection of noir crime stories Bad Juju & Other Tales of Madness and Mayhem which won a 2011 Spinetingler Award for Best Crime Short Story Collection and was a featured book at the 2010 Texas Book Festival. Except for Maracaibo, he has been to every location where the nineteen stories in Bad Juju are set. His crime novel A Death in Mexico was named one of the five top debut crime novels of 2012 by the indie BookPeople Bookstore in Austin, Texas.

Violence, sex, and gonzo plot twists fuel Woods's diverting collection of 19 stories, most set in sun-and-blood-drenched borderlands. "Incident in the Tropics," "Down Mexico Way," "Maracaibo," and "We Don' Need No Stinkin' Baggezz" amp up the volume to 11, while other offerings feature flying sharks, the adventures of a bodiless head, and a slime thing quickly snaking up nostrils. Woods, who earned his neo-pulp rep in Web zines such as Dogmatika and Plots with Guns, keeps the words popping along, though the endings of his stories are often inconsequential--only more reason to hop instantly into the next yarn. Throughout, a penchant for vivid imagery slaps the reader around like a boxing bag: "A veneer of sweat covers her body like the glaze on a Christmas ham"; "shadows as murky as an abortion clinic in the Bible Belt"; "Her small conical breasts confronted him like twin interstellar ray guns." New pulp, indeed. -- Publishers Weekly

"[With Bad Juju] Woods has arrived fully fledged as a maestro ...astonishing." --Ken Bruen, Shamus Award-winning author of The Guards and London Boulevard

"Quirky and disquieting, Bad Juju...leaves you marveling at the imagination of Jonathan Woods" -- Michael Connelly, Edgar Award-winning author of Nine Dragons and The Scarecrow

"Bad Juju is the wildest, funniest, scariest collection of stories I've read in a long while." -- Scott Phillips, author of The Ice Harvest and The Walkaway

"Bad Juju is the product of a truly twisted mind, and I mean that in the nicest way." -- Ben Fountain, 2007 PEN/Hemingway Award-winning author of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara

"These dark, often strange, eerily radiant stories add something special to the tradition of noir crime writing." -- Jay Parini, author of The Last Station and The Apprentice Lover

"Bad Juju is by turns intense, lyrical, dark and disturbing. Jonathan Woods is an original." -- Dani Shapiro, author of Family History, Black & White and Devotion

"Evocative, imaginative, hot and neo-pulpy..." -- Allan Guthrie, author of Slammer, Hard Man and Savage Night

"[Bad Juju is] not for the faint-hearted. Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett would approve and be, I suspect, more than a little bit envious..." -- Ron Rash, PEN/Faulkner Award finalist author of Serena and One Foot in Eden

"[With Bad Juju] Jonathan Woods has laid down the gauntlet for gonzo noir in the 21st Century." -- Anthony Neil Smith, editor/publisher of plotswithguns.com and author of Hogdoggin'