Welcome to Shelf Control — an original feature created and hosted by Bookshelf Fantasies.

Shelf Control is a weekly celebration of the unread books on our shelves. Pick a book you own but haven’t read, write a post about it (suggestions: include what it’s about, why you want to read it, and when you got it), and link up! For more info on what Shelf Control is all about, check out my introductory post, here.

Want to join in? Shelf Control posts go up every Wednesday. See the guidelines at the bottom of the post, and jump on board!

Title: Joe Golem and the Drowning City
Author: Mike Mignola & Christopher Golden
Published: 2012
Length: 272 pages

What it’s about (synopsis via Goodreads):

In 1925, earthquakes and a rising sea level left Lower Manhattan submerged under more than thirty feet of water, so that its residents began to call it the Drowning City. Those unwilling to abandon their homes created a new life on streets turned to canals and in buildings whose first three stories were underwater. Fifty years have passed since then, and the Drowning City is full of scavengers and water rats, poor people trying to eke out an existence, and those too proud or stubborn to be defeated by circumstance.

Among them are fourteen-year-old Molly McHugh and her friend and employer, Felix Orlov. Once upon a time Orlov the Conjuror was a celebrated stage magician, but now he is an old man, a psychic medium, contacting the spirits of the departed for the grieving loved ones left behind. When a seance goes horribly wrong, Felix Orlov is abducted by strange men wearing gas masks and rubber suits, and Molly soon finds herself on the run.

Her flight will lead her into the company of a mysterious man, and his stalwart sidekick, Joe Golem, whose own past is a mystery to him, but who walks his own dreams as a man of stone and clay, brought to life for the sole purpose of hunting witches.

How and when I got it:

According to my Amazon records, I bought the paperback edition in 2014.

Why I want to read it:

You know, I honestly don’t remember how this book came to my attention! Chances are, I either saw a recommendation on another book blog or, possibly, this was an Amazon recommendation that popped up for me after I read The Golem and the Jinni!

In any case, when I first bought this, I thought it would be a graphic novel, but it’s not. It’s an “illustrated novel”, so the plot is told in narrative form, but there are illustrations to go with. I think that because I didn’t pay attention to what I was buying and had incorrect expectations, I may have been feeling let down when the book arrived, and so ended up shelving it and never picking it up again.

The are some pretty positive reviews on Goodreads, and I’ve enjoyed (and/or been creeped out by) other books by Christopher Golden, so I’m inclined to eventually read this book rather than putting it on the donation pile.

Apparently, the story continues past this book via comic books. According to Wikipedia:

Joe Golem is a novel and comic book series created by Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden. It began with a promotional short story, Joe Golem and the Copper Girl, followed by an illustrated novel, Joe Golem and the Drowning City in 2012, both published by St. Martin’s Press. The series was expanded as a comic book series published by Dark Horse Comics from 2015 to 2019. The series follows Joe, an occult detective in New York City during the 1960s and ’70s. The Joe Golem series is set in The Outerverse, a shared universe with Baltimore (a 2007 novel by Mignola and Golden and its comic book continuation), and other series.

I’m very on the fence about the whole thing.

What do you think? Would you read this book?

Please share your thoughts!

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• Write a blog post about a book that you own that you haven’t read yet.
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Have fun!