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For Book Pop!, Paul Krueger wrote a special short story from the world of Last Call at the Nightshade Lounge. Read it below:

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is why I think The Catcher in the Rye is so damn important anyway.  Big deal, we all read it in high school.  Except I didn’t.

Well, I did.  But that wasn’t my first time slipping into Holden Caulfield’s shoes.

My dad’s a great guy for a lot of reasons, but a big one is his support of my reading habit.  When I was growing up, he and my mom all but shoveled books in my general direction, and I devoured them like a furnace.  They knew I had a big imagination, so they gave me things in kind: stories about epic battles, or shadowy mysteries, or an average boy enrolled in a very un-average school.

So when my dad dropped a library copy of Catcher into my lap and I asked what it was about, I was surprised when he said, “It’s about a kid who wanders around New York.”

I stared at the cover, with its yellow text and sketchy rendering of a red carousel horse.  Surely, robots or aliens would figure into his explanation any second.  When they didn’t, I said, “And…?”