Carlos

If you like Pertwee-era Doctor Who but feel all the “hapless British soldiers firing guns ineffectually at inhuman monstrosities” action would benefit from some awkward sex and bloody gore (as in “geysers of blood,” not “bloody good show”) then this is the book for you!

A fun collection of vampire stories, from Polidori to Dennis Etchison.

An interesting mix of ghost stories, from the scary to the sad to the somewhat perplexing. As far as creepy, the title story is the high water mark.

Highly intriguing in subject matter. The writing is somewhat repetitive and at times opaque, though I can't say how much of that is the translation.

Too much wind.

Overall, a fun read, but the central conceit (Mythos story filtered through the prose and personality of important counterculture figure) feels a little creakier than it did in Move Under Ground.

Mostly left me underwhelmed. I didn't hate these guys, despite the obvious jackassery. I didn't really find them that funny, either. This book felt more historically important than compelling. I preferred Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly.

A nice tour of the development of the Mythos, from its origins in Lovecraft's fiction, through the Derleth era. It covers a good number of authors who have worked in the Mythos. Also, I was rather thrilled to see that Joshi found Mr. X almost as disappointing as I did.

Save for one story, all of the stories in this collection are well-written haunting works of weirdness.

The first half is made up of stories set in a future where Argentina has decided to cling on to “traditional” values, while the rest of the world moves on.

The second half consists of solid science-fiction stories, somewhat Twilight Zone-like (in a good way).

Though the miseribalism gets a little heavy-handed at times, Mockingjay makes for a satisfying conclusion to the series.

Interesting work detailing Borges' relationship to Argentine literary tradition.

"But I thought that was what poetry is, Mr. Harrow: circumspect. If it wasn't it would be just talk."

I thought I would enjoy this, and for the first few chapters I found the familiarity of it encouraging. Consider the premise: a young woman at a Bennington-like college, her literary aspirations, the lecherous married professor into whose circle she drifts, the peculiar roommates, her sense of alienation, and the suggestion of something darker lurking at the edges. Because I've had the good fortune to have read Ms. Jackson's (Don't call her Shirley) brilliant, hypnotic, disturbing [b:Hangsaman|131177|Hangsaman|Shirley Jackson|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1302734503s/131177.jpg|1825944], reading Beasts filled me with a powerful sense of deja vu.

Admittedly, the part of Hangsaman where the heroine, Natalie Waite, befriends and is charmed by a youngish professor and his somewhat unhinged wife makes up only a small part of the novel. It's as if Oates had decided to rewrite the older novel by concentrating only on the relationship with the professor and turning all of the subtext into text.

It might have worked. Oates is definitely a talented enough author to pull it off. Still, I found myself approaching its violent conclusion not with tension or glee but a sense of indifference, a lazy shrug. Maybe it is just the comparison with Hangsaman. Jackson knows how to zig when you think she'll zag, knows how to pull you into her protagonist's headspace as if the text had magic properties.

For all of its modern Gothic gestures, Beasts feels disappointingly linear, it's characters surprisingly flat. When it finally brings on its lurid revelations, they felt like the punchlines to jokes I had already heard.

Interestingly, circumspect means “cautious, prudent, or discreet.” I'm still asking myself whether the novel was too cautious or if it would have benefited from some discretion.

Great followup to “The Monster in the Mirror.”

It'd be easy, as with Dead Until Dark/True Blood, just to say, well, it turns out that the pay cable adaptation is better than the original. Admittedly, this has that problem where all of supporting characters are really bland and one-dimensional but were given something like depth (or at least the illusion of depth).

The main problem was that Dexter himself really wasn't that funny or interesting. There were a few moments of a sort of dark lyricism, but much of his narration was just pedestrian, with a sort of marginal cleverness. There were a few moments where Dexter broke into alliteration, which only recalled Humbert Humbert from Lolita, a character who is genuinely funny, disturbing and strangely seductive. (All things Dexter attempted to be, yet fell short of.)

Overall, I wouldn't say it was terrible, but I'm not really tempted to continue on with the rest of the series.

I have this notion that the similarities between Ayn Rand and H.P. Lovecraft merit a closer look, and so I was kind of excited, when I was about two chapters in, to discover that Anthem was first published in 1937, the last year that the Old Gent dwelt within the confines of Euclidean space. Because, and I cannot stress this enough, this novella starts off very much in the Poe/Lovecraft mode of the first-person Gothic tale, with our narrator confessing to his terrible crimes in writing. He's even writing by the light of a stolen candle, and it's hard to get more Gothic than that. And then we learn–more shades of Lovecraft–that the confession is connected to the protagonist's discovery of a subterranean space belonging to a lost civilization about which dark things are muttered.

The setting also has something of the feel of Lovecraft's Dreamlands, since the setting is a city of no later than medieval technology run according to traditions interpreted by a council of elders. (Though no mention is made regarding prohibitions on feline homicide.) So, here we have all the makings of a strong Gothic tale: the society with its arbitrary laws and customs, the daring (if off-kilter) protagonist, the discovery of the lost civilization, the quest for forbidden knowledge. I wish I could say that the story lives up to that early promise, but it doesn't, and since most people won't read this for its Gothic qualities, I'll try not to dwell too much on that.

The first chapter is actually solid enough. There are a few flaws in the world building, but nothing to really ruin the plausibility. In the second chapter, when the main character falls in love with a beautiful lady, we learn that men and women are not allowed to have sexual thoughts except for once a year when they have sex in order to reproduce. This society doesn't have powerful libido-suppressants or brainwave modulators or anything like that at it's disposal. It basically tries to suppress the human sexual drive through disapproval, a strategy with the same long-term prospects as stopping a locust swarm with a large umbrella. (Even Lovecraft, who liked sex way less than Rand did, would only have attempted such a thing with a society of aliens or transdimensional beings or something along those lines.)

Soon, the protagonist discovers electricity–through a plot contrivance that is, frankly, amateurish–and realizes that electricity and lightning (‘The power of the sky') are the same thing. Soon, he is experimenting with electricity and, having recreated a light bulb, declaring: “The power of the sky can be made to do men's bidding. There are no limits to its secrets and its might, and it can be made to grant us anything if we but choose to ask.” That's not the only instance of an increasingly mad scientist tone that the protagonist takes on.

Having figured out the principles of the funny glass spheres in the cave and the protagonist reinvents the light bulb. He gets excited about showing it to the elders, reasoning that never had such an invention been offered to men. And I realize that maybe he means the people of his current civilization, but the way it's written, I just wanted to point out the whole cave full of batteries and light bulbs and how he's taking credit for someone else's invention.

This peaks in the climax of the novel, when he shows the light bulb to the elders, and they say it will have to be destroyed, and he runs out, yelling, “You fools! You thrice-damned fools!”

That's also pretty much where the story leaves off being interesting. He runs away to surprisingly unpopulated woods, his lady friend joins him, he makes a bow and arrow (though there's no reason to believe he would have any training in how to do this), they find a conveniently abandoned and well preserved house where he learns (because she's a woman and not up for learning on her own, or something) about the past, and then he engages in a long and tedious rant which is either the kind of thing you're into (if you like Rand's politics/philosophy) or should just be skipped over.

Interestingly (and getting back to the way the story collides into Gothic archetypes), the story ends at a familiar premise: the hero in an ancient, isolated structure believing himself safe and the rightful lord of the property wherein he dwells. In a Gothic text, that tends to be where things start to go wrong

There are some other elements, minor absurdities which wouldn't stand out so much if the rest of the work was actually engaging. One thread is how certain words–such as I, she, he, and ego–have been forbidden, but it's kind of half-assed, and if you're interested in how a regime might manipulate language to make the wrong kind of thoughts impossible, stick to Orwell's 1984. (Rand may have experienced totalitarianism up close, but her understanding of it does not match Orwell's.)

Really, the main problem is that at this point in her career, the need to deliver a polemic has started to take over whatever gifts Rand has as a writer. At least a pulp stylist like Lovecraft could have made this entertaining, though the moral message would likely have been much more ambiguous. I do wonder what Ayn Rand's version of “Herbert West - Reanimator” would have been like, though.

A note on scoring: I oscillated between 2 and 3 stars for this. That lest section, though brief compared to the filibuster ending of Atlas Shrugged, is painfully dull, but right up until that point, I was entertained enough to be leaning towards 3 stars. I thought about downgrading, but since it's so eminently skippable, I decided I shouldn't penalize the novel for it.

An American scholar arrives in India with plans to study the treatment of fear and disgust in Sanskrit literature. A young boy listens in rapt attention as an Irish woman reads to him the tale of Dracula. A wandering storyteller captivates a crowd with stories of rakshashas, prets, bhuts, vetals, ghouls, kapalikas, aghoris–and the brave heros who confront them. A promising politician finds his career and life cut short by a young woman.

Lee Siegel weaves all of these threads together into an often captivating, often moving story about horror stories and what they mean to us. The book was a lot of fun, though perhaps a little less frightening than I had hoped it would be.

Near the end of the book, the philosophical melding of Lovecraft, Zen Buddhism and Schopenhauer and its meditation on a cosmic nihilism capable of erasing the relative nihilism that afflicts our contemporary lives made me begin to wonder if perhaps just as physicists have postulated that the universe moves inevitably towards a heat death, perhaps human consciousness moves inevitably towards a thought death, in which the piecing together of disassociated knowledge is the genesis of the new Dark Age. Which I guess isn't much of a review, and is something inspired by the book instead of taken from it. Still, if the above intrigues you, I suspect the book will as well.

A satisfying conclusion to Mieville's Bas-Lag trilogy, Iron Council is both more political and more literary than its predecessors.

Francisco Goldman's story of his wife Aura and her tragic death. Very sad, sometimes difficult to read.

One thing that puzzled me as I read It was, Why wasn't it scary? I finally came to the conclusion that the problem is that It is meant for kids or at least teenagers. When Pennywise makes his first appearance, he entices his young victim with the promise that once in Pennywise's realm, he will have lots of cotton candy and games and won't ever have to grow old. The echo of Peter Pan and Pinocchio's Pleasure Island is clear, and I think It makes much more sense when you consider it along those lines.

I have to admit that while some people find Pennywise completely terrifying, I thought he didn't quite work. Part of it is the way King structures the story. Our first sighting of the clown is when he murders someone when he's clearly some sort of monster, so there's no frisson, no ambiguity, when he starts showing up in his various guises. His habit of changing into cinematic villains to stalk the young protagonists also struck me as counterproductive, a postmodern sort of move which served mainly to remind me that Pennywise, like the Wolfman, the Mummy or the Creature from the Black Lagoon, is just another pop cultural artifact.

King also errs in going Lovecraftian, as he doesn't really have the temperament to pull it off. It is closer to Smaug than to Cthulhu, though I wonder if it would be possible to write a horror story that encompasses King's humanistic approach when dealing with its characters and Lovecraft's cosmic approach when dealing with its outer beings.

Anyway, I give it four stars because I acknowledge I'm not really the audience for it but still think it's good at what it sets out to do.

I found the first book in the series underwhelming, but I thought I'd give the second one a chance, figuring that this one wouldn't get bogged down in world-building like the first did. Too much of the first third of this book seems to be taken up with rehashing the events of the previous book, and it feels like Fforde's stabs at humor haven't really improved. I could bore you with describing every strained attempt at wackiness or over-explained joke, but having recently re-read the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, I have to say Fforde just has no bite. Considering that the Thursday Next books are aimed at book nerds, the whole idea of taking shots at giant corporations, bureaucracy, celebrity culture and fashion just feel like lazy pandering. Sorry, Jas, this is where you and I part ways.

La invasion is Piglia's debut collection, and though not at the same level as Nombre Falso or his novels, still reflects his talent and sense of storytelling. One thing I found interesting was how he manages to use the influence of predecessors like Borges or Arlt while still making the stories very much his own. Favorites include “Las actas del juicio” and “Mi amigo.” A couple of the stories–“Las actas del juicio” and “Mata Hari 55”–are included in some editions of Nombre Falso.

It's always hard to know what to say about a classic, what with so much having already been said. I already knew quite a bit about the book, so it felt slow to me at first, but as it went on, it got much better, haunting in more than one sense of the word.

The aristocracy of vampires has gathered at the ancient fortress of Castle Banat in the Carpathian Mountains to argue politics and, for some, to partake of the Golden, a woman who has been bred to have blood of a particularly delectable and intoxicating quality. However, when the Golden is discovered murdered one evening, it falls on newly converted vampire Beheim, who was previously a police inspector, to seek out the culprit. He soon learns that this investigation will be like none he conducted as a mortal and that failure could spell his doom.

The first word that comes to mind when thinking about this book is “operatic.” The setting of Castle Banat, which is vast and mysterious enough to rival Gormenghast, holds many mysteries, and the intrigues between the vampires are often quite complex. Beheim is an interesting protagonist, largely sympathetic, though flawed; we see these flaws amplified as part of his new existence, and there are times it is easy to wonder if he will cross over from sympathetic to deranged. Shepard's style is up to the task of describing such an grandiose and fascinating story.