just finished reading a beautiful tome, Subterranean Press’ homage to the Ace Double Novels of decades passed, two unique and essential novellas by the King of Speculative Fiction, Lucius Shepard, VACANCY and ARIEL. both of them have equally far-flung premises, one centering on his evocatively-maligned hometown of Daytona and very odd goings-on in a certain …
just finished reading the latest of Charlie Williams’s novels set in the downtrodden UK burg of Mangel centering around the thoroughly politically incorrect, recent mental patient, inadvertent murderer (new father?) and town hard-man, Royston Blake. Blakey is Mayhem Personified, and the argot Williams weaves is truly addictive, and one roots for this rube and malcontent …
Just finished reading THE TERROR, 2007 novel by American author Dan Simmons, a fictionalized account of Captain Sir John Franklin’s lost expedition of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror to the Arctic to force the Northwest Passage in 1845–1848. Franklin and his crew are plagued by starvation and scurvy and forced to contend with mutiny and …
just finished reading Hari Kunzru’s novel, GODS WITHOUT MEN, an unabashed mashup of CLOUD ATLAS (complete with a blurb from David Mitchell himself: “A beautifully written echo chamber of a novel”; he would know first-hand the bases for such echoes) and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND. not as wholly reducible as that, as the …
finished reading the gem of satirical literotica, 50 SHADES OF LOUISA MAY. the smartest funny book or the funniest smartest book i’ve read in recent memory. when this sordid 50 Shades fad has died off, this book will be the only worthwhile vestige. any guesses as to who might’ve penned this? i’m thinking Michael Chabon …
just finished reading the latest reprinted volume of weird fiction king, Thomas Ligotti: NOCTUARY. loved it not quite as much as his GRIMSCRIBE, SONGS OF A DEAD DREAMER or MY WORK IS NOT YET DONE, but these are earlier works, and he still invokes an existential dread not approached by even the best of Lovecraft …