This short novel is weird in ways in which only M. John Harrison can be. A futuristic literary dystopia, the story is set on the southeastern English coast and centers on Phillip and his aunt Marnie. Sometime in the past, some sort of inscrutable alien race called the iGhetti appeared out of nowhere, and everything changed. Decades later, Phillip picks up flotsam on the sea coast, including…
Orphans of the Tide is an odd YA novel, concerning the residents of an island City who fear the periodical resurgence of the Enemy who takes over a person to be his Vessel for rebirth. This tale follows Ellie, an independent young orphan with a superiority complex, and her young friends, including other orphans and a boy she has plucked out of the body of a dead whale. Everyone has jumped to the…
This is the third of three books retelling H.P. Lovecraft's stories, with artwork and clanky verse, both in the style of Dr. Seuss. The first was H.P. Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu for Beginning Readers , the second was H.P. Lovecraft's Dagon for Beginning Readers . The first was fun, the second didn't quite work as well, but the third, H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness for Beginning…
Ursula K. Le Guin died in 2018, with many highly distinguished books under her belt, plus a few real clunkers. Now comes Ursula K. Le Guin's Book of Cats , from the Library of America, a slim hardcover with poems, some prose, and a whole lot of cat doodles by Le Guin, plus a lot of white space. No editor is listed, but one hears someone else's voice in the essay "The Lives of Ursula's Cats."…
Every once in a while, when the modern world seems especially insane, I read another Philip K. Dick book as a kind of therapy. Last time it was Time Out of Joint , ten years ago. On this very blog . I concluded: "I wonder: has the modern world come too closely to resemble Philip Dick's mindscape, that the impact of his novels is lessened?" This time, I picked up Galactic Pot-Healer , and came away…
In the wake of the popularity of the first Addams Family television series, which ran from 1964-1966, cartoonist Charles Addams published The Chas. Addams Mother Goose , an oversized volume which contains some twenty-seven familiar nursery rhymes, each accompanied by one or more Addams illustrations that give a macabre interpretation to the nursery rhyme. It is pleasant for what it is, but one…
Fairy tales, by their original oral natures, are often retold, with variations, and they are often reworked with different ideologies involved. Perhaps the best of such reworkings are the feminist versions by Angela Carter ( The Bloody Chamber ) and Tanith Lee ( Red as Bloo d). In Tales from Beyond the Rainbow , we have ten stories of a slightly different sort: LGBTQ+ tales "proudly reclaimed" by…
Why I Love Horror , subtitled "Essays on Horror Literature," is a collection of nineteen essays--one by the book's editor Becky Siegel Spratford, the others by various current horror writers, with an introduction by Sadie Hartmann (responsible for a crappy nonfiction title, 101 Horror Books to Read Before You're Murdered ). I picked this up not because I think the essays on horror literature will…
This is the Victorian-styled story of a young girl, Faith, who wants to be a naturalist like her reverend father, but she must work in the shadows as she is stymied by being female. At the heart of the story is a mysterious plant, called the Lie Tree, which possibly has biblical associations, and which is sought by rivals of her father while he experiments with its magical yet sinister properties.…
This is an early novel by Catherine Fisher, who is perhaps best known for Incarceron , the first of a series. The Candle Man is a stand-alone young adult novel from thirteen years earlier. It is a curious tale about the conflict between a kind of water witch, Hafren, who wants to initiate a record flooding of some towns along the Severn Estuary (called in Welsh the Aber Hafred--Hafren being the…
A couple of years ago I enjoyed R.J. Ivankovic's H.P. Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu for Beginning Readers , noting that it was simplified Lovecraft in creaky verse with illustrations in the style of Dr. Seuss. H.P. Lovecraft's Dagon for Beginning Readers is the follow-up--and it's basically more of the same. If you like the concept of the book, you will likely enjoy the book. I understand there…
Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE In Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan , a short novella published in 1894, Helen Vaughan is the mysterious femme fatale who dies horribly at the end. In Rosanne Rabinowitz’s Helen’s Story , a slightly longer sequel to Machen’s story published in 2013, we learn that Helen Vaughan didn’t die--Machen made that up. She is immortal, both Pan’s daughter and…
Daniel Pinkwater has been writing books for children and young adults for many decades. I read through a number of them in the 1980s and 1990s, including Fat Men from Space , for younger children, and classics like The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death and its sequel The Snarkout Boys and the Baconburg Horror , about two boys who "snarkout"--that is, sneak out to midnight shows at the Snark…
I saw a new movie, Clown in a Cornfield . It's a vapid mess, filled with cliches upon cliches, and with characters whose actions and motivations do not make any sense. It is plotted like a roller-coaster ride, and once you are strapped in, you follow it to the end, slightly amused by a few unexpected twists. I learned it was based on a novel, so out of absurd curiosity, I read the novel to see if…
Jack Zipes is some months shy of 88, He is a renowned scholar of folklore and fairy tales, including critical works as well as translations and anthologies. The Wrath of Peace or How the Wellikans Saved the World is a story written for and dedicated to his grandchildren Anya and Little Jack, about two twin witches Anja and Zack who try to save the world from the evil dictator Nexus with help from…
The Bone Man is a novelette from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction , December 2007, here published as a chapbook with illustrations by Daniel Williams. Durbin's story begins familiarly: a traveler stumbles upon some sort of local festival in an unnamed Midwestern town. Here the stranger is a hit man, Conlin, who has just finished a job. He comes to a town on Halloween that is preparing…
The ingredients used to make this novel promise something delectable. There is a deceased and disreputable writer, Cyril Heldman, who wrote weird and occultish tales and who died under very strange circumstances. His literary executor, Catherine Richards, whose house is crammed full of books, papers, newspapers, herself dies bizarrely in the first chapter: by falling from the sky onto the nearby…
Novelist Andrew Michael Hurley has published what is basically a thirteen story collection, centered around a fictional border town between Yorkshire and Lancashire called Barrowbeck. This provides a thin skein that connects the stories, and the hint that the setting is something rather more significant enters into only a few of the tales. The first is set in the distant past, while the final…
This book looked interesting. Two college associates secretly experiment with extra-sensory perception, and one encounters some old mirrors of obsidian of a type associated with Dr. Dee, Edward Kelly and ancient Aztec worship. But any interest is quickly ruined by the style. The book has three main characters, the conniving and mysterious Doctor Wiston, and the researcher Gwyn Thomas, who is doing…
The idea of a novel set in and around the late 17th century Paris salon meetings of Madame d'Aulnoy, where modern fairy tales came to life, seems like a good idea. Or at least an interesting one. What Clare Pollard presents is more of a kaleidoscopic documentary than a novel. And it's filled with twenty-first century diction, and various contemporary "isms": feminism, sexism, lesbianism, etc.,…
I liked Clarke's previous novel, Piranesi (I reviewed it here on Jan. 12, 2022), so the idea of a new book by her attracted my attention. Disappointment after disappointment followed. First, I learned the book is only sixty-three pages: so, a novella at best. But then I got a copy. Nineteen of those pages are publishing matter, or illustrations without text. Eleven pages have only a small amount…
A collection of nine stories by Mark Samuels, who passed away suddenly in December 2023, after this collection had been put together. Seven of the stories are arranged as "The Gallows Langley Sequence of Tales," as they are all set in and around fictional places in Hertfordshire, including the town Gallows Langley and the valley of Thool--a setting used previously by Samuels, most notably in the…
Thomas Ligotti and Brandon Trenz have written two screenplays, both unproduced, and both now published by Chiroptera Press. The first was Crampton , a 2000 reworking of a 1998 proposed X-Files episode into an original full length feature. It appeared in print in 2002, and was reprinted by Chiroptera Press in early 2024. (I reviewed this edition in this blog on March 17, 2024.) The second, Michigan…
This is the definitive book on the zany eccentric London record label Stiff Records, which was founded in 1976 and lasted through 1986, promoting punk, ska, jazzy rock, the new wave, and traditional rock. Acts that got their start at Stiff include The Damned, Ian Dury, Elvis Costello, Wreckless Eric, Rachel Sweet, Lene Lovich, Madness, and the Pogues, among many others. The narrative is typical of…
Katherine Rundell is not a stupid person. She is an Oxford-educated academic, and after holding similar fellowships, she is now a Quondam Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. As a side-gig she has published some ten or so books, including novels and books actually aimed at children, and an award-winning biography of John Donne, the subject of her thesis. So why, then, is Impossible Creatures such…