Read Recently -- April -- the next couple of books
Adrift on the Haunted Seas: the best short stories of William Hope Hodgson
Hodgson was one of the writers who had a big influence on H. P. Lovecraft. Born in 1877, he ran away to sea rather than go to school, and started writing in 1902. He died at Ypres in 1918, killed by a German mortar shell.
Because of his decade as a sailor, many of his stories have to do with the sea, and particularely with the Sargasso Sea, an area of calm waters crowded with seaweed in the mid-Atlantic. Popular imagination populates the area with lost ships and monsters, and Hodgson's stories play that up (though his monsters are mostly giant octopodes and freakishly large crabs). There are also some poems, and even one Carnacki story. It also includes the story, "The Voice in the Night", which was the inspiration for the Japanese horror film Matango .
Dark, creepy, and atmospheric, Hodgson's writing is magnificent (admittedly in a style now long out of date, though less so than Lovecraft's). Not only do I recommend this book highly, I recommend that you should buy any of Hodgson's writing that you happen to come across.
Hallowe'en Party by Agatha Christie
Ariadne Oliver (who, as you may remember, is a stand-in for the author herself) is visiting friends in the countryside when she is invited to help out with a halloween party for the local children/adolescents. During the set-up for the party, one of the children, in an obvious bid for attention, announces that in the past she saw a murder committed. No one takes her seriously; she apparantly has a habit of trying to draw attention to herself, so she flounces off. A little while later she apparantly flounces back, mostly unnoticed. But someone sees her, because she is found face-down in the apple-bobbing bucket, drowned. Disturbed, Mrs. Oliver seeks out Poirot and asks him to look into it.
This isn't bad; it's nice to see Mrs. Oliver again and the mystery is an interesting one. What didn't work for me was the ending, which felt both like it came out of left field and also kinda goes over the top (not as far as the ening to Bad Boys II, of course, but that would be difficult to do) in strange directions. So, mildly recommended only.