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I've been reading The Maltese Falcon lately, Dashiell Hammett's 1930 novel. I hadn't read it or The Thin Man despite having read all of Hammett's other novels. I suppose I figured the famous films made from both titles were perfectly fine substitutes. But I was jonsing for some Hammett so I started in on the Falcon. I'm enjoying it, of course ( Read more... )

"WHOM THESE CHAINS BECOME NOT SO", by Caitlin R. Kiernan, is the new Sirenia Digest story I read to-day. It's good. It's a sort of mash-up of the ancient Greek Andromeda story, altered so that she can expect no rescue, and a vignette of an author for the story discussing it with a friend and sometimes lover. The imagery in the Andromeda story is ( Read more... )

To-day I read what I think is the newest Sirenia Digest, number 214, containing "Night Fishing", a new Caitlin R. Kiernan story. It's a nice blurring of the line between a multiverse story and an unreliable memory story, centring on a narrator menaced by some entity that shifts shape and temporal location in his recollections. It put me in mind of ( Read more... )

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Reading MR James has gotten to be a seasonal tradition with me. This year, my mother sent me a hardback collection of his ghost stories, which makes the experience of reading them even better. When you're reading stories about antiquarians poring over manuscripts and carvings and abnormal adornments in abandoned churches, it's nicer to do so on ( Read more... )

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I figured I should read a horror novel for Halloween month so I'm about halfway through 1933's The Werewolf of Paris. I'm enjoying it. According to Wikipedia, some consider it the Dracula of werewolf stories. That may be so.

Its political commentary is a little more simplistic than Dracula's rumination on Victorian sexual psychology. It's easy to ( Read more... )

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