All Hallows Read / Hallowe'en Reading 2011

All Hallows Read is in full effect so I’ll throw out some recommendations for 2011 (and all future Hallowe’ens):

What says Hallowe’en like a giant tentacle cosmic horror lurking deep beneath the sea? I am, of course, talking about Cthulhu and two recently published books fit the bill perfectly. Let’s start with Good ol’ H.P. Lovecraft himself.


The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories by H.P. Lovecraft recently published in a beautiful classy edition from Penguin Classics. This one has some of the master’s greatest, including the titular Call of Cthulhu and includes introductions and edits by S.T. Joshi, the authority on all things Lovecraft. I reread the story and the creeping, lurking sense of horror is present throughout the story. Also included is Dagon, one of Lovecraft’s earliest tales, and a short one tying into the Cthulhu mythos. Also included, among others, are the following: The Rats in the Walls, The Colour out of Space, The Picture in the House, and perhaps one of my favorites, The Shadow Over Innsmouth with its links to Cthulhu and town of fish folk. The thing with Lovecraft’s stories is that many collections overlap with each other. For example, this volume has a fair amount of overlap with the excellent Science Fiction Book Club collection edited by Andrew Wheeler, Black Seas of Infinity. One of the two major tales that don’t overlap is At the Mountains of Madness, one of Lovecraft’s longer tales which appears in Wheeler’s volume. The major tale in the Penguin volume not in Wheeler’s selection is Herbert West—Reanimator, which is good, but because it appeared in installments rather than one single installment, tends to be a bit repetitive at the beginning of each passage. I can’t recommend either volume highly enough, but since the Penguin edition just published and is more widely available, that might be the easier book to buy. Really though, you can’t go wrong with either.


Another timely volume is The Book of Cthulhu edited by Ross E. Lockhart (Nightshade Books I’ve been dipping my toes into this one over the course of the month and I am very impressed. The book itself is quite attractive and follows the impressive line of themed anthologies at NightShade edited by John Joseph Adams. Lockhart cast his net very wide in bringing in stories ranging in source from Cthulhu themed anthologies from the 1970s to stories appearing in this anthology for the first time. Highlights include the moody and creepy Caitlin R. Kiernan’s Andromeda among the Stones where curiosity becomes an obsession to a fault and a good choice for an opening story. Dreams and the uncertainty of the Cosmos play a strong role in Ramsey Campbell’s The Tugging. I liked A Colder War Charles Stross quite a bit, too. Plays with communism, the Cold War (obviously) and links to ancient cults and religions. Kage Baker’s Calamari Curls plays with perhaps, voodoo connections to the Cthulhu mythos. All told, I haven’t read the whole anthology yet, but I like much of what I’ve read. I’m looking forward to getting through Tim Pratt’s story, based on how much I’ve enjoyed his Marla Mason stories which may (or may not) have ties to a certain cult.

I’ll finish out today’s post with a few links to past books I’ve highlighted at Hallowe’en and a short review of a what I think is a taut, solid ghost story.

Dark Harvest by Norman Partridge
Isis by Douglas Clegg


No Doors, No Windows by Joe Schreiber
Small town secrets, an eerie house, and an unfinished manuscript form some of the support structures in Joe Schreiber’s haunted house novel No Doors, No Windows. It is also a story about a writer, Scott Mast who returns to his hometown in New Hampshire to attend his father’s funeral. Scott initially stays with his brother Owen, who is the lone parent of Henry, Scott’s nephew. Owen never recovered fully from the death of his and Scott’s mother a decade ago and has succumbed to alcoholism. This is only the tip of the iceberg’s darkness, because Scott, a writer himself, finds a manuscript revealing dark deeds, on which his father was working.

Scott returns to skeletons in the closet, people whom he left behind when he moved to Seattle and gave little consideration in the intervening years. These include an old girlfriend, a town-wide tragedy, the town’s most popular girl, and Round House – a dark house not far from where Scott’s father crashed his car and died.

On one level, No Doors, No Windows is very much a haunted house story. Scott soon finds himself spending a great deal of time in Round House trying to finish the creepy manuscript on which his father was working. He soon wonders if the dark events relayed in the unfinished manuscript actually occurred in Round House.

Some of the conventions in the novel are familiar – the darkness surrounding the ‘present’ of the novel is informed by events generations removed from the protagonist and a haunted writer struggling with his craft have been done on more than one occasion by Stephen King and recently to great effect by Caitlín R. Kiernan in The Red Tree. However, Schreiber terrifically takes the familiar elements and molds them into his own satisfying vision of darkness.

Schreiber’s style might be considered sparse and natural. Characters who have known each other don’t immediately unfold their histories when they come together; there are no paragraphs and/or pages of exposition. Characters simply act as themselves and speak without regard for the reader’s foreknowledge of these characters. In this respect, Schreiber paints a very realistic picture of how these people would interact.

No Doors, No Windows is a taut and emotional ghost story, the root of whose hauntings are revealed carefully and deftly. Schreiber has written a precise, solid and engaging novel that pulls no punches and is recommended.

Lost Neverland

I posted the review of the second Douglas Clegg book I read yesterday, Neverland , which I enjoyed a great deal:

Clegg employs an easy-going first-person narrative in Neverland, with Beau as our storyteller. His voice is extremely effective, having lulled me into the story with a sense of comfort. The style is, for the most part, matter of fact, but Clegg manages to balance that element with the horrific things Beau and his cousins experience in Neverland. The tension is ratcheted up as Sumter’s ‘god’ begins to hold more sway over Sumter, and it seems to have an adverse affect on the adults as well. When the adults drink and argue, the children inevitably seek out Neverland as something of a twisted haven creating a cycle of discord.

There’s a timeless nature to Clegg’s depiction of the children, Beau in particular as our protagonist is very relatable and that fact (and its effectiveness) cannot be underestimated. In many ways, the loss of childhood innocence here in Neverland is very comparable to the same type of loss of innocence the boys in Stephen King’s masterful short novel The Body (basis for the film Stand by Me) experience. Though Beau’s tale is much more ostensibly supernatural, the similarity in the way he and Gordon Lachance lament the episodes featured in their respective stories is very similar.

A small television program ended on Sunday, one that a few people may have heard of - Lost. I’ve touched on the show here at the o’ Stuff in the past but never really gone too deep into analyzing the show. There are already quite a few folks on the intarwebs doing a spectacular job of this, the best of whom is the venerable Doc Jensen, although Alan Sepinwal covers things nicely, as do Doc Artz and whole slew of other folks.

I really enjoyed the finale and think Darlton did a helluva job bringing closure to these characters. Granted we didn’t see what happened to Kate, Sawyer, (and perhaps most potentially interestingly, Alpert) once they escaped The Island that Houses the Soul of the World, but that’s not important. As Christian Shepherd said, what happened on the island was real and was the most important part of these character’s lives. After all, do we want to see Frodo’s daily chores in the years before he gains possession of the One Ring?

I will admit, I was getting a bit scared towards the end when everybody was converging on the Church of All Holy Symbols. My fear was that we would get a reveal much like that of the film Identity wherein all the characters are actually one of multiple personalities in a character’s head, either Hurley or Jack, take your pick. What we got instead was the reveal that the Side-Flash was the way station before ascending to Heaven. I can buy that, I like that. These characters went through the most emotionally powerful time of their lives on the Island. I think the Island’s power allowed them to create the way station so they could meet each other one last time anew and whole in a manner they wanted themselves to be, the way they always sought to become.

The stuff on the Island worked great as well. The uncorking of the Golden Light, which made Smokey Locke vulnerable was a necessary step in the progress of the characters and towards The End. O’Quinn’s fear when he was in pain and bleeding from the mouth was played superbly and showed that the magic leaving the island allowed for mortality and other bad things. I see The Heart of the Island as a repository for all the souls of the world – as Jacob’s “mother” said, a little bit of the same light that is in the cave is inside every man but that people always want more … while the other people can't take the light, they might try and if the light goes out here it goes out everywhere.

Desmond popping the cork began sucking the souls away, leaving all people with just their physical shells and no inner power. It happened to Smokey and the islanders first since he was so close to the source. If Jack never put the cork back in its place, the effect would have spread. Of course, Jack (and the viewers by extension) had to take that with a leap of faith and the power of the series’s narrative in the previous 100+ episodes made that leap of faith, for me, possible.

With Jack’s last act before his heroic sacrifice, he anoints Hurley as the guardian of the island, recreating the circle which gave Jacob the reins in a way – that is both are initially reluctant guardians. Although much of the entire series focused on Jack as the protagonist and “Hero” much of the surrounding elements focused on Hurley – in the flash-forwards he helped to bring people together, he brought Jacob’s message to Dogen, his soul and uplifting attitude made him the Heart of the Losties. With him so connected to the numbers, it made logical sense that he would become the new Island Guardian. The scene outside the Church of All Holy Symbols between Hurley and a humble Ben was bittersweet and touching as was the scene between Ben and Locke.

Many things were seemingly unanswered –

The Polar Bears – Nothing was really explicitly stated why they were on the Island, but many things can be deduced. They are big and strong, the donkey wheel was difficult to push and was in a ice-cave when Ben pushed the wheel. It isn’t a stretch to believe they could have been used by the Dharma Initiative for pushing the wheel, amongst other things.

The Dharma Initiative fizzling out of relevance – Again nothing explicit, but their connection to the Hanso family, who owned the Black Rock, and their tampering with the Island’s properties could be a cautionary tale that maybe Man just wasn’t ready to understand the heart of the island.

The Island itself – I think I covered my theory on just what the Island was supposed to be.

Walt and his powers – Was he a potential candidate for Island guardianship? Maybe, but more likely that the character grew to be a nine-foot tall kid and just couldn’t be worked back into the story.

Widmore’s quick death and seemingly unsatisfying end at Ben’s hands. – The creators are big fans of King’s Dark Tower and his death, and role as a Big Bad in previous seasons, mirrors the role and fall of King’s mainstay baddie Randal Flagg. I was quite annoyed with how King disposed of one of his signature characters. Was it frustrating that we didn’t get a knock-down, drag-out confrontation similar to Jack and Flocke? Of course, Widmore was built up so long as a relatively mysterious, power player that his final moment and quick death were unsatisfying and a bit frustrating. What did Widmore do to be exiled from the Island? Was it because he left the Island when he shouldn’t have? We’ll never know. This is probably the one element of the series with which I have the most issues.

The Pregnancy Thing - This is likely some kind of mythological side-effect of Jacob’s fake mother braining his real mother.

In the end, these seemingly unanswered elements don’t add up to much in the larger picture. If Darlton had told us, through perhaps Pierre Chang, that the Polar Bears were brought to the island to use in experiments to determine bear shit makes good fertilizer how would that add to the overall story or its ending? Leaving such things for the viewer to ponder works for me.

The finale was a great ride, and will leave me and many of the show’s fans thinking and debating for a long time. I’ll be saving this on my DVR for quite a while.

Isis and The Gathering Storm

With Hallowe’en only days away, what better time than now to post my review of a gothic supernatural tale of death? None better, I say, none better. To that end, the review in question is of Isis by Douglas Clegg, a short book that should be read in one sitting for the best effect. It’s a nicely designed book with terrific illustrations by Glenn Chadbourne.

Isis is a very short tale, clocking in at only 113 pages of very large type with haunting illustrations by Glen Chadbourne. The tale follows young Iris Villiers from her pre-teen to teen years as she comes of age alongside her twin brothers at Belerion Hall, where their family recently moved just before the start of the novel. The tale takes place in the 19th Century, placing this story very much in the gothic tradition. Clegg tells the story in Iris’s voice through the first-person narrative and the words flow very well, realistically, and with a great air of believability. Through her voice, Clegg captures the naïve innocence of selfish youth very well.
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When the story takes a turn for the worse, Iris cannot help but ignore the warnings of Old Marsh and we see the ‘be careful what you wish for’ adage come into full effect. The story then, comes across as a fairy tale in the dark tradition of the Brothers Grimm.

Oh, and there’s a new book in a small little fantasy series publishing today. I’m not sure if people have heard of it - The Gathering Storm by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson.*



At by SFFWorld, we set up two discussion threads:

The Gathering Storm - Wheel of Time Book 12 Official Discussion SPOILERS
The Gathering Storm - Wheel of Time Book 12 Official Discussion NO SPOILERS,

*I don’t think I could rightfully consider myself a FSF blogger if I didn’t mention the book.