[Sound the Second Novel Alarm! Spoilers for The Magicians ahead. I mean it this time.] The Magicians was an exercise in literary frustration for me. I loved it. It was wonderful. Its adherence to explaining away its every mystery absolutely infuriated me. Reading it a second time allowed me to be well aware that the breathtakingly horrific things that occurred in the unfurling of Lev Grossman’s fantasy novel cioppino would not remain the unexplainable night terrors of a magical world beyond our reckoning and to simply enjoy the […]
And Is Probably More Hygienic Than Most Bikers
Occasionally timing is simply not on our side. Shortly after posting my review for Paul Chapman’s Porn Gnomes and Other Strange Tales, the author had a twenty four hour giveaway of his three collections, free to anyone who might have liked to download them from Amazon. Though I would have liked to have spread the good word, it was only at the very end of that day that I saw the announcement, and the price shortly thereafter returned to normal. Then again, maybe that’s for the best. The […]
Everything happens in this book: Snow Crash
Hiro Protagonist (yeah, that’s his name) is a pizza deliverer in an unspecified future. Pizza delivery is run by the mafia and is super important. All pizzas must be delivered within 30 minutes or huge, major consequences happen. Long story short he crashes in a pool and meets Y.T a spunky skate-board-car-surfer. She delivers the pizza and thus befriends the mafia. And then Hiro is also a hacker and there is a huge virtual world called the metaverse. And in this metaverse there is a […]
“But a dragon had spoken to her.”
Early in Tehanu, Tenar (hello old friend!) muses about her friend Moss, the village witch: “She thought Moss was following her heart, but it was a dark, wild, queer heart, like a crow, going its own ways on its own errands.” I can’t think of a better way to describe this book. In the last pages of The Farthest Shore, another mage says of Ged, “He has done with doing.” Tehanu is the story of what comes after The Doing. Ged leaves Roke and returns […]
Wish I Could Be… Part of His New World?
Collecting Lucifer issues #14-28, and presented in a series of 3-part tales, Lucifer, Book 2 packs just as much interest, theological imagination, grotesqueness, and creativity as the first volume in the series. This kind of thing is definitely not for everyone, and my appreciation of the illustrative qualities varied from artist to artist within the book. However, I once again thoroughly enjoyed the characterization that Mike Carey has created in Lucifer, many of the issue covers and artworks separating the different sections within this book […]
Ghost Stories on a Tatami Mat
Target: Miyabe Miyuki’s Apparitions: Ghosts of Old Edo. Translated by Daniel Huddleston Profile: Horror, Ghost Stories Japanese horror ranges pretty heavily from mild ghost stories to some incredibly creepy and dehumanizing body horror. Apparitions fortunately falls into the former citatory, chronicling a series of stories that walk a fine line between scary and sentimental. These tales capitalize on the cornerstone of Japanese spirituality: that every object and creature is imbued with a sprit. At their core, these stories are more cautionary tales, advising the listener to act with honor […]