Bran the Blessed

I had somehow forgotten to say that before Maker of Shadows I finished Charles Williams' All Hallows Eve. A brilliant story about the eventual downfall of a ruthless would be messianic two hundred year old wizard. While being just slightly less atypical than Williams' stellar The Place of the Lion, the material doesn't veer into advocating any existing religion beyond very broad allusions once or twice. I was reminded of Dion Fortune's The Winged Bull, in the sense that this is how that book should have been written, and it shows you can show a malicious old bastard using his mental powers to use spirits, doubles and psychic energies without it being a repository for jargon and the characters preening about in a cringy fashion.

Also I have just finished Tiffany Thayer's The Greek. I heard very little about this book before, but read it because it was by the same man who wrote Doctor Arnoldi, one of the nastiest (but not gory, there is a difference) books I have ever read which takes the question "what would happen if people stopped dying ?" to it's horrendous logical consequences. A book that made me feel like one could feel had the author reached out from the page and physically assaulted his reader with a crowbar.

Now The Greek is sadly (or thankfuly ?) not like that. It basically shows how a Greek manages to become Emperor of the United States....however it is unusual because the central focus character is Tiffany Thayer himself, who writes himself into the story, as himself, and makes himself the Mussolini to Paros the Greek's Victor Emmanuel, by his own words. I can't think of any author who actually wrote themselves into a book where they have their wife cheat and divorce them, and then becoming the second in charge of a dictatorial imperialist Empire.

However, the book sadly falls a bit flat. The beginning portion where Thayer goes to Tenos island and slowly uncovers the twisted history of Paros' family and the various historical anecdotes related to his ancestors, supposedly going all the way back to Pericles, while he becomes part of a secret society protecting The Blood of Pericles in order to make them rulers of Greece is great. The various twists and turns of Paros' genealogy make for interesting and mostly serious reading.

But then when Paros takes over America the book stops tracing this most intriguing family history, and in fact stops having much of a plot. Instead most of the book after that point is Thayer making contrarian, pseudo intellectual, dictatorial legislation against various people and things, such as attempting to drive all magazines into bankruptcy, making rape legal unless a woman is raped by at least four people, having all the infirm, blind and demented people shot en masse or instituting polygamy in the US after banning non educational films. And also providing several blank pages in the book for people to write in their suggestions as to whose death would be of benefit to the State.

It feels weird with the dramatic ending and last minute reveal which suddenly plunges the whole narrative back into seriousness, when Thayer had spent some two hundred pages being irreverent and tongue in cheek and not much else.

Finished E. Vivian Charles' "Maker of Shadows". I liked it (though the "...Nineveh, one of the most evil cities on Earth in it's time" bit annoyed me to no end) though I find the central villain to be taken down rather easily and not have much of an onscreen presence.

Read The Cloud Walker by Edmund Cooper. It reminded me in a lot of ways of The Road To Corlay, with it's post apocalyptic British medievalism. I liked it, though it's more action oriented than Corlay, and one wishes one would actually get to see the Admiral Death brought up so much in the story.

Also just finished Marcus Sedgwick's The Dark Horse. An amusing little norse ish fantasy, with a bit of a tragic end, nothing really wrong there to be honest.

Finished And Strange at Ecbatan the Trees by Michael Bishop. A fine work, especially since it focuses more on space medievalism than any boring technical details which bore me so. A nice work, though it seems maybe a tiny but fragment-like in how it ends. I would have liked to see Gabriel Elk's efforts finally succeeding in some capacity.

And also Out of His Head, A Romance by Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1862). I usually read works from about the 1880's onwards, though there is no general rule for me doing so. The core of this is promising enough, a short novella of an insane man, whose fate seems to be the working out of a Colonial curse (though the text in the end somewhat disputes this, for no real reason), and who acts under the assumption that everyone else is insane, while working on some sort of Moon Apparatus whose purpose we are never told. That part of the book is alright and entertaining, especially the part where the narrator solves a locked room mystery only to pin the guilt on himself in hope of being hanged for the thrill of it, but the author thought it wise to append a section of pointless tales to the book. The first one, talking about a local legend surrounding a date-palm tree, is fine, but then you have a boring and pretentious tirade about Springtime in the country, a pointless affair about a man accidentally courting a fifty year old crone in his sleep, another completely useless affair of a man falling in love with the idea of a mysterious and beatiful stranger his friend keeps describing to him that turns out to be his own (the narrator's) fiancé, and I guess an okayish fluff piece about a woman almost being forced to marry an old codger on Christmas but him breaking his leg on the way to the house and her old beloved returning from god knows where loaded preventing that from happening.

I preffer this more as a long and bloody journey instead of an allegory, I think it's better at that then at the other.

Also finished reading Unholy Relics by M. P. Dare. The title story, "Borgia Pommade" and "Bring Our Your Dead" were good, but there were some stories here which either have a bit of an easy sollution, or just end.

Just finished A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay. I actually liked the journey aspect of the book, but I find the epilogue and main character shift twelve ish pages before the end to be a mistake since I don't really see that as necessary, narrative wise.

And sure you might say "But he wanted to do X nebulous allegory" but was it really needed ?

4 hours ago, seventhcircle said:

That sounds pretty cool. How would you rate the book overall? 

If you're responding to me, then I did say it's one of the most imaginative books I've ever read. So of course I like it : P

I was almost dreading reading on, fearful that Garfinkle would spoil my pretty much perfect impression somehow, like usually happens when you find something you really like (oh Silverberg, why did you inject realistic explanations into the Epic of Gilgamesh, of all things !) but that didn't happen.

20 hours ago, dogpoet said:

That sounds interesting. Does the difference between Chinese and Classical alchemy come into it at all?

Well the novel has a significant plot point about the mutual incomprehensibility of each other's science, and chi lines and accupuncture are used to do seemingly impossible things.

Just finished Richard Garfinkle's Celestial Matters.

So basically imagine a steam "punk" story set in the 600's with the Greeks fighting the Chinese, while flying on ships carved from moon rock in a Heliocentric universe where spontaneus generation is a thing, where medicine is based around balancing the four humours, with steam powered cannons and spontaneous animal farms, where the main characters routinely get divine visitation from the Gods to give them counsel.

Basically it's probably the most imaginative story I've read, since even though it is a "sci-fi" story, it's science has to be imagined with a rather high level of fantasy, considering it is based around a completely different set of physical laws, in a universe where the Earth is the only stationary object in existance and the stars are lights that are fixed in the heavens.

11 hours ago, Christian said:

I'm reading Path into the Unknown (edited by Judith Merrill), which is a collection of science fiction short stories from the Soviet Union dating to the 1960s. It's a pretty slim book though.

There are two short stories by the Strugatskys included, although one is an older story by them which doesn't exactly rank with their better, more mature work. I believe that the two stories are included to show the evolution in the writing style. The better story is "Wanderers and Travelers".

So far, my favourite story is "The Boy" by G. Gor. This is the first fiction I've ever read from this writer.

So what would be the worse of the two then ?

First off, I finished Felipe Alfau's Locos, A Comedy of Gestures, an amusing collection where characters suddenly change their interpersonal relationships between stories, changing parentages and nicknames and significant others, with some comedic moments, but also notably adventurous or fantastic ones, like the life of Juan Chinelato, crimelord, butterfly charmer and seller of dead men's clothes and that of Seňora Valvedre who comes to die for a few months each year before getting better again.

Then I read Marcel Schwob's little diversion, The Children's Crusade, being a short little collection of testimonials and internal monologues of people involved in said affair.

And I just now finished my first John Blackburn, Bury Him Darkly. It's a quest for the Grail turned catastrophe novel, and certain parts of it reminded me very much of The Ice King, though of course I claim to plagiarism, simply similar narrative conventions applied for a similar situation. Quite looking forward to the copy of Broken Boy that's been waiting on my shelf these past two years now.

16 hours ago, dogpoet said:

I rather like that one, but if it didn't hit the spot for you, Roadside Picnic and Hard To Be A God are a bit more unified as narratives.

I already have the latter.

And it did, that's the sad part. It really felt like it was building to something, and why have two separate narratives of Person A trying to get into the forest and Person B trying to get out of it to where Person A is and then never having them meet or their plotlines converge ?

Not to mention the thing just ends, incredibly abruptly.

4 minutes ago, dogpoet said:

To answer this with something other than he who is not your bitch telling his fans to sit and spin, does anybody have a preference towards series that break down like this, where the books are self contained so that you can read other stuff in between and then pick up the thread again later, or series that have obviously been written as a single fat novel published in seperate chunks? Robert Jordan was far from the only guy who takes the latter approach after all: all of Gene Wolfe's series have been written to zip through the whole thing in one go (though mercifully he doesn't seem to expect you to go straight from one third of his meta-series to the next), and there's all sorts of Moorcocks, Tolkeins and game sharecrops that take that approach as well.

Who ? What ?

I just finished The Snail on the Slope by the Strugatsky's. I liked the two novels this essentally is, but am annoyed nothing ever got explained and that the two plotlines never converged.

A more in depth spoilery review at

http://theweirdandwonderfulblog.blogspot.cz/2018/03/the-snail-on-slope-by-arkady-and-boris.html

I can kinda see why, to be honest.

Finished reading Frederick Henri Seymour's Magus ye Sorcerer about a "warrior wizard" and adversary of Charlemagne. More written in the vein of a knightly romance, but nice overall and has an interesting weird introduction.

And The Torture Garden by Mirbeau. Nice and very horrific at times, though fairly light on any actual plot, most of the book being the description of walking through said Garden during one afternoon.

Will try to be more in depth about both later.

On 2/19/2018 at 6:56 PM, Christian said:

That story probably wouldn't be looked at in that askance a manner, even now, considering the shocking levels of attention that H.P. Lovecraft continues to gain by the year. Lovecraft went far beyond "worse case scenario" a number of times. Yet, not a year goes by since the second decade of the 21st century where you won't get, at least, a bi-monthly release of a new Lovecraftian-themed anthology.

Plus, I was at the book store over the weekend, and there were five different "complete works" of Lovecraft collections available on the shelves.

Sax Rohmer gets far too much attention for the Fu Manchu stories, and not anywhere near as much attention for his Golden Dawn-inspired occult fiction. He's written some quite good works, outside of the pulp-level Fu Manchu stories, but they don't get the attention that Rohmer deserves. Brood of the Witch Queen is truly a classic of occult fiction.

How's that Hedayat going by the way ? Would like to hear your opinions on it so I know if I should have a go at it.

Anyway I finished reading Geoffrey Bennett's This Creeping Evil today. You know, this

Sadly it's not as good as it should be, especially given the ending. Shameless plug for someone to maybe read my full review on my blog then:

http://theweirdandwonderfulblog.blogspot.cz/2018/02/this-creeping-evil-19501963-by-geoffrey.html

11 hours ago, dogpoet said:

Gotcha. I've been meaning to get around to reading that for years. Is there some ideologically unsound content in there, then?

Well there's two or three places where he is not very sensitive about the black factory workers, though not as bad as it could have ended up being in the worser case scenario, to be honest.

3 hours ago, dogpoet said:

Is that the '30s SF novel about an android army being grown as the ultimate weapon? I think Brian Aldiss was a great fan of that one.

Not android but artificial flesh monsters vs robots.

He also wrote the foreword for the reprint.

To be fair people do overdo this sort of thing a lot. I dunno what people would say about The Death Guard if it was more mainstream, especially in this climate.

I have just finished Sax Rohmer's Wulfheim, a rather fine, atmospheric little piece that I do not quite understand the general disinterest in.

My full review, riddled with spoilers and a heavy dose of grammatical errors as of yet uncorrected, can be found here.

http://theweirdandwonderfulblog.blogspot.cz/2018/02/wulfheim-1950-by-sax-rohmer.html

On 2/13/2018 at 8:07 PM, Christian said:

I'm reading The Blind Owl (originally published in 1937) by Sadegh Hedayat, who is considered the greatest writer in modern Iran.

The work is considered to be so nihilistic and depressing, that it's said that it can cause some readers to commit suicide.

Now, that's high praise, indeed. Although, considering some of the dark, dreary, hopeless books I've read in my time, I would assume that a reader would have to be pretty sheltered to decide to kill themselves after reading this novel.

I'll keep the forum updated if I'm thinking of doing myself in while reading through The Blind Owl.

I have that on my to read pile since recently, I'd like to know your thoughts so I could start it myself.

Finished The Road to Corlay the other day. Sadly do not have access to the other two books in the sequence but as a perhaps temporary standalone this book is very nice, though as such I would complain of not enough world building to quite satisfy my appetite for post apocalyptic mediavelism, a rare fruit indeed I take it among fantastic fiction.

This edition does in fact include "Piper at the Gates of Dawn" and that is probably the stronger of the two halves. The odd sf coma induced time-displaced telepathy in the main text comes rather out of left field and, though not terribly written I suppose, in this book at least it does not really amount to much and could have been omitted.

I am glad there is more to follow since there was definitely more that could be told here.

Now if only Internet Archive could manage to get the other two parts for online loan as well.

It took me about two weeks but I finally made it through Visiak's Medusa.

Below be my honest review of the damn thing and be warned, I think Wagner was once again being a doofus when he put this on his list of the absolute best Horror novels.

http://theweirdandwonderfulblog.blogspot.cz/2018/02/medusa-1929-by-e-h-visiak.html