The Old Curiosity Shop

Flow my Tears, the Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick

2012-02-04T09:33:00.003-07:00

"The exclusiveness of space, we've earned, is only a function of the brain as it handles perception. It regulates data in terms of mutually restrictive space units. Millions of them, trillions, theoretically, in fact. But in itself, space does not exist at all." (page 40)

"Do you now see what happened to Taverner? He passed over an universe in which he didn't exist. And we passed over with him because we're objects of his percept system. And then when the drug wore off he passed back again." (page 842)

"No nights are black enough for those that in despair their last fortune deplore." (page 736)

John Banville, La Notte di Keplero

2012-02-04T09:11:00.004-07:00

"Com'era innocente, com'era inutilmente amabile la superficie del mondo! Il mistero delle cose semplici lo assali'. Una festiva rondine sfreccio' attraverso una scompigliante folata di fumo di lavanda. Avrebbe piovuto di nuovo. gli giunse il suono di una corda pizzicata. Sorrise, in ascolto: era forse la musica delle sfere?" (p. 71)

"Cosa aveva guidato suo padre? Quali voglie impossibili si erano agitate e avevan dato calci dentro di lui? E che cosa? Il pestare di piedi durante le marce? il puzzo penetrante della paura e dell'attesa sul campo di battaglia, all'alba? il calore bruto e il delirio di qualche locanda lungo la strada? Era possibile amare la mera azione, il brivido di un fare incessante? Dinanzi ai suoi occhi tristemente meditativi ricomparve la finestra. Questo era il mondo: quel giardino, i suoi figli, quei papaveri. Sono una piccola creatura, il mio orizzonte e' ristretto. Allora, come una improvvisa inondazione di gelida acqua, venne il pensiero della morte, essa stringeva in pugno un mondo di spada arrugginita." (p. 108)

"Il cerchio e' il portatore delle armonie pure, le pure armonie sono innate nell'anima, e cosi' anima e cerchio sono una cosa sola. Che semplicita', che bellezza." (p. 192) "La ragione per cui certi rapporti producono un accordo ed altri una dissonanza non e' comunque da ricercarsi nella aritmetica, bensi' nella geometria ..." (p. 193)

2011-09-11T01:57:00.002-06:00

I fantasmi by John Banville

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

QUOTES:

"Non sono mai stato il tipo che venera la natura, eppure riconosco un certo valore terapeutico alla contemplazione dei fenomeni naturali; credo che abbia a che fare con l'indifferenza del mondo, voglio dire con il modo in cui il mondo non si interessa a noi, alla nostra felicita' o a come soffriamo, con il modo in cui si limita ad aspettare guardando in alto, borbottando tra se' in una lingua che noi non capiamo mai." (page 71)

"Quello che la interessava era la stessa cosa, che interessava me, ovvero ... ovvero che cosa? Come il presente nutra il passato, o versioni del passato. Come parti del tempo perduto riaffiorino repentinamente nel mare appannato della memoria, luminose e chiare e incredibilmente dettagliate, piccole isole compiute dove sembra sarebbe possibile vivere, seppure solo per un attimo." (page 151)

"... la teoria dei molti mondi e' la mia preferita. L'universo, dice, in ogni punto e in ogni istante si divide in miriadi di versioni di se stesso. ... Ciascuna direzione possibile, dice la teoria dei molti mondi, produrra' il suo universo, con all'interno le sue stelle, il suo sistema solare, il suo Plutone, il suo te e me ... In questa versione multiforme della realta' il caso e' una legge ferrea." (pages 176-7)

"Ecco dove vorrei vivere, su qualche dimenticata striscia di spiaggia sabbiosa, con la schiena alla terra, la faccia rivolta all'oceano sconfinato. Quella sarebbe liberta', guardare in solitudine i giorni passare, segnare le stagioni, osservare le maree di primavera e le aurore autunnali, superare il sole estivo e le bufere dell'inverno. Pura esistenza, pura esistenza e nient'altro." (page 206)

"Con quanta timidezza si dispongono porzioni casuali del mondo - un pezzo di cortile spiato dal vano di una porta di sera, nuvole che si accalcano in un angolo di finestra - come a dire: Guardaci! Noi significhiamo qualcosa!" (page 220)

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2011-07-19T11:59:00.001-06:00

Flight Training, Kibi and the Search for Happiness by J.Z. Colby

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

“Nec tu caelestem neque terrenum, neque mortalem fecimus,

ut tui ipsius quasi arbitrarius honorariusque plastes et fictor,

in quam malueris tute formam effingas”

Pico della Mirandola (Oratio de hominis dignitate)

“We have made you (Adam) a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal or immortal,

in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer”

(Oration on the Dignity of Man)

The quote that better describe Nebador book four (Flight Training) is:

“If Kibi - or any of you - … can’t learn to use your feelings as guides instead of masters, then you must like slavery more than you realize.” (page 27)

Five boys and girls, after being chosen as Ilika’s crew, have to grow up facing happiness (such as love stories, learn a lot of interesting stuff), and difficulties (growing up is always a sloping path).

“So … by passing those tests back at Doko’s Inn, I was applying for the hardest job in the whole … universe?” (page 69)

So Kibi understands which is the hardest job: not only the test per se, but becoming adult.

For the same reason Ilika suggests that “Going into space is pretty complicated, … Yes, it’s one of the biggest tests a civilization goes through before … growing up. For you five, it will mark the end of your lives as simple people from a little kingdom, and the beginning of your adventures in the vast universe.” (page 255)

We have made you a creature neither of sky nor of earth in order that you may, learning from your feelings and proud shaper of your being (sculptor - plaster, potter - fictor, painter - pictor), fashion yourself in the form you may prefer.

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2011-04-21T17:29:00.001-06:00

Joyner's Dream by Sylvia Tyson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Joyner’s Dream by Sylvia Tyson

published by HarperCollins Canada, 2010

Joyner’s Dream is a multi-generational story of a family bound by love of music, especially for a fiddle called Old Nick.

At the other side of the moon, the family struggle against a curse, or ‘Joyner’s malady’: a natural aptitude for thieving, and fate that deserves to the family a narrow path towards troubles.

The story begins in England in 1780; continues in Halifax, Nova Scotia, beginning of twentieth’s century; and eventually in Toronto, nowadays.

Each book’s chapter tells about a member of the family, who best shows the ‘marks’ of the family.

“As for myself, having been a diligent and enthusiastic collector of books since first I learned to read, it seems to me that there exists an overabundance of tales chronicling the lives of the high and mightily in which ordinary folk like us serve only as colourful backdrop, comic bumpkins or faithful retainers.”

Another theme of Joyner’s Dream is the strong desire in the family’s members to create a history of the family, beyond the chains that tie them to the ‘ordinary folk’.

In other words a desire for a continuum that could be destroyed by the fate intended for this family. Although it is clear from the start that it is in vain.

In my opinion Joyner’s Dream needs a good work of screaming, many parts are described just as a list of events while other parts are very gripping for the readers.

Beth Joyner and George Fitzhelm’s stories are the best of the book: both are living human beings (beyond the paper); because they accept, they fight, with and against the family’s dark side. The History, in these two chapters, is not just glued to the characters as in other chapters, but comes together with Beth and George’s stories.

Who is interested, can listen to Joyner’s Dream’s songs on Amazon.com.

I received this free e-book from NetGalley.

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2011-04-17T10:45:00.001-06:00

Mushishi, Vols. 8/9/10 by Yuki Urushibara

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Volume 8

THE MILK OF THE VALLEY

Ginko is rescued by a man under the influence of mushi. The man works day and night without rest. The parents of the man had found a pond of milk when they were poor and without nothing to drink.

The mushi who transforms the blood in milk is called Chisio: it “forces the host in sleepless work gathering nourishment for it. And Chisio builds its own strenght.” (page 43)

The man: “My body … is what it became by drinking my mother’s blood.” (page 42)

THE BOTTOM OF WINTER

“On the mountain in late winter …

when are heard …

low-pitched, tiny, murmuring sounds …

quickly and all at once …

the mushi of spring awaken.” (page 49)

This time the mushi is called Oroshibue: “the whistling sound of a cold mountain wind in winter.” (page 218) Oroshibue helps the mountains with the winter’s migration.

Ginko notices that “the mountain is … closed off.” (page 60), it seems that the mountain is going to die. “The winter mushi can’t migrate?” (page 61)

But Ginko found that the Koki are healing from their wounds inside the bog, so the mountain wasn’t going to die.

Koki is nutrition for Oroshibue, so it steals from Ginko his Koki

and eventually “Winter fails. The mountain laugh. The fields are dressed in rich green.

THE HIDDEN CHANNEL

The title refers to those water channels that are hidden by the trees and greenery.

A girl and her friend are bound each other: they know their thoughts without talking.

Ginko: “There is a deep channel between you and that person.” (page 94)

“They say there are paths that nobody can see … (paths) between the minds of people.” (page 95)

“What causes this … are mushi that are working at our command. Kairogi (waterways) … that’s what they’re called.” (page 96)

SUNSHOWERS

A girl forecast the coming of the rain.

The girl: “I only came to foretell the coming of the rain. Do you think any human has the power to make it rain?” (page 143)

A mushi called Amefurashi: “ Normally they float in the sky. … But … as sunny days continue and the air begins to lose its moisture … they come close to the earth … and take the form of runaway water.” (page 169)

Ginko tells to the girl that the mushi Amefurashi is inside her: “stealing the moisture away from your body. They rise into the sky and gather the rain above you.” (page 170)

The girl: “Then I’ll find a spot on Earth … and plant some roots. … I’ll walk with the rain … and like the clouds … I’ll drift along.” (page 175)

THE MUD WEEDS

A brother kills his own brother, but mushi …

“They’re mushi that take the corpses of animals and breaks them down until they’re the consistency of mud.

When a living thing steps into the mud, it spreads the spores around.” (page 182)

Volume 9

THE FINAL BIT OF CRIMSON

A child takes the body of another child, when she is old remembers of the other child and wants to go ‘home’.

“Just about dusk … especially when there’s a sunset like today’s … She says ‘going home’ … and she tries to leave the house.” (page 10)

“Something gets sucked out of the world at sunset … and something else appears. There’s a creature called Omagadoki.

The people who get sucked in by it … see the form of a shadow with non one to cast it.

And if that shadow is stepped on or somehow comes underfoot … they are bodily sucked in by the Omagadoki, and are exchanged for someone else.” (page 26)

THE WHIRLWIND

Ginko is traveling on a ship when he hears a boy whistling: the boy is calling Torikaze to make wind and move the ship.

Torikaze means bird wind.

Ginko already knows this mushi called Torikaze, so he tells to the boy not to whistle a night.

Inadvertently the boy whistle during the night, so doing he recalls another mushi called Yobiko.

Yobiko: “They build nests by making holes in the rocks on the sea-shore. The wind blows through the holes making a whistling sound, and they gather at the sound.” (page 72)

Yobiko first causes the sinking of the ship; and after, at home, the boy is followed by Yobiko that makes holes everywhere.

Ginko intervenes and acts as the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

STARS IN THE JAR OF THE SKY

A child could be kidnapped, so her parents ask for help to Ginko. Ginko thinks that the child, although invisible, is living in the house.

The child, attracted by the stars sparkling in the well, has fell into it. “... crystal clear water … where an infinite number … of stars live.” (page 134)

“the source of life called the light flow … hits the well … and sparks are created.” (page 136)

The child falling in the wall has gone to the other side of the sky and can not come back.

ACQUAMARINE

A mushi called Uko lives in the body of a child. He has webbing on his hands.

Uko “infect the corpses of people who have drowned in the water. … they can revive the person.” (page 148)

“... the sea, the river … the rain and the clouds … are all the same?” (page 185)

The story tells about the liaison between mother and his child. An ancestral element, the water, explains the origin of life and the connections between living being.

The mother: “You’re here. I can find you everywhere.” (page 186)

THE BED OF GRASS

This story tells about Ginko as a boy.

“The master is the personification of the ‘nature’ of things.” (page 204)

Ginko can not become the master of nature, he can just live inside the nature.

“The entire world as a whole … is your home.” (page 204): Ginko is immersed in a bed of grass.

Volume 10

THE THREAD OF LIGHT

Ginko had saved a baby wrapping him with a special clothes. Because of that, the baby grew up strong and incapable to control himself. The clothes is made of a special thread: only mothers can see this special thread. It shows the bond between mothers and sons.

“That thread is what we mushishi call Yoshitsu.” (page 36) Yoshitsu means fairy-stuff.

The mother inadvertently picks up Yoshitsu from the baby, but suddenly the baby looses vitality. The father of the baby prefers to separate the baby from his mother.

So Ginko has to save the boy draining Yoshitsu from him, but the medicine doesn’t work.

The last chance is the mother of the boy: only the mother can see the thread, and free the boy from Yoshitsu.

THE ETERNAL TREE

A man ate a seed that looked like a plum. But it was a mushi called Satorigi (means: understanding tree). When the man finds a Japanese cedar cut down, he walks on the tree’s roots and seems his feet turned into the wood.

Satorigi shelters inside trees, when it senses the tree is in danger, Satorigi gives off a flower and after a fruit. Inside that fruit is stored all of the tree’s memory.

“... a tree stood on this land. And spread its branches high and wide. And without change, it quietly watched over … the ever changing creatures that were born and died beneath it.” (page 97)

THE SCENTED DARKNESS

“Night. Suddenly you’re hit by the smell of flowers … and it brings back the thread of a memory.” (page 99)

A man is victim of a Kairo, it’s a mushi “that puts out a smell like flowers to lure in bugs … it takes the creatures, it traps and put them into a strange loop of time.” (page 131)

The man repeats infinitely his life’s story.

The story suggests the idea of life as circle, or just acceptance of the temporary (Wabi).

DROPS OF BELLS

Ginko meets a girl who he thinks is a master of nature.

After some time Ginko meets a man: he is the girl’s brother. The man explains to Ginko: she “... had grass growing from her head from the day she was born.” (page 166)

In the mountains there are ‘fertile places’ called ‘light flow’. (page 175)

“in such places, the mountains need a ‘master’ to take care of things. … Those who have been chosen to be masters … are born with … grasses growing out of their bodies.” (page 175)

Ginko: “Now … I’d better be on my way.” (last page - ‘Curtain closes’)

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2011-04-12T17:58:00.000-06:00

Shibumi by Trevanian

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“It was ironic to realize that the destruction of the world would not be the work of Machiavelli, but of Sancho Panza.” (page 137)

Shibumi (1979) is a novel written by Trevanian (Rodney William Whitaker).

Nicholai Hel, the main character, was born in Shanghai. His mother is a deposed member of the Russian aristocracy. Nicholai’s adoptive father, Kishigawa, is a general in the Japanese Imperial Army. Kishikawa teaches to Nicholai about the concept of Shibumi.

Shibumi (noun) - Shibui (adjective): one doesn’t tire of a shibui object but constantly finds new meanings and enriched beauty.

“Shibumi has to do with great refinement underlying commonplace appearances. … Shibumi is understanding, rather than knowledge. Eloquent silence. … In philosophy, where shibumi emerges as wabi, it is spiritual tranquility that is not passive, it is being without the angst of becoming … And in the personality of a man, it is … Authority without domination?” (page 77)

Wabi-sabi represents a Japanese point of view, or aesthetic: the main principle is about the acceptance of the temporary.

When Kishikawa has to join the Japanese army in Manchuria, Nicholai becomes the pupil of a master of Go. So Nicholai learns to play Go.

“Go is to western chess what philosophy is to double-entry accounting.” (page 165)

Kishigawa is captured by the Russian, to avoid the trial Nicholai kills his adoptive father. Soon Nicholai is captured by the Americans and held in jail, where he is tortured.

During his imprisonment Nicholai retains his sanity studying the Basque language. In jail he also develops a sense of proximity: he manages to feel people near him, although in darkness.

After three years Nicholai gains freedom becoming a spy in the US Intelligence Service. Nicholai asks for the names of those who tortured him as payment for his service .

Nicholai becomes a skillful killer, and in his fifties he retires in the mountain of the Basque country, living with his mistress, Hana, in a shibui way.

Nicholai becomes an expert in caving, accompanied by his best friend Le Cagot.

“This most primitive nightmares involve falling through the dark, or wandering lost through mazes of alien chaos. And the caver - crazy being that he is - volitionally chooses to face these nightmare conditions. That is why he is more insane than the climber, because the thing he risks at every moment is his sanity.” (page 235)

Nicholai’s existence is interrupted by the arrival in his castle of Hannah, the niece of a man who saved Nicholai’s life.

Hel, Hana, and Hannah: three hs, surrounded by another h: hate. And facing hate, shibumi; or, better, they are side by side.

Although Shibumi resembles a spy story by John LeCarre`, the background and suggestions of the story expand the espionage ambit, such as fights between powerful organizations.

Trevanian tells also about ways of life (shibumi), cultural anthropological (Basque People), and Anti-Americanism sentiment (Nicholai leaves Japan, protesting against Westernization of Japan; remembering the same idea of Yukio Mishima).

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2011-04-11T07:47:00.001-06:00

The Final Summit: A Quest to Find the One Principle That Will Save Humanity by Andy Andrews

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

David Ponder is an ordinary old man who is summoned by the archangel Gabriel to lead a meeting.

“With a serious nod, Gabriel began:

- You are at a turning point, he said

- You, the human race, are balanced on a precipice, and He is not pleased. … now the Travelers are being convened with an opportunity to avoid what seems to me, the inevitable.” (page 32-3)

The most influential leaders of the past history are gathered around a table to discuss ‘the one principle that will save humanity.’

“What does humanity need to do, individually and collectively, to restore itself to the pathway to ward successful civilization?” (page 71)

The Travelers in charge for the Answer are: Winston Churchill, Joan of Arc, Abraham Lincoln, Eric Erickson, King David, George Washington Carver, and Joshua Chamberlain.

The Final Summit is my first reading of Andy Andrews, so my opinions about this book could be incomplete.

I was disappointed since the start of the book because, although the ingredients were ‘high level’, the result is poor.

Reading the praise for The Final Summit, I was expecting a story stuffed with ideas, suggestions, and quotations from historical characters.

I was also expecting a bit of fantasy.

The style of the book suggests the idea kind of brainstorming meeting for insurances’ sellers, so motivational purposes are far from this book. The final answer ‘that will save humanity’ seems hanging over there, and so …

It is not just double-entry accounting.

I advise to reread hagiographies books, where ‘examples’ and suggestions comes from real life.

Booksneeze has provided me with an Arc of this book.

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Thoughts and quotes: Selection by J.Z. Colby

2011-03-25T16:16:00.001-06:00

Selection by J.Z. Colby

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

“We will often get to do wonderful things.” (page 281)

Selection is the third book of Nebador series where we read an important passage in the life of Ilika’s students: he decides about who will become his ship’s crew. The choice comes without many troubles, because it is expected so by the students.

The Ilika’s ‘brand new’ crew stops learning pedibus scarpantibus and the sky becomes the classroom.

“The whole universe is like a huge college, and everyone is always learning new things.” (page 77)

So from the sky comes the northern light or aurora borealis teaching to the students an universal law: humankind as infinitesimal part of the universe, although wonderful things are waiting for us.

Eventually a mention to Tera, the donkey: “Tera’s heart beat a little faster deep in her chest from all the attention and kind words. She sensed that some kind of change was about to happen to her people, but didn’t know what or why. However, she clearly felt drops of water fall onto her thin summer coat during that hour, and knew it wasn’t raining.” (page 150)

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Thoughts and quotes: tHE sHADOW oVER iNNSMOUTH AND tHE hAUNTER OF tHE dARK by H.P. Lovecraft

2011-03-25T15:57:00.003-06:00

The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories:
THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH and THE HAUNTER OF THE DARK
by Howard Phillips Lovecraft
Penguin Classics (1999), Paperback, 448 pages

The Shadow Over Innsmouth (November - December 1931) tells of the village of Innsmouth, where lives a hybrid race: half-human and half-fish/frog. Lovecraft resumes Dagon’s myth of the god fish.
The narrator arriving by bus at Innsmouth is facing a deserted city and mostly in ruins. The Innsmouth’s people are fish-like head: the so called ‘Innsmouth look’.
The only normal person is the grocery’s clerk, who informs the narrator about the city and a man, named Zadok Allen, who is known as a good source of information.
Zadok tells to the narrator a story of fish-frog men, they live beneath the sea. These men, called the Deep Ones, help the humans bringing them fish and jewelry in exchange of human sacrifices.

Zadok Allen: "Hey, yew, why dun't ye say somethin'? Haow'd ye like to he livin' in a taown like this, with everything a-rottin' an' dyin', an' boarded-up monsters crawlin' an' bleatin' an' barkin' an' hoppin' araoun' black cellars an' attics every way ye turn? Hey? Haow'd ye like to hear the haowlin' night arter night from the churches an' Order o' Dagon Hall, an' know what's doin' part o' the haowlin'? Haow'd ye like to hear what comes from that awful reef every May-Eve an' Hallowmass? Hey? Think the old man's crazy, eh? Wal, Sir, let me tell ye that ain't the wust!" (page 306)

The narrator is forced to spend the night in Innsmouth, and during the night he hears people talking and forcing his room’s door; he manages to escape from a window.

After some time from the nightmare in Innsmouth, the narrator starts researches into his family tree, discovering …

“In the winter of 1930-31, however, the dreams began. … Great watery spaces opened out before me, and I seemed to wander through titanic sunken porticos and labyrinths of weedy Cyclopean walls with grotesque fishes as my companions …
I was one with them …” (page 333)

THE HAUNTER OF THE DARK

The Haunter of the Dark (November 1935) is a short story of the Cthulhu Mythos. The Haunter is an entity living in a church, and it is described as an incarnation of Nyarlathotep (a malign deity in the Cthulhu Mythos).
An ancient artifact, known as Shining Trapezohedron, is used to summon a being from the depth of time and space.
Professor Enoch Bowen discovered the Shining Trapezohedron in Egyptian ruins, although made of alien material.
Members of the Shining Trapezohedron’s cult awaken the Haunter of the Dark by gazing into the glowing crystal.

“Before his eyes a kaleidoscopic range of phantasmal images played, … the thought of ancient legends of Ultimate Chaos, …” (page 354)

Nyarlathotep comes from the chaos, and he shows other worlds, and the secrets of arcane knowledge.

“I am on this planet.” (page 359) (maybe!)

2011-03-04T09:23:00.000-07:00

Nightmare Alley by William Lindsay Gresham

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“... we come like a breath of wind over the fields of morning.

We go like a lamp flame caught by a blast from a darkened window.

In between we journey from table to table, from bottle to bottle, from bed to bed.

We suck, we chew, we swallow, we lick, we try to mash life into us like an am-am-amoeba …” (page 242-3)

Nightmare Alley (1946) is set in a carny where Stan Carlisle works.

The book is structured in twenty-two chapters, the same number of the Major Arcana: they are the Tarot cards used by the fortune-teller. Each chapter is named from the name of the cards. Gresham does not follow the order of the Major Arcana, but shuffles the deck, following an order bonded to Stan’s life.

In the first pages Stan is staring at a geek, a ‘wild man’ in a carny who bites the heads off live chickens.

The young Stan wants to leave behind himself, in every way, this way of life symbolically shown by the geek.

Stan is a pride man as well described in the following passage: “How helpless they all looked in the ugliness of sleep. A third of life spent unconscious and corpselike. And some, the great majority, stumbled through their waking hours scarcely more awake, helpless in the face of destiny. They stumbled down a dark alley toward their deaths.” (page 59)

Stan begins his social climbing by seducing the fortuneteller Zeena. His objective is to learn Zeena’s secrets of a mind-reading system. When Stan becomes master of the mind-reading, he leaves Zeena and escapes with Molly, another girl of the carny.

Stan’s pride helps him to become The Great Stanton: admired as the sun (the Tarot’s card: “The Sun: On a white horse the sun child, with flame for hair, carries the banner of life.” (page 115)

Stan’s performances introduce him in the high society, where, with the help of another woman, a psychologist, Stan tries to fool an industrialist ‘resurrecting’ his girlfriend.

But as always the sun burns if you are too close to it: Stan’s nightmare, every day the same, becomes reality: “To the left was an alley, dark, but with a light at the other end of it. … And behind him the heavy splat of shoes on cobbles. He raced toward the light at the end of the alley, but there was nothing to be afraid of. He had always been here, running down the alley and it didn’t matter; this was all there was any time, anywhere, just an alley and a light and the footsteps spanging on the cobbles but they never catch you, they never catch you, they never catch you …” (page 259)

Stan becomes aware of the impossibility to change his destiny: the geek, the nightmare, are always at the end of the alley, waiting for him.

The web surrounding Stan is built with feel of guilt, pride, and uncontrollable desire to repeat, endless, the same nightmare in the same alley.

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2011-03-01T18:34:00.001-07:00

The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories:
THE WHISPERER IN THE DARKNESS
by Howard Phillips Lovecraft
Penguin Classics (1999), Paperback, 448 pages

Akeley: “Do you realise what it means when I say I have been on thirty-seven different celestial bodies-planets, dark stars, and less definable objects - including eight outside our galaxy and two outside the curved cosmos of space and time?” (page 255)

The Whisperer in the Darkness (February - September 1930, soon after the Planet Pluto’s discoveries) refers to Cthulhu Mythos, although the main theme concerns the Migo, an extraterrestrial race of fungoid creatures.

The story is narrated by Albert Wilmarth, an instructor of literature at Miskatonic University in Arkham.

During a flood in Vermont, strange things are seen floating in rivers. Wilmarth starts a debating on newspapers, and although he is skeptical about the floating things in Vermont, he uncovers old legends about monsters living in the Vermont’s hills.

Henry Wentworth Akeley, a farmer living in Vermont, learns of Wilmarth from the local newspaper and he writes to him affirming that he has proof about an extraterrestrial race of monstrous living in Vermont hills. Akeley writes that the monstrous don’t menace the human race, they only hire human agents as spies.
Akeley’s first letters describe the attacks of the monstrous at his farm.
Eventually he decides to meet the extraterrestrials (but is he truly Akeley, or someone else?), so he writes to Wilmarth that they are a peaceful race and they have taught him about marvels beyond all imagination.
Akeley invites Wilmarth to his farm.

“Mad or sane, metamorphosed or merely relieved, the chances were that Akeley had actually encountered some stupendous change at once diminishing his danger - real or fancied - and opening dizzy new vistas of cosmic and superhuman knowledge. … to be linked with the vast outside - to come close to the nighted and abysmal secrets of the infinite …” (page 237)

Wilmarth arrives finding Akeley immobilized in a chair. Akeley, whispering in the darkness, tells to Wilmarth that the extraterrestrial have extract his brain, so to permit him a travel in the outer space.

“I knew enough now. It must indeed be true that cosmic linkages do exists - but such things are surely not meant for normal human beings to meddle with.” (page 257)

2011-02-28T19:32:00.001-07:00

The Skin Map by Stephen R. Lawhead

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“The most incomprehensible thing about the world, is that it is comprehensible” Albert Einstein

“Do you know that Einstein is wrong, and that certain objects and forces can move with a velocity greater than that of light? With proper aid expect to go backward and forward in time, and actually see and feel the earth of remote past and future epochs” (The Whisperer in the Darkness by H.P. Lovecraft)

London’s rain and thunderstorms change Kit Livingstone’s life. Not because he gets sick, but because of the power of nature that reveals to Kit the ‘unpredictable’ laws of physics.

Telluric energy flows are mapped since centuries, and they are known as ley lines: pathways to other worlds.

So the adventure starts: Kit meets his great-grandfather, who tells him about the ley lines and the possibilities of time-slip (only backwards) and body travels.

“... the possibilities are endless. Your friend could be anywhere or anywhen.”

“Anywhen?”

“Moving from one world or dimension to another, you inevitably travel in time as well.” (page 40)

Kit’s great-grandfather needs him to find the Skin Map, that has been separated into five pieces.

The Quest of the Bright Empires involves many characters, places, and epochs.

Kit Livingstone and his girlfriend Wilhelmina.

Kit’s great-grandfather, Cosimo and his friend Sir Henry.

Arthur Flinders-Petrie, the first ‘owner’ of the Skin Map.

Lord Burleigh, the villain of the story; who, as every villain, is present in every epoch of the Skin Map’s search.

The locations and epochs: ancient and nineteenth century Egypt, Prague during sixteenth / seventeenth century, China when the Portuguese inhabit Macao (seventeenth century), London contemporary and in the year 1666.

Lawhead with the ploy of the ley lines has written an historical fiction book, where the History is presented as a whole. So The Skin Map is recommended for readers of historical fiction, but also for whom is interested in physic laws or, better, Quantum Mechanics. Of course, The Skin Map is not a textbook about quantum mechanics, it is a book of fiction; but as quantum mechanics has opened new horizons in the physic’s field, The Skin Map could open, and in my opinion this is Lawhead’s main idea of the introductory book of the series, new understanding of reality, and unpredictable: everywhere and everywhen.

“The Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics says that different editions of us live in many worlds simultaneously, an uncountable number of them, and all of them are real. …

Quantum physics is stranger than science fiction.” (The Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav, page 96) (See also Many-Worlds interpretation of Schroedinger Cat’s paradox).

“And then?” - asked Lady Faith

“We wait” (page 370)

We have to wait until September for Quest the Second: The Bone House.

BookSneeze has provided me with a complimentary copy of this book.

View all my reviews

Thoughts and quotes: The Colour Out of Space by H.P. Lovecraft

2011-02-25T18:02:00.002-07:00

The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories:
THE COLOUR OUT OF SPACE
by Howard Phillips Lovecraft
Penguin Classics (1999), Paperback, 448 pages

“It is not because of anything that can be seen or heard or handled, but because of something that is imagined.” (page 170)

The Colour Out of Space (March 1927) is narrated by an unnamed surveyor from Boston. He is looking for a place where to build a new reservoir.
Surveying a rural area he comes across a patch of land. The surveyor’s feelings are of angst, so he hurries to go on.
Curiosity grows in the surveyor, he asks for information and talks with an hermit, Ammi Pierce.
Ammi tells to the surveyor an horrific story: in June 1882 a farm, run by Nahum Gardner and his family, was hit by a meteorite containing a substance of an indescribable colour.
“It was just a colour out of space …” (page 199)

Lovecraft in The Colour Out of Space quotes two painters: Salvator Rosa and Johann Heinrich Fuessli.
Both painters probably had been source of inspiration for Lovecraft: Salvator Rosa for his landscapes, overgrown wilderness, mountains swept by wind, haunting vistas.
Johann Heinrich Fuessli’s paintings suggesting of the supernatural.

Thoughts and quotes: Un Bel Morir and The Tramp Steamer's Last Port of Call by Alvaro Mutis

2011-02-22T18:32:00.004-07:00

The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll (New York Review Books Classics):
UN BEL MORIR and THE TRAMP STEAMER’S LAST PORT OF CALL
by Alvaro Mutis
NYRB Classics (2002), Paperback, 768 pages

UN BEL MORIR
(or Un bel morir una vita honora from Francesco Petrarca
A Beautiful Die a Lifetime Honor)

‘I imagine a Country, a blurred, fogbound Country, an enchanted magical Country where I could live.
What Country, where? …
Not Mosul or Basra or Samarkand. Not Karlskrona or Abylund or Stockholm or Copenhagen. Not Kazan or Kanpur or Aleppo. Not in lacustrian Venice or chimerical Istanbul, not on the Ile-de-France or in Tours or Stratford-on Avon or Weimar or Yasnaia Poliana or in the baths of Algiers.’ (page 286)

The Gaviero takes lodging in La Plata and finds a room in the house of a blind woman. Under his room, the river: ‘The room resembled a cage suspended over the gently murmuring, tobacco-colored water …’ (page 193)
Quiet living is not for the Gaviero, so he is hired to transport supposed railway materials upriver. The job turns out to be very dangerous, and ‘His wide-open eyes were fixed on that nothingness, immediate and anonymous, …’ (page 294)

The Gaviero’s question, where ‘I could live?’, has only one answer: everywhere, and always with water (a river or the ocean) which faces and leads to another place.

THE TRAMP STEAMER’S LAST PORT OF CALL

Alvaro Mutis tells about his ‘meetings’ with a dying tramp steamer, the Halcyon, all around the world.
‘The tramp steamer entered my field of vision as slowly as a wounded saurian. I could not believe my eyes. With the wondrous splendor of Saint Petersburg in the back ground, the poor ship intruded on the scene.’ (page 301)

The tramp steamer as a talking soul suggests to Alvaro Mutis about ‘the world of dreams and fantasy’.
But ‘Life often renders its accounts, and it is advisable not to ignore them. They are a kind of bill presented to us so that we will not become lost deep in the world of dreams and fantasy, unable to find our way back to the warm, ordinary sequence of time where our destiny truly occurs.’ (page 302)

The bill is presented to Alvaro Mutis in form of the Halcyon’s captain; who recounts his love affair with Warda, and the Halcyon.

Warda is the sister of Abdul Bashur, close friend of the Gaviero.
Abdul Bashur warns the Halcyon’s captain: ‘What you two (Warda and the captain) have will last as long as the Halcyon.‘ (page 349)

Alvaro Mutis needed to know Halcyon or the idyllic time of the past.

Thoughts and quotes: Mushishi, Volume 7 by Yuki Urushibara

2011-02-18T17:55:00.002-07:00

Mushishi, Volume 7
by Yuki Urushibara
Del Rey (2009), Paperback, 240 pages

LOST IN BLOSSOM

‘You silently withstand blizzard …
You silently overflow with beauty …
You silently …
steal life away to thrive yourself.’ (page 3)

Lost in Blossom tells about a woman alive for hundreds of years drinking a sap from a sakura (cherry tree). ‘There’s something living in this tree. It’s a mushi called Kodama, and it’s taken the form of froth.’ (page 16) The tree lives longer than the normal tree of its kind, and Kodama can also give people long life and beauty.

‘They say that a soul resides in ancient tree that have withstood the ages. And it is the soul that captures the heart of man.’ (page 47)

THE MIRROR IN THE MUCK

‘There’s a mushi called Mizukagami that lives in stagnant water.’ (page 59) When the image of an animal reflects on the surface of a lake that contains Mizukagami, it mimics the animal’s shape and step by step replaces the animal. But Mizukagami lacks of blood and flesh, so it disappears when its image reflects itself: a mirror, or the eyes of a human being.
A mushi version of The Portrait of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde.

AT THE FOOT OF LIGHTNING

Shoraishi is a mushi living in the atmosphere, eating lighting; sometimes the larva of Shoraishi falls to earth and enters the human body through the belly button. This time Shoraishi has chosen a child whose mother doesn’t love him.
Mushi seems to intervene as a Trojan Horse in the life of mother and son. Mushi doesn’t change the relation itself, with Ginko’s help it shows a different point of view of the same problem. So Ginko asks to the mother: ‘You never … looked at his actions that way before, did you?’ (page 128)

THE RAGGED ROAD

‘It is the Ragged Road. It is the path that mushi travel to come above ground. It is the eye that links the worlds of the mushi to our world.’ (page 159)
Ragged roads are paths filled with trees and shrubs. When someone leaves you and there are trees or shrubs around, that one is watching you from the shadows of the leaves.

P.S.
Ginko should meet a mushi called David Bowie.

Thoughts and quotes: The Rescue (Guardian of Ga'hoole, Book 3) by Kathryn Lasky

2011-02-17T19:01:00.002-07:00

The Rescue (Guardians of Ga'hoole, Book 3)
by Kathryn Lasky
Scholastic (2004), Paperback, 208 pages

‘Six strong, quick witted owls about to fulfill a destiny, they had indeed become a band of owls who would rise into the blackness …’ (page 168)

Dreaming of the past, ‘Once upon a very long time ago, in the time of Glaux there was an order of knightly owls, from a kingdom called Ga'Hoole, who would rise each night into the blackness and perform noble deeds.’ (page 18)

Today, Eglantine, Soren’s sister, is back, but at the same time Ezylryb has disappeared.

‘Soren, Gylfie, Twilight, and Digger could not imagine anything worse, anything more brutal than St. Aggie’s. But the Barred Owl had told them differently. There was something far worse.’ (page 51)
The band, Soren, Gylfie, Twilight, Digger, Octavia, and Eglantine, are ready to start the rescue of Ezylryb.
The first clue comes to the band from The Rogue Smith of Silverveil, a female snowy owl who works as blacksmith not attached to any kingdom in the owl world. The Rogue Smith reveals important information about the past of Ezylryb, and Metal Beak.
‘Metal Beak … thought any owl who was not a Tyto Alba was a little less than completely pure … before we could become true members of that Way of Purity, we had to sleep in stone crypts with the bones of the old Tytos that they called the Purest Ones. (pages 139-140)

Eglantine helps the other members of the band to find the castle where many questions about Ezylryb, Metal Beak, and the world of the owls would find some answers.

And the humans (the Others)?
- Oh, you know about the Others do you?
- Did you know that not only did they not have wings or feathers, but that they had two long sticks for legs that were just for walking.
- How did they get along?
- Not that well, apparently. (page 92)

Thoughts and quotes: The Call of Cthulhu by H.P. Lovecraft

2011-02-17T13:33:00.002-07:00

The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories:
THE CALL OF CTHULHU
by Howard Phillips Lovecraft
Penguin Classics (1999), Paperback, 448 pages

The Call of Cthulhu (1926) is written in a documentary style, in three parts. The narrator recounts his discovery of notes written by his granduncle George Gammell Angell.

The narrator, among the notes, finds a bas-relief sculpture. It shows an octopus, or a dragon, or a human caricature. Henry Anthony Wilcox, who based his work on dreams of great Cyclopean cities, is the author of the sculpture. Wilcox’s dreams happened in March, April 1925, and during the same time in every angle of the world there were cases of group folly.

‘The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity … but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality … that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.’ (page 139)

The second part of The Call of Cthulhu, is The Tale of Inspector Legrasse: Legrasse assists at a meeting of people venerating a statuette, and repeating:
‘In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.’
Legrasse, as police inspector, arrests some people and takes the statuette. The statuette has close resemblances with Wilcox’s bas-relief.

‘Those first men formed the cult around small idols which the Great Ones shewed them; idols bought in dim aeras from dark stars. That cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume this rule on earth. The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild beyond good and evil.’ (page 155)

‘the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any man, and who came to the young world out of the sky.’ (page 153)

The Madness from the Sea is the third part of The Call of Cthulhu. The narrator after reading the notes, investigates on Cthulhu Cult. Casually he reads an article about a derelict ship with only one survivor, Gustav Johansen.
The narrator reads in a diary written by Johansen that they have been attacked by another ship; eventually they have defeated the attackers and sailed toward an uncharted island.
‘The thing cannot be described - there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order.’ (page 167)

About the Joshi’s note regarding an obvious Lovecraft’s reference to Nietzsche, the editor quotes Lovecraft: ‘let me state clearly that I do not swallow him (Nietzsche) whole.’ The note is referred to the Nietzsche’s idea of morality, beyond evil and good. Although I agree with Joshi about morality, I’d like to suggest interesting connections between Lovecraft and Thus Spake Zarathustra by Nietzsche.

‘Some day he would call, when the stars were ready and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him.’ (page 154)

Thoughts and quotes: The Paris Wife by Paula McLain

2011-02-16T17:17:00.003-07:00

The Paris Wife
by Paula McLain
Bond Street Books (2011), Hardcover, 336 pages

‘Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know’
Ernest Hemingway

Hadley Richardson is the Paris wife of Ernest Hemingway. She is his first wife and they lived mostly in Paris during 1920s.
Paris in 1920s is the center of literary world, when the so-called Lost Generation shows its apex.
‘We could walk into any cafe` and feel the wonderful chaos of it, ordering Pernod or Rhum St. James until we were beautifully blurred and happy to be there together.’ (page xi)

Paula McLain writes an absorbing book from Hadley’s point of view, with some insertions from Hemingway’s thoughts (in italic characters).

The couple struggles to survive with no money, and especially Hemingway’s will to become a writer.
Just after their marriage, Hadley’s doubts about her ‘collocation’ in Hemingway’s life is increasing.
‘I wasn’t at all convinced I was special, as Ernest was. He lived inside the creative sphere and I lived outside, and I didn’t know if anything would ever change that.’ (page 107)
Actually Hemingway was one of the few writers to whom life is a link for books, and the contrary; the stories come to Hemingway from real life, and he lives his real life always on the border between life and death, where life shows its power. At the beginning of Hemingway’s career, when he is with Hadley, that objective is very far but Hemingway already knows it.

McLain, almost until the first Hadley and Hemingway’s journey in Spain, shows respect and fear, writing about Hemingway. That could be McLain’s choice of Hadley as a weak character, but the reader’s feeling are different: it seems mostly McLain’s fear to write, although indirectly, about Hemingway.
The Paris Wife improves when Hadley and Hemingway life changes with the first books’ success, although it means a change also in the marriage: ‘It was the end of Ernest’s struggle with apprenticeship, and an end to other things as well. He would never again be unknown. We would never again be this happy. The next day we boarded a train back to Paris.’ (page 195)

I recommend this book to Hemingway’s fans: it’s better than a biography, although less ‘feral’, vitalistic, than Hemingway’s books.

PAULA MCLAIN was born in Fresno, CA in 1965.
She received her MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan in 1996, and since then has been a resident at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony (a community of artists where they can work in peaceful surrounding, some notable names: Leonard Bernstein, Jonathan Franzen, Alice Sebold, etc.).
She is the author of two collections of poetry, a memoir Like Family (Little Brown, 2003), and one previous novel, A Ticket to Ride.
Paula McLain lives in Cleveland, OH with her family.

Review: The Festival, He, and Cool Air by H.P. Lovecraft

2011-02-10T17:02:00.002-07:00

The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories:
by Howard Phillips Lovecraft
Penguin Classics (1999), Paperback, 448 pages

The Festival

The Festival (October 1923) is considered to be one of the first of Cthulhu Mythos.
During Yuletide (a winter festival celebrated by Germanic people, and later absorbed into Christian celebration) an unnamed narrator is going to Kingsport, Massachusetts.
The narrator comes at his relatives’ house where he meets an old man. The old man tells the narrator to wait a few moments in a room. The narrator picks up a book from a pile: the Necronomicon.

At the sound of a clock bell the narrator goes outside the house and follows a crowd of cloaked figures.
The people is going to a great white church, where they engage in a Yule-rite.

‘It was the Yule-rite, older than man and fated to survive him; the primal rite of the solstice and of spring’s promise beyond the snow; the rite of fire and evergreen, light and music. … But what frightened me most was the flaming column; … For it all that seething combustion no warmth lay, but only the clamminess of death and corruption.’ (page 115)

Lovecraft suggests the idea of ‘the survival of some clan of pre-Aryan sorcerers who preserved primitive rites those of the witch-cult … that … had its origin in a pre-Aryan race that was driven underground but continued to lurk in the hidden corners of the earth.’ (from the explanatory notes, page 385)

He

He (August 1925) tells the story of an unnamed narrator who has moved to New York.
One night the narrator meets a man, who is wearing eighteen’s century clothes, and offers to show him the city.

Eventually the narrator follows the man at his home, where he learns about the true face of New York: he sees visions from the past and the future with flying creatures and mutated people.

‘I never sought to return to those tenebrous labyrinth, nor would I direct any sane man thither if I could. Of who or what that ancient creature was, I have no idea; but I repeat that the city is dead and full of unsuspected horrors.’ (page 129)

These were Lovecraft impressions of New York.

Cool Air

Cool Air (March 1926) is another story written during Lovecraft’s journey to New York.
The narrator is looking for an apartment for rent in New York. He finds one where, upstairs, lives a doctor, Dr. Munoz.
One day the narrator suffers a heart attack and he is rescued by Dr. Munoz.
As the acquaintance goes on, the narrator learns about Dr. Munoz’s obsession: he keeps his apartment at a vey low temperature (13° C) using a refrigeration system.

Problems occur when the refrigerator’s pump breaks down.

Dr. Munoz, after death, has preserved his body for eighteen years helped by the cold. The narrator is witnessing Dr. Munoz’s body decay, caused by the warm.

A technologically (refrigeration system) version of The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar by E.A. Poe.

Review: Ilona Comes with the Rain by Alvaro Mutis

2011-02-10T08:26:00.002-07:00

The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll:
Ilona Comes with the Rain
by Alvaro Mutis
NYRB Classics (2002), Paperback, 768 pages

Ilona comes with the rain, and goes with the fire.

‘Somewhere in his soul he bore the mark of the defeated that isolated them irremediably from other men.’ (page 105)

The adventures (and misadventures) of Maqroll this time are set in Panama City.
As always in Maqroll’s life, when the bottom is very close, he meets an old friend, Ilona: so Maqroll’s adventures start again.

Maqroll and Ilona start a business of ‘stewardesses’. After a while, of course, they become bored of this way of life and also another woman, Larissa appears to remind them about finitude of life.

Maqroll’s adventures are always mixed with the idea of humankind without borders, distances, as a world waiting for this character to start running its soul.

Review: Mr. Humphreys and his Inheritance by M.R. James

2011-02-05T18:34:00.002-07:00

More Ghost Stories:
Mr. Humphreys and his Inheritance
by M.R. James
Edward Arnold & Co. (1911)

Mr. Humphreys has inherited a property from an uncle: ‘neither the property nor the uncle had he ever seen.’ (page 219)
Mr. Cooper, the property’s bailiff, has gone to the train station to pick up Mr. Humphreys.
Soon after arriving at the house, Mr. Humphreys and Mr. Cooper start an exploration of the property. Mr. Humphreys enters into the maze or labyrinth, where he finds a strange sundial. But the first impression is wrong, instead of a sundial on the top there is a stone column with a metal globe engraved with figure of the patriarchs of evil.

The dessecretion of the maze follows a series of strange events.

When Mr. Humphreys is tracing a maze’s plan, he finds a dot or a hole on the plan:
‘An ugly black spot about the size of a shilling. Ink? No.
It resembles a hole, but how should a hole be there? …
It seemed to go not only through the paper, but through the table … and through the floor below that, down, and still down, even into infinite depths.’ (page 269) and ‘far, far down there was a movement, and the movement was upwards - towards the surface. … waving black arms prepared to clasp the head that was bending over them.’ (page 270)

Quid multa?

I didn’t believe in ghosts, not until I became one.

Review: Martin's Close by M.R. James

2011-02-05T12:44:00.001-07:00

More Ghost Stories:
Martin’s Close
by Montague Rhodes James
Edward Arnold & Co. (1911)

- Madam, will you walk, will you talk with me?
- Yes, sir, I will walk, I will talk with you.

The narrator has to visit some land in the West. He is accompanied by the estate handy-man John Hill.
The rector of the parish where there are the properties, tells to the narrator to inquire about Martin’s Close.
During the visit the narrator asks to John Hill about Martin’s Close: the story of this bit of land concerns the murder of a young woman, Ann Clark by George Martin.

George Martin ‘was troubled before his cruel action come to light by the young woman spirit.’ (page 174)

The narrator finds a report of Martin’s trial by Judge Jefferies.

The story that follows tells about the trial’s last days. Accordingly to witnesses ‘Ann Clark was seen after the 15th of May (murder’s day), and that, at such time as she was so seen, it was impossible she could have been a living person.’ (pages 190-1)

‘And prey, what came out (from the cupboard), a mouse?’ (page 199)

Review: The Rats in the Walls by H.P. Lovecraft

2011-02-05T11:17:00.002-07:00

The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories:
The Rats in the Walls
by Howard Phillips Lovecraft
Penguin Classics (1999), Paperback, 448 pages

‘They must know it was the rats.’ (page 108)

A descendant of Delapore’s family is the narrator of The Rats in the Walls (1923). He has recently moved from Massachusetts to England.

The narrator and his cat, named Nigger-man, hear noises of rats scurrying behind the walls.
Looking for the rats he discovers ‘a subterraneous world of limitless mystery and horrible suggestion.’ (page 105) The narrator’s family raised human cattle building an underground city.

Eventually the narrator attacks a friend and eats him. He is locked in a mental institution, claiming his innocence and telling that were the rats in the walls to eat his friend.

A gift from Lovecraft to Edgar Allan Poe.

Review: The Shipwrecked Men by Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca

2011-02-05T09:57:00.001-07:00

The Shipwrecked Men (Penguin Great Journeys)
by Alvar Nunez Cabeza De Vaca
Penguin Classics (2007), Paperback, 160 pages

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (ca. 1492 – ca. 1560) was a Spanish explorer.
He took part in the 1527 Panfilo de Narvaez expedition to explore Florida.
Became famous writing in 1542 The Report, or The Shipwrecked Men. Six hundred men and five ships was reduced to four people.

Cabeza de Vaca’s story of the journey is brief but tells to the readers many important facts related to the first knowledge of the New World. Cabeza de Vaca’s point of view is not the usual of the conqueror, but like one of a modern anthropologist: accepting the people with their way of life, without judging or trying to change something.

Although there are several theories about the exact route of Cabeza de Vaca’s journey, it is known that they travelled across Dominican Republic, Cuba, Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Mexico City where they have been rescued.

‘Since the lodges afforded so little shelter, people began to die, and five Christian quartered on the coast were driven to such extremes that they ate each other, until but one remained, who, being left alone, had no one to eat him.’ (page 50)

Review: The Snow of the Admiral by Alvaro Mutis

2011-02-05T09:08:00.001-07:00

The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll:
The Snow of the Admiral
by Alvaro Mutis
NYRB Classics (2002), Paperback, 768 pages

The Snow of Admiral is the diary of Maqroll’s journey on Xurando` river towards a sawmill.
Everything is real but could be otherwise: as Don Quixote and the windmill, or the quest for Dulcinea.

Metaphysical question, and some answers:
‘The best thing is to let everything happen as it must. That’s right. It’s not a question of resignation. Far from it. It’s something else, something to do with the distance that separates us from everything and everybody. One day we’ll know.’ (page 45)

‘How many wrong turning in a labyrinth where we do everything we can to avoid the exit, how many surprises and then the tedium of learning they weren’t surprises at all, that everything that happens to us has the same face, exactly the same origin.’ (page 62)

‘A woman’s body under the rush of a mountain waterfall, her brief cries of surprise and joy, the movement of her limbs in the rapid foam that carries red coffee berries, sugarcane pulp, insects struggling to escape the current: this is the exemplary happiness, that surely never comes again.’ (page 17)

Eventually Maqroll comes to the sawmill:
‘And again, in the fading afternoon light, the enormous metal structure was surrounded by a golden halo that made it look unreal.’ (page 70)

Review: The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral by M.R. James

2011-02-05T09:01:00.002-07:00

More Ghost Stories:
The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral
by Montague Rhodes James
Edward Arnold & Co. (1911)

Dr. Black is cataloguing the Barchester’s Cathedral library, when he discovers a box containing some fifty year old diaries.
The diaries concern the death of Dr. Haynes, a former Archdeacon of the Cathedral.

During winter time Dr. Haynes is alone in the cathedral’s apartment, because his sister’s health doesn’t allow her to stay.
Dr. Haynes diaries tell of ordinary events, but soon after the main theme of the diaries are the noises of cats in the cathedral (although Dr. Haynes has never owned a cat).
‘The hall and the staircase seemed to be unusually full of what I can only call movement without sound.’ (page 157)

Has a carved figure on the stalls of Barchester Cathedral something to do with these noises?

Review: Casting the Runes by M.R. James

2011-02-03T14:04:00.002-07:00

More Ghost Stories:
CASTING THE RUNES
by M. R. James
Edward Arnold & Co. (1911)

Warning: before to write a book’s review, read Casting the Runes (You could change idea!).

The runic alphabet, developed from the Etruscan, was used in northern Europe from third to seventeenth century.
In magical practice ‘casting the runes’ means send curses through slip of paper in runic letters.

Karswell is a writer of alchemy and witchcraft books. When somebody refuses to review or submits a negative one about his books, the reviewer’s fate is marked.

‘The obvious course was to find a match, and also to consult his watch: he might as well know how many hours of discomfort awaited him.
So he puts his hand into the well-known nook under the pillow: only, it did not get so far.
What he touched was, according to his account, a mouth, with teeth, and with hair about it, and, he declares, not the mouth of a human being.’ (page 112)

Review: The Tractate Middoth by M.R. James

2011-02-03T08:20:00.002-07:00

More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary:
THE TRACTATE MIDDOTH
by M. R. James
Edward Arnold & Co. (1911)

Mr. John Eldred is looking for a book in a library. The book is Tractate Middoth from the Talmud. A library assistant, Mr. Garret, helps Mr. Eldred to find the book, but a man is reading the Tractate:

‘It looked to me dry, and it looked dusty, and the streaks of hair across it were much less like hair than cobwebs.’ (page 58)

Mr. Garrett is shocked from the reader of the Tractate and he is forced to stay at home. Before Mr. Garrett returned to work at the library, the librarian wanted that he takes a week’s rest. Mr. Garrett leaves for a village on the sea.

In train he met a landlady, Mrs. Simpson and her daughter. Mrs Simpson had apartments empty at that season, so Mr. Garrett decides to take one.
An evening, during their talk, Mrs Simpson is very interested in Mr. Garrett’s job as librarian. The Simpson’s decide to ask for help to Mr. Garrett: the women have to find a book where inside could be the will of their uncle. The only clue is a number that sounds familiar to Mr. Garrett: it is the number of the book that Mr. Eldred was looking for. Another interesting clue for Mr. Garrett is that Mr. Eldred is Mrs. Simpson’s cousin.

Mr. Eldred is the first to find the mysterious book, but when he is searching for the will in the book:
‘something black seemed to drop upon the white leaf and run down it, and then as Eldred started and was turning to look behind him, a little dark form appeared to rise out of the shadow behind the tree-trunk and from it two arms enclosing a mass of blackness came before Eldred’s face and covered his head and neck.’ (page 79)

The story has a good plot and M.R. James is a master to insert the ghost’s passages only when needed, so to keep the reader’s curiosity high.

Review: The Baron by Katherine Mansfield

2011-02-03T08:14:00.001-07:00

In a German Pension:
THE BARON
by Katherine Mansfield
Dodo Press (2005), Paperback, 112 pages

In a German Pension contains thirteen short stories written by Katherine Mansfield after she visited Germany.

The Baron (1910)

A young lady is fascinated by a mysterious German baron.

‘I imbibe nourishment in my room.’ (page 14)
or Sic transit gloria German mundi (Thus passes the glory of the German’s world),
or When you don’t know, you could imagine everything.

Review: The Temple by H.P. Lovecraft

2011-02-03T08:08:00.001-07:00

The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories:
THE TEMPLE
by H. P. Lovecraft
Penguin Classics (2001), Paperback, 464 pages

The Temple (1920) is narrated as a found manuscript written by Lieutenant Commander in the Imperial German Navy, Altberg and during WWI.
The manuscript describes the last days of Altberg and his U-boat before sinking at the bottom of the ocean.
After defeating a British freighter, Altberg and his crew find a dead body with a strange piece of carved ivory in his pocket. One of Altberg’s officers keeps the object, but soon after a series of unexplained accidents occurs.
Altberg survives after his crew, but he doesn’t manage to con the U-boat and lands at the bottom of the ocean.
Altberg discovers that he is surrounded by the remains of an ancient city: Atlantis?

Lovecraft spoils this story when he describes Altberg’s germanophile feeling.
‘But the story is significant in postulating an entire civilization antedating humanity and possibly responsible for many of the intellectual and aesthetic acievements of humanity.’ (from explanatory notes by S.T. Joshi, page 374)

Review: The Music of Erich Zann by H.P. Lovecraft

2011-01-31T09:00:00.001-07:00

The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories:
THE MUSIC OF ERICH ZANN
by H. P. Lovecraft
Penguin Classics (2001), Paperback, 464 pages

The Music of Erich Zann was written December 1921.
An university student rents an apartment in an almost empty building. Another tenant of the building is an old German man named Erich Zann.
Erich is mute and plays melodies ‘never heard before.’ Erich tells to the student that he has discovered sounds of an otherworldly nature. But Erich’s main reason to play these melodies is to keep back from his window unknown creatures looking ‘illimitable blackness.’

‘Then I remembered my old wish to gaze from this window … It was very dark, but the city’s lights always burned, and I expected to see them there amidst the rain and wind. Yet when I looked from the highest of all gable windows, looked while the candles sputtered and the insane viol howled with the night-wind, I saw no city spread below, and no friendly lights, gleaming from remembered streets, but only the blackness of space illimitable; unimagined space alive with motion and music, and having no semblance to anything on earth.’ (page 51)

Lovecraft can hear from the space without end the planet’s motion: a music indescribable with words.

Review: A School Story and The Rose Garden by M.R. James

2011-01-31T08:51:00.002-07:00

More Ghost Stories:
A SCHOOL STORY and THE ROSE GARDEN
by M.R. James
Edward Arnold & Co. (1911)

A School Story

‘Si tu non veneris ad me, ego veniam ad te’
(If you don’t come to me, I’ll come to you) (page 13)

Two men were talking of their school days, especially concerning ghost stories.
During Latin grammar lessons, Mc Leod stops thinking, maybe feeling something strange coming from the teacher, Mr. Sampson.
One night Mc Leod is watching at the professor’s window: ‘there was a man sitting or kneeling on Sampson’s window-sill … beastly thin … looking around and whispering as if he hardly liked to hear himself.’ (page 15)
The next day Mr. Sampson was gone.

The Rose Garden

Quieta non movere
or Are ghosts noisy?

Mr. Anstruther and his wife are talking about their rose garden, he disagrees with his wife because the spot is not very nice: there are shrubs, and it is not sunny. Eventually Mrs. Anstruther makes sure that her husband starts the job.
A previous owner of the estate, Miss Wilkins, visits Mrs. Anstruther; they talk about the rose garden. But when Mrs Anstruther is telling to Miss Wilkins her project, the latter thoughts ‘were evidently elsewhere.’ When Miss Wilkins and his brother Frank were children, he disappeared for a while and reappeared on the bench of the rose garden. Frank had been asleep and he had had ‘a very odd disjointed sort of dream.’ Frank was in a court for a trial, and after he was walking towards the gallow. ‘He never saw much of what was around him, but he felt the scenes most vividly.’ (page 30)

The same night, Mr. Anstruther had had the same dream.

‘Mrs. Anstruther … was sure some rough had got into the plantation during the night.
- And another thing, George: the moment that Collins is about again, you must tell him to do something about the owls.’ (page 35)

Are ghosts among us? or are they just owls?

Review: The Anvil Stone by Kathleen Cunnigham Guler

2011-01-28T17:36:00.002-07:00

The Anvil Stone (Macsen's Treasure, Book 3)
by Kathleen Cunningham Guler
Bardsong Press (2006), Hardcover, 416 pages

‘Death to you. Two sons of the North or two of the White Dragon. Your choice. Beware … Excalibur.’ (page 373)

Marcus ap Iorwerth follows his dream to unite Britain and fights Saxon’s threat. Marcus is helped by his wife Claerwen, who foresees the future with what is called ‘fire in the head’.

‘The light burst inside Claerwen, firing magnificent and hot and raging, and from its center she saw a hand ran up through the water’s surface. It was the woman of the lake’s hand, and her graceful, slender fingers clutched a sword’s hilt as sure as strong as any warrior’s. The blade, long and slightly tapered, was forged of fine steel; the hilt, pommel and cross-guard of brilliant, chased gold. Light radiated from it …’ (page 92)

Rival fractions fight each other to impose a new king on Britain, they are also searching another piece of Macsen’s Treasure: the sword Excalibur. Uther, present king, already holds parts of Macsen’s Treasure: the crown, the spearhead, and the torque; but Excalibur is waiting for the new king: Arthur.

Marcus gets injured, so follows a long exile and separation from Claerwen.
Eventually many mysteries are revealed, but Arthur is still a boy …

The Anvil Stone also fights against an enemy: Arthur’s legends and hundreds of books already written about his adventures (legend or truth).
Arthur and Excalibur are the winners.
King Arthur lived in the early sixth century, according to legends he defended Britain from the invaders Saxons. Legends and history tells a story where magic is important and necessary.
The Anvil Stone lacks of magic, fantastic scenery, supernatural events.
Myrddin (or Merlin the Enchanter) spreads a bit of fantastic on Marcus’s life, but insufficient to bear an entire book (it comes at the end of the story): ‘He will be the light that comes out of the darkness. You (Marcus) are a blacksmith. You know of dark and light, fire and iron.’ (page 401)

Marcus and Claerwen’s story is a thoughtful passage of their life. They clarify each other of previous fears, nightmares, dreams.
Marcus’ dark side (Iron Hawk) is unveiled when his past is narrated to Claerwen.
Claerwen: ‘Is this your true nature? Is the disdain for killing just a mask to hide it, a nature you won’t admit to himself except through the Iron Hawk?’ (page 369)

Review: Number 13 and Count Magnus and The Treasure of Abbot Thomas by Montague Rhodes James

2011-01-27T12:07:00.002-07:00

Ghost Stories of an Antiquary:
NUMBER 13 and COUNT MAGNUS and THE TREASURE OF ABBOT THOMAS
by Montague Rhodes James
Ayer Co Pub (1977), Hardcover, 270 pages

NUMBER 13

‘His back was now to the door. In that moment the door opened, and an arm came out and clawed at his shoulder.’ (page 143)

Mr. Anderson, narrator’s cousin, went to Denmark engaged upon some researches into the history of Danish church. He stays in an inn where the room number 13 is missing. Returning to his room, Mr. Anderson notices that the door refuses to open, he hears some noises in the room: ‘He had tried the wrong door, of course. … He glanced at the number: it was 13.’ (page 120) Finally, entering in his room number 12, it ‘seemed to have contracted in length …’ (page 121)
The landlord confirms to Mr. Anderson that the number 13 room had never existed, but a contract concerning these extraordinary phenomena is discovered: a professor sold himself to ...

COUNT MAGNUS

Mr. Wraxall wants to write a book about Scandinavia. He learns about an important collection of family papers belonging to the proprietors of an ancient manor-house in Vestergothland.
The earliest owner of the manor was Magnus de la Gardie, buried in the church’s mausoleum. Mr. Wraxall becomes interested in Count Magnus, especially because he had been on the Black Pilgrimage and had brought ‘something or someone back with him.’
‘Just at that instant … I (Mr. Wraxall) felt a blow on my foot. Hastily enough I drew it back, and something fell on the pavement with a clash. It was the third, the last of the three padlocks which had fastened the sarcophagus (Count Magnus’). I stooped to pick it up, and - Heaven is my witness that I am writing only the bare truth - before I had raised myself there was a sound of metal hinges creaking, and I distinctly saw the lid shifting upwards. … I was outside that dreadful building in less time than I can write.’ (page 175)

THE TREASURE OF ABBOT THOMAS

‘it’s perfectly safe in the daytime.’ (page 243)

The story tells about a hidden treasure of Abbot Thomas. Mr. Somerton is interested in Abbot Thomas’ treasure and discovers that the secret has to be found somewhere in the window. Abbot Thomas himself had placed the window illustrating Job Patriarcha, Johannes Evangelista, and Zacharias Propheta.
Mr. Somerton deciphers the meaning of the series of letters written on the window. But there is also a warning: Gare a qui la touche.
‘Then I heard him call softly: All right, sir; and went on pulling out the great bag, in complete darkness. It hung for an instant on the edge of the hole, then slipped forward on to my chest, and put his arms round my neck.’ (page 264)

M.R. James’ character are always quiet teachers who become actors in supernatural events. James usually doesn’t tells who is the ghost, and he doesn’t explain the causes of the events.
James accompanies the readers by hand towards these irrational phenomenons.
It’s worth reading M.R. James for his excellent style and grammar, maybe coming from his Latin’s study (he was a medieval scholar).

‘I found myself at Steinfeld as soon as the resources of civilizations could put me there.’ (pages 254-5)

The best story is The Treasure of Abbot Thomas, followed by Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad; The Mezzotint.

Review: The Ash-Tree by M.R. James

2011-01-25T17:54:00.001-07:00

Ghost Stories of an Antiquary:
THE ASH-TREE
by Montague Rhodes James
Ayer Co Pub (1977), Hardcover, 270 pages

‘It will be long, I think, before we arrive at a just estimate of the amount of solid reason - if there was any - which lay at the root of the universal fear of witches in old times.’ (p.85)

The Ash-Tree (1904) tells of Sir Richard Castringham who has just inherited a house, and an ash-tree.
Richard’s ancestors Sir Matthew condemned a woman to death for witchcraft. After that, the house has been cursed, but the real problem is the ash-tree.

James writes a ghost story about an ash-tree for many reasons, mainly connected with legends, superstitions, that tells of ash-trees.
Upon ash branches witches could fly; venomous animals don’t take shelter under an ash-tree; ash seedpods are used in divination; people don’t cut ash-trees for construction lumber: the houses could catch fire.

Review: The Hound by H.P. Lovecraft

2011-01-25T17:24:00.001-07:00

The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories:
THE HOUND
by Howard Phillips Lovecraft
Penguin Classics (1999), Paperback, 448 pages

‘Madness rides the star-wind …
claws and teeth sharpened on centuries of corpses …
dripping death astride a Bacchanale of bats from night-black ruins of buried temples of Belial.’ (p.88)

The Hound was written by H.P. Lovecraft in 1922.
This short story has been influenced by many important books: A Rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans; Vathek by William Beckford; and Edgar Allan Poe.

The narrator and his friend St.John are interested in robbing graves. They have set up a museum in their basement: headstones, skulls, a portfolio bound in tanned human skin.
One day the narrator and his friend learn about a cemetery in Holland where a former grave robber has been buried, several centuries before.
Reaching the cemetery they notice a barking giant hound. Both start digging finding a coffin, inside the coffin they are surprised to find a corpse still intact. Hanging from the corpse’s neck there is a jade amulet: it is one mentioned in the forbidden book Necronomicon.
‘Necronomicon … the ghastly soul-symbol of the corpse-eating cult of inaccessible Teng, in Central Asia.’ (p.84)
They return home and strange sounds (the hound?) can be heard in their house.
St.John is killed by an unknown creature.
The narrator wants to stop the curse and return to the Holland cemetery, discovering … the amulet is hanging from the neck of the former grave robber.

Review: The Rest is Illusion by Eric Arvin

2011-01-25T17:13:00.002-07:00

The Rest is Illusion
by Eric Arvin
Port Jervis, NY : Young Offenders Media, 2010.

‘The moon’s brightness made the creek below resemble a forgotten cobbled road leading to some ancient and terribly important place. A place out of which myths are born. A place where the feeling of new experiences never dies, never exhausts or extinguishes, where the passion for truth is enmeshed in the very notion of life.’ (page 99)

The Rest is Illusion tells the story of a tree, watching a river and witnessing the story of Dashel.
Dashel is grabbing the last days of his life, and his friends Sarah, Ashley, Tony, and ‘Wilder’ are jumping the last obstacles so to reach adulthood.
The ancient Celts venerated trees as font of wisdom, hope, and imagine of the cycle of life / seasons. So The Rest is Illusion tells the relation between Nature, also as weather, physical universe, life, and people wanting to hear about magic, helped by Nature.

Eric Arvin could have written the usual coming of age tale, but he has preferred magic’s help. The characters find comfort close to the tree and its surroundings, and Nature give them advises through magic.

I didn’t like: the end of the story, kind of life goes on; Wilder’s character is depicted too many times; some dialogs say more than once the same concept.

A note, page 127: Giacomo Puccini’s title opera is Gianni Schicchi, and not Scacchi (chess). An aria from this opera is quoted ‘O mio bambino caro’ (Oh my dear child), instead of ‘O mio babbino caro’ (Oh my dear daddy). Maybe the correct quoted aria is coherent with the character of Sarah Coheen and her father’s relation.

Review: Hop-Frog by Edgar Allan Poe

2011-01-23T10:50:00.001-07:00

Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe:
HOP-FROG
by Edgar Allan Poe
Doubleday (1966), Hardcover, 832 pages

Hop-Frog (1849) was originally published with the title Hop-Frog: Or, the Eight Chained Ourangoutangs.
The story tells about the court jester Hop-Frog, a dwarf. Both Hop-Frog and his best friend Trippetta are slaves of an unnamed king. The king decides to hold a masquerade, Hop-Frog suggests realistic costumes of orangutans, and they have to be chained together implying a massive escape from the zoo.
Hop-Frog is seeking revenge because the king has mistreated Trippetta.
During the masquerade Hop-Frog attaches a chain from the ceiling that is linked to the chain around the men in costume. Trippetta pulls the chain so all the men are hanging above the hall. Hop-Frog wants to identify the men so he climbs up and holds a torch, but soon the costumes catch fire.
Hop-Frog and Trippetta escape to their home country.

A first analysis: Poe writing Hop-Frog seeks revenge on a personal enemy.
A second point of view: the idea of a crime without guilty, the criminal is a dwarf or in The Cask of Amontillado a man with a costume, and the orangutans: fears, monstrosities, deformities. Evil is bond with ugly, so we can separates crime from honest, just watching at.
But Poe could indicates a path towards a different idea: those associations are easy, too easy. Why not?
But all stopped on a sidewalk of Baltimore.

Review: The Cries of Vampira by Sean H. Robertson

2011-01-23T10:41:00.002-07:00

The Cries Of Vampira: The Horror Of Gaad Grey, The Evil Alpha Werewolf - Volume 1
by Sean H. Robertson
CreateSpace (2010), Paperback, 82 pages

The Cries of Vampira is a fantasy story set in Scotland in the twelfth century, and concerns two clans fighting each other: the Robertsons, who lived at the Dunalastair Castle, Royal vampire homeland Vampira and a secret werewolf horde: the Grey Wolves.

The narration’s style is simple, for instance in each dialog the name of the character is always recalled. This kind of narration reminds of fairy tales for children.

The title could get confusion in the readers because The Cries of Vampira is not a vampire story, where usually vampires bite humans.
In this story many roles are inverted: vampires are good people living among humans and sometimes they have saved humans.

The Cries of Vampira improves through the narration, so hopefully book two could earn more than three stars.

Review: Herbert West - Reanimator by H.P. Lovecraft

2011-01-21T18:20:00.002-07:00

The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories:
HERBERT WEST - REANIMATOR
by Howard Phillips Lovecraft
Penguin Classics (1999), Paperback, 448 pages

‘They knew, indeed, that West had been connected with activities beyond the credence of ordinary men.‘ (p.76)

Herbert West - Reanimator contains six short stories narrated by West’s friend from the years of medical school until West’s disappearing.
Lovecraft wrote these short stories between October 1921 and June 1922. He tells for the first time of zombies.

From the Dark
West and his friend / narrator met in medical school, and the last one is fascinated by West’s theories about dead bodies that could be restarted. ‘Holding … that all life is a chemical and physical process, and that the so-called “soul” is a myth …” (p.51)
After several attempts to restart a dead body, they manage with a fresh corpse. Hearing an inhuman scream West and his friend have to flee: ‘vaulting madly into the starred abyss of the rural night.’ (p.54) ‘... burst the most appalling and daemoniac succession of cries that either of us had ever heard. Not more unutterable could have been the chaos of hellish sound if the pit itself had opened to release the agony of the damned’ (p.54)
The Plague-Demon
A typhus epidemic breaks out and although West and the unnamed narrator are not allowed to dissect human cadavers, they are called to help the dying victims. West injects his serum in each body, but without appreciable results. Dean Halsey, chief of the university dissection lab succumbs to typhoid; so West steals his corpse. After the injection, Halsey reanimates but becomes violent.
West: ‘Damn it, it wasn’t quite fresh enough!’ (p.60)
Six Shots by Midnight
West and the narrator purchase a house near the town’s cemetery (of course!). They also buy a corpse of a black boxing champion. West injects the serum but nothing happens, so he and the narrator bury the corpse.
A child is missing and parts of his body reappears at the West’s door house: the courier is the black boxing champion (Ups?).
The Scream of the Dead
The narrator after a visit to his parents, returns to the house who shares with Herbert West. The latter shows to his friend a corpse perfectly preserves. West explains that he has invented an embalming fluid and he has waited the narrator’s return to reanimate the corpse. They manage to reanimate the corpse but before dying again, the corpse screams revealing an horrible truth.
The Horror from the Shadows
Five years after the last reanimation, West has joined the army in the WWI. West means to procure bodies for his experiments. West befriends another medic sharing with him his theories about reanimation. After a while West’s new friend is killed: the body is decapitated. West injects the serum in the trunk and in the head, so the head begins to speak, telling the last moment of his life.
The Tomb-Legions
Herbert West-Reanimator’s last story tells about zombies as we know from movies.
West and his friend return from WWI and move into a house which is directly connected to an ancient system of catacombs. West reads in a newspaper an article telling a series of strange events involving a man with a wax head. This man is West’s friend from WWI, he seeks revenge helped by other zombies.
Zombies come out from the catacombs and take West with them. ‘Detectives have questioned me (the narrator), but what can I say?’ (p. 80)

Review: Nebador: Journey by J.Z. Colby

2011-01-20T13:27:00.004-07:00

NEBADOR Book Two: Journey
by J. Z. Colby
Nebador Archives (2010), Paperback, 312 pages

‘What are your lessons about?
The students looked at each other, they all said at once, Everything!’ (p. 74)

The adventures of Ilika and his nine students continue: after escaping the city where the students were tested, the countryside awaits them.
The countryside challenges them: trust, happy and sad discoveries, love affairs, and they become aware that the journey is one way.
At the end of the book, coming to a mountain pass the group faces their past: from this high point of view, like a rite of passage, a step towards adulthood has been conquered.
‘Ilika was very proud of all his students. Each had, in his or her way, wrestled dragons to help solve their first serious trigonometry problem.’ (p. 269)

Colby chose trigonometry instead of dragons, vampires, etc. to talk to young adult. Is it a good choice? In part I think so, maybe the first book, The Test, narrated with an atmosphere of mystery (medieval city, monasteries, bracelet) grip the reader to the book better than Journey. Journey needs a bit of ‘taste’ of dragons.

‘- I wonder if I’ll have stories someday - Misa pondered out loud.
- Someday, you’ll be able to tell the story of the fire. … Sometimes they’re a little painful at first, but at time passes, they get easier to tell. Stories are like that.’ (p. 243)

Review: The Big Splash by Kit Marlowe

2011-01-19T18:15:00.003-07:00

The Big Splash
by Kit Marlowe
Noble Romance Publishing, LLC (2010), Kindle Edition

The Big Splash (2010) is a short story written by Kit Marlowe, an English professor who writes historical romances.
London 1929, Jazz Age and people who like living superficially, or, better, immersed in a glass of Martini.
Constance Wynne Hare, walking on velvet carpet (meaning that the word ‘concerns’ does not belong to her vocabulary), has men eager to throw themselves at her feet. After an afternoon of dancing, in the last pages of the story, similarly an act in a play (Commedia dell’arte), and acting the love triangle: he (Mr. Wood), she (Constance), and the other (Mr. Granville), Constance has finally a chance of wonderful news for her mother.

The story is funny, vibrant, but sometimes lacks of Jazz.

Review: Lost Hearts and The Mezzotint by Montague Rhodes James

2011-01-19T18:09:00.002-07:00

Ghost Stories of an Antiquary:
LOST HEARTS and THE MEZZOTINT
by Montague Rhodes James
Ayer Co Pub (1977), Hardcover, 270 pages

‘it’s a funny thing to me how them marks and scratches can ‘a’ come there -
too high up for any cat or dog to have made them,
much less a rat … ‘ (p.42)

Lost Hearts (1904) by Montague Rhodes James.
The orphaned Stephen moves to the house of his uncle Abney.
Stephen soon discovers that the house is haunted by two ghostly children: a gypsy boy and an orphaned girl.
Stephen also discovers that his uncle is obsessed with the idea of immortality.
Is there a connection between the two ghosts and uncle Abney?

The Mezzotint (1904) is a classic ghost story.
Mr. Williams is employed in a museum, and his attention is to enlarge its collection of English topographical drawings. Mr.Britnell is a publisher of art’s catalogue, he asks Mr. Williams to buy an ‘Interesting mezzotint’. Mr.Williams, although interested, wonders why the mezzotint is so expensive.
Watching the mezzotint:
‘- But there’s just one other thing.
- What?
- Why, one of the windows on the ground floor, left of the door is open.
- Is it really so? My goodness! he must have got in.’ (p.69)

Ghosts wandering between the yard and the house in a picture, jumping on a window.

Review: The World Above the Sky by Kent Stetson

2011-01-18T17:32:00.002-07:00

The World Above the Sky
by Kent Stetson
McArthur & Company Publishing, Ltd. (2010), Paperback, 400 pages

I received this free e-book from NetGalley.

‘And the soul of the world was the sea.’ (p.ix)

Six Worlds and three parts / acts:
First part: Eugainia St Clare Delacroix, living Holy Grail, is escaping to the New World from her old husband, Lord Ard. Fleet commander is Prince Henry Sinclair, Eugainia’s protector, who has a objective: the Templar dream of establish a new Arcadia. The party reaches the Atlantic coast of Canada but soon a battle starts against the Skrelings (indigenous people of North America and Greenland).
Second part: the party becomes friend of two indigenouses: Mimkitawo’qu’sk, a young man and chief; and his aunt Keswalqw. Most of the second part tells of the love story, terrestrial and celestial, between Eugainia and Mimkitawo’qu’sk.
Third part: Eugainia and Mimtikawo’qu’sk, after living alone for a while, come back to the village. The party, reunited, starts the search for the Holy Grail, but a fleet is coming from the sea …

The World above the Sky is bonded to a legendary Venetian document published in 1558. Nicolo` and Antonio Zeno, Venetian navigators, wrote a series of letters and maps, called the Zeno’s maps. The Zeno’s describe a voyage of exploration, throughout the North Atlantic, under the command of a Prince named Zichmni (associated to Henry Sinclair). Henry Sinclair was a Scotland’s Earl of Orkney in the late 1300. The legend says he made land in the Canadian Maritime one century before Columbus, although Zeno brothers’ document tells that he landed in Greenland and not in Canada.
Zeno’s legend is the background of The World above the Sky.
Accordingly to Stetson: ‘no one owns tales, nephew. Only the Creator. Maybe we taught them, long ago. Maybe they taught us, long ago. No matter. So long as we learn we live. I should say their tale is similar to our tale. Not exactly the same. Similar.’ (p. 65)

I liked the first and last part of the book.
The second part, unfortunately the longest, suggests an idea of inaction. Maybe Stetson’s idea was to give the impression of Humans bond to action and Gods to inaction. Or maybe an unhappy reconsideration of a play in a novel.
The Sturm und Drang of the first part is fascinating for the high style of narration, like epic stories, and reminding, of course, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival.
In the last part when other Europeans are coming to land in the New World, Stetson ‘invents’ to stop the world, so to prevent the landing. The solution comes from Jules Verne’s A Journey to the Center of the Earth; but apart from the connection between the books, I found
this part enjoyable.

I don’t recommend this book for a general audience, it is enjoyable for readers of epic story and literature written in high style.

Useful the last pages of the book with the Pronunciation Guide and Mi’kmaq Dictionary.

‘It will comfort you to know we’re all subject to folly. No one truth shapes and re-revises every mote and twitch of the living cosmos: nothing, small or large, is set in stone. Chaos rules. Order emerges, brief and impermanent. Revision is endless; certainty breeds contradictions; peace depends upon war; night exists not to counter the day alone, but to reveal the stars, which mimic the working of the waking mind.’ (p. 144)

Review: Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book by Montague Rhodes James

2011-01-16T16:47:00.001-07:00

Ghost Stories of an Antiquary:
CANON ALBERIC’S SCRAP-BOOK
by Montague Rhodes James
Ayer Co Pub (1977), Hardcover, 270 pages

‘They were in the sitting-room of the house, a small, high chamber with a stone floor,
full of moving shadows cast by a wood-fire that flickered on a great heart.’ (p.13)

Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book was first published in 1904, although it was written in 1894.
The story is set in southern France.
An English tourist is photographing the interior of the cathedral of Saint-Bernard-de-Comminges at the foot of Pyrenees, when the cathedral’s sacristan tries to sell him a strange book. The Englishman is impressed by a drawing in the book. After buying it, he returns to his room, and …
‘his attention was caught by an object lying on the red cloth just by his left elbow. …
A pen wiper? No, no such thing in the house.
A rat? No, too black.
A large spider? I trust to goodness not - no. …
God! a hand like the hand in that picture!’ (p. 23-4)

Review: The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar

2011-01-16T12:22:00.002-07:00

Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe:
THE FACTS IN THE CASE OF M. VALDEMAR
by Edgar Allan Poe
Doubleday (1966), Hardcover, 832 pages

The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar was first published in 1845.
The narrator is interested in hypnotism, and he is curious to know what effects hypnotism would have on a dying person. The narrator thinks of experimenting his idea with his friend Ernest Valdemar. Valdemar, who is dying of tuberculosis, accepts.
Valdemar is hypnotized and while in trance he tells to the narrator that he is dying and then that he is dead.
Finally the narrator decides to awaken Valdemar from hypnosis (?), but during the process Valdemar’s body decays into a liquid mass.

More than a story Poe is narrating an experiment, so it seems not one of the Poe’s best stories. Point of advice: instead of reading the story, watch the movie Tales of Terror with Vincent Price.

Review: Beyond the Wall of Sleep and The White Ship

2011-01-14T17:21:00.002-07:00

The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories:
BEYOND THE WALL OF SLEEP and THE WHITE SHIP
by H. P. Lovecraft
Penguin Classics (2001), Paperback, 464 pages

‘There is probably a tremendous but invisible stellar orbit in which our very different ways and goals may be included as small parts of this path — let us rise up to this thought! But our life is too short and our power of vision too small for us to be more than friends in the sense of this sublime possibility.
Let us then believe in our star friendship even if we should be compelled to be earth enemies.’
Friedrich Nietzsche

Beyond the Wall of Sleep was written in 1919. Joe Slater is a murderer confined in a mental hospital. He dreams of otherworld with fantastic visions.
An intern of the hospital has built a device for two-way telepathic communication. To test the device the intern attaches himself with Slater. The intern starts to receive a message from a being of light, who explains that all men are light beings. Beyond the wall of sleep, humans are light beings and they experience visions of other world.
Is Slater a star in the sky?

The best parts:
‘I am your brother of light, and have floated with you in the effulgent valleys. … we are all roamers of vast spaces and travellers in many ages. Next year I may be dwelling in the dark Egypt which you call ancient, or in the cruel empire of Tsan-Chan which isto come three thousand years hence.’
‘We shall meet again - perhaps in the shining mists of Orion’s Sword, perhaps on a bleak plateau in prehistoric Asia. Perhaps in unremembered dreams tonight; perhaps in some other form an aeon hence, when the solar system shall have been swept away.’ (p. 19)

*********************************************************************

The White Ship was first published in 1919.
Dream or imagination?
Basil Elton is a lighthouse keeper when a bearded man piloting a white ship and sailing upon a bridge of moonlight, takes Basil on board. They start a voyage towards mystical islands. Basil learns about Cathuria, the land of Hope. This land is ‘beyond the basalt pillars of the West. … but who can tell what lies beyond the basalt pillars of the West?’ (p.24)

Maybe:
Beyond some symbolical connections between The White Ship and desire of the unknown …
Beyond some connection between The White Ship and Plato’s lost realm of Atlantis situated beyond, again, the Pillars of Hercules …
The White Ship is the calling / imagination / evocation of fantastic worlds beyond and inside the Pillars of Hercules.

A quotation:
‘for ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time.’ (p. 21)

Review: Olalla

2011-01-13T10:14:00.002-07:00

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: And Other Tales of Terror:
OLALLA
BY Robert Louis Stevenson
Penguin Classics (2003), Edition: Revised, Paperback, 224 pages

Olalla was first published in 1887 and is set in Spain during a war. The narrator is an English soldier recovering from his wounds in an hospital. After a while the soldier takes residence with a local family. The family consists of a mother, a son, Felipe, and a daughter, Olalla; they are an old Spanish family living in a residencia.

‘It was a rich house, on which Time had breathed his tarnish and dust had scattered disillusion.’ (p. 112)

The soldier cuts his wrist and asks Olalla’s mother for help. Seeing the blood the woman starts screaming and bites the soldier’s arm.

In Olalla Stevenson retrieves from the Gothic genre the themes of old and decayed families, vampires, buildings resembling castles, and, of course, the atmosphere of angst. Although the soldier’s infatuation with Olalla takes most of the story and Stevenson keeps the Gothic themes in the background, Olalla suggests an idea of passage between the Gothic genre tout court and its themes transferred inside the individuals (for instance Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde).

Review: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

2011-01-11T18:30:00.002-07:00

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: And Other Tales of Terror
by Robert Louis Stevenson
Penguin Classics (2003), Paperback, 224 pages

‘I can’t describe him. And it’s not want of memory; for I declare I can see him this moment.’ (p.10)

Robert Mighall, editor of this edition of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, writes that the statement of Dr Jekyll (last chapter of the book) is the best known part of the story written by Robert Louis Stevenson. Mighall advises to read the book completely: “They would find there something different from what they imagined: a more complex, rewarding and disturbing story than the version that has been handed down in popular culture form.’ (p.ix)

As Mighall writes in the introduction, following the path of Gothic novelist Stevenson changes the set of his stories: abandoned ruined castles and woods, Stevenson set the horror in the mind of individuals. The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe is the past, the good and the evil are inside the mind.

‘I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both; … I had learned to dwell with pleasure, … on the thought of the separation of these elements. If each … could but be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was unbearable; the injust might go his way … and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path.’ (p.56)
This edition contains a brief dissertation of Robert Mighall: Diagnosing Jekyll: the Scientific Context to Dr Jekyll’s Experiment and Mr Hyde’s Embodiment; although very useful, I prefer a different point of view ‘diagnosing’ Stevenson and his book.
Cesare Lombroso’ s idea about the connection between head’s shape and criminality (drawn from physiognomy): ugly means crime, handsome means honest person; is only an easy and popular connection. In my opinion, on the other hand, Stevenson writes about the dichotomy between good and evil. Good or just has always tried to keep a distance from evil or unjust, but Stevenson wants to find another solution: both just and unjust living in the same person. But morality liked, from biblical times, dichotomy; so Stevenson doesn’t solve the problem with Dr Jekyll: his friend ‘can’t describe him’ (p.10)

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was first published in 1885; the next year, 1886, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche wrote Beyond Good and Evil (Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future). Nietzsche ‘screaming’ his ‘Affirmative Philosophy’ or ‘Philosophy of Yes’ preludes how to build a bridge towards / beyond just and unjust.
Stevenson and Nietzsche: same times, same ideas, different solutions.

Review: The Black Cat and The Cask of Amontillado

2011-01-08T17:25:00.002-07:00

Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe:
THE BLACK CAT and THE CASK OF AMONTILLADO
Edgar Allan Poe
Doubleday (1966), Hardcover, 832 pages

The Black Cat was first published in 1843.
The narrator tells about his black cat Pluto (Pluto is the Roman god of the underworld).
Pluto is especially fond of the narrator, but, one night, he comes home drunk and when he tries to seize the cat, it bites the man.
The narrator is angry with the cat, and later he hangs the cat from a tree.
Some time later the narrator finds another black cat and takes it home.
One day the narrator and his wife are visiting the house’s cellar while the cat nearly trips the man. He is infuriated and grabs an axe trying to kill the cat. The narrator’s wife stops him but she is killed instead of the black cat.
The man buries the woman, but when the police start to search her, the man breaks down and tells to the police where he has buried his wife.
/////////////////// /////////////////// ///////////////////////
The Cask of Amontillado was first published in November 1846.
The story is set in a nameless Italian city.
The narrator, Montresor invites his friend Fortunato to drink a special wine called Amontillado.
Montresor thinking about ‘The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne …’ (p.191), chains Fortunato in a wine cellar’s niche and builds a wall to bury him alive.

At the end of The Tell-Tale Heart and The Black Cat, the narrator, feeling guilty, confesses his murderers.
This time the murderer is unrepentant: the idea of ‘The thousand injuries’ to bury behind a brick’s wall sometimes works.
The feeling of guilt is suppressed: the new idea is dichotomy, such as The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Stevenson (1886), The Double by Dostoevsky (1846), etc.

Rip.

Review: The Fall of the House Usher

2011-01-06T16:00:00.002-07:00

Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe:
THE FALL OF THE HOUSE USHER
by Edgar Allan Poe
Doubleday (1966), Hardcover, 832 pages

‘During the whole of a dull dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, …’ (p.177)

The Fall of the House of Usher was first published in 1839.
The unnamed narrator arrives at his friend’s house, Roderick Usher’s, because he is complaining an illness and he is asking for help to his friend.
Roderick’s twin sister, Madeline is also ill, and during the stay of the narrator at the Usher’s house, she dies.
Roderick asks his friend to bury his sister’s corpse in a provisional coffin.
Roderick feels fear, guilt, and he seeks comfort with his friend; but during the conversation a loud scream pierces the air: Roderick’s sister?
The narrator fled away from Usher’s house with terror in his eyes.

MAYBE:
A man wants to know his double soul and riding an unstable horse is watching Usher’s house.
One side of his soul asks for help because the other side shows to him illness and feeling of guilt.
As twin souls they can not be separated, actually the reunification becomes the biggest scream of the loudest storm.
The man prefers to fled away from the falling of the Usher’s house, or from his soul.

Review: The Pit and the Pendulum

2011-01-02T17:44:00.003-07:00

Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe:
THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM
by Edgar Allan Poe
Doubleday (1966), Hardcover, 832 pages

The Pit and the Pendulum is a short story published in 1842.
The main character is a prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition. The story tells about the prisoner’s experience of being tortured.
At the center of the cell there is a pit, and on the ceiling there is a picture with a painted Father Time, and hanging from the picture there is a pendulum sliding downward.

Poe’s idea is to describe an atmosphere of fear. The narration, despite the brevity of the story, is slow so to suggest in the reader the angst of ‘tempus fugit’ (time flies).

At the end the rats free the prisoner ...

Review: Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad

2011-01-01T14:29:00.003-07:00

Ghost Stories (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets):
OH, WHISTLE AND I’LL COME TO YOU, MY LAD by M.R. James
Peter Washington (editor)
Everyman's Library (2008), Hardcover, 416 pages

Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You my Lad was written in 1904 and it’s a ghost story from the stories collected in Ghost Stories from an Antiquary by Montague Rhodes James (M.R. James).

‘... there must be rats …’ (p. 142)

One man, two beds, and one ghost, or ...

A professor takes a vacation, unfortunately he can rent only a double-bedded room.
Nearby the inn there is a Templars’ Preceptory, where the professor finds an old whistle with some inscriptions on it.

In the evening the professor blows in the whistle …

Although the professor sleeps only in one of the two beds, the other one is always unmade.

Ghosts, rats, or ‘he should be … careful about using a thing that had belonged to a set of Papists.’ (p.137)

Review: The Mystery of Marie Rogêt and The Purloined Letter

2010-12-31T18:52:00.002-07:00

Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe:
THE MYSTERY OF MARIE ROGÊT and THE PURLOINED LETTER
by Edgar Allan Poe
Doubleday (1966), Hardcover, 832 pages

The Mystery of Marie Rogêt is a short story written in 1842, and follow The Murders in the Rue Morgue. The main character in both stories is C. Auguste Dupin, an ‘ancestor’ of Sherlock Homes and Hercule Poirot.
Dupin and his unnamed mate also narrator of the story, undertake the murder of Marie Rogêt in Paris. Marie Rogêt is a perfume shop employee; she is killed and her body is found in the Seine River.
The story is based upon the murder of Mary Cecilia Rogers. Edgar Allan Poe writing The Mystery of Marie Rogêt gives birth to the first murder mystery based on a real crime.
Dupin’s ‘ratiocination’ takes most of the story, and it seems too long and not very interesting.

The Purloined Letter is the third of Poe’s detective stories. He wrote this story in 1844.
Police’s Prefect of Paris has a case he would like to discuss with C. Auguste Dupin. Minister D. steals a letter from a room of an unnamed woman. The letter could contain compromising information. The Prefect tells Dupin that he has searched the Minister’s room but did not find anything.
A month later the Prefect tells Dupin about the reward upon the letter’s return. Dupin asks to the Prefect to sign a check because he has already found the letter.

Among these three detective stories I preferred the first one: The Murders in the Rue Morgue. In this story the narration of the events and Dupin’s ‘ratiocination’ are balanced, so the reader can enjoy reading.

Around the same period another writer, Fyodor Dostoevsky, based his books on real crimes reading Moscow’s newspapers.

Review: The Poison Tree

2010-12-29T17:27:00.003-07:00

The Poison Tree: A Novel
by Erin Kelly
Pamela Dorman Books (2010), Hardcover, 336 pages

I WAS ANGRY WITH MY FRIEND:
I TOLD MY WRATH, MY WRATH DID END.
I WAS ANGRY WITH MY FOE:
I TOLD IT NOT, MY WRATH DID GROW.

Karen lives in a flat with her mates, she has a boyfriend, good grades at school, parents not too boring, what else? Could Karen be angry with them?
Casually Karen meets Biba, and later her overprotective brother, Rex. A hot London summer begins: are they Karen’s foe?

TILL IT BORE AN APPLE BRIGHT.
AND MY FOE BEHELD IT SHINE,
AND HE KNEW THAT IT WAS MINE

A child gives birth, Alice. Meanwhile two people die, and one person goes to jail.

IN THE MORNING GLAD I SEE
MY FOE OUTSTRETCH’D BENEATH THE TREE.

Finally Karen takes out her wrath.

*********************************************************************
Start again
Karen bears ‘... a life lived in translation’, so when she meets Biba and her brother, a new world is before her. A first Karen’s impression: ‘I felt as though I were being read and interpreted for the first time, unfolded and examined like a map left in a drawer for so long that it creates and pleats come permanently to describe their own topography.’ (p.29) But the compass of this undiscovered map points towards drugs, alcohol, and homicides.

The Poison Tree is narrated from the point of view of Karen, jumping between events in the present and in the past. The author of the book, Erin Kelly, during the narration often suggests that something has to happen, creating an atmosphere of waiting for a catastrophe. Almost twenty chapters of the book (there are twenty-nine chapters, a prologue, and an epilogue) are surrounded by this atmosphere, but this is also the weak part of the book. Kelly, every a while, uses some ‘post it’ to remind to the reader about the events to come; but these reminders are not enough for a psychological thriller.
Another weak part is the character of Biba: why is she so special? Is Biba special because of her pseudo-bohemian way of life? Is Biba surrounded by an aura, air of mystery? and which is this aura? Karen and Biba friendship doesn’t suggest anything extraordinary.
The Poison Tree sometimes seems Karen’s journal indicating only a cathartic objective, so the reader is an outsider in this contest.

On overall I liked the characters, especially Karen’s descriptions of other people: accents (maybe inspired by George Bernard Shaw), and idiosyncrasies.

Ending with the poet:
‘A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees’ (William Blake)
Every review is a different translation of the same book.

Review: The Outsider

2010-12-28T16:45:00.003-07:00

The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories:
THE OUTSIDER
by Howard Phillips Lovecraft
Penguin Classics (1999), Paperback, 448 pages

The Outsider is a short story written between March and August 1921.

‘Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness.’ (p. 43)

A man who has been living alone in a castle decides to search human contact. The narrator knows the world outside only from his reading of antique books.
He finds a way out of the castle and tries to join a party, but the people are terrified before him and run away.
The man detects a presence: ‘It was the ghoulish shade of decay, antiquity, and desolation.’ (p. 48)

Conscious of his figure:
‘Now I ride with the mocking and friendly ghouls on the night-wind, and play by day amongst the catacombs of Nephren-Ka in the sealed and unknown valley of Hadoth by the Nile. …
Yet in my new wildness and freedom I almost welcome the bitterness of alienage.’ (p.49)

Review: The Picture in the House

2010-12-27T18:22:00.003-07:00

The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories:
THE PICTURE IN THE HOUSE
by Howard Phillips Lovecraft
Penguin Classics (1999), Paperback, 448 pages

The Picture in the House was written on December, 1920.

‘They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles, and falters down black cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia. …
Most horrible of all sights are the little unpainted wooden houses remote from travelled ways, …
In such houses have dwelt generations of strange people, whose like the world has never seen.’ (p.34)

A traveller in rural New England seeks shelter from a thunderstorm in a house. Although there is nobody in the house, as first impression, the man finds a strange book. The book tells Pigafetta’s account of the Congo region; the volume tends to fall open on a specific page: a butcher’s shop of the cannibal Anziques.
Some noises from the upstairs suggest that the house is occupied.

Review: Nyarlathotep

2010-12-26T17:12:00.003-07:00

The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories:
NYARLATHOTEP
by Howard Phillips Lovecraft
Penguin Classics (1999), Paperback, 448 pages

Nyarlathotep appeared in 1920 (the story).
Nyarlathotep or the Crawling Chaos is a malign deity in the Cthulhu Mythos of H.P. Lovecraft.

Nyarlathotep walks the Earth in the appearance of a human being, although he has thousand other forms. Nyarlathotep as messenger of the outer gods will destroy the human race and the earth as well.

‘A sense of monstrous guilt was upon the land …
There was a daemoniac alteration in the sequence of the seasons …
And it was then that Nyarlathotep came out of Egypt …
He said … that he had heard messages from places not on this planet …’ (p.31)

‘Beyond the worlds vague ghosts of monstrous things;
half-seen columns of unsanctified temples that rest on nameless rocks beneath space and reach up to dizzy vacua above the spheres of light and darkness.
And through this revolting graveyard of the universe …’ (p.33)

Maybe there has been a meeting between Batty (Blade Runner) and Nyarlathotep:
- I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time... like tears in rain... Time to die. -

Review: Shredni Vashtar and The Open Window

2010-12-26T10:46:00.002-07:00

The Short Stories of Saki:
SREDNI VASHTAR and THE OPEN WINDOW
by Saki
Modern Library (1977), Hardcover

Sredni Vashtar is a short story written between 1900 and 1914 by Saki (Hector Hugh Munro).

This story is collected in this volume and also in an audiobook: Classic Chiiling Tales.

A 10-year-old boy called Conradin lives with his guardian Mrs. De Ropp. Conradin’s is very hard because of his guardian, so he invents a new religion for himself. The idol of this religion is a palecat-ferret. Conradin named it Sredni Vashtar.

‘Do one thing for me, Sredni Vashtar.’: this is the Conradin’s prayer and the idol obeys to him.

******************** *********************** ************************************

The Open Window was collected with other short stories in 1914.

A girl of fifteen tells to a visitor about her weird family.

Girl: ‘Out through that window, three years ago to a day, her (= girl’s aunt) husband and her two young brothers went off for their day’s shooting.
They never came back.’ (p.289)

Girl: - Here they are at last (she cried)

- In the deepening twilight three figures were walking across the lawn towards the window. … A tired brown spaniel kept close at their heels.

The ghost: - Who was that who bolted out as we came up?

The aunt: - A most extraordinary man … and dashed off without a word of good-bye …
One would think he had seen a ghost.

The girl: - I expect it was the spaniel.
He was once hunted into a cemetery somewhere … by a pack of pariah dogs. (p.291)

Review: The Masque of the Red Death

2010-12-24T16:50:00.003-07:00

Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe:
THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH
by Edgar Allan Poe
Doubleday (1966), Hardcover, 832 pages

The Masque of the Red Death is a short story written in 1842.

Prince Prospero attempts to avoid a plague known as the Red Death. The Prince is hiding inside his castle together with other friends.
They have a masquerade ball when a mysterious figure meets Prince Prospero. After that meeting the Prince dies.

This story reminds another setting: The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio, where some people fled from the Black Death in a villa outside Florence.

According to some critics, this book does not suggests an allegorical reading. In my opinion it’s because The Masque of the Red Death suggests so many allegorical readings, that an unique interpretation is impossible The most important thing: many words put together by Edgar Allan Poe to create suspense.

Review: Timber

2010-12-24T11:11:00.001-07:00

Timber by John Galsworthy

‘And, suddenly, he saw himself slowly freezing out here, in the snowy night, among this cursed timber.’

Timber is a classic tale of horror written by Montague Rhodes James (M.R. James).

Sir Arthur Hirries decides to sell his timber, and before that he walks in the wood.

A wood becomes a trap crowded by ghosts … but they are only trees.

Review: The Monkey's Paw

2010-12-24T09:51:00.003-07:00

Ghost Stories:
THE MONKEY’S PAW by W.W. Jacobs
Peter Washington (editor)
Everyman's Library (2008), Hardcover, 416 pages

‘It had a spell put on it (the monkey’s paw) … He wanted to show that fate ruled people’s lives, and that those who interfered with it did so to their sorrow.’ (p. 107)

The Monkey’s Paw is a horror short story written in 1902 by William Wymark Jacobs.

The paw of a dead monkey is a talisman that grants its possessors three wishes. But the wishes, of course, come with a price to pay.

The White family becomes the owner of this monkey’s paw, a ‘gift’ from their friend Sergeant-Major Morris (just arrived from India).
Mr White’s first wish is 200 pounds. The price is very high: the life of his son.

Mrs White asks to his husband to express their second wish: Herbert (their son) back to life. Mr White has seen the mutilated corpse of his son and disagrees with his wife about this second wish.

But at the end, and after expressing the wish to the monkey’s paw ... the Whites hear knocking at the door …
‘A third knock sounded through the house.
- What’s that?, cried the old woman.
- A rat, said the old man in shaking tones, a rat. It passed me on the stairs.’ (p.117)

Review: Celephais

2010-12-24T09:25:00.001-07:00

The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories:
CELEPHAIS
by Howard Phillips Lovecraft
Penguin Classics (1999), Paperback, 448 pages

Fantasy story written in November 1920.

‘Where the sea meets the sky’

Celephais is the name of a fictional city. Kuranes slowly slips away to the dream-world and creates Celephais.
In Celephais there is no perception of time: time doesn’t influence the life in this city.

‘But some of us awake in the night with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas, … and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into the world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy.’ (p.24-5)

Review: The Tomb

2010-12-21T18:33:00.002-07:00

The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories:
THE TOMB
by H. P. Lovecraft
Penguin Classics (2001), Paperback, 464 pages

An horror short story written in June 1917.

‘All things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them.’ (p. 1)

Jervas Dudley discovered the entrance to a mausoleum belonging to the Hyde family , whose house had burnt many years before.
Jervas attempts to enter in the tomb, but he is unable; so, inspired by an example of Plutarch’s Lives, he decides to wait until it is his time to gain entrance to the tomb.

After several years, while Jervas is sleeping beside the mausoleum, he believes to see a light from inside the tomb. He finds the key to the tomb and inside the mausoleum Jervas discovers an empty coffin with the name of Jervas Hyde upon the plate.

Following again the example of Plutarch he starts to sleep inside the coffin, so to gain the name upon it.

Jervas is awoken by his father and discovers that he has never been inside the tomb.

A desire becomes dream, or nightmare: every person change with his consciousness the appearances of the things.

Review: The Friends of the Friends

2010-12-21T18:27:00.002-07:00

Ghost Stories:
THE FRIENDS OF THE FRIENDS by Henry James
Peter Washington (editor)
Everyman's Library (2008), Hardcover, 416 pages

‘What was her nervousness therefore but a presentiment? She had been hitherto the victim of interference, but it was quite possible she would henceforth be the source of it. The victim in that case would be my simple self.’ (p.82)

A woman is narrating a weird story of another woman. Every person who meet this strange woman after a while dies, but also reappear as a ghost.
At the end the woman follows the same fate.

Review: Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family

2010-12-19T11:30:00.003-07:00

The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories:
FACTS CONCERNING THE LATE ARTHUR JERMYN AND HIS FAMILY
by Howard Phillips Lovecraft
Penguin Classics (1999), Paperback, 448 pages

Short story written in 1920.

In the first part of The Late Arthur Jermyn, Lovecraft describes the ancestors of Sir Arthur Jermyn. They are all explorers and they are fascinated especially by the Congo region.

In the second part Lovecraft tells about Arthur Jermyn and his journey in Congo on a research expedition. Arthur heard stories from his ancestors of a stone city of white apes and the mummified body of a white ape goddess.
Could the mummified white ape be anyone of his ancestors?

Review: White Raven

2010-12-18T16:47:00.001-07:00

White Raven
by Deborah Cannon
Trafford Publishing (2006), Paperback, 256 pages

White Raven tells about three themes:
a man, Jake Lalonde, searching for his Haida heritage and parents;
the fight between loggers and environmentalists;
the legend of the Seawolf.

Jake Lalonde was abandoned in foster houses when he was a child, now as an adult is searching for his parents. Jake has just one clue: a photo of a totem pole that bonds him to the Haida heritage.
Jake’s searches open the Pandora’s Box in a small village on Pacific Coast.

In this village loggers and environmentalists fight each other: ‘It’s a complicated situation. Some people, Native and White, want logging under provincial legislation. Others want Native autonomy, the right to do with the forests as they will, to log or not lo log, … Environmentalists want to halt the industry altogether. Each has good reasons depending on whose viewpoint you take …’ (p.233)

The novel is surrounded by an atmosphere of myth: the Haida’s legend of the Seawolf.
Haida is an indigenous nation of the Northwest Coast of North America. I liked the Haida’s description of Diamond Jenness: Haida as the Indian Viking of the North West Coast.
Seawolf legend: a man found two wolf pups on the beach. When the pups had grown they would swim in the ocean and kill a whale for the man to eat. But the wolves killed so many whales and the meat began to rot. The Great Above Person saw this waste meat and punished the wolves, so they had to remain at sea and became Sea Wolf (Killer Whale or Orca or Grampus). ‘A great white wolf transformed itself into a killer whale while retaining its white markings and the habit of traveling in packs.’ (p.32)

From the beginning of the novel Deborah Cannon describes to the reader the atmosphere of the Pacific Coast scenery: ocean’s smell, noises of lorries carrying logs, and the omnipresent magical world of ancient myths.
‘The smell of wet cedar filled the air … Jake imagined the village as it might have once been: smoke spiralling out of the roofs of the houses, fires ablaze on the beach to light the fishermen’s return journey, and a captain who called the island home,’ (p.50)

All together White Raven is a good book, although I preferred more descriptions of the Haida’s world and their legends. In the last chapters of the novel, the hideous Thomas MacPherson prevails and the book becomes a thriller losing the original idea.
‘Be patient. A dance is just a dance and spirit masks are spirit masks. You can’t absorb a hundred years of Haida heritage in one night …’ (p. 2)

A brief guide of the characters:
- Jack Lalonde and his girlfriend Angeline, and his friend Damon Spencer (both archaeologists).
- Thomas MacPherson (the logger), and his wife Susan (Susie), and their daughter Lucy.
- Jimmy Sky (the Sgua-ay) was married with Tilley.
- Henry Moon and his wife Leona, and his mother-in-law Flora.

Review: tHE sTATEMENT oF rANDOLPH cARTER

2010-12-17T13:48:00.002-07:00

The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories:
THE STATEMENT OF RANDOLPH CARTER
by Howard Phillips Lovecraft
Penguin Classics (1999), Paperback, 448 pages

‘The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.’ (from the Call of Cthhulhu)

This short story was written December 1919.

Randolph Carter represents the double of Lovecraft telling about his dreams.

Carter has been found wandering through swamps in a state of shock, this story is his statement to the police. Carter has to explain the disappearance of his friend Harley Warren.
Warren has received from India a book where he learns about a door between the surface world and the underworld.
Warren discovers the location of such portal and invites Carter …

No monsters, no blood, just the atmosphere by the master Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

‘I watched amorphous, necrophagous shadows dance beneath an accursed waning moon.’ (p.13)

Review: tHE mURDERS iN tHE rUE mORGUE

2010-12-16T19:01:00.002-07:00

Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe: THE MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE
Edgar Allan Poe
Doubleday (1966), Hardcover, 832 pages

‘The necessary knowledge is that of what to observe.’ (p.3)

The Murders in the Rue Morgue is a short story written by Edgar Allan Poe in 1841. It has been claimed the first detective story.
C. Auguste Dupin and his friend, the last is also the narrator of the story, solve the mysterious massacre of two women.
‘What to observe’ in this omicide is a hair that does not appear to be human.

‘De nier ce qui est, et d’expliquer ce qui n’est pas.’ (p.26)
‘To deny what exists, and to explain what doesn’t.’

Review: Dagon

2010-12-16T18:47:00.002-07:00

The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories: DAGON
Howard Phillips Lovecraft
Penguin Classics (1999), Paperback, 448 pages

‘Lovecraft’s pseudo mythology brutally shows that man is not the center of the universe, that the - gods - care nothing for him, and that the earth and all its inhabitants are but a momentary incident in the unending cyclical chaos of the universe.’ (p.xvii, from the introduction by S.T. Joshi)

Dagon is the testament, or last letter of a tortured man who plans to commit suicide. The narrator thinks he is destined to die because of the knowledge he has gained.
The narrator is a merchant-marine officer, and during a voyage on the Atlantic Ocean his cargo is captured by a German sea-rider. He manages to escape, but he is stranded on what seems to be a volcanic island. He sees a gigantic white stone covered by hieroglyphs, and when he is watching them … a creature emerges from the sea: Dagon …

This short story introduces Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos: Dagon, the fish-god.

Review: tHE hORLA

2010-12-14T17:43:00.003-07:00

THE HORLA by Guy de Maupassant
Peter Washington (editor)
Everyman's Library (2008), Hardcover, 416 pages

‘But what is this being, this invisible being who is ruling me?
This unknowable creature, this wanderer from a supernatural race.’ (p.57)

The word Horla means - out there - (from the French ‘hors’ meaning out, and ‘la’ meaning there).

The Horla is a short story by Guy de Maupassant, written in 1887 and tells how an invisible being influences the mind of the narrator.
The narrator writes in his journal the progressive domination of the Horla on his thoughts and actions.

Akaky wants to be another person buying a new cloak: The Cloak by Gogol (1842).
Golyadkin thinks that another person has stolen his identity, and this second person step by step replaces Golyadkin’s life: The Double: a Petersburg Poem by Dostoevsky (1846).
A person discovers another side of himself: Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Stevenson (1886).
At the end Gregor Samsa becomes a beast: The Metamorphosis by Kafka (1915).

Review: Black Bird, Vol. 1

2010-12-14T17:31:00.002-07:00

Black Bird, Vol. 1
by Kanoko Sakurakoji
VIZ Media LLC (2009), Edition: Original, Paperback, 194 pages

‘There is a world of myth and magic that intersects ours, and only a special few can see it.’ (back cover)

A silly sixteen-year-old girl, Misao Harada, could be a special person because she imagines demons around herself. But apart from a tempting statement on the back cover, nothing more of the book is tempting.

Go back to the real vampires’ stories.

Review: tHE tELL-tALE hEART

2010-12-12T17:35:00.006-07:00

The Tell-Tale Heart
from Complete Stories and Poems by Edgar Allan Poe
Doubleday (1966), Hardcover, 832 pages

An eye, a heart, and a drum.
The Tell-Tale Heart is the most famous short story by Edgar Allan Poe.
Some unnamed person kills a man with a ‘vulture eye’. The police knock at the door called by a neighbour because of a scream in the middle of the night.
The unnamed person is calm … but a beat from the floor like a heartbeat becomes every moment louder … louder …
‘It was the beating of the old man’s heart.’
‘... as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage.’ (p.123)

Review: The Isle of Voices by Robert Louis Stevenson

2010-12-10T11:26:00.003-07:00

THE ISLE OF VOICES

The Isle of Voices or a bad dream.
Keola is married with Lehua, daughter of Kalamake (a sorcerer) .
This short novel is set in some Pacific Ocean ’s island.
The bad dream starts with the first spell of Kalamake: leaves become shining dollars, so Keola plans to stop working and share Kalamake’s riches.
The sorcerer disagrees and with the second spell abandons Keola in the ocean. Keola is rescued by a ship and left in an island called the Isle of Voices.
In the Isle of Voices, invisible devils ‘day and night you heard them talking with one another in strange tongues.’ (p.670) ‘All tongues of the earth were spoken there … whatever land knew sorcery, there were some of its people whispering in Keola’s ear.’ (p.673)
Eventually Keola is rescued again, this time by his wife.
Sorcery or bad dream?

Review: The Waif Woman

2010-12-08T13:05:00.004-07:00

The Waif Woman by Robert Louis Stevenson

‘This is a tale of Iceland, the isle of stories, and of a thing that befell in the year of the coming there of Christianity.’ (p.1)

The Waif Woman is a short story suppressed by Stevenson and published twenty years after his death. Many editors prefer not to include this story in their selections because The Waif Woman is unfinished.

Thorgunna, a woman wearing beautiful clothes, a ‘chests of clothes beyond comparison … fine coloured stuffs, finely woven’, takes accommodation in a inn where the innkeepers are Finnward and his wife, Aud.
Aud cannot help herself thinking about these clothes.
But there is a rule: the ‘voice of Thorgunna sounded in her (Aud) ear: "The things are for no use
but to be shown," it said. "Aud, Aud, have you shown them once? No, not once!" (p.11)

‘At last she got to bed in the smooth sheets … she shook awhile … and a grue took hold upon her flesh, and the cold of the grave upon her belly, and the terror of death upon her soul. With that a voice was in her ear: - It was so Thorgunna sickened -’ (p.11)

Sometimes is not necessary an explanation of the meaning of the book, Stevenson suggests the setting and feeling a reader might feel reading The Waif Woman.

Review: The Ice Child

2010-12-07T19:20:00.002-07:00

The Ice Child
Andrea Heyser
Dorrance Publishing Co., Inc. (2003), Paperback, 224 pages

‘The Neander are doomed, our land is changing, we die of Human diseases, … Before we disappear from under the moon, we must know that the Neander gods are preserved in the land of the Humans.’ (p. 91)

The Ice Child tells about The People Who Live With The Wolfs, a clan of Neander, and the early Humans. A sacrifice becomes a beginning religion of the Neander, and it is adopted by the Humans.

I liked the first chapters describing the Neander and their surrounding. Heyser suggests the idea of wolf’s pack: a group of Neander and their cave, it seems a bird’s-eye view in the past.
I also liked the sacrifice’s description when the Neander start to believe in god, especially because they will earn protection and a lucky hunting. The sacrifice unified all Neander, rooting the idea of brotherhood among them.
In the last chapters is narrated the friendship between a child, Heiler, and a cub bear, Bruna. I liked also this chapters because Heyser shows us a world where all species can live together.

I feel perplexed and disagree with Heyser about the narration of Neander and Human’s feeling, and self-conscience. In my opinion they are more appropriate lately in Homo Sapiens’s evolution.

The Ice Child is a good start reading about prehistoric people, also with these following reading: Sarum by Edward Rutherfurd, and Jean M. Auel’s books.

Nera, the wolf, is dying: ‘The mother spirit was calling her to follow … before she knew it she was running ahead toward a light, the moon. As she run, faster and stronger, she saw shapes materialize around her, they were her children, an old mate, and her mother.’ (p.95)

http://store.yahoo.com/cgi-bin/clink?dorrance+7XZRvv+index.html
I received a complimentary copy of The Ice Child as a member of the Dorrance Publishing Book Review Team. Visit dorrancebookstore.com to learn how you can become a member of the Book Review Team.

Review: Mushishi, Volume 6

2010-12-07T19:07:00.001-07:00

Mushishi, Volume 6
Yuki Urushibara
Del Rey (2008), Paperback, 256 pages

Heaven’s Thread or String from the Sky
A girl was taken by a white string from the sky and disappeared. After a while the girl returns and strange things start to happen to her.
The girl: ‘I just … pulled on this thread that came out of the sky … then everything around me went black …’ (p. 24)
A mushi called Tenpengusa nests in the sky, and ‘They’re born from the shadows … and they haunt the border between sunlight and darkness.’ (p. 29)
Ginko found the girl and they return to the village. The girl is infested by the mushi so she floats in the air. Only the man who wants to marry her tries to understand and ‘... no matter what awful thing happens during the daylight, the stars are always there unchanged.’ (p. 42)

The Chirping Shell
A man and his daughter live outside the village because he thinks the villagers are responsible of his wife’s death. A mushi and Ginko seem to fix the problem.
‘When I say the song in the shell … what’s really singing is a mushi that nests inside of shells. Some call them Yodokaridori. Others call them Sezurikai.’ (p. 62)
‘People who put the shells up to their ears to hear them … forget how to use their own voices.’ (p. 63)
The girl has lost her voice and Ginko thinks that she and her father have to go back to the village, so the girl can learn to talk again.

The Hand that Pets the Night
A man can easily capture animals with the power coming from an eye depicted on his palm. The man’s palm is infected by a mushi called Fuki. ‘ Your hand forces your prey to do whatever you want.’ (p. 106) ‘Fuki is … Koki, the source of life, that has gone to rot.’ (p. 107)

Under the Snow
‘They’re a class of being called Yukimushi. If you unravel a snowflake, sometimes you’ll find them inside.’ (p. 150)
Toki is a boy infested by mushi: he does not feel the cold and he can’t touch anything warm.
‘In a land where white snow blankets the ground for the better part of the year … there are more odd things found in the snow … than one could ever find in the water or earth.’ (p. 189)
Toki rescuing a girl has to carry her on his shoulders, so he has to bear the warmth of another body. Bearing the girl’s warm , although Toki feels it hot, he has to accept his condition and heal.

Banquet in the Farthest Field
Brewing sake, instead of yeast, a man uses a mushi called Suimitsu-to; drinking this strange sake the man see things ‘that looked like red and black hairs.’ (p. 229), but ‘those weren’t hallucinations. They’re mushi called Shojo-no-hige. Mushishi use them as guides to mushishi gatherings.’ (p. 230)
‘... when we can’t make a good batch of sake … I’d drink just a little of that leftover sake.’ (p. 237)
‘Then I’d be able to see the distinct shapes of living things …’ (p. 238)

Many episodes of this sixth volume tells about Ginko helping people who have to accept what they usually refused.

Mushi could be similar to spirits in western culture, and they have to be accepted as they are. Ginko as Mushishi can understand the meaning of mushi in the world, so he helps people to live with mushi, to avoid mushi, etc., but Ginko never kills mushi.
Mushishi episodes are set in rural Japan, during the Edo and Meiji eras (1600 / 1800).

Review: Alichino, Volume 3

2010-12-04T17:35:00.002-07:00

Alichino, Volume 3 by Shurei, Kouyu
Kouyu Shurei
TokyoPop (2005), Paperback, 160 pages

‘The dark beauty … of insanity and suffering … lurked so deep … in your marrow … that you lost sight of … who you are.’ (p. 10-1)

Ryoko and Myobi are looking for Tsugiri and Enju. During the search they meet Matsurika, and finally the mysterious connection between Ryoko, Myobi, Hibiki, and Matsurika is revealed.
Hibiki is a Ryoko’s friend and when Matsurika catches Hibiki’s soul, Ryoko can save his friend only signing a ‘contract’ with Myobi (a beautiful owl or girl or Alichino).
Only Kusabi can destroy Alichino / Matsurika’s soul; and only Tsugiri is the Kusabi.

‘When you forge a contract with an Alichino, your two life forces merge. You will remain alive, for as long as that Alichino takes breath … and you will be infused with that Alichino’s power. But in exchange, you will completely loose sense of who once were.’ (p. 43).

The characters are solitary (uninhabited cities), with the feeling that nothing matters, kneeling in front of Fate.

Review: Nebador: The Test

2010-12-03T17:58:00.001-07:00

NEBADOR Book One: The Test
J. Z. Colby
Nebador Archives (2010), Paperback, 306 pages

Received from the Goodreads Firstreads Program.

‘And someday, perhaps a story will be written about our adventures, and students will pay two great silver pieces to purchase a copy to learn to read.’ (p. 263)

A young man arrives in a medieval city seeking for crew to hire for his ship. Ilika from Satamia in the region of Nebador as captain of the ship finally found ten young boys and girls suitable for his purposes.
‘I have been training to be a ship’s captain … Now I have my own small ship, and for my final test, I have to find and train my own crew.’ (p. 82)

The narrative proceeds slowly as the growth of a tree, but Colby keeps high the mysterious plot and the reader never puts down the book until the end.

Nebador falls under the genre of young adult books, maybe the old fashioned word Bildungsroman (Formation Novel) could explain what this books are about: usually they tell of psychological growth from youth to adulthood, and teenager are their target.
I recommend Nebador for young adult readers, but I’d like to advise a complementary reading: The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse.

P.S. A brief guide:
Girls: Kibi (16 years old), Buna (14), Mati (13), Neti (15), Sata (11);
Boys: Rini (13), Kodi (12), Toli (19), Miko (16), Boro (14).

Review: Berlin Book Two: City of Smoke

2010-12-01T19:47:00.002-07:00

Berlin Book Two: City of Smoke (Bk. 2)
Jason Lutes
Drawn and Quarterly (2008), Paperback, 200 pages

‘And what a dirty, dirty city - the soot, the automobile fumes, the smoke from the factories.’
(p. 152)

The May Day demonstration of 1929 doesn’t solve the tensions between Communist and National Socialist, Jews and Gentiles. Jason Lutes in book two following various threads tells about people living in Berlin: the main problem is which idea / party is better than another to solve the deep economic crisis.

Marthe Müller follows Kurt Severing while he interviews survivors of the May Day. People struggle to keep their goods, other people struggle to gain food.
An American jazz band holds concerts in Berlin, and this music helps people to avoid the Berlin’s smoky words.

Berlin a city without rules, moral, only words spread everywhere like smoke.
‘The world outside is filled with different sorts of words. Thanks to the emergency election, the rhetoric has come in thick, like smoke downwind of a burning building.’ (p. 206)

Review: The Body-Snatcher by Robert Louis Stevenson

2010-12-01T19:41:00.002-07:00

Ghost Stories (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets):
The Body-Snatcher by Robert Louis Stevenson
Peter Washington
Everyman's Library (2008), Hardcover, 416 pages

When the past rings two times.

First time: a group of friends, Fettes among them, are reunited talking and drinking. A sick man in the village needs a doctor, so they are waiting for this doctor to show up. Eventually the doctor rings at the door and Fetter is shocked: MacFarlane enters, he is an old Fetter’s companion from the time of medical school. Fetter and MacFarlane pick up corpses for the school of anatomy; sometimes when dead corpses lack, MacFarlane, in disagreement with Fetter, kills someone.

Second time: Fetter and MacFarlane after resuming a woman’s corpse from the grave and returning to the city from the graveyard, when rain is pouring and every light is (also) dead … they become aware that they are carrying a different corpse: a man who Fetter and MacFarlane have already dissected in the past …

Review: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym by Edgar Allan Poe

2010-11-29T17:30:00.002-07:00

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
Edgar Allan Poe
Doubleday (1966), Edition: Book Club (BCE/BOMC), Hardcover, 832 pages

A narrative of two voyages and three ships.
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket tells the sea adventures of Pym from Nantucket (famous ships whaling harbour).

The first voyage and ship: Pym and his friend Augustus go to sea with the Ariel, but a terrible storm hits the boat and they are saved by the crew of another ship.

The second voyage and ship: Pym is hidden in the Grampus, a ship of Augustus’ father. Several members of the crew mutiny and Pym risks to die because Augustus cannot help him.
This is the best part of the book, where Poe show why he is the master of suspense, horror, and mystery books.
For instance, chapter three: a man (Pym) in darkness with a piece of paper in his hands. Who could write two pages like these ones instead of Poe?

The second voyage and third ship: Pym is one of the last survivors of the Grampus, he is starving, finally he is rescued by the Jane Guy’s crew. This last part of The Narrative is different from the previous telling the voyage of the Jane Guy toward the south pole; and describe sceneries, people living in this remote countries. The Narrative becomes a travel journal and the main character (Pym) only a witness of the voyage.

Review: Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim's Tale

2010-11-22T17:28:00.002-07:00

Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim's Tale
Ian M Cron
NavPress (2006), Paperback, 256 pages

St. Francis of Assisi has always fascinated lots of people, and many books have been written about his life. Chasing Francis is not another biography about Francis, but tells the story of Chase Falson, founding pastor of an evangelical church in New England, and his ‘meetings’ with Francis..
Aftter a terrible event, an ‘earthquake’ that hits the foundation of his beliefs, Chase decides to go on a pilgrimage in Italy. This pilgrimage is a journey following the spiritual path of Francis.
Two worlds meet each other in Assisi: the first, Chase with his background (American way of life): churches managed like companies, consumerism, or paraphrasing Descartes (Cogito ergo sum): ‘I shop, therefore I am’ (p. 195) the second ‘... amidst the simple beauty of nature.’ (p. 83) as Chase quotes Anne Frank, a journey to the first days of Christianity, where simplicity is a buzzword.
The first feeling of Chase is skepticism: ‘I wonder what Francis would say if he were the main speaker at a church-growth conference.
Would anyone take him seriously?’ (p. 100)
But Chase with the help of his uncle, a Franciscan friar and other brothers, like some industrious brown ants, discovers a world with ‘new colors’ (p. 121), a new path to follow. Every day the friars have a surprise for Chase: they pick up small colored pieces of stone so to build a mosaic with the image of St. Francis, or out of metaphor they ‘restore’ Chase.

Time is running: Chase has to go back home: ‘Where would I go when my pilgrimage was over? Francis was teaching me … How would I apply all this new knowledge?’ (p. 139)

At the end ‘we again beheld the stars.’ (p. 208)

This book was written in a genre called wisdom literature, a balance of fiction and non-fiction: in my opinion it has been a good choice; resulting a readable book from different point of views: an historical book (St. Francis and his age); travels’ book , also suggesting the idea of journey as redemption.

I received this book free from NavPress Publishers as part of their Blogger Review Program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commision's 16 CFR, Part 255: "Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

Review: Alichino, Volume 2

2010-11-18T18:50:00.001-07:00

Alichino Vol. 2
Kouyu Shurei
TokyoPop (2005), Edition: 1ST, Paperback, 164 pages

Ryoko: ‘No matter what demons you face outside … don’t fight them with the ones you have inside.’ (p. 58)

Matsurika, a female alichino, kidnapped Enju because she wants to kill those close to Tsugiri.
Tsugiri with the power of Kusabi could destroy the alichino’s race.

Artworks: a strong and dangerous liaison with a decay world (gothic?): Venice, Greece … Buildings, clothes, are part of the past; today nothing happens. Alichino and souls fight each other, but almost they just show themselves in a mirror, waiting ...

Review: Mushishi, Volume 5

2010-11-15T19:37:00.002-07:00

Mushishi, Volume 5
Yuki Urushibara
Del Rey (2008), Paperback, 272 pages

The thread of Mushishi, volume 5 is mushi who destroy, also mushi who give birth new life. But mushi is a creator imperfect.

The Sea Palace or Shrine in the Sea
A shrine in the sea gives people another life. Ginko visits this place searching for mushi.
‘Below the rock ... is a trench they call the Dragon’s Palace. People who lose their lives there ... are -born again-; looking exactly the same as before.’ (p. 12)
‘The things in the water (some kind of mushi) are the embryos of several different types of living things. They are the animal in its earliest form.’ (p. 30)
Mushi is an original form of life, who shows itself in a multitude of appearances. Mushi gives people another life, although this people look the same as in the previous life.

Eye’s Fortune, Eye’s Misfortune or Eye of Fortune, Eye of Misfortune
A mushi entered a woman’s eyes: she can see again, but her sight improves day by day, until ...
Mushi helps a blind woman to see again, although ‘It seemed as though when I closed my eyes, I could see the past or future of those close to me.’ (p. 79)
Mushi is imperfect and goes beyond creation.
‘After the eyes fell from me ... they were buried beneath the earth.
Eventually a face came up from the ground.
And suddenly there was a beautiful flower reflected in the beast’s eyes.’ (p. 101)

The Coat that Holds a Mountain or Clothes that Embrace the Mountain
A coat is infested by a mushi. Ginko is looking for the coat’s first owner, who is also the painter of the mountain on the coat.
‘... I was trying to find out about the mushi living in the short coat. So I went looking for the mountain pictured in the painting.’ (p. 146)
This mushi is called Ubusuma, it means to give birth earth. The short coat’s fabric is made with thread and dye found in the mountain; the coat and its owner are linked because both come from the same mountain.
When the coat’s owner has to sell the coat, the mushi Ubusuma forces the man to return to the mountain, there he finds again strength and determination to draw again.

Flames of the Fields or The Journey to the Field of Fire
A mushi threatens a village. The mushishi of the village decides to burn the mountain, so to kill the mushi. Ginko doesn’t agree with the mushishi.
Mushishi of the village: ‘ Tomorrow we plan ... to burn everything on the mountain.’ (p. 167)
‘All of the ground we had just cleared ... was totally covered with that grass. And ... no matter how much we cut it or pulled it out, it would all soon grow back ...’ (p. 171)
‘That grass … is the larval form of Hidane. huh?’ (p. 188)
Fire give birth and death. ‘After it’s sucked enough heat … it gives off a grass seed from its corpse.’ (p. 195) This grass seed is called Hidane, a mushi who ‘... suck out the heat from humans to live’ (p.187)
‘... inside each Kagebi (little balls of flame) (there) is a mushi called Hidane (fire grass seed)’ (p. 186-7)
At the end Kagebi can kill mushi/Hidane with its fire. All that is born from fire, dies in the fire.

The Snake of Dawn or Sunrise Serpent
A woman is forgetting her memories. Her son is helped by Gynko to solve this problem.
‘A mushi … that eats memory … ? Yes. It’s called Kagedama (soul’s shadow). (p. 231)
‘... (mushi) enters the ear and goes into the brain. … the host hardly ever sleeps afterward. And it slowly starts to forget things.’ (p. 232)
‘We only know of one weak point for the Kagedama, and that’s the sun.’ (p. 233)
‘... keep recalling the things that you don’t want to forget.’ (p. 236)

Best artworks:
- Kai (the coat’s owner) watching at his native village after the landslide (p. 127);
- Ginko and an eagle (?) (p. 161).

Review: The Journey (Guardians of Ga'Hoole, Book 2)

2010-11-14T14:12:00.009-07:00

The Journey (Guardians of Ga'hoole, Book 2)
Kathryn Lasky
Scholastic (2003), Paperback, 256 pages

‘In the twilight hour
We are home in our tree
We are owls, we are free’ (p. 139)

Guardians of Ga’Hoole’s second book tells about Soren and his band (Twilight, Digger, Gylfie and Mrs. Plithiver) when they finally arrive at the Great Ga’Hoole Tree.

At the Tree they meet other owls:
Boron and Barran, king and queen of Hoole;
Bubo, the blacksmith;
Madame Plonk, the singer;
Otulissa, the never ending talking owl, she is a bookworm;
and Ezylryb, (picture) (so far, my favourite character), he is a Whiskered Screech Owl,

the wise weather interpretation teacher, and Soren’s mentor.

The Great Ga’Hoole Tree is home for many owls, there is also a school. Every owl has to improve its skills following a chaw.

Soren begins to discover his own flying powers, so his mentor Ezylryb says: ‘There are many ways to learn - through books, through practice, and through gizzuition (from the word gizzard, a digestive organ behind the stomach of birds). They are all good ways, but few of us have gizzuition (intuition).’ (p. 198)

At the end of the book a surprise: between several owlets grounded and wounded, there is ...

Review: Wild Birds of Prey - Owls

2010-11-12T11:28:00.003-07:00

Wild Birds of Prey - Owls
Deborah Kops
Blackbirch Press (2000), Edition: 1, Library Binding, 24 pages

Reading Guardian of Ga’Hoole by Kathryn Lasky, Owls by Deborah Kops is a useful book to understand owls’ life.

Some curiosities:
- ‘An owl can tell the height that a sound is coming from as well as its direction. This ability is partly a result of the unusual placement of its ears - one ear is higher than the other.’ (p. 13)

- ‘A great horned owl living in the North may store its uneaten prey in the snow during winter. Later, it can thaw out its frozen dinner by sitting on it.’ (p. 17)

- ‘Owls are not nest builders ... Some times, a hawk and an owl occupy a nest in alternate years.’ (p. 19)

Review: Alichino, Volume 1

2010-11-11T12:51:00.001-07:00

Alichino Volume 1
Kouyu Shurei
TokyoPop (2005), Edition: illustrated edition, Paperback, 164 pages

‘Beautiful creatures called Alichino grant wishes to those in need - but at a price!’ (back cover)

Alichino (Harlequin, Arlecchino) is one of the devils in the Hell (Inferno) by Dante Alighieri.

Alichino’s main characters:
- Tsugiri, with the power of kusabi
- Enju, Tsugiri’s guardian.
- Ryoko, Tsugiri’s master and Myobi’s lover.
- Myobi, usually in the form of a owl. otherwise a beautiful girl.
- Hyura, protected Tsugiri when he was a child.
- onihcilA, many.

Selling your soul to devil makes your wishes into reality. ‘They say alichino can take many different forms ... and possess a beauty beyond compare.’ (p. 18) Beauty arises desire especially when you are a soul in sorrow. ‘Their wings are as light as gossamer, and their souls as lily white as winter’s first snow.’ (p. 18)
‘... the sorrowful beating of a human’s heart will always draw an alichino near.’ (p. 40)

As well black exists because of white, or death because of life, Enju say: ‘ The kusabi and the alichino exist for each other.’ (p. 105)
Tsugiri is ‘someone with the power of kusabi ... (and) can bring death to an alichino’s soul.’ (p. 102)

Best artworks: alichino’s reborn (p. 101); and Myobi talking to Tsugiri (p. 119): turmoil in the sky (clouds, moon, dark, light) reflects as well that of Tsugiri’s soul.

A last question/joke: Who is Alichino’s characters’ hairdresser?

Review: The Capture (Guardians of Ga'Hoole, Book 1)

2010-11-07T17:39:00.004-07:00

The Capture (Guardians of Ga'hoole, Book 1)
Kathryn Lasky
Scholastic (2003), Paperback, 240 pages

‘Good light, Soren, Gylfie said
Good light, Soren and Gylfie, Twilight said
Good light, Twilight, Soren, and Gylfie both said together.’ (p. 183)

The first book of the series Guardian of Ga’Hoole, tells the adventures of Soren, a barn owl.

The Capture could be subdivided in three parts:
the first one tells about Soren and his family, living happily in a nest. The most important event is the birth of Eglantine, Soren’s sister.

The second part tells a dramatic event: Soren is pushed out of the nest by Kludd, his brother. Follows Soren’s capture by a patrol of the evil owls from the St. Aegolius Academy for Orphaned Owls.
Living in St. Aggie’s is terrible: most of the time is spent forgetting the past life, and every owl has to learn his new name: a number. A mystery surrounds St. Aggie: owls have to pick up tiny particles (flecks) so the Academy gain power and control over all owls’ world.
At St. Aegolius Academy Soren meets enemies and friends: Gylfie, a female elf owl (one of the smallest owl) befriend Soren and together they learn to fly.
‘... this is not humble, this is where owls belong - high near the wind, near the sky, close to the heartbeat of the night.’ (p. 117)

The third part tells about Soren’s and Gylfie’s escape from St. Aggie: flying toward nowhere they meet Twilight, a great grey owl and they also meet Digger, a burrowing owl.

The first and third part are the best ones of The Capture: at the beginning we know about owls’ world, and it is not strange for the readers to learn that they read the psalms.
When Soren, and Gylfie, become free from St. Aggie they fly toward some sad news about their parents, but also no one stop them to seek the truth about the legend of Ga’Hoole so to protect the world from the evil.

The second part reminds about other brainwashing’s camps ...

‘- But where is it you’re going? he asked
- To the Great Ga’Hoole Tree.
- What? said Digger, but before Twilight could answer, Streak (an eagle) broke in,
- I’ve heard of that place, but isn’t it just a story, a legend?
- To some it might be, Twilight said, and blinked at the eagle.
- But not to owls, thought Soren. To owls, he thought, it is a real place.’ (p. 215-6)

‘And, indeed, Soren knew still another true:
Legends were not only for the desperate.
Legends were for the brave.’ (p. 218)

Soren: Barn Owls (Tyto Alba), (Barbagianni): it is widely distributed in the world; it measures 10–18 inch in overall length, with a wingspan of 30–43 inch.

Twilight: Great Gray Owls (Strix nebulosa), (Allocco di Lapponia): they belong to the Wood Owls group; are residents of Canada and Alaska; It is the largest owl species with a wingspan of 5-foot.

Gylfie: Elf Owl (Micrathene whitneyi), (Civetta?): is the smallest owl, only 5.5-inch.

Digger: Burrowing Owls (Athene cunicularia), (Civetta delle tane): they nest in burrows.

Review: Mushishi, Volume 3

2010-11-06T18:15:00.002-06:00

Mushishi, Volume 3
Yuki Urushibara
Del Rey (2008), Paperback, 256 pages

The Cry of Rust or The Sound of Rust
Ginko has to find out why a strange rust afflicts people and houses in a village. The village’s people think a girl is the cause of the rust.
The girl, Shige: ‘Whenever my voice was heard, the people around me would get patches of rust.’ (p. 17) But ‘This isn’t rust. It’s a Mushi called Yasabi.’ (p. 20)
‘Shige ... acted like a normal kid ... But her voice ... had a quality that attracted the things (Mushi) that caused the illness (the rust).’ (p. 34)
Ginko: ‘I wanted your voice to echo in the mountains surrounding the town. The Yasabi that gathered in the town wiil be dispersed into the mountains.’ (p. 45)
A voice could be heard in the village and the sea across a pass in the mountains.
‘But even now, they say ... that the people of the town ... can still hear a broken, husky voice with an odd beauty to it ... echoing softly through the mountains.’ (p. 48)

From the Ocean Edge or Where Sea Meets Man
Ginko is traveling along a beach where he meets a man looking for his wife (Michichi).
‘You’ve heard the term Umi-sen, Yama-sen, haven’t you? It refers to the belief that if a serpent lives for a thousand years in the sea and another thousand years in the mountains, it becomes a dragon.’ (p. 73) Mushi ‘there seems to be no difference between them and snakes. (p. 73) Mushi are linked to ancient beliefs (dragons).
Ginko decides to take a boat and with the boatman they go on the sea looking for Michichi, eventually they find her, but suddenly Michichi disappears.
When people are far from the shore, snakes (Mushi) and mist don’t allow them to return to the land, they cannot see the shore. Inside mist time is different from real time, when you look at what you wanted to see it disappears. Being (Sein) is linked with Time (Zeit): Michichi can live only living in the same time of her husband
One of the best episodes!

The Heavy Seed
In a village there are unusual harvests. Before harvests strange events happen: a natural disaster and the death of one of the village’s people.
‘The field of this village ... have always had a big harvest during natural disaster.’
‘On that year somebody always ... grow an extra tooth that autumn. When autumn comes to an end, the tooth falls out. And that person ... dies ...’ (p. 97)
‘Mushi are creatures so weak they can be carried by light.’ (p. 105) ‘They are closed to Koki, the liquid origin of Mushi. The light flow is the vein in which the Koki flows. You could call it - life - itself.’ (p. 106)
Mushi, light, Koki, life, and the heavy seed: manipulating Koki and seed ‘there are even ways to achieve immortality or resurrection.’ (p. 106)

White Living in the Inkstone or The White which Lives within the Ink Stone
Adashino is a collector of Mushi-related items. Some kids get themselves in trouble when they take one of Adashino’s Mushi.
‘So when ink was rubbed on it (inkstone), the Mushi came back to life ...’
‘It entered their bodies ... and is chilling them from the inside.’ (p. 148)
‘What is inside the inkstone ... is a Mushi called Kumohami (cloud eaters).’ and ‘... like clouds, they eat the water or ice, and give off snow or hail.’ (p. 165)

The Fish Gaze or One-Eyed Fish
This episode reveals Ginko’s origin: he is an orphan adopted by Nui.
Mushi ‘exist differently, but ... they aren’t completely estranged from us.’ (p. 193)
‘There are two types of darkness. One type is when you close your eyes, ... the other is ... endless darkness.’ (p. 196) ‘The ones (Mushi) that take the shape of darkness are called Tokoyami (eternal darkness). (p.; 198)
‘But if you ... can’t remember your name or your past ... that means that Tokoyami is near you. They say that if you remember, you can get away from it. And if it turns out that you can’t remember? Then find a name for yourself. It doesn’t matter what.’ (p. 202)
Darkness is where you don’t exist, ‘Fright ... and rage ... are things that blind one’s eyes.’ ‘Everything ... simply ... lives as it lives, that’s all.’ (p.230)
Ginko has to become a Mushishi and has to know darkness, so he must lose one eye.

Review: Berlin: City of Stones: Book One

2010-10-27T16:54:00.003-06:00

Berlin: City of Stones: Book One (Part 1)
Jason Lutes
Drawn and Quarterly (2000), Edition: 1st, Paperback, 209 pages

Berlin: City of Stones, according to the magazine Time, is one of the best graphic novel ever written.

Berlin: City of Stones by Jason Lutes is supposed to be a graphic novel series describing life in Berlin between WWI and WWII. The main characters of book one are an art student (Marthe Mueller) and a journalist (Kurt Severing), a second story line tells about a family who decides to follow the main political streams: mother and daughter join the communist party, while father and son join the Nazis.

In Germany, following World War First, a new government called Weimar Republic is established ; this new parliamentary republic has to face many problems: economic, extremism on the left and right political parties. Weimar Republic ends with the beginning of Hitler’s Third Reich.

Back to Berlin: City of Stones, the drawings of this graphic novel are very impressive, black and white shows and tells brilliantly the History of these years.

A last thought / question: Is Kurt Severing the double of Walter Benjamin (without mustache)?

Review: The Life and Adventures of Kit Long Wolf

2010-10-24T17:46:00.004-06:00

The Life and Adventures of Kit Long Wolf
John W. Carter
Dorrance Publishing Co. Inc. (2006), Paperback, 70 pages

‘One morning at daybreak his warriors were all around our village. He said to my father, I want all the furs and yellow stones you have I claim this land for Spain. Everything you have now belongs to Spain.
My father said, this land belongs to the Great Spirit. We only live in it. ‘ (p. 16)

John W. Carter was born in 1932 in Tennessee.

The Life and Adventures of Kit Long Wolf tells four decades of the life of an Irish immigrant to the new world in 1563 when he was a teenager.
Kit is the main character and narrator of the book. After escaping from the ship during harboring in the new world, he lives alone for a while befriending a wolf. When is captured by a native tribe he’s called Kit Long Wolf. Trusted for his wisdom he becomes Medicine Man of the tribe.

Dorrance Publishing has published two books linked to each other: Mayflower Maid by Raleigh Bruce Barlowe and The Life and Adventures of Kit Long Wolf by John W. Carter. These books are linked by the settlement in the new world between 15th and 16th century. The events are narrated from different points of view: Mayflower Maid tells the view of the English settlers while in Kit Long Wolf is narrated the point of view of the first nation. So is very interesting to read both books and learn something more about the first years in this new world.

Carter is a good writer although in Kit Long Wolf, only 70 pages, many events are narrated quickly and superficially.

Http://store.yahoo.com/cgi-bin/clink?dorrance+7XZRvv+index.html

I received a complimentary copy of (The Life and Adventures of Kit Long Wolf) as a
member of the Dorrance Publishing Book Review Team. Visit dorrancebookstore.com
to learn how you can become a member of the Book Review Team.

Review: Mushishi, Volume 2

2010-10-11T18:03:00.002-06:00

Mushishi, Volume 2
Yuki Urushibara
Del Rey (2007), Paperback, 240 pages

The Mountain Sleeps or The Sleeping Mountain
In this first novel of volume 2, an old Mushishi tells to Ginko the story how he became the guardian of the mountain.
The mushi is called Mugura and ‘are like the nervous system of the mountain.’ (p. 13) The old Mushishi cannot leave the mountain because of the dangerous mushi, and Ginko cannot help him.

The Sea of Brushstrokes or A Sea of Writing
A curse afflicts a family for generations: a birthmark the color of an ink stain means a new writer of mushi’s stories.
‘In the future ... we animal and plant life must live in concert with the mushi.’ (p. 59) In the past after a great calamity mushi’s separated from the other animal and plant, so started the curse of the ink birthmark.

They That Breathe Ephemeral Life or Those who Inhale the Dew
Mushi in called Biku and live in Akoya’s sinus cavity because she inhaled it from a flower. Akoya in a girl revered as a god and a boy asks to Ginko to investigate the case.
‘Once again today, the sun rises and sets again. The flowers that bloomed this morning begin to bow their heads.
Once again today, the sun will set and rise again. And when the sun hits it, the flower blooms, but it is a different flower from yesterday’s.’ (p. 93)

Rain Comes and a Rainbow Is Born or Raindrops and Rainbows
The fourth novel is the best of this second volume.
A boy travels looking for rainbows: ‘I’ve heard that treasures are buried at the ends of rainbows, but ...’ (p. 147)
Mushi is called Koda and means rainbow and snake. ‘The Koda ... are light ... and rain that has some Koki in it. ... (the Koki are) the stuff that is the basis of a mushi’s life force. ... they may have sources that cause them to start. But they have no goal. They live only to flow. They don’t let anything interfere.’ (p. 178)
Like Ginko’s travelling is without goal so Koda is not dangerous, they live only to show themselves.
‘In an area to the west where there’s a river famous for its flooding ... word is spread about a bridge that can withstand the floods.
When the river rises, they remove certain planks ... and they let the water flow as it well.
When the water level falls, they return it to normal.’ (p. 181)

The Veil Spore or Cotton Changeling
Ginko helps a family with strange children.
Mushi is called Watahaki: ‘they have the form of green cotton that floats on the air.’ (p. 195) Watahaki give birth baby with a short life span. Ginko has to burn the house with these mushi/children, but he keeps one for himself. ‘You are an inscrutable being.’ (p. 226)

Review: Martian Time-Slip

2010-10-11T09:10:00.003-06:00

Five novels of the 1960s & 70s - Martian Time-Slip
Philip K. Dick
New York : Library of America : Distributed to the trade in the U.S. by Penguin Putnam, c2008.

Arnie Kott: ‘... we got the future, and where else do you think things happen except in the future?’ (p. 115)

Martian Time-Slip refers to living in different times instead of present, also past or future.

This novel by Philip K. Dick is set in a colony on Mars and tells the story of Manfred Steiner, an autistic boy who can help other people to live in the past or in the future.
Arnie Kott, leader of the water worker’s union, becomes interested in Manfred because he wants to use Manfred’s skill to predict future in his business ventures.

Martian Time-Slip is a speculative science-fiction novel because Dick doesn’t tell about space ships or other futuristic electronic devices; so who remembers Blade Runner (or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) is crowded out by reading this novel.

Review: Saga of the Swamp Thing: Volume 1

2010-10-10T11:27:00.003-06:00

Saga of the Swamp Thing: Volume 1
Alan Moore
DC Comics, Inc. (1987), Edition: 1st, Paperback, 176 pages

‘You shouldn’t have come here.’ (from the back cover)

The first four chapters are the best of this volume; the last three tell events improved in the next volumes of the saga of Swamp Thing.

‘He isn’t Alec Holland. He never will be Alec Holland. He never was Alec Holland. He’s just a ghost. A ghost dressed in weeds.’ (p. 33)
The Swamp Thing becomes aware of his nature: in a previous life he was an human being called Alec Holland, now in this new form he is only weeds and mud.
‘Woodrue ... he took ... my humanity ... away from me ... caused so much agony ... and when I thought the agony was ... over, that I found ... peace ... he tainted that as well ... Woodrue.’ (p. 72)
The Swamp Thing refuses to live as half man / half tree and he / it rooted in the swamp, becoming a vegetable.

Jason Woodrue becomes part of the swamp, and grows like a plant. Woodrue: ‘I am come to announce the Green Millennium.’ (p. 79) But this Green Millennium means destruction, so the Swamp Thing wake up to put order, aware that he is not anymore Alec Holland.

Review: The Book of Human Skin

2010-10-02T18:35:00.003-06:00

The Book of Human Skin
Michelle Lovric
Bloomsbury Publishing (2010), Hardcover, 512 pages

‘Hic Liber Cute Compactus Est’ (p. 143)

‘Why are we all doing our best to become angels? It is perhaps because we shall always have something shadowy in our consciences ...’ ( p. 459)

Books with the cover made of human skin, and behind this Gothic library there is Minguillo Fasan. Against this project of books of human skin there is an obstacle: Marcella, Minguillo’s sister.

The Book of Human Skin is narrated from five main characters’ points of view: Minguillo and his sister Marcella Fasan (a noble family of Venice), Gianni delle Boccole (House Fasan’s butler), Sor Loreta (nun in Arequipa’s convent, Peru`), and Doctor Santo Aldobrandini.
Although this book could be categorized as historical fiction, we can find other genres: horror, romance, and especially Gothic fiction.
In the background Michelle Lovric’s passion for Venice: ‘marbled water cradled in the shadow of a bridge, a palazzo seeming to sway in a web of fretwork, ...’ (p. 181) or ‘ the play of water reflections under bridges and the cries of seagulls at dawn.’ (p. 438)
And from this Venetian’s water reflections towards the old wet brick’s walls in the calle (an alley of water) the destiny follows a path of magic; so when Minguillo’s father writes to his wife about the insanity of their son, Minguillo intercepts the letter and ‘I (Minguillo) had barely finished scanning it (the letter) when a fictitious gust of wind carried it out of the window and away down the Grand Canal before any inquisitive monkey might count his toes.’ (p. 78) Randomness and magic change everything and give birth to a new story.

Minguillo Fasan talking about his books: ‘When I say I loved books, I mean that I loved not just the souls of my books but their bodies.’ (p. 39) or ‘Late at night, did Minguillo books of human leather talk among themselves?’ (p. 285) Minguillo a sadistic man remind the first pages of Les Chants de Maldoror by Comte de Lautréamont: ‘One should let one’s fingernails grow for fifteen days. etc etc’ His dreams are collecting books of human skin and living for ever in Palazzo Espagnol.

Marcella Fasan is a patient sister whose Kafkian life goes from a tormented cohabitation in Palazzo Espagnol in Venice, to the hospital for lunatics, and finally in a convent in Peru`. She waits until her enemy (her brother) collapses; and again the human skin intervenes to correct imperfections: the small pox.

Gianni delle Boccole is depicted speaking a Celinian argot; an example: ‘so as not to draw saucespishon (= suspicion)’ (p. 393) He is the butler in Palazzo Espagnol and loves Marcella like a father.

Doctor Santo Aldobrandini explains why the human skin is so important: ‘Perhaps this is why I have always loved the skin: because it is both the story and the storyteller.’ (p. 21)

Sor Loreta hates her skin and body. She thinks to reach sainthood because of her behavior: drinking only vinegar and fighting every way of life outside the strict monastic rules. This character is surprising for her frankness and seemingly funny logical thinking.

A final note / quote: ‘Dio ha manda` l’om per (par) castigar l’om’; in my opinion a better translation could be: God created man to torment man. instead of God created man to shame man. (last page)

Review: Mayflower Maid

2010-09-19T14:01:00.002-06:00

Mayflower Maid
Raleigh Bruce Barlowe
Dorrance Publishing Co. Inc. (2006), Paperback, 242 pages

Raleigh Bruce Barlowe, a bachelor’s degree in history, is the author of several historical novels, his books are competent describing events really happened.

The historical events: the Mayflower ship sailed in 1620 from England to Plymouth (Massachusetts, United States) with a hundred of English Separatists, known as Pilgrims.
Bet Tilley, the Mayflower Maid, as old woman remembers and tells the story of the founding of the Plymouth colony from the exile in Holland and the perilous voyage across the Atlantic.

In many parts of this book, history seems glued to the characters’ life, so nobody emerges as a full personality. Bet and her friend / brother John meet each other on the Mayflower and what could be the thread of the novel is forgotten for most parts of the book.

A fast read book remembering the first settlers of a new world.

Buy this book: http://store.yahoo.com/cgi-bin/clink?dorrance+7XZRvv+index.html

I received a complimentary copy of Mayflower Maid as a member of the
Dorrance Publishing Book Review Team. Visit http://www.dorrancebookstore.com/
to learn how you can become a member of the Book Review Team.

Review: Mansfield Park

2010-09-07T22:14:00.002-06:00

Mansfield Park (Everyman's Library (Cloth))
Jane Austen
Everyman's Library (1992), Hardcover, 528 pages
and
Mansfield Park (The Complete Classics)
by Jane Austen
Naxos Audiobooks (2007), Edition: Unabridged, Audio CD, 14 pages

Par délicatesse J’ai perdu ma vie (from Chanson de la plus haute tour by Arthur Rimbaud)

Two becomes one; and after, two becomes three.
Two:
Jane Austen’s first book, Sense and Sensibility tells the story of two sisters with different feelings about how to become woman. The contrast of personality between Elinor and Marianne is the contrast between sense and sensibility as well.
The following book Pride and Prejudice, although the title was chosen by the publisher, shows another contrast between two kind of judgments: pride and prejudice.
One:
In the next novel, Mansfield Park with Fanny Price as main character, Jane Austen elects only one character, who with her sensitivity (délicatesse) contains all the roughness of feelings read in the previous books.
Three:
Mansfield Park has also a bound with the number three. Jane Austen writes a book in three volumes, she wants to write a comedy in three acts. The novel also tells how the party at Mansfield Park try to arrange a comedy (although there is only the rehearsals).
The number three is the structure of Mansfield Park because we find in it how the desire of someone or something is never direct, but always follows an indirect path.

Fanny wants to be desired by the others of the party when she is retreat in her rooms: ‘She alone was sad and insignificant; she had no share in any thing; she might go or stay, she might be in the midst of their noise, or retreat from it to the solitude of the east room, without being seen or missed!’ (p. 162) In the novel The Eternal Husband Dostoevsky wrote about the same idea: ‘might go or stay ... without being seen or missed.’ Fanny (number one) and the party (number two): they need the absence of Fanny (number three) so the party knows about Fanny.

The choice of Maria to marry Rushworth is, as always, an indirect choice (the third path). ‘Henry Crawford had destroyed her (Maria’s) happiness, but he should not know that he had done it; he should not destroy her credit, her appearance, her prosperity too. He should not have to think of her as pining in the retirement of Mansfield for him ...’ (p. 206) The third choice means resentment: Maria marries Rushworth only because Henry leaves her.

Mimetic desire needs jealousy and a third person. Mary talking to Fanny: ‘There is a daughter of Mr.Fraser by a first wife, whom she is wild to get married and wants Henry to take.’ (p. 371) Mary thinks that Fanny could desire to marry Henry only because another woman wants to marry him.

Fanny marries Edmund at the end. But it’s really happened? Austen suggests that happened ‘exactly at the time when it was quite natural that it should be so.’ p. (484)

Jane Austen with Mansfield Park tells about a world never narrated before. Apart from some sporadic descriptions of servants, Austen this time widens her view telling about poor people. Fanny unfortunately has to know her parents, and Austen takes the time to describe this world where they live.
The first encounter: William, Fanny’s brother, introduces their father to her: ‘But here is my sister, Sir, here is Fanny; turning and leading her forward’; - ‘it is so dark you do not see her.’ (p. 391) The dark room is not only lack of candles, Austen in a few words tells parental feelings, past story of a family, suffocating world, etc.
‘There was neither health nor gaiety in sun-shine in a town. She (Fanny) sat in a blaze of oppressive heat, in a cloud of moving dust; and her eyes could only wander from the walls marked by her father’s head, to the table cut and knotched by her brothers, where stood the tea-board never thoroughly cleaned, the cups and saucers wiped in streaks, ...’ (p. 452)

‘Here`s harmony! - said she (Fanny) - Here’s repose! There’s what may leave all painting and all music behind, and what poetry only can attempt to describe. Here`s what may tranquillize every care, and lift the heart to rapture! When I look out on such a night as this, I feel as if there could be neither wickedness nor sorrow in the world; and there certainly would be less of both if the sublimity of Nature were more attended to, and people were carried more out of themselves by contemplating such a scene.’ (p. 116)

Review: Judgment and Wrath

2010-09-05T09:37:00.002-06:00

Judgment and Wrath
Matt Hilton
William Morrow (2010), Hardcover, 352 pages

Joe Hunter is hired by Richard Dean who wants to keep his daughter safe from her abusive boyfriend, but the truth is different and to complicate the story a fallen angel, Dantalion, intervenes.

The narration follows an usual action plot with gun fires, car chasing, and all still alive, with a lot of scratches, until the end.
The best parts of the book are the changing of point of views between Joe Hunter and Dantalion, when the same action is viewed from different angles.
The characters are just sketched and the dialogs between actions don’t keep suspense high.
I preferred less textbook’s descriptions of guns, knifes, helicopters, or how to spy other people.
Although these lacks in the book, action sequences keep the reader clinging to the page and the book is readable.