Reading Report. May/June 2025
Continuing Horror MAYhem a bit longer, I read “The Summer People” by Shirley Jackson (1950) The beginning reminded me of Nesbit’s “Man-Sized In Marble,” but Jackson’s story takes the very normal and turns it progressively darker.
Blending Horror MAYhem with Arthur Conan Doyle’s May 22nd Birthday (also my Dad’s Birthday!) I kept to my tradition of honoring both men with a read of Doyle’s work. I finally got around to reading Doyle’s “The Parasite,” which I have in several collections including “Dracula’s Brood.” The story is one of, if not quite parasitic vampirisn, obsession and mesmerism. The ending was a bit of deus ex machina and I expected that denouement in the middle of the story with the narrator’s predicament going on, but still a fun and spooky story. (It’s one of those tales told through entries in a diary/journal, by the way.)
Also read Doyle’s “The Fiend Of the Cooperage.” A horror story that eschews the supernatural for a real-world terror. Set in Gabon off the coast of Africa. I could see where Doyle was going with it, but it was nonetheless horrifying! Reminicent of Doyle’s hero E. A. Poe as well as another of Doyle’s stories.
When someone reads Arthur Conan Doyle, the characters are alive. Not every writer can say that.
And I’ll consider this a last blast of Horror MAYhem; in early June I read Algernon Blackwood’s story “Ancient Sorceries.” I’d never read one of his John Silence stories before. Maybe overly long and wordy but not a word wasted! Utterly gripping with plenty of cat imagery in a tale of a little French town where the dark ways of the past are not gone.
I’ve been dipping into “This Is A Thriller,” by Alan Warren, a non-fiction book about the 1960s horror anthology hosted by Boris Karloff. Absolutely marvelous!
Read Frank Belknap Long’s sweet and fun story “The Mississippi Saucer.” That was anthologized in the Asimov/Greenberg/Waugh anthology “Flying Saucers.” A book I should do a whole post on sometime! And Long is a neglected writer, mainly associated with Lovecraft but he was so much more.
Re-read Jack Finney’s “The Other Wife,” in the Fifth Annul “Year’s Best Sci-Fi” from Judith Merrill, which I picked up in Emporia.
Read a fun picture book that’s going to be a Christmas Present so I won’t mention it here!
Read Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Tom Toothacre’s Ghost Story” for Stowe’s June 13th Birthday. Spooky and fun with a different way to get rid of ghosts! From about 1871.
Finally finished J. Scott Coatsworth and Kim Fielding’s fun novel “Office Of the Lost.” Sweet, well-done and funny!
Read the regular online offerings by E. H. Timms and Kaje Harper, as well as J. Scott Coatsworth’s weekly serial “Down The River.”
Read “The Christmas Shadrack” by Frank R. Stockton. I LOLed at this sweet and funny comedy of romance, manners and magic in Victorian-era America. Published in 1891.
Read Ray Bradbury’s “Memento Mori.” One of those macabre Bradbury stories that nonetheless makes you smile.
Read Gahan Wilson’s “The Big Green Grin.” This and the Bradbury are in the anthology “Gathering The Bones,” edited by Campbell, Dann and Etchison.
Had lunch with my friend Bryan Dietrich, estimable sci-fi writer and poet and he signed a copy of “Drawn To Marvel,” a collection of Superhero poetry he edited with Marta Ferguson. It has some of his poems in it too!
AND I ordered (and I don’t believe I did!) a collection of comic book stories: “The Detective Chimp Casebook.” I’d never read a Detective Chimp story before and these little crime stories are charming as all get-out! Mostly written by John Broome and illustrated by Carmine Infantino the stories were first published in the 1950s.
No, I wasn’t driving.
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