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"...history is a genre that occupies the uncanny valley between traditional, orderly storytelling and the drooling nonsense of a stroke victim."

This is why I'm quitting this book. It's just full of awful crap like this. If the goal of the phrase is to highlight the challenge of creating narrative out of the chaos of the past, there are much less annoying ways to express that idea.

On second thought, I'm just going to be stubborn and skip the remainder of part two. Some reviews indicate that things get better in the final section, so I'm willing to give it a shot.

By the time we had a second quirky group of missionaries who gave a quirky name to their boat, I began to fantasize about traveling back in time to kill baby Martin Luther, as Protestantism was clearly a huge mistake. It's probably time to DNF.

There's a combination of voice, themes and subject matter in this work that completely fails for me as a work of entertainment. I'm tempted to finish just to understand what this book is trying to do and whether I hate the goal or the methodology, but on the other hand, it's really hard to get through.

"And now, constant reader, it is time for an essential digression."

No, it isn't. The whole novel is a series of digressions, none of which have risen to the level of essential.

Just as with Edward Lee, I feel like I'm developing an antagonistic relationship with this text.

One of the best collections I've read in ages. Interesting variations on dark fiction (psychological, body horror, science fiction...) all told with a solid command of the language to create a truly unnerving atmosphere.

This whole epistolary section reminds me of Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland.

1. All this talk of a veiled prophet makes me wish I was rereading Borges' A Brief History of Infamy. (IYKYK)
2. The prose is pretty rizzless.
3. There's no real sense of structure to the narrative, no feeling of set up, anticipation, payoff. The most recent passage is whether the prophet and their followers are literally or metaphorically "veiled," and I just don't care.

After the last couple of horror novels turned out to be slogs, this is right up my alley. Brief, well-crafted snippets of the uncanny.

As much as the Ligotti influence is present, this feels like the opposite of "Nethescurial" (one of the finest tales in the weird canon). Mechanically, the focus is on writing instead of reading. More subjectively, while Nethescurial's writing feels like being lost in a maze, this feels more like reading about the steps to build a maze. We'll have to see if it ends up working.

"Some authors, though, get away with it regardless."

Have you ever met one of those, Eddie?

What I find most offensive about Lee's writing isn't the sex, the violence, the copious bodily fluids, the language, the misogyny, the racism or even the sub-Christgau musings on the music that was popular in his youth. It's his use of flashbacks.

I'm really not trying to be nitpicky but we're less than 10 pages in and already getting a flashback to repeat exposition we got at the start of the story. And delivered to the same character no less! I guess our protagonist has that Memento disorder...

I finished "The Pig."

I'm not going to belabor the point.

I've read Penthouse letters with better story structure.

I will say, The Pig managed to inspire a real emotional reaction from me. Not horror, not even disgust (though I felt some of that) but anger. I find myself needing to skim over the mentions of rock bands because it's pretentious hack shit, and every time it happens, I feel an overwhelming desire to punch Edward Lee in the dick.

On a bright note, the plot has finally kicked in. Yay...

Again, I have to ask, what's the arc here? Do I care why the gross act in the first scene takes place? No. Do I care if the protagonist makes his film? No. Is it offensive? Sure, but it's 2025 and I have access to the internet. Offensive isn't an achievement. It's not horror. The one nice thing I'll say about Lee is he seems to have a good vocabulary.

I don't get "Pig." When your hook is "Would you like to know why this person did this gross thing?" and you a) already show much grosser things on the page and b) digress into a tedious 19-year-old's idea of literary horror, sure, you have a series of words, but do you actually have a story?

Have I lost my capacity to read fiction? I can see the stylistic similarities to Ligotti or Michael Cisco, and yet that now that style isn't enough to get me to push through on an opening that's up its own ass about the in-story "author," their mental health and publication history, and what they're NOT going to write before telling us about the grayness they see in the world. It's like an anti-hook.

The first story follows a private detective investigating the disappearance of three youths. I've come to the conclusion that I kind of hate character work in horror stories. If I wanted to read about a middle-aged guy lamenting his divorce, I'd stick to Raymond Carver.

The Tale of Toad Loop.
In theory, a middling Lovecraft riff which borrows a little from Dunwich Horror, The Shadow Over Innsmouth and The Curse of Yig. The faux folksy style really makes it grating, though.

Finally slogged my way through the end of The Black Massif.