Dave J. > Recent Status Updates

Nearing the end now... While I have mixed feelings about the "new" stories, this collection also contains some of Haynes' best (both stories I've read before and ones I've just discovered here). A pretty worthwhile read overall, I'd say.

The last handful of stories have been excellent. The uncanniness, the horror, the poetic style, and the deeply empathetic treatment of characters all come together in astounding ways. Looking forward to the rest.

Neat how Howard created his own mythos for some of these stories. He even references Lovecraft's Necronomicon in one.

"In the name of utility, democracy, and science, many educators had
come to embrace the supposedly uneducable or less educable child as
the center of the secondary-school universe, relegating the talented
child to the sidelines.... This group has indeed been neglected by many educators and looked upon...as a deviant, a side issue, a special problem, at times even a kind of pathology."

"We cannot know, of course, how much impact the content of school
readers had on the minds of children. But any child who accepted
the attitudes prevalent...would have come to think of
scholarship and the fine arts as embellishments identified with the
inferior society of Europe, would have thought of art primarily with
regard to its services to nationality...[and] its contributions to character."

Further along, the quality of the writing has improved but nothing has jumped out and wowed me yet. The atmospheric horror is decent but mostly familiar, or rather, I'm more desensitized to stories like these now. Will keep reading since they're at least enjoyable in their pulpy, fast-paced way.

Reading through some of these I'm reminded that Howard tends to get hung up on repetition, and he also tends to write many similar stories. But at the same time, they're full of energy and rhythm, and he is certainly a deliberate writer who knows his bounds well.

So far: fueled by paranoia, gaps in reality, and lots of emotion. In between the pity, the laughs, the dreams, and the rage, the characters are undeniably tragic, but also relatable in their epiphanies and moments of clarity.

"The freedom of intellect and art is inevitably the freedom to
criticize and disparage, to destroy and re-create; but the daily necessity of the intellectual and the artist is to be an employee, a protégé, a beneficiary.... The anti-intellectualism of businessmen, interpreted narrowly as hostility to intellectuals...is part of the extensive American devotion to practicality."

Much of the newer (new to me) stories in this collection are missing the skillful command of language and unabashed morbidity that made Haynes' "Thou Shalt Not Suffer a Witch" collection so gripping. These are written in a more casual, colloquial way, which is not to say the style is ineffective, but it does tend to be less impactful. Still, my overall experience has been more positive than negative.

Well researched and engrossing. Hofstadter delineates between the rise of the "one hundred percent mentality"--a proto-fundamentalist "desire to strike back against anything modern" (rational criticism, evolutionism, a social gospel, etc), and the church-goer that was open to progression, skepticism, and valued education. The former thrills in "chasing phantoms" in an "arena of conflict" vs. empirical understanding.

At the end of Part 1. It's no Moby Dick but it has its moments. About as plodding as it is momentous. The writing itself is skillful enough, and Nemo is indeed an interesting character. Will continue.

As other reviews have mentioned, this book tends to be long-winded when it comes to information about the sea, but it's a decent adventure story otherwise.

"But the willows especially; for ever they went on chattering and talking among themselves, laughing a little, shrilly crying out, sometimes sighing—but what it was they made so much to-do about belonged to the secret life of the great plain they inhabited...a host of beings from another plane of life, another evolution altogether, perhaps, all discussing a mystery known only to themselves."

So, only three stories out of thirteen were okay-ish weird fiction, which is a bummer. And out of the other ten ghost stories, I only liked the three written by Edith Wharton, E. Nesbit, and C.P. Gilman. The rest were more or less shoddy or predictable. I ended up not being able to finish five of the stories here.

Well, six stories in and the weird fiction finally appears. I take back what I said in my previous update--now it's clear that this collection is a mix of genres. The two weird fiction stories that I've read seem to be nods to both Lovecraft and Hodgson, but they're unfortunately underwhelming stories. Too much telling, not enough showing.

Misleading title--so far, at least. It should instead be "Women's Supernatural Horror" or "Women's Ghost Stories." As for the stories themselves, the first two are rough and didn't draw me in, but the following three are excellent (there are thirteen stories in total here). If the quality stays the same then I'll definitely enjoy the rest of this book.

What an experience this trilogy has been. I can't believe it's over. But thankfully there are still more of Peake's books to check out (as well as the fourth novel in Gormenghast put together by Peake's widow, Maeve Gilmore.)

"Such a sensation can become too powerful for the human body. It is as easy to control as a sliding avalanche. It takes a sacrosanct convention and snaps it in half as though it were a stick. It lifts up some holy relic and throws it at the sun. It is laughter. Laughter when it stamps its feet; when it sets the bells jangling in the next town. Laughter with the pips of Eden in it."

"So Juno returned to her home, and it was true that it had already become a place of echoes, shadows, voices; moments of pause and suspense; moments of vague suffering or dwindling laughter...moments of acute nostalgia where she stood all unwittingly at a window in a haze of stars; or of sweetness hardly to be borne when the shadow of Titus came between her and the sun as it rose through the slanting rain."

Justice at last?

"A primordial love for his birth-place, a love which survived and grew, for all that he had left his home, for all that he was a traitor, burned in him with a ferocity that he could not understand. All he knew was that as he stared at the spider-man, he, Titus, began to age. A cloud had passed over his heart. He was not so much in the thick of an adventure as alone with something that smelt of death."

"By the Sun, Moon and Stars and the Golden Apples of the West!"

The stories after the first one are an improvement in writing style, but they still have issues, namely that there is more telling than showing, and at key points we are told what to think of characters and their decisions. The stories themselves are lacking in tension, too. I found the previous books' personal dramas a lot more compelling.

It's been difficult to put this one down. The narrator spares no one and refuses to favor any of the characters, which makes each scene all the more intriguing.