Alex Patterson > Recent Status Updates

How many times has it been pointed out, in academic papers or in blogs, that the Experiment Station of this book mirrors the boarding school of Ishiguro's 'Never Let Me Go', which mirrors The Maw of the game series 'Little Nightmares'?

Wide brown scummed expanses of an estuary extended under a dreary sky to a distant group of coal-spirit tanks, rusty and cobwebbed with pipework, beside a refinery where a thick smear of smoke ascended reluctantly to join the clouds.

Wide brown scummed expanses of an estuary extended under a dreary sky to a distant group coal-spirit tanks, rusty and cobwebbed with pipework, beside a refinery where a thick smear of smoke ascended reluctantly to join the clouds.

That’s a kind of ghost they have there up in those forests. Same size as a child, and they got no heads. They feel there way about at night and if you’re a-sleeping out in the forest they get ahold of you and won’t nothing make ‘em let go.

This is my second time reading Northern Lights, my first having been in 2018. I'm enjoying it a lot more. Northern Lights, already in just the first thirty percent of its story, embodies many concepts that have shaped my taste over the past four years: the aesthetic of Steampunk, and the streak of horror in fairy tales, and using normal font for thought bubbles and impressional statements.

Then came the crash of glass and the glug of spilled liquid.

I can't stop thinking about this sentence I read today, which narrates a nineteenth-century hot-air balloonist as he sailed into a cloud and, inside, heard music from below resounding as if present:

'He was delighted when he entered a thick cloud with particularly high hygrometer reading, and suddenly found himself in the middle of a concert hall in which 'excellent orchestral music' was playing.'

Having thrice read Joe Moran's style-guide 'First You Write a Sentence', I find myself using its principles to measure any prose I read. The principles fail this, Holmes' book, in a few areas. One area is how Holmes links up sentences, where he too often uses adverbial conjunctions ('moreover', 'nonetheless', 'interestingly'), as if scared the reader might not be following his line of thought.