August 2008

“This adventure will test the nature of the world.”

Title: The Etched City
Author: K. J. Bishop
Genre: Fantasy/Surreal/New Weird
Year: 2003

K.J. Bishop’s The Etched City is one of those books that are at once both obvious and perplexing when trying to assign to any one genre. It’s undeniably fantasy in the same way Stephen King’s Dark Tower series [...]

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Buster wasn’t always right, and he gave mixed answers sometimes, but the thing that sticks with me, the thing that always seems right, was what he said about how life isn’t always satisfactory, and that in the end, dirt and flesh are pretty much the same.

Title: A Fine Dark Line
Author: Joe R. Lansdale
Genre: Mystery/Thriller
Year: 2003

In [...]

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I recently received my contributor’s copy of Murky Depths # 5, and all I can say is that this is the format genre print magazines need to aspire to emulate. Forget the boring old monochrome newsprint digest format that nobody can see in the rack, and don’t be fooled by the glossy full-sized [...]

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Astute readers may have noticed it, but it took me a few days. Seems Gollancz’s Fantasy Masterworks edition of The House on the Borderland and Other Novels, which I used to illustrate my recent review, makes a pretty big boo-boo on the cover. Spot it?
Perhaps they had swine-things on the brain when they did [...]

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Are you familiar with the scent of extinguished birthday candles? For me, their aroma is superseded by a sound like the drawing of a bow across the bass string of a violin. This note carries all of the melancholic joy I have been told the scent engenders — the loss of another year, the promise [...]

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