protean depravity

Yesterday was one of those wonderful days when wonderful surprises happen and anything seems possible. I had an afternoon shift at the Hammett and when I arrived there the word was already circulating around that in the morning the renowned SF author Peter F. Hamilton had been at the Otherland Bookstore, asking if he can sign his books on the shelves.

It is a rare talent for an author to be able to perfectly balance the weird elements in their writing with the mundane; to scatter into what is deceivingly like our lives that which decisively is unlike it, and to do so just to the right degree. This is a delicate craft, and it's one Michael Wehunt masters in his latest short story collection The Inconsolables . The title already implies it: All Wehunt's characters are in a state of uneasiness, they are looking for comfort and for solace, whether by reviving childhood interests after a separation, by adopting a stray dog after the death of a child, in hypochondriasis, or whether it's about a married couple who simultaneously reaches the midlife crisis, or a woman, lead by a crooked and scary cupid, confronting in a room all the men who have sexually assaulted her throughout her life, or the last man on Earth who will die, because he was born thirty-seven days before the dealine for immortality in a new world where it h...

Hello everyone, I hope you are doing well and the stormy summer doesn't frustrate you much - it does me. Here's something to read when the rain floods the city again (incidentally my first short review is about exactly a book about that), enjoy!

What comes to your mind when you think of the “Wild West”? Horses, bandits, desperados, cowboys, wise natives, prostitutes in petticoats dancing to piano songs in wooden saloons, rangers, scorching heat, guns, dust, grave diggers, Sheriffs and Reverends, public hangings, even Chinese railroad workers and wandering medicine men? Well, Hot Iron and Cold Blood adds flesh eating birds, vampires, worshipers of Yog-Sothoth, revenge spells, headless warriors, ghost dinosaurs, spirits, crazy pimps, and speaking holes to that, and so here we have one of the most original and well-done anthologies of the past decade which absolutely succeeds in wonderfully integrating the weird, the unsettling as well as the horror and terror into this intrinsically surreal and hostile, but at the same time free and hopeful environment. The idea of living in a time without my dentist and Nine Inch Nails is terrifying to me. Any historical story set in a time without these is principally uninteresti...

Oops! I almost forgot the blog's birthday (yet again)... 

  Mid-year has come and gone and it is again time for looking back at this year's reading and draw a balance. There's a bitter-sweet feeling though, there haven't been too many good books that impressed me greatly, though I have to admit, because I have been struggling a little bit privately, I have read a lot of non-fiction and self-help books which don't really flow into this balance. And in the end, they didn't really help a great deal, so they were kind of wasted reading time. So, my friends, here's this year's mid-year freakout, in the hope that the really good stuff is yet to come!