The Empusium: a Health Resort Horror Story (Book Review)
I finished reading a few days ago, and can still feel my admiration building. In many ways traditional in structure, it is a tale of a character transformation, from the point a young man...
Category: fiction
Reading Genesis: book review
Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis, London: Virago, 2024. Can the writer of this very closely-argued, scholarly study be the same Marilynne Robinson we’ve some to know and, at least in my own case, to profoundly...
Book Review: Black Elk Speaks
Rating books is always reductive, unfair: it flattens a full-fledged, 3D experience into a less than a line…just 5 dots! Rating this one is particularly absurd, like passing judgement on the New Testament or...
Riddley Walker (book review)
This book is hard to read. The language insists on calling attention to itself, so no stars for “ease” or “comfort”. But I can’t imagine a more effective way of insisting on the fragility,...
Re-reading the Picture of Dorian Gray
I’ve never really been attracted to the horror genre. The story invariably seems too contrived to be plausible. I need the horror to be real. The Picture of Dorian Gray is definitely a horror...
Writing and Digging
My first reading at Telltales (the writers group in Falmouth–see last post) was called “Daisies”. It’s pretty much a description of something that happened to me–hard to say exactly when, but within the...