The year two thousand fifteen was, first and foremost, the year that they cut me open to replace the piece of my aorta resembling a boa constrictor that swallowed a goat with something that may or may not be a garden hose. For roughly two-thirds of the year almost everything seemed to circle back to… Read more »
Yearly Archives: 2015
First Lines: Trigger Warning
Neil Gaiman’s latest volume of collected short fictions and disturbances, Trigger Warning (table of contents), is a hoot. For this post, I was going to dump a load of links to you, but as I could mostly find links to readings of the work, I won’t. Take, for example, “Click-Clack the Rattlebag”, which is an… Read more »
First Lines: Karakter
Jacob Willem Katadreuffe, the hero of F. Bordewijk’s literary classic Karakter, is—excuse the pun—a bit of a character. Just like his mother, he is stubborn and not willing or able to accept charity, favors, or a helping hand. And you can blame his father as well. That man definitely is a piece of work. He… Read more »
First Lines: The Damnation Game
Three weeks after finishing Clive Barker’s The Damnation Game I still do not know what to make of it. While it started out interesting enough with a thief searching the ruins of Warsaw for a mysterious, unbeatable card-player. Then, fast-forward, it is several decades later, and a reclusive millionaire hires a boxer turned small-time criminal… Read more »
First Lines: Unidentified Funny Objects 2
Right after I finished reading Unidentified Funny Objects, I cracked open volume two. Figuratively speaking, of course, as breaking my e-reader would be a waste. Like the first volume, UFO2 contains a smothering of funny stories. Some favorites: “Class Action Orc” by James Beamon in which an imprisoned orc acts as a public defender for… Read more »