Monthly Archives: December 2015

2015 In List (Mostly, Anyway…)

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 »

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 »

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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 »