Silvertail had some investigation to do... ----- Chapter 27. Silvertail wriggled harder, and managed to get his furry shoulders through the small hole near the foundation of the school. That accomplished, he could easily drag the rest of himself through. It is fortunate that rats can fit through any hole their heads can go through. He had parked the car at a nearby restaurant. Making his way to the school from there, mostly in rat form, was the real challenge. Proportionately, rats were faster than humans—but [ Continue reading... ]
On My Shelves: The Delirium Brief
August 8, 2017 By Leave a Comment
In the prior Laundry Files novel, The Nightmare Stacks, the UK was invaded by a desperate army of super-Nazi magic-wielding Elves. Fortunately, the army was defeated when the innocent young vampire (er, sorry, PHANG) agent captured the heart of the Elven Princess and the two of them defeated her Evil Stepmother and Evil Overlord Father, thus making her the All-Highest. Of course, all this troperiffic goodness was filtered through the twisted nature of the Laundryverse, but still, it was surprisingly upbeat; eldritch horrors notwithstanding, [ Continue reading... ]
On My Shelves: The Fuller Memorandum (Laundry Files #3)
May 5, 2017 By Leave a Comment
Bob Howard, IT expert, computational demonologist, and sometime field agent for the ultra-top-secret U.K. agency called The Laundry, is back. Fresh from the James Bondian adventure of The Jennifer Morgue, Bob's married to Mo, who he rescued in the first book and who returned the favor with a vengeance in the second, and while any marriage that includes two people who know about the Great Old Ones and their impending arrival in CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN isn't going to be filled with picket fences and cheery nights all the time, you might hope that [ Continue reading... ]
On World Fantasy Con and the World Fantasy Awards…
November 11, 2015 By Leave a Comment
Following WFC 2015, it was announced that henceforth the World Fantasy Awards would not be represented by a bust of horror legend Howard Phillips Lovecraft, commonly abbreviated to Lovecraft or HPL. Personally, I felt this was the right decision. Even if you don't agree with those who began the movement based on feeling that it was inappropriate to use a known (and admitted) racist as the symbol of one of the most prestigious awards in the SF/F community, the simple fact is that HPL sucked as a selection to represent the World Fantasy [ Continue reading... ]
On My Shelves: The Jennifer Morgue
August 4, 2015 By 1 Comment
Bob Howard is back. A hacker-turned-agent for the supernatural covert agency of the United Kingdom, The Laundry, Bob has recovered from his earlier encounters with a parallel-world Nazi plot to summon an energy-consuming "ice giant" into the world and an internal power struggle that revealed part of the government's plans for CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN (when the Stars are Right and Things emerge from beyond the realm of sanity). But things are never quiet when you're one of the people on the front lines between the rest of humanity and someone who [ Continue reading... ]
Under the Influence: H. P. Lovecraft
July 23, 2015 By 2 Comments
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. -- H. P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu Howard Phillips Lovecraft was never well-known during his lifetime, and indeed died nearly completely destitute, having gone from a comfortable middle-to-upper-class upbringing to poverty. But following his death, the stories he had written for the various [ Continue reading... ]
On My Shelves: The Atrocity Archives
June 30, 2015 By 1 Comment
The idea that thoughts, concepts, mathematics, logic themselves can affect reality is hardly unique. I've previously reviewed The Incompleat Enchanter by Fletcher Pratt and L. Sprague deCamp, in which Harold Shea and Reed Chalmers work out the Mathematics of Magic which allow the users to cross to other worlds, Doctor Who has frequently used the concept (Castrovalva, the Shakespeare Code, etc.) and numerous other authors have taken their turns with it. The Atrocity Archives is Charlie Stross' take on the concept, done in a more modern and [ Continue reading... ]
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