Justin Howe's Blog, page 14

BWBC 37: Stately Grace

And we’re back… This week’s story is a funny, if nasty, one. At least, it’s a nasty one if you’re a religious sort.

“The State of Grace” by Marcel Ayme

M. Duperrier is a devout Christian, so much so that God has anointed him in this life with a halo. M. is incredibly happy about this, but his wife Mme. Duperrier a lot less so. She is the sort of person that finds it much more important to be esteemed by her concierge than her creator. Needless to say, she’s mortified, because the halo ...

BWBC 36: THE DEVIL & THE FATE OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

If you want writers to be forgotten the easiest way to do it is to teach them to high school students. Case in point, Stephen Vincent Benet, Pulitzer winning poet, short story and play writer. He’s the guy who wrote “The Devil & Daniel Webster”. No, I haven’t read it either. But I recognize the name. Which I know is the equivalent of Toni Colette saying to Daniel Craig in Knives Out, “I read a tweet about a New Yorker article about you.”

But so, that’s this guy.

The writer of a story I...

BWBC 35: Henry & Hans

I have rediscovered my time management skills and organized my executive function disorder to bring you two, count’em, TWO short-story synopsis. First we have that two-fisted purveyor of screw turning, Henry James. After that will follow that treacly plumber of psycho-sexual phantasmorgia, Hans Christian Andersen.

Let’s get to it!

“The Friends of the Friends” by Henry James

This story’s premise was great and hooked me from the start. An editor is going over a deceased writer’s paper...

BWBC 34: “Seaton’s Aunt” by Walter de la Mare

I don’t know what to think of this week’s story.

Walter de la Mare’s one of those obscure weird English writers you sometimes hear about, influential and lauded by others, but whom you feel time has left behind or at least buried beneath other more recent obscure weird English writers. “Seaton’s Aunt” is considered one of de la Mare’s best, and it’s very much one of those Weird English stories that leans heavily into its 5.5ness instead of trying to go all the way up to 11. Is this good? ...

BWBC 33: Definitive Article Adjective Noun

This week’s story was the first that made me explicitly look up whether the author was known as an anti-Semite or not. A quick peek at Wikipedia and I discovered it wasn’t Jews the author hated but the Irish. So that’s fun. 

“The Grey Ones” by JB Priestley

Our narrator is seeing a psychiatrist because he worries he might be cracking up. You see he’s figured out that there’s some active force of Evil at work in the world and it seeks to destroy all humankind. But first it must crush all...

BWBC 32: The Lemmings

Welcome!

This week’s story is “The Lemmings” by Alex Comfort. Comfort’s most famous as the author of the 1970s era bestseller, The Joy of Sex. Maybe you peeked at it when you were a child? He was also a pacifist and a nudist. And while “The Lemmings” is a solidly okay story. But it does gain something by imagining it being screamed at you by a naked man carrying a sign that reads, “Wake up Sheeple!”

“The Lemmings” by Alex Comfort

Our nameless narrator travels to an island where he meets The Keep...

BWBC 31: Them!

I have a friend who has a theory. According to him every animal is one of four types: a bug, a slug, a rat, or a lizard. These are categories are less to do with the animal’s biology than how they interact with humans. 

Slugs generate disgust, bugs generate extreme terror at their alien nature, lizards a more familiar terror (we might not like it but we can recognize their desire to eat us), and rats are familiar and knowable. Fish and birds are lizards, wolf and deer are rats, jellyfish ...

BWBC 30: The Dude, the Death, and the Dog

This week has been a week as has every week before it this year except more so. It’s possible back in 2018 we had a week that wasn’t a week extra than a week, but if we did I don’t remember it. Not only has it been a week, but also I’ve suddenly become very busy at work and am likely to remain so until November.

And I do not like this.

Apologies in advance if things show up later or are slimmer than usual. I’ll likely default to slim over delayed, but there you go. It’s a bummer too, b...

Books August 2020

Man, damned with faint praise

Here are some recent books reads. Maybe you will find them interesting, or maybe you’d like to recommend something you’ve enjoyed.

Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells (Murderbot #3): I am a fan of the Murderbot series and this one delivered the usual murderbot goodness even if it wasn’t my favorite of the series. One thing was Murderbot didn’t seem to have any new shows to watch and obsess over so that quark in their voice wasn’t present as much as it had been in ...

BWBC 29: The Long Slow Train Ride to the Sausage Factory

Let’s jump right into it.

“In the Penal Colony” by Franz Kafka

I’m sure we’ve all read this story, but in case you haven’t and are cribbing from this blog to complete your English assignments (a foolish course of action, if I may say so), I’ll give you the particulars here:

In a penal colony, a traveler is present at an execution. An ingenious machine designed by the colony’s former commandant performs the execution. This commandant is dead now, but the machine’s current operator at...