Justin Howe's Blog, page 17

February/March Books 2020

A strange thing has occurred: I am having a hard time reading. I keep starting books then setting them aside, and Im not sure what the cause of the trouble is. Heres two months worth of what Ive finished.

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Ashenden by W. Somerset Maugham: Im a big fan of boring and absurd spy novels and this book delivers both. Ashendens a thinly veiled Maugham stand-in and these stories all take place between the start of World War I and the Russian Revolution except the wars far away and its more about...

BW BC 11: The Misremembered Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar

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Only one story this week because the Du Maurier was longer than expected. Thats okay because Im slightly ahead of schedule so can slacken the pace a bit. That means we only have Edgar Allan Poes The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.

This is actually one of my favorite Poe stories, but after this reread I have to admit very little of what remembered happening in this story actually happens in this story. And much of the cool shit I like about it is actually either made up whole cloth by my...

BW BC 10: To Sleep, Perchance to Dream

[image error] This weeks stories continue the thread from last week. As in Maughams Lord Mountdrago we have dreams, dreamers, and doubles. We also get another classic from the Arabian Nights. We start with Giovanni Papinis The Sick Gentlemans Last Visit. Papini was an Italian writer active during the early half of the 20th century. As such he oscillated between reactionary and revolutionary politics, coming to rest on Catholic Conservatism and in particular Fascism. So thats that. Jorge Borges called...

BW BC 09: Death is Your Friend So Get Comfortable With Them

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What Ho, Black Water fans!

We have two stories this week, well actually, we have three stories, but the second ones not really worth talking about much. So lets talk about that one first!

Jean Cocteaus Death and the Gardener is a flash length retelling of that story where a guy sees Death, and Death sees him, and the guy leaves town, only for Death to say to some other guy, Funny seeing that guy here, because I have a meeting with him tonight in [whatever town the guy fled too]. Its not a...

BW BC 08: Haunted Before the Fact

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We have two classic stories of the ghost’s appearance heralds an approaching death sort: Charles Dickens’s “The Signalman” and Pedro Antonia de Alarcon’s “The Tall Woman”. Both also employ the tried and true “let me tell you a story” and the “f*** you and your explanations” techniques.

“The Signalman”… wandering narrator wanders to some remote spot and sees a lonesome signalman beside the train tracks. At first the Signalman is spooked by the sight of the narrator, but after some time he...

Ruritanian Shades

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Let’s do this.

Anthony Hope’s 1894 novel The Prisoner of Zenda is one of those books that sparked a genre. That this genre, the Ruritanian romance, no longer exists is beside the point. Once you’ve read the original you’ll realize how much it saturates our collective imaginations. Its DNA can be seen to this day almost everywhere: romance fiction, travel writing, science fiction, even fantasy.

At its most basic, The Prisoner of Zenda is a swash-buckling romance. Slightly disrespectable...

BWBC 07: The Supernatural Commonplace

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Three short, grisly stories from Black Water this week and I’m starting to feel like this anthology is the mix-tape Alberto Manguel made to impress Jorge Borges.

The first story, “An Injustice Revealed” by Anonymous, comes from 6th century China and I feel that Manguel really missed an opportunity to talk about P’u Songling here. For anyone that doesn’t know, P’u Songling was an 18th century collector of strange tales from China and those stories, like this one, have a tone that’s...

BWBC 06: The Good Bit

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Two short ones this week: LP Hartley’s “A Visit from Down Under” and Saki’s “Laura”. They’re good, but also both very much the kind of story you see in anthologies of the Classic British Ghost Story sort.

Hartley is probably most famous as the guy who said a thing, which in this case is the quote “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” See? You have heard of him before! “A Visit From Down Under” starts on a rainy London bus with a strange man all bundled up and...

Support Me on Patreon and You Will Get Nothing*

I beg your forgiveness for this interruption, but this is the first of twelve pitch advertisements for my Patreon that I’ll post throughout the year.I am using Patreon to support my writing (and lifestyle, which involves a lot of pajamas, tea, and books.) And what will you get in return for your support?

Quite simply, you will get nothing.

You get nothing
Let me explain: While in the past I’ve offered patrons an exclusive monthly column about old weird books called Yesterweird, those posts...

BWBC 05: A Thousand Words Tell a Picture

Welcome to portrait country.

Not physical portraits as in the Dorian Gray sense (although one does show up in our second story “Enoch Soames”), but the prose sort. First in the short ghost story “Importance” by Manuel Mujica Lainez, about a Mrs. Hermosilla Del Fresno, a self-important woman whose soul after her death lingers on for eternity among her possessions, and second in Max Beerbohm’s longer story about time travel, deals with the devil, and “Enoch Soames”, its titular self-important...