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“The Derelict”

A ship is somehow processed into a bizarre, fleshy organism that traps and eats… anything, but for the purpose of this particular story it’s people. I wasn’t exactly sure where this story was going to go but when it became some sort of solid-state amoeba that swallowed one of the sailors during the action it turned into an awesome sea-oriented horror story.

“On the Bridge”

This is an emotional plea in the wake of the wreck of the Titanic that means to communicate just how stressful it was to be in the position of sighting icebergs while on a recreational ocean liner, from the POV of the guy who is on watch, sees the iceberg, and makes the right command, and still has to take the wheel himself because the quartermaster turns it THE WRONG WAY.

“The ‘Prentices’ Mutiny”

Nothing supernatural, here, but the way in which the ‘prentices are holed up against three of the senior officers and under siege echoes a lot of Hodgson’s nautical weird fiction. The brutal officers remind me of the not-quite-ghost story in the second volume, of the stowaway who had been rendered insane through the relentless hazing perpetrated by the officers.

“The Albatross”

This story is vaguely similar to “The Mystery of the Derelict” except the emotional story is a woman, lost at sea, desperately sending out a message by way of an albatross. And, it’s not set in the Sargasso. In this case, in a similar story beat as Glen Carrig, the man who establishes the daring rescue achieves the lady’s hand in marriage.

“Out of the Storm”

The only problem I have with this piece is how verbose the Morse code message is. Other than that, this is a dying communication from a man who is witnessing nature at its absolute worst, driving people to fruitless, amoral acts for their own survival. It’s a short but brutal story with the Storm and sea described in terms typically reserved for Eldritch horrors.

“The Shamraken Homeward-Bounder”

This feels more like wish-fulfillment on Hodgson’s part. It’s a story about a bunch of old sailors, the youngest of whom is 55, who sit around and reminisce and then think that they are sailing toward the gates of heaven, hearing the voices of their loved ones, when it’s actually an electrical storm that precedes an intense cyclone that presumably kills them all.

“The Voice in the Night”

A++. Dudes out fishing are hailed by a mysterious voice who talks very weirdly and does not want to be seen in the light. There seems to be something sinister afoot, but the presence in the dark has a very good reason for not wanting to come aboard the ship. If you’ve read A Series of Unfortunate Events through then you should give this one a try.

“A Tropical Horror”

After reading the more or less normal but eerie stories of giant octopi and squids of the Sargasso Sea, this tale about something like a mammoth sea serpent is refreshing. The thing pretty much owns the ship and methodically eats the helpless crew alive, one by one, until the MC hacks part of its enormous tongue off. It’s first-person present tense, which adds some immediacy.

“The Silent Ship”

This story is both an alternative ending and its own sort of account of the finale of The Ghost Pirates. The primary difference is that Jessop does not survive and instead falls prey to the same sort of listless death that consumed…Jacobs?…in the story, rather than be able to give his own account of the doom that followed the crew.

“The Ghost Pirates”

Idk. I like the ending. The way that Jessop tells the story, you almost believe in his sci-fi, parallel dimension explanation of what’s going on. This doesn’t entirely square away with the end, though. It feels like the ship took a portal to some sort of afterlife where they’re beset upon by the spirits of drowned sailors, specifically pirates.

The ship is now sort of flirting between the dimensions, like it’s become ethereal itself, and it appears to be visible to the outside world but incapable of seeing others most of the time based on the “mist”, a shimmering veil like King’s thinnies from The Dark Tower. There is sort of a proto-Philadelphia Experiment feel about the whole thing, except with an otherworldly element.

Sailors are being besieged by malicious prankster phantoms. At the 50 page mark, we get an explanation that echoes one of the Carnacki stories, that a ship can be made receptive not to GHOSTS but a parallel dimension, a parallel Earth, and parallel lifeforms. That’s, like, a long way to go to avoid saying that they’re ghosts, but these seamen would prefer not to be perceived as superstitious.

This is an important book but difficult to recommend because it’s so highly psychological and wrapped up in Hawthorne’s narrative voice rather than that of the characters. Very little actually happened in a physical sense over the last 50 pages: Hester tells Dimmesdale that Chillingworth that the latter is her husband—after telling Chillingworth that she’s going to do so—and they resolve to leave the town.

Hawthorne lays it on thick, here. Just like he avoids specifically saying what the A stands for, he shows pretty much everything that is going on in the background with Dimmesdale without explicitly saying “He’s the father!!!!” There’s enough ambiguity though, even in his vision of seeing Hester point from her letter to his chest, that it’s easy to say that we don’t definitively know.

The basic story is simple. Hester married an old man with a physical deformity, a scholar, as an orphaned young woman in England. She is sent ahead to the colonies but he fails to show, and after two years, she has a baby girl. She is condemned for adultery, even with her husband missing, presumed dead, but rather than death, she is sentenced to… The Scarlet Letter.

I read this book for my junior year of high school, which our English class was “American Literature”. I don’t recall and we probably skipped over the 38 page sketch that opens the book, where Hawthorne talks at great length about his time as a customs official at the port of Salem. It’s a fascinating study of Hawthorne’s inherited co-workers, an entire generation of elderly Americans.

lol. Idk why Brown is having to move against his own organization like this, probably to stage things so that Jane feels like she has finally been rescued and feels safe enough to drop the amnesia facade. Which may have been the game all along.

Julius has maybe edged out Peel as Mr. Brown, but there’s no telling. Christie has pretty well insulated both characters from being ruled out. Both would theoretically do what they need to if they were Brown in their particular situations. Also, it’s painfully obvious from the moment Annette first appears that she’s Jane Finn.

Mr. Brown is almost certainly either Julius or Sir James given that Mrs. Vandemeyer passed out on seeing the two of them. Both have pretty good covers. We actually don’t know anything about Julius and his episode at the ward was told by him. Sir James has a great cover, given that he has put a host of criminals in jail… which if he’s running the show, means he’d have insider information.

It started out as kind of a ridiculous book but now that the characters are actually in peril it’s gotten pretty decent. I’m not sure about the Julius Hersheimer character—is he really Finn’s cousin? Is he really interested in her well-being?—but the main plot sort of echoes the fourth man in the Big Four, an overlord who works in plain sight under an assumed identity while handing out edicts as Mr. Brown.

A goofy buddy thriller where Tuppence, the domineering and adventurous young woman, accidentally blackmails a criminal organization… Socialists!!! The plot is very anti-labour. This has more of a feeling of comedy where the English couple is off to a grand old adventure, like The Man in the Brown Coat but with less erotic choking and more “well we have gotten ourselves into quite a scrape, haven’t we, love?”

It’s interesting to see the difference Butler plots between her characters two years from the onset of the Pattern. There’s no stone unturned in examining every aspect of the developing Patternist society. It’s also interesting to see Butler provide a sort of creation myth for mental illness. That’s not exactly what Doro’s latents are, but it’s close enough in execution.

I like this as a sci-fi book but it’s way more weighted toward the interpersonal conflicts of telepaths than the sort of “what is this?” action story of Patternmaster. Mary just had to lay down the law and also shows that she is able to activate other latent telepaths, which is starting to worry the devil, the 4,000 year old Doro who built this to rule it, not to see it buoy Mary up.

It’s weird how much of telepathic powers are just taken blithely for granted by Mary. This is the formation of what appears to be the first pattern, linking different telepaths together. I appreciate that this segment includes what appears to be each telepath receiving their own individual call, each one with their own distinctly different motivations and backgrounds, though usually involving Doro.

Patternmaster is sci-fi with telepathic society in the distant future. This prequel explores a lot of what we had to take for granted as telepathy is being established by… a body-hopping psionic named Daro who eliminates the egos of the bodies he possesses. He’s 4,000 years old and, uh, there’s a lot of gross stuff between him and Mary, Mary who knows that he’s her father, whatever the body.

There is something stylistically hypnotic in Hemingway’s repeated phrases but this novella is a huge piss-take on a literary tradition that the author was expected to inherit but utterly broke with. I don’t know if I’ve ever read anything in the Chicago school of literature circa 1920s so I’m not entirely sure what he is supposed to be parodying. All I know is that I’m not supposed to take it seriously.

It’s a knowing mix of Cinderella and The Frog Prince. It’s like, the power behind stories allowing you to twist the fabric of reality if you align the pieces correctly. Like Hero Questing in Glorantha. Or how translation in Babel allowed similar aspects based on the fluidity of the meaning of words as they passed between languages, like a game of telephone.

Lots of fun in Genua and the battle with the fairy godmother, Lily. Now it almost feels like the book is moving too fast, but that’s pretty much the way it is when the first half of the novel is spent having fun on the way to the main location.