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“The Tale of the Rajah’s Ring”

Lal is a great fighter who goes to deliver a ring by ask of his uncle and who steps into the middle of some subterfuge but manages to come out far ahead in terms of money and in a position to leave town in relative leisure. It’s a sort of fun rogue’s tale where Singh gets the best of the ruling elite.

“The Sword of Lal Singh”

Lal was El Borak’s second in command in Khoda Khan’s tale. Apparently Howard was feeling out an Afghani main character if he decided to write a poem commemorating Singh’s mercenary experience. It’s kind of silly and makes Singh out to be a world-weary action hero.

“Intrigue in Kurdistan”

This story, for once, is ALL El Borak. Howard is leaning into oriental menace; Gordon is trying to get Turkey and the Kurds at war with each other so that another European power can push Turkey out. He manages a fantastic escape from a prison cell and is sneaking around secret passages in the castle until he miraculously runs into a beautiful American girl in distress.

“North of Khyber”

Another evolution of Allison. He’s free of Gordon, here, but apparently related to the American elite, with an independently wealthy uncle. Of course, his cousin Madge is in love with him, but Allison doesn’t see it or feel it. There’s a side character, Moriarty, a detective who’s trailing them. I don’t get how this was supposed to tie back into the main plot.

“A Power Among the Islands”

Steve and Gordon are on a ship in the Samoan islands and foil attempted rape by the Captain of the ship on an island girl who is apparently the daughter of one of the island kings. Sexual assault is not okay by Howard’s heroes, but they spare the Captain’s life and basically flex on him. This underscores Howard’s belief that peace is only maintained by the powerfully benevolent.

“The White Jade Ring”

An important evolution in the characterization of Steve Allison. The big question is, if it’s so dangerous for Allison to be walking around with this stupid ring, then what is the antique dealer doing with it in the first place??? Like, if they’re willing to murder for it, then the shopkeeper shouldn’t even have it in his possession to sell it in the first place.

“The Shunned Castle”

El Borak and Steve are palling around India and are investigating a potentially haunted castle. The locals are terrified of it, but the fragment finishes up before they get very far past the front gate. All we really get is that the castle is very old and dangerous as a result of its age. This could go either way, supernatural or just plain banditry.

“The Land of Mystery”

This is an African travelogue as told by El Borak to his cast of characters. He looks for and finds an unusual sword and sorcery-style kingdom of, uh, Africans who look white in everything but their skin tone, with a white ruling class. Somewhere along the way he fights through a jungle of super-gorillas and DINOSAURS and he rescues a slave girl before the story fragment ends.

“I emptied my revolver…”

This not quite two page fragment has someone—not El Borak—fighting side by side with Yar Ali. I assume that it’s Steve Allison; this might be an action scene intended for the previous unfinished story. It’s fine nuts and bolts stuff but barely adds anything to the El Borak lore apart from suggesting that Gordon has trained Allison in hand to hand weapons combat.

“El Borak”

I like these stories because Gordon has a cast of familiar comrades, established in “The Coming of El Borak”, who follow him around. This one established another character, a slightly boorish Texan named Steve Allison who features in the later stories of this collection. Steve is hired to shoot down Gordon in an Arabian city and earns the enmity of his employer well before he confronts El Borak.

“Khoda Khan’s Tale”

Khoda tells us broadly that El Borak rescued the girl from the last story and made nice with the Afghani tribe before offering a fascinating travelogue through Howard’s understanding of Africa and the Congo. It’s a weird Africa story with El Borak as a white savior but it’s very charming. It ends just when it gets good, too! Barnacles!!!

“The Coming of El Borak”

This story fragment is told by one of the Afghanis. His tribe kidnaps an English woman, expecting to hold her for ransom, but once she reaches the tribe there’s intrigue between the men in power who want to rape her. The story ends long before her rescue, right as the more noble of the Afghanis are themselves saved by El Borak, though he isn’t actually named.

“Gordon, the American”

A lot of this collection consists of unfinished fragments. This is more of a character piece that establishes Gordon aka El Borak within the country of Afghanistan, his relationship with the various tribes—some he has an affinity with, some he is familiarly against—and is leading into a mysterious forest whose secrets we never discover.

“The Iron Terror”

A radium-punk story where our hero wishes to conquer part of the Middle East using a rumored automaton. It’s a robot! An android, even, powered by radium and somewhat remote-controlled. Of course, the ballsy El Borak provokes the scientist into accidentally smashing the thing’s controls, placing Gordon into the fight of his life. Howard doesn’t explain how Gordon is supposed to escape…

The killer has moved on to the third sister and re-enter Gordon Gant, going to bat for Ellen’s spirit. Marion is about to be married, so this is coming all to Hell with the information wedging apart Marion and her father, and the killer is likely to target Gant once Marion tells him about it.

WHAT

NO

REALLY????? THATS INSANE

I got knocked completely off my base. The last 50 pages turned over everything… and holy hell I can’t believe how the story has spun out so far. It’s pretty brutal for the thrillers that I’ve read, but then again I’ve read precious few of them. My expectations have been thoroughly subverted.

So we have Gant and Powell. Gant is charming but with a serious edge. Powell is up front about having dated Dorothy in the past. Powell is the obvious front runner… but this is halfway through the book. As a savvy reader, my assumption is that if the murderer was one of these two, that Gant is the murderer and Powell is another one of Dorothy’s exes.

Oh god I was wondering how this functioned as a mystery and I realized that the first 100 pages we never got the murderer’s name!! Ellen twigging to her sister’s motive with the “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue” tradition is great. Ellen is smart but she has two incorrect assumptions: 1) the murderer doesn’t know what she looks like and 2) Dorrie sent the letter

it is the contents of Dorrie’s valise that her murderer coldly details, the items she packed with the promise of a new and wonderful married life, that knocked me down. They signal the anticipation of potential, now unrealized forevermore, assassinated hopes and dreams. The next section is titled after Dorrie’s sister, Ellen. I know that he is going to romance her. I know that this is going to hurt reading.

Ira Levin is painting the portrait of a cold-blooded monster. He has gotten his girlfriend pregnant, who he was trying to manipulate in order to get into her family fortune, and his plans are so awry that the only logical conclusion he can reach is to murder her, staging it like a suicide. Unlike Morrison’s writing, there is zero compassion for this narcissistic sociopath in Levin’s portrayal.

the character sketches of Pecola’s parents are good. These are people who have suffered through and have been worn down by life. Like, these characters aren’t just villains in their daughter’s life, though there’s no accounting for what Cholly is apparently to do to her.

entire stories exist within this book. every excerpt that tells the overall story of what it could be part of the experience of a young black girl in the time that Morrison is writing about. menstruation. domestic violence. Sexual abuse. racism from African Americans with paler skin tones. racism from self-sacrificing, joyless wives. Dealing with prostitutes. and so much more.

Toni Morrison is a universally acclaimed female African American author. Reading this, it’s not hard to see why. Pecola is a young black girl who has internalized racism, the most apparent symptom of which is she earnestly wishes and prays to have blue eyes. This story is an examination of every avenue by which this viewpoint is nurtured in a child and how it ultimately destroys them.

The Lovecraftian mall is a great weird antagonist for the B plot. I could have used more Death, but this is pretty bang-on.

The satire of the birth of the shopping mall is one of Pratchett’s more pointed critiques of the 20th century. Pratchett would be somewhat amused to note how malls are now on the decline, at least in America.

That’s the end of the Tale of Desperaux… though not the end of the entire book. This edition comes with a short story that I’ve yet to read. The book was quite sweet, though, and I while I wasn’t exactly sure how it was going to end I was pretty sure that it was going to finish with some sort of redemption for Roscuro. What DiCamillo hints at is… the death of the queen is ultimately what saved the princess.

The loose life assembling itself into a shopping mall / department store is one of the weirder asides of the Discworld given that it’s a major plot point. I would rather read about Windle the undead wizard and his experience with the “undead” and Mrs. cake and Death as Bill Door. Not that I don’t appreciate the Wizard comedy routines; there are a lot of jokes wrapped up in the cornball unseen university.

Desperaux and the Cook is a great exchange. So is the one with Botticelli.

Now that we’re 100 pages in we get into the meat of Death’s experience in being mortal, as only He can. I remember the pseudo-romance with Miss Flitworth being really bittersweet. The Equal Rights for the Undead being composed mostly of the undead who don’t have it in them to be properly horrifying is something that I didn’t pick up on when I was reading this in high school.

MRS CAKE THE MEDIUM!! And her werewolf-like daughter Ludmilla!! I’ve been thinking forever about One Man Bucket and his brother Two Dogs!! This is surprisingly light on Death’s activities as we focus on Pratchett’s speculative fiction plot point, pent up life supercharging the Discworld. It’s great sketch comedy, though; he nails the pacing in moments like the crossroads burial.