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“The Forbidden”

THE CANDYMAN!!

An academic looks into urban graffiti for her thesis statement and gets much, much more than she bargained for. When it isn’t dark fantasy it’s an intriguing meditation on humanity’s endless waltz with violence and a sort of parable about the fundamental need for horror stories among human beings. Very dark; very good.

“The Age of Desire”

Sci-fi horror where doctors develop an aphrodisiac that turns animals into supercharged sex maniacs. This is a squicky one; the human test subject becomes a rapist who tries to tear out the beating heart of his victims, amoral in his ecstasy. Jerome is closer to something like the mindset of a Greek god, I think, given the scene where he HAS SEX WITH A WALL. Fornicating a fortification?

“Down, Satan!”

Written like a parable, this very short story features a billionaire who looks for God but can’t find him, who then looks for Satan with similar results, and then builds a physical Hell with the intent of luring the Devil to a place on earth. It goes about as well (or as poorly) as could be expected.

“Revelations”

Juxtaposition of an unhappy preacher’s wife and her domineering, self-righteous husband with a married ghost husband and wife who are visiting the scene of Her murdering Him to see whether they can reconcile. It’s tragi-comic, but you mostly want to see Buck and John get ground into oblivion. There’s a third couple, too, but they are as transient as they are catalysts for the others.

“The Inhuman Condition”

Three British ne’er-do-wells shake down and cruelly beat a homeless drunk. The fourth doesn’t really partake in the abuse but he DOES come away with a curious triple-knot that unleashes bizarre, murderous creatures when one of the tangles is solved. It was interesting seeing knot magic here when it was a significant plot point in The Hexologists.

“The Body Politic”

An unusual nightmare of body horror where hands truly have minds of their own, and the ensuing rebellion. The liberation of the hands is a ghastly ordeal. I think that I’ve seen so many relatively sanitized crawling hands (Thing??) that this orgy of dismemberment - itself a communicable condition - had plenty of punch to it.

“On Ghosts”

An essay about how the shrinking wilds of the world have obliterated the mechanisms for imagination, all except for ghosts, and whether or not ghosts are real. She has her own NOT ghost story, where she desperately WANTED to see a ghost, and recounts two stories by the only two people she had met who would maintain that they had seen ghosts “at broad daylight”.

“The Mortal Immortal”

A young man, assistant to Cornelius Agrippa (an occult physician), wrestles with the fallout of drinking (half of) the elixir of immortality. This is mostly a philosophical romance in broad strokes. What would happen if you married the love of your life, only for the both of you to find out that you were eternally youthful?

It would probably have been better to get these in a full collection of Shelly’s Gothic tales - I know Hippocampus Press sells one that also includes Frankenstein - but a chapbook is what I gots and the chapbook is what I’s reads!

I am emotionally prepared for them to not rescue the Quagmires or find out what V.F.D. means but at this moment, I would not be surprised to find out that a core conceit of the tv show - the Baudelaire’s parents still being alive, at least until they reappear to be summarily killed for real - is being held as a surprise for the book series.

As if it isn’t obvious who detective Dupin is

It’s pretty big to be at the point where the climax typically goes wrong! Must be a crazy 100 pages left!

Well okay either Hector accidentally / purposefully leaves the children behind in his mobile air home OR Olaf’s crew steals it

Oh god it’s gonna be several books of potential meanings for the anagram V.F.D. isn’t it

Volunteer fire department?
Veterans of foreign delicatessens?
Vast fulminating darkness?
Very fast dogs?

It’s obviously something to do with the fountain. Also LMAO that the next page following “Count Olaf has been captured” had an illustration of what appears to be him about to be burned at the stake. IF ONLY!!!!!

So they are being held somewhere uptown if Isadora is sending poems via crow?

THE BRAND NEW FOUNTAIN OMFG

Omigosh Sunny is becoming more subtly intelligible

I can’t imagine Snicket breaking with the format so my assumption is that Hector is going to take off in the hot air mobile home like the Wizard of Oz, not purposefully abandoning the children but being unable to stop and pick them up as he stated that it was impossible for it to re-land

Okay the mental image of the village of crows is pretty cool. Also I hope that Hector doesn’t turn out to be dead, a bad guy, or a terrible guardian

I can’t be proud for seeing that Luciana is almost certainly the villainous Esme, and that the old chief of police is probably dead

the further I read into this series the more I realize that while the Netflix series may not be 100% accurate as to what happened in any particular book, the embellished details are usually spot-on for things and tics that are seen later

As far as climaxes go, Pratchett writes a pretty good action sequence. I remember quite a bit of what happens with Trymon from all those years ago. I also loved the traveling magical salesman. I’m pretty sure that this comes up again in another book but I couldn’t tell you which one exactly, even if my life depended on it.