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If I make comparisons between King and Barker it is because he monolithically stands as my experience in the modern horror genre, isolated examples like The Exorcist notwithstanding. It’s not unfavorable. Ultimately the differences between what they are willing to attempt to describe and how they go about describing it is, uh, profoundly more visceral in Barker’s case.

That escalated quickly! A debauched party leads to the revelation that, as far as the story goes, there is no single act that has condemned Whitehead. It’s not narratively clean but it’s realistically human for there to be no Contract in Blood or the like.

As a thriller, now, and the temptation of Marty the gambler, this story has teeth. I’m guessing that things go poorly for him but I’m riding out the hope that Clarys gets some peace at the end of this nightmare and not The Void. But, well, it’s Barker, which bodes ill for any character when the genre is horror.

Also kudos to Barker for not just coming out and saying that Breer has been dead since Mamoulian “woke” him up. It’s more interesting with Breer ignorant or maybe subconsciously in self-denial about his increasing repulsiveness.

For some reason I wasn’t thinking that Whitehead’s reckoning would happen before the book was halfway over. It’s not like the story could drag on forever with him as the stifling dictator of the house, though. Also, I glazed over the last one, but Barker’s sex scenes are even more explicit than the ones in his short story collections.

As far as horror goes this book is a slow burn but lovingly wrapped up in the human tragedies that walk its pages. Knowing Barker, I have no idea what kind of a blood tornado is going to happen, but I fear the worst for Carys.

Building up the sort of dynamic existing at Whitehead’s house, we get a better sense of Marty the ex-con and are introduced to a potentially romantic entanglement - Whitehead’s young, neurotic doctor. The beginning of the third section re-ties Mamoulian - “The Last European” - into the story alongside a child-murdering serial killer, no doubt the forces of Hell organizing.

Having worked in the sex trade himself, Barker is not squeamish about the depravities witnessed in the post-world war II Warsaw and his love of the Grand Guignol (illustrated in Ray Russell’s “Sagittarius”) makes for prose more rooted in humane grotesqueries than at the very least his contemporary, Stephen King. It’s early to form an opinion of Marty.

The last section is sort of a send-up of the Atlantean / Lemurian high fantasy. It feels like the point where individual episodes start to gel into a more “typical” Discworld novel. I am marveling at how hardcore Pratchett went in on detailing the errant magics of the Discworld given how little it actually matters as the series went on to address more humanistic concerns.

The Pern part of the travelogue is boiled down to more sword and sorcery with a couple of swipes at the more ridiculous aspects of McCaffrey’s first few Dragon novels. At this point I sort of wish that the book had spent a little more time in each of the sub-sections; they blow by so fast and Pratchett’s microcosms are pretty fun in and of themselves.

The Conan the Barbarian / Elder God pastiche is kind of fun but I think that this segment mostly shines in fleshing out the dice games of the Discworld gods. Hrun gets a better chance to shine in the ridiculous Pern-esque section that follows, here. Also “muscles bulging like melons” is a popular phrase in this galloping parade of parodies.

The mad brawl through Ankh-Morpork is a fun send-up of sword and sorcery. Pratchett writes good action. What puts me off during this re-read is how far the characters are from their later, familiar presentations. Death is probably the biggest one; his characterization makes him much more lovable. Here, he is more of a parody. My initial intro to Discworld was Soul Music so I’m a little biased

No lol it’s just as good as I remember. Actually after twenty or so years of doing other things and not fiendishly rereading Discworld over and over again, if anything I appreciate Pratchett’s comedy even more. I cackled all over again at the smash cut of Rincewind caught trying to flee Ankh-Morpork.

Because I want to reread all of Terry Pratchett and finish his work since his passing and also after reading The Hexologists I am low key terrified that humorous fantasy may not do it for me anymore. But, uh, I should just trust that Discworld is still fantastic

Oh gawd Jerome, you are a completely different kind of shi’thead

The fact that the doorman was bidding on a red herring statue completely slipped by me. I was just as focused on V.F.D. as the Baudelaires

THE SECRET PASSAGE OPENED UP UNDER THERE?????

☠️☠️☠️ Esme ☠️☠️☠️

On the one hand, it’s nice that the Quagmire triplets are recurring characters. On the other, Violet’s insistence that she not be told the mystery of V.F.D. all but ensures that they are going to be gone by the time the Baudrlaires return to rescue them.

Okay, Jerome is cool, but Esme is everything you’d expect from a problematic Baudelaire guardian. I’ll be sad if Jerome dies 😢

omfg it’s the hook handed man if the coat is covering his hands… right?

“Nabo: The Black Man Who Made the Angels Wait…”

It’s painfully obvious early on between the title and the opening that Nabo is somewhere on the borderline between life and death but the Why of the story has something of a fairytale and Nabo’s literal and figurative passing bearing its effect on the mute girl is a strange, bittersweet moment.

“Monologue of Isabel Watching It Rain in Macondo”

This story takes place during the history of Macondo, some time after Martín disappears but before Isabel births her son. It’s a torrential downpour that starts out welcome but becomes a malaise and a flood, reminding me in some ways of Bradbury’s insane Venusian downpour in “The Long Rain”.

“The Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship”

Wow. This is a ghost story with an aside about the orphan boy’s mother, who buys a cursed rocking chair, but it’s mostly about the boy seeing the ghost ship and being maltreated by his village. This thing that they mocked and beat him for trying to tell them about, he guides to them, a cataclysmic force of supernature.

“Blacamán the Good, Vendor of Miracles”

This one has the ring of a Tall Tale and is the account of two street hustlers, one of whom is falling in prowess while the other is transformed into a Christ-like figure who is capable of the very miracles that his confederate cannot. There is a very morbidly funny twist to the end that is the payoff for what was basically a picaresque temptation of Christ in the desert.

“A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings”

I THINK that I may have read the previous story in college but I KNOW that I read this one back then. I love Marquez’s tone of magical realism here and there; it is “A Tale For Children” and has the ring of a beautiful fable that illustrates something that may or may not be an angel and how the Spanish Catholic townsfolk react to his existence.

“The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World”

A beautiful story where a dead man washes ashore at a village, but he isn’t like any other drowned man. The village is positively transformed through their sympathies and empathies and when he is sent back out again he is one of their own. I love the passage where Esteban’s humility in death wins over the previously bemused men in the village.

“Leaf Storm”

A lovely tragic story that centers around the death of a man as seen by a grandfather the colonel, his daughter, and her son. The first two see the past through different lenses, based on their experiences with the doctor. The “child” is free from the emotional history of the boom and collapse of the town and the passages of him recognizing his developing sexuality are beautiful.

Well it was fairly easy to guess that Henry was still alive and involved in the plot, but the how and why, I could not have guessed unless I went by the rule of the economy of characters