Eggp > Recent Status Updates

Wiki: "This country, for many miles around, was known as the driftless area, a magic little pocket that, for some reason not yet known, had been bypassed by the glaciers while they crunched far south on each side of it."

07. Joyce Carol Oates - The Bingo Master, 3 stars. [2022]
08. T.E.D. Klein - Children of the Kingdom, 2 stars. Racist puts grandfather in a home, buys into a conspiracy theory about mole people.
09. Gene Wolfe - The Detective of Dreams, 2 stars. Sinners have dreams about Jesus without recognizing him.

Wiki: "There are uhlans all around us to protect us then."

Wiki: "The name that came up most often, however, was that of Saint Thomas himself."

04. Davis Grubb - The Crest of Thirty-Six, 4 stars. Man is terrified by his river job, takes the love of a beautiful witchy woman for granted.
05. Robert Aickman - Mark Ingestre: The Customer's Tale, 2 stars. Old man shares the story of his sexy encounter with a murderous couple.
06. Karl Edward Wagner - Where the Summer Ends, 3 stars. College students gets friendly with a junk merchant.

Wiki: "Of course the “Newgate Calendar” was still going at that time, though one wasn’t supposed to care for it."

Wiki: "Fleet Street was never the same after Temple Bar went."

01. Dennis Etchison - The Late Shift, 4 stars. Drinking buddies see an addled acquaintance working at the gas station.
02. Isaac Bashevis Singer - The Enemy, 2 stars. Old man on a boat voyage suffers through having an exceedingly rude waiter.
03. Edward Bryant - Dark Angel, 5 stars. Witchy woman gets fitting revenge on an old deadbeat boyfriend.

Wiki: "He was a feuilletonist on a Yiddish newspaper in Warsaw."

Wiki: "Talking-piercings, scarification, had Bibi ever seen the sundance ceremony?"

07. Stephanie Ellis - The Way of the Mother, 3 stars. The land requires a sacrifice from a family that got lazy about the old ways.
08. Zachary Von Houser - Leave the Night, 2 stars. Drunk blunders into a religious festival, pisses off the locals.
09. S.T. Gibson - Revival, 3 stars. Hillbilly snake handlers ignore a girl child's obvious snake charming talents.

Wiki: "Here a flotsam of something black, very much like the nibbler but webbed in sagging cable and the blistered strips of some heavy plastic casing; it was nothing she recognized but she took it anyway, its heft was good in her hand."

Wiki: "For me, exiled for years to the torrid tropical jungles and dreariness of the faraway mosque, she’d been the electric-blue shock of the jay and the flash of the yaffle in an old English woodland."

Wiki: "She snatched the batik off the table."

04. Steve Toase - The Jaws of Ouroboros, 4 stars. Stone circles are hungry mouths, pasty byproducts make a valuable drug.
05. Eric J. Guignard - The First Order of Whaleyville’s Divine Basilisk Handlers, 2 stars. Hillbilly snake handlers find a new religion.
06. Romey Petite - Pumpkin, Dear, 1 star. Peter pumpkin eater kills his wife, she comes back.

01. Coy Hall - Sire of the Hatchet, 3 stars. Executioners go to a village to extract a confession from a witchy girl.
02. Sam Hicks - Back Along the Old Track, 3 stars. City boy witnesses the unusual funeral practices of a local family.
03. Lindsay King-Miller - The Fruit, 4 stars. Half of a lesbian couple wants to have a child, gets distracted during harvest season.

Wiki: "It was a Daimler hearse."

16. Marcia Muller - Kindling Point, 3 stars. Unhappy couple buy a fixer upper while their marriage is failing, kids learn the house's history from a ouija board.
17. Joyce Carol Oates - The Bingo Master, 3 stars. Intellectual spinster throws herself at the first good looking man to give her attention.

13. Jane Rice - The Idol of the Flies, 3 stars. Evil little boy prays to self-made idol for nasty things, tortures household staff.
14. Mary Elizabeth Counselman - Night Court, 2 stars. Reckless/murderous driver gets scrooged by ghost trial of accident victims, totes won't speed (j/k).
15. Shirley Jackson - The Lovely House, 3 stars. Girl stays at rich friend's fancy house, gets chummy with with ghostly relatives.

Wiki: "The one with the kangling on top."

09. May Sinclair - Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched, 3 stars. Woman is twice disappointed by love, has affair in her prime.
10. Agatha Christie - The Lamp, 3 stars. Sensible widow rents haunted house, can't hear ghost.
11. Rebecca West - The Gray Men, 1 star. Person recovering from an illness sees a soulbag being carted off.
12. Dorothy L. Sayers - The Cyprian Cat, 3 stars. Man shoots at cat, gets the death penalty.

Word: "I had to work hard to interpret it, to see, for example, that that spattered rhomboidal patch was a cornfield, starred with arrish mows, that rolled its fourth corner over the bend of the hill."

1. a. Grass (also clover, etc.) which grows again; an aftergrowth of grass after mowing (perhaps ‘brushwood’). b. Stubble; a stubble-field.

Wiki: "She worked as a deaconess in his parish, wearing the uniform of a deaconess, the semi-religious gown, the cloak, the bonnet and veil, the cross and rosary, the holy smile."

Wiki: "It already seemed filled with illness and a smell of chlorodine sweets, but I noticed Mother was almost looking pretty, and I could imagine how she had looked when she was young."

06. Ann Radcliffe - The Haunted Chamber, 3 stars. Man volunteers to spend the night in a spooky room, disappears.
07. Mary Shelley - The Last Man, 2 stars. Plague survivors wander around, hear organ music.
08. Gertrude Atherton - The Striding Place, 4 stars. Man worries about his missing "friend", spots something in the river.

Wiki: "Below the great rocks which form the walls of the Strid was believed to be a natural vault, on to whose shelves the dead were drawn."

Wiki: "The air was Haydn's "New-Created World," and, old and drooping as humanity had become, the world yet fresh as at cre­ation's day, might still be worthily celebrated by such an hymn of praise."


Haydn: The Creation | Nederlands Kamerkoor, Concerto D’Amsterdam & Klaas Stock by DW Classical Music

Wiki: "Other objects, too, were seen obscurely on its dark surface, but he paused not to examine them, and returned hastily into the bedroom, as he surveyed which, he observed the door of the Oriel, and opened it."

01. Charlotte Perkins Gilman - The Yellow Wallpaper, 5 stars. [2015]
02. Edith Wharton - Afterward, 4 stars. [2019]
03. Virginia Woolf - A Haunted House, 1 star. [2018]
04. Flannery O'Connor - Judgement Day, 2 stars. [2018]
05. Daphne du Maurier - The Birds, 4 stars. [2016]

Wiki: "His name was not Tom, it was William, but the combination of Tom Tiddler had always been too much for his colleagues."