Eggp > Recent Status Updates

Word: "Then I got up, went on to the balcony and immediately saw the balefire, high on the mountain in the darkness of the new moon."

1. An outdoor fire used in witches' rituals

44. Michel Bernanos - The Other Side of the Mountain, 2 stars. Seafaring boy's adventure takes several terrible turns.
52. Eric Basso - The Beak Doctor, 1 star. Sleeping sickness in a foggy/murky/smoky/misty over descriptive city.
98. Brian Evenson - The Brotherhood of Mutilation, 4 stars. Recent unwilling amputee is abducted to cult compound to investigate a mystery crime.

54. George R.R. Martin - Sandkings, 4 stars. Sadist collects exotic animals to fight each other, or torture.
57. Michael Shea - The Autopsy, 4 stars. Pathologist does his job for victims/cause of mine explosion.
68. Lucius Shepard - Shades, 3 stars. Vietnam vet returns to see ghost from his past.
95. Jeff VanderMeer - The Cage, 4 stars. Unscrupulous antique dealer buys from the recently bereaved/afflicted.

108. Stephen Graham Jones - Little Lambs, 3 stars. Men guard a structure that may not exist.
109. J. Robert Lennon - The Portal, 4 stars. Exploring as a family sours after a few trips.
110. K.J. Bishop - Saving the Gleeful Horse, 3 stars. Big beastie saves a piñata.
111. China Miéville - Afterweird: The Efficacy of a Worm-Eaten Dictionary, 1 star. Etymology is/isn't real, weird isn't/is a thing, worms, blah blah.

104. Liz Williams - The Hide, 2 stars. Concerned boyfriend sends girl to stay with sister.
105. Reza Negarestani - Dust Enforcer, 1 star. Middle Eastern baddies and their snake-dicks.
106. Micaela Morrissette - The Familiars, 4 stars. Little boy with a possessive invisible friend.
107. Steve Duffy - In the Lion's Den, 3 stars. Zoo animals behave oddly after man breaks in.

Wiki: "Her New Age soul was enchanted by it all, by the faux-Arthuriana of Glastonbury and the rather more real claims of Cadbury, by the startling caverns of the Mendips and the flat lands between, where the lake villages had once stood."

Caves of the Mendip Hills > Wookey Hole

Wiki: "You mean there was a T’ai Shan mountain on Old Earth?"

Wiki: "All he could think of was the disturbing statue of Pius XII ... by Francesco Messina ... Messina’s Pius XII is shown in rough strokes, his round glasses as empty as the eye sockets in a skull, his right arm raised defensively—bony fingers splayed—as if trying to ward off the evil of his time."

Wiki: "The original Gateway Arch had no farcaster function."

100. Daniel Abraham - Flat Diane, 4 stars. Father inadvertently creates effigy of daughter.
101. Margo Lanagan - Singing My Sister Down, 4 stars. Family turns punishment into party for guilty girl.
102. T.M. Wright - The People on the Island, 3 stars. Couple finds inert bodies posed around island.
103. Laird Barron - The Forest, 3 stars. Man is introduced to his friends' new insect interests.

Word: "On the passenger side overgrown pastures dwindled into moiling vapors."

1. To toil, to work hard
2. To churn continually; to swirl
3. To defile or dirty

Wiki: "She wore a cold white mask similar to the mask Bengali woodcutters donned when they ventured into the mangrove forests along the coast. The tigers of the forest were stealthy. The tigers hated to be watched; they preferred to sneak up on prey from behind, so natives wore the masks on the backs of their heads as they gathered wood."

94. Neil Gaiman - Feeders and Eaters, 3 stars. Man bumps into (much diminished) acquaintance at dumpy diner.
96. Jeffrey Ford - The Beautiful Gelreesh, 3 stars. Handsome beastie sympathizes with his dinner.
97. Thomas Ligotti - The Town Manager, 4 stars. [2013]
99. Mark Samuels - The White Hands, 3 stars. Journalist grows obsessed with his research.

Wiki: "There were a couple of other people in there, sitting alone at their tables, derelicts and insomniacs huddled over their empty plates, dirty coats and donkey jackets buttoned up to the neck."

Donkey jacket > Teddy boys

Wiki: "Here Smiley asked politely whether Karla had ever thought of having Haydon actually take over the Circus himself: why bother with a stalking-horse at all?"

Wiki: "'I’m afraid you’ll have to ask a woman that question, not us,' said Smiley, wondering again where Immingham was."

Wiki: "She was a plain kid, a bit blue-stocking for my taste, but she was young and she had one hell of a pretty smile when she stopped crying."

90. Caitlín R. Kiernan - A Redress for Andromeda, 2 stars. Woman attends Halloween gathering, wears the wrong outfit.
91. Michael Chabon - The God of Dark Laughter, 4 stars. Mutilated body in the woods might be a clown.
92. China Miéville - Details, 3 stars. Boy brings food to a woman with all the answers.
93. Michael Cisco - The Genius of Assassins, 3 stars. Random murders.

86. Craig Padawer - The Meat Garden, 3 stars. Warring factions and their unique weapons.
87. Stepan Chapman - The Stiff and the Stile, 3 stars. Old lady solicits help from nearby residents.
88. Tanith Lee - Yellow and Red, 4 stars. Nephew inherits more than a creepy old house.
89. Kelly Link - The Specialist's Hat, 2 stars. [2018]

Wiki: "A musical instrument called a regal stood on the table between them. It looked like two large bibles."

Wiki: "I went into a movie theater where they were showing The Lady from Shanghai by Orson Welles. When the scene with the mirrors came, it was too much for me, and I left."

Wiki: "A dragon, a reptile with black membranous wings, a cock's crest, and gaping jaws that bristled with tiny sawlike teeth. Handsome, isn't he? My own composition. I used a salamander, a bat, snake's scales....A subterranean dragon. I was inspired by this ... It's the Mundus Subterraneus of Athanasius Kircher, first edition, 1665."

Wiki: "For a moment, risking the ricocheting bullet, he had entered the action on the screen, but only for a moment, on the run, as in Hellzapoppin, where the reels get mixed up and an Indian on horseback rides into a ballroom and asks which way did they go. Somebody says, "That way," and the Indian gallops off into another story."

Wiki: "You went along endless dark corridors, you stopped at the edge of bottomless pits, you felt chilled to the bone, and you could almost catch a whiff of firedamp."

Wiki: "It's a gold mine, all right. I realized that these people will gobble up anything that's hermetic, as you put it, anything that says the opposite of what they read in their books at school."

Wiki: "Here in the first draft there is mention of these spheres—what were they called? Yes, the Magdeburg hemispheres."

82. William Browning Spenser - The Ocean and All Its Devices, 3 stars. Gloomy family returns to same hotel every off-season.
83. Jeffrey Ford - The Delicate, 2 stars. Creature turns into a dog, goes hunting.
84. Stephen King - The Man in the Black Suit, 3 stars. Old man writes about the time he met the devil.
85. Angela Carter - The Snow Pavilion, 2 stars. Rich woman's boytoy takes shelter from a snowstorm.

Music: "Today is as cold as the killing cold of the perpetually white countries; today’s atrocious candour is that of those white freckles that are the stigmata of frostbite."

Wiki: "My hair was very thick at the time, and it tended to stand up on my head a bit like Struwwelpeter's."

78. Lisa Tuttle - Replacements, 4 stars. Couple's opposite reactions to foreign beasties.
79. Marc Laidlaw - The Diane Arbus Suicide Portfolio, 3 stars. Photographer considers trading crime scene pics.
80. Steven Utley - The Country Doctor, 4 stars. Archeologists uncover something strange in small town cemetery.
81. Martin Simpson - Last Rites and Resurrections, 5 stars. Grieving man gives decent burial to roadkill.