Matthew > Recent Status Updates

*choked up* I... I just love him so much

At this point it's safe to say I'm not just skimming through this, I'm straight up rereading it

Hey! Not many people will read this, but I wanted to get on the record and say that I've been dying to read a good book, but between my acting and my writing, I've had trouble finding the time. I want a good meaty novel to be next. I picked up The King of Elfland's Daughter and The Worm Ouroborus from the Strand today. So we'll see!

A curious collection of two short stories, a novella, and connective vignettes. The first story was remarkably bad and amateurish, now I'm moving onto the second story, fragments of a fictional memoir written by the author's previously-unpublished younger sister (!) about her self-insert witch character (!!!)

"I bleeding to death"

Slowly and slowly getting better. Heathcliff's Byronic moodiness, Catherine's breathless emotional flights, Nelly's maternal warmth, and Hindley's casual cruelty intermingle with each other to create a great cast of characters. Add in interesting supporting characters like Lockwood and Joseph and we're in the realm of Shakespeare or Chekhov-style character creation.

Walter makes her career out to be a little... effortless? ("I had a wealthy family, I was a talented kid, then I went to acting school, then I went on the dole, then I joined the actors' union," etc.) but her writing style is amicable.

"If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn's prayer."

I knew it couldn't last. At some point between page 190 and now, all the characters seemed to have combined into one, and where once we had Snide, Noah, Strobe, Jim, and Jerry, now we just have the anonymous first-person "I" to guide us through the arid lands of the Red Night. Just as some characters die at the moment of ejaculation and enter a new body, so too has the transition to Tamaghis blended people together.

I knew it couldn't last. At some point between page 190 and now, all the characters seemed to have combined into one, and where once we had Snide, Noah, Strobe, Jim, and Jerry, now we just have the anonymous first-person "I" to guide us through the arid lands of the Red Night. Just as some characters die at the moment of ejaculation and enter a new body, so too has the transition to Tamaghis blended people together.

"We have many places here..."

"I am Captain Strobe, a slim siren."

And just like that, we're in a Clem Snide novel. Interesting literary connections in this chapter, from the antique (Jerry Green performed a Lord Dunsany play in high school) to what was in the 80s quite contemporary (John Fowle's The Magus.)

Burroughs clearly liked writing Snide very much; it seemed to ground him in a long-form narrative fiction for which he had patience. His own personal Herbert West?

This book rocked my world in my teenage years. I return to it now for an informal book club.

The Farnsworth prologue is as mind-bending as ever. And the Cthulhu namedrop in the Invocation is a truly bold statement of intent.

Okay, we're doing this. We're pushing through. This book has long since stopped being about anything I care about, but maybe if I finish it it'll unblock me and allow me to move on to something else.

I don't know how much longer I'll stick with this. It's okay but I'm getting into a little fantasy kick (with Lovecraft, Harlan Ellison, and Glen Cook), and poor old Shoji doesn't exactly scratch that itch.