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"Transgressive" is the overused academic word for the ending of The Jade Cabinet, whether it is the transvormation of Etherea or the union between Memory and Tubbs. Just when one thinks they have found a resolution in the writing, Ducornet tears through the page and reveals a sudden shocking depth of character that sends expectations reeling. It is a truly stunning end.

Slowing down on Latin for a bit because I have a trip to Germany coming up in May. Need to brush up on my Deutsch!

The gun has appeared.

There are echoes of Dhalgren in Grains hurtling-toward-the-collapse story "Our City at Night," but with a strong injection of occult forces. At this point, I am confident in saying that I prefer Grains at longer word counts. It gives his voice needed breathing space and makes the flourishes more emphatic and impactful. I'm glad there are some longer pieces left in this collection.

Poor, mad Baconfield. Why do I find him such a sympathetic character (at least at this point of the novel)? Probably because I'm sorry his insane journey into transcendence has been irrupted by the appearance of the Hungerkünstler.

In a timeless vision, or, rather in a vision where time is all-at-once, "Anima M" is revealed as the narrator's utmost desire. But getting what you wish for doesn't always lead to clarity. On the contrary, the culmination of desire here reveals a nightmare of boschian disjunctures, time run amok into pure chaos.

"Eternal Advent" tries hard to be syncretic. Alas, too hard. The symbols and metaphors of Christmas and Babylonian myth and the ubiquitous recounting of a deluge that destroys the world congeal together (notice I didn't use the work "combine") in a sort of ur-mythic clump of . . . I dont quite know what. Something seems to have unraveled in this story; the elements do not cohere.

It's intriguing and horrifying to see a man completely break under the weight of his own broken character. But no one deserves to be undone like poor Tubbs.

"Forest of Monsters" was . . . adequate. Somewhat. There was potential there, and an interesting ending that was so interesting that it didn't fit with the rest of the story, even if one was to treat it as a story of time travel, which was never really clear. All in all, I was left . . . confused and disappointed? Three stars. I didn't hate the story, but I just barely liked it. So much wasted potential.

A self-admittedly unreliable narrator is not something one often sees in literature, but the self-deprecating notion actually adds a depth to the narrative here. We simultaneously see the curtain and what is behind it.

Slow reading because I read, then practice, then reread, then practice again . . .

I rather liked the unfolding-apocalypse (with a dream-time glimpse into the pyrrhic acknowledgment of respect to the lone survivor, imparted by the new God of this world) portrayed in "The Golden Age". I, for one, embrace the arrival of our robot overlords. This was an effective story, paced perfectly, with an air of reverent restraint that fit the tale to a tee. Well-played, not-quite-terminator.

"A Devil" has a very enthusiastic narrator . . . that I found absolutely annoying to read. Some people might love the voice of a manic meth-head, but I'm definitely not one of those people. Add to that the fact that I am not a fan of second person and . . . well, you can see where this is going. I'll spare you the conclusion.

The scene of Etheria's spontaneous demonstration of legerdemain and the following visit to a street fair freak show lend a strong thread of magic realism to the book. The question, as with most magic realism, is "what is supernatural and what is deception?" Or, more properly, how literally do we take the imaginative? I tend to fall in the undeceived camp; the fantastical becoming credulous. I want to believe.

Tubb's desire for smooth geometric architecture, "so that his infant son would always be visible to the nakedness eye and thus never in mischief," echoes with the glass walls of the Panopticon.

Slow going. But my vocabulary is growing. Learning as much about English as I am about Latin. So. Many. Cognates!

I would have liked "The Lord of the Sea" a lot more if I hadn't already been saturated in tentacles and cosmic doom and esoteric whatevers. Sometimes, a collection is too much because it shows the hackneyed self-repetition of an author over and over and over again. At a certain point, it becomes more than a little tedious, especially for one who has been reading cosmic horror for so long.

The narrator of "Organism," a proponent of stark materialism to the exclusion of anything smacking of the spirit, discovers that materialism is more stark than he could have imagined.

I've discovered why Grains uses so many adverbs and why it bothers me so much: he's trying too hard to pack too much information into too small of a receptacle. Economy of syntax becomes clumsy, at that point. Let language breathe!

Ugh. Absolutely brutal and self-justifying. Tubbs is a monster.

"Razorwraith" sustains a prison of dream-state futility, the absolutely inevitable doom that one frequently feels in the worst of nightmares.

"The Portraits of the Baron," the second-longest work in this collection, was, admittedly, very enjoyable. If you enjoy horror, that is. Grains can even be excused, at this length, for his love of adverbs, as they are softened by the length of the work. I loved the deep dives of esotericism here and the ending, while predictable, was satisfactory and held an ironic twist. This is the strongest work in the book.

Laughing out loud while reading this in my workplace break room and people are giving me amused looks. Tubby and the poor Walking Stick - great Victorian slapstick (quite literally - was this how the term was coined? No, that's an anachronism).

Feeling like I should read Byatt's Angels & Insects in tandem with this. Ah, the dark underbelly of victoriana.

I'm reading this in the original Latin. And I've only been "studying" Latin - not terribly seriously - for a couple of years now. I'm hoping this dovetails with my more serious study of Latin (using Familia Romana) that I'm doing now. In any case, it's going to take a looooong time before I'm finished with this. I should pick up speed as I learn more. Maybe someday I'll read better than a five-year-old Roman child.

"The Army of the Others," more a vignette than a full story, combines military discipline with the chaos of cosmic horror. Effective, but incomplete. 3 stars.

Ah, neighbors of Alice Liddel, sharing in the relationship with Mr. Hodgson (aka "Lewis Carroll". This is a fairy-tale world, a palace in the element of air. Soon, this palace, I fear, will fall to the ground.