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"Sombre Sonnet" is an goth manifesto. I approve.

I bought this in preparation for a snail mail roleplaying game in which I am playing a rare book collector in 1930s Berlin. This was a good investment! Beautiful, thorough, and immersive, but never cumbersome. This is Taschen at their finest, and that is saying something!

I delight in the attempt to unravel a long poem that is full of intentional contradictions. Teasing out hidden meanings turns my crank. Making popcorn to watch this unfold . . .

Here, in "The Robing of the Bride," all my expectations for what I was anticipating when I bought this book are met - gothic atmosphere, a revelation of hidden things that ought not to be, an unholy masquerade un-veiled. Or, rather, veiled. To quote the sound advice of one character "it is best you do not see". This story, previously unpublished, shows that often in collections, the new works are the best. Five stars

Anyone who fell deeply in love in their youth will feel the sweet tugging of old joy and the sadness of loss upon reading "Blackberry Time". I can't tell if the ending was too abrupt or exactly terse enough. I'm leaning far enough toward the latter to call this a five star story. Uncanny and melancholy, this story might set its hooks (in the form of blackberry thorns) into you, too.

And now Isis as the proto-goddess. I'm lost in antiquity.

Slow, interesting progress. Graves seems to suppose quite a bit without a lot of evidence. But I'm not reading this to convince myself of his arguments or to refute them. I'm in for the ride through history, "real" or fictional.

Those Greeks got around, if you buy Grave's history.

The White Goddess, associated gods, and her bards have deep roots. Very deep, tangled roots.

Dedicated "To the Memory of Charles Baudelaire" - an auspicious start, before the poetry has even begun!

Maybe "Sithean" wasn't the right story for me to read on the same day I had browsed travel information on the Isle of Skye and just returned from holiday in the UK AND the same night my wife is flying home from having visited her mother. Now I'm spooked. Five annoying stars. Thanks a lot, Bell.

"Secret Dyonisiac mushroom cult," you say? You have my attention! Tell me more!

"Wild Wales," with an introductory quote by Aickman, is on the border of what I might call "Aikman-esque," but not quite up to the same standard. Still, what struck me is the strength of the voice in the story. The narration itself heralded the predilections and preferences of the narrator himself: His likes, his comforts, his dislikes, his fears. For this, and a story well-told, four stars.

"The Island" was well-written, but standard fair for an English-isles ghost story. 3 stars.

"The Virgin Mary Well" gave me shivers. Stories don't often do that to me. Reality maps on phantom reality in spite of efforts to contain or banish malevolent spirits. Not precisely the ending I expected, but a nice (that is, nasty) bit of a surprise. Bell caught me off-guard with this one. I shall not look at wells in quite the same way now, especially when young ladies are present. Five twisted stars.

Trees to letters seems a bit of a jump, but I'll play along. Were the ancient Welsh literate? I suppose the poets were, at least literate with oral tradition.

"Many Shades of Red" is prettily written, but not very effective at pulling an emotionL reaction from me. Three stars.

And there she is, introduced, the White Goddess. Now: Details.

It's so appropriate that I bought this book in Wales. Poetic, really. :)

Having been lost, alone, on an unfamiliar mountain at night, I had a strong reaction to "The Executioner". While not everything correlated, I know the sense of fear that comes with that situation. California or the Outer Hebrides, that fear is the same! This story is a horror of nature, along the lines of some of Hodgson's work. Respect nature, because it won't respect you, haunted or not!

I'm back from Europe. I showed great restraint and only bought 7 books there. 5 of those were bought in the "booktown" of Hay-On-Wye. My notebook is full of thoughts and observations from the trip which will inform, if not translate directly into, my own fiction. I am glad to be back and think this is a good time to make Goodreads, Twitter, and Instagram my "go to" social media. FB sucks.

Alrightly. I just shut off notifications for my vacation. If it helps to swallow the bitter pill, I will be buying books in Hay-on-Wye, Wales' most famous "booktown". See you on the other side!

I might finish this book yet today, but you'll have to wait two full weeks for the review. My long vacation starts tomorrow!

Just as an FYI, I will be offline, mostly, from 7/18 - 8/1. My wife and I are taking a trip to Europe (probably the last of our lives unless we win the lottery - and I don't play the lottery), so I want my full attention on the trip. Plus, I'll be taking a couple of notebooks with me to fill my brain with story ideas. Let's call it a research trip. :)

Chris Lambert quoting Tony Redman in his treatise on M.R. James: "Wherever you've got a margin between two types of culture and two types of landscape you often get a deeper awareness of the supernatural and the spiritual". This rings true to me, who lived overseas most of my childhood and loved (and still love) to wander the "spaces between". I could go on, but should probably do a blog post about this some time.

"The House" is clever, with the perfect amount of creepy. Much is left to the imagination in this self-referential meta-story, pulled off to perfection! Five stars to this excellent tale, a primer on how to creep your reader out! Fantastic.

Transgressive, Irreal . . . running out of appropriate words.

"Apotheosis" is a somber, moody piece about a visit to a Hebridean isle. The narrator finds that he is or was an unknowing stranger visiting strange shores. I can't say it was "heavy handed", but the fingers fell just a touch too bluntly on the "X" of the plot map. Still, a four star story and well worth the read. Looking forward to more of the same in this volume.