Forrest > Recent Status Updates

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.

There is a simultaneous childhood fascination with the outre and a world-weariness swirling around in the narrator of The Jade Cabinet. The eccentricities of her family, in particular her father, who had a bout of madness (at least one so far) probably have a lot to do with that. Oh, and her older sister, Etheria, who, while beautiful and socially-adept, does not speak. And did I mention Lewis Carroll yet?

"Alone With the Guru" was adequate and unsurprising. A decided "meh" if I'm being honest with myself (which the narrator of this story was not). Three stars.

This is a year of re-reading works that have sunk deep into my mind. I recently re-finished Malpertuis and now it's time to revisit The Jade Cabinet. This time I shall write up a proper review!

Just finished a re-read of Malpertuis and it is even better the second time through. More thoughts on that later (as an addendum to my initial review). Also, I'm re-reading Rikki Ducornet's The Jade Cabinet starting now. Rikki is an amazing author whom I've had the pleasure to correspond with from time to time (and published some of her short fiction in a bygone age).

I had hoped that Grains could, with a longer work, have the textual room necessary to let his prodigious vocabulary and strident style breathe more freely. This is exactly what happend with "Under the Sun of Yabalon-Xi," another Smithian tale, but one that features an inevitably doomed quest through bizarre landscapes and corners of reality. Five stars.

This principal of "editing" is a keeper. I use it in my writing, of course, but applying it to "life" is a potential gamechanger. I've dabbled in it, inadvertently, in my work life and the older I get, the more I see it as essential to my mental health.