Category: Bitching

  • “The Loop”/Horror Endings/What I am Reading

    I read “The Loop” this week; which was… ok? It showed up in a twitter thread from a horror writer I like, and was on sale, so I gave it a whirl. I note a number of horror novels I’ve read this year have trouble sticking the landing. It seems to be an issue with…

  • 70% of “You Can’t Win”

    I’m about 70% of the way done through “You Can’t Win” and I’m not 100% sure about finishing it. Here’s the thing: it’s a well written book, and it does a good job of telling its story. But there’s an underlying problem I’ll get to in a bit.  I first heard of this book somewhere…

  • In Which the Author Stops Apologizing/What I am Reading

    One of the things I have found about writing a blog that you update frequently is that certain themes emerge whether or not you want to. For a while, I struggled with my role with the blog, eventually deciding “gee, I’m a critic”. I’ve played with the notion of “status vs. contract” novel, and described…

  • No Long Entry/Short Stories

    Owing to some personal stuff, there’s no ‘long’ or ‘in depth’ entry this week; It’s both my wedding anniversary and the one year anniversary of Hurricane Ida, and our evacuation from the city. I had originally intended to write up some thoughts about that, but after a few drafts, decided it’s beyond my abilities to…

  • “The Deep”/A Difficult Subject/”Moby Dick”/Storygraph/What I am Reading

    *This entry will contain some discussion of sexual abuse; if that’s something you don’t wish to read about, or are not in a place to deal with, I’m going to encourage you not to engage with it. You can scroll down to the first set of *** to skip that part, or not read at…

  • Winner/”The Deep”/What Actually Frightens

    Well, that was a bit bleaker than I had anticipated, but the winner is, ironically, “You Can’t Win”, so that is next on the list. While I was waiting, I started Nick Cutter’s “The Deep”. I read “The Troop” and “Little Heaven” a bit ago; and I remember the gross killer tapeworms of “The Troop”…

  • “The Pallbearer’s Club”/Booktube/A Definite Title

    A couple of anecdotes: A little bit ago, I was wasting time watching YouTube, which is something I do a little too much of, if I am being honest. There was a video on the movie “Incident in a Ghostland” which I saw some length of time ago, and decided to watch. The youtuber appeared,…

  • Hating Will Shortz/Cleverness/”Ella Minnow Pea”

    “Everybody’s clever nowadays” -Oscar Wilde Clever is a difficult thing. It’s fairly easy to write something without being clever at all. We’re going to have to define our terms a little bit here: on it’s surface, clever is a synonym for ‘smart’— but when I hear the word, I tend to think of something that’s…

  • Illness/”Moby Dick”/Cough/No List This Week

    I have had a rotten cold for three weeks or so, which has slowed down my reading pace somewhat; I have advanced to chapter 23 in my Moby Dick re-read, so we’re onboard the ship, Starbuck has appeared, and the narration has done one of the weird shifts it does. Melville does not use a…

  • “A Descent into the Maelström”/What I am reading

    I read “A Descent into the Maelström” this week in addition to finishing “Vamphiri!” and working on a couple other things that I’ll mention below. It’s a story about a whirlpool, and the narrator’s failure to die in it after figuring out that the larger an object, the faster it gets sucked down, so he…