It’s the 160th birthday of Arthur Conan Doyle, the man who gave us Sherlock Holmes, then took him away from us, and then gave him back to us.
And as a way to celebrate this day, I think I’ll spend the rest of the evening to work on my Sherlock Holmes pastiche.
Who knows, maybe ACD’s ghost will come around and inspire me.
But I doubt it.
Last year I was paid 50 bucks by an Italian magazine to review books not available on the Italian market and related to the Horror genre1. I did it, and the reviews were so successful that my 50 bucks gig was not renewed for the second year – it was not worth the investment.
Now, my contract having been dead for over six months, I thought I’ll reprise here some of those reviews, expanding and revising the text.
If you like them, you might consider buying me a coffee or supporting me on Patreon. Unless you did already, in which case, thank you.
Should there be any interest, I will go on with new reviews using the same format.
Let me know what you think in the comments, please.
For starters, here’s a bit about a very interesting non fiction book, called Egyptomania goes to the Movies . Continue reading
It is Arthur Conan Doyle’s birthday!
The man that gave us Sherlock Holmes and Professor Challenger deserves a little celebration, and what better way to celebrate a storyteller than through his stories?
So here we go – a Ladybird Horror Classic, The Mummy, based on ACD’s own Lot n. 249.
Enjoy!
And here you can get the original, as an illustrated PDF, as published by Harper’s Magazine.
It’s been pointed out to me that it’s damn hard finding a paleontologist these days, not to mention a paleontologist versed in science fiction.
I never thought of myself as a rare commodity before.
And as luck would have it, right now I am revising The House of the Gods, my novel of a lost world in the Amazon Forest, filled with dinosaurs and action.
In ten days I’ll send the final draft to my publisher, and then we’ll see.
But in the meantime, why not do a little paleontology/science fiction post about my preparation work for the novel?
I’m a rare commodity, but I can be had – for a price. Continue reading
… and then they ask you where your ideas come from.
I was looking up M. Y. Halidom last night.
Halidom was the alias of one Alexander Huth, that published a number of supernatural tales and novels in the late 19th and early 20th century.
I learned of his existence when I found out about the three volumes of Tales of the Wonder Club, a collection of “club stories” about a bunch of individuals that meet in a pub (the quaintly-named “Ye Headless Lady”) to trade strange and chilling stories.
A small clique or brotherhood, known as “The Wonder Club,” had been nightly in the habit of assembling here for years, and this served to bring grist to the mill. Some of the eminent men from the neighbouring village, among whom were the doctor, the lawyer, an antiquary, an analytical chemist, and others, had formed among themselves a club, which was to consist only of very choice spirits, like themselves, and if any guest were introduced among them, it was only to be with a letter of introduction and the full consent of all parties. By these strict rules they hoped to keep the club select. A room at the inn was set apart for them, into which no one not belonging to the club ever presumed to enter, unless it was the landlord, who would be called every now and then to[7] replenish the bowl, and whom sometimes the guests of the club would “draw out,” as it was whispered in the village that the landlord of the “Headless Lady” knew a rare lot of stories, he did; also how to tell ’em, too, my word! but these he generally reserved for his more intimate customers. One strict law of the club that we have not yet mentioned was that no guest invited was to be a “business man.”
The set-up is strikingly similar to Ike Asimov’s Black Widowers stories, but here the slant is towards the weird, the horrific and the supernatural. With a bit of humor thrown in for good measure.
And to make things more fun for collectors, Huth that was Halidom published the first book of the series under another alias, Dryasdust.
Interested parties can find an illustrated edition of the three volumes of Tales from the Wonder Club on the Project Gutenberg.
I will probably post on each of the three volumes separately. Continue reading
There was only one man who could write a pulp homage to gothic romance, dragging in references from Jane Austen to Edgar Rice Burroughs, from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to Lester Dent, and beyond, while making it deliciously naughty.
And that man was, of course, the late lamented Philip José Farmer.
The Evil in Pemberley House by Farmer and Win Scott Eckert – who completed the novel based on Farmer’s outline and notes – is exactly that: a P.J. Farmer tour de force featuring subtle (and not-so-subtle) references and tongue-in-cheek plot twists, feeding both the old master and his readers’ obsession for the pulps and the icons of popular literature.
The plot in brief: Pat Wildman, daughter of world famous adventurer/crimefighter Doc Wildman, moves to England after the loss of her parents. She has inherited old Pemberley House, with its ghosts and its curses, and carries a number of unresolved issues herself.
But what is happening really in Pemberley House, and what connections have the events that Pat is witnessing with the history of her family? Continue reading
What with yesterday being the Wold Newton Event anniversary and all that, I spent my Sunday afternoon re-reading Philip José Farmer‘s The Peerless Peer.
And a rip-roaring read it was.
Now, in all honesty, The Peerless Peer is probably not the best of Farmer’s novels, but it is certainly a lot of fun.
In a nutshell: in 1916, the murder of a researcher in Egypt forces Mycroft Holmes to enlist the services of his brother Sherlock and of Dr Watson.
But Holmes alone can’t tackle the problem, and once in Africa, he will join forces with a notorious “eccentric” British peer. One that lives in a tree house he shares with an ape… Continue reading
Karavansara 