Monthly Archives: May 2011
Pillow talking with aliens – David Lodge’s A Man of Parts
I’ve been reading David Lodge’s A Man of Parts, a mixture of biography and fiction. Set at the end of Wells’s life, the story is told in a series of parts and internal conversations. As he lies dying, he begins … Continue reading
Crossing the Styx – Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!
When the Bowl-A-Bed is better than the starting place, you know the journey must be bad. Even when the world that you grew up in is configured in an Old Testament styled, Classical one of occasional miracles. After Hilola Bigtree’s … Continue reading
Exhuming the spirits – Alan Campbell’s Sea of Ghosts
It was one evening at the last Glasgow Eastercon that Peter Lavery, the editorial mainstay of (new) weird fiction in the 2000s, gave me a sampler for Alan Campbell‘s Scar Night. I read it and bounced (a little drunkenly as … Continue reading