Whimsical, Wooly, and Weird: Charles Fort's Book of the Damned!

This book was not what I was expecting. Seeing it referred to in so many works of fiction, I expected it to be fiction or fictionalized accounts of foggy real events. In actuality, it contains hundreds and hundreds of references to real reports in journals and magazines, and Fort's attempt to offer alternative explanations for them in a somewhat unserious way.

A Book Full of Feist's Fortes: Krondor: The Assassins

Krondor: The Assassins is the second book in the Riftwar Legacy saga. It's a story connecting the two video game stories that Feist novelized after the fact: Krondor: The Betrayal is Feist's take on the story of the game Betrayal at Krondor, and it turns out (I just looked this up the other day) that Tear of the Gods is Feist's novelization of the story in Return to Krondor, which got a lot less hype than the first game back in the day.

Missed Opportunity: "Penelope" by Vincent Starrett

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Right after "The Floor Above," which I did a reading of last week, appears a short story by Vincent Starrett called "Penelope." It has tons of great elements of a good weird tale:

• A talkative, eccentric, intelligent main character: Raymond is unorthodox but imaginative and expansive in his descriptions of the world around him
• A strange astrological prophecy: Raymond is told by his mad father to "Beware of Penelope when in perihelion"
• A furtively-told story: Raymond invites Haswell into his home to tell him the story that has convinced others Raymond himself is mad
• A bizarre physical phenomenon: Raymond awakes at midnight one night to discover the force of gravity has inverted for him and only him!
• A tense twenty minutes: Raymond walking around on the ceiling draws out his landlord with a revolver
• An acrobatic exit: Raymond climbs "up" the fire escape to the street and goes around outside for a bit

Almost-Lost Wolfe Media: 1959 TV Pilot with SHATNER as Archie?!

Stumbled onto this while I was poking around on the Internet Archive. Apparently CBS produced a few episodes of a Nero Wolfe TV series back in 1959, with Kurt Kasznar as Wolfe and William Shatner as Archie. The pilot survives in a remastered and colorized version here.

Returning to a Sci-Fi Satire Classic: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy!

I loved this book back in the 1990s when I first read it. I even went so far as to buy a big collection of the whole series, and enjoyed the hell out of it. But I gave it to a friend, so it had been over twenty years since I had read this book, when I picked it up recently for a review!

A Reading: The Floor Above, by M. Humphreys

I read the second issue of Weird Tales without anything jumping out at me as worth talking about, and had gotten through a good chunk of issue three... was I in the wrong state of mind? Or was I being too stringent?

Then, this story jumped out at me and I decided to do a reading. Only later, when I started looking into this story, did I learn two things:

1) Lovecraft liked this story enough to mention it in a letter,

and 2) It seems as though nobody knows who M. Humphreys was.

A Short Reading: FEAR, by David R. Solomon

This is a strange story. I wouldn't call it amazingly good, but it does manage some excellent gory descriptive language and has an easy-to-miss message about priorities, and how much those different priorities are worth. It's a sympathetic while somewhat anti-climactic ending.