This one was a doozy, but a good doozy. The Winter King is the first book in a trilogy that Bernard Cornwell calls "The Warlord Chronicles." It's a retelling of the King Arthur legend, but with extra attention paid to incorporating the scraps of historical data we have from back then, as well as a dark, gritty, and earthy interpretation that refuses to whitewash the characters or the setting.
It was a really, really good book.
I'm finally getting around to finishing the Skylark series! Even though Skylark of Valeron had a pretty definitive ending back in 1934, apparently lots of readers, including Frederik Pohl, wanted more Skylark, and in 1965, Doc Smith agreed. He serialized the new book, Skylark DuQuesne, in IF Worlds of Science Fiction and collected into a book in 1966.
It was Smith's last book before he passed away.
Like a lot of Smith's stuff, the book starts with a crazy revelation--the method Seaton and company used to keep DuQuesne and the bodiless intelligences out of trouble turns out to have a fatal flaw, and probably won't last very long. This kind of reframing or even retconning is a pretty common element in Smith's sequels, so it wasn't too jarring. In fact, the reason given and the logic behind it is subtle but surprisingly sound.
I felt like I had been neglecting science fiction, so I went hunting around last weekend. There's a book of some of the early Hugo-winning short fiction, and first up there was The Darfsteller, by Walter M. Miller, Jr. Well, I went looking for alternate copies of that novella and everywhere I looked the covers recommended Miller's classic novel, A Canticle for Leibowitz. Sometimes loudly. I figured I'd check it out.
I've heard of it but I had never read it until a few days ago!
What I found was a very solid book, with excellent worldbuilding, and with very good tone, characters, ideas, and perspectives. But the "very good" elements each fell slightly short of excellence for a specific reason, but more on that below.
Just a quick announcement, Naya Nomikou just published an excellent narration of my short story, "The Fifth!" She did an amazing job capturing the rising tension and confusion, and added some great ambience and sound effects, too!
Go check out her channel and her videos, and give her a like and a subscription if you wish! She reads a lot of great creepy stories I've never heard of, and good comedies and poetry as well.
Thanks to Naya for narrating my story!
This week's review will likely be out Wednesday evening, and I'm going to be talking about A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
Machen is another one of those authors who was extremely influential on Lovecraft. He is best known for his weird fiction, and last weekend I read his book The Three Impostors, published in 1895. Lovecraft had some mixed feelings about this book, calling it "a work whose merit as a whole is somewhat marred by an imitation of the jaunty [Robert Louis] Stevenson manner." Stevenson's book New Arabian Nights was apparently a model for Machen.
However, Lovecraft also said that this book contains "certain tales which perhaps represent the high-water mark of Machen's skill as a terror-weaver."
I found my way to this book through Nero Wolfe. In the paperback Bantam Crime Line edition of one of my favorite Wolfe books, The Doorbell Rang, the introduction was written by Stuart Kaminsky, who said that the end of The Doorbell Rang was his favorite ending to any novel until he read Eight Million Ways to Die by Lawrence Block, published in 1982.
That was pretty high praise to me, so I picked up a copy and read it several years ago. Yesterday, I read it again and here are my refreshed thoughts.
A little bonus post for you all this week...
I was looking at historical books on cheesemaking (don't ask) over at the Internet Archive, and I stumbled onto this little manuscript that is almost too strange to believe.
