I don't read too many of these, but my friend Justin (author of The Good Guy and more, and also my co-host on The Wordy Pair) gave me this Aliens omnibus, with three novels in there.
The first one, Earth Hive (which I keep remembering wrongly as Hive Earth) was surprisingly good.
This week I've got a strong recommendation for a short story. Filling about nine pages of the (admittedly dense) Weird Tales, "The Two Men Who Murdered Each Other" is not a creepy story, but a strange tragedy!
Written by Valma Clark and published in the July/August 1923 issue of WT, it's excellently written, with a gentle but consistent flow and a timeless style. The prose is detailed without being overly flowery or wordy, and the three characters are developed quite well considering the limited space.
This book was attached to the end of the Lensman Super Pack I bought a long time ago, but after I read through all of the main books, I looked at this one and it seemed like it was mostly unrelated to the Lensman series, at least in the first few pages that I read. So, I neglected it for a while.
Last weekend, I decided to give it a look, and I quite liked what I found. This book is a novel created by stitching together three of Doc Smith's stories about a guy named Neal Cloud. It has also been called Masters of the Vortex, but the version I read was called The Vortex Blaster. There might be some small differences between versions.
I know I said I was caught up with my YouTube posts, but I was looking through my notes and I did miss a couple, so I'll try putting up those posts around one a week until I finish them.
This one is my reading and reaction to what might be the earliest example of Lovecraft's fiction: a tiny little short story (we would call it "flash fiction" today) that he wrote at the age of six!
Flipping through Weird Tales, I found this story with a disarmingly simple style and a very solid pace. There are a lot of stories in WT that really don't seem to belong there, but this one surprised me with a neat little twist that I thought was handled subtly enough that I didn't see it coming on my first read.
You'll probably catch it because I warned you, but it was a good story nonetheless.
So, I decided to do a reading of it, since it was pretty short. Enjoy!
Oh, by the way, I didn't try to do "voices" for this one but I probably should have. Hindsight is 20/20, I guess. Maybe next time.
If you'd rather read it at your own pace, you can do so on Internet Archive or Wikisource.
