There will be a lot more weird stuff happening in Pine Cove.

I'm a pretty big fan of Moore. Practical Demonkeeping was his first novel, so you'll see growth as a writer as he goes on. I don't think he's done anything that I haven't at least liked. Lamb, his novel about Jesus' best friend, is one of my favorite books of all time.

They’re pretty stand-alone, except for the vampire books which need to be read in order. There is some benefit to reading his books chronologically because characters will make appearances in later books. It’s certainly not necessary though.

The Stupidest Angel (the Christmas book) is probably my second favorite of his books. And I mostly hate Christmas.

The Unknown
edited by D.R. Bensen

I often wonder what it was like in the 40s, when the pulps were on the newstands, side by side with the superhero comics of the age... how awesome would that be? I know alot of our society today chooses others forms of entertainment besides print, but the thought of being able to see a rack of magazines with this quality of story in it boggles my mind sometimes.

This collection is all from the short lived magazine and has quite a stellar cast. Funnily enough, my favorite was the entry of L. Sprague de Camp, who the editors heaps quite a lot of praise on. I always think of him as the guy that tried to steal Conan, but 'The Gnarly Man' is really good.. its the story of a Neatherthal the survived into the modern world, and what happens when he reveals himself. Great stuff, with just the right balance of humor and seriousness.

This was not my favorite Ffynrd and the Gray Mouser story 'The Bleak Shore', in which the two heroes are mindless zombies for most of the story, but it's definately a classic property.

I also really liked H.L Gold's 'Trouble With Water', where a hen-pecked husband runs afoul of a water gnome on a fishing trip to hilarious effect.

My favorite was 'snulbug' by Anthony Boucher, where a very sad little demon is summoned, and the summoners uses it to try to learn about and profit from the future. Time travel REALLY sucks, and this story pointed out exactly why, as Snulbug tells the hapless hero exactly why all his schemes will fail. Our intrepid hero does get his money though, in a decidedly non-time travel way which made me smile.

The other stories were still decent, if not spectacular, and several include an illustration of some sort by Edd Carter that the preface indicates were from the original magazine. It's always good to read a few short stories as a change from the more common epics of today.

I've always felt he latched on to Conan to try to make it his own... he tried to take away the nuance of the character and make him more generic. Clearly, he helped alot for the commercial success of the property, but I've just never really liked his stuff. I'd read a small bit of his non-Conan stuff and wasn't impressed, but this one was really cool. Maybe I just got the wrong stuff... I know he's very well respected by fellow writers.

You're right... It just rubs me the wrong way that he edited Howard's stuff, and tried to make him more Superhero-y. Without them though, there' no Arnold movie, which, for all it faults, sure did wonders for the character exposure wise.

I got some SSOCs at my LCS.. most are post movie, and the letter pages are filled with people asking if Robert E Howard approved of he movie and/or the comic. It's funny how we take some things for granted... like how easy information is to learn today. It also shows how people were hungry for more, which is good.

The Good, the Bad and the Little Bit Stupid
Marina Lewycka, 2020


Well, I noted on the preceding page that I found Lewycka's other more recent novel, The Lubetkin Legacy, a bit disappointing; well, this one is beyond just disappointing. I think the best thing about it is the title - and, in fact, a pithy one-line review of it would be: Not at all good, in fact quite bad and more than a little bit stupid.
The novel is set mainly in Sheffield, England in the summer and autumn of 2016, just after the Brexit vote, and the story revolves around the various members of the Pantis family: George, a 79 year-old retired college professor, his wife Rosie, a 59 year-old schoolteacher, their early thirty-something son and daughter, Sid and Cassie, and Brenda, their next-door neighbor and a hairdresser who owns her own salon. George and Rosie have a falling out due to an argument over Brexit (he voted for and she against) and George ends up having a brief affair with Brenda. At about the same time, George also gets an e-mail informing him that he's won the equivalent of about 7 million pounds in the Kosovo state lottery, which he doesn't recall entering, and that he has to provide bank account details to collect his winnings. Sid advises George that this sounds like a scam, but he finds the sum of money seductive, and this leads to a sequence of troubles, starting with sketchy characters with odd foreign accents claiming to be bank clerks and/or banking fraud officers even visiting George at home and asking him all manner of questions. Everyone in the family, and Brenda, get drawn into this, and they all eventually end up in northern Albania at one point where they come face to face with human traffickers and organ harvesters - and if this is all beginning to sound a bit ludicrous and far-fetched, it really is.
I think a good and even amusing story could have been salvaged out of the basic plot, but it seems like no effort was made here to tell a coherent story that made sense by its own logic. All of the characters behave way too stupidly (as noted, more than just "a little bit") to drive the plot forward and in real life it's doubtful that any of them would have made it out of that detour in Albania alive. I find it hard to believe that this made it through the vetting process, i.e., agent, beta readers, editors, etc., that most books released by major book publishers undergo.
This is all the more disappointing, because I know Lewycka can do so much better; her first four novels in particular are outstanding.