There was an hour, and I was using for something–or so it seems–and without it I am a bit of a shambles. But I’ll get you a prose snippet for next week, I promise.
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More Torrors… and all that Shat
My second look back at Eighties horror novels is up on Tor.com. It’s called “The Dog Who Played with Scrabble” and is about Dean Koontz’s Watchers
I am now one thousand pages into Stephen King’s It
In between the two–and ain’t this a bit of a head-twist?–I have also read and reviewed Shatner Rules: Your Guide to Understanding the Shatnerverse and the World at Large
Whimsy from William Gibson meets Exquisite Words
I love the humor in this fragment, and the way you can see the scene so clearly.
“You’re mumbling again, big guy,” said Memory, shivering into hallucinatorily clear focus on the rumpled sheets, her thighs warm and golden against the Royal Stewart flannel. She adjusted the nosecones of her chrome bustier. “Also, you’re on the verge of a major fashion crime.”
I froze, the starched white tails of an Elmore of Shinjuku evening shirt half-tucked into the waistband of a favorite pair of lovingly-mended calfskin jodhpurs. She was right. Pearl buttons scattered like a flock of miniscule flying saucers as I tore myself out of the offending Elmore.
–William Gibson
The Horrors, at Tor (rors)
Reading Christopher Buelman’s Those Across the River
Exquisite Words likes the short stuff
This is from a very short story called “Fairyland,” by Darin Bradley. You can read the whole story here at Coffinmouth.
Here’s the snippet. It’s a terse little stream of images that add up to a quite clear picture before easing into character stuff:
A valley. Pastures, which had gone bad. Empty. Haze obscured the surrounding hills. It was what Gil had expected of The Bomb. An Indian Summer twinkling radioactive ejecta. Refracting sunbeams like farm dust or smog. Or burning magnesium. He thinks of his own ghosts, and wonders if they burned up somwhere else, in the past. Maybe the whole world was dead already. Maybe we were all eaten up and spat out in radioactive chunks.
(The story originally came to me via Snuffy‘s twitterfeed.)