needs more demons?

Back in 1999, members of a mailing list I was on traded book recommendations. Several of the novels I read as a result (among them Hulme’s The Bone People, Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina, Dunn’s Geek Love, Ryman’s Was, Carroll’s Outside the Dog Museum, Powers’ The Goldbug Variations, and Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End [...]

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I enjoyed the Interstellar Radio Company’s dramatization of Sheckley’s short story “Ghost V” quite a bit. It reminded me that Sheckley was one of the classic science fiction writers I’d never really explored. I’ve been working on remedying that, starting with the volume at hand, a short story collection from 1972.
The stories in [...]

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I liked Black Rubber Dress quite well right up to the final chapters. Sculptress and amateur-sleuth-by-virtue-of-nosiness Sam Jones (don’t call her Samantha) sells a piece of artwork to a London investment bank, which — along with the titular garment she wears to the unveiling — gives her an entrée to, and a pleasantly outside perspective [...]

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Dennis Wheatley’s supernatural thriller The Satanist is so ugly and offensive that I often found it unintentionally hilarious. It revolves primarily around the attempts of a special branch of British intelligence to unravel the schemes of a cult of communist Satanists (some of whom are also, no joke, ex-Nazis).
The novel was first published in [...]

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