Books Completed October 2023

 Good ol' spooky season.

 

 

 

Night Terror, by John Kenn Mortensen - I got Mortensen's Post-It Monsters years ago, and was thrilled and surprised to see, via another blog's monthly media post, he had some new work out. This is a big-format art book full of his creepy and evocative line drawings that was great to have for Halloween time. It's definitely going on the bestiary shelf.

Just a few sample images.

 

Sean Äaberg's Halloween Book - I backed this on Kickstarter back in 2021, and forgot about it until it happily showed up at the start of October. I was expecting more of an art book, but it also contains several essays by the author on his own vision of what Halloween should be about. I'll admit it wasn't clicking right for me until I started thinking about it as a hardbound zine, and then it all worked. I only found out after the fact that he was really involved with zines of various sorts for years, so there you go. The Halloween menus lists actually really inspired me and I ended up making a lot of corn bread and chili and pumpkin curry over the month, so that was fun.

 

Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury - Normally in October I read The October Country, but I just wasn't feeling it this year for whatever reason. I remembered a discussion with a friend at work about this one though, and her being surprised I had never read it, so I picked it up. Turns out I have read this before, but not for something like 20 years, and I somehow forgot about it, which doesn't seem like it should be possible. I don't know if this is Bradbury's masterpiece, but it's certainly one of his strongest works, very much in his primary-colored idiom, while breaking from it in startling ways that are still his own. Fantastic.

The Halloween Tree, by Ray Bradbury - This one I do read every year, not a tall order for a young adult book. This year the theme of smiles really jumped out at me for some reason. Everything is smiling or is a smile (particularly scythes). Some day I will have to vet the history he describes against the real world. I'm sure it was at least good-faith accurate when he wrote it, but he also has his own mid-century, middle America biases I don't feel like he ever really addressed.

H. P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, by Gou Tanabe - A quite faithful manga retelling of Lovecraft's longest work that my wife gave me for Christmas several years ago and I decided to pull off the shelf for October. I love Tanabe's intricate line work and ability to convey a sense of vast, horrifying scale from a 7 x 5 paperback 2-page spread. Having the Elder Things convey emotion somehow is also impressive.

The Handyman Method, by Nick Cutter & Andrew F. Sullivan - The same blog post above says "this book opens the door to the dank basement of Gothic masculinity, forcing us to examine the dark shape of manhood in the current moment". Sounded enticing, so I picked it up new to get some contemporary writing into my October reading. I think I'm just straight up bad at reading for themes though, because this landed as a pretty standard modern terror tale for me. It had its moments, and I'm stealing the dungeon idea for an adventure at some point.

Methuselah's Children, by Robert Heinlein - Not Halloween really at all, but I found this on a shelf and had no idea where it came from. Since it was short and I didn't recall ever reading it, thought I'd just tear through. It's a Heinlein novel, yep, but the Lazarus Long character always feels like he wandered in from a pulp comic from two decades earlier. The structure is quite odd, feeling like three and a half smaller books kind of strung together with self-insert political rants and Math. Fun in its own way?

Cat and Girl Vol. 5, by  Dorothy Gambrell - The last volume of the set I picked up in a flash sale. More wit, cynicism, cloudcuckoolanders, and simmering despair. A few more color page experiments than the last volumes. All told, glad to have this set in my comics bookcase finally.

Peter Hunt's Cape Cod Cookbook - I found a trove of a half-dozen cookbooks from the 60s in a little free library, and this was the first one I went through -- what a trip. I was not familiar with Peter Hunt, but he was apparently a famous folk artist living in Cape Cod in his later years. The recipes are fine and interesting (but with an approach to the availability of seafood we'd find hard to fathom these days), but taken as a snapshot of a certain lifestyle in the early 60s on the Cape, it's fascinating. Most recipes are described as coming from a certain neighbor, and the notion of just dropping in at someone's studio until a party forms spontaneously and someone decides to start making paella, or having the restaurant across the street from your house decide to send a violinist over to your patio party on a whim are... another world.