The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia - This was part of last year's Christmas stack from my wife. It took me a long time to get rolling on this one. Everything about it should have worked for me - the brooding atmosphere, the hybrids, the tense secrets - but it couldn't hook for whatever reason. About halfway through it finally did and I finished it in a couple of days, carrying it room to room. There small central cast and half a dozen evocatively described locations they move between, and once I imagined it as a staged play in those constraints the flow worked better for me.
The Gods of Pegāna, by Lord Dunsany - I've read this many times, and once, long ago, tweeted the entirely of its text. Recently I pulled it off the shelf after talking with my UU minister neighbor, wondering if there was something in there she might make a sermon of, and ended up reading the whole again. Holds up. This is an awful public domain, POD edition though so I'm not going to share it with her. Looking for a better one with the original Sime illustrations.
The Mystery of Doggerland: Atlantis in the North Sea, by Graham Phillips - My mom sent me this for my birthday with a note like "I don't know, seemed interesting". I went into it with what I felt was the appropriate amount of skepticism for any non-fiction book that mentions Atlantis in its title, but it was surprisingly reserved. No mention of ancient hovercrafts at all, but rather a fairly measured discussion of the rise and fall of sea levels over the past several thousand years and how that has displaced cities and societies. I liked the speculation around the discovery of ruins that might have been an ancient spa.
Every Heart A Doorway, be Seannan McGuire - Another part of the Christmas pile from my wife. I've read a few other of McGuire's books over the years and generally enjoy them, and the pattern holds here. It's a compact little "kill your darlings" queer magical mystery that I think I finished in a day.
H. P. Lovecraft's The Shadow Over Innsmouth, by Gou Tannabe - This manga adaptation of one of my favorite Lovecraft stories was a birthday gift from my wife. She has previously given me Tannabe's adaptations of At the Mountains of Madness, which I also really enjoyed. This one takes more liberties with the source material, mixing in some aspects of (spoilers) Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family, but make it work extremely well. Where Madness showed Tannabe's skill at illustrating huge vistas, this work focuses on claustrophobia and decay with equal skill.
Delicious in Dungeon Vol. 14, by Ryoko Kui - The last one! I'm finally free of spoilers. Could not have predicted how this was going to end but by gum it stuck the landing. What a great series, and I'm excited to see the second season of the anime next year.
A Light in the Attic, by Shel Silverstein - A little free library find. Of course I've read this many times over the years, and it wasn't a huge investment to sit down for an hour on an afternoon with it and read it again. It does contain one of my favorites, and one I've taken to heart at work over the years:
If you have to dry the dishes
(Such an awful, boring chore)
If you have to dry the dishes
('Stead of going to the store)
If you have to dry the dishes
And you drop one on the floor—
Maybe they won't let you
Dry the dishes anymore.
Alien Nation comics, by Adventure Comics - I finished up my rewatch of the original series and all the made-for-TV movies earlier this year. While looking up trivia about them, I discovered there had been a whole (short lived, again) line of comics published shortly after the TV series ended! eBay provided a pretty complete collection in one order, but I have a few others to pick up to finish the whole run. One thing I noticed was they didn't have a consistent approach to handling the Newcomer's language - I guess continuity editors are a newer invention.
- A Breed Apart - The first one I cracked, and it made me trepidatious of the rest. The art was... "gifted high school student" level and the story ended on multiple cliffhangers with a plea in the afterward for readers to write in and beg for its continuation. This was the only one in the stack I have to use the medium of comics to introduce visuals that couldn't have been done in the TV show, though.
- The Firstcomers - Better, but with a really frustrating narrative structure bordering on "it was all a dream". Since this is an officially licensed work, I guess it means The Greys exist in the Alien Nation universe. Good to know. The male lead in this one is an irredeemable prick with a rat-tail haircut.
- The Spartans - Good one, pulls in some characters from the show. Plays with the Overseer concept in a way the show never did. Sets itself up for a sequel without begging for one.
- The Skin Trade - Best of the lot, really enjoyed it. If there had been a second season of the show, I would have liked to have seen it based off this. The main character, Mason Jar, adapts a hard-boiled detective persona based off movies he watched in internment and leans into it. Great character names and tweaks on lore established in the show. Also characters from the other comic runs show up and are referenced, showing Action was trying to set up a whole parallel roster. A shame nothing else came of it.
