Reread Red Nails tonight, and Patrice Louinet's Hyborian Genesis III to complete my Cimmerian September journey and to finish the third Del Rey Conan volume.



My journey encompassed all 21 Howard Conan stories, the poem Cimmeria, Howard's essay The Hyborian Age, his letter to Shuyler & Clark, all three of Patrice Louinet's Hyborian Genesis essays. John Hocking's Conan and the Emerald Lotus (the first of two pastiche novels by Hocking in the recently released City of the Dead volume-I still need to read the second at some point), and the few issues of Conan the Barbarian and Conan: The Battle of the Black Stone by Jim Zub and friends that came out in September.

Now I can turn the calendar to October and start on whatever horror offerings I want to get to in prose, comics and on film that I can (though I might argue that most Conan stories qualify as cosmic horror in the Lovecraftian vein at least, and that sword & sorcery as a genre is a fusion of adventure fiction and cosmic horror),

-M

Sherlock Holmes: The Stuff of Nightmares
by James Lovegrove




I was pretty sure of it already, but I've officially decided I'm a fan of James Lovegrove. I read two of his Cthulhu casebooks with Holmes and Watson, and I was expecting this to be similar, since the description mentioned Spring-Heeled Jack.



Instead, its more of a steam punk adventure, which is pretty great. Lovegrove's Watson is just the way I want him to be...grumpy and a bit thick but competent and brilliant in flashes. He makes some silly comments, but also some great observations about life.



The story was an entertaining one about a series of bombings in England in 1890, which lead into a throwaway line in 'the Final Problem'. Love it when a pastiche writer does that sort of thing.



I was particularly tickled when Watson was talking to the readers about inconsistencies in his stories (he mentions he lies about knowing Moriarty on purpose)... especially since this story is definitely not consisted with Lovegrove's Cthulhu books. You could, of course, chalk that up to those being 'secret'... but Watson says several times in this one he's writing it for himself, not for publication, so that doesn't make sense. I don't always like it when authors go meta, but this was unintentional I think (those other books are a couple years away, which makes it very funny.



The ending here was surprising and wonderfully ridiculous... while it would have made an amazing cover, I get why they didn't go there.



The cover, in fact, does no justice to Baron Couchemar... definitely the worst part of the book. I would love to see him again sometimes (if he survived). I had forgotten Lovegrove had written so many Holmes books ,I'll have to find those at some point... perhaps after his soon to be release Conan book that I'm pretty excited about.

The Silkworm, by Robert Galbraith (who's actually J.K. Rowling). The vagaries of our local second-hand bookstore's inventory mean I'm reading the Cormoran Strike series a little out of order, but that's all right. It's not so much the plots I care about, but rather the relation between the characters. A bit like in Star Trek: Deep Space 9, where I'd have been happy with entire episodes of exchanges between Odo and Quark, Bashir and Garak, or Kira and Dukat.

In this novel, a novelist who wrote a scandalous roman à clef disappears... while Robin Ellacitt is decidedly making poor matrimonial choices, and Cormoran Strike still acts like a selfish bear. But all it's quite engrossing! 

Also, do people drink that much beer in England? Sounds like a cool place!

I'm still only around 2/3 of the way through my first "Hallowe'en book" of the month so I'll comment on one the last big ones I managed to finish recently, a re-read of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso that I spread out over the previous few months. This time I tried the early 19th-century translation by William Stewart Rose and also had the Gustave Doré illustrations to enjoy as I went along. It's been a long time since I read the 1970s Barbara Reynolds version that's available in Penguin paperback so I can't really compare the two fairly but I did sometimes feel that I remembered Reynolds flowing a little more easily than Rose.

We superhero comics fans often say superheroes are modern myths but I don't think that's the best comparison: for me they really bear a closer resemblance to the heroes of Arthurian and Carolingian romance and I was reminded of this again as I read Orlando Furioso for the first time in over 20 years. For one thing, the whole idea of knights errant, i.e. armoured heroes wandering around looking for wrongs to right and especially damsels in distress to rescue, is pretty close to superheroes going around looking for crimes to stop, etc. Perhaps even more significantly, the general feel of superhero stories is closer to Mediaeval or Renaissance romance than to the more primal, often amoral (at least to us) world of myth. There's a similar idea of a clear-cut, easily recognised division between good and evil. Also a similar tendancy towards exaggerated feats of strength and power - in Orlando Furioso, Astolpho rides the hippogriff to the moon, in myth when Bellerophon tried to ride Pegasus to Heaven he crashed down to earth, like Icarus, like Phaethon.

And thus in Orlando Furioso we often have individual knights performing superhuman feats of strength and prowess, killing hundreds of enemies single-handedly. Interestingly, though, the combats between the top knights come across to me as surprisingly realistic - I mean in terms of how those scenes feel: obviously I don't know much about how such combats played out in real life. Even Orlando, though he is gifted with an invulnerable skin (an advantage which Achilles does not possess in the Iliad, contrary to common belief), and in his madness routinely massacres scores of victims with his bare hands (this would make an interesting compare-and-contrast with the Hulk, for any enterprising academic comics scholar), doesn't easily win all his one-on-one battles with other elite knights and in fact sometimes seems lucky to have won at all. And the same goes for the other knights.

Getting away from the superhero comparisons and back to the book itself, this is so full of great stories and exciting battles and other set-pieces, I think many modern readers who wouldn't ordinarily think of trying something lie this would be surprised at how entertaining it is - always assuming the reader is open-minded enough to put up with some aspects that run contrary to modern expectations. One ting I really enjoyed and that I had forgotten about a little was how much prominence was given to the two female knights, Bradamante and Marphisa: those characters and their adventures are probably my favourites of the poem, if I had to choose.

Capone: The Man and the Era by Laurence Bergreen

Popular biographer Laurence Bergreen gives us a comprehensive biography of, probably still, the most famous gangster of all time, Al Capone.  Capone was the head of the Chicago Outfit during the height of Prohibition from 1925, when he took over from Johnny Torrio (following the unsuccessful assassination attempt on Torrio), until his sentencing on income tax evasion in 1931.  Capone was what everyone thought of as a prohibition era racketeer.  Flamboyant.  Dressed to the nines.  Surrounded by molls and bodyguards.  Ordering hits to take out rivals.  Bribing politicians.  And a lot of that was true.  But it was also only part of the story.  

Bergreen gives us Capone's entire life.  From his boyhood in Brooklyn where he first started working for Torrio and Frankie Yale.  To his brief time in Philadelphia as an bookkeeper.  To Chicago, again working for Torrio, as a brothel manager and, ultimately, as an organizer.  If it was Torrio who started the trend to turn racketeering into an organized operation, it was Capone who finished the job.  I don't think there can be any doubt that Torrio and Capone's methods for organizing Chicago were an inspiration for the way the Commission ultimately organized crime across the U.S.   And, from his "thrones" in Cicero and Chicago Heights, there was very little doubt that for a few years Capone was the most powerful man in Chicago...possibly in the Midwest.  He controlled mayors, legislators, judges, Senators.  The police were almost universally on his or some other racketeer's payroll (usually more than one).  

And why?  Because of Prohibition.  Gambling had generally been kept to the margins.  Prostitution had definitely been kept to the margins.  But with Prohibition, you had a law that was utterly unenforceable...because very few people actually wanted it to be enforced.  Without Prohibition, organized crime likely doesn't become organized and remains on the margins instead of, ultimately, becoming bigger than U.S. Steel.  

So, yeah, Capone was a racketeer.  But he was also very much a family man.  He was a big tipper and he gave tons of money to marginalized individuals.  He also was given to puffing what he did.  Some of that was natural bluster.  Some was the result of the progress of the neurosyphilis that ultimately killed him.  He was a great organizer.  Had he wanted to go (or been able to; anti-Italian discrimination was a very real thing) "legit" he could have been a very successful businessman.  He was pretty brilliant as both insulating himself from the deeds carried out in his name and in disguising how he came about his wealth.  The case the IRS built against him was certainly valid, but the conviction was questionable, and I say that as a criminal attorney of 25 years experience.  Capone's attorneys absolutely botched that case.  And the Judge was absolutely biased against Capone, made a lot of very questionable rulings and 100% committed judicial misconduct on more than a few occasions during the trial.  

This is a very good book.  Super interesting and well written like the other two books by Bergreen I've read (his biographies of Louis Armstrong and Magellan).  But it's not without faults.  Bergreen, on a number of occasions, asserts as fact the identities of individuals involved in famous gangland killings when those identities are not known to a certainty.  In particular, he does that with the infamous St. Valentine's Day Massacre.  Is he probably right...yeah, he probably is.  But he should maybe hedge his bets just a bit.  And he's firmly convinced that the real head of the Outfit...the power behind the scenes was an obscure mafiosi named Frankie LaPorte.  He doesn't, however, give us any evidence of this at all.  Is he right?  Is he wrong?  I don't know.  LaPorte is a fairly mysterious figure.  He was definitely involved with The Outfit and was absolutely a bigwig in the "Sin Strip" area of Calumet City.  But Bergreen gives us nothing to bolster his assertion that Capone bowed to LaPorte.  

This is a big book about a big man who was, for a few years, one of the biggest men in the country.  Capone's legacy, even if that legacy isn't wholly accurate, still permeates our popular culture.  So it is well worth the commitment to give this one a read, even with some fairly clear issues.  

Saint's Blood
Sebastien de Castell

I was afraid that the author was going to torture his main character too much in these books for me to be able to get into the remainder of the series (ala poor Harry Dresden), but it seems a good Inquisition is just what was needed to overcome that sentiment.

I am definitely a sucker for a battle between faith and logic, and this is one that's better than most.. a fun mix of a little bit of supernatural stuff that can sort of almost be explained with science and chemistry.

The authors system of Gods and Saints was already a bit unique, but it gets fleshed out and taken to the next level i this book, and it's really pretty neat. I do feel like prehaps Tristia is a bit overpopulated with evil nobles.. there has to be a couple nice ones somewhere, no? Or course, that is part of the, well, I guess the moral of the story that there isn't. But I feel like there would at least be a few.

Also, I think Tommer is the greatest Mary Sue of all time... I love that guy.

The final duel between Laws and Faith really was great, so much was campy, but what would a Muskateers analogue be without campiness?

Of course, anyone that knows me probably sees that as a spoiler, because I would only truly enjoy it if said battle goes one way, but really no more so than simply knowing this is not the final book of the series.

I'm really glad I found this series!

The Viy
Nikolai Gogol, 1835
I’d never read this before – it’s a scary folk tale by Gogol featuring a mythical being, the Viy, that he claimed was taken from Ukrainian (or as he would have called it, ‘Little Russian’) folkore. The Viy is a sort of earth being, kind of similar to gnomes in Western European folklore, with an iron face and hands, arms like tree roots and a large eyelids that fall to the ground and have to be lifted by others so that it can see (and its gaze is fatal). Generally it’s believed that Gogol completely fabricated the Viy, as there are no creatures in Ukrainian folklore with that name, although the topic is still debated by scholars, as some claim that there are figures in the local mythology and folk tales that more or less match up to it.

(an illustration of the Viy from an early 20th century Russian publication of Gogol's story)
However, the titular being only appears at the very end of this story, which is more of a witch tale than anything else. The protagonist, a young seminarian in Kiev named Khoma Brut (called Thomas Brutus in older translations), has a terrifying encounter with a witch one summer night – she puts a spell on him and rides on his shoulders like a horse, but he eventually turns the tables on her and flees. Soon after he’s told by the seminary’s rector that a local Cossock chief wants Khoma specifically to hold a three-night vigil over the body of his beautiful daughter – who ends up being the witch in question. Each night, as Khoma recites prayers out loud, the witch rises, her skin changing colors from blue to green, and she casts all kinds of enchantments to try to kill Khoma (and manages to turn most of his hair gray on the second night), but he’s able to resist by stubbornly praying and drawing a spell circle on the floor that she can’t cross. Then, on the third night, she summons the Viy…
This is a pretty good story if you like folk tales and scary stories, and it’s pretty easy to find online if you’re interested in reading it.