it's dark in the dark

Allow me to save some of you two trips to the bookstore: THE HAUNTING OF TWENTIETH CENTURY AMERICA sounds like it would be about famous ghost-hunting spots, unsolved mysteries, and hotel suites haunted by doomed lovers who met infamy. Not so. Here instead we find a history of European occultism, an entire chapter about Edgar Cayce, more chapters about past lives, spiritualism, astrology, and the New Age movement. Please don’t trust me to judge a book like this. I am not the intended audience. Fans of conspiracy theories who enjoy history should, at the very least, get a kick or two out of this voluminous, heavily-researched tome.
The Haunting of Twentieth-Century America by William J. Birnes and Joel Martin – 2011 – Forge

Ho. Ho. Ho. I LOVE the writing of Liz Williams, whose Detective Chen series I absolutely adore. My rat army has orders to pick up any Liz Williams novels they may find. 15% supernatural romance, 30% drug-induced fever dream, 10% science fiction and 60% dark fantasy, THE POISON MASTER schemes to bring freedom to a planet populated by humans but ruled by cruel trans-dimensional giant WTF insect things that don’t make any sense and I don’t know how else to explain what happens here. Hmmmmm. OK. How about this? A woman is forced to go on the lam and is subsequently pulled into a treacherous multi-world intrigue after she accidentally kills a rich divorcee with recreational hallucinatory drugs (that she happens to take a lot of herself, being an apothecary). With nowhere else to turn, she finds herself employed by the Poison Master, a rich assassin from another world who CLAIMS to want to overthrow the insect things. But can he be trusted? Did I mention that she’s helplessly attracted to this dangerous man? His daughter calls our heroine a “junky”. I’m not doing a good job of describing this book. It’s a good book!
The Poison Master by Liz Williams – 2003 – Bantam Books

While we’re on the subject of authors I’ve been reading lately, let’s talk about something by Mr. Kim Newman, author of Anno Dracula. Wonder what it would be like to read a book that followed the century-spanning lives of one of the older vampires from Anno Dracula? Our monster isn’t really a vampire that drinks blood so much as a vampire that finds sustenance in human terror and BAD DREAMS. This novel had: So. Much. Promise. Too bad the full last half of it was our protagonist’s experience of a bad dream created by this vampire to entrap and murder her. More like murder her with boredom. We read as she wanders through a hundred and some-odd pages of dreams that really should have been terrifying, considering the author and subject matter, but more closely resembled those dreams where you are looking for something but you can’t find it and everyone in the restaurant breaks into song and then suddenly you’re walking down a hallway looking for the bathroom but there’s a foot of water on the floor and you wonder if that’s water from the bathroom because if that’s the case then you might want to look for higher ground and here you are wearing your best shoes. Oh wait! Is that a character from that Pulitzer prize winning play? He knocks back a shot of whiskey and turns to the bar. He doesn’t know that his fiancee’s lover is about to march in with a gun, but suddenly it’s raining and the bridge is washed out. What were you looking for again? You can’t find it. Am I boring you yet? ZZZZZZZZZZZ. Somebody wake me up!
Bad Dreams by Kim Newman – 1990 – Carroll & Graf Publishers

Many thanks to TOR/FORGE for the review copy of The Haunting of Twentieth Century America.