Short-Stories by Various
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This small collection of a handful of classic stories proves refreshing, if a touch moralistic. I love Hawthorne’s writing, but his stories I find just a touch too direct. (Don’t lecture me, old man!) My favorite in here is one I hadn’t read before, “The Griffin and the Minor Canon,” which is basically the story of a gargoyle coming to stare at its likeness above a church. Its presence terrifies the villagers, and the further reactions made for interesting reading. Something about that story really works on me.

What I love about this collection is how representative it is of horror stories as literature.

Some bad formatting in this free kindle version frustrated me at times.

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The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Stop me, oh-ho-whoa stop me, stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before: A man wakes up in a London hospital to find no one around, stumbles out into Piccadilly to find the world has gone all apocalyptic while he’s been sleeping.

Yep. Turns out this book was made into a movie called 28 Days Later, among others.

There’s a lot to recommend this book by John Wyndham, which details the attempts to rebuild civilization after a meteorological event renders most of the world blind, leaving them at the mercy of dangerous, scientifically-engineered plants known as triffids, which are tall clumsy things with vicious stingers that now run rampant over a population too sense-deprived to effectively corral them anymore. For one, I liked the author’s vocabulary, and the guy can actually write a nice sentence. For another, I thought a lot of this book was really well-imagined. The details and reactions to the events were nicely convincing, and I adored the second chapter, which discussed the origins of the triffids.

Unfortunately, the book as a whole was perhaps just a little too languid in its pace. It felt cozy and safe most of the time, and I wished that it could have been more exciting. Until very close to the end of the book, the triffids play a painfully minor role, and while it’s interesting that most of the conflict arises from the need to find a solution to meeting the needs of a population that’s gone blind … I just, what can I say, I wanted more triffids. I loved their design, I love the way Wyndham describes them moving with their long stalk swaying nearly comically front-to-back, but it annoyed me how little drama they ultimately provided.

I really want this killer plant book to be scarier. Alas.

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The 39 Steps by John Buchan
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Richard Hannay’s been feeling bored with his life in London. Reading the paper one morning, Hannay sees something about a politician he admires, and next thing he knows, he’s conjured an anti-semite out of thin air to spin yarns in his parlor and tell him there is a plot to kill the admirable politician and launch Britain and Germany into war. Luckily for Hannay, this anti-semite is murdered mysteriously, leaving Hannay looking pretty suspicious, so what can he do but become the author’s wish-fulfillment and go on the run and engage in a little international espionage.

By which I mean he runs around in the fields. A lot. He hides in this field. He hides in that field. Some shadowy figures close in, and off he goes, running again.

I much prefer the move version, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. At least that has good music for all the running around parts.

This book is a series of improbable scenes of a man adopting various disguises to avoid detection while he does next to nothing of any import — until the final chapter, where he unravels it all in one of the most ridiculous scenes I have ever read. Seriously. He realizes that the man sitting right in front of him with NO DISGUISE ON is a man he met and had a conversation with a few chapters earlier. And it’s treated like an ah-ha! moment.

Credit where it’s due, I suppose for being one of the first of its kind. Rumor has it this book started the spy genre. If so, I wish they’d had a better blueprint. This is one of the worst books I’ve ever read. It has little resemblance to the Hitchcock film of the same title.

And they call it a classic …

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The Amazing Screw-On Head and Other Curious Objects by Mike Mignola

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’d read the single-issue comic before and always wanted more. This collection of short stories by Mignola (and special-guest story conceived by his daughter) rounds out the experience in satisfying ways.

The eponymous story features the character of Screw-On Head, who is a small mechanical hero under the employ of Abraham Lincoln, sent on a mission to save the world from some ne’er-do-wells. Great writing and artwork, as per Mignola’s usual, abound, although the story itself might be a little bit of a standard-issue MacGuffin-driven yarn.

But the following stories, which feature and expand upon characters and elements of Screw-On Head, are shockingly good. I especially liked “The Witch and Her Soul,” which has the single most beautiful depiction of a “mortal coil” in a story that made me laugh out loud.

All of these are winners, though, and I thought the last piece, which was sort of a coda for the rest of it, depicting objects from the other tales in an atmospheric museum, was so inspiring and effective it made me want to read everything again right away.

This is a book I will cherish for quite some time.

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