The Readin Roos

This particular Lovecraft anthology didn't have any Cthulhu in it, but I'm using this graphic anyway** (it's by Artess, licensed by Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0) because I like it. I also really enjoyed reading this collection. It's full of gruesomeness and opium-induced nightmares. Compared to more contemporary horror writers (I'm thinking of Clive Barker), Lovecraft may seem a little tame.

By all rights, this book should be very depressing. The stories are about people stuck in lives of degradation and drudgery. Yet, the situations have just enough of the absurd that they manage to come off as funny. If you're looking for reassurance that the world is a good and happy place, this is not the place to look. If you're looking for something that hyperbolizes the ridiculousness of the world and turns it into something that is laughable, then this book may be worth a look. It seems to go by pretty quickly, so I'll probably be reading some of Saunders' other books soon.

Not at all a bad collection of mysteries from the Crime Writers' Association. I picked it up because there's a story from one of my British serialists, Catherine Aird. Her work has really grown on me and I've come to love her characters.

I love O. Henry-esque twists, which add a delightful layer to many short stories. A few that captured the idea well in this collection: "This Way Nobody Gets the Blame," by Lesley Grant-Adamson and "Disposing of Mrs. Cronk," to name two.

The stories in this book are all beautifully written, but some of them are likely to leave readers scratching their heads. That is, undoubtedly, the point. This book is not something to zip through in an evening (and I don't mean to denigrate those quick reads, I like them too), but something to dwell on and contemplate.

Some of the stories are fairly uplifting, but many of them are quite dark. I thought it was a good balance of the light and the dark.