The X-Files: Cold Cases by Joe Harris
My rating: 2 of 5 stars A Well-Made but Backwards Looking Production X-Files Cold Cases #1 consists of five episodes taking place about ten years after the TV show. Scully and Mulder have left the FBI and are living under aliases (Mr. and Mrs. Blake), trying to keep a low profile, when good old Skinner (their immediate FBI boss in the old TV show days) drops by to tell them that someone has hacked into the FBI database to peruse the old X-Files, possibly compromising the pair’s identities. This sets in motion their return to the FBI to go through some of their old cold cases, which sets in motion their involvement in schemes featuring black oil, the purity virus, super aliens or alien-human hybrids (who shapeshift, mind control, heal mortal wounds, take over people’s bodies, fly around in near instant travel UFOs, and so on), and Scully’s child (now eleven-years-old, fostered off to another family, and currently of unknown location). That concept is good and bad. The good is that it’s familiar and nostalgic and pretty much captures what made the TV show absorbing and appealing. The bad is that it looks backwards so much to the old TV show, reviving multiple dead characters multiple times, reopening old cases, resuming the old alien or alien-human hybrid schemes, etc. I just wish the producers had tried to make new cases unrelated to the old ones rather than revisit the old ones (often with substantial flashbacks from characters). One whole episode (4) consists of Spender’s flashbacks to the 1950s, 60s, and 70s and to various points of his early career. They could have made up new Cold Cases instead of revisiting old ones from the TV show. I did enjoy the quirky participation in events of the Lone Gunman, the mismatched and motley trio of hackers from the TV show (one of them has a crush on Scully, calling her “Red” and saying things like, “I’d walk through fire and wrestle bees for that woman.”) There are some good lines, like “Officer—the flashlight is dazzling me and this is not what it looks like,” “Extraordinary men are always the most tempted by ordinary things,” and: “Agent Mulder, do women speak so freely to men in your country?” “Yes, it’s a thing called gender equality, very potent when mixed with free speech. We like it.” Listening to the audiobook is like listening to the TV show. There are sound effects (cigarette lighting and puffing, cars crashing, guns firing, flame throwers and geysers spewing, etc.). The famous theme music sounds great. The dramatic “DUN!” sounds for the ends of cliffhanger scenes (almost as if we’re about to break for a commercial) are effective. And the voice actors are mostly fine--though the Saudia Arabian English accents in a late episode sound suspiciously like the Russian English ones in an earlier one. Without being able to watch the handsome and lovely Mulder and Scully interact and do their things and play off each other, a key part of the attraction of the old TV show is unavoidably missing in this audiobook, nostalgic though it is to hear Duchovny and Anderson’s voices and fine though they are at voice-acting (though sometimes sounding bored by it). Perhaps that’s why it’s easy to think that the alien shapeshifting and body puppetry etc. are a bit too convenient and absurd, and that the “not the government but the GOVERNMENT” concept (especially when you factor in scheming aliens) absolves the US government and its agencies of much agency in pernicious plans. Finally, the set of five episodes ends with MANY loose ends, so although I am not sorry to have listened to them, and did have fun with them while cleaning the apartment etc., I’m not going to listen to succeeding X-Files Cold Cases, because the project is too backwards looking for me and too prone to the old When You Have Aliens with Superpowers the Writers Can Do Anything They Want Any Time They Want flaw. Recommended mostly for fans of the old series. View all my reviews
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Viking Tales by Jennie Hall
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Concise, Vigorous Children’s Introduction to Vikings (but listen to the LibriVox audiobook at your own peril) Jennie Hall’s Viking Tales (1902) is an interesting, compact children’s book that depicts a few famous Norse Vikings, their achievements, and the Viking ethos and culture. Hall’s short introduction “What the Sagas Were” vividly introduces Iceland, skalds, sagas, and the first books recording the “stories of kings and battles and ship-sailing” that she has selected from among to retell in her book. The stories she covers in Part One: In Norway recount Harald Shock Hair (AKA Harald Hair Fair) growing up and unifying Norway under his rule; those in Part Two: West-Overseas relate Ingolf and Leif’s chafing under that rule and founding a colony on Iceland, Eric the Red being outlawed and finding Greenland and founding a colony there, Leif Ericson’s discovery of Wineland (Vineland), and Thorfinn’s attempt to found a colony in Wineland. After the tales come a chapter of Descriptive Notes, including interesting information on Norse names, houses, feast halls, foster fathers and brothers, and a chapter of Suggestions for Teachers, including highlighting for young students how Vikings visited and or settled on a chain of islands going west to America and how they possessed three main values: courage through strange adventures, love of truth and hard endurance, and faithfulness to spoken words. The last part of the book is a list of source texts, most of which were published in the 19th century, like The Volsunga Saga (1870) translated by Eirikir Magnusson and William Morris. In her stories and notes, then, Hall entertainingly captures the Viking love of exploring and fighting (“the frolic”) and going a-Viking (when they can take other men’s goods and make them thralls), and provides many details on Norwegian weddings, funerals, gods, sacrifices, Valhalla, sailing, etc. One of my favorites are the “hell-shoes” placed on the feet of men who die in battle so they may comfortably and successfully tread the hard road to Valhalla. Here is a representative passage taken from the start of a tale told by the thrall Olaf to his master, Harald, when Harald was a young boy: "So we harried the coast of Norway. We ate at many men's tables uninvited. Many men we found overburdened with gold. Then I said: 'My dragon's belly is never full,' and on board went the gold. "Oh! it is better to live on the sea and let other men raise your crops and cook your meals. A house smells of smoke, a ship smells of frolic. From a house you see a sooty roof, from a ship you see Valhalla.” Notice the cheerful disregard for contemporary ethics or morals, the pride and pleasure in taking what belongs to other people, the enjoyment in “frolic.” (Olaf then recounts without the slightest regret how, when he tossed his spear in the air to see which direction it would point to when it landed, letting the gods decide which way he should go next, it pointed him right to the large fleet of Harald’s father, King Halfdan, who captured him, nearly executed him, and made him a thrall.) Notice also how well Hall captures the Viking voice. Harald names his banner “War Lover” and goes to battle saying, "I am eager for the frolic!" In his party celebrating being made an exiled outlaw, Eric the Red says, "There is no friend like mead. It always cheers a man's heart." And when about half his men decide to join him in his impending adventures he shouts, "O you bloody birds of battle! . . . Ever hungry for new frolic! Our swords are sisters in blood, and we are brothers in adventure." The Norsemen are also liable to break into song at intense moments, as when Eric’s son Leif travels from Greenland to Norway for the first time: My eyes can see her at last, The mother of mighty men, The field of famous fights. In the sky above I see Fair Asgard's shining roofs, The flying hair of Thor, The wings of Odin's birds, The road that heroes tread. I am here in the land of the gods, The land of mighty men." It’s a man-centered world: “But none may go to Valhalla except warriors that have died bravely in battle. Men who die from sickness go with women and children and cowards to Niflheim. There Hela, who is queen, always sneers at them, and a terrible cold takes hold of their bones, and they sit down and freeze.” That said, there is one promising female figure in the tales, Gyda, who is "fair and proud," a literate healer who sends the dime a dozen king Harald a “Saucy Message” saying she’ll only marry a man able to unify all of Norway under one rule. This is a book for kids, Hall leaving out sex (there is no mention of rapine, of course, and although babies do appear a couple times, they come rather magically as if without natural human agency). But as the above excerpts reveal, she doesn’t sugar coat the violence or Viking ethos, expressing both their courageous thirst for adventure and their callous lack of regard for their victims. Kids and adults should like this book, but if you are an adult interested in Vikings, I’d really recommend The Long Ships (1941/45) by Frans G. Bengtsson. Viking Tales is available for free on LibriVox, but the 18 chapters are read by 11 different people, mostly American men and women and an Australian, with different levels of sound quality and voice/manner appeal. It is jarring to hear a new reader start almost every new chapter. The best reader (whom I wished had read the whole thing) is Lars Rolander, who reads with perfect pace and clarity and a wonderfully appropriate Scandinavian accent. It was so painful listening to the worst reader, who luckily only reads the Descriptive Notes and Suggestions for Teachers after the stories, that when Rolander briefly returned to read the list of texts, his voice was manna for my ears and soul. View all my reviews
The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “We all of us somehow are caught” or "The show is over and the monkey’s dead.” The twelfth summer of nearly thirteen-year-old Frankie Addams has been a "long season of trouble," and now she's caught in its never-ending August dog days. The imaginative tomboy has suddenly grown to 5’ 5" and is now too tall to stand under the bower she and some other kids have used as a stage for their dramas (of which she has written many, though never any featuring romance). Not that Frankie has any friends her own age anymore: she’s been kicked out of her girl’s club, and her best friend has moved away. She feels the world cracking and turning too fast. World War II drags on: the allies are in Paris and soldiers are passing through Frankie's hometown. Her cat Charles has disappeared. She has turned into a secret criminal, having pilfered a knife (she excels at throwing knives) and having sneaked her father's pistol out of the house and fired it. She wants to live somewhere else and wants to be someone else. Her summer has consisted mostly of hanging out with Berenice Sadie Brown, her family's ever 35-year-old African American cook with a blue glass eye, and John Henry West, her bespectacled, six-year-old cousin. But as Carson McCullers' The Member of the Wedding (1946) begins, something has just happened to wrack Frankie with undefinable, strange, and disturbing new questions and feelings: Her big brother Jaris and his fiance Janice visited, shocking Frankie with their intimacy and beauty. They'll be married this coming Sunday a hundred miles away in Winter Hill, and Frankie and her father are going, and she's decided that she's not coming back home after the wedding, because she’ll go live Jaris and Janice wherever they go. “You are the we of me.” Berenice has seen all kinds of crazy love, from men who fall in love with ugly women to women who fall in love with cloven-footed devils, but "I never heard of anyone falling in love with a wedding." When Berenice warningly asks Frankie, "What if they don't want you?" she replies, "I'll kill myself. But they will." The novel centers on the most crucial day in Frankie’s life, the day before the wedding, the last one (she passionately hopes) that she’ll spend in her southern hometown. The novel also relates Frankie’s memories of the ways in which she and Berenice and John Henry have spent the summer: playing bridge with a sticky deck, listening to the radio turned up loud, desultorily arguing with each other, listening to Berenice’s stories about her four husbands (each new one worse than the last), recalling the freaks at the county fair, and eating southern food (like Jumping Henry—peas and rice—ham knuckles, sweet potatoes, cornbread, and buttermilk). The novel also depicts Frankie’s wanderings around her home town, passing by the miserable prison, entering the shabby Blue Moon bar/hotel, shopping for an orange satin dress to wear to the wedding (tomorrow!), following the Monkey Man and his monkey (both of whom wear the expression of someone afraid of having done something wrong), getting her fortune told, and encountering a drunk soldier who thinks Frankie is older than she is. The novel does all that in three parts, each one featuring a different girl: Part One features Frankie (her nickname), Part Two F. Jasmine (her name to join Jaris and Janice), and Part Three Frances (her birth name). The interactions between Frankie and Berenice and John Henry are funny, charming, and touching, the three people of different ages, races, and genders treating each other with honesty (as when Berenice tells Frankie about her wedding dress, “I’m not accustomed to human Christmas trees in August") and circumspection (as when Berenice stops short of telling the kids about something appalling her fourth husband did to her). Sometimes they each other; sometimes they hold each other. Younger and more innocent than Frankie, John Henry steals the show, often plaintively asking, “Why?” McCullers writes great descriptions, like "The sun drunk blue jays screamed and murdered among themselves," and “The sound was enough to shiver the gizzards of musicians and make listeners feel queer,” not to mention "The cars drove slowly in a browsing way." She writes potent lines about life, like the following: “We all of us somehow are caught. We born this way or that way and we don’t know why. But we caught anyhow. I born Berenice. You born Frankie. John Henry born John Henry. And maybe we wants to widen and bust free. But no matter what we do we still caught. Me is me and you is you and he is he. We each one of us somehow caught all by ourself. Is that what you was trying to say?” Susan Sarandon reads the audiobook luminously, with a clear, compassionate voice and a complete understanding of everything going on above and below the surface, always managing to keep herself in the background while enhancing the text, never over acting, unlike the many professional actors who “perform” audiobooks, drawing attention to their virtuosity and distracting attention from the book itself. It's a pleasure to listen to her read the novel. She does a great Berenice ("dark gold voice" rough and low, earthy and wise, honest and kind), John Henry (high and sweet voice questioning and cute), Frankie (sensitive, self-centered, and imaginative voice between Berenice and John Henry in tone and pitch). The Member of the Wedding is a southern novel (with the food, climate, pace, race, etc.), but also a universal one (with the painful and clumsy and frank development of an exceedingly sensitive and imaginative girl into an adolescent). People who like that kind of thing, along with lots of humor and lots of pain, all beautifully written, should like it. View all my reviews
The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Engineers, Monks, Aliens, and an Elevator to the Stars "The sort of man who will never be happy unless [he is] shaping the universe," 22nd-century engineer Vannemar Morgan made his name on earth by building a bridge linking Europe and Africa, but his ambitious new project is of another order of magnitude: to make a bridge from the earth to the stars by constructing a 40,000 km tall space elevator, or "Orbital Tower." Morgan believes that the elevator would be a boon to humanity, largely replacing rocket technology by being 100 times more efficient and cheaper and less polluting, reinvigorating the moribund 200-year-old space age, and making the (fictional Ceylon-like) quiet island country of Taprobane the launching center for the solar system and even the universe. Arthur C. Clarke's The Fountains of Paradise (1979) is a traditional hard sf novel with plenty of scientific and technological details and sublime descriptions of natural and artificial wonders old and new. Clarke imagines a World Government running the future earth, with colonies on the moon and Mars and war an embarrassing thing of humanity's past. Writing in the late 70s, Clarke foresaw things like a global computer network that would enable people to use their Personal Internet Profiles to subscribe to news topics of interest, individual identity numbers, and smart heart monitoring devices. This is an adult novel, for Clarke narrates only from the points of view of middle-aged or older characters and does no nostalgic idealizing of childhood, as for Morgan "The dreams of childhood had been far surpassed by the [engineering] reality of adult life." Clarke goes to town researching, imagining, and describing the science, technology, and engineering required to accomplish Morgan's project, "an enterprise to fire the imagination and stir the soul." There are, for instance, the crucial hyperfilament cables made of "continuous pseudo-one-dimensional diamond crystals," thinner than spider thread, to be manufactured in zero-gravity factories, up and down which cables the capsules carrying freight and passengers will travel. The other end of the "bridge" will be a satellite about 40,000 km up in synchronized orbit around the earth. The Midway Station over half way up will anchor the tens of thousands of kilometers of hyperfilament cables. Clarke also details the economics of the project, including organizing its funding, and some of the politics behind it, including Morgan trying to hide his project from his conservative and envious boss. Perhaps the most interesting detail, however, is the religious problem. The earth end of the elevator can only be placed in one spot, the tall Taprobane mountain peak of Sri Kanda, due to its position on the equator, extraordinary height, and freedom from gravitational anomalies. And there atop the sacred peak just happens to be a 2000+ year old Buddhist monastery populated by intractable monks who don't want any noisy, busy, new-fangled projects like Morgan's to interfere with their quiet, contemplative spiritual life. Much of the novel seems to paint humanity's religious inclinations and conflicts (centuries of "pious gibberish") in the galactic context as a childlike step needing to be outgrown. The Star Glider, an AI-driven probe launched by advanced aliens 60,000 years ago to travel throughout the galaxy contacting developed life forms, says things to the human scientists communicating with it things like, "Belief in God is apparently a psychological artifact of mammalian reproduction," and "I am unable to distinguish clearly between your religious ceremonies and apparently identical behaviour at the sporting and cultural functions you have transmitted to me. I refer particularly to the Beatles, 1965, the World Soccer Final, 2046; and the Farewell appearance of the Johann Sebastian Clones, 2056." And yet Clarke also treats the spiritual leanings of human beings with sympathy, as in the enigmatic face of an old bust of Buddha ("The eyes of the Buddha were completely blank--empty pools in which a man might lose his soul, or discover a universe"), or the ancient legend of butterfly warriors ("There is something very strange about a universe where a few dead butterflies can balance a billion ton tower"). And at one point the eminently practical atheist Morgan says, with only partial irony, "now I know that the gods are on my side, whatever gods may be." Like other novels by Clarke (e.g., 2001 and Childhood's End), this one is more interested in big ideas about civilization, nature, technology, science, religion, humanity, mortality, immortality, and the like than in well-rounded characters. Morgan is not overly compelling. His reporter friend, Maxine Duvall, muses that his intense drive and ruthless ambition make him "both larger than life and less than human." He has never married, has no children and relatively few friends, has no vices, isn't prey to self-doubt, and is cool in an emergency. The novel, however, is not just a dry account of a future engineering feat in an almost post-religious context. There is an extended exciting, if somewhat unlikely, scene in which Morgan (sixty-six and heart-compromised) attempts to bring some vital supplies to some astronomers stranded 600 km up the elevator. And Clarke at times exhibits a playful side, whether in cosmic ironies, like the name the space elevator goes by 1500 years after its construction, and in chapter epigraphs quoting works on psychology, religion, and science from real world historical figures like Freud and from fictional ones like a book by R. Gabor published by Miskatonic UP in 2069. Marc Vietor is a good reader for the auidobook, suitable for Clarke's objective narration and thoughtful approach to his subjects. People who like traditional, hard sf dealing greatly with the differences (and similarities) between science and religion should like this Hugo and Nebula-winning novel. View all my reviews
NOS4A2 by Joe Hill
My rating: 3 of 5 stars The World of Stuff and the World of Thought In the prologue of Joe Hill's NOS4A2 (2013), Charlie Manx, who looks like a bald, Keith Richards (only older), has apparently been lying comatose for a decade in a prison hospital since being convicted of abducting and killing dozens of kids in his Christmas-themed house of horrors, the Sleigh House, when he briefly wakes up in 2008, grabs the wrist of a nurse, and tells her that he has a place for her son in Christmasland, where all the children are safe in his head, and a place for her in the House of Sleep, courtesy of the Gasmask Man and his gingerbread smoke, and that all he needs is his ride, the Wraith. The novel itself begins in 1986, when eight-year-old Vic McQueen's first rides "between Lost and Found," pedaling her too big and too boyish Raleigh Tuff Burner bicycle through a condemned covered bridge called the Shorter Way into a different place several hours away from her hometown in order to find her mother's lost bracelet. The novel then sets the paths of Vic and Manx on a decades-long collision course in suspenseful, painful, humorous, and moving ways. The premise of the novel (as a few characters explain it) is that everybody lives in two worlds, the "real" world of stuff, facts, work, etc., and the "inscape" world of thought, emotion, and imagination, which are as powerful as gravity and as real as rocks. Furthermore, a small number of "strong creatives" (like Vic and Manx) are able to use special personal vehicles to move back and forth between their personal inscapes and the real world and or to bring elements from one into the other and or to shape reality like dough. Thus from when she was a girl Vic could ride her Tuff Burner through her personal bridge, coming out anywhere in America where she would find whatever she was looking for. Such "gifts" come with a cost. So using her imaginary but real bridge gives Vic terrible migraines centered in her left eye, messes with her mental equilibrium, and leads her right to Manx. Joe Hill writes vivid and imaginative descriptions, as when Vic first rides her Tuff Burner, and "It was like witchcraft; she could've been riding a broom, slicing effortlessly through Halloween darkness, a thousand feet off the ground"), and then first rides through the wood-slatted Shorter Way, "through stammering rays of white light. When she crossed through one of those wafer thin sheets of brightness, she felt it in her left eye, a kind of distant throb." He has a mind for how people hurt each other, as when Vic's father says to her mother during an argument, "Jesus. What an ugly fuckin' person you are inside. And I had a kid with you." He also has an ear for the witty line, as when Manx rhetorically asks, "Who do you think I am? Willy Wonka?" He writes flawed and human characters that make what happens easy to sympathize with. Vic can be unlikeable, denying the reality of her gift and hurting her parents, but she is also brave, strong, creative, and down to earth: a biker picture book maker mother. The supporting characters are neat: Lou Carmody, a "morbidly obese," gentle and innocent biker-mechanic fan of comic-books and Vic; Maggie, an elfin punk librarian whose gift is to find answers to questions by pulling Scrabble letter tiles out of a bag, the cost of which is a painful stammer (Hill under and poorly uses Maggie); and Bing Partridge, a childlike (in all the worst ways) middle-aged loser who murdered his abusive parents as a boy and becomes Manx' Renfield. And Charlie Manx is a fine villain. At once stupid and cunning, creepy and funny, sadistic and protective, he believes he's rescuing kids from abusive parents ("The fires of hell are not hot enough the man or woman who would hurt their children") and giving them endless fun without pain or sadness. NOS4A2 reminds me of the work of Hill's father Stephen King in novels like Doctor Sleep (the True Knot villains from that book are referred to here as being strong creatives like Vic and Manx). Like his father, Hill works into his novel many references to American popular culture (here from Sam Spade and Sponge Bob to Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman and Ironman), as well as some to international high literature (here from Chekov to Borges). Like his father, Hill works into his novel relevant themes (here about parent-child relationships, childhood and adulthood, imagination and reality, and love) and writes suspenseful and brutal action scenes and brief moments of grace. Hill can do some bad writing, as when he cracks an excrescent joke about a young soldier, "Tom was well dead, not to mention well-done." He's also capable of going too far, as with some FBI machine guns. And there are multiple occasions when he contrives something against what we might expect characters to do given their personalities, situations, or gifts. An author shouldn't give his characters supernatural abilities and show them in action and then without a good explanation make them not work (or introduce new supernatural elements like ghosts) to generate suspense or complicate the plot. (view spoiler)[SPOILER SEQUENCE! Here are some examples of jarring contrivances: Manx conveniently interrupts Wayne's conversation with Vic before the boy can warn his mother about Maggie. At a key point Maggie fails to predict Wayne and Manx's arrival at her library when earlier in the novel she's been waiting for months for Vic to show up. Vic would be more alert for Wayne and Manx to visit Maggie, given that Manx and Bing have just kidnapped Vic's son and given that Maggie has just warned her that Manx was on the move. The ghost of Vic's mother starts appearing beside Wayne inside the Wraith to help him resist Manx' inscape spell by talking backwards; where this ghost or method of resistance suddenly came from I have no idea. A highly intelligent FBI agent wouldn't think that Vic's 12-year-old son would have given her the brutal (hammer shaped) bruises in her back while fighting against her attempts to kill him or kidnap him, and I suspect that a set of Rolls Royce tire tracks could not be seen as belonging to a Triumph motorcycle. If the FBI and police are so focused on Vic as suspect in her son's disappearance, they'd search her mother's house where she and Wayne have been living before going to a rented lake house, and would probably interview neighbors and discover the dead Dutch neighbors obviously not killed by Vic. Vic's Shorter Way has always taken her right where she is needing to go to find things, but at a key point it deposits her behind a burnt church blocking her view of Bing's house, so she mistakes her destination. (hide spoiler)] About the audiobook, listeners who prefer less dramatic readings might be put off by it being "PERFORMED by Kate Mulgrew." But I enjoyed her relishing the language and enhancing the story and making it more funny, scary, and moving. She revels in reading Charlie Manx, Bing, Lou ("Dude!"), sweet, stammering Maggie, and a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, "Kingfishers Catch Fire" (alas Hill abandons it). Hill closes the audiobook by reading an afterword in which he talks about the novel's themes (the loss of innocence and childhood magic and how hard it is to be a parent) and premise (everyone lives in the world of consensus reality and a world of personal fantasy), about how he naturally came to be a writer by growing up observing his father and mother, and about why he likes audiobooks. Fans of Joe Hill, Stephen King, or urban fantasy horror, as well as people who find Christmas creepy, would like this book. View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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by Sabaa Tahir
A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance
Elias is an elite Martial soldier, Laia a naïve Scholar slave. As they alternate telling their stories (in trendy Young Adult first person, present tense narration), we soon rea...
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Perfect Stories of Life in Early 20th Century China
Chinese Classic Stories (1998) by Xun Lu is an excellent collection of seven short stories by perhaps the most important 20th century Chinese writer of fiction. Lu Xun (1881-1936) stu...
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The Surgeon's Mate (1980) is the 7th novel in Patrick O'Brian's addicting series of age of sail novels about the lives, loves, and careers of the British navy captain Jack Aubrey and the ...
An Overwritten, Oddly Compelling Gothic Father
Matthew Lewis' notorious and influential Gothic novel The Monk (1796) takes place during the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition. Ambrosio, the monk/friar/abbot/idol of Madrid, is nicknamed ...
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