What're you readin'

Edogawa Ranpo, though I’ve only really encountered his horror stories second hand (through film adaptations, pretty much) should probably be mentioned as well, very much a parallel development to America’s Weird Horror (both of them overtly branching from Edgar Allen Poe’s innovations in the genre, Edogawa’s name literally being a pun)

The New York Trilogy is pretty good.

The Invention of Solitude is excellent and sort of devastating?

Then Auster was through saying things but unfortunately didn’t stop writing and churned out nothing but garbage for the length of my natural life.

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I mean dude wrote another memoir that’s nothing but repeating stuff from Solitude without the emotional context and in a style that reads like safety meeting minutes from my dumb day job gosh

The one he only wrote, Smoke, I remember being pretty good. The sequel, Blue in the Face, which he codirected, really sucks.

The comic book adaptation of City of Glass is generally excellent but it has an appropriately insufferable introduction by the guy who did Maus.

oh no beef with maus in particular, but the introduction he wrote for City of Glass is extremely bad. Talking about the disgust he feels that his comics are ever shelved anywhere near superhero trash.

smoke was inexplicably one of my favorite movies in high school, i loved the soundtrack too for some reason? i never saw blue in the face but iirc it was basically made at the same time as smoke when the actors were bored, using the same costumes and sets. seemed like a fun idea but not surprised the result was bad.

Yeah I have some genuine affection for the movie. The soundtrack had possibly one of the best filmic uses of a Tom Waits song so that may be part of why

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it’s still the only tom waits song i can stand :frowning: but admittedly i have never really tried that hard

Finished Declare, love the mixture of leCarre and occult stuff. If I had the time I’d probably go on a Powers binge read, but oh well.

Also caught up to all the various KJ Parker stuff that’s come out recently, ie the last like 5 installments of Two of Swords and The Devil You Know. It’s weird, but he’s like some fucked up comfort food for me now. Also starting The Belly of the Bow.

I really enjoyed Last Call when I read it (in high school) but I haven’t read much by him since. I’ve had The Drawing of the Dark sitting on my shelf for years, only ~50 pages read, and I liked it well enough but was distracted by other works.

I thought Last Call was lame when I read it in high school just the worst kind of Look At What I Read writing Tulpa worse than a Gaiman

Say what you will but there’s no way it could have been worse than a Gaiman, it didn’t have that unearned-smug ‘convinced of its own cleverness’ that Gaiman books have.

Or maybe it did and I was the smug one all along :cryingpig:

Tulpaiman :waynestare:

I warmed up to Grace of Kings before the end but I’m not sure if I’m invested enough to read the sequel when it comes out this fall. I’m reading some Holmes now, I find those stories always make a decent palate cleanser.

Tangentially, besides The Sandman, the only Gaiman things I’ve enjoyed were A Study in Emerald and Snow, Glass, Apples, though I haven’t read any of his novel length stuff.