Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Autumnal" data-source="post: 9313794" data-attributes="member: 6671663">The Early Middle Ages by Philip Dalleader, a Great Courses lecture series. Pretty good. Lots of good information, and some comparisons well worth thinking about. But the prof’s humor isn’t as funny to me as it was to him, and he had some odd mannerisms that made it sound like he was periodically gasping for breath or sighing. Worth my while, especially for the syllabus PDF thst comes with most Great Courses entries in Audible, but I’m unlikely to seek this guy out for more. Howls from the Dark Ages, edited by P.L. McMillan and Solomon Forse. Also pretty good. As the title suggests, this is a collection of horror stories set in medieval times. Nearly all are set in Europe, though one takes place somewhere in Mesoamerica and another in China. Mostly the demons or something like them, though not all. The stories range from distinctly original to well-crafted uses of familiar elements to reasonably satisfying. None are less than satisfactory and several all excellent. I don’t generally do any ranking, but this is a great example of what I’d give a B+ to if I did the kind of thing. Good reading if you’re interested in the subject, no new entries in my pantheon of favorites. All the Fiends of Hell by Adam Nevill. Now this is a new entry in my pantheon of favorites. I’ve been a Nevill fan since The Ritual, and this is (I think) his best yet. It starts with a night of red light and ringing bells, and everyone on Earth who can called outside and sucked up into the sky. The only people who survive are those who couldn’t response: the disabled, those unconscious or too ill to understand what happened, people in jail, and so on. Things get worse for them. The protagonist is a very ordinary forty-something guy who hose life has been contracting in failure for a long time. Severe flu had him clobbered on the red night, and remains a problem whenever he tries to exert himself heavily. Soon he encounters two children who survived the same way, and whose parents were taken. He tries to do the right thing by them, but it’s hard. I got genuinely scared several times while reading this, and I seldom get that from horror stories these days. I also got marvelous feelings of sadness, as if Nevill were saying, “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but here’s what happened…” Thsts one of things I most read for horror for, and am always glad to encounter it. The whole thing was just immensely satisfying. Best horror I’ve read this year, one of the best in several years. Oh, and if you’re one of those rare souls who read Nevill’s volume of stories without characters, Wyrd and Other Derelictions, then: yes. This novel does build on imagery in “Hold the World In My Arms for Three Days and All Will Be Changed”.</blockquote>

Verification