Dear readers and book lovers, it’s been five years since I launched Cornell Booksellers with my sister Christine. Perhaps the worst possible time to get into the book business, but never mind, it’s been a wonderful adventure so far.

However, five years is long enough to lead one to reflect on the path taken thus far and to reevalute how to proceed.

Partly this period of contemplation is the result of aging hardware, software and inventory at Cornell Booksellers. In order to upgrade everything at once, and possibly redirect our energies, I’ve decided to take our book listings offline for a few months. So, Cornell Booksellers is effectively shut down for a time.

I will probably drop by here, now and again, to ramble on about one topic or another. I will also continue to blog over at my other venture Intentionally Entertaining.

Don’t forget to visit us here once and awhile and look for an announcement concerning the store towards the end of the summer or early fall at the very latest.

Thanks for your patronage and thanks for listening to me ramble on.

Once again, dear reader, I’m going to send you over to my other electronic outpost Intentionally Entertaining, in order to share another book review cum memoir cum recipe.

On essentially the first page of Dracula, Jonathan Harker enjoys a local Carpathian dish called paprika hendl. In the lavishly annotated Dracula from 1975 pictured above, Leonard Wolf provides not one, but two recipes for paprika chicken.

This represented one of my earliest encounters with the concept of annotation and also my first experience with a piece of fiction that so deliberately evoked the experience of eating a specific dish. As I mention in the post, it seems obvious to anyone who is reasonably well read that describing food and food-related activities in fiction can help to ground characters and situations, but this was the first time I recognized it as a part of the literary toolkit.

That literature should be able to relate closely to food as art is now a part of my general understanding of life. Ultimately all the arts come together, as they should, as part of the shared experience of being human. If art is an extension, commentary or heightening of the artist’s personal experience or vision, then the preparation of food must be both an aspect of other arts and often an art unto itself—food is too fundamental to the human experience to be something separate.

Anyway, check it out, there’s even a funny bit about deboning a chicken.

Over at Intentionally Entertaining, I’ve put up a review/editorial about the brilliant Italo Calvino‘s story Under the Jaguar Sun—once again warping the boundaries of what either blog is supposed to exist for.

Food and art and books intersect at so many interesting junctions that it seems natural to me to always be talking about all three simultaneously. And Calvino’s story would seem to indicate that he once shared something of this conviction.

At any rate, it’s a post about an old book really, so it seemed natural to mention it here as well. Hope you enjoy.

Reading a book like The Maltese Falcon is a little challenging for me. I’ve seen the beloved second film version many times since I was a child—it was also the first movie I watched in the first film studies class I ever took—so my expectations going in were that I would find little in the way of fresh experience. There’s a distancing effect that happens to me where I find I’m often comparing what I’m reading to my recollections of the film. And those recollections aren’t always accurate, despite how many times I’ve seen the movie, so the distancing is multiplied while I interrogate myself about my memories.

Look, I’m not going to argue that I’m not too introverted sometimes.

Anyway, the surprising thing is, about halfway through The Maltese Falcon I got completely engrossed in what I was reading and achieved the highly sought after Nirvana of total escapism. Mr. Hammett was that good.

From the first page, I was first surprised by the differences from the 1941 film. In the book, Hammet describes his main character Sam Spade as looking like a tall “blonde Satan.” Like most people, when I hear the name Sam Spade, I think of Bogart, who was neither tall nor really devilish (at least in appearance).

But, this was still the point in the book where I was wrestling with my preconceptions. At about the point where Spade roughs up “the Levantine” Joe Cairo, I was fully immersed  in Hammett’s morally grey world of tough guys and femme fatales. I stopped seeing Peter Lorre and Bogart and started seeing the characters as Hammett described them.

Part of my ability to lose myself in the book is the slightly different tone it takes. Probably as a result of censorship at the time, Hammett’s novel seems harsher and darker than the movie. The book is not elaborately violent or sexy, but it definitely has more edge than the film. And Spade as a character displays an even more dubious morality than his film counterpart.

Do I need to recap the plot? It doesn’t differ that much from one of the most popular films of all time. Sam Spade, a detective, and assorted criminals including one legendary femme fatale scheme and swindle each other over a rare historical object from Malta.

Hammett goes into considerable detail about the history and provenance of his MacGuffin; to the point where I felt like I was watching a lost Indiana Jones movie. It’s a startling effective passage in the book and provides an interesting resonance to the proceedings that might otherwise be lacking if the characters were squabbling over more conventional spoils. It’s easier to imagine everyone becoming obsessed with the Maltese Falcon because Hammett provides it with more back-story than some of the main characters—which is not at all a criticism on my part.

But what’s really striking about the book is the absolute ambiguity (I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but stick with me) of Spade’s moral calculus. There’s some suggestion that Spade makes the decisions he makes in the course of the book because he believes in criminals being brought to justice, but it could just as easily be interpreted as Spade favouring that side of the game—slightly. In fact, his calculated approach to life ends up alienating his loyal to a fault secretary Effie. She comes late to realize what the reader has a few scenes earlier: Spade is basically a bastard, who may or may not have some rudimentary motivations left related to issues of justice.

The Maltese Falcon, the book, expresses a deeply nihilistic worldview that the movie only really suggests. The movie is a classic film noir, but can only touch on the blackness of the novel—still a bracily modern read, even over 80 years later.

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Update: In a nice bit of synchronicity the Reading Copy Book Blog just posted a link to a great site The Composites, that does police-style composite sketches of literary figures—including this awesome one of Sam Spade.

For those who missed it, I recently posted a review of two retro cookbooks over on the other blog I share with my wife Michelle: Intentionally Entertaining.

Cooking has long been a passion of mine—as I’ve mentioned previously in this space—and the new blog has been a great way for me to drone on about food topics for the like minded. But since this blog should be about actually collecting old books once and awhile, it seemed like a good idea to share.

I reviewed the Esquire Party Book, 1963 and A Man’s Cookbook, 1961—both examples of what I think of as the sub-genre of cookbooks for men—and both hilariously dated, yet with something to offer.

If you are, like me, endlessly enthusiastic about food* and cooking, please join us sometime at Intentionally Entertaining.

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*I actively dislike the term “foodie.” Here’s my problem with it: we already had two very serviceable words in English for both being a food enthusiast, “gourmet;”and for being overly enthusiastic about good food, “gourmand.” Why the hell did someone need to coin “foodie,” which sounds trivial and faddish to me? And don’t give me those “stuffy French words” arguments. I’ll take a little elegance in my language over “foodie” any time.

I’d like to turn your attention for a moment to heavy metal music.

Aside from a few friends and family, I’m unclear about who is out there reading this blog, but I’m now picturing monocles popping out of eyes and a needle scratching across Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations.* It’s supposed to be a book blog after all. But I should be able to focus on other arts from time to time, no?

I’ve been thinking about heavy metal a lot lately thanks to catching two recent works on the subject: Until the Light Takes Us (an independent documentary on the Norwegian Black Metal scene of the 1990s) and Metal Evolution (a television series on VH1—MuchMoreMusic in Canada).

Both of these documentaries have made me reexamine why I liked heavy metal as a youngster and why it still holds some appeal for me today. In particular, I’ve been thinking about the concept of dangerous music. When I was fourteen, my mother was horrified by the idea that I might want to go to an AC/DC concert. To her, they were as dangerous as drugs and other vices—an active threat to the the well being of her son. Today, AC/DC are essentially corporate—elder statesmen of the rock establishment who will eventually play the Super Bowl Halftime show, I have no doubt. It’s hard to even think of them as metal anymore, though that’s what they were.

As I kid, I kind of thought heavy metal was dangerous too. Of course, that was the appeal. Because it was dark and vaguely threatening we were drawn to it as curious adolescents looking for another window onto the world of adult experience. It was an easy outlet for our hormone driven aggression and seemed to express our expereince as outsiders.

Elvis was once dangerous though, right? Doesn’t most rock music go through this cycle of moving from outside to in, along with the aging of their target demographics?

Yes and no.

Let’s go back to Until the Light Takes Us (“Until” hereafter). Until reminds us that some music scenes really are built and maintained by the truly dangerous. In the 1990s in Norway, an underground metal scene developed under the influence of the highly theatrical music and appearance of bands like Venom and Bathory—probably mainly Venom but this point is somewhat contentious—and a smattering of other earlier heavy acts and even punk and goth. Venom had taken their own Black Sabbath and Alice Cooper influences to their logical limits and created a sludgy, horror-movie themed, and hair-metal tinged sideshow.

This second-echo influence led to a very low-fi, horror-drenched metal, literally named after a Venom song: Black Metal. The ironies flow from there: Norwegian black metal was low-fi for aesthetic reasons—as a reaction to the popularity of glam**—but also because Venom weren’t very good musicians and their early albums were badly produced. The Norwegian kids also took Venoms‘ horror-movie aesthetics to extremes; transforming the cartoonish makeup of Kiss into corpse-paint.

What resulted was a music scene built on all the most dubious impulses of a mediocre metal band from the 1980s, taken to new heights (or I guess depths). Norwegian black metal became much closer to real art and eventually real danger, where there was little in their primary influences. An echo, of an echo becomes something nearly real. Norwegian black metal was post-modernism at its most ridiculous and sublime.

This is also the point at which the black metal scene in Norway began to devolve into real madness—including suicide, arson and finally murder. The second wave of kids influenced by the early Norwegian black metal founders even took the horror trappings deadly seriously and declared themselves Satanists. The sometimes sympathetic outsider stance of angry young men turned into pathology.

Until is a highly evocative and lyrically shot and edited film. It sets up a convincing dialectic between two of the principal founders of Norwegian black metal: Gylve “Fenriz” Nagell and Varg “Count Grishnackh” Vikernes—with Nagell representing ART and Vikernes representing POLITICS. The camera follows Nagell all over Oslo and through forests and even to Sweden. His restless wandering is set against static shots of Vikernes being interviewed in prison, where he is serving 21 years for the murder of another key member of the scene Euronymous.

Vikernes is an initially warm, engaging and articulate interviewee. He is roughly handsome and almost boyish. But, gradually, as you’re exposed to more and more of his “philosophies”, Vikernes emerges as a real monster. His anti-Christian, pro-pagan politics are actually born out of deep hatreds and antisemitism. The twinkle in his eye starts to look like madness. His detailed description of Euronymous’ murder—couched as self-defense—is one of the most chilling things I’ve ever seen in a documentary.

Whereas, the brooding and sullen Nagell emerges as the main protagonist of the film. His thoughts on the violence of the scene—and Vikernes role in particular—remain obscure, but his passion for his art is undeniable. He seems a little lost at times, like he can’t quite wrap his head around what became of the black metal scene. And he often has difficultly articulating his positions during the interviews. But a real intelligence and a deeply felt artistic temperament clearly drive him. Nagell apparently never participated in the violence and madness of Norwegian black metal, he seems to be a music lover through and through. I wish the filmmakers had included some live footage of Nagell playing black metal today. I like to think that would be his real element and might show him as less sullen under the right circumstances.

The directors of Until, Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell,  make some really interesting creative choices throughout. For a documentary ostensibly about a heavy metal subculture, black metal music is fairly minimal on the soundtrack—highlighting key scenes but not overwhelming the chilly, slow-burning atmosphere of the film. In fact, the main musical keys at the beginning and end of the piece are cold, Nordic electro-pop. Norway becomes more than simply the background to the events documented—its cold, grey conservative nature a prime influence on young, disgruntled outsiders. Until the Light Takes Us is low, slow and dark—fittingly reflecting the music, lifestyle and tragedies it documents.

Metal Evolution on the other hand, is a much more approachable experience than Until—less art and more straightforward reportage. It demystifies a lot of the sub-genre boundaries of metal, rendering it less threatening to the average bystander, by following the logical trail of influences from band to band. And Metal Evolution glories in the music.

Sam Dunn is an affable and engaging anthropology grad who turned his love of heavy metal into a cottage industry after the success of his first co-directed film Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey. In Metal Evolution, Mr. Dunn explored the world of heavy metal as any anthropologist would: through personal exploration of the tribal subcultures of metal—first-hand field observation and recording, often as a participant in the rituals himself.

Metal Evolution once again features Mr. Dunn as protagonist and audience surrogate and shows us the birth and development of metal as a musical genre in careful detail. Each episode tends to focus on the development, peak and influence of separate sub-genres (e.g. pre-metal, new wave of British heavy metal, glam, thrash etc.).

The advantage of this approach is to better place metal in the overall history of music and to help draw attention to the artistic merits of the various approaches to the form.

Mr. Dunn’s only real weakness is his need to see metal culture and art as posivitely as possible. This approach is refreshing compared to most media coverage, but occasionaly one-sided and perhaps a little too fanboyish at times. Intellectually, I feel I have to make this point as an objective criticism, but really, most of the time, I’m right there with Mr. Dunn throwing up the horns.

I would love for my friends and family to watch this show, because I think it helps separate into discreet art what can sometimes seem like undifferentiated noise.

My favourite current heavy acts are Mastodon, Baroness and Pelican. All of which would seem like lounge music to a fan of Dimmu Borgir or Cannibal Corpse or Amon Amarth.***

The point is, it seems to me at least, that heaviness in music is extremely subjective. Pelican, in particular, is downright pastoral compared to most metal, but I’ve had people in my car ask me what that noise is they’re being subjected to.

I think some heavy metal still appeals to me for the same reason some free-jazz does: they can be dense, challenging listening experiences that reward both close attention and trance-like reverie—and both can devolve without warning into cathartic chaos.

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*To be fair, I used this pretentious example because I actually own a vinyl copy myself—bought only this year—which is doubly pretentious considering the archaic nature of the media.

**In Until one of the scenes founders, Gylve “Fenriz” Nagell, even describes black metal as a reaction to death metal, which he sees as too commercial.

***I have to admit to a certain affection for Amon Amarth’s long-standing, and single-minded dedication to the sub-genre of Viking Metal—no, really, it’s a thing, Google it.

Last week I stumbled upon some highlights of Jonah Campbell‘s recently launched book Food & Trembling, based on his excellent blog, in an article at the Toronto AV Club. I was so taken by the excerpts that I went out that night to my closest, oppressively gargantuan, big-box-bookstore and snagged a copy. I’ve had it close to hand ever since.

Food & Trembling is a wonderful collection of essays on our (I say “our”, meaning humanity‘s) obsession with food—in both the upliftingly positive and soul-crushingly negative aspects of that obsession…but mostly positive.

Mr. Campbell is clearly enamoured with M.F.K. Fisher and that special technique she had of combining intellectual inquiry and descriptions of sensual experience in her writing. I applaud (and share) his crush. But there are lots of food writers influenced by Mary Frances who seem exclusively drawn to her ability to captivate, with lucid and vivid detail, the experience of dining & eating, but not many who share something of her rigorous intellect.

Mr. Campbell seems as interested in the intersection of language and food—the way we talk about food and the etymology of food terms—as he is in the way we experience food. Many of the essays in Food & Trembling feel like they were written by a post-punk Wittgenstein trying to explore how the way we express ourselves about food is related to the way we prepare and consume…and over-consume it.

One of the most striking essays for me was the one titled Food as Destroyer. Not many food writers are willing to stare as unblinkingly into the abyss of over-indulgence:

“Somewhere in the process of this meal…I become faintly conscious that I am ‘eating to destroy’—not just the food but myself.”

In particular, Mr. Campbell is referring to that desire some of us apparently have to consume foods that are bad for us when we’re sick. This touched a nerve for me personally as I am often lured to the canned products of the late Maestro Boiardi during illness—a comfort-food association from childhood—that usually results in regret.

Food as Destroyer also has one of many footnotes scattered throughout the book—most of which are hilarious and/or illuminating, and I would not say so numerous as to be considered at excessive DFW-worshiping levels—this was one of my favourites:

“It is on faith alone that I accept that there exist those people who move through the world indifferent to what they put in their bodies, so long as it meets their basic survival need. Such characters, with their emotionless or at least emotionally uncomplicated engagements with food, will remain forever slightly opaque to me, like people who don’t read books or listen to music…”

Mr. Campbell’s essays swing wildly from erudite examination to personnel confessional to comedic reportage—a charming and highly engaging way to explore the sociological background of food while simultaneously celebrating the joy of eating it.

If I have any complaint, it’s that the book is a little too beholden to the blog of its origin. There are a couple super-brief chapters that smack of that I just had a stray cool thought so I’ma post it approach that any long-running blog endulges in occasionally. There’s nothing particularly wrong with these pieces, they just seem a little lightweight compared to most of the other essays—a minor quibble.

In an essay on the etymology of the word croissant, I think Mr. Campbell states lucidly himself the appeal of his blog and book for me:

 ”…it is this very lack of rigour that I think renders my company tolerable. Who really wants to suffer the smug self-satisfaction of the expert, when one could enjoy the fumbling charm of the amateur? But for all my insistence  upon quality…if there’s one lesson to be drawn from my dumb life it’s that if you’re not going to do something right, you should at least enjoy doing it.”

The above passage may have been written in a spirit of self-deprecating comedy, but I find it true to my tastes. I often prefer the explorations of a bright generalist to the didactic certainty of the expert. Sometimes, at least for me, the expert can seem limited by a rigid framework of absolute certainty. Unanswered questions are in no way a limitation of a given piece of writing and can, in fact, make the reader feel more engaged—like part of the conversation. I have almost unlimited access to Google, I can look up the finer points myself if I’m really keen. There aren’t many hyper-specialized experts that can make you laugh out loud reading their dissertations.

Food & Trembling is a great little book: funny, affecting, thoughtful—winningly puerile—and wholly engaging. Pick it up.

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The work of the inimitable Ralph McQuarrie

Allow me to indulge my nerdiest impulses here for a moment, if you please…

Drew McWeeny’s Nerd 2.0 columns have forcibly reminded me of what’s really special about all of the Star Wars films.

I began reading these columns with a feeling bordering on disdain for the overt sentimentality on display. But Mr. McWeeny eventually wore down my defenses in his highly affecting portraits of the unfettered enthusiasm of his small boys for George Lucas’ universe. I finished his last Star Wars blu-ray column with tears in my eyes.

I’ve long been an apologist for the Star Wars prequel films, based largely on my own experiences watching the films with my young (at the time) son. He was maybe 7 or 8 when I started showing him the prequel films and a little older when I introduced the originals. (In hindsight, I wish I had followed Mr. McWeeny’s viewing order.) My apologias all revolve around the same basic theme: however much we may still enjoy the Star Wars products as adults, these are really children’s entertainments.

Many of those who will protest, loudly, that the prequel films are equally disappointing as kid-fare have never really watched them with kids.

Here’s the thing: Star Wars (I still refuse to call it A New Hope) was revelatory to us as children. I saw Star Wars at the drive-in the year it was released, 1977. I was eight-years-old. I can remember vividly for months afterward creating little cardboard spaceships out of Kleenex boxes, paper towel rolls and scotch tape for my action figures. My cousin Barry and I fought mock space battles and lightsaber duels and stomped around the house singing the John Williams themes for what seems like years. I loved many entertainments as a child—Planet of the Apes, Spider Man, 101 Dalmatians, The Wild Wild West, Space 1999, Doctor Who, The Hobbit—but no other book, comic, television show or movie that I experienced as a child made me want to inhabit that universe like Star Wars.

When I first went to see The Phantom Menace in the theater, I had many of the same reactions as the most troll-like online enemy of Lucas: the plot was overly complicated yet dry in places, the dialogue was stilted, there was too much indiscriminate use of CG, it was too busy and oddly structured, some of the aliens seemed to border on racist caricatures—sure, all true—but the overwhelming feeling I had sitting in that dark theater was the thrill of being eight again. Was that feeling entirely nostalgic? Hell no.

Here’s a brief list of everything The Phantom Menace does right: Ewan McGregor, Watto, the designs for the new fighters and cruisers and robots and guns and pretty much everything, the pod race, the final lightsaber duel (one of the best in all of the films)…and does anyone deny the inherent coolness of Darth Maul?

For months after seeing The Phantom Menace my son created large, complicated scenes of battling droids and aliens and Jedis on the floor of my apartment with action figures and toys from other sources and bits of homemade gear. For years after seeing the rest of the films, he continued to stage elaborate imaginary scenes and battle with plastic light-sabers and draw scenes from the movies and dream of that galaxy far, far away.

My son loves Miyazaki films—many great works of art superior to Star Wars in almost any way—but he never wandered around the house pretending to be Nausicaä.

Star Wars is highly derivative of many ostensibly better sources, but the relative quality of a given work of art is not the only measure of its worth. As I write this, kids all over the world are wacking each other with makeshift lightsabers—no one is pretending to be Joseph Campbell.

All of the Star Wars films work beautifully for kids and for adults who are still capable of channelling a little of the innocence required to suspend disbelief long enough to let Star Wars, the universe, wash over you. What George Lucas understands, as Mr. McWeeny noted in his last column on the subject, is that a dense level of detail is required for kids to get truly lost in something. Star Wars appeals to kids whose imaginations begin to create their own fanfic as eight-year-olds—writing themselves into that world.

It still appeals to me, because experiencing it with my son let me revisit that eight-year-old me in such a visceral way. I could see so much of myself in his reaction to Star Wars and I can still get lost in all the sometimes silly details myself. I am eight-years-old when I watch any of the movies now.

Critiquing the Star Wars films like other movies is really beside the point for me personally, but I can see why people still do it. I’m not oblivious to the validity of some of these critiques, but I have no patience left for them.

Star Wars is a grand toolbox for the imaginative, not static works of cinema.

On Stranger Tides is one of the most purely fun books I’ve ever read. Published in 1987, it’s difficult, in hindsight, not to imagine On Stranger Tides being an unacknowledged inspiration for the entire Pirates of the Caribbean film franchise—despite Disney having only bought the rights to the novel in 2009 and apparently only plundered it (pun intended) as the loose basis for the fourth installment. We shall have to take them at their word.

Unsubstantiated conspiracy theories aside, Tim Powers is a mad genius who, if there were any real justice in this world, should be much better known. Mr Powers has created some of the most unique fantastic fiction in several genres and is one of the key progenitors of what we think of as steampunk today, through his seminal 1983 novel The Anubis Gates.

In On Stranger Tides Mr Powers manages to refresh the incredibly tired clichés of pirate stories through the layering of a wild palimpsest of real sixteenth century pirate history with voudoun ritual & afro-Caribbean folklore, tangled familial & criminal intrigue, taut thrill-filled action, love story & comedy, and full-on supernatural horror.

It’s this last element that really elevates the book. Mr Powers shades in the background of his rousing high-seas adventure with a system of magic based equally in the psychological histories of its wielders & victims as in a deep, fathomless (pun intended) supernatural other-world of shadowy semi-human spirits. He drags his characters through frightening scenes of violence and hardship during which they drift between the real world, supernaturally altered states or other dimensions and psychologically traumatic scenes of their own past.

And in all these scenes he describes highly original and creepily perverse depictions of undead apparitions and weird creatures. I don’t want to spoil anything, so let’s just say I’ll never look at tree fungus the same way again.

My minor complaint is that the only real female character, Beth, is a bit thinly drawn, as she disappears off the page for long stretches. However, this marginalization is a largely necessary side effect of the plot. In the end, the character of Beth becomes key in an interesting and unanticipated way (at least by me, but maybe sharper readers would see it coming…the hints are there).

In fact, the novel pays off all of its incredibly dense plotting in such a satisfyingly clockwork manner by the conclusion, that I’m a little jealous of Mr Powers’ ability to successfully wrangle all the concepts he’s jammed into this book.

Hollywood, please take note: big fun doesn’t have to exist in the absence of big ideas.

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I think this is a really wonderful idea. As Mr. Gaiman has alluded to previously, there are no existing holidays that are explicitly about giving a book—despite how often some of my friends and family get books from me on other holidays. And Halloween is the ideal time for story telling. I have an early school memory—grade two or three—of a substitute teacher doing a reading to a small group of us around Halloween. Maybe six of us sat cross-legged in a semi-circle around her in a small room off the main classroom. She went all out and dimmed the overhead lights and held a flashlight under her chin. She read The Tell-Tale Heart to us and I’ve been a lifelong fan of Poe ever since. I wish I could remember her name and could tell her what a difference that simple act of sharing a good story made to me.

So, in the spirit of All Hallows Read, I’d like to make a general suggestion for what is quickly becoming a little known spooky book: The House on the Borderland, by William Hope Hodgson.

Borderland was published in 1908 and was very influential on writers such as H.P. Lovecraft who would go on to lay the foundation of the contemporary genres of horror, science-fiction and fantasy—weird stories. Lovecraft gave Hodgson special regard in his groundbreaking essay Supernatural Horror in Literature. He describes Hodgson’s unique skills in terms of his ability to convey ”…vast occasional power in its suggestion of lurking worlds and beings behind the ordinary surface of life…” H.P.L. singles out Borderland in particular as perhaps Hodgson’s best book. The influence of Borderland on Lovecraft’s work is undeniable.

What makes the book really special to the reader today is its casual disregard for what we now see as the boundaries of sub-genres. Hodgson was writing in a period before people began making clear distinctions between SF, fantasy and horror. To the modern reader, Borderland is a wild mix of survival horror, alien invasion SF, contagion & body transformation horror and a kind of new age spirituality involving astral projection. All of these seemingly disparate elements mesh better than one might expect. The whole is definitely more than the sum of its parts.

And in the spirit of Halloween, The House on the Borderland is genuinely creepy. In particular, the siege and survival horror parts of the story, which begin early in the novel, still posses considerable power to freak us out. Later, when the story detours into bizarre, disease-based body transformation, the book becomes truly unsettling and darkly doom-laden.

The House on the Borderland is unlike almost any other work of horror or dark fantasy and holds great rewards for the adventurous reader. Just writing about it makes me want to dig out my copy and curl up next to the fireplace and get lost in Hodgson’s supremely eerie world again.