Lord Samper's Library

Apologies for the ‘blogging silence’ yesterday; I’m looking after the cats, again, and yesterday was all about damage control… You see, ‘little cat’ lives for getting out of the house and having adventures but it was raining (hard) and she didn’t like that, choosing to blame it on ‘big cat’ who was already feeling out of sorts because her family are away for the next week. You can see where this ended up. Honestly, I thought looking after my girls was hard work, trying to keep ‘little cat’ amused etc is something else. Anyway… I did get a little reading under my belt but that’s for another day. While the cats are asleep, lets take a look at some movies that I’ve been watching over the last few days. One strangely disappointing, one surprisingly good and the last one? I’m still not sure… ‘V/H/S/Mixtape’ (2026) Over the last few years, horror streaming service ‘Shudder’ have been very kindly adding new entries to the ‘V/H/S’ franchise and this years instalment has arrived. I should say ‘...

You won’t see me ‘Trick or Treating’ this Halloween. My daughters are past that now and to be honest… If I want sweets and/or chocolate these days, I just go out and buy them; Halloween or not ;o) There are a couple of things that I do like to (try and) do over Halloween though and when I do, you’ll see it right here. That’s right, I’m talking ‘watching scary movies’ and ‘reading scary books’. And yep, I do that over the rest of the year but, you know… Anyway… It hasn’t been a bad week for reading, over here, but the week is almost done and so am I ;o) Just a couple of short stories for you today, one of them ‘really short’… ‘The History of the Necronomicon’ – H.P. Lovecraft Page Count: 2 Pages Seriously… I thought I was getting a four page tale, at least that’s what the contents page told me, but one of those pages was the title and the other was the blank page that came before the next story. I’m not quite sure how I feel about that but… Here we are. Anyway… ‘The History of the Necr...

  Page Count: 144 Pages It was back at the start of the year that I found myself taken by cover art showing a birds-eye view of a brown bear making her way through the woods, carrying a shovel and dragging a bloody sack behind her. Sometimes, your reading choices can be a little more interesting if you act on impulse and that’s how I came to read ‘Beneath The Trees Where Nobody Sees’; a strangely sweet tale of a bear just trying to juggle work, at the local hardware store, with her ‘other work’ as a serial killer. As you do ;o) You can read my full review over Here but here’s a couple of sentences that sum it up… I’ll swear at the TV pretty frequently but you won’t normally catch me swearing at a book, until I read ‘Beneath The Trees’ and said ‘fuck’ out loud, twice in the first chapter. Part murder-mystery, part ‘slasher’ and a thoughtful piece about the law of the jungle as seen through the eyes of a serial killer, all at the same time. I reckon I’ll be hard pressed to find anot...

It’s a slightly shamefaced Graeme who greets you today… After all my moaning and worry about having my teeth pulled, it turns out that yesterday’s appointment was just a prelude to the main event. A scan of my jaw (and the few teeth left in it), a little cleaning up and enough ‘laughing gas’ that there were actually a few moments that made me chuckle ;o) I wasn’t good for much, yesterday afternoon (honestly, I’m a little surprised I made it to the train station…), so I took it easy and read a couple of short stories that I’d been meaning to get to. Let me tell you about them… ‘The Distance In Their Eyes’ – Stephen Graham Jones (From ‘Predator: Eyes of the Demon’, Titan Books) Page Count: 12 Pages The ‘Predator: Eyes of the Demon’ anthology has been sat on a shelf for a while now and every time I go to pick it up… You know what happens next ;o) Anyway, my youngest daughter finally watched ‘Predator: Badlands’ the other day, really enjoyed it too, so I took that as a sign and chose ‘The...

  Page Count: 141 Pages It was only a few weeks ago that I read ‘Doctor Who and the Invasion of Time’ but it feels like a lot longer. Time slows down when you’re unemployed, sometimes that’s a good thing but sometimes, not so much :o( Anyway… It felt like a long time since I’d picked up a ‘Doctor Who’ book and a walk through Greenwich Market, the other day, turned up a copy of ‘The Claws of Axos’; a book that I hadn’t read since… Erm… sometime in the ‘eighties? I can’t remember exactly, lets just say that it has been a while. Either way, it felt like everything had come together and it was about time I had a re-read. So… That’s what I did. When I’m hunting books, I never ignore tracks and signs and… I’m always hunting books ;o) ‘Axos calling Earth, Axos calling Earth…’ The creatures stood before them, beautiful golden humanoids, offering friendship and their priceless Axonite, in return for… what? Only the Doctor remains suspicious. What is the real reason for the Axons’ sudden ar...

  Page Count: 412 Pages I actually have a copy of the ‘Ravenor Omnibus’ but the size of it makes it a little impractical for ‘commuter reading’, or any kind of reading that doesn’t involve a comfy chair and a free afternoon. I’m working on that by the way (the comfy chair, not the free afternoon, I have too many of those…) Where was I…? Oh, yes :o) The omnibus isn’t a book to be lugged around, in my bag, so when I happened upon a copy of ‘Ravenor, it very swiftly became my ‘commute reading’ and… Here we are ;o) I’ve needed to give my reading a little ‘jump-start’, just recently, and some ‘Warhammer 40K’ is always a good place to start. I’ll be honest, for large chunks of this read, I wondered if I should have picked another book but ultimately, it was worth the read. The storming tale of Inquisitor Gideon Ravenor and his band of lethal operatives conveys the grim far future from the ground level up as they investigate the trafficking of a dangerous substance within the Imperium. Wi...