Lord Samper's Library

Although Halloween does lose a bit of the sparkle when you realise that you can just go and buy your own sweets... Oh well ;o) However you're spending it, I hope you have a good one. My evening is going to spent trailing after my kids and making sure that they don't egg anyone's houses if they don't get sweets (that last bit may not be true, or isn't it...?) That's for later on though. Right now, lets take a look at the books that found their way back to mine this week and it's not a bad selection if I do say so myself :o) Some good examples of what you can find in charity shops, if I don't get there first that is...  If I see a comic book in a charity shop, I will more often that not give it a go, even though it often means that I end up with duplicate 'Walking Dead' books (dammit!) I've read 'Bad Guy Earth' before but needed a new copy so that was a purchase. I saw 'Pulp' while I was queuing in the British Heart Foundation s...

It feels like ages since we've had a 'Saturday Doctor Who Post' here (it's actually barely a month since the last one but it feels like ages...) so I thought I'd spend last night finishing off the box set that I got for my birthday. And eating pizza. It was great, just what I needed after being back at work for all of a day before the weekend... ;o) Without further ado, let me tell you all about it. Returning to London, the Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith find a city almost completely deserted. The civilian population has been evacuated in the wake of an unimaginable event. Somehow, dinosaurs are walking the streets of the capital. As the Brigadier and UNIT fend off increasingly vicious attacks from gigantic prehistoric reptiles the Doctor investigates just how these monsters are appearing without warning. But when Sarah Jane is kidnapped, the Doctor realises that perhaps even his oldest friends can't be trusted... We're looking at a show from 1974 that ha...

I grabbed a copy  back in July with the intention of reading it before the movie came out and then popped it on a TBR pile and promptly forgot about it. Easily done at my place 😉 Well, my eldest daughter borrowed it for a read and ended up getting really into it so I thought that at the very least, I needed to read it myself and see what was what. So that is exactly what I did 😊 It took me a while to get round to it but I have finally read ‘Neil Gaiman’s Eternals’ and before the movie arrives as well (well, only just but we’re not quibbling here; it’s way better than I normally manage!) Just a quick post today though, I’m catching up on work stuff (after the last few days on leave) so unfortunately don’t have the time to really go off on one here, hope you don’t mind 😉 The Eternals, immortals with phenomenal powers and created by the more than god-like beings known as the Celestials. When medical student Mark Curry is approached by a man with strange golden eyes and told th...

I've had a really nice four days off work but I think that the time has finally come to go back into work for a little peace and quiet before the weekend... ;o) I also need to give my cash card a break but that's another story. Lets just say that I need to stop thinking I can keep track of the bill, as I go, when we're eating out. Oh well, three weeks until Payday :o) In the meantime though, it looks like this is the last episode of 'Creepshow' as far as Season 3 goes. It's been a great Season overall, not perfect but a hell of a lot more consistent in terms of the stories. Lets take a look at the last two stories, shall we...? Once again, it's going to be a shorter post than normal because I'm shattered and I'm back in the office tomorrow (well, working at my desk in my flat but you know what I mean)... 'Drug Traffic' A family is detained, and a young girl’s distressing symptoms quickly escalate without her medication. I love anything ...

And by 'occasional', I course mean one of those days where my kids have run me ragged and I've only just got back to my place and I've got no time left to actually write the post that I wanted to (Neil Gaiman's stint on 'Eternals' actually, just in case you were wondering... ) A day very much like today ;o) Luckily for me, I had a copy of Fritz Leiber's 'Swords and Deviltry' in my bag (which I've never read funnily enough, hence why it was in my bag, it's way past time) and I read a few pages on the bus back home. And that's when I came across this quote, ‘As the twain eyed each other challengingly through the murky fog lit indirectly by distant torches, they were already dimly aware that they were two long sundered, matching fragments of a greater hero and that each had found a comrade who would outlast a thousand quests and a lifetime – or a hundred lifetimes – of adventuring. No one at that moment could have guessed that the Grey M...

This is a collection of horror stories originally published in ‘Graveyard Rendezvous’, the Guy N. Smith fanzine, that ran from 1992 - 2012. They feature mayhem and murder, cannibals, zombies and spectral beings which lurk in deserted graveyards during the hours of darkness, and numerous other blood curdling stories. This collection also features a brand new story ‘Sabat: The Robber’s Grave’ . I had a lot of fun with Guy N. Smith's 'From the Dark Hour s' a week and a bit ago (it feels like so much longer than that, time flies and all that...) so in the spirit of picking up books that I know I'll enjoy, I didn't hang around in grabbing a copy of 'Tales from the Graveyard'. I also grabbed a copy of 'Nightmares from the Black Hill' but lets not get ahead of ourselves, I'll talk about that another time. I tore through 'Tales from the Graveyard' over the course of yesterday which should tell you everything that you need to know. You probab...

I'll come out and say from the off, I've been a fan of Steven Erikson's 'Malazan' books for a long time now. I still need to finish the main series but that's on me, not the books. I get seven or eight books in and then something inevitably happens, my focus just goes and I'm left picking up the pieces of yet another failed read-through. One day, one day... Still the books that I have read were great! ;o) So when I was looking over the shelves, in Forbidden Planet, and saw that there was a new-ish (look, there's no way that I'm ever going to catch up with all the new books now) 'Bauchelain and Korbal Broach' novella, I picked it up straight away as I knew that, at last, there was a Steven Erikson book that I could actually finish ;o) Was it any good though? From where I'm sat, it certainly was. The king is dead, long live King Bauchelain the First, crowned by the Grand Bishop Korbal Broach. Both are, of course, ably assisted in the runn...

I'm hoping that this is the last week that you see me being all middle aged and moaning about gout (mine) here. It seems like drinking as much water as possible (in as short a time as possible) is the immediate way forward, it flushes out the uric acid crystals around the joints, now I just need to make some changes to make sure it never happens again. It's a bit stop/start but I'll get there ;o) But you're here for the books, aren't you? Of course you are. I got paid the other day so treated myself to a few books because of course I did; especially after a couple of 'work days' this week. Sometimes you just have to go with it and count the cost afterwards ;o) Looking at my flat though, I'm either going to have to cut back on my book buying or get really creative with where I store them all... Or just read quicker, that could work :o) While I try and figure that out, take a look at what came home with me this week... I saw that 'The Chronicles of Str...

A quick review today as, well... I haven't left myself much time, for anything more in depth, because I spent most of today reading the hell out of 'Don't Move'. That should pretty much tell you everything that you need to know but if not, keep reading... Megan Forrester has barely survived the unthinkable. Six months ago, she witnessed a horrific accident that killed her husband and son, and lives with the guilt of knowing she could have done more to save them. Now, Megan hopes to mend the pieces of her broken spirit by attending a local church group's annual camping trip. But the church group members--riddled with dark secrets of their own--make a catastrophic navigational mistake, leaving them stranded in an untouched canyon in the West Virginian national forest. Isolated from any chance of help or rescue, Megan and the others quickly realize why this side of the canyon has never been surveyed by humankind: it's home to a terrifying prehistoric arachnid th...

I figured it was way past time that I got stuck into the pile of books that I got for my birthday… 😉 Not just that though, I was really after a little ‘short story action’ as well (can’t seem to settle on a regular sized book at the moment) so ‘The Best of Glen Cook’ covered both angles. I’m always a little wary of books that say they’re the ‘best of’, it feels like a bit of a bold statement to make and with me being an awkward character, my response runs along the lines of ‘who are you to tell me that?’ I know, it’s silly but that’s the way I’m wired 😉 A Glen Cook collection though, that’s a little bit different; mostly because I tend to enjoy the books of his that I pick up (although I haven’t read all of his work) so I am a little more accepting that I’ll find well told tales here, maybe even his best. I’d thought I’d start off in some familiar territory, the city of Tunfaire and a certain former soldier turned private eye. Lets talk about ‘Shadow Thieves’, a story that origin...

I’m in no mood to come up with anything bookish today (loads of reasons, most of them to do with work – there’s loads of it to get through before I go on leave next week…) so it was kind of fortuitous that this latest episode of ‘Creepshow’ came along when it did. I got to have a proper break, at lunchtime, and I’ve got something to blog about. Just a quick one mind you, it’s been a long day… ‘ Creepshow’ has had a few excellent stories, these last few weeks, but is still prone to those little lapses of consistency that leave you wondering why you watched the whole show instead of just the good story. The show has built up a lot of credit with me (when it's good, it's really good) but I still can't help but approach Thursdays with a little note of caution as I don't know which 'Creepshow' is going to show up. The excellent one, the 'half and half' or the not so good at all...? Well this week... I found myself watching another 'half and half' epi...

This is probably going to be a shorter post than normal as my work laptop died yesterday and now I’m trying to fit two days’ worth of work into today… I am beginning to really hate this week, it’s a good job that I’ve got a few days off next week 😊 But anyway… I had the best time watching ‘Slasher: Flesh and Blood' (have a click Here for my thoughts on the matter) so it was a pretty much foregone conclusion that I’d be searching out the rest of the series to get all caught up with. Unfortunately for me, I don’t have Netflix (and probably won’t bother with it, to be honest) so had to go down the ‘old school’ route of searching out the DVDs instead. Luckily for me, Season 1 ('The Executioner') wasn’t hard to find at all… Sarah Bennett and her husband Dylan move back to the town of her birth, fictitious Waterbury, Canada,  into her childhood home, where both of her parents were murdered on the Halloween of 1988. Her mother was pregnant with Sarah at the time of the killi...

There was this period of a couple of months, last year, where I'd go on Amazon and whatever book I was looking for, it was invariably £1.99 for the Kindle. It was almost like there was a lockdown on and Amazon knew that we all wanted to catch up on our reading, hmmm... Well of course I loaded my Kindle up with sweet deals that I promptly forgot about, until the last couple of days that is. I've been after a little more Warhammer 40k in my reading and remembered that there's a nice little vein of the stuff on my Kindle, just waiting to be mined. So that is just what I started doing with 'Cadia Stands'... Under almost constant besiegement by the hosts pouring from the Eye of Terror, Cadia acts as a bulwark against tyranny and death. Its fortresses and armies have held back the hordes of Chaos for centuries, but that grim defiance is about to reach its end. As Abaddon's Thirteenth Black Crusade batters Cadia's defences, and armies of the Imperium flock to rein...

Well, four but it felt like loads! I did manage to get a couple of books read over the weekend (neither of which were 'The God Is Not Willing' but that's the way my reading muse will sometimes go...) but we'll talk about those as the week goes on. Right now, we're all about the movies because I watched a whole load of those too and one of them, well... lets just say that I want to leave this post as a reminder to myself not to watch it again. It wasn't that bad, it just wasn't much of anything really but I'm getting ahead of myself a little. Actually, no I'm not, lets start with that film... 'Crawl' (2019) A young woman, while attempting to save her father during a category 5 hurricane, finds herself trapped in a flooding house and must fight for her life against alligators. I really wanted to like this enjoy but the whole 'father and daughter reconciliation' arc just wasn't enough to get me into the film and there wasn't a...

Sorry for the lack of post yesterday... I took my gouty foot over to my ex's for a spot of child sitting, only to have one of the girl's friends to take it as a personal challenge, to wreak havoc, when I asked him to be careful round my foot. He looked me in the eye, grinned, and then stamped down as hard as he possibly could... I was in no mood to be posting stuff here after that! Ouch... But you're here for the book pics aren't you? Lets talk books... It's a bit of an odd haul this week as most of the books are already on my shelves, just with different covers, editions etc. I'm no book collector but I'm finding that I like to have all the different editions so... maybe I'm starting to turn into a little bit of a book collector? I don't know, maybe... (and that doesn't bode well for my tiny flat!) Lets take a look, 'The House on the Borderland'  is the only book here that I don't already have a copy of. (I know...) I saw it cheap on...

What lies in the dark? What stirs in the murk? What creeps and crawls in the blackness, fearful of the sun but thirsty for meat? Lethal hauntings, murderous animals and uncanny curses rule the night, as Guy N Smith, master of pulp horror, unleashes a new set of nightmares to plague your dreams. The tales within these pages tell of the evil in nature and the destructive psychosis of man; delusions and fever dreams from the dark hours. Featuring the stories Beasts of the Dark Hours, Night of the Necrophile, The Lair of the Giant Squid, The Prison Cell Door, The Shrunken Head, The Clairvoyant, The Immortals, The Big One, The Last Crab and The Taxidermist. The more I get into Guy N. Smith’s work, the more I’m very much in awe of his output. I think the word ‘prodigious’ is apt here, the size of his back catalogue is just amazing and that’s only what I’ve seen of it, I think there’s a lot more that I’m unaware of. And a large chunk of this is made up of short stories which again was...

I wasn't planning on another 'Creepshow' post quite so soon but I had a little look on Prime earlier (just on the off chance) and it turned out they'd got their act together and put Episode 4 up on time. Who'd have thought it...? ;o) I won't go on too much here, because I did all that yesterday, but lets just say that all of a sudden, 'Creepshow' has become a little bit of a 'must watch' show so I was all over this episode. Was it any good though? Let me tell you. 'Stranger Sings' A Siren lures a doctor into her trap to carry out a diabolical plan. I ended up loving this story but maybe not for the reasons that it wanted me to. There are a couple of half decent jump scares but it ended up being this really sweet story about a nerdy doctor who was kind of looking for love and maybe found it when he was least expecting. Okay, the Siren did threaten to kill him, to start off with, but even so... 'Stranger Sings' ended up being kin...

This particular post is a little bit later than normal as there was something going on with Prime which meant this episode didn’t show for around about a week after it was meant to. Hey ho, that’s the way it goes sometimes. I happened to check Shudder yesterday, looking for something to watch, and when I saw it was finally up… Well, I was all over it because of just how great the last episode was (read my thoughts over Here ) and that isn’t something I say about ‘Creepshow’ very often. Actually, I don’t think I’ve ever said it at all come to think of it, funny that… But anyway. Episode 3 had an awful lot to live up to (from where I’m sat anyway) and perhaps inevitably, didn’t quite make it there. Not to worry too much though, there’s still an awful lot to like in these episodes and I’m starting to see a little consistency in the quality. A sign of better things to come? Fingers crossed…   ‘The Last Tsuburaya’ An immoral art collector could never have anticipated the ways a terri...