Lord Samper's Library

  Page Count: 103 Pages Because ‘Lord Samper’s Library’ has a couple of shelves for children’s books, you’ve already seen a few feature here over the last few years. Or is it because my youngest daughter got me to read a ‘Unicorn Academy’ book and then suggested, with my ex-wife, that I post about it here? A little bit of ‘A’ and a little bit of ‘B’… Drunk with happiness at having new lens’ in my glasses, and a ‘soft touch’ when it comes to my daughters, I figured I’d go for something very different, to my normal reading, and see how it all went. Imagine a school where you meet your own unicorn and have amazing adventures together! That's what happens for the girls at Unicorn Academy on beautiful Unicorn Island. Olivia is so happy to be at Unicorn Academy. She hopes her sweet unicorn, Snowflake, will discover her magic before graduation day! Everyone is busy decorating Unicorn Academy for the graduation ball, but it looks like someone is trying to ruin the party. It's up to O...

I'm feeling pretty rough today so am going to sit in my comfy chair and read; I've got my glasses back so now, reading has suddenly become a lot easier, hopefully today will see me finally finish 'The End and the Death Volume 2' (two hundred and something pages left, I fancy my chances). In the meantime, have a trailer for 'Wormtown', coming to digital platforms on November 7th. I don't normally do this but feel like I should say... If you have a thing about eyeballs, eye sockets or parasitic worms being in the vicinity of these, maybe bear that in mind before clicking on the trailer below...  I freak out if I get a stray eyelash stuck in my eye, so of course I'm going to watch 'Wormtown' ;o) One year into a plague of flesh-eating, mind-altering worms, the nocturnal town of Ashland, Ohio, has embraced the parasites’ rule. Under cult-like Mayor Joshua, zealous Ranchers spread their gospel—by persuasion or by force. A trio of uninfected women cling...

  Page Count: 278 Pages I had to take a slight detour, from the intended route, but I’ve made it to Halloween having read a decent chunk of horror and supernatural fiction, go me :o) The plan was to round October off with a little Edgar Allan Poe but ‘Killer On The Road’ has been sat on the table for too long, all lonely and unread, so I resolved to do something about that yesterday (and the font size was just right for my eyes, can’t wait to pick my glasses up later today) . And that’s exactly what I did, even though I had a few things that I should have been doing instead. Time well spent? Let me tell you about it. Sixteen-year-old Harper has had another blow-out argument with her mother and decides to hit the road, again. However, her two best friends, little sister, and ex-boyfriend all stop her from hitch-hiking her way up Route 80 in Wyoming by joining her on an intervention disguised as a road trip. What they don’t realize is that Harper has been marked by a very unique seri...

  Page Count: 19 Pages Damn I’m getting old now. Here’s a sentence I never saw myself having to write… I’m waiting for my glasses to come back from the optician, with a new set of lenses, and this has rather limited what I’ve been able to read this week; that and the ongoing stuff that has seen me signed off work. I need to be reading though so I’ve been dipping in and out of a few short story collections this week. I’ve never read anything by Kingsley Amis so when I saw his short story ‘Something Strange’, I had the opportunity to do something about that and read another horror short story at the same time. ‘Something Strange’ was originally published in 1960. I found ‘Something Strange’ in ‘The 2nd Fontana Book of Great Horror Stories’ but if you’re after reading it yourself, you can also find it in Amis’ ‘Collected Short Stories’. Bruno, Clovis, Lia and Myri are the only occupants of a small outpost in space, carrying out their duties whilst waiting for the message from Base tha...

  Page Count: 58 Pages Regular visitors to the blog will know that every now and then, I decide that I really need to read something of Arthur Machen's, buy a book and then promptly pop it on a bookshelf to be forgotten about/possibly given away. Well… I can confirm that I have finally read an Arthur Machen story and it’s the one that everyone knows about. I had to start somewhere and the cover for ‘Tales of Horror and the Supernatural’ pretty much demanded that I start there. As a child of the eighties (mostly), I’ve got a soft spot for cover art like this; take a look and tell me that you disagree. Some things really were better in the ‘old days’ ;o) Anyway… ‘The Great God Pan’ was originally published, as a novella, in 1894 and my copy can be found in the 1975 Panther edition of ‘Tales of Horror and the Supernatural (Volume 1)’. Honestly though, if you’re looking to read ‘The Great God Pan’ yourself, you’ll have absolutely no trouble finding it in print or as an eBook. It’s not ...

My ability to focus on written words continues to drift in and out of... erm… focus, so I’ve been watching a lot more movies just recently. And here is where we catch up on a few of those movies, funnily enough while I try and figure out what book I’m reading next ;o) As always, ‘movies of varying quality’ is the order of the day so, lets have a little chat about what I’ve been watching. ‘The Long Walk’ (2025) In a near future America, fifty young men must compete for a huge cash prize (and one wish granted) by walking, across the country, until one person is left standing. But once you start walking, there is only one way you can drop out, and it’s permanent. I’ve got nothing against older Stephen King adaptations (ok, maybe ‘The Tommyknockers’) but I’m currently living in a golden age of Stephen King adaptations that are consistently great (ok, not the TV show of ‘The Mist’…); and I think that ‘The Long Walk’ might well be the best of them. I absolutely couldn’t take my eyes off this...