Lord Samper's Library

My Halloween usually involves a scary movie and/or some similar reading but this year… When I woke up and realised that I’d slept through half of ‘The Thing’, that told me things weren’t going to plan (and that I could do with more sleep in general). My copy of ‘Shadows over Innsmouth’ hadn’t turned up either (and I didn’t fancy reading anything else) so I went back to sleep and I’ll see if I can do Halloween better next year instead 😊 ‘Shadows over Innsmouth’ actually turned up yesterday so it wasn’t as if I had to wait too long 😉 It was the promise of a Guy N. Smith Mythos tale, that I hadn’t read, that originally had me hitting the ‘Order’ button and even though I’ve already read ‘Only The End of the World’, that was years ago and it’s in this collection so that was an easy decision to make. Quick thoughts again for this post, I hope you don’t mind 😉 These were two very quick reads and I’ve got a few other bits that I need to get done today…  ‘Return to Innsmouth’ – Guy N.

For whatever reason (I work in IT but I have no idea how computers work or why they work) my work laptop has taken it upon itself to do loads of restarts just recently. Every time it happens, my work day pauses while I wait for all my documents to come back... That's ok though, my copy of 'Smoke and Mirrors' made it to the top of a TBR pile (there is more than one, much more...) and I've been reading through it while my laptop does its thing... An elderly widow finds the Holy Grail beneath an old fur coat. A stray cat fights and refights a terrible nightly battle to protect his unwary adoptive family from unimaginable evil. A young couple receives a wedding gift that reveals a chilling alternative history of their marriage... These tales and much more await in this extraordinary book, revealing one of our most gifted storytellers at the height of his powers. I've been putting this post off for ages because, well... I'm a little bit in awe of this book and how

'The coat. It was elegant. It was beautiful. It was so close that he could have reached out and touched it. And it was unquestionably his .' It has been far too long since I last read 'Neverwhere' so I'd totally forgotten that the Marquis de Carabas had even lost his coat, let alone that he needed to get it back (which of course he would have had to, it's his coat ). But while I was looking for a little treat (to sweeten the prospect of going back to work after my holiday) I saw this title and it wasn't enough to know that the Marquis got his coat back, I needed to find out the 'how' as well. So I grabbed a copy and read it pretty much as soon as it came through the door (but not before realising that I already had the story in my copy of the Gardner Dozois and George R.R. Martin collection 'Rogues', oh well...) It turned out that a short trip back to London Below was just what I needed; in fact it was almost like I'd never been away. G