Lord Samper's Library

Well, this is awkward... My plan for today was to talk about my favourite stories from Stephen King's 'Night Shift' collection and I had a great time reading them yesterday. And then, well... I thought I'd double check the blog and it turns out that all my favourite stories from 'Night Shift' have already featured on the blog. Seriously... 'Graveyard Shift' and 'The Mangler'. 'Grey Matter' 'The Lawnmower Man'. Honestly, I don't know what's going on with me at the moment... Anyway. This wouldn't normally be a huge issue (flat full of books and all that) but I'm house/pet-sitting, at the moment, and I've got nothing with me that I've actually finished. So... Unless I magically come up with something else today (possible but unlikely...). 'Past Me' is stepping in again to help me out. A quick post to kick Halloween off then. Have some thoughts on H.P. Lovecraft's (very) short story 'Nyarlathote...

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...

I found ‘The Black Stone’ in the ‘Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos’ collection but it can also be found here and there online as well, Project Gutenberg is a good place to look. You’re welcome 😉 It was originally published in the November 1931 issue of Weird Tales. I’m in that place, once more, where I’ve got two or three books on the go but am nowhere near finishing any of them; one day I’ll learn to settle on just one book at a time but today (well, this week…) is not that time. I wanted to keep things ticking along though (feels like ages since I’ve made it through a whole week of posting) so I figured it was time for another short story to have its moment on the blog 😊  I always mean to read more of Robert E. Howard’s horror stories so when I saw ‘The Black Stone’ in ‘Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos’, my mind was made up for me… Not content with having one of the few remaining copies of Friedrich von Junzt ’s ‘Nameless Cults’, our narrator decides on a trip to Hungary, and the vil...

I’m well into Matt Wesolowski’s ‘Demon’ and while I could quite happily just sit and read it until I’m done, I didn’t want the blog to feel all unloved in the meantime 😉 It was time then to revisit my resolution to read more short stories, this year, and that’s just what I did last night. ‘Swords v. Cthulhu’ has already been featured here when I looked at Eneasz Brodski’s ‘Of All Possible Worlds’ but that was ages ago (well, April 2020 but it feels like ages ago…) so it felt like the right time to revisit the collection and a tale of a fight for survival beneath the earth… ‘Her sword in a high guard (what the old woman who taught her to fight called the Horn of the Bull), Angela advances deeper into the tunnel. She steps lightly, but does not worry overly much about remaining silent. For one thing, the iron scales sewed to her leather tunic clink and rattle with her every movement. For another, the beast she is hunting appears able to hear the slightest sound. For a third, she wan...

I'm back at work today (and I've got a horrible feeling that it will be a rough one) so I didn't want to go into today with a full on book review, not until I've got the lay of the land at work. You've been there, you know exactly what I mean ;o) I didn't want to hang around too long, before posting something bookish, so thought I'd compromise and kick off 2022 with a short story post; I'm sure you won't mind too much ;o) My copy of 'Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos' collection hasn't seen too much action, since I read 'Sticks' anyway, so I thought I'd pay it a visit again, this time to read me a little Robert Bloch with 'Notebook Found in a Deserted House'. It's been so long since I've read anything by Robert Bloch that I totally forgot I had, until I did a little digging and found that I'd read the short story 'Maternal Instinct' back in 2013. That was zombies though, lets see how Bloch did with Cos...

I'm no Lovecraft scholar; I know what I like of his work and I very much disagree with the man's views on race, that's about the size of it really. I do enjoy his work though, dry as it is (I think Lovecraft's vision of mankind set against gods who barely notice our existence far surpasses his ability to tell it on the page), and 'The Colour Out Of Space' is a favourite of mine so when I heard it was going to be adapted into a film, I knew that I'd be watching it sooner rather than later. Well, 'sooner' finally came round, I watched it last night and it was great. 'It came from the stars, where things aren't like they are here... 'Color Out Of Space' follows the Gardener family, whose recent retreat to rural life crumbles when a meteorite crashes into their front yard. The mysterious rock melts into the earth, infecting both the land and the properties of space-time. Mutant technicolor flora start sprouting, and local ...

I don't know where this week has gone but I do know that there was no time for any reading, not really. I'm going to see what I can do about that, over the weekend, but here's what I thought of a short story that I did manage to find time for today; just to keep things ticking over in the meantime... 'Of All Possible Worlds' is taken from the 'Swords v. Cthulhu' anthology, incidentally one of only a handful of books that I've bought when drunk. Seriously... I was coming home from the work Christmas party and thought I'd sober up in Waterstones, 'Swords v. Cthulhu' ended up coming home with me and has proved to be quite the drunken purchase with pretty much all the stories hitting the mark. 'Of All Possible Worlds' isn't quite the highlight of the collection but it's a favourite of mine (and it's only twelve pages long so was a good choice for today's reading). Marad's life depends on whether the Emp...