Lord Samper's Library

  Page Count: 17 Pages My journey, through this week, continues with another short story that I managed to squeeze in, last night, between bouts of looking for my youngest daughter’s Geography school book. I finished off ‘The Lesser Horsemen’ but I’ve got no idea where her school book is; oh well.. That’s a 50% success rate, I’ll take it. Anyway. Sometimes you can go for ages, reading books that are perfectly fine (even brilliant) but aren’t quite the right book at the right time. And sometimes… Sometimes you find yourself reading a short story that turns out to be exactly the right story at exactly the right time. And that’s what happened to me when I picked up ‘Folk Songs For Trauma Surgeons: Stories’, opened it up and started reading ‘The Lesser Horsemen’. Three out of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse can’t stand each other, the fourth is off pursuing an inevitable solo career but God really needs the other three to buckle down and work together. It’s time for a week’s cruise...

  Page Count: 42 Pages I’ve had a good run, finishing full length novels, but I think it’s time to take a little breather and make this week all about short stories instead. I’m pushed for time at the moment, and I have plenty of anthologies to choose from. Lets see where the journey takes me. Well, the first stop is pretty obvious, not only because you’ve already read the title but also because ‘Warhammer’ has become a real ‘go to’ for me these days, the Old World most of all. I’ve travelled a fair way through the Old World but I’ve never made it to the outskirts of Mordheim, let alone behind its walls. That changed last night though with a tale of friendships lost and found, a horde of rat-men and possibly the best dog ever… Captain Heinrich Gogol is a man on a mission, a mission that will take him into the cursed heart of Mordheim to locate the Heart of Sigmar. The only problem is that the Skaven already have the Heart and they’re not interested in giving it up. And who is the m...

  Page Count: 37 Pages You can read ‘Agate Way’ over at Reactor if you fancy it; I visit very irregularly so completely missed this tale when it appeared last year, story of my life really… ;o) No free read for me, not this time. I felt like following ‘Acquired Taste’ with a much shorter read and came across ‘Agate Way’ whilst in the middle of finding out that Nathan Ballingrud is actually a real writer (and not just a literary creation of Clay McLeod Chapman). I’m not afraid to own up to my mistakes, just don’t laugh at me too much (I’m feeling fragile)? Anyway, lets take a little trip down ‘Agate Way’; just a little one though, you wouldn’t want to end up lost. Not here… A pair of sisters are hired to find--and if necessary, dispose of--whatever is killing neighborhood pets in a dying town. No-one told them that people have been going missing as well, now Casey and Tara are about to find out that ‘nature never tires, she never rests…’ Sometimes, you read a story and by the time...

  Page Count: 37 Pages Just a quick one today as I’ve got the day to myself and three books (I think) that are a good way along the road to being fully read. I want to see if I can finish at least one of them, lets see how it goes… In the meantime, here’s a tale that found its way onto my Kindle, back in 2024, and then proceeded to languish unread for the next couple of years. Nothing against ‘Faith In Iron’, if you’ve seen my place, you’ll know that it’s very easy for a book to get lost in the crowd; especially if it’s hidden away on my Kindle ;o) Anyway… I was watching a lore video that mentioned ‘Faith In Iron’ the other day; I put two and two together and realised that I needed to get my moneys worth out of the read. And that’s exactly what I did... The tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus eschew the weakness of flesh, preferring to show their faith in the Omnissiah by replacing their organics with machine parts. As well as religious, this is practical – disease can't affect ...

  Page Count: 23 Pages What with one thing and another, Wednesdays are always busy, in and outside work, and while I wouldn’t swap it (well, I wouldn’t swap the bits where I get to hang out with my daughters); there’s never enough time at the end of the day to settle down with a good book. So, I settled down with (what I hoped would be) a good short story instead. And it was :o) I had seen that Chris Wraight’s ‘Vaults of Terra’ trilogy is due to be published soon, collected in one volume, so I thought I’d go and see if any of the accompanying short stories were available on the Kindle. ‘Argent’ was the first one that I came across so that’s the one I went with. And... Interrogator Luce Spinoza’s hunt for a traitor brings her to Forfoda and into the company of the Imperial Fists. Unearthing a den of corruption, Spinoza learns what it means to fight alongside the Emperor’s Angels, and vows to prove herself worthy of this honour or die in the attempt. It has been a long old time since...

I’ve spent the week trying to cheer up a depressed cat (Cat 1) while trying to keep a hyperactive kitten (Cat 2) from wrecking my ex-wife’s place. Lets just say it’s easier said than done and my reading has taken a bit of a knock, just at the time when I wanted to finally finish some ‘long unfinished’ stuff before the year wraps up. Also, while I’m in a much better place than I was a couple of months ago, this year has still been one hell of a slog and I’m really (really) tired and still forgetting all sorts. Like, reading books for example :o) Oh well… I did manage to read a little yesterday and listened to a quick audio-book, both Warhammer 40K (to absolutely no-one’s surprise) Let me tell you all about it… ‘The Wrath of Kharn’ – William King (Black Library) Page Count: 15 Pages Of all the enemies that the Berzerkers of Khorne wage war against in the 41st Millennium, none are so hated by their blood-soaked god as the servants of his rival, Slaanesh. As Khârn, champion of the Blood Go...

  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: 10 Pages Just a quick post today as I had a late night/early morning with my new ‘friend’ insomnia. I say ‘friend’, probably more accurately described as that one guest who won’t take the hint and just leave… Oh well, fingers crossed for a better night tonight ;o) In the meantime, I did get a little reading under my belt today; mostly while I was in the waiting room for a hospital appointment (which went ok, thanks). I am still plodding my way through ‘The End and the Death Part 2’ and decided to take a little time out for some horror, what with it being Halloween Week and all. I found Kit Reed’s ‘Chicken Soup’ nestled in the Ramsey Campbell edited ‘New Terrors 1’ collection; just where I remember it being all those years ago when I picked it up in the school library. If you can’t find a copy of ‘New Terrors 1’, your best shot at reading ‘Chicken Soup’ will be to track down a copy of Reeds collections, ‘Revenge of the Senior Citizens’ or ‘Weird Women, Wired Women’. Th...

  Page Count: Fourteen Pages, eight lines and two words (sorry, it has been one of those weeks) I was looking for something short and sweet, to end the week on, and came across ‘Dig Me No Grave’ courtesy of Paperback Warrior’s write-up . Having read it, I can attest to it being short (all of fourteen and a bit pages in ‘The Dead Remember’ collection) but sweet? Not at all and that is meant in the best possible way :o) ‘Dig Me No Grave’ was originally published in the February 1937 of ‘Weird Tales’ and while it has appeared in other collections since then, I read it in ‘The Dead Remember (The Dark Man Omnibus: Volume 2) and also found it in my copy of ‘The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard. If you’re an e-reading type, you can grab yourself ‘Dig Me No Grave’ over at Project Gutenberg. John Kirowan is woken, in the middle of the night, by his friend John Conrad, bearer of bad news and come to beg a favour. The occultist John Grimlan has just died and Conrad asks that Kirowan att...

‘The Stronger Spell’ was first published in the November 1953 edition of ‘Fantasy Fiction’ and also appeared as part of the ‘Tritonian Ring and Other Pusadian Tales’ collection, also published in 1953 (thanks for the save Wikipedia, appreciate it). I found it in my copy of ‘The Mighty Barbarians’ collection, a book that had been sat on my shelf (without being read) for far too long. Last night, I thought I’d finally do something about that and read something by L. Sprague de Camp that wasn’t a ‘Conan’ book… After ‘singer of sweet songs’ Suar Peial rescues the druid Gleokh from a murderous affray, the two celebrate the latter's deliverance in a local tavern. Gleokh holds forth on his revolutionary new weapon, an experimental gun, but by the end of the evening, Peial and his friends will learn that even the concept of a gun is dangerous; especially when they are sharing a tavern table with a wizard… ‘Tavern conversation’ isn’t something I normally look for in my fantasy reading but...

Page Count: 20 Pages A long read, then a short read then… I’m not thinking that far ahead, we’re halfway through the week and it feels like I’ve been through a week already ;o) Just a couple more days after this and it’s the weekend. Anyway, after spending the last couple of weeks in ‘The Fall of Cadia’, I needed my next read to be short and sweet but something I could get my teeth into, and chew on for a bit, at the same time. I had a feeling that ‘Human Resources’ was the read I was after so I gave it a read and… Set years before Service Model, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s all-too plausible short story navigates a world where humans are increasingly redundant. “Holring and Baselard value your contribution to our team” As one of the last non-robot employees at Holring and Baselard, Tim Stock retains a vital role in the human resources department: firing the multinational conglomerate’s remaining human workers. But the soul-crushing task eats away at Tim. As he watches the company replac...

Page Count: Six Pages I came across ‘Eight O’ Clock in the Morning’ in ‘The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction No.13’ (Edited by Avram Davidson); in fact, it’s the main reason I bought the book when I saw it in Greenwich Market. If you’re looking to read it yourself, you can find it Here or the November 1963 edition of ‘The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction’ (thanks Wikipedia!) Either works but clicking on the link might be quicker ;o) I came to ‘Eight O’ Clock in the Morning’ the long way round, taking a circuitous route via Stephen King’s ‘The Ten O’Clock People’ and a brief stop to (finally) watch ‘They Live’. I’d always had it in mind to give ‘Eight O’ Clock in the Morning’ a go though so like I said, when I saw it mentioned in the blurb, I had to grab the book before someone else did… At the end of the show the hypnotist told his subjects, “Awake.” Something unusual happened. One of the subjects awoke all the way. This had never happened before. His name was George Nada ...

Page Count: 27 Pages Amazon is jammed full of Black Library short stories but right now, I’m running out of ones that I’d be happy to pay £1.99 for so this will probably be the last one I buy for a while. I’ve got a few anthologies that will keep me going in the meantime. So it’s that time of the week, again, where everything catches up with me and my reading slows down to a crawl. Just one more day to the weekend though, we can do it :o) While we wait for Friday to sort itself out, lets have a little talk about my last read of the week… Dalchian Rassaq, the skin-taker, leads his Night Lords warband – the Blades of Atrocity – in a lightning raid on an Adeptus Mechanicus facility. Abandoned by their supposed allies, Rassaq must massacre his way out of the facility if he has any chance to exact revenge. Sometimes, you find yourself at the end of the week and all you’re after is a short, sharp burst of mayhem to get you through the day; like an espresso in book form ;o) If that’s what you...

Page Count: 20 Pages There is no escaping it… By the time you read this post, my week off will be well and truly over and I’ll be back at work; trying to make sense of a weeks worth of email. And just in case anyone is wondering, I’m counting time spent lying awake in bed, worrying that something went horribly wrong while I was away. My head is at work, even if the office isn’t open quite yet ;o) But anyway… I’m sure you’ll excuse me if today’s post is a short one, I’ve got more than a few things to get done today. While I’m working my way through those, you can have some quick thoughts on another slice of ‘Grimdark’ fiction from the war torn universe of the Horus Heresy. The series, as a whole, has ended now (just the one anthology to come) but as far as we’re concerned right now, the Warmaster’s shadow hangs heavy over Terra and the end-game is about to begin… Malcador the Sigillite is troubled. The war fleets of the traitor Horus approach, and war on the Throneworld is inevitable. B...

Page Count: 19 Pages I’ll be honest… I don’t play the Warhammer games (have never been able to get my head round the rules) so don’t know much of anything about the Blackstone Fortress game. I know that a Blackstone Fortress was crashed into Cadia but that’s it. I do know two things though :o) Robots are always cool, especially when one of their arms is a massive machine gun, and Guy Haley is a top tier writer for the Black Library. So when I saw the cover for ‘Man of Iron’, it didn’t take much for me to pick up a copy. I spent most of yesterday sat in my favourite chair watching movies (more on that another time) but I did find a little time to give ‘Man of Iron’ a shot. And... Of all the explorers in the Blackstone Fortress, the towering robot known only as UR-025 is perhaps the most mysterious… and dangerous. An automatous tool of Magos-Ethericus Nanctos III of Ryza, the machine's true reasons for joining the muster at Precipice and venturing inside the ancient alien labyrinth ...

Page Count: Eight Pages. After working my way through the last couple of hundred pages of ‘Into the Narrowdark’, my next read needed to be something completely different and a change of pace as well. You know where I’m coming from ;o) With that in mind then, I took the jump from epic fantasy, straight into a slice of science fiction that I hadn’t read in almost forty years… (Note to self: Stop thinking about how long it has been since you’ve read certain books, you’ll just upset yourself) Wikipedia very kindly let me know that Isaac Asimov’s short story ‘Flies’ first appeared in the June 1953 issue of ‘Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction’, eventually ending up as part of the Asimov collection ‘Nightfall and Other Stories’. And that’s where I first came across ‘Flies’, poring over the books on my Dad’s shelves. He was cool with me reading a little Asimov and while I got a few short stories under my belt, it was ‘Flies’ that stuck with me and the other day, I figured I was well overd...

Page Count: 28 Pages Yesterday was a day in the office so as ever, the journey home was just the right amount of time for reading a short story :o) ‘The Monkey’s Paw’ first appeared in ‘Harper’s Monthly’ way back in September 1902 ( much obliged Wikipedia ) and I came across it while having my lunchtime bagel yesterday. I was having a look at the plot for ‘The Monkey’ ( thanks again Wikipedia ) which led to the Stephen King story, of the same name , and finally, what looked like the root inspiration for those tales. I was intrigued and that was all it took for me to find myself a copy of ‘The Monkey’s Paw’ and give it a go myself. Mr. and Mrs. White are about to learn the price you must pay when you interfere with fate; a lesson they will learn courtesy of a withered monkey’s paw… ‘The Monkey’s Paw’ is a creepy tale that doesn’t hang around getting to the heart of the matter, a very effective exploration of human greed and what inevitably happens when this is set against fate, no matte...

Page Count: 19 Pages Life did its thing again, last night, and didn’t leave me a lot of time for reading; that’s the way life goes though and at least there was some good (hanging out with my eldest daughter) to offset the bad (after a drunk chap took a nasty fall outside the house, he’s ok now). So it was then that ‘These Deathless Bones’ was promoted from ‘todays commuting read’ to last nights ‘quiet time reading’. At only 19 pages. ‘These Deathless Bones’ was just the right length for what ended up being not a lot of quiet time. Oh well… ;o) The other reason I grabbed myself a copy of ‘These Deathless Bones’ was that I’d picked up a copy of ‘The Salt Grows Heavy’ and thought that a much shorter work would be a good way to get a feel for Khaw’s work before picking that book up. If ‘These Deathless Bones’ is anything to go by, I think I’m going to be in for a bit of a treat. All the King ever wanted was for his second wife to love her step-son but it is far easier to hate, especial...

Page Count – 20 Pages Apologies for the brief radio silence, life stepped in and demanded some attention… For what it’s worth, I didn’t read an awful lot over the last couple of days. I did make some decent inroads into ‘Into the Narrowdark’ but am still a good couple of hundred pages away from the finish line. Just a quick post today as ‘Down Amongst the Dead Men’ was a short and sweet read that I got into on the way to yesterday’s hospital appointment. That and the fact that I have my half-year review tomorrow morning, that’s taking up a lot of my brain right now :o( In the meantime then, On the nightmare world of Krieg, the elite Death Korps practise their killing arts against the only enemy they have available: those among the population unsuitable to join the regiments of the Imperial Guard. In the midst of a live-fire exercise, one of these human targets disobeys orders and follows the trail of a mysterious alien beast, one that could spell doom for all of Krieg if it is not s...

Page Count: 37 Pages After the disappointment of 'Starship Traveller', I fancied something completely different and it doesn't get a lot more different than a tale taken from the very first issue of 'Weird Tales' back in March 1923. That and I'd heard that 'Ooze' was an influence on 'The Blob', a favourite film of mine. And so it was settled, last night was all about 'Ooze'... Our narrator visits the ruins of a house in the swamp so that he can hopefully solve the mystery of the death of his friends so that their daughter (whom he has adopted) can know the truth when she is older. What he finds out though is far beyond anything that he ever expected to find... 'Ooze' takes its own sweet time to get going and given that the tale is only 37 pages long, that's a hell of a risk to take. I gave it a chance though and the approach does pay off to an extent, with Rud hiding revelations in plain sight and hopping back and forth, along...