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Malcolm Lowry’s quasi-autobiographical masterpiece Under the Volcano has joined the swelling list of books I had to return to the library and check out again in order to finish, largely because I kept setting it aside in favor of other reading material that was more fun.
Under the Volcano haunted me for years before I read […]

Once upon a time (in the 1940s), Mssrs deCamp and Pratt teamed up to write a series of short novels about the magical misadventures of one Harold Shea. The tales had a proto-post-modern spin to them: Shea would get transported into myths and pre-copyright stories like Spenser’s Faerie Queene. The Shea stories have an absurdly […]

I’m not a big fan of movies that rely on “twist” endings. I think the value of surprise as an artistic technique is easily overrated. If it’s not a good movie if you know the ending, it’s just not a good movie, period.
But on the other hand, it can be really rewarding to see a […]

Jack Vance’s fiction and (mostly ’50s) pulp art