Renting a lighthouse is unusual, but even more so is an unfriendly boy’s peculiar behavior.
You know what’s even more unusual? Traveling home from The Woodshed Mystery, seeing a lighthouse for sale on the side of the road and deciding that your grandfather should buy it. And knowing that he totally could1.
If I have a real name, I’ve never known it. I’m called Hellboy.
I recently discovered comiXology (mostly for reading Fullmetal Alchemist, Vol. 1). Hellboy was one of the comiXology Unlimited suggested reads. Free trial? Let’s do it.
Burn before reading.
A time travelling, spy versus spy, Romeo and Juliet-esqe love story with each of the two parts written by a different author (Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone) as they travel through time and space and parallel realities, each trying to bend history and reality to the whim of their handlers… all the while trying to hide their correspondence from the same.
If a satellite in space ever mapped the myriad of lone tracks and trails across Mongolia, it would resemble a plate of spaghetti dropped on the floor.
Haven’t we done this before? With the desert and Khans?
After 18 of these, they’re starting to sound awfully familiar. Basically, combine a bit of the Japanese influence from Dragon and a bit of the mysterious deaths on islands from Shock Wave and you have Black Wind. Doesn’t make it bad by any stretch of the imagination… just samey.
I think the crazies part of listening to this book was doing so while on lockdown from COVID-19. It’s not quite as bad as a weaponized smallpox by a long shot, but Cussler’s descriptions of the world shutting down, health facilities and morgues being overloaded was disturbingly prescient. Given that he passed in February, before the full extent of what was coming had really hit the United States, I wonder if he could have imagination it coming to life.
Did not finish at 60%
I’m not actually sure what it is about the books. The writing is fine–it’s overdone in a way that feels ‘Holmesy’ with a Cthulhian creepiness throughout –but I just can’t get it to stick. And then about halfway, suddenly we have a few chapters of a flashback from entirely another set of characters, which I actually enjoyed reading more. But that’s not the book I started to read.
The simple idea that people should be allowed to worship as they wished caused more suffering than the ten plagues of Egypt.
Four hundred years later… Sometimes things are better. And sometimes things feel like they’ll never change.
He smiled to himself at remembering what a reporter wrote about him, in one of the few times his feats had gained distinction. There is a touch of Dirk Pitt in every man whose soul yearns for adventure. And because he is Dirk Pitt, he yearns more than most.
So. Homer’s Odyssey was real. But they weren’t Greeks but rather Celts and they weren’t in the Mediterranean but rather in the Americas? Sure. The baddies are a cult of Celtic Druid superwomen, all hot as heck kickass redheads? Sure. The evil plot is to dig a giant tunnel to redirect the Atlantic Current and freeze Europe?
Well that’s one heck of an opening. A ship on fire! Trying to fit thousands on a ship normally crewed by dozens! Mysterious baddies! Action on the high seas! One of the things I like most about these series.
Get through all that and… rescue in a submarine! More adventure! And a rescue by Clive Cussler! He gives them a bit more direct help than sometimes, but it works. Plus you get a line like this:
You are far too stolid and unimaginative, Watson, to invent a tale like that.
Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows is a strange book. In a nutshell, Sherlock Holmes and The Call of Cthulhu are both in the public domain now, so author James Lovegrove essentially took them and mashed them into this unholy (yet at times awesome) abomination. In universe, these stories are told by Watson as ’the real story’, where all of the rest of the Sherlock Holmes mythos was fiction made up to hide the darker, Cthulhuian truths. They found their way from Watson to Lovecraft…