Every once in a while there's a glitch in the Ottawa Public Library's ebook system, and a book that should be expired and inaccessible on my ipad just... isn't. It just sticks around until I tap on it to delete and return. It's a happy little gift from the literary gods for which I am always grateful. This time it is a massive tome called
New Cthulhu: the Recent Weird, and if it hadn't gone all Overdrive Slipstream I never would have gotten through it on time since it weighs in at around 1100 digital pages.
As a fairly devoted horror fan, I'm not great at appreciating actual Lovecraft. Look, I relish tentacle porn and the unjudicious use of the word 'eldritch' as much as the next girl, but it's a little too on-the-nose for me - I just like my horror a tad more subtle. So it's probably not even technically
allowed that I love Lovecraft-inspired horror fiction as much as I do. But I do, and most of the stories in this sprawling, wide-ranging collection are delicious, inventive and engaging with sometimes just a whiff of tainted sea air or the merest glimpse of a beslimed sea creature, sometimes more. Also included was Norman Partridge's bleakly superb Lesser Demons, which I had just been thinking about the other day without being able to remember either the title or the author (so much fortuitousness here!). Truthfully, I feel like the editor would have had to squint a little to get that one into a Lovecraft-inspired anthology, but I'm good with it.
I'm a bad rereader, I think I've mentioned that. The TBR pile is ever-growing, and much of the lure of reading for me resides in the pleasure of discovery. That's not a really good or defensible thing, though, not entirely. It's often why I pass over literary fiction in favour or sci fi and fantasy or horror, and the truth is that, for me, moderation and variety works the best in reading as well as in diet.
Wait, that kind of doesn't work for where I'm going next. Sod it, I'll leave it there anyway. After my last tear through a bunch of library holds that came in all at once, I was becalmed once again, with no idea what to read next and nothing really pulling at me. I wanted a sure thing, and as I'm realizing more and more, when you've read a couple thousand books and your memory is worse all the time, there's nothing like a reread for a sure thing - not only do you know already know you loved it, you can't really remember exactly why! Or what precisely happened! Or when!
And that brings us to about the length that my blog barometer tells me I would start getting bored after, so I'll tell you about who I've been furiously rereading tomorrow.
