An ongoing feature on this site, provided there is interest, will be a collection of stand-out media. I read a lot across a lot of mediums and topics, and I tend to watch somewhat obscure films and shows. This recommendation series will feature collections of some old and new (to me) standouts.

The Thief, by Fuminori Nakamura

Some have taken to calling Fuminori Nakamura a Japanese Dostoevsky. There are certainly grounds for such a comparison. I’ve long thought that Dostoevsky was, perhaps, one of the first noir writers. And Nakamura certainly writes noir, but his work is decidedly philosophical. While it doesn’t — at least in translation — have quite the surgical depth that Dostoevsky has, it is nonetheless extremely insightful. The Thief was the book that put him on the (international) map, but he has written several celebrated novels before and since, including Last Winter, We Parted.

The Thief takes the reader along the somewhat bleak and aimless path of its eponymous pickpocket. Forced to participate in a home burglary, the thief finds himself at the center of a strange storm of circumstances that force him to reflect on his own moral and social choices. A likable character thrust into terrible situations, Nakamura’s thief is a worthy and capable narrator for a simple, but thought-provoking narrative.

Xeethra by Clark Ashton Smith

I adore Clark Ashton Smith, possibly more even than Lovecraft. Where Lovecraft usually grounded his stories in some variation on the real world, Smith almost always wrote entirely within fantastical settings. Each story is a brief glimpse into an entirely realized world and civilization. Some settings are granted more than one story, some are loosely connected across the millennia of a civilization’s lifespan. And some stories offer only the briefest flash of a brilliant, fascinating world.

Xeethra is part of Smith’s Zothique stories, which are set on a mysterious future continent. Zothique is, to those who keep track of these things, loosely but officially connected to the wider Cthulhu mythos. None of which is strictly necessary to enjoy these stories.

A humble little tale, Xeethra takes us on a dreamlike adventure on the shoulders of the shepherd boy Xeethra, who trespasses in a mythical, god-like realm and steals a bite of forbidden fruit. The gods who guard this garden then place upon him a blessing and a curse, fating him to roam Zothique in search of a vanished city.

No Longer Human, by Osamu Dazai

I only recently found this book on a list of required Japanese novels. Dazai is a writer of the type I like to call “observers”. Another example would be Salinger, and even early aughts-era Chuck Palahniuk (with Fight Club). His observations of Japan’s changing landscape in the early parts of the twentieth century represent some of the most compelling human examinations ever put to paper. Brutally honest, painfully insightful, and more than a little disquieting, Dazai’s semi-autobiographical novel is both beautiful and heartbreaking to read.

*Note: The edition I read — the New Directions edition pictured above — was translated by Donald Keene. I read a few pages of a few different translations, and this one was by far the most pleasing.

I Was a Stranger, by John Hackett

Taking place primarily in winter, this beautiful WWII memoir follows General Sir John Hackett of the British Air Force after he was grievously wounded by a mortar round and surrendered to the Germans for medical treatment. After miraculously surviving stomach surgery in terrible conditions, a network of daring spies then smuggled him out of the occupied hospital and stashed him in the house of four matronly sisters in occupied Holland. What follows is an engaging and charming (and often thrilling) tale of human kindness.

Bookshop.org does not carry this book, but Slightly Foxed sells a beautiful cloth bound edition.

One Day In the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The first time I read this book it was a particularly bitter February when several feet of snow had fallen over the course of a long, stormy week. The days were dim and gray and the nights were long, thick as tar, and viciously cold. I finished it while leaning over the stove for warmth, dipping bites of soft bread into a bowl of hearty chicken soup. I highly recommend reproducing these exact circumstances.

This book and the subtle lessons it conveyed have been vividly imprinted in my mind in a way that is inextricably linked with the cold darkness of midwinter.

This is also an excellent entry-point into Solzhenitsyn, for those who might be understandably a little intimidated by his more… intimidating work.

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

One of those books that grew to be larger than it really is. One could say that House of Leaves is bigger outside its covers than it is inside. An excellent book told in a very engaging way, despite the endless, looping paths of narrative. I know it has a wildly overblown cult following, but it really is very good. It isn’t the typographic oddities that make it great, either. But rather the Borgesian stories-within-stories. The typographic fun is novel, but not very interesting. It’s the story itself that makes this book shine.

A young tattoo artist is gifted a manuscript and a trunk full of notes by a friend upon his death. The manuscript is the increasingly mad academic analysis of an infamous documentary made by a filmmaker. This film was originally begun to document the maker’s move into a new house with his family, until he realizes that the house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. When he discovers a path into the house’s “interior”, things really start to get interesting.

This storylines echo across each other. Navidson (the documentarian) makes discoveries that impact the lives of both Zampano (the dead manuscript author) and Johnny Truant (the tattoo artist). Time and reality slowly collapse around the three until all the remains is The House.

A wonderful, isolating novel that feels most at home in dark winter nights. Pair with a shot of something strong to really get the whole effect.

Hell Screen, by Akutagawa Ryunosuke

An absolute gem from the east, Akutagawa Ryunosuke (or in the western fashion, Ryunosuke Akutagawa) had a Borgesian flare to him that was nevertheless particularly Japanese. This short story, Hell Screen, recalls to mind the stories of Borges, Lovecraft, and others of the Weird tradition who would relate stories as if explaining a real and factual historical matter. In this case, the painting of an infamous screen depicting the horrors of Hell. The descriptions of this screen are reminiscent of the Hell panel in Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, but, again, particularly Japanese. And the story of how it came to be includes a chilling examination of obsessive human nature.

Everything I’ve read of Akutagawa has delighted me. If you can possibly get your hands on the edition I have pictured above, you will also be fortunate enough to read the wonderful forward by Jorge Luis Borges himself in which he provides the keenest possible observations on the meeting of East and West, particularly for Akutagawa himself.

If you can’t find that particular edition, you can read the forward here at archive.org.

Others:

• The Brothers Karamazov, by Dostoevsky

  Or anything by Dostoevsky

  (The Russians are to be read in winter. I don’t make the rules.)

• Invisible Allies, by Solzhenitsyn

  Each chapter of this lovely volume is devoted to one of the many people who helped Solzhenitsyn during his life, from the woman who transcribed his books, to the many people who kept him hidden. Published only after their safety was no longer a question, this beautiful book is a grateful and loving writer’s tribute to the cast of nameless, faceless people who helped him throughout his trying life.

• Endurance, by Alfred Lansing

  (A ship stuck in the ice…)

• And in the spirit of Shackleton, why not try Oddsfish! by Robert Hugh Benson

  This is one of the books that Shackleton had in his personal library, the contents of which he lent to his crew to keep their minds from agitation.

• I spoke recently of The Aviator, by Eugene Vodolazkin. This is a lovely time to read him as well. The Aviator is a spiritual relative of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, as both involve the Russian condition, as well as insightful observations regarding Stalinist Russia.

• If you’re looking for titles for younger readers, The Winged Watchman by Hilda van Stockum, about a group of children who rescue a wounded RAF pilot in occupied Holland during World War II, hiding him in a windmill, is a wonderful book for young people.

Articles and Essays

• I Used to Know How to Write in Japanese

  A fascinating personal examination by the author of his own decaying ability to write kanji, the Japanese script made up of logographic characters (like Chinese). The purpose of the essay was to explore the strange disconnect between being able to read Japanese and yet being unable to remember how to write it, not an uncommon phenomenon in logographic languages in our technologically-reliant age.

  I’m not alone in this “character amnesia,” either. Whenever I tell a Japanese native about my lost ability, they all readily admit to having forgotten how to write many kanji, too. Apparently, this is a well-known phenomenon in Japan and in China. There is even a term for it, wahpro baka (ワープロ馬鹿), meaning “word-processor idiot”…

  He doesn’t really get into the tech-reliance aspect of this, but focuses on the neurological, which is fascinating in itself.
  

• Eugene Vodolazkin’s "The New Middle Ages"

  The author of one of my favorite novels of all time (Laurus) has a way of speaking on Medieval matters with both clarity and almost childlike optimism. Taking the modern age’s woes and anxieties regarding authorship and the future of literature, he places them in a wholly unique context, comparing the emerging, modern thought on authorship to medieval ideas.
  Some readers might (with good reason) bristle at the idea of “the death of the author”, but as always, Vodolazkin gently urges the reader to look at things from a different perspective. Elsewhere he has written on the false modern notion of constant progress, and on civilization’s more cyclical nature. If that is true than we find ourselves entering a new Middle Ages, though that might not quite mean what a person would expect. Nevertheless, perhaps that isn’t all bad. There are, after all, certain things about medieval thought and writing which might benefit the modern mind.

  “Nikolai Berdyaev divides epochs into days and nights. Days include antiquity and the modern age. They’re colorful and magnificent, and they go down in history as moments of explosive display. The night epochs—such as the Middle Ages—are outwardly muted but profounder than those of the day. It is during the sleep of night that what has been perceived during the day can be assimilated. A night epoch allows for insight into the essence of things and for concentrating strength. We are now entering such a time.”

  All in all, a wonderfully thought-provoking read.

• “The Animalization of Otaku Culture” by Hiroki Azuma

  A fascinating examination of otaku culture by a Japanese philosopher who has been making some waves for his analysis of modern society (especially that which is involved in the telling of stories). He expounds on his notion of “databasification” of culture, which might be the single most apt description of what has become of culture in recent years. A brief and easily digestible read, absolutely worth your time.

  “The Era of Ideals/Modernity formed a structure in which a grand narrative/ideal controlled the diverse small narratives throughout the world. Consequently, cultural criticism and social criticism consisted in analyzing grand narratives as reflected within the various small narratives (works of art and literature). In the postmodern, however, grand narratives have collapsed. What is emerging in their place is a new model that might be called ‘grand database.’”

• “Scenes of a Russian Winter” by William Jay Smith

  An absolutely delightful account of the author’s stay in Soviet Russia in the early 80s when he was a visiting professor. His observations are related with the elegance of a poet and are by turns somber, bizarre, frightening (just slightly), and charming. It is, of course, the people who are written of with the gentlest and fondest remembrance.

  “The Writers’ Union oddly enough seemed the right place for a display of medals. On the staircase leading up to the auditorium there, one was reminded of their importance. On the first landing were displayed row after row of photographs of lesser-known writers wearing here and there only an occasional medal. On the second landing were the better-known writers, many of them much decorated. On the third and highest level were displayed the military writers, their chests festooned with decorations. Could it be that the surest way to literary success in this strange country was to join the Soviet Army?”

• “The Murder of Leo Tolstoy” by Elif Batuman

  A strange and wonderful essay written to describe the author’s stay at Tolstoy’s house during a conference of writers specializing in the man himself. Batuman had received a grant to attend the International Tolstoy Conference by presenting her hypothesis that Tolstoy had, in fact, been murdered. Though an earnest investigation was indeed carried out, the majority of this essay is centered on the colorful cast of characters encountered in the home of the literary legend.

  I enjoyed this essay tremendously. Beautifully written and with a great deal of information about Tolstoy’s later years delivered in digestible bites in between passages describing Batuman’s investigation and her observations regarding the other writers at the conference.

What I’m Currently Reading (help)

• Life for Sale and The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea, by Yukio Mishima

• The Double, by Fyodor Dostoevsky

• Cult X, by Fuminori Nakamura

• A Man of Heart, by Liam Guillar

• Technological Slavery, by Theodore John Kaczyinski (yes, that Ted Kaczyinski)

• Cancer Ward, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

(The above quote is taken from the wonderful epic poem by Liam Guilar, which I highly recommend. A sweeping overview of ancient English mythology told like a slightly modernized epic, medieval poem. Chapter four, in which the captain encounters The Red Queen, is my favorite.)

All book recommendations are above the cut. If you’re a paid member, you’ll be able to see the bonus film and television recommendations below the paywall. I hope you can find something you’ll enjoy!

I. Books (etc.)

• The Fisherman by John Langan
  A personal favorite of mine. Partly a traditional horror novel and partly an epistolary novel in the tradition of Lovecraft, Blackwood, et al. Absolutely wonderful. It’s better if you go into it knowing nothing.

• Adam Nevill
  While he used to be an excellent horror writer, Adam Nevill’s most recent work is not up to his original standards (in my opinion). However, many of his older novels are exceptional. Part of the reason he’s so good is his ability to dig into the psychology of horror’s effects on the mind. We experience every second of the narrative from a uniquely introspective view. And the clarity with which he writes these inner elements is part of the reason I used to read him so religiously (especially in October). The following are my two favorites of his:

  

  • Under a Watchful Eye
    This one is a surreal, psychological story with careful hints of the supernatural. The best psychological story Nevill ever wrote, in my opinion. As the main character’s peace is chipped away one splinter at a time, we experience each agonizing scratch. This one is also a little hard to describe without giving too much away. It follows a man living in a coastal house whose life is upended when a figure from his past returns...

  • Last Days
    My actual favorite. I love the idea of dangerous investigations and lost cults, there’s something very Weird (capital W) there and it always draws me in. But, again, Nevill’s grip on the psychology of his main character is incredibly engrossing.

• Robert Aickman
  A hidden gem almost left to gather dust in the out-of-print tragedy pile. Aickman is widely considered a master of the atmospheric short story and his handsome, recently reprinted collections are worth picking up. These are the four I own and my favorite stories from each:

  

  • Dark Entries offers “Ringing the Changes” and “The View”

  • The Wine-Dark Sea offers “Your Tiny Hand is Frozen” and “The Inner Room”

  • Cold Hand in Mine, one of Aickman’s most famous collections, offers to the stout of heart “Pages from a Young Girl’s Journal” and also “The Clock Watcher”

  • I have only started to read The Unsettled Dust. Though the titles are very alluring.

  

• Eaters of the Dead by Michael Crichton
  Another all-time favorite. Written by the author of Jurassic Park, this slim novel is constructed as if it was nothing more than a translation of a very old manuscript. “Written by” a young ambassador from an Arab court who finds himself accompanying a Beowulf-esque figure and his band of warriors as they take on an unspeakable evil that is terrorizing the north. This book combines my love for history and atmospheric horror (and fantasy) into one wonderful novel.
  As an aside, the 2000 film The 13th Warrior that is based on this book is also absolutely wonderful.

  

• Red Dragon by Thomas Harris
  My favorite of the Hannibal Lector books (that I’ve read). I vastly preferred Will Graham to Clarice Starling. This was a moody, interesting, readable book.

  

• Night Film by Marisha Pessl
  One of the only modern novels I’ve read that I really enjoyed. A strange, ominous, odd, dangerous story that follows a washed-up reporter looking into a young woman’s recent suicide. The young woman in question happened to be the only daughter of a reclusive, legendary filmmaker (think: David Lynch meets Francis Ford Coppola). What follows is a strange, dreamlike foray into an alien world of poisoned otherness that lurks just beneath the glossy veneer of beautiful Hollywood.

  

• 14 by Peter Clines
  I got this book based on a friend’s recommendation that it “reminded him of The Lost Room”, which was high praise indeed. Turns out, he wasn’t really wrong.
  Like most Weird horror, 14 is better if you know very little. The simple synopsis is that it follows a guy stuck in a dead-end job, with scant funds, as he moves into an odd apartment building as the new handyman.
  The occupants are a motley bunch, but likable. It’s the building itself that defies logic. That, and the mysteriously boarded and locked apartment 14. This isn’t a mere haunted apartment building, this is something else entirely…
  There are three things that set this book apart from other simple popcorn books:
  First, the characters. This is a group of truly likable people who are all different and all have their own issues and weaknesses. But when the, uh, defecation hits the oscillation, some of these people really did shine.
  Second, the story. Clines really did have fun with this one. It was such an out-there concept with every turn bringing something else unexpected. Every chapter was a joy.
  Third, the writing. Clines is not Hemingway, nor does he try to be. This was the first novel I read where I experienced this wonderful sensation: the words disappeared. At some point I realized that I was no longer reading the book in my head, but the scenes were playing out like a little movie. His prose disappears so completely that the mind can effortlessly see the pictures he’s painting with it. It’s perfect for a book like this.
  p.s. The Fold is this book’s sequel, somewhat. To avoid spoilers, I suggest you don’t read the synopsis of that book before you read 14. That one is pretty good, too. But 14 is my favorite.

  

• Darkness on the Edge of Town by Brian Keene

  Like 14 this unassuming book is greater than the sum of its parts. An epistolary novel that relates, from the perspective of a Regular Guy, all that comes to pass after the small town of Walden, Virginia is completely cut off from the entire rest of the whole world by a thick, inky, total blackness. Aside from the panic and confusion, the story does a remarkable job charting very interesting and believable character arcs in the midst of these horrible times which are at once realistic and not at all bleak. Some people are reduced to their worst selves, some remain constant, and some find it in them to become better. This one is unavailable on Bookshop.com, for some reason. The link above takes you to the author’s site where you can choose how to buy the book.
  (The prose of this novel isn’t really anything to write home about, but the storytelling is outstanding. Personally, I love both epistolary novels and stories that follow dangerous, possibly supernatural exploration. So this book was very fun for me, while also being a pleasant surprise.)

  

• Penpal by Dathan Auerbach
  This incredible, unsettling story began as a creepypasta by 1000vultures and quickly grew into one of the most legendary stories in the history of nosleep. That was how I originally read it.
  The story follows a young man who has begun to remember a series of strange events from his childhood that involved, among other things, a mysterious and increasingly predatory penpal. This story has to be experienced as blindly as it was originally posted; it’s better to know as little as possible before you read.

• Search and Rescue Woods
  Not a book, per se, this multi-part nosleep post is my all-time favorite creepypasta. Incredibly well-told stories, incredibly well-written. One of those creepypastas that might just be partly true. It presents itself as a collection of stories related by an anonymous person who works search and rescue for the US Forest Service. These stories generally revolve around strange things that happened when search parties went looking for missing hikers and campers. Outstanding late-night reading.

• Honorable Mentions:

  • I love a lot of Lovecraft, but a favorite of mine is At the Mountains of Madness

  • The Borges stories The Immortal and Ibn-Hakam al-Bokhari, Murdered in His Labyrinth, both from The Aleph are two I could recommend for this time of year. But as far as I’m concerned, there are no bad Borges stories.

  • The Lottery by Shirley Jackson

  • The Willows by Algernon Blackwood
    A masterpiece of atmosphere and elegant description, this longer short story tells a simple tale with such stunning beauty that it will always be my favorite Blackwood. Bonus: the finest description of the Danube ever put to paper (probably)

  • Ted the Caver

Note: All book recommendations, as I said, are featured above. Below the paywall are movie and series recommendations only.

II. Films and Television

• The Ritual, 2017
  Based on a novel by Adam Nevill, this is one the last great Netflix horror films. Exceedingly, almost oppressively, atmospheric, it follows a group of regular guys who are going on a walking holiday through the northern woods in remembrance of their friend who died some months earlier. While out in the frigid, unwelcoming woods, they come to realize that they are being hunted by something ancient and nameless. And it will test them in every possible way.

  

• The 13th Warrior, 1999

  One of my all time favorite movies. It is a loose, imaginative retelling of Beowulf in which a (semi) banished poet from an Arab court finds himself compelled by prophecy to join a group of Norsemen who have been asked to help a northern king rid his lands of some great, unnameable foe. Along the way our soft, snobby Arab finds himself irrevocably changed by his circumstances and the influence of the rough, noble warriors he is lucky enough to call friends.

  

• Outlander, 2008

  I will fight to the death anyone who doesn’t like this movie. Yet another Beowulf reimagining, and just as original as the above. However this one absolutely kills the execution.
  Jim Caviezel (a favorite actor of mine since I saw Frequency when I was younger) plays a man from a distant human civilization from another planet whose entire outpost was devastated by a fierce and terrible monster. Crash landing on earth in our ancient times, he accidentally brings the monster with him. And now it’s laying waste to the Norse villages. Compelled by a strong sense of duty and guilt, he sets out to hunt and kill the monster, but first he’ll need to earn the trust of the northmen, who are already at war with each other.
  Sure, aspects of this story aren’t historically accurate. But it’s an incredible story and very well told.

  

• The Lost Room, 2006

  One of my favorite American television productions of all time. This simple miniseries told such a wonderfully unique story so well that it immediately became a cult classic.
  When a homicide detective finds himself in possession of a mysterious motel key that “opens every door”, he also finds himself hunted by those who would do anything to get the key for themselves. What begins as a curiosity becomes a desperate obsession when his daughter (tiny Elle Fanning) becomes lost in the “the room”, the strange non-existent motel room accessed only by the key. He soon learns that the motel key is just one of many seemingly ordinary “objects” each of which has strange power. Cults worship them, others devote their lives to destroying them. But one thing is for certain: one of these objects has the power to bring his daughter back.
  Aside from being an incredibly good story, The Lost Room is a clinic in worldbuilding. Some of the most inventive and deftly handled worldbuilding I’ve ever seen.

  

• The Endless, 2017

  Moorhead and Benson’s masterpiece, and the film that put them on the map. Everything they’ve made since pales in comparison. The Endless is an enormously original film executed with genius-level perfection.
  The story follows two brothers who are invited to return to the cult that raised them before the rest of the cult members “leave”. While there, they begin to unravel the mind-bending secrets of the mountain, as well as their own strained relationship.
  Perfect storytelling in addition to outstanding characters and beautiful character development. This one is a high I’ll chase forever.

  

• The Mothman Prophecies, 2002

  Very, very early-aughts in feel, for anyone who’s been craving that in a movie. I’m a huge fan of John Keel (who wrote the original book on which this movie is somewhat, loosely, a little bit based), and his theories about ultradimensional beings. That is, I’m a proponent of the theory that Mothman is not a cryptid, but a being from another dimension.
  Anyway, this movie is one of Richard Gere’s best. Laura Linney also helped elevate it from a simple autumn popcorn movie to something with style and substance. It follows a highly respected Washington D.C. political journalist (Gere) recovering from a devastating loss as he drives out of state to interview a governor. Somehow he ends up hundreds of miles off course in the tiny, sleepy town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia… which is being plagued by strange visions of a freakishly tall figure with glowing red eyes, as well as strange phone calls and other inexplicable occurrences. The reporter decides to stay in West Virginia in an effort to figure out what’s happening. What follows is a deeply atmospheric story with strange, mind-bending twists and turns.
  

  

• Cure (Japanese) 1997

  Imagine if David Lynch had been Japanese and made a film that had a more concrete plot and narrative. That’s Cure. Difficult to describe, strange to experience, but certainly stays with you.
  A troubled detective whose wife is experiencing some kind of early onset dementia finds himself up to his eyeballs in murder victims that follow a bizarre, nonsensical pattern. As his investigation draws nearer to the culprit, the truth about what’s really happening gets more and more unclear.
  This one needs a couple watches. But it actually delivers (unlike some Lynch).

  

• House of the Disappeared (South Korea) 2017

  You might recognize the leading lady here as Kim Yunjin (or Yoon Jin) from Lost. She is the jewel in this film; her performance elevated this straightforward ghost story into something very memorable.

  Having served most of a life sentence for the murder of her husband and child, an aged woman dying of cancer is released from prison to live out the remainder of her days in her family’s old home. While she admitted to killing her husband, she has always maintained that not only did she not kill her son, but that he’s still alive.
  When she arrives home, the house immediately greets her with a flurry of inexplicable activity. As if to torture her, it forces her to relive the horrible events that led up to that terrible night all those years ago. But with the help of a young, local priest, there just might be a way to finally find out what happened to her son.

  

• Rampant (South Korea) 2018

  Listen, we all got tired of zombie movies eventually. But Rampant, which came out somewhere near the end of the trend’s lifespan, is one of the best entries. Hyun Bin, a noted Korean action star, carries this movie through a story that could have been a b-movie, but instead managed to be an excellent blockbuster with a lot of heart and substance.
  The carefree son of the Joseon king returns from his (very pleasant) time as a royal hostage in the Qing court to find his country strangely empty. That is, until the hordes of zombies begin to attack. He then has to team up with a ragtag group of survivors to try to fight his way back to the king’s palace. However, the king’s court is dealing with just as many threats from within…

  
  

  

• Sleep (South Korea) 2023
  So. Good. This one came out a little while after the leading actor’s scandal and then suicide, which, I think, prevented it from spreading as it should have.
  The story is simple: a husband begins to develop very alarming sleepwalking habits. What begins as something slightly odd very quickly escalates to all-consuming terror. His pregnant wife becomes convinced that some supernatural force has taken over him. Her investigation leads to even more disturbing discoveries in their apartment building.
  He remains convinced, however, that the only thing plaguing him is a rare and terrible sleep disorder. Their disagreement creates a strain that worsens the situation.
  As his night behavior becomes more and more violent and bizarre, they know that something must be done. But is the problem medical? or supernatural?
  The psychological understory here is what makes this film sing. Exceptional performances from both leads, especially in the insane climax, push it over the edge. A very, very good film.

  
  

  

• The Closet (South Korea) 2020
  After the death of his wife in a car accident, a workaholic architect moves with his traumatized young daughter into a remote country house. This doesn’t help matters, however, as his relationship with his daughter only gets worse. Until one day, she goes into her bedroom closet… and never comes out.
  What begins as a search that captures the attention of the country quickly devolves into tabloid accusations against the father. With nowhere left to turn, he reluctantly accepts the help of an odd young shaman who insists that this very thing has happened many times before. What’s more, he has spent years trying to find these missing children, and stop the powerful force that keeps taking them. The father will have to find a way to work with him if he wants to find his daughter before she’s gone forever.
  Besides being a very good story, this one shines in its characters. From the quirky shaman to the cold, flawed father, the characters elevate this film a great deal. Individual development, wonderful chemistry, and wonderfully rich storytelling all come together to make a film that is greater than the sum of its parts.

  
  

  

• The Grotesque Mansion (South Korea) 2021
  I typically do not like anthology movies. I prefer a single, continuous story. This one, however, manages to be both. Known by many English names, including The Haunted Apartment and The Ghost Mansion, this film felt like a collection of short stories written by Lovecraft and Aickman, all of which came together to tell a larger, overarching story.
  A struggling webtoon writer decides to interview the manager of a rundown old apartment building where many have reported strange occurrences. Each story unfolds as related by the manager to the writer. And all the stories are connected to the central mystery of the building. I think it’s best to know nothing going in. The stories themselves are very good and unique, and the connecting larger story certainly doesn’t disappoint. I usually rewatch this one every October.

  • (Note: they attempted a sequel, The Grotesque Station, but it is — let me tell you — abysmally bad. All except for one of the stories, about a homeless man who finds a very strange vending machine…)
    

    

• Svaha: The Sixth Finger (South Korea) 2019
  A personal favorite. A cynical but devoted priest (Squid Game’s Lee Jung-jae) makes his living exposing predatory cults posing as real branches of their religions. Hired by a Buddhist friend to look into a strange Buddhist cult that’s gaining popularity, he finds himself thrust into a maelstrom of human greed, supernatural evil, and the ominous power of fulfilled prophecies.
  A very unsettling film that tells a horror story in an unusual way. Following at least three plot threads, the relevance of all the pieces doesn’t become clear until the final horrible revelation.

• Honorable Mentions:

  • As Above, So Below (America) 2014

  • Hellhouse LLC (America) 2015

  • Noroi: The Curse (Japan) 2005

  • Bestseller (South Korea) 2010

  • Stay, (America) 2005

  • The Empty Man, (America) 2020
    Another favorite. Very Weird, very good. Incredible fifteen minute prologue.

Giorgio de Maria’s The Twenty Days of Turin is, I am told, something of a cult classic in its native Italy. Set in Turin, naturally, it managed to capture the unique city just as it was emerging from the second world war and slipping gruffly into a period of social and political unrest. There is a subtle undercurrent of both relief and tension that weaves through the story in a way I have found to be not uncommon in post-WWII European literature. But, interestingly, these co-threads of relaxation and tension are also, I would say, prevalent in our own modern society.

While de Maria’s timely contribution to the literature of his age is certainly worth noting, what places this book among the prophetic are his extraordinary, almost point-for-point predictions regarding the impending arrival — and devastating consequences — of social media. There is an argument to be made for placing The Twenty Days of Turin on the same shelf as Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm and Huxley’s Brave New World.

Of course, Giorgio de Maria in 1977 could not have foreseen the particulars of the personal computer nor the shape and functionality of the smartphone. But these are incidentals. The core of the thing — the nature of social media itself — was something he saw clearly enough to be able predict everything about it except the specific technology by which it would be implemented. Indeed, it is as though someone from 2025 traveled back to 1977 and, over an espresso in the Piazza San Carlo in the shadow of the bronze horse and his noble rider, he explained in terms a Torinese from the 70s could understand how Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram worked. And Giorgio de Maria, so disturbed, turned the time traveler’s terrible revelation into a work of horror.

The story is simple, though wonderfully Borgesian. It follows a nameless salaryman who, in his free time, is researching a bizarre event that occurred ten years ago called “The Twenty Days of Turin”. He hopes to write a book about the occurrence and so has been going about the city in an effort to collect sources and witnesses who might be willing to talk to him.

I. “The Library”

It doesn’t take very long for the reader to pick up on the repeated and significant mentions of “the Library”. According to every witness — and even our narrator’s understanding — the Library stands somehow at the center of everything that happened. Indeed, after the twenty days’ events had ended the Library had been destroyed. There is even the vague implication that the events might have ended… because the Library had been destroyed.

In the book’s third chapter the reader is finally introduced to the Library. Our investigator-protagonist is granted special permission to view its charred remains by the city’s mayor. Through him we learn how the Library came to be:

Dapper young men — origins unknown — who were very polite, very smartly dressed, very affable, and very tuned-in to the major issues in the world went door to door in the city in pairs of two.

“[The Library] was presented as a good cause, created in the hope of encouraging people to be more open with one another. Its creators were little more than boys: perky, smiling youngsters, well groomed and well dressed, without a trace of facial hair. They looked designed to win people’s trust […] It’s true; it was whispered that dark forces acted behind them…”

They introduced to the citizens of Turin a novel new concept: a “library”, but one that was filled not with the “artifice of literature” but rather:

“‘We’re looking for true, authentic documents reflecting the real spirit of the people, the kinds of things we would rightly call popular subjects…’” (emphasis in the original)

The Library worked like this: regular people — anyone, really — could contribute a “manuscript”. This could be anything: some offered old photos, some offered books of poetry or recipes, some dug out diaries from their youth. Most often, however, Library users simply wrote something which they intended specifically for inclusion in the Library. Almost all of these contributions were confessional in nature.

Upon approval these manuscripts were then shelved in the Library under a kind of code name. Anyone could enter the Library, browse these manuscripts, read whatever he or she liked, and then, if desired, inquire at the front desk for the contact information of the author of a given title. The Library clerks would then put the reader and the writer into contact with one another creating, they claimed, friendship connections.

It should be noted, all of this cost the users a small fee. There was a small fee for having one’s manuscript included in the Library, a small fee for admittance, and a small fee for obtaining a writer’s contact information. The money, users were told, was intended for charitable purposes, specifically for the care of patients at the insane asylum in whose basement the Library was being housed.

(Yes. The original Library was located in a sanatorium’s basement.)

Anyone who lives in our social media-infested world does not need to be told just how infectiously popular this Library became.

“The pen could scribble freely whatever the spirit dictated. And once it started, it was hard to stop!”

Countless contributors emerged almost overnight. The idea of being read, of being seen was so tantalizing to every person in Turin that even the least literarily inclined began to dredge up their deepest, most personal selves in order to fill a manuscript that could be placed upon the shelves of the Library. Because having one’s manuscript on the shelves of the Library meant that someone might read it. And if someone read it, they might then reach out…

“The prospect of ‘being read’ quivered in the distance like an enchanting mirage— a mirage as real, nonetheless, as the ‘realities’ that were written down. I will give myself to you, you will give yourself to me…” (emphasis in the original)

There weren’t many of these manuscripts left for our investigating narrator to read. He found one in which a middle-aged woman detailed at great length certain medical difficulties she had encountered in recent years. One described the daily life of a very ordinary, respected man who had developed an obsessive habit of writing absolute nonsense on hundreds of papers scattered throughout his house, all of which he kept cataloged with his photographic memory. If even one paper was moved, he would fly into hysterics. One slightly more disturbing manuscript had been written by a seventy-year-old man expressing his infatuation with a local eighteen-year-old girl. His writing detailed the various services he wished to offer her, if she was willing.

“The range was infinite: it had the variety and at the same time the wretchedness of things that can’t find harmony with Creation, but which still exist and need someone to observe them, if only to recognize that it was another like himself who’d created them.”

In the course of his investigation, our narrator began to notice an overlapping theme. Towards the end of most of the manuscripts — which had begun with the energizing enthusiasm of connecting with another person — the writer began to describe a growing feeling of hollowness. Many even began to use the same motif: a dried up lake which haunted their restless dreams.

The pattern of hollowing stood at the center of the so-called Twenty Days. As more and more users made repeated contributions to the Library — in an effort to staunch the spiritual bleeding, so to speak — this hollowed, emptied feeling only worsened. In time the hollowness gave way to fitful insomnia. Before long nearly the entirety of the city of Turin was plagued with an epidemic of insomnia. Soon thereafter insomnia became a kind of somnambulism. People from all across the city would climb into bed every night, toss and turn for a time, and then — almost as a coordinated mass — get up and file calmly into the streets in great, silent crowds.

For twenty days this continued. And almost every night some mysterious force would brutally murder two or three of these sleepwalkers, usually by bludgeoning them to death. The identity of this murderous force is the central mystery of the novel, so I won’t give it away here.

II. The Psychosis

Our narrator spent most of the middle of the story trying to escape the spiritual and psychological event horizon of the Library. Even with his investigation limited to the periphery, it still seemed to have infected his mind with a hint of that hollowing depression and insomnia. He began to rely on sleeping pills; even still his dreaming mind was beset by images of a dried lake…

It didn’t take long for his investigation to reveal that the Library had re-emerged — if it had ever been gone at all. Its existence was less organized now; it had abandoned even the facade of order and dignity. Gone were the tidy shelves and the helpful clerks, there were no cataloging systems and certainly no payments made for friend connections. Contributors literally left their manuscripts in the trash, or sometimes in the gutter, or under a bush. Other users were easy to spot: they were the ones rifling through trash cans like vagrants, but with a certain look in their eyes.

At one point our increasingly disturbed protagonist became victim to obsessive, random correspondence from an anonymous individual. Eventually, for reasons having to do mainly with his own growing sense of isolation and despair in the midst of his investigation, and against his better judgment, he replied to the strange letters. He viewed this act as adjacent, somehow, to using the Library, and immediately regretted it, yet continued the correspondence. For weeks he received letter after letter from this bizarre individual detailing his Kafka-esque living arrangements in a way that was equal parts polite and threatening. Our protagonist’s only friend in the city had an interesting observation to make about this distressing pen pal:

“I think [the letters] might’ve been a lure, an attempt to snare your subconscious mind and reduce it to passivity. Whoever wrote them knew his addressee very well, weaknesses and all… Too many things about us are already on record.”

After attempting to cut off communication, he received yet another letter via his displeased boss. This he crumpled and threw into a trash can on the street, aware as he did so that this would be taken as a contribution to the new iteration of the Library. Indeed, picking up some random bit of written trash and then tossing it into another trash can served almost the exact same function as “re-tweeting” (re-trashing?) or whatever else it might be called. Especially if one added a few notes to the pages before tossing them.

A keen observation made rather obliquely in the course of the second half of the story was that prolonged interaction with the mechanics of the Library gradually drove one insane. This was somehow different from the emptiness and the insomnia, though it was likely a comorbidity. This insanity was particularly dehumanizing. As their usage of the Library continued, users became less and less human. Their behavior became unpredictable, even dangerous. There was a perverse, subtle (and compounding) psychosis that settled like tepid water into the hollowed-out lake bed inside each and every one of them. Even our protagonist felt a shade of this, especially when he made his contribution.

Alongside this growing madness, there was also an observable decrease in everything else. The citizens of Turin possessed an alarming lack of concern for the derangement that was building within and around them.

There was, indeed, a mystery at the heart of all this. Who controlled the Library and what did they get out of it? What, precisely, had caused the deaths during the Twenty Days? All those who managed to brush up against the answers to these questions found their lives threatened by mysterious forces. Even our narrator was repeatedly warned off. In any event, it was clear that there was nothing about the Library that benefited its users. But the Library, nevertheless, benefited someone.

After the initial Library was destroyed, the second iteration showed that the entire process had become inescapably addictive. After a “contribution” was “deposited” another person would fall upon the trash can as if he had just watched someone drop a diamond ring inside.

Many have remarked that Giorgio de Maria’s predictions regarding our disconnected, isolated modern age are chilling in their pointed accuracy. Perhaps even more chilling, however, is how well he predicted the artificial means by which society would try to fill that void of loneliness and isolation. And also the catastrophic outcome of those artificial remedies.

It seemed, too, that de Maria had intuited that powerful forces, who were focused solely on their own ends, would nurture society’s dependence on this poisonous artificial “social connection”. Promising relief from isolation they would offer a solution that would do nothing but exacerbate the problem. And then they would encourage continued use as the only remedy. All the while they would remain in the background, draining an addicted population too sedated by their own emptiness to realize — or care — what was happening. This population could then be effortlessly controlled.

Indeed, there were passages in The Twenty Days of Turin that made my jaw drop in much the same way Brave New World or 1984 have done in the past.

It’s difficult — and, to my mind, almost irrelevant — to speak of this book as a literary work. The prose is simple, but good. The story events are well-structured, the setting atmospheric, though thinly drawn. We never get a chance to know our narrator particularly well. The story’s ending is abrupt and even a little unsatisfying. But what solution could there possibly be? Have any of us solved the problem that is social media? Indeed, the ending of The Twenty Days of Turin might be a critical piece of the prophecy.

Have you not seen the sleepwalking masses processing through their emptied lives? Have you not heard the smiling, clean-shaven, sharply dressed young men tell you how this was going to make your life so much richer? (Have you not sensed the powerful forces behind them?)

Have you not also dreamt of the dried up lake bed? Would you not rather wake up?

*No spoilers below

Eugene Vodolazkin occupies a unique niche in both literature in general and Russian literature in particular. As a medievalist and a man of particularly medieval faith, his approach to the question of Russia is strikingly similar to the masters of his complex nation’s particular variety of literature. There is an air of Tolstoy and, more especially, of Dostoevsky in the works of Vodolazkin that places them above humble book reviews.

As he progresses through his career, as his abilities and his themes condense, rather than broaden, his talent compresses into something very like a diamond and one begins to imagine a future in which Vodolazkin simply is a part of Russian culture.

The work of a mind such as his is not meant to be reviewed so much as studied and, more appropriately, experienced.

All this to say that it’s difficult to judge The Aviator fairly. For one thing, it emerges like a hardy bloom from particularly Slavic soil and so is different for passers-by such as myself to fully appreciate. For another, if one is reading it after Laurus, which I am, one might not experience it in the proper way. Laurus, Vodolazkin’s third novel (The Aviator is his fourth) is widely considered a masterpiece. More to the point, Laurus was precisely the type of book I personally tend to enjoy. Medieval, spiritual, profound, human. There is a richness to Laurus that is, in a sense, borrowed from the setting. A medieval setting — to me, at least — tends to be imbued more deeply with the magic of everyday transcendent mythology. An ordinary world that breathes otherness. The Aviator, set as it was in the twentieth century, could not quite capture such a miraculous setting. A world in which televisions and democratic politicians play a daily role will inevitably seem less magical in its aesthetics. And, in truth, there is very little of the magical or the miraculous in The Aviator. It soars through very ordinary skies in a very ordinary literary engine.

Yet somehow, in spite of that, something very extra-ordinary is present in its pages.

Narratively, The Aviator is not a complex story, it’s not even what I would call a structured story. Told in the form of journal entries written by our narrator, the eminently Russian protagonist Innokenty, the story reads less like a story and more like a series of images cycled through at random. One gets the impression of looking through one of those old, red View Finder toys. Innokenty has just woken from something like a coma and, as such, finds that most of his memories are gone. His doctor, the wonderfully German Geiger, assures him that these memories will return in their own time and, in the meantime, he ought to write what he remembers as he remembers it.

The prose, therefore, reads like the simple journaling of a man who is not, in terms of profession, a writer. The same phrases are repeated over and over. There is a lack of specificity or an overuse of “essentially” or “basically”; prose habits that are trained out of professional writers. Having read other work by Vodolazkin, I can say with some confidence that this was a deliberate choice. His prose is generally beautiful and poetic. The decision to write Innokenty’s entries in this less polished fashion must have been intentional. To some degree, I think this might have weakened the story. But it’s hard to judge how the original Russian had read.

That said, these snippets of Russian history, as told, in a sense, by a witness, are truly remarkable. Vodolazkin focuses not on the major events or even the major persons, but on the ordinary. Here we see Innokenty sharing a beer with a friend after a hard day’s work, here we see him playing on the beach with his timid cousin Seva. Here he is falling in love, and here he is experiencing profound loss. Here is a description of the light through the window, and here a description of the cruelties of the labor camp’s sadistic guards. A particularly striking element here is when these memories are overlaid with Innokenty’s present. A reader could predict such an occurrence in a story like this, but they never go quite the way one would expect.

As time progresses, and as more of his memory returns to him, Innokenty is able to form a more solid image of himself in his own mind. Too, he gradually comes to understand what is alluded to in the book jacket synopsis: somehow he has leapt forward in time almost seventy years. With his own most recent memories taking place in Soviet Russia immediately before the Great Terror, he is shocked to find himself in the post-Soviet Russia of the 1990s.

Around this time, also the time when he leaves the hospital, the style shifts.

Given that our hero has been displaced in time, his only human tethers to existence are the select few who have been with him since his emergence. His beloved doctor Geiger, and a woman who becomes his only family. At this point in the narrative, Innokenty’s diary entries are interspersed with theirs. This arrangement is made at the insistence of Geiger who wishes to monitor his patient with the utmost care and attention. And also with a certain German level of redundant precision.

From a reader’s perspective, there were times when this was an enlightening way to reveal plot events. For instance, we first see Innokenty perform some strange action through the eyes of the woman, then we hear from Innokenty himself what he had been doing and why, and then we hear Geiger remarking in a characteristically German fashion on both the action itself and the woman’s reaction to it. As Geiger and the woman are products of the present, while Innokenty is a relic of a strange past, these passages are fascinating examinations of the generation gap that divided Russia across regimes.

However, there were also times when this style grew tedious. One would finish reading a description of an event, only to turn the page and find oneself reading through the exact same event with little difference. And then — turn the page — and here’s one more description of the same event. My assumption is that there were cultural nuances that were present in even the tedious triplicate that were unfortunately lost on my non-Russian mind. Luckily, even if they were a bit tedious, they were rarely drawn out.

The real beauty in any Russian novel, in my humble opinion, lies in its specifically Russian philosophical nature. There are not many civilizations whose fiction output is marked by exhaustive — and not always flattering — philosophical examinations of the human condition. This is one of the reasons Dostoevsky stands out as such a giant of the genre; few other Russian novelists devoted quite as much personal energy — and narrative space — to such examinations.

I have said “not always flattering” but understand, if you would, the Russian sheen on such a thing. Russians might seem somber or even morbid, but it is precisely because of this that their faith, hope, and love are so unshakable. Few have managed, like the Russian novelist, to sift through darkness until pure, unblemished light could be found. Few, I think, understand that pure light in the way that a Russian does. Which is not to say that the rest of us cannot, but perhaps not in quite the same way. The Russian novelist takes it upon himself to understand the meaning of guilt and darkness and shame, in order to more fully understand the meaning of forgiveness, illumination, and love.

Vodolazkin does a bit of that here. His meditations come through the temporally displaced lens of Innokenty. As a man who had been born under the last czar, witnessed the October Revolution, suffered under Stalin, and then emerged in the corrupt bureaucracy of 1990s democratic Russia, he had a unique view of humanity in general and Russia in particular. His ideas, while apolitical, presented a grim condemnation of the nature of the Russian people. There is the repeated notion that a nation receives the leader it demands. Or, put another way, that a nation’s leader is a reflection of its people. The woman and Dr. Geiger did not agree, but Innokenty had witnessed the widespread uprising of the October Revolution, he had had his happiness, his family, and his life ripped away by the indifferent cruelty not of the Soviet throat-stompers, but of regular people. In his neighbors he saw reflected the image of Stalin. But, Innokenty’s friends argued, perhaps they came to reflect Stalin only after being subjugated by him, rather than the other way around.

In the end, this question is never resolved. It lingers as a perspective as unique as its speaker’s situation.

Some have remarked that the core theme in The Aviator is that love is greater than justice, a musing Innokenty writes in his journal while he considers his own guilt, as well as that of one particular camp guard who tortured him during his imprisonment sixty years ago. But I doubt this is being understood in the way it might have been intended. Innokenty, after all, had no intention of dismissing the horrors acted upon him or his loved ones during the first half of his life. But it is the love he unearths in his second life that overcomes to some degree the intense despair that had taken hold of him in the first. Not love in the romantic or even the familial sense. This love is that of the uniquely Russian kind. It is the same love spoken of by Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov. A love that embraces all and that takes upon the bearer the sins of all his neighbors. Is there forgiveness, or is there universal guilt? Perhaps there is only forgiveness because there is universal guilt, and thus there is universal love. If all are guilty, then the love that mirrors divine love is the only thing that can elevate us above the animals and the swirling, crushing cycle of human sin.

Laurus illuminated the timeless, medieval beauty of fifteenth century Rus. The Aviator shines a similar light on modern man. There does not need to be a deeper theme to this story than what one could find upon the page. This is a lovely story all on its own.

Nevertheless, the quiet power of profoundly humbling love for mankind feels timely, to some degree. Don’t misunderstand; this is not a universal love that prompts the Woodstock crowd to dust off their bell bottoms, or that insists on an erasure of all guilt. Rather, this is a love that is elevated to something akin to the Divine. “For God so loved the world…” This is a love that compels the lover to bleed and die — even if he is innocent, especially if he is not — for the good of all the world.

If there is suffering, there is also miraculous escape.
If there is loss, there is the opportunity to experience the joy of discovery.
If there is repentance, there can also be love.
If there is despair, there is always hope.

*This is a living list. I will publish addendums whenever I remember the ones I’ve definitely forgotten.

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Possibly one of the most significant and important novels ever put to paper in the history of human civilization. Yes, I know that sounds like an overstatement. But Dostoevsky’s masterpiece is just that: a masterpiece. It plumbs the depths of the universal human condition with profound insight, deep compassion, and uncommon wisdom. What Dostoevsky learned about being human from his difficult life is carefully compressed into one of the most stunning diamonds of storytelling ever produced.

Heartwarming, heartbreaking, and, most importantly, it makes you think. Not to be read quickly or skimmed. Take your time with this one and it will repay you a hundredfold.

*a note: I loathe the Pevear/Volokhosky translation. The old translation, by Constance Garnett might not, to some, read as elegantly (arguable) but it is the only one I would ever recommend. However, I’ve not been able to find a copy of her translation in print. I purchased my copy (a beautiful Heritage Press edition from 1961) on eBay. Not everyone is as particular as I am about translations, though…

(As Professor Fraus-Dolus said, “it is in the nature of languages that a pretty translation is not accurate, and an accurate translation finds its own beauty without help.”1)

Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkin

Perhaps the most extraordinary medievalist novel of the twenty-first century, and possibly one of the best novels of the twenty-first century. Profoundly Russian, in the tradition of Dostoevsky. Deeply medieval, in the tradition of Eco’s The Name of the Rose. This book accomplishes the rarest of literary feats: it manages to convey not just a tale of another time, but also the deeper sense of that time. Laurus transports the patient reader to medieval Rus in a way no other book has ever done. But it also transports the consciousness of a modern person to that of a medieval Russian. Here is the sense of timelessness, of eternity, a sense of myth and legend that is indistinguishable from everyday matters. Here is the spirit of a time that has long been lost, captured and preserved in the pages of a beautiful story.

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

Everything I needed to say about this book is here.

Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges

Try as I might, I could not choose a volume of Borges’ stories that I loved more than any other. So I can only put forward for your consideration: all of them.
There is little to say about Borges that would not diminish him to some degree. To say that he writes stories would omit the sense of wonder these stories evoke. To say that these stories evoke wonder would omit the feeling that some hidden truth of the universe has been glimpsed. To say that they reveal glimpses of some hidden truth would omit the whimsical sense of narrative joy with which they were clearly written…
The notion of telling stories as if they were not fictional, was not, of course, invented by Borges, but I think anyone would agree that he perfected it. Whether it’s a biography of a fictional author or an academic examination of the various interpretations of a non-existent book, Borges proceeds with the medieval sense that everything is true. And you, hungrily reading page after page, can’t help but agree.

If you’re looking for a place to start:

The Library of Babel (obviously)
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

(I will update this list as I remember more of my absolute favorites, though I’ve never read one that disappointed)

A curious aside: When I was an infant (nineteen) I was on a train from Frankfurt to— somewhere, I don’t remember, it’s not important. For this train ride I had saved a new volume of Borges I had brought with me from home. And so I read one of the stories (I can’t remember which one, but for some reason I have the sense that it was Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius) and it filled me with so much wonder that I immediately pulled out my tiny little journal and scribbled away a story of my own. That story passed through several hundred iterations and revisions until it gradually became the world of Níogoln, in which I’ve set The Blue Prince.

The Gods of Pegana by Lord Dunsany

There are many who point to Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter as his important contribution to literature. But I’m afraid I have to disagree. Nothing of his has quite the magic or the wonder as his pantheon of invented gods and their strange, mystical tales.

Within this body of faux-mythology, the great god Mana-Yood-Sushai, upon finishing the creation of the small gods, fell asleep to the drumming of Skarl. And while he slept, the small gods set about making, for their own amusement, the world and all within. And should Mana-Yood-Sushai ever wake, he will wave his hand and unmake everything before returning to his own important work. (Many humans of this world include in their prayers entreaties to Skarl the Drummer to never cease his drumming, for when he does Mana-Yood-Sushai will wake.)

What follows is an astonishing collection of tales relating the duties of the various small gods and the way in which the humans of their creation interact with them.

Lord Dunsany wrote many, many collections of stories. Some revolve around the lore of Pegana and some take a Weirder — even cosmic — leaning and would likely be comfortable on the shelf next to Lovecraft. Truly a forgotten master.

Out of print. There are several decent paperback facsimiles floating around and Penguin did a collection called In the Land of Time and other Fantasy Tales. It’s not everything, but it’s a decent start.

The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

Obviously.

One of the most significant works of fiction of the modern age. Tolkien drew upon hundreds of years of history and mythology to craft his own version of an epic tale. The magic of Tolkien lies not in the extraordinary mastery of invented languages, nor in the breadth of his worldbuilding, but in the depth of his works’ roots. There is ancientness to Middle Earth that transcends the written work itself, transcends the maps, the lexicons, the lore, the characters. Tolkien understood the relationship of the present with the past. He understood the importance of the past and the way a culture’s roots weave through soil, home, man, woman, hearth, battlefield, and, especially, story, to provide our present with nourishment. His work accomplishes a feat that was not formerly rare but is now all but unheard of: it is an extension of something ancient and established while expressing the particular mind of its author. It is not a novelty or a revolution. It is a return to roots.

I read it for the first time when I was eleven or twelve. I remember finishing The Hobbit and crawling out of my reading nook between the couch and the window nearly on the verge of tears.
“What’s wrong?” my father asked.
“I’ve finished,” I answered sorrowfully.
“And so?”
“Now I’ll never see them again. I’ll never go with them on any more adventures!”
“There are more adventures,” my father assured me. “You just need to read The Lord of the Rings. That’s three whole books of adventures.”
“Is Bilbo there?”
“Well, no. A bit at first. But then it’s his nephew, Frodo.”
I was terribly dubious. There was simply no way I could ever love a character the way I loved Bilbo. But I tried anyway. And by the time I finished The Return of the King Frodo had become at least as important to me as dear Bilbo.

There really is nothing in the world quite like these books.

The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien

This book, in the bookshelf in my head, sits next to The Gods of Pegana. It is ancient lore, told as such. It reads like a carefully translated edition of a recently-unearthed volume of forgotten texts, the cultural history of some long-forgotten civilization that is nevertheless familiar and recognizable. It is much more interesting if you’ve read The Lord of the Rings. It isn’t really meant to be read like a novel. The chapters can often stand alone. The whole tale does come together here and there. But this is a history, and a long one. This is less worldbuilding and more an experiment in artificially-organically manufacturing an entire civilization’s ancient roots.

I am always working on lists of my all-time favorite books, together with a brief description for each. I will be posting links here*

I get asked fairly often what books I would recommend. And since I can’t seem to be bothered to keep my goodreads up to date (that circa 1995 website certainly isn’t helping) I’ve decided to provide a list.

I will be constantly adding to this list until I shuffle off this mortal coil. And probably even after.

Click through for the list:

My Excellent Booklist

*this is a link to my Bookshop storefront. If you’d like to throw me a coin or two of support — while thumbing your nose at Amazon — feel free to purchase there. Otherwise, acquire the books however you’d prefer!

Once you click through, you’ll find a masterlist and a few smaller lists divided loosely into categories. Maybe you’ll find something new. In any event, have fun browsing!

If there is any interest in book, movie, or television reviews, I am considering doing that here on this site as well. If you wouldn’t mind sharing your thoughts on whether or not that’s something you’d be interested in, I’d greatly appreciate it.

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