A Librarian on Elm Street

I picked up this book after reading the summary and thinking it sounded pretty cool. I was not wrong, but I had no clue what I had gotten myself into. Still don't for that matter, but I digress.  Without giving anything away that's not on the dust jacket, the initial set up of the book is following a group of Paladins pledged in the service of the Saint of Steel, one of the several deities in this world. The different servants of the different gods have abilities particular to the deity they serve. Interesting enough. The paladins of the Saint of Steel go into berserker rages in battle, and are nigh-invincible, while the Saint keeps them on target and prevents them from killing innocents. The Saint would then pull them out of the rage when it was no longer needed. How much the deities actually interfere in the day to day is up to interpretation, but one day all of the servants of the Saint of Steel feel the Saint die. They didn't know that a god could even die, but there yo...

 Many many moons ago, I had read literally all but a few hard to find paperback Star Wars books. This was before the Dark Times.....before the Empire.....otherwise known as Disney.  I'm joking! I don't hate the sequels by any stretch and I weirdly like The Last Jedi more each time I watch it. Rise of Skywalker I have issues with from a movie point of view as a film afficionado, which from some of the reporting I've seen online about the post and mid production edits the studio forced, I feel justified in my views. J.J., buddy, you're telling me you started the most anticipated sequel series of films arguably in all time and didn't have an ending planned out from the start? Or a middle? Tell me you learned nothing from LOST without telling me you learned nothing from LOST. But I digress.  Point of the story, I was heavily emotionally invested in the old Star Wars Expanded Universe of books and, to a lesser extent, comics. I've had a hard time getting back into re...

 Full Disclosure; I've been watching the anime of this manga on and off for years so I'm only halfway through season two at the moment.  It's been literal years since I watched the first couple episodes of season one, so I can't specifically remember beat by beat how closely Vol. 1 synchs up, but it definitely feels pretty close.  The worldbuilding is what always sold me as the best part about the anime. The AOT world is so different and the society so distinct while still retaining some elements that seem vaguely familiar to you....it draws you in and constantly leaves you guessing and scrambling for a foothold of understanding. Honestly, you wind up so much like the main characters. You know a little bit about the past, the history and backstory of your city and the human realm, but you are forced primarily to exist in this moment and in this space where your survival is not guaranteed. You try to figure out what's going on, and you can tell you're missing pie...

Horror novels are a difficult thing to write. You have to ebb and flow with the fear as a story builds and characters develop. Too much one way and it devolves into a jumbled mess of a thriller. Too much the other and it isn't scary or particularly interesting....at least to me. That balance is hard to strike and even harder to maintain for a long work. (Side Note: This is another reason Stephen King's career and corpus is remarkable, but I digress.) One of the ways to short-circuit the problem of balancing a long-form horror story is to completely sidestep the problem and write short stories instead! Some of the best and most notable examples of the genre take this exact strategy. Poe, Henry James, Shirley Jackson, the aforementioned King, and also notably the titular figure of this book, H.P. Lovecraft. Matt Ruff's Lovecraft Country wondrously stitches a series of short-stories together into a connected narrative creating an entire shared universe of character and set...