Literature

Somewhere to read the words themselves.

Archives

• The H.P. Lovecraft Archive (Website) — the complete electronic texts of H.P. Lovecraft, categorized and alphabetized, free to read: the fiction (from “Dagon” and “The Call of Cthulhu” to the novella “At the Mountains of Madness”), plus the poetry, essays, and selected letters.

Articles

• The weird aliens of early science fiction (Article) — Zaria Gorvett on how the grey, big-headed alien came out of a single 1961 abduction account and into Spielberg, and how much stranger the aliens of the 1880s were: J.-H. Rosny’s Les Xipéhuz are transparent blue cones that communicate by tracing symbols on each other with light.

Books read

Books I’ve finished, with a rating.

• Neverwhere — 8/10 (Novel) — Neil Gaiman’s 1996 novelization of his own BBC serial, restoring what the broadcast cut. Richard Mayhew helps an injured girl called Door and drops out of the London he knows into London Below, a city under the city with a Floating Market, a real Knight’s Bridge, and the assassins Croup and Vandemar on his heels. The 2006 “Author’s Preferred Text” is the edition to get.

Short stories

• A Dollar for Your Soul (Short story) — Earl Vickers’ story from Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine #10 (Autumn 1990), free on his Museum of Conceptual Art site. George bets he can get every eleventh-grader to sell their soul within a week, at a dollar each on official-looking transfer forms; the buyback price of ten dollars plus three more souls turns the class into a pyramid scheme, until the narrator finds a way to make George sell one himself.