Sunday Status Update: January 23, 2022

This week, Drizzt Do’Urden of Dungeons and Dragons fame.

Drizzt: I learned some deeply troubling news this week. While attending the annual Brooding Drow with Swords Meeting (can’t think why people keep snickering when I use the acronym), I found myself unexpectedly one of the very few dark elf warriors remaining. Why, for many years one could scarcely swing a +2 defending scimitar without hitting at least three somber but noble members of my race. I have often reflected that my own modest example must have inspired others, and it has been a source of no small pride to me. Yet lately, the meeting’s hallowed halls ring empty, and this last time the mood was especially subdued. I sought out my old comrade Liriel (veteran of many meetings), and asked her the problem. “Oh, fashions change, Drizzt,” she said. “Now they’re all being Vex and Percy.” I inquired who these personages might be, whereupon she gave me a funny look and asked if I’d heard about some kind of amazon show. Apart from evidently involving amazons, it seems to involve lots of profanity and gore, and I was about to tell her how much I disapproved when we were interrupted by a guest from the convention’s hotel coming in to harangue us for indecency, of all things! Why do these things keep happening to me?

Marion: A.C. Wise’s story collection The Ghost Sequences provides a sampler of her work and some serious shivers. That cover is just a bonus. After I’d filled up on ghost and horror stories, I decided I needed a change of pace, so I reread William Gibson’s The Peripheral and Agency (actually, I’m 80% of the way through Agency as of this writing.) The books still work well, with current events (cough:pandemic:cough) making them slightly creepier than they were the first time. It’s a little, well, awkward, sitting in Year 3 of a pandemic, watching feed of a volcanic eruption near Tonga, and reading about the Jackpot mass extinction events in our (supposedly fictional) near future.

Sandy: Moi? In my review of the 2020 collection The Women of Weird Tales, I mentioned that I was very interested in reading a novel by one of the ladies covered in that volume, Greye La Spina. The novel in question was Invaders From the Dark, which was originally serialized in the pages of Weird Tales in 1925. Well, now I am in the middle of finally reading this classic tale of grisly lycanthropy and am enjoying it very much. I hope to be able to get back to you all with some thoughts on this one very shortly….

Terry: I’m still working on finishing up everything with a bookmark in it, but the new books keep batting their eyes at me, and I’m not going to be able to resist those come hither looks much longer. In the meantime, though, I finished The Library of the Unwritten by A.J. Hackwith, which didn’t start out well but ended beautifully, and Lore Olympus by Rachel Smythe, a web comic transferred to the page, based on the myth of Persephone and Hades, which was … okay. I know I’m in a minority in that latter opinion, from what I’ve seen around the web. I’m currently reading Wise Woman by Phillippa Gregory, one of her first novels, which is … okay. This was probably the wrong place to start with her novels; I’m going to jump forward in time and try Tidelands next.