Marion: I read The Dawnhounds by Sascha Stronach. I enjoyed it while I was reading it; I don’t know what I think of it yet though. I finally started a 2019 Hugo winner, A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine, and I’m so glad I finally did! This is everything I love in a book so far! And, apart from genre, Empty Shells, The Story of Petaluma, America’s Chicken City is helping me learn more than I ever thought possible about incubators, hatcheries, political chicanery, chickens and eggs.
Sandy: Moi? Having recently read and enjoyed the Ramble House releases The Tongueless Horror and Other Stories: The Weird Tales of Wyatt Blassingame, Volume 1, Lady of the Yellow Death and Other Stories: The Weird Tales of Wyatt Blassingame, Volume 2, and The Unholy Goddess and Other Stories: The Weird Tales of Wyatt Blassingame, Volume 3, where else could I possibly head next but to Mistress of Terror and Other Stories: The Weird Tales of Wyatt Blassingame, Volume 4? I am hugely enjoying this current volume as well and hope to share some thoughts on it with you all very soon….
Terry: It’s been a busy week with little reading time, so I’m still reading everything I was last Sunday. One exception: Tamsyn Muir’s Undercover, part of a six-story series called INTO SHADOW. I love how off-kilter Muir’s writing is, strange and wonderful.
I was struggling to get traction with Naomi Novik’s Golden Enclaves and took a break to read Grady Hendrix’s sarcastic Paperbacks From Hell, about the ’70s-’80s horror boom in paperbacks. What’s scary is how much some of that fictional material got used, not only to fuel the ’80s “Satanic Panic” scapegoating of day care and preschool staff, but to provide the major narrative elements of the current QAnon nonsense. Fraudulent “memoirs” like Michelle Remembers, Satan’s Underground, and Go Ask Alice, along with Russ Martin’s novels about an evil super-elite conspiracy sacrificing children to Satan, contain most of the sick story ingredients that have been cooked into a dangerous political weapon in the last few years.
By coincidence, our governor yesterday indicated he will pardon (with Governor’s Council approval) Gerald and Cheryl Amirault, two siblings who got railroaded (along with their mother) into long prison sentences during the Satanic Panic, after police and social workers basically browbeat small children into giving false testimony about Satanic abuse against them (the creepy interviews were taped, and offer clear evidence of the perversion of justice). Several prominent politicians made their initial reputations on this case. It’s frightening to find we’re still wrecking peoples’ lives based on made-up stories, much as in the long ago Salem Witch Trials that we all look down on now as nothing but the hysteria of superstitious and uneducated villagers.