I managed to do that
thing I do, where I commit to one thing and am then completely distracted by something else in the middle... so I've been re-reading Antonia Forest's
Marlow Family books, which I've loved since I came across them as a teenager - they're both familiar (boarding school stories, adventure stories) and yet so different from other books (falconry! Nelson (and Hornblower) fandom! (I'd never
heard of fandom when I first read them, but Nicola
absolutely is a
fan, down to the reading and collecting and... *g*) Catholicism!). But then I got to the sequel written by the author who wasn't Antonia Forest, and although I was ever so hopeful cos it had good review, it just
isn't nearly the same - it's just a bit
off to me, so I got bogged down and abandoned it...
...but I was reading spooky Pros short stories from the 1st of October, so I hadn't forgotten the challenge entirely! And my fourth R.i.P. book was finally published in paperback, and so I read that
properly (it's never the same in ebook, it just isn't...) -
The Secret Casebook of Simon Feximal, by one of my current still-favourite authors, KJ Charles. Yeay!
A story too secret, too terrifying - and too shockingly intimate - for Victorian eyes.
A note to the Editor
Dear Henry,
I have been Simon Feximal's companion, assistant and chronicler for twenty years now, and during that time my Casebooks of Feximal the Ghost-Hunter have spread the reputation of this most accomplished of ghost-hunters far and wide...I won't quote the whole blurb, but the Samhain tongue-in-the-cheek warning is:
Contains a foul-tempered Victorian ghost-hunter, a journalist who's too curious for his own good, villainy, horror, butterflies, unusual body modifications, and a lot of tampering with the occult. *g*
It's really a collection of short stories about Simon Feximal and his companion Robert Caldwell, but they're linked together as a book, so I'm saying
novel. They are, of course, reminiscent of Holmes and Watson, but they're not any less their own characters for all that, and I do like Charles' Victorian London world. Another of her strengths is the way that she pulls out real old stories and myths, and spins them into something completely new and wonderful (and awful!) You wouldn't think
butterflies could be made into a supernatural horror type story, but Charles manages it! There's a feel of writers like M.R. James and H.P. Lovecraft to it somehow, and I definitely recommend it!
(I'd also read three short stories even before I was distracted by the Marlow family books, but I got distracted from posting about
them by looking up the true stories - but I
will post them! I've also been re-watching
Apparitions, for the Screen Challenge, but got distracted from
that by having forgotten that they really are rather dark, aren't they - I lived in a house with other people the first time I watched them!)
( All the Perils... )
