A Night in the Lonesome October —
All is not what it seems…
In the murky London gloom, a knife-wielding gentleman named Jack prowls the midnight streets with his faithful watchdog Snuff – gathering together the grisly ingredients they will need for an upcoming ancient and unearthly rite. For soon after the death of the moon, black magic will summon the Elder Gods back into the world. And all manner of Players, both human and undead, are preparing to participate.
Some have come to open the gates. Some have come to slam them shut.
And now the dread night approaches – so let the Game begin.
Author: Roger Zelazny
Illustrator: Gahan Wilson
Genre: Fantasy, Horror, Gaslamp
Publisher: Avon Books
Publication Date: September 1, 1994
Pages: 280
October 19th
The pace is picking up. The ‘things’ in the house are getting restless; and the ones in the mirror are congregating around a flaw in the glass that Snuff knows will bear close watching.
Snuff enters a mutual agreement with Quicklime, the snake that is the Mad Monk’s familiar, to try to make sense of the pattern that is emerging. They visit the Count’s place to make sure he is still there, and he is, sleeping, but Snuff knows that if the count moves about the center will keep shifting. We are also given the fact that in some partnerships it is the player that calculates the pattern, in others it is the familiar.
Gypsies arrive, it is assumed, to protect the Count and hide his comings and goings, further confusing Snuff’s calculations. If both the vicar and Talbot are players, the old manse wil be the center for the Halloween ritual. The manse has a new resident, a woman called Linda Enderby who seems to be friends with Larry Talbot and who smells to Snuff like the great detective. Enderby is making a point of visiting all the players in this new guise.
Another fact arises; Graymalk has discovered that the vicar knew about the dead policeman all along, and was hoping that Jack would be blamed when the body was discovered.
Is the vicar the killer? Are his ceremonies in praise of the Elder Gods a clue as to the nature of the ritual we are leading up to? Are the Great Detective and Larry Talbot in cahoots? All these questions are more could be answered in the next episode of this monster mash
Another lovely Gahan Wilson illo today, of the Count, very Lugosi-like, asleep in his coffin.
Boo-graphy:
William Meikle is a Scottish writer, now living in Canada, with more than thirty novels published in the genre press and over 300 short story credits in thirteen countries.
He has books available from a variety of publishers including Dark Regions Press, Crossroad Press and Severed Press, and his work has appeared in a number of professional anthologies and magazines.
He lives in Newfoundland with whales, bald eagles and icebergs for company.
When he’s not writing he drinks beer, plays guitar, and dreams of fortune and glory.
The Green & the Black —
A small group of industrial archaeologists head into the center of Newfoundland, investigating a rumor of a lost prospecting team of Irish miners in the late Nineteenth century.
They find the remains of a mining operation, and a journal and papers detailing the extent of the miners’ activities. But there is something else on the site, something older than the miners, as old as the rock itself.
Soon the archaeologists are coming under assault, from a strange infection that spreads like wildfire through mind and body, one that doctors seem powerless to define let alone control.
The survivors only have one option. They must return to the mine, and face what waits for them, down in the deep dark places, where the green meets the black.
Meghan's House of Books 