Saturday, September 25, 2021

Oculus Presents: Latest finds for the Shelf

Heya, folks, this is Oculus Presents.

Been a bit busy these past few weeks with work, writing and suchlike, but that doesn't mean I stopped buying books or reading (these days I'm mostly doing literary fiction, that's why the blog has been a little quiet on the review front). As usual, I scour the used bookshops for anything neat I can find, and I've ordered a few... interesting things online as well, so the Shelf is quite teeming with life. I've managed to score an excellent vintage copy of To Kill a Mockingbird and a biography of Franz Liszt among others, but let me show you the ones relevant to my genre collection...

My earliest find, from last month, is this copy of Savage by Richard Laymon - a western novel about a young boy pursuing Jack the Ripper into the American Wild West. The premise sounds neat enough, and Laymon fans are eating up the book, but I haven't heard super mega great things about his writing skills from people whose tastes I trust, and the first chapter had a teenage boy in Victorian London calling people "tough hombres", which, er, yeah. I have a feeling that this is going to be an experience.


Something I'm already quite fond of, though, is this story collection by the awesome C. L. Moore. Catherine L. Moore was one of the pioneers of female speculative fiction writing in the pulp era of the 30's and 40's (although she didn't retire from writing until the early 60's). There had been other female specfic writers at the time, of course, but she had been probably the most iconic. This is a collection of her short stories with the rugged space adventurer, Northwest Smith, as the hero - including the first Northwest Smith story ever, Shambleau, which is one of my favorite short stories. She also wrote Jirel of Joiry, one of the earliest female sword-and-sorcery heroines, and let me just say, I'm dying to get my hands on a copy of that collection. I'm going to do a Moore-stravaganza on this blog where I review this collection and discuss Shambleau in more detail, but until then - let us admire this fantastic cover.


And finally, one of my favorite used book finds: this reprint of an iconic, much-respected collection of short vampire fiction, edited by the late Alan Ryan (who I'm quite fond of, if you recall from my review of Cast a Cold Eye). Dunno who the hell okayed this lackluster cover and the weird font choice (the original cover art, done by Edward Gorey, fit the book's themes so much more); but the collection has stories from Bram Stoker, August Derleth, Stephen King, Richard Matheson, C. L. Moore again and other genre greats, and I've heard that Alan Ryan was an editor of great taste in short fiction, so I'm very much looking forward to diving in. Not this year, alas (I have 25 books to read until the end of the year for various reading challenges I signed up for, pray for me - I swear it's fun though, or I wouldn't be doing it), but chipping away at this book, one short story at a time, sounds like the perfect entertainment for the upcoming chilly winter months.

Well, folks, that's it for today - I'll be returning soon with a few reviews, gods willing (two of the books I'm planning to read until December are Hawk & Fisher and Vampire Beat from the Shelf, and I'll try to fit in The Lure as well); and hopefully I can do something interesting to celebrate Halloween with, I'll figure out what. Until then, have a very spooky October, everyone.

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