Howling Frog Books

 Here are some titles from my official TBR list that I just haven't written about yet!  Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia : I saved this one for October, for an official RIP read.  And wow, this is a spooky story!  It's the 1950s, and Noem í is a debutante out for a good time in Mexico City.  Her father sends her down to the countryside to check on her cousin Catalina, who married last year in a romantic whirl.  Noem í arrives at a classic Gothic scene: a mouldering family mansion on a misty mountain, and....this is a strange place.  The silver mine that gave the Doyle family their wealth has been closed down for years, the house is festooned with mold, and everyone is very strange.  Catalina seems to be ill.  Her husband Virgil is creepy, but not as creepy as his elderly father is.  Just one family member, Francis, seems friendly, if shy and something of a weak character.  As Noemi unravels the dark family history and the se...

 Nettle and Bone, by T. Kingfisher I tell you what, T. Kingfisher/Ursula Vernon is really fantastic.  What a great story.  I love that she takes the (possibly rather tired) fairy-tale retelling thing -- or just the fairy-tale style genre and wrenches it into a new shape that is sharp and truthful, not at all frilly, and also funny. Marra is the youngest of three princesses in a tiny kingdom squished between two large and powerful realms.  Her parents are constantly walking a tightrope over an abyss, and the solution seems to be to marry the oldest daughter to the crown prince of the Northern Kingdom.  When Marra's beloved sister is killed in an accident just a few months later, the second sister is sent in her place and Marra, always awkward and difficult, is placed in a convent.  She stays there for years, learning many skills, and is quite happy.  When she's summoned to her sister's side, though, she realizes that Kania may be a queen, but she's also...

 The Box of Delights, by John Masefield This story has been ridiculously difficult for me to find.  I've wanted to read it for years, as it's always being mentioned as a classic, beloved by generations of British children.  I read The Midnight Folk last year, and that turned out to be the first book, so I already knew Kay Harker when I started this one.  It was kind of a goofy thing to do to read a Christmas story in the September heat, but who cares? Kay is now about 14, I would guess, and he's home from school for Christmas.  Some friends are staying with him, so there will be plenty to do.  On the way from the station, Kay meets a little old Punch and Judy man, and invites him to come and perform at his house...and this plunges him into another adventure.  The wolves are running, and they're after the little magic box that the old man entrusts to Kay.  With it, Kay can shrink or be whisked to another place, or he can see into history.  Ka...

 I have long wanted to collect Lucy Boston's lesser-known works, but for some reason it took me a long time to realize that I could just look on Abebooks and order them.  A couple of them are practically unobtainable, but I found four at good prices and have been enjoying them.   If you're unfamiliar with the name, Lucy Boston wrote the classic and strange Green Knowe books, which I love.  She actually lived in the house that she calls Green Knowe in the stories, which is a good 900 years old, and the house inspired much of her writing.  Some years ago when my mom and I took my kids to the UK, we visited the house and it was wonderful .  I highly recommend that you go! The Guardians of the House: Tom likes to fish by the river, and he's seen the strange old house nearby.  When he sees the owner leave one day, he decides that he must explore.  Tom gets into the house, and finds many strange old items, all of which have faces.  Looking at...

80s callback cover art  The Sacrifice Box, by Martin Stewart I was intrigued by the description of this novel when I first saw it, and eventually I got a copy to read.  It's very appropriate for RIP season! On a small British island in the mid-1980s, September has been waiting his entire life to leave.  He's a misfit geek, and he has no friends, so he's put all his energy into earning a university scholarship so he can get to the mainland and start his life.  Four years ago, though, when he was 12, Sep did have friends.  For one perfect summer, he and four other kids ran around together.  They found an old stone box in the woods, and they decided to make sacrifices to it -- each of them would bring something important.  Then they made rules. Never come to the box alone.  Never open it after dark.  Never take back your sacrifice.  Once summer was over, the social forces of school kicked back in.  The kids dropped each other and nev...

 Well, I'm going to call it good.  I've definitely read 20 books this summer, even if I didn't finish that exact list, and much of it has been very good reading!  The Popol Vuh was a highlight, and so was Piranesi .  I still have a couple of books to post about, too.   I only read one book for #WIT month, which is kind of disappointing.  I have another book of Urdu short stories, but so far I've only read one, so I can't exactly count it.  Oh well. In the fall, I'm very much looking forward to Witch Week , which will take place at Calmgrove this year, and I'll be doing a guest post. Plus RIP season is starting!  I have a couple of fun books for that, but mostly I want to focus on preparing for Witch Week.

 Ivory Apples, by Lisa Goldstein  I think it was Jenny who loved this book a while back, and I've meant to read it ever since.  RIP finally stirred me to it.  Wow.  It is a great story, and also takes some very unexpected turns. Every couple of months, Ivy's dad, Philip, takes her and her three sisters to go visit their Great-Aunt Maeve, who lives way out in the country.  Philip takes care of her mail and business, and the girls are never supposed to tell anyone that Maeve Reynolds is actually Adela Madden, author of the beloved fantasy novel Ivory Apples .  Maeve can't, and won't, handle the publicity and the fans. At the park, the sisters meet Kate Burden, a remarkably friendly young woman who insinuates herself into the family's life.  She is an obsessive fan of  Ivory Apples , and in fact she wants what Adela Madden had in order to write the story, which is not something easy to come by.  She is willing to destroy the entire family ...

 Heap House (Iremonger Trilogy #1), by Edward Carey  This is one of the strangest, most bizarre middle grade/YA books I have ever read in my entire life.  I picked it up on a whim from the donation table, and it looked like a proper read for RIP, but I was not expecting the complete outlandishness of this story.  I'm not even sure how to describe it. In an alternate Victorian London, the Iremonger family rules the realm of trash.  They're bailiffs (in US terms, repo men) and they also do salvage.  Over the last hundred years or so, they've amassed miles of land near London, all of which is covered by the heaps (of trash).  Their mansion stands in the middle of the heaps, and is a conglomeration of an incredible number of buildings they've repossessed and fastened on.  The people of an entire town work in the heaps, searching for goods to be salvaged, but the heaps are very dangerous -- they even have their own weather. Young Clod Iremonger is one ...

 Castle Hangnail, by Ursula Vernon I don't know why it took me so long to get around to this charming and funny story!  People recommended it to me, and even my youngest said it was great (she is picky).  RIP finally got it done. Castle Hangnail has been without a Master for quite some time, and the minions are very worried that the Board of Magic will shut them down and decommission the castle.  Even so, the guardian is skeptical when a 12-year-old girl shows up and announces that she is their new Wicked Witch.  She's awfully short and frizzy, and she doesn't look impressive or demand impossible tasks, as a proper Master should.  But she takes on the proper Tasks to make the castle hers, and the minions start to like Eudamonia, who prefers to go by Molly ...until, that is, her secrets are found out. This was so much fun!  It's got clever plot, lovable characters, and great atmosphere.  Molly makes friends with the bats in the attic, and they send...

 It's time for Readers Imbibing Peril XV!  As with so much these days, everybody is taking a step back and this is a simplified event for fraught times.  No levels or sign-ups, just join in and read a book or three, and post on your Twitter or Instagram or blog -- for those of us dinosaurs still writing blogs. So I happily went and gathered a pile of books, and here they are.  I don't know which ones I'll read when; this is just a pile to pick from.  Are you going to join up with RIPXV? 

The Bride of Lammermoor, by Sir Walter Scott The Classics Club issued a dare to pick a spooky classic from our lists to read.  My CC list has already had most of the spooky classics taken, but I did have one left: The Bride of Lammermoor, by Sir Walter Scott.  I knew it featured a bride who goes mad and stabs somebody, and that an opera, Lucia di Lammermoor , was based on the novel.  Also, the novel was published in 1819.  But it's historical fiction, set at the end of the 17th century, over 100 years before Scott wrote it. Edgar, Master of Ravenswood, has been dispossessed of his ancestral property.  His father was a Jacobite and was stripped of his title and everything else, too.  Edgar has a single tower left to him, Wolfs Crag, and no money whatsoever.  He has to find a job overseas, because he's certainly not welcome in Scotland, but first he would like to take his revenge upon the man who persecuted his father and then got all the property:...

Busman's Honeymoon, by Dorothy L. Sayers I'd been meaning to read Have His Carcase , the Harriet-goes-hiking one, but I don't have it, so I read a different Sayers mystery that I haven't read for a long time. Harriet and Lord Peter have finally gotten married -- in their own interesting way, which involves circumventing sister-in-law Helen's plans for a proper society wedding and a Paris honeymoon.  No, the newlyweds have decided to sneak off and spend their honeymoon week at their new country house, Talboys, which they've only just purchased.  The former owner promised to have everything ready for them to move right in. Instead they arrive to a locked house; nobody is expecting them, Mr. Noakes has been gone for a week on business, and certainly nothing is ready at all.  There are even dirty dishes on the table.  Everything gets more and more fussed and ridiculous, as neighbors come clamoring in and chimneys fail to draw.  There is a lot of domestic comed...

Book of Ballads and Sagas, by Charles Vess (and Co.) Back in the 1990s, Charles Vess did a series of comics/graphic novels in which he collaborated with various writers to produce versions of old ballads (plus one Norse myth story, thus the 'sagas').   Featured authors included Charles de Lint, Jane Yolen, and Neil Gaiman -- your standard 90s list of up-and-coming fantasy writers, in fact!   Now, those comics have been collected and reissued in a nice hardback edition, and if you were bookish in the 90s, this is guaranteed to give you some flashbacks. So here we have (quick count) 13 ballads, surely a lucky number.  Most of them are reasonably well-known to anybody with a passing knowledge of ballads; there is Thomas the Rhymer, Barbara Allen, The Demon Lover, The Twa Corbies, and Tam Lin.  They're frequently given extra detail -- I was rather tickled to see that in "The Demon Lover," the girl runs off with James Harris -- or considerably more backstory...

Thirteenth Child Across the Great Barrier The Far West, by Patricia C. Wrede This middle grade/YA trilogy is now several years old, but I completely missed it.  I like Patricia C. Wrede, who wrote the Dealing With Dragons books and generally seems to have a lively imagination.  The story stars Eff, and tells the story of her life from birth all the way through her mid-20s.  It's an alternate history world in which magic is real and the world abounds with magical critters, many of which are highly dangerous -- especially on the Columbian continents, which are crammed so full of lethal animals that exploration and expansion are extremely difficult.  In a frontier Columbia where history is very different from ours, Eff tries to figure out where she belongs. Thirteenth Child starts with Eff as a tiny little girl; her twin brother, Lan, is the seventh son of a seventh son, which makes him a powerful magician, but she is kid #13, and some of her relatives are co...

The Boy Who Couldn't Die Strange Attractors The Green Futures of Tycho We love William Sleator in our house.  My husband and I both grew up reading Sleator, and now we try to collect the books.  (Cheap on Abebooks!)  William Sleator specialized in YA/children's SF and horror, and boy he was good.   His most famous titles are Interstellar Pig (funny) and House of Stairs (Kafkaesque). The Boy Who Couldn't Die -- Ken's best friend is killed in an accident, and Ken resolves that he will not die.  His search for a solution leads him to a woman who says she'll make him invulnerable for the low, low price of fifty bucks.  And it works; Ken can't be beaten up, or burned, so he decides to go for the thrills and spend his spring break diving with sharks in the Caribbean.  But at night, he's having awful, horrifying dreams of doing things he doesn't want to do.  What will be the price of immortality?  Strange Att...

The Chessmen of Doom The Secret of the Underground Room The Lamp From the Warlock's Tomb I have spoken many times of my adoration of the king of children's Gothic/horror, John Bellairs.  Despite the hot weather making it hard to get into RIP quite yet, I was really in the mood to enjoy some nice Bellairs reading, and I grabbed these three books while I still could, before I put so much stuff in front of that particular bookshelf that I could no longer reach anything on it.  (I know you will be happy to hear that the carpet is now finished, and it looks great, and we now face untold amounts of work hauling everything back into place.) The Chessmen of Doom is a particular favorite of mine because the chessmen in question are the Lewis chessmen.*  Professor Childermass' eccentric brother, Peregrine,** has died and asked his brother to spend the summer cleaning up his country estate in Maine.  Johnny and Fergie are keen to go along and have s...

The Dark Crystal: Creation Myths (3 vols.), by Brian Froud, et al. A couple of years ago, we bought these graphic novels for our oldest.  With the release of Netflix' and Jim Henson Studios' new Dark Crystal series imminent, I decided I'd better get with the program and read them.  I'm glad I did that before we started watching the series (we've finished episode 2; we are no good at binge-watching anything and like to digest in between episodes). We got these in separate volumes; they were out of print at the time, but now everything is being re-published and you can get them in a collected volume as well.  So that's what I've linked to. A mysterious storyteller narrates the beginning of Thra and its peoples.  We see the origin of Aughra,  the arrival of the urSkeks from another planet, and their eventual division.  Gelfling folktales are sprinkled throughout, such as 'How the Gelfling Maiden Got Her Wings' or tales of an adventurous sailor lo...

RIP completely snuck up on me, as I suppose is appropriate.  But if 20 Books of Summer is still going on, and it's 95 degrees out, how can it be RIP already?  Well, luckily for us, it just can.  September 1st happens no matter what the weather.  And so here we are, for the 14th year of Readers Imbibing Peril.   The rules are easy and general: The purpose of the R.I.P. Challenge is to enjoy books that could be classified as: Mystery. Suspense. Thriller. Dark Fantasy. Gothic. Horror. Supernatural. The emphasis is never on the word challenge , instead it is about coming together as a community and embracing the autumnal mood, whether the weather is cooperative where you live or not. The goals are simple.  1. Have fun reading. 2. Share that fun with others. As we do each and every year, there are multiple levels of participation (Perils)... Ooo, new color scheme!  Nice!  Head on over there to check out the Perils and...

Sister Emily's Lightship, by Jane Yolen Happy Halloween! I can't exactly call this an RIP read, but it has elements and so I'm going to round off the event by squeaking it in here, and incidentally segue into Witch Week!  Jane Yolen is one of the grand dames of SF/F writing, I think we can all agree (RIGHT?  *ominous glare*), and this collection of short pieces that were published all over the place is well worth tracking down. Many of these stories are twists on classic fairy tales -- "Snow in Summer," for example, is a version of Snow White set in Appalachia, or in a really genius bit, "Granny Rumple" is a realistic tale that could have been the seed for an anti-Semitic Rumplestiltskin .  "Godmother Death" is a wonderful version of a story found across cultures, in which a man outwits Death...but only for so long. There's a nice little series of stories about fey, where the characters are related or appear in various tales.  The y...

The Great God Pan, by Arthur Machen Arthur Machen wrote some early fantasy horror, and I always like to see what Victorians invented back when there were fewer scripts for how a fantasy story should go.  This one is fairly weird, but it isn't a novel; it's a collection of four short stories, though "The Great God Pan" is the longest and almost qualifies as a novella.  I have a paperback Penguin English Library copy, which appears to be unavailable in the US except as an import, but Penguin just published a fancier hardback with more stories in it than I have. In "The Great God Pan," a doctor finds a way to do brain surgery that will allow the patient to see other dimensions; what he calls "seeing the great god Pan."  The victim of this surgery at first appears to have completely lost her reason, but further chapters, set in later years, reveal bits and pieces of a much worse story.  A girl, and then a woman, appears at intervals and befriends...