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Archive for the ‘Huh?’ Category

Christian Bök, “The Extremophile” (published 2025) [Ghost Box IV] (2025)

Posted in Christian Bok, Hingston & Olsen, Huh?, Patton Oswalt, Poetry, The Ghost Box on October 31, 2025| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK:

[READ: October 31, 2025] “The Extremophile”

It has been six years since Ghost Box III came out….

After years of demand, the Ghost Box is back! Patton Oswalt’s much-beloved spooky-story anthology returns for a fourth edition, with the same trademark production details—magnetized box lid, anyone?—that Ghost Box fans have come to expect.

As always, working with Patton on Ghost Box IV was a dream, and we can’t wait to show you the nightmares that he’s wrangled and stuffed into the box this time around.

I don’t know very much about Christian Bök except that he wrote the poetry series Eunoia which is a remarkable piece of art and poetry:

 Each poem uses only one vowel, creating sentences like: “Hassan can, at a handclap, call a vassal at hand and ask that all staff plan a bacchanal”

It’s worth checking out.

I didn’t know if he did anything since, but apparently he has been working on something called The Xenotext which Wikipedia says

Xenotext consists of a single sonnet (called “Orpheus”), which gets translated into a gene and then integrated into a cell, causing the cell to “read” this poem, and in reply, the cell builds a protein — one whose sequence of amino acids encodes yet another sonnet (called “Eurydice”). The cell becomes not only a durable archive for storing a poem, but also an operant machine for writing a poem. The gene has so far worked properly in cultures of E. coli, but the intended symbiote is D. radiodurans (“the dire seed, immune to radiation”) — an extremophile, able to thrive in very inhospitable environments, deadly to most life on Earth.

I quoted that because it uses the word extremophile, which is the name of this story.

This story is quite short and it is, simply, a list of conditions that this entity can survive in.  It’s fascinating but not terribly interesting and, indeed, not very scary.  Especially since nothing happens in the story.  I mean, the ending is “It awaits your experiments,” which I guess is an interesting setup and given some of that background above it does make it slightly more compelling, but as a story, well, meh.

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Michael Shea–“Brief Scenes of a Noxious Nativity” (published 2024) [Ghost Box IV] (2025)

Posted in Hingston & Olsen, Horror, Huh?, Michael Shea, Patton Oswalt, Supernatural, The Ghost Box on October 26, 2025| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK:

[READ: October 26, 2025] “Brief Scenes of a Noxious Nativity”

It has been six years since Ghost Box III came out….

After years of demand, the Ghost Box is back! Patton Oswalt’s much-beloved spooky-story anthology returns for a fourth edition, with the same trademark production details—magnetized box lid, anyone?—that Ghost Box fans have come to expect.

As always, working with Patton on Ghost Box IV was a dream, and we can’t wait to show you the nightmares that he’s wrangled and stuffed into the box this time around.

It’s unusual that I simply do not get a story.  And I absolutely did not get this one.  Or maybe I don’t get why it was written.  It’s very short (3 pages in this tiny format) and it shows two scenes.

In the first scene, a rock hits a hill.  Something cracks open and a little molecular net–an elaborate hydrocarbon making its first appearance in nature–floated out.  She floated through the rock to the water and was swallowed by a fish.

In the second scene a backhoe hits a bluff–maybe the same hill?–and another microsomething escapes.

On a second reading I get that I think this microscopic invader is potentially going to destroy the world.  But it was so oddly written that I ‘m not really sure.  Ah, I see that this is excerpted from a larger work.  So that makes sense because this felt like the set up to something.  Although I won’t be seeking out the novel.

Interestingly, Shea wrote a story in Ghost Box II that I loved.  Every story is different.

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Dan Santat–The Aquanaut (2022)

Posted in Animals, Dan Santat, Death, Graphic Novel, Huh?, Ocean on February 11, 2025| Leave a Comment »

 SOUNDTRACK:

[READ: February 2, 2025] The Aquanaut

I like Dan Santat (his instagram is fun) and I like his drawing style.  I’ve read a lot of books that he has illustrated but I don’t know that I’ve read all that many books written by him.

This book was pretty weird, but the story was a lot of fun.

The story opens with a man getting killed at sea (yea, pretty shocking).  The man turns out to be the father of the main character, Sophia.

Sophia’s father and her uncle had created a marine theme park called Aqualand.  They were scientists and they wanted to bring the world of the sea to everyone.  But there’s not a lot of money in that so investors kept insisting that they add more excitement to Aqualand.  And soon it was a far cry from what they’d envisioned.

But then one day, an Aquanaut walks out of the sea.  The aquanaut is in a diving suit–the one that her father had used!–It causes quite a stir, obviously, but it has one goal: to find Aqualand.  It’s especially funny when you realize that the suit is being “driven” by three sea creatures.

I enjoyed the story well enough but it did leave a lot of questions, mostly to do with the plot.  There’s no real explanation or even introduction to the sea creatures. And after reading the afterword where Santat talks about how personal the story was to him, I wanted to like it more.  But instead I mostly enjoyed the illustrations and the overall environmental themes and vibe of the book.

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Caza–Kris Kool (1970) [ 2020 reprint]

Posted in Caza, Graphic Novel, Huh?, Infinity, Outer Space, Sex, Sexism, Violence, Virginity (Loss of) on March 13, 2024| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: hiatus.

[READ: February 2024] Kris Kool

Caza is Philippe Cazaumayou, a French illustartor who has been working since the 1960s.  This was his first novel and it is as psychedelic as one might expect from a comic made in 1970.

There’s sex, there’s trippy colors, there’s outer space, there’s even a plot of sorts.

Kris Kool “has known the sumptuous vertigo of sinking among the moribund asteroids… [his] eyes were burnt by the truly dense flames of the sun’s corona.”

Kris is talking to a naked woman [we learn later that she is a “Lectronic Party Doll–For bachelors only”] about his spacecraft–that he sold it to the scrapyard and doesn’t have enough for a new one.  This adventurer can’t possibly end his days like this can he?

Fortunately a rogue named Bluebeard offers him a job piloting an illegal ship for Gweene.  The Gweene is a hot woman with tattoos all over her body and… no face.   She offers him a job to go to the Mandrakes from Venus, the flowerwomen that Kris believes are a myth.  (more…)

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John Scalzi–Starter Villain (2023)

Posted in Adventure, Cats, Death, Funny (ha ha), Huh?, Morality, Murder, Supernatural, Technology, Villains, Violence on February 3, 2024| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: hiatus

[READ: February 3, 2024] Starter Villain

My wife and I have relatively different tastes in books, but we have a large section of overlap.  And since she is a much faster reader than I, she brings home all kinds of books that I think I’d like to check out.

And this was, obviously one of them.  I mean, blah blah, books by their covers, but come on, of course I’m going to at least look at this one.

She confirmed that it was good and I jumped in.

I must say right off the bat it’s not what I thought it was going to be.  The cats are not the villains, despite how obvious that seems. Rather, the cats are helpers to the villain.  But we’ll get to that.

Charlie is down on his luck.  He’s a substitute teacher.  He’s recently divorced–this hurts even more because his Uncle Jake sent him a pair of berry spoons as a wedding present with a note that said 18 months, which was exactly as long as his wedding lasted.  And the house he’s living in was his only inheritance.  But he has three half siblings who are all owed a part of the house.  But it’s the only place he has to go.  And he’s got this stray cat that he recently brought home…

His last hope for a semblance of success is to buy a local Irish pub that is for sale.  But it costs a few hundred thousand dollars more than he has–and the bank isn’t fooled by his lies.

When he gets back from the bank, there is a woman waiting on his porch.   She tells him that his Uncle Jake (the one with the spoons) has died and left him a substantial sum.  He just has to go to the funeral and say a few words on his behalf.

Charlie hasn’t seen his Uncle since he was like five years old and has no idea what to say about the man.  The man owned parking garages.  How could he have a substantial sum?  But whatever, he has not much else going on.

The funeral home is hilarious because all of the bouquets has curses and threats on them–beautiful flower arrangements with sashes that say things like “See You In Hell.”  And when the funeral actually starts one of the men takes out a knife to make sure that Jake is dead. (more…)

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Peng Shepard–The Cartographers (2022) [audiobook 2022]

Posted in Adventure, Audiobooks,  Brittany Pressley,  Jason Culp,  Karen Chilton,  Nancy Wu,  Neil Hellegers,  Ron Butler, Death, Emily Woo Zeller, Huh?, Magic, Maps, Morality, Murder, Mystery, Peng Shepard, Supernatural, Violence on January 20, 2024| Leave a Comment »

[LISTENED TO: January 2024] The Cartographers

This book came on a recommended list and WOW did it sound great.

In fact, after the first few chapters, I was telling my wife about the great premise.  But I was already warning her about the irritating characters.  And, as the story went on, the premise got even better, but the characters got even more and more annoying.

And the repetitions in the book were endless.  She kept repeating herself.  She was saying the same thing over and over again.  Perhaps in a slightly different way.  But then she would circle back and confirm the repetitions.  So by the end of a chapter you had read the same thing two or three times.  And then she might repeat it once more.

The book grew so annoying that I almost didn’t bother finishing it (as many people on Goodreads said).  But I hate not finishing things, so I did something that I never do.  I sped up my audio book.

I’m not sure if I found the characters especially dull because of their actions or because of Emily Woo Zeller the audiobook narrator.  But holy cow, this book dragged on.  By the end of the book I had moved the audio speed up to 1.8x and for Emily Woo Zeller, it did not make it hard to follow (some of the other narrators were too sped up at that speed).  

The other narrators were Ron Butler, Nancy Wu, Jason Culp, Brittany Pressley, Karen Chilton and Neil Hellegers.  It was a little hard to tell when a new narrator came in, because they mostly seemed to be telling the story from different points of view.  But sometimes the main narrator narrated their parts as well. 

So the premise of the story (and I hope this isn’t a spoiler) is that if a map is made with an error (intentional or not), whatever is on that map actually exists–but only if you have that map.  I mean, this is an amazing premise.  And it is based on a real event. (more…)

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Melissa Broder–“Hamburger Baby” [The 2023 Short Story Advent Calendar #13] (2023)

Posted in Babies, Canadian Content, Christmas, Hingston & Olsen, Huh?, Melissa Broder, Pregnancy, Short Story, The Short Story Advent Calendar on December 13, 2023| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK:

[READ: December 13, 2023] “Hamburger Baby”

This year my wife ordered me The Short Story Advent Calendar.  This is my sixth time reading the Calendar–it’s a holiday tradition!  Here’s what H&O says about the calendar this year.

The 2023 Short Story Advent Calendar is a deluxe box set of individual short stories from some of the best writers in North America and beyond.  Now in its ninth year, the SSAC is back to once again bring readers a deluxe, peppermint-fresh collection of 25 short stories from some of the best writers in North America and beyond.

The author of this story was Melissa Broder.  Each day has an online component with the author with a brief interview.

It’s December 13. Melissa Broder, author of Death Valley, considers the DockATot.

(more…)

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Sam Ernst–The New Manifesto or The Slow Eroding of Time (2021)

Posted in Arthur B. Johnson, Books about writers, Choose Your Own Adventure, Dreams, End of the World, Funny (ha ha), Funny (strange), Huh?, Humiliation, Sam Ernst, Skiing, Unreliable narrator on July 18, 2023| Leave a Comment »

[READ: June 1, 2022] The New Manifesto

So I received this book at work and it was my job to catalog it (it has yet to be cataloged by anyone else).  But there was a problem.

The cover of the book says The New Manifesto a novel by Sam Ernst.  But you never trust the cover for the actual title of a book, you trust the title page.  And the title page says The New Manifesto or The Slow Eroding of Time Arthur B. Johnson edited by Sam Ernst.

Now the cover also has an about the author of Sam Ernst (with an author photo of the back of his head).  And the list of books by Arthur B. Johnson don’t seem to exist.  So, clearly, the author is Sam Ernest and Arthur B. Johnson is fictional,  But from a cataloging standpoint, Johnson needs to be acknowledged in some way.  Which is a pain.

Anyway, I decided to see if this book was worth all of the trouble.

I’m not quite sure.

It opens with a Foreword by Dr James L. Vanderworthy of Bradford College (also fictional).  He says that The New Manifesto is the novel that resonates with him more than any other.  The editors preface is from Ernst, he says he had a copy editing position at Smith Ralston Excelsior which led him to meet and befriend Arthur B. (“Artie”) Johnson.  It was this that inspired him to edit Artie’s words in the way we see here.  The Publisher says they didn’t really know what to do with the book, but they thank Ernst for his tireless work on it.

The book is presented in nine parts.  Many are short, but some (like part 2 An Assemblage) are nearly 100 pages.

Part 1 the Prelude is a series of 25 numbered paragraphs

1. He sat down to write
4. He was writing a book.  A book he never finished.  This is a story of failure.
18. Given the book’s title, he was finding it surprising how little manifesting was being done.

Part 2 is written in several much longer sections.  Each one is a hilarious account of the narrator’s life as he does remarkable things and then moves on.

He averts a war between two countries. He speaks neither language but found a letter from one kingdom to the other.  Had the message not gotten through, war was inevitable.  But he rowed for days across the sea to bring the message to the beacon he saw.  He walks to a war torn country and is taken for a doctor (he is not).  Because of a book he had just read, he is able to diagnose a seemingly dying patient, and as he leaves the area he inadvertently participates and wins the 1984 Sarajevo Ski Jump Competition.

After a few more adventures, including one aboard a ship, he gets a job at Brookhaven National Laboratory, where he uncovers a brilliant scientific schema because of the box elder bugs that swarm his office window. (more…)

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Jodi Taylor–A Symphony of Echoes [The Chronicles of St Mary’s, #2] (2013) [audiobook 2014]

Posted in Adventure, Audiobooks, Death, Dinosaurs, Fears, Feminism, Fire, Funny (ha ha), History, Huh?, Jodi Taylor, Morality, Murder, Mystery, Supernatural, Thieves, Threats, Time Travel, Violence, Zara Ramm on July 2, 2023| Leave a Comment »

[LISTENED TO: January 2023] A Symphony of Echoes

This is the second book in a something-teen long series.

I sometimes wonder if I enjoy a series more for the narrator of the audio books than the quality of the books themselves.

I didn’t think that at the time of reading this, because I was swept up in the comedy and adventure and (yes, I’m saying it, time travel).  However, while looking for a cover image, I read a scathing review of this book and felt that I did agree with many of the criticisms.  I guess I just didn’t care.  And I wonder if that’s because Zara Ramm gave great voice to the lead character Max and also did an amazing job with all of the different characters (male and female from all over the place).

Book 2 continues the time travelling saga of the historians of St. Mary’s.  Like the other stories there are several seemingly random adventures that the crew must go on.  The first, in this case, is with a soon-to-be-retiring historian named Kalinda Black.  She wishes to go to Jack the Ripper times and suss out what actually happened.

Things go horribly wrong when Jack the Ripper (in some form or another) hops a ride with them back to St. Mary’s.  It’s confusion and chaos trying to fight a near invisible enemy.  And that’s before anyone realizes that Captain Farrell is missing.

It is, of course, the dastardly duo of Izzie Barclay and Clive Ronan, set in a future St. Mary’s.  In a sign of things  to come, Max realizes that they cannot kill Ronan because of time paradoxes (I am not about to go into details of that) and that Izzie is much harder to kill than it seems when Max shoots her and dumps her in an elevator.

Because the future St. Mary’s has been decimated by Barclay and Ronan, Max stays on as interim head. (more…)

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Jodi Taylor–Just One Damned Thing After Another [The Chronicles of St Mary’s, #1] (2013) [audiobook 2014]

Posted in Adventure, Audiobooks, Death, Dinosaurs, Fears, Feminism, Fire, Funny (ha ha), History, Huh?, Jodi Taylor, Morality, Murder, Mystery, Supernatural, Thieves, Threats, Time Travel, Violence, Zara Ramm on July 1, 2023| Leave a Comment »

[LISTENED TO: July 2022] Just One Damned Thing After Another

This is the first book in a something-teen long series.

I sometimes wonder if I enjoy a series more for the narrator of the audio books than the quality of the books themselves.

I didn’t think that at the time of reading this, because i was swept up in the comedy and adventure and (yes, I’m saying it, time travel).  However, while looking for a cover image, I read a scathing review of this book and felt that I did agree with many of the criticisms.  I guess I just didn’t care.  And I wonder if that’s because Zara Ramm gave great voice to the lead character Max and also did an amazing job with all of the different characters (male and female from all over the place).

As we meet Madeline Maxwell (Max), she is in a bad way.  She has few prospects and fewer coins in her pocket.  She’s pretty desperate until she gets a surprise visit from a former teacher who tells her about a job with poor pay and worse conditions.

This leads to a job as a historian at St. Mary’s Institute of Historical Research.  The cool thing about St. Mary’s is that historians travel to the past to “confirm” details of things that happened.  Essentially University researchers get to experience historical events first hand, including all of the dangers involved.  The Institute is a part of University of Thirsk. (more…)

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