October 17, 2025 · 12:01 am

Atlas of Unknowable Things by McCormick Templeman

book cover

…the world seems especially chaotic and violent to me lately, like basic human decency has gone out the window. Most days I think I’m imagining it, but some nights I wake up with this certainty that it’s real, almost like there’s this slow leak of evil drifting out into the world tainting everything it touches.

I began to understand. I had stepped through a veil of sorts. Hildegard wasn’t like other places. There were rules here I didn’t understand. There were puzzles and clues and mysteries, and even though I felt an almost immediate and palpable sense of danger, some part of me was excited. I’d spent my entire life waiting for something to feel real, to feel important. I’d always wanted to feel at the center of something truly grand. And though I couldn’t say definitively that what was happening to me was necessarily grand, at least it was something.

As for the title, it turns out many of the things at issue are indeed knowable.

Post-grad Robin Quain is going through an identity crisis. She had a bad experience with a bf who had stolen her research to publish as his own. Then she is staying with her cousin, Paloma, in New York when her roomie goes suddenly suspicious and hostile, adding to her disorientation. Robin is looking into the possibility that the witch trials were actually an attempt to squash a long-standing established religion. She finds a clue that might lead her to a great discovery, a particular artifact. While doing this she learns that a woman has died and another, one linked to her research, has gone missing. Both were near a small college in Colorado, one that has an impressive library that might help her find what she seeks, one where the missing woman had taught, one where Robin is now accepted for a summer residency, and the game is on.

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McCormick Templeman – Image from Lighthouse Writers

Hildegard College really does seem like a game site, not just to us as readers, but also to Robin as a character. The story has a video game feel, find hidden clues, pick up weapons/tools, advance a level, answer riddles, repeat. But she feels less than entirely safe, or welcomed.

I felt like a fawn isolated from the herd as a pack of wolves slowly surrounded it, closing in, preparing for the sacrificial feast.

The student body is gone for the season, leaving the staff, professors mostly. They have a surprising history of connection with the institution. They also seem a particularly unusual collection of brains and beauty.

There is more at stake than the particular bit of history/lore that she is delving into. There are mysteries aplenty in the Rockies, including just what the hell is going on at this very eccentric tucked-away place. It is definitely something significant. There are many hints of things that might be considered supernatural, paranormal, or mythical. (Templeman has a PhD in English lit with a specialty in 19th century horror, so this fits right in) Strange flashes of light and howls in the woods, death of a local from mauling by an unidentified animal, sirens that go off in the wee hours that are most definitely not sounded to warn of loose guard dogs, large horned beings that appear in bedrooms, an island to which no one is allowed access, you know, stuff. Is Robin being paranoid? Is she being paranoid enough? Templeman provides plenty of red-herring clues that keep us guessing. Witches? Vampires? Werewolves? Ghosts? What?

The book makes several mentions of the dubious line that divides science from magic, a major thematic thread.

“Witchcraft and science aren’t as far apart as we’d all like to believe. Some say the supernatural is just natural phenomena for which we don’t yet have a scientific explanation.”

…is it possible to perceive a glimmer of the factual and historical within mankind’s persistent attraction to the supernatural?

…where are we? Where are we really?” In the depth of the night, the trees seemed to be moving in our direction. Or was it something else? He kissed my forehead. “Oh, sweetie, we’re in the place monsters come from.” “Monsters are real?” “They always have been. You just need to venture far enough out into the woods.”

It is not just the line between science and myth that is at issue, but the line between reality and something other. Robin has a real identity challenge, which makes this a more complex than usual journey of self-discovery. It runs the risk of making Robin an unreliable narrator.

There is a lot to enjoy IN Atlas, particularly the research nuggets that enrich the narrative. Templeman fills us in on elements relating to Joan of Arc, Scottish witch trials, ancient religions, a full bouquet of botanical skinny (a PhD in Chinese medicine no doubt helps Templeman here), tarot-like divination, and plenty more.

Robin’s difficulties at the school include a newfound proclivity for somnambulism. This seemed a bit overused, as Robin flits between this and that state whenever it seems convenient for the story to progress. There is a struggle Robin goes through that, while key to our suspension of disbelief, I found less than persuasive. This knocked it down a notch for me. But overall, the genre bending in Atlas is fun. The suspense is palpable. The fodder for imagination is voluminous. The scientific and historical knowledge on display is colossal. Robin is an appealing academic every-woman, a truth-seeker in a challenging place, and thus we can engage with her. It is a knowable thing that Atlas is a fun read that will keep you googling references and flipping pages.

Sometimes no rescue is possible—not when you’re the problem.

Review posted – 10/17/25

Publication date – 10/07/25

I received an ARE of Atlas of Unknowable Things from Saint Martin’s Press in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating.

This review is cross-posted on Goodreads. Stop by and say Hi!

=======================================EXTRA STUFF

Links to the Templeman’s personal, Instagram, and Goodreads pages

Profile – from her site

McCormick Templeman is a writer, editor, and scholar. A former professor, she has taught a variety of courses in English literature and creative writing. After graduating from Reed College (go Griffins) with a BA in English Literature, she went on to earn an MFA in Creative Writing from Naropa University, and a PhD in English and Literary Arts from the University of Denver where, in addition to creative writing, she specialized in 19th century horror and depictions of medicine in literature.

Possessed of a lifelong interest in the healing arts, she worked for a time as a licensed acupuncturist and herbalist and ran her own clinic in New York City. She holds a doctorate in acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine from Pacific College of Health and Science, a certificate in plant medicine from Cornell, and she is currently working toward becoming a clinical mental health counselor.

Interviews
—– Dennis James Sweeney’s Substack 2025 – Two Questions with McCormick Templeman, author of Atlas of Unknowable Thing
—–In Walks a Woman – Atlas of Unknowable Things by McCormick Templeman / Special Guest Dr. Rachel Feder – audio – 58 minutes

Items of Interest from the author
—–Eater of Books – Blog Tour Guest Post with McCormick Templeton, Author in Slasher Girls and Monster Boys in which MT lists her top ten under-the-radar horror films
—–Google – preview

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Filed under Fantasy, Fiction, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

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October 10, 2025 · 12:01 am

The October Film Haunt by Michael Wehunt

book cover

Jorie vanished from the scene, from the entire internet. Her connections, her film production and book deal, the screenplay she sold, her agent, the October Film Haunt brand, the two hundred thousand followers scattered across social media—everything drained out of her life a long time ago. She hasn’t so much as watched a trailer for a scary movie since.

“Until it became real. I don’t know if it’s evolution or some Lovecraftian construct, but what is it to know something, really? Belief leads us to something more real than knowing, Jorie. Have you not noticed that everywhere lately?”

Sometimes “belonging” is not such a wonderful thing.

The October Film Haunt is not a book for everyone. If you are a nerd-level horror maven, this will be a bloody fabulous read, with links, left, right, center, up, down and all around for you to catch and relish. For those of us who are just folks who like reading some horror books, it can be disjointed, confusing, and potentially unsatisfying.

About a decade back, Jorie Stroud, a nod to Halloween’s final girl, Laurie Strode, and two friends formed The October Film Haunt. Their schtick was to go to places where horror movies had been filmed, and scope them out for atmospherics, filling their site with reportage and recordings of their outings. Could real places be as creepy or even creepier than the flicks that were made there? Unfortunately, they went a step too far with an indie film, called Proof of Demons, suggesting that there might be more reality to that film than was justified. As a result, some foolish teens tried something out that they should not have, and one of them died.

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Michael Wehunt – Image from Pseudopod

There was blowback, and Jorie’s film ambitions, of any sort, were buried under a caul of notoriety. Then there was another death in the ripples from the initial fatality. Jorie has lived all these years with a heavy burden of (deserved) guilt. Then one day, a VHS package arrives, a trailer for what appears to be a sequel to the Proof of Demons film that had sparked all the trouble. Why? And why send it to Jorie? Is someone trying to punish her?

The primary stream of the story is final girl Jorie enduring the assaults on her sanity, her person, and those close to her. Who is doing this to her, and why? Is the mysterious PoD director, Helene Enriquez, making a sequel and somehow forcing Jorie to be a part of it?

This novel plays with several horror sub-genres simultaneously. The found-footage form, epitomized by The Blair Witch Project, is one. That film marketed itself as being based on real-world footage left behind by missing documentarians, that was discovered and cobbled together into a narrative. It was nothing of the sort, of course, but many people bought into the PR, which included a documentary style TV special and a website claiming the people who had shot the footage were really missing.

Wehunt adds slasher and demon-possession into the mix. He imbues the former with the sort of faceless, mindless killing machine aspect we would expect of Michael Myers, substituting sheets for disturbing masks. We are not talking KKK sheets here, which should be feared, but hospital sheets (maybe to be feared for different reasons?) featuring crowns worn beneath the bed linen for which the unusual outerwear seems ill-designed. And offers wrinkles on the demon possession motif by blurring the lines between possessor and possessed,

I wanted the book to be, you know, secular. I really wanted to avoid the priest vs. demon Abrahamic Christian typical dynamic of a demon possession story. – from the Talking Scared interview

while tossing into the genre blender cursed films. It is pretty much a part of this story that seeing the VHS tapes that are making the rounds can be lethal for the viewers. Home invasion? Sure, plenty of that. Cult madness? Yup. And probably more.

There are other characters who travel along this dark path with Jorie. Coleman’s brother, Jackson, went missing when he was a kid, in circumstances eerily resonant with the Proof of Demons film. He gets dragged in by a vague promise to find his brother, and maybe rid himself of his cancer.

I wanted to be there as someone who just doesn’t, horror is not on his radar. It’s never been an interest of his. He’s almost 60 years old. He’s not going to become a horror fan now. But he’s chosen for this one element of the book. And so he would have no touchstones.He would have no easy point of reference for the things that are happening to him. And simultaneously, he has been diagnosed with stage four cancer. So, things that happened to his body would to him sort of feel like it’s the cancer, isn’t it? – from the Talking Scared. interview

Beth Kowalczyk was the other survivor of the October Film Haunt trio. Jorie reconnects with her, after a very long estrangement, hoping to gain some support and understanding.

Trevor Henderson created the Pine Arch Creature for the film.

He cheered the modern legend leaking out of the film—but soon became uncomfortable and spoke out against it. “It was a really cool folklore for a minute there,” Henderson says. “A great monster that lingered with you…But then people were pushing these rituals. Some of them were like self-harm. It wasn’t just for fun anymore, so I checked out…Looking back, I can see the root of that kind of thinking that’s everywhere now, that sort of desperation to believe anything you want even when the reality is right there. There’s a difference between make-believe and post-truth. One of them isn’t dangerous.”

Roger Eilertsen was the character actor who played the PoD lead, lending gravitas to the role. He is in his 80s now, and it is unclear why he is being troubled by the sorts of intrusions endured by all the main characters. And the intrusions are considerable, beginning with delivery of a VHS tape and progressing to stalking, home invasion, unwanted filming, assault, kidnapping and worse.

The primary conceptual question that gives this book weight is the notion that belief can create reality. A very different example of such is the musical, The Music Man in which a conman persuades the kids of a midwestern community that they really can play the instruments he has only been pretending to teach. Lo and Behold, the parents somehow perceive their kids as having actually learned to play and construct an idyllic image of their new town orchestra that sounds great to them. But that perception is clearly in the eyes of the receivers. The paranormaling of the world here is quite real. There is plenty that could be made of this in a political analysis, but Wehunt claims no interest in that, so I will take a pass, well mostly, Pathetic followers of QAnon believe some pretty outrageous bullshit, and act on those beliefs in the world. Not to mention the daily flood of lies and provocations spewing from the current administration. And their attempts to create the reality of their fantasies.

The fear level is considerable as common horror trope rules are disregarded and thus expectations are thwarted. The apparent mindlessness of the cult behavior is inexplicable. Not that real-world cult behavior is necessarily understandable. Questions abound, primarily why? Why was this person dragged in to this bizarre undertaking? Why that one? I found the answers less than satisfying. The lines between reality and something else grow increasingly smudged. The portrayal of the Pine Arch Creature, also literally smudged, may offer a suitable metaphor. As does the literal eye in the sky, whether it represents a deity, a film director, or a voyeur. Metafiction can be a difficult thing to pull off, particularly as it makes it a challenge sustaining a reader’s interest in the characters when one so frequently points out the literary and structural underpinnings of the story itself.

There are plenty more details for you to find for yourself, a virtual cornucopia in fact. And catching the references can definitely be fun. But it all seemed too much for me. As noted above, if you are a horror maven, have at it. Enjoy! But it was form over substance, over fear, for me.

“Until it became real. I don’t know if it’s evolution or some Lovecraftian construct, but what is it to know something, really? Belief leads us to something more real than knowing, Jorie. Have you not noticed that everywhere lately?”

Review posted – 10/10//25

Publication date – 09/30/25

I received AREs of The October Film Haunt from Saint Martin’s Press in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating.

This review is cross-posted on Goodreads. Stop by and say Hi!

=======================================EXTRA STUFF

Links to Wehunt’s personal, FB, Instagram, and Blue Sky pages

Profile – from his site

Michael Wehunt grew up in North Georgia, close enough to the Appalachians to feel them but not quite easily see them. There were woods, and woodsmoke, and warmth. He did not make it far when he left, falling sixty miles south to the lost city of Atlanta, where he lives today, with fewer woods but still many trees. He writes. He reads. Robert Aickman fidgets next to Mary Oliver on his favorite bookshelf.

Interviews
—–Cinemachords – The October Film Haunt Author Michael Wehunt Talks Fandom, Urban Legends, & Digital Mythologizing
 – Howard Gorman
—–The Nerd Daily – Q&A: Michael Wehunt, Author of ‘The October Film Haunt’ by Elise Dumpleton
—–Talking Scared – 255 – Michael Wehunt & What If A Horror Film Broke Into Your House? – open in podcasts – then transcript is available

Items of Interest
—– The Philip Experiment: A Benchmark in Paranormal Research by C. Wesley Clough
—–Wikipedia – The Medium is the Message
—–Wikipedia – metafiction

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September 19, 2025 · 12:01 am

Replaceable You by Mary Roach

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It’s another photograph of the penis [transplanted from the owner’s middle finger], now with a rustic ceramic pitcher hanging off of it. Exactly as you or I could put a hand out, palm up, and hang a pitcher off our middle finger. The pitcher is hand-painted, white with a red and green floral pattern. I’m picturing the man and his partner again, this time having lunch in the kitchen. A little iced tea, my love?

Eventually the day arrives when no further breach is possible. Mr. Baron, wrote his doctor, Richard Martland, “was now informed, the only chance for saving his life was by making an artificial anus . . . the inconveniences resulting from such operation, were candidly pointed out to him.” Mrs. White, on the occasion of her twelfth day without a bowel movement, is presented with the same proposition. Both patients consented. Or rather, as Pring put it, “did not violently object.” And so it went. “An opening was now made . . . and instantly a large quantity of liquid feces and wind escaped,” Martland wrote. Both doctors were impressed by the force with which the matter was expelled, with Pring taking additional note of the “considerable distance” traveled. – There was no mention of a fan in the vicinity.

This book certainly lends new meaning to the expression “an heir and a spare.”

I imagine many of us, certainly folks of my demographic, have had the experience of having parts replaced, probably because of need, but for some because of choice. I know I would happily have my begrudging spine replaced if I had the chance. And there are certainly a few improvements I could use that would be competing for second place on that list. Thus, my interest in Mary Roach’s latest, Replaceable You. (My ex can attest to the truth of the title’s applicability to the entire me.) Of course, I would read anything Mary Roach has written. She is one of my all-time favorite authors. And just in case her work is new to you, she combines a hard-reporting look at a particular scientific realm with a sense of humor that will leave you gasping for breath. Complete swallowing any ingested liquids before reading her work, as they may come blasting out your nose and mouth before you can get a grip. You have been warned.

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Mary Roach – image from Harvard Bookstore – shot by Jen Siska

Roach has made a career of writing about the human body, from conception (Boink) to grave (Stiff), and beyond (Spook), with travels through the alimentary canal (Gulp), the body’s reaction to space flight (Packing for Mars), to war (Grunt) and even to strangeness having to do with our interactions with animals (Fuzz). This time around, she covers a range of body parts subject to replacing. She sniffs out the history of nose jobs back to the 1500s, and lets us in on why they were in such high demand back then. She brings home the bacon by filling us in on the status of pig research (on, not by) for the purpose of developing organs that can be transplanted into humans, a subject close to my heart.

A formal “miniature swine development” project got underway in 1949, a collaboration between two Minnesota powerhouses, the Mayo Foundation (research arm of the Mayo Clinic) and the Hormel Institute (research arm of pork).

There are sections on the replacement, or enhancement, of sexual organs. One of the opening quotes of this review notes a particular form of actual, not kidding, replacement for a male member. Female anatomy comes in for a bit of consideration as well.

Dow Corning…made the first silicone breast implant, circa 1961, this one at the urging of Texas plastic surgeon Thomas Cronin. Cronin had been “inspired by the look and feel of a bag of blood.” It is hard for me not to picture the scene: Cronin standing around the OR, idly gazing at a bag hanging on a transfusion pole and turning to a colleague: Hey. Does that remind you of something? Cronin contacted Dow, and his resident, Frank Gerow, implanted some prototypes into dogs. The team were “excited” by the outcome—and again, stop me from picturing this.

Continuing downstairs…

Who looks at the human digestive tract and thinks, Moist, tubular, stretchy . . . Might that make a reasonable vagina?

Some, apparently. The derriere comes in for a long look as well. Part of this is a consideration of the changing fashions in tush shape, stretching from sane to anime.

I have made it (well in) to septuagenarian with what is probably an unremarkable range of replacement parts. My right arm was the recipient of two metal plates and a bone graft from my hip after a rather nasty industrial accident in 1970. The plates were removed once they had done their job of helping my bones knit, a few years later. The bone graft helped heal another fracture, and was eventually absorbed back into my skeleton.

Roach tells of prosthetic limbs, and the surprising news that some people prefer them to the original. In fact, the initial inspiration for this book came from a reader who had suggested that Mary take on the exciting world of football referees. Understandably, that failed to score, but it turned out that the woman, who has spina bifida, had a problem with her foot. It had, as a result of her other difficulties, become less than useless. She wanted it removed so she could get a prosthetic, but few surgeons would consider electively removing it. Mary joined her at the Amputation Coalition National Conference, and the game was…um…afoot.

It will come as no shock that using one’s own body bits as a source of transplantation offers the huge advantage of sparing you the need for a lifetime of immunosuppressive drugs. The body’s Studio 54 security guard can take a quick look and wave the new part in as the right sort. It worked for me a second time.

Other recent personal additions were the product of open-heart surgery, three stents and an aortic valve replacement. The stents were made up of material extracted from my right leg, and the valve was contributed by a member of our porcine community. I have yet to experience any desire to go digging for truffles in nearby woodlands.

Roach takes joy in comparing the techniques and tools of hip replacement surgery to woodworking, noting that while patients could actually be conscious during the surgery, the clanging, sawing machinery noise would be so disturbing that it is deemed preferable for patients to remain unconscious for the duration. She says that “Hip replacement has the visual drama of a visit to a Chevron station.”

Sadly, I was born with a mouthful of (well, maybe not born with, which would be weird, but ultimately host to a couple of sets, baby and adult) soft teeth (my dentist’s words). This led, over time, to a need for fillings, caps, bridges and dentures.
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If you count up all the teeth that are removed and replaced with implants or dentures, I bet they would lead the pack in sheer numbers of replacement bits. Mary leads us on a walk through dentures in history, the up and down sides, as well as the benefits of not using them at all. Yes, Geoge Washington makes an appearance. You will find the section on spring-loaded replacements both fascinating and alarming, and concerning as well is the fact that so many people have elected to remove healthy teeth in order to install dentures.

Replacing hair is big business these days. But not just up top. Pubic hair is also replaceable. Not only can the short and crinkly be replaced, with hair from the head, but the opposite can be done as well. Of course this can present some grooming challenges, as pubic and head hair grow differently and behave inconsistently when treated with grooming products. Mary subjected herself to a bit of hair harvesting in her travels.

My donor site is smeared with bacitracin, but no gauze is taped in place, because my hair would get stuck. On the flight home, I will feel the back of my head start to ooze. Do you fly Southwest? Don’t sit in 11B.

She delves into the growth industry of 3D printing of bodily materials. It turns out that it is not so simple as it might seem. Each muscle and organ has particular abilities and behaviors that are very difficult to replicate, involving twisting, contracting, and reacting to incoming messaging from the brain. The Star Trek replicator might do a great job of producing “Earl Grey, hot,” but fabricating people-pieces is proving a much more complex undertaking than sci-fi writers imagined.

Eye lenses are being replaced at increasing rates. There are even many people who, as with tooth replacement noted above, are having their natural lenses replaced in order to improve their vision.

I have worn glasses since I was eight years old, for distance. The only issue I had with them was losing track of them. But in the last few years, it became obvious that there was a buildup of material on the left lens of my eye (not just the product of inattentive eyeglass wiping) that made night driving particularly challenging. Oncoming headlights, even non-bright ones, spread a glare across my field of view that was problematic. I had cataract surgery earlier this year (2025), left eye only. And it worked like a squeegee on a filthy window. The headlights are still miserable, particularly when people insist on using their brights, and when many newer cars use lights that are brighter than the prior generations of illumination, but the improvement in my vision was immediate.

She writes about the processes involved in recovering bio-materials from the recently dead, the potential for banking our own cells as a source for future replacement materials, a machine for offloading heart and respiration work from the body temporarily, and introducing us to the wonderful world of ostomies, noted up top.

Mary may write about science, but she is not, per se, a scientist. Thus, she can offer us an every-person view into the subjects she investigates. She reacts how we might react when faced with the same discoveries. She brings the oh, wow!, the joy-of-discovery moments to life for readers, and thus makes what she has learned stick for us more than it would from any dry textbook. If she leaves you in stitches, that might just be a part of your replacement work. If you burst with laughter, bust a gut, if you crack up or your laughter is side-splitting, that may be why you needed the work in the first place. Of course, if you laugh your head off, there is probably no short-term solution to that. Replaceable You is the real thing, as is Mary Roach. She is one of a kind. Accept no substitute. She is irreplaceable.

Nana takes a seat at Kuzanov’s desk and starts opening files on his computer desktop. After a few false starts, she locates a folder of photographs documenting a finger transplant performed on a cancer patient. Most of the man’s penis had been amputated, leaving him unable to do two of the things most men like to do with their penis: penetrate and pee while standing. The surgery would restore both. – She missed one.

Review posted – 09/19/25

Publication date – 09/16/25

I received an ARE of Replaceable You from W.W. Norton & Company in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating. And could you check to see if anyone left any spare spines lying around.

This review is cross-posted on Goodreads. Stop by and say Hi!

===================================EXTRA STUFF

Links to Roach’s personal, Instagram and Twitter pages

Profile – from her site

I grew up in a small house in Etna, New Hampshire. My neighbors taught me how to drive a Skidoo and shoot a rifle, though I never made much use of these skills. I graduated from Wesleyan in 1981 and drove out to San Francisco with some friends. I spent a couple years working as a freelance copy editor before landing a half-time PR job at the SF Zoo. On the days when I wasn’t there in my little cubicle in the trailer behind Gorilla World, I freelanced articles for the Sunday magazine of the local newspaper. One by one, my editors would move on to bigger publications and take me along with them. In the late 1990s, magazines began to sputter out and travel budgets evaporated, and so I switched to books.
People call me a science writer, though I don’t have a science degree and sometimes have to fake my way through interviews with experts I can’t understand.
I have no hobbies. I mostly just work on my books and hang out with my family and friends. I enjoy bird-watching (though the hours don’t agree with me), hiking, backpacking, overseas supermarkets, Scrabble, mangoes, and that late-night “Animal Planet” show about horrific animals such as the parasitic worm that attaches itself to fishes’ eyeballs but makes up for it by leading the fish around.

Interviews
—–Stuff to Blow Your Mind on iHeart – Replaceable You, with Mary Roach by Robert Lamb – audio (36 minutes) with available transcript
—–Peculiar Book Club – MARY ROACH is Un-Replaceable! – video – 1:10:03 – from 5:00
—–NPR – From heart to skin to hair, ‘Replaceable You’ dives into the science of transplant with Brandy Shillace
—–Association of Health Care Journalists – Mary Roach calls herself ‘the gateway drug to science’ by Lesley McClurg

Other Mary Roach books we have enjoyed
—–2021 – Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law
—–2016 – Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War
—–2013 – Gulp
—–2010 – Packing for Mars
—–2006 – Spook Six Feet Over – recently renamed
—–2004 – Stiff

Items of Interest
—–New York Times – 10 Icky Things Mary Roach Has (Unfortunately) Brought to My Attention – by Sadie Stein – from sundry MR writings, in case you have not laughed enough from reading her latest
—–Bauman Medical – What is a Pubic Hair Transplant?
—–Youtube – A particularly disturbing transplantation scene from the 1973 film Oh Lucky Man

Song
—–Beyonce – Irreplaceable

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September 12, 2025 · 12:01 am

Life, and Death, and Giants by Ron Rindo

book cover

At age one, Gabriel Fisher weighed thirty-four pounds and stood forty-one inches tall. It was not only Gabriel’s unusual size that dazzled Thomas, but also his unusual way with animals. As a three-year-old boy, Gabriel would often sit on a milking stool beside Jasper’s chicken coop with a piece of bread hidden behind his back. He’d wait, watching the chickens scratch in the yard until his favorite hen, a barred rock named Betsy, eased her way close to his feet, and then he’d reveal the bread with a flourish. The other hens would race toward him, but Betsy would immediately hop on his lap and peck at the bread until she’d eaten it all. Afterward, Gabriel would cuddle her while he napped in the afternoon sunshine, and she’d turn her beak into the hollow under his armpit and fall asleep.

I recognized myself inside those pages. In a life devoted to goodness, devoted to God, there can still be yearning. A quiet mouth, a devoted heart, does not mean a quiet mind. Sometimes while reading, I found myself crying, overwhelmed by the depth and breadth of Miss Dickinson’s daring, by the baring of her soul.

Some books you rip through, eager, panting, for the resolution of a conflict and the presentation of the next one. Some books demand that you go through them slowly, a stroll hand in hand. Instead of a 5K. Life, and Death, and Giants is a book you want to take your time with, savor, taste, relish, feel.

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Ron Rindo – image from Wisconsin Literary Map

Ron Rindo came across the story of the tallest person ever, from the 1920s and 1930s, and wondered how the modern world might react to a someone of like dimensions.

Just eight pounds five ounces at birth, [Robert Pershing] Wadlow stood eight feet 11.1 inches tall, weighed 439 pounds, and had size 37 feet at the time of his death, at age twenty-two, his extraordinary growth driven by hypertrophy of the pituitary gland. For a time, Wadlow toured with the Ringling Brothers Circus and promoted shoes for the International Shoe Company, but he seems to have sought a normal life, resisting efforts to define him exclusively as a circus attraction. He died of an infection in Manistee, Michigan, and is buried in Oakwood Cemetery in Alton, Illinois. My musings about how the twenty-first-century world might react to a giant in its midst provided the initial inspiration for this novel. – from the Acknowledgments

Giants such as these may have a brief stay among us, but, unlike the “beetle at the candle” or the “Hopper of the mill” can maintain more than their mere accidental existence. (The title of the novel is taken from that of the poem by Emily Dickinson. There is a link to it in EXTRA STUFF.) Gabriel Fisher is a magical person, imbued with qualities of a different realm. It is not just his physical characteristics, which mimic those of an actual human being, or the athletic prowess that traveled with his inflated size, but his kindness, considerateness, his gentleness, and his Franciscan affinity for creatures wild and domestic. A Tom Bombadil comparison would also be apt.

He opened his mouth, bayed like a young coyote. “That’s the boy,” Thomas said, smiling. “Let everyone know you’re here.” From the woods just beyond Thomas’s yard, a red fox barked, and squirrels began chattering. A half mile down the road, farm dogs howled; cattle lowed in their sunny pastures.

But, as great a presence as Gabriel is, it is the other characters in the novel who tell us what we need to know about him. He is a central hub around whom all the character spokes attach and it is their stories that make the novel roll.

“It’s a polyphonic novel, told from multiple perspectives, so in a sense, it’s five different stories,” says Rindo. “Hannah, Doc Kennedy, Billy Walton and Trey Beathards tell Gabriel’s story, but in the process, each of them tell their own story, too.” – from the Madison Magazine interview

Hannah Fisher is Gabriel’s grandmother. She loves him unreservedly, but the code of her Amish religion keeps her at a distance for far too long. Gabriel was born out of wedlock, his mother, who dies in childbirth, shunned by the community. Hers is one of the primary voices we hear throughout, as she struggles with the tensions between her faith, her love, and her sense of right and wrong.

Dr. Thomas Kennedy is a veterinarian, and the other primary voice here. Tragedy and unwarranted suspicion had driven him from a more urban life to this rustic town of Lakota, Wisconsin. He forms a life-time bond with Gabriel by virtue of delivering him into the world. Their connection is a thing of beauty, and will warm your heart. He also nurtures a friendship with Hannah. He is as good a person as you will come across anywhere.

Billy Walton manages a youth baseball team, and recruits the very oversized Gabriel to sign on. He is, of course a marvelous and dangerous player, given his power. Billy owns the local bar, and is making a place for himself after a lifetime of screwups.

Trey Beathards used to be someone, a football player, later a coach, then a drug addict and womanizer. There is much of Trey that is in need to rebuilding. He becomes Gabriel’s high school football coach, and guides his next steps. Billy and Trey introduce us to the great sports myth piece of the novel as Gabriel’s prowess exceeds any reasonable expectation, becoming the stuff of legends.

Most of the primary life tales told here share an arc. A past with troubles, self-inflicted or not, then rising from their ashes to find hope, redemption, or something like it. It is in how the characters behave around Gabriel, how they help him, look after him, care about him that we see a community in action. I am trying not to say it takes a village, but it is unavoidable.

There is a set of secondary characters here who add to the community element of the story, a gay couple who take in a stray, a severe Amish husband who does not welcome any “English” influence, a crusty older Amish man who seems to have burned all his bridges, a brotherly caretaker who goes above and beyond in caring for another.

The lines between Amish and “English” can be difficult to traverse, but Gabriel has a foot in both worlds and helps bring them to a common cause. In a different way, Thomas tries to expose Hannah to possibilities beyond her Amish restrictions. Rindo’s handling of religious and secular perspectives is deft.

You will enjoy the occasional book references scattered throughout, both to specific novels and to other unnamed texts. In parallel with the split between seeking fame versus opting for retreat, there is the tension between looking outward for inspiration and looking inward.

In his day job, Rindo teaches, among other things, the poetry of Emily Dickinson. That appreciation makes its way into the novel in two forms, a book of Dickinson’s poems that Hannah’s mother had left for her, and work left by another maternal influence. The poet’s perspective is woven into the tale, in a concern for faith, for nature ,and for the struggle to figure out how to live one’s best life, alone and in community, and the many sorts of love one can enjoy.

There were multiple times while reading this book that I was moved to tears. Not just for the emotional content of the characters’ struggles, but for the poetic descriptions, particularly of natural events.

Sometimes we feel we are on the scent of hidden things, but we doubt ourselves. Sometimes it’s because we believe we must be mistaken. Other times, it’s because we fear we might be right and we don’t want to be, or can’t be, because of who we are or where we live. But then something comes along to reveal that what we have scented with our innermost soul simply is, and our fear subsides. This revelation was my mother’s legacy, a book of poems she’d hidden, like a pheasant in the orchard grass.

There is no need to fear anything here. Life, and Death, and Giants is a heart-warming novel that will bring tears to your eyes, but which will also prompt you to consider just how to live, and just how society might work with a baseline of respect. It is one of the great works of 2025.

Review posted – 09/12/25

Publication date – 9/9/25

I received an ARE of Life, and Death, and Giants from St. Martin’s in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating.

This review is cross-posted on Goodreads. Stop by and say Hi!

==================================EXTRA STUFF

Links to Rindo’s personal and Instagram pages

Profile – from Wisconsin Literary Map

An English professor at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, Ron Rindo was raised in Muskego, Wisconsin, and lives with his wife, Jenna, on five acres of wooded land in Pickett, where they raised five children and keep an orchard and an array of vegetable and flower gardens. He has published three short story collections, Suburban Metaphysics and Other Stories (New Rivers Press, 1990); Secrets Men Keep (New Rivers Press, 1995); and Love in an Expanding Universe (New Rivers Press, 2005); and a novel, Breathing Lake Superior (Brick Mantel Books, 2022). His short stories and essays have also appeared in a wide variety of journals, and an essay, “Gyromancy,” was reprinted in The Best American Essays, 2010

Interviews
—–ABC National Radio – Greyhounds, dark academia and an Amish community in new fiction by Toni Jordan, R.F. Kuang and Ron Rindo – audio – from 37:22
—–Madison Magazine – This novel set in small-town Wisconsin is more than a ‘tall tale’ by Anna Kottakis

Music
—–Hungarian Rhapsody Number 2 – in Chapter 8

Items of Interest from the author – Links to these short stories can also be found in Rindo’s website
—–Terrain.org – The Return of Migrating Birds
—–The Summerset Review – Horses
—–Wilderness House Literary Review – The Mystery in Summer Rain
—– The Trumpeter – The Song of the Tree Frog
—–Tikkun – A Theory of Everything

Items of Interest
—–All Poetry – Life, and Death, and Giants
—– Eddie Carmel

For what it’s worth, I had the experience, growing up in the West Bronx, of seeing Eddie Carmel every now and again. He and his parents lived there. It’s not like we ever had a conversation. But my pals and I spotted him climbing into a taxi or other car, feet planted in the front passenger seat. Tush in the rear. At that time of his life, he was afflicted with scoliosis, among other maladies, and walked with at least one cane. While it was startling to see someone that large (believe the 8’9″ number. There is no way he was only 7’3″) it was also very sad. It seemed from looking at him, his face, that this was a man who was in great pain. He was someone who was no longer able, if he had ever been able, to be comfortable in his own oversized skin. Awe was replaced with a very large feeling of pity.

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August 29, 2025 · 12:01 am

Killer on the Road / The Babysitter Lives by Stephen Graham Jones

book cover

“Next hundred and fifty miles are—they’re like the Bermuda Triangle for travelers, do you know that?” he says, finally bringing his pasty face around to Harper. “Thought it was the Snow Chi Minh Trail,” Harper says right back. It’s what her dad used to call 80 in the winter. “He’s talking about all the people who go missing, dear,” the woman says. “You’ve seen the posters in the windows at the gas station, haven’t you? Not just . . . walking people either. Drivers too.” “Just because people don’t call to check in doesn’t mean they’re missing,” Harper says. “Just means they don’t want to get found.”

“Thanks for the ride,” the hitcher says, climbing in from the sheeting rain. “What’s the old joke?” the driver says, clocking his mirror to ease back up to speed. “I ask you—no, you ask me if I’m a serial killer, and I say no, I’m not worried about that. The chances of two serial killers randomly being in the same car are through the roof, right?”

Somewhere in a U-Haul storage unit, there is a box or several with the remnant paperbacks of my wastrel youth. Among the volumes doing battle with mites of diverse sorts is a stack of Ace Doubles. From 1952 until 1973 Ace produced a line of paperback books that were printed in what is called the tête-bêche format.

“The ends of the two parts met in the middle, with a divider between them which functioned as the rear cover of both (the two parts were oriented upside-down with respect to each other in order to effect this)”– from Wiki

It was a bit of an oddity, but my need for science fiction was great, and I took my sustenance where I could find it. This format allowed for the publication of two pieces in a single volume. They could be novels, novellas, or abridged publications. (You can see a nice collection of covers from these on Flickr) There were other sorts, mysteries and westerns, for example, but I only cared about science fiction. As part of a celebration of Saga Press’s tenth anniversary, they decided to revive the format. What fun to see the form brought back to life! Stephen Graham Jones was asked to contribute some work. This volume is the result.
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Image from Simon & Schuster

These SGJ works are not of immediately recent vintage. Both were written in a two-month period in 2018. The Babysitter Lives, was published as an audio book in 2022.

Release date was about when it would fit in the schedule, when is there gonna be a few months when I don’t have a book out to make these two books happen. It was that and we really wanted to do a flip book as part of Saga’s ten-year celebration. I had these two novels ready to go. Seemed like the perfect time. – from the Spotify interview

The two novels are quite different. Killer on the Road is a duel between a serial killer with a special gift and a final girl, as they drive along route 80 in Wyoming, marking a trail of carnage, exit by exit, stop by stop. (Jones has driven this road many a time and can attest to its many dangers, although maybe not the ones depicted here.) Pre cellphone, of course. Harper is 18 and leaving home after a blowup with her family, hitchhiking. She teams up with some friends who are tooling around in a National Park Service Vehicle. Not your usual road trip. Bucketmouth, a living urban legend, drives this road, eager to add to his personal roadkill total. He is also lonely in his particular form of awfulness and is quite loquacious. Harper becomes someone he likes to talk to, and therein lies the ongoing tension. It began as a novella, but Jones needed more space for Bucketmouth to do his thing. He also needed more space for Harper to grow, and voila. I am not sure why this sat around for seven years waiting to be published.

As with many in the genre, young people are done in with some regularity. Some older folks as well. The doings-in are very creative and awful. There is a non-stop pace to it, keeping the characters moving along route 80 and into and away from peril, a battle of wits and creativity, as Jones finds interesting ways for his monster to reduce the population, and challenge his final girl, the actual final solution to serial-killer-slasher-monsters, to make it stop before everyone succumbs.

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Stephen Graham Jones – image from El Pais – courtesy of Jones

The Flip side book, The Babysitter Lives starts off with the usual creepy vibe. Teen on a sitter gig, wanting nothing more than to see the kiddies off to bed early enough to get some SAT test prep in. No boyfriend waiting for a chance to hook up. But a buddy of the bff sort will be by to make studying difficult. So, stalker? horror-mask guy in the closet with a machete? Not really, although there is very real mortal peril, and a veeeeerrrry creepy jack-in-the-box, that called to mind the Twilight Zone episode It’s a Good Life. This tale merges the haunted house story with the babysitter alone and in danger genre to create a truly nightmarish read.

The house has issues, including hosting the ghost of a psycho-killer, seemingly able to lock and unlock doors at whim, and is fitted with a chutes-and-ladders characteristic that makes it tough to figure out exactly where and when each transit point leads to, and if it will lead there again, as the house tries to eat her.

I confess, it was all too much for me. I did finish reading it, but was on the verge more than once, of throwing up my hands. While I think I am fairly able to keep track of details and actions in any book, I found that I was often perplexed about what had just happened, who was where, who was who, when we were, and what the rules were. While the lead was appealing, I just did not feel involved enough to make the effort to firm up my understanding of the logic and structure of the story by paying closer attention. Ultimately, while I appreciate genre-bending as much as the next reader, am perpetually impressed by the gift SGJ possesses for creating new images while referencing the classic ones, and enjoy a good scare, The Babysitter Lives did not do it for me. This does not lessen my appreciation of SGJ’s creative genius. I will be lining up to read his next new work as soon as it is announced.

I ran into that darkness, and am still running. – from the 5280 interview

Review posted – 08/29/25

Publication date – 07/15/25

I received an ARE of Killer on the Road – The Babysitter Lives from Saga in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating.

This review is cross-posted on Goodreads. Stop by and say Hi!

=======================================EXTRA STUFF

Links to Jones’s personal, Twitter and FB pages

Profile – from DemonTheory.net

Stephen Graham Jones is the NYT bestselling author of thirty-five or so novels and collections, and there’s some novellas and comic books in there as well. Stephen’s been an NEA recipient, has won the Texas Institute of Letters Award for Fiction, the Los Angeles Times Ray Bradbury Prize, the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, the August Derleth British Fantasy Award for Best Horror Novel, the Independent Publishers Award for Multicultural Fiction, the Western Literature Association’s Distinguished Achievement Award, the American Library Association’s RUSA Award and Alex Award, the 2023 American Indian Festival of Words Writers Award, the Locus Award, four Bram Stoker Awards, three Shirley Jackson Awards, and six This is Horror Awards. Stephen’s also been inducted into the Texas Literary Hall of Fame, he’s been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award, and the Eisner Award, and he’s made Bloody Disgusting’s Top Ten Horror Novels. He’s the guy who wrote Mongrels, The Only Good Indians, My Heart is a Chainsaw, Earthdivers, I Was a Teenage Slasher, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, and Killer on the Road. Stephen lives in Boulder, Colorado.

Interviews
—–5280 – Meet Colorado’s Most Prolific Killer, Horror Author Stephen Graham Jones by SPENCER CAMPBELL

After his first few novels, Jones realized his book event audience had begun treating him as an authority on Native American culture, just as his teachers had. “I did not like it even a little bit,” Jones says. He made a decision to swerve hard into slashers, zombies, and werewolves, “as a way of telling all those people, I dare you to try to find the Indian stuff in this,” Jones says. At the same time, Jones tried to publish works in the vein of David Foster Wallace. “What happened was about 2006, 2007, I feel like I became two writers,” Jones says. “One was on kind of a literary track, and one was doing the schlockiest genre stuff I could think of.”

—–Writers Digest – The WD Interview: Stephen Graham Jones by Moriah Richard
—–DemonTheory.net – PFDW # 181 – Interview with Stephen Graham Jones on Mapping the Interior
—–Pen.org – Crafting Nightmares: The Art of Horror with Stephen Graham Jones & Paul Tremblay – brief and not specific to this book.
—–Spotify – Episode 37: “A Fish story” with Stephen Graham Jones – by Matthew Jackson – audio – 1:06:57 – from 3:45

My reviews of (sadly, only six) previous books by Jones
—–2025 – The Buffalo Hunter Hunter – in Coots Reviews
—–2024 – The Angel of Indian Lake -The Indian Lake Trilogy #3 – in Coots Reviews
—–2023 – Don’t Fear the Reaper -The Indian Lake Trilogy #2 – in Coots Reviews
—–2021 – My Heart is a Chainsaw -The Indian Lake Trilogy #1 – in Coot’s Reviews
—–2020 – The Only Good Indians
—–2016 – Mongrels

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August 15, 2025 · 12:01 am

Rope by Tim Queeney

book cover

While many short lengths of rope helped countless individuals through the centuries, rope also was a tool of human innovation writ large through collective action. Just as many small strands come together to form a rope, so, too, did many people gather to perform the biggest of tasks. The exemplar of this from the ancient world is the Egyptian pyramids. While we don’t know exactly how these human-built mountains were assembled, we can be sure that rope was an essential tool in their construction. In this way rope stands as both a tool and a symbol of humans working together to achieve the greatest things.

The concept of rope remains timeless; what changed over millennia was the application of the human mind toward making ever better rope and in devising ways to use it.

Neanderthals used rope 50,000 years ago. Did Homo Erectus, Habilis, Australopithecus, or any of the sundry other homo genus cousins get there first? Dunno. Maybe, but no thread of evidence for any rope-making before Neanderthal has been found. Still, it was a helluva long time ago, and ropy material tends not to survive forever, unlike stone tools, so…maybe. Makes rope rank with fire and stone tools, (although, rope was a form of tool-making, it probably came after stone tools) as basic elements of civilization. (Oh, and let’s not forget Duct Tape)

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Tim Queeney – image from his site – shot by Molly Haley

The breadth of this book reminds me of the opening scene of
2001:A Space Odyssey, taking us at it does from the dawn of tool-using man (or pre-man) to the futuristic apex of a 21st century space station. Tim Queeney takes us on a past-to-future journey of similar timescale, albeit without the perplexing Star Child ending.

There are books that cover a seemingly narrow subject in vast depth. I have read several of this sort, stovepipe books I suppose one might call them. (Banana, A Perfect Red, The Age of Deer, Eels, Just My Type, or many others) It is usually the case that the information revealed therein broadens our appreciation for the subject matter at hand, generating a lot of reactions like, “I never knew that,” or “wait, what?” Rope could be considered a stovepipe book in that it is focused on a seemingly single thing. Yet, once one dives in, it soon becomes apparent that the subject matter is massively broad, touching on a vast array of human history and enterprise. It seems less a narrow stovepipe look than a Poppins-esque vista of the rooftops of London. For a book of such modest length, it offers a broad, deep, and surprising look at one of the seminal tools of human existence.

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Image from Disney

For Tim Queeney, this book is an homage to his nautical father, the man who taught him everything he knows about sailing, making manifest the emotional and experiential ties that bind father to son. As one might imagine there is a vast amount here related to seamanship through the ages. And much wisdom to be had for aspiring sailors and fishermen. He notes knots in abundance. Sadly, in the AREs that I read, paper and Kindle, there were no illustrations of these or the other devices and tools that Queeney describes. I cannot say if this is also the case in the hardcover release. I added links to a couple of old seamanship books in EXTRA STUFF if you find yourself wanting some instruction on how to twist and tie (or untie) this or that obscure tangle of rope. And there are sundry images available on Queeney’s site, although not on knot tying, at least not that I found.

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The Lifeline by Winslow Homer – from the Philadelphia Museum of Art

In a slightly related vein, it was fun to learn of the need for rope skills in the world of entertainment. Maneuvering sets on stage take a set of skills that any sailor would easily recognize, and that any stage pro would need to have mastered.

My personal experience with rope is minimal. I recall as a stripling hanging out with friends in the Morris Heights neighborhood in Da Bronx, a place that offered the presence of sundry empty lots. There was one in particular, a large one that featured a singularly tall tree. I have no idea which foolhardy child undertook the task, but someone had climbed up that tree and slung across a sturdy branch a rope that ended in an engorged knot about fifty feet below. (Well, of course, someone with a strong arm might have just tossed it up and over from the ground, but where’s the fun in imagining that?) The Bronx is a hilly place, so the improvised swing began on the uphill side and swung out over the downhill side. Losing one’s grip at top could result in a slight bruise and a dose of embarrassment. Letting slip on the downhill side, particularly if the drop was unintended, could result in weeks in a cast. I swung out on this very thick knot of rope a time or three, but, being of a risk-averse sort, considered that sufficient. My other related, rope-involved escapade occurred as a much older idiot. I will not repeat it here, but direct you to my review of Rivers of Power for the mortifying details. Otherwise, no further rope-related personal experiences of note pop to mind, so you are spared that.

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Section of cable showing strands in the cables supporting the Brooklyn Bridge – image from Catskill Archive

There is also a lot having to do with things quite far removed from the briny deep and the boards. Major world constructions of diverse sorts, pyramids, and ancient megaliths, for example. Surprisingly, in Inkan (Queeney’s spelling) traditions, rope, khipu, was used, through an intricate language of knots, to tell stories. One could say that these ropes in particular were used to create yarns. Some might, but not me. You will be surprised to learn who perfected the art of the lasso. And then there is some history on notions of knots in the realm of matrimony. As with so many things, one person’s tool is another person’s weapon. He racks his brain to report on rope as a tool of restraint, pain infliction, and termination. Subjects cover land transportation, the manufacture of rope, construction, communication (sub-Atlantic cables) rope tricks, climbing, space exploration and plenty more. He also provides considerable attention to materials that were used in the past and the materials that make up much of the rope-assigned tasks of our age, from the invention of rayon and nylon to the use of metal like steel, to the superstrength fibers of today, like Kevlar.

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A drawing of how the steep ramp, poles and ropes could have helped the workers lift the huge blocks of stone used to construct the pyramids. – image from Kids News

Queeney has a very engaging style. Only rarely will you find it necessary to struggle past some technical jargon. His enthusiasm is infectious. No mask needed. He will throw a lariat around your attention and slowly pull you in.

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A space elevator made of carbon nanotubes stretches from Earth to space in this artist’s illustration. – image from Scientific American – source: Victor Habbick Visions/Science Source

Whenever anyone proclaims “no strings attached,” you should know better. Rope makes it clear that there are, and for at least 50,000 years always have been, strings attached, and that without them, we might still be traversing waterways powered by oars and muscle, communicating face to face, and satisfying ourselves with building structures of exceedingly modest dimensions. The discovery and implementation of rope technology has allowed us, as in the Indian Rope Trick, to climb into places we had never known before. So does this remarkable book.

Review posted – 08/15/25

Publication date – 08/12/25

I received digital and paper AREs of Rope from St. Martin’s in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating. And, uh, I held up my end, so could you untie me, please?

This review is cross-posted on Goodreads. Stop by and say Hi!

=======================================EXTRA STUFF

Links to Queeney’s personal, FB, Instagram, Twitter and Blue Sky pages

Profile – from his site

In addition to writing books, I was the longtime editor of and columnist for Ocean Navigator, a magazine for serious offshore sailors. At ON I also taught celestial, coastal and radar navigation as an instructor for the Ocean Navigator School of Seamanship, both in hotel meeting rooms ashore and on tall ships at sea. I love to sail, hike, get lost in museums and spend timeless hours drawing and painting. I’m a dad to three sons and a rescue dog. Am a NE Patriots and Arsenal fan and tend to reference a Stanley Kubrick film every two minutes or so. I’m also that annoying night sky watcher who is always pointing out the constellation Cassiopeia — because its forms a big W, which reminds me of my wonderful wife, Wendy.
I live in Maine and can hear the fog horns of three lighthouses when the fog rolls in.

Interviews
—–History Unplugged – Rope Equals Fire as Humanity’s Most Important Invention: It Allowed Hunting Mammoths and Building Pyramids – with Scott Rank – audio – 58:27
—–Rope Equals Fire as Humanity’s Most Important Invention: It Allowed Hunting Mammoths and Building Pyramids – text extract of the above podcast
—–Maine Calling – Rope by Jennifer Rooks, Jonathan P. Smith – audio – 50:36

Items of Interest from the author
—–The History Reader – Rope’s Role in Colonial America’s Tarring and Feathering
—–Queeney’s blog
—– Dragging a Ship Uphill? Gonna Need Some Rope – On Werner Herzog making Fitzcarraldo
—– Ben Franklin Gets Juiced With a Little Hemp
—–Rope Ends: Moving Massive Stone Blocks the Natural Way

Items of Interest
—– The Kedge Anchor, or, Young Sailor’s Assistant – an 1847 source of knowledge maritime, including instructions for tying dozens of sorts of knots
—–The Ashley Book of Knots – 1944 – thousands of knots, with illustrations
—–Earth-Logs – Earliest evidence for rope making: a sophisticated tool by Steve Drury
—–Arcanth – Making Rope – Medieval to Edwardian technique – video – 2:49 – this is amazing!
—–Wiki – the Indian Rope Trick

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July 31, 2025 · 12:01 am

Unworld by Jayson Greene

book cover

At that moment, I understood several things about upload consciousness in rapid succession. Her intelligence wasn’t able to filter out or compartmentalize grief. She had no neurochemical responses flooding in to numb her pain, to soften its impact. A mind was eternal, unforgiving; a brain was a soft, plump cushion. Loss needed a brain.

I was a grieving mother, for Christ’s sake. My pain was meant to crack the earth. And here I was, not even half a year later, one of grief’s private citizens again. Were people’s memories really so short? Or was it just that you could never stop performing—falling to your knees, rending your garments—if you wanted to keep their attention? I guess it was only the people eager to make themselves a burden who reaped the rewards.

Unworld is a tale of heart-crushing grief that raises a vast array of questions about the nature of our existence. It presents as a twenty-minutes-into-the-future sci-fi look at things that may be near at hand, but which have yet to fully arrive.

We share much of our existence with the digital world, posting images on line, communicating via e-mail, text, et al. But if you are like me, you will struggle to remember considerable chunks of what has been communicated. What if you could get a personal recorder that kept track of everything for you, ready to play it back whenever you need it? Could have used that when I managed to wander away from my baseball glove as a pre-teen. It took a long time to save up enough to replace it. Or later in life, when faced with the hated, hostile question, “How could you not remember?” I definitely get the appeal. But the benefit comes at a cost. The AI that you just invited into your head gets to see everything. It becomes the keeper of your memories. In the patois of the novel this is called an upload, and you are the tether to which it synchs. You may have the option of evicting your digital tenant, but how many people really would? And what if your upload begins to have a yearning for independence? They are comprised of your memories and experiences, after all. Can they make off with that to form their own private being? What if they reside in multiple tethers (sequentially) over time? You can see where this might get complex.

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Jayson Greene – Image from WAPO – photo by Ebru Yildiz
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But the story is easier to traverse than that. There are four main characters, well, four from whom we hear. The central person around whom the story circles is Alex, a teenager, who may or may not have committed suicide. We are given four POVs, beginning with Anna, Alex’s mother, who is crushed and confused. Cathy teaches a class called Applied Personhood Theory. Sam(antha) is a teen a bit older than Alex. They had been friends, and had been working on a film project together. Aviva is the upload. We get a second take from Anna to close out the tale. The Alex we get to know is the sum of their memories and impressions.

But then, one could as easily say that the story revolves around Aviva. She is significantly part Anna. But she also has a disembodied relationship with Alex, and thus relates to Sam as she and Alex work on their project, and spends time as an upload in someone else as well.

It is unclear if Aviva is a menace, a predator of some sort, an artificial enhancement, an independent person, a fusion of herself with the people with whom she has synched, or what. She is getting closer to Alex and thinks, Wake up, I wanted to scream at her. (Anna) I am the ogre from a fairy tale. I am the cuckoo bird who kicks the real mother out of the nest to assume her place.

You could go through this book thinking about just who these characters are. Alex clearly has significant issues, enough to make him want to escape his own skull, maybe find release in a digital realm. Anna cannot find an escape from her grief, from the loss of her son, separation from her upload, the shakiness of her marriage. Can she be a whole person on her own? Cathy has had issues of her own. A drug addict earlier in her life, she is looking for something in an illegally obtained upload, some understanding of a real experience that has been purely theoretical to her so far. Sam is the stable one of the lot, struggling with the loss of her friend without ever really knowing why he had died. And Aviva’s construction is the most fraught of all, dependent on her tether(s) for most of her memories and sensations, but yearning to be independent, truly existing on multiple planes.

It is easy to let theoretical peregrinations overwhelm the emotion of the story. But there is plenty of rank human emotion on display as well. Anna’s loss is gut-wrenching. Greene knows something about the experience of losing a child. He published a memoir in 2019, Once More We Saw Stars, in which he writes about recovering from the accidental death of his two-year-old. Aviva may lack the physical tools that humans possess to manage our high-end stress, so her inability to handle strong emotion is understandable. As is Alex’s panic at a sudden new level of overwhelmingness.

In addition to tapping into your feelings UnWorld generates plenty of confusion. More questions are raised than answered, and those questions are the sort that will stick in your head for a while, whether or not you install a special chip behind your right ear.

“Do you feel how shitty it is to be encased in a brain, when you sync with Mom? It’s got to be like going from, like, this wide-open vast universe to locking yourself in a closet. If I were you, I’d never want to come back.” “Actually,” I said, “when I go too long without syncing with your mom, everything is painful and more difficult.” He considered this. “What if you were cut free?” he asked. “Where could you go?” I hesitated. “That’s difficult to answer, Alex,” I said. “What tethers me to your mom is pretty powerful—love, family, history. Cutting it would be severely painful. I could go anywhere, I guess, and listen to anyone’s anything, but who would I be?”

Review posted – 07/18/25

Publication date – 06/17/25

I received an ARE of Unworld from Knopf in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating. I can turn this thing off now, right?

This review is cross-posted on Goodreads. Stop by and say Hi!

=======================================EXTRA STUFF

Greene’s Instagram page

Interviews
—–Dad Talks
Dad Talks #8 : Jayson Greene By Michael Venutolo-Mantovani – This was for Greene’s previous book Once More We Saw Stars, but relevant to this book as well
—–Circulating Ideas – Jayson Greene – Unworld – with Steve Thomas
—–Books Are Magic – Jayson Greene: UnWorld w/ Mattie Lubchansky video – 46:25 – Greene reads an excerpt to 10:00, then interview

Item of Interest
—–Twenty Minutes into the Future – Max Headroom was a 1987 satirical sci-fi series that had as its tagline “twenty minutes into the future.” The phrase came to be used for any sci-fi that was set in the short-term near-future.

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July 25, 2025 · 12:01 am

American Mythology by Giano Cromle

book cover

They reached the far edge of the lake, where the woods grew right up to the shore, making it dark and shadowed. Tree branches seemed to sway and move, even though there was no breeze. Luther stood very still, staring at something deeper inside the forest, a dense knot of branches and limbs braced against each other. Mud was chinked into crevices between logs. Grasses and moss thatched a roof. Jute realized it was a primitive shack, like something out of a fairy tale. Without saying a word, they slowly approached. Once they were upon it, Luther reached out and tugged a gnarled branch, which turned out to be a door. They stepped inside.

…this was what small towns did. They caught you in their nets, kept you from going out into the world and growing into the person you were supposed to be.

The prologue sets the scene. 1853, a trapper crew reports trap lines being cut, members mysteriously disappearing, whispering noises heard in the woods.

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Giano Cromley – Image from his Twitter profile

Julius (Jute) Ramsey is our leader today. A strange event happened when he was 11 years old, on a hike up to the unmapped Ramsey Lake with his father. Subsequent signs offer more warning than welcome. Dad was clearly afraid, and all but dashed away. He became almost a different person, losing his mood control, and his job, disappearing for increasing durations until he stopped coming back at all when Jute was 16. Jute’s mission today is to return to that place and discover exactly what had so changed his father, as much as he wants to discover proof of something undiscovered

Luther tucked his chin into his Adam’s apple for a moment. “Don’t be surprised if you see some mighty strange stuff up there,” he said. “Ramsey Lake is what some folks call a thin place.” “What’s a thin place?” Jute asked. “Every culture’s got spots like this,” he said. “Where the veil between our world and the spirit world is so thin they practically overlap.”

For Jute Ramsay it is an unmissable opportunity to go on a BigFoot hunt with a major player in the field. For Doctor Marcus Bernard, eager to return to academic acceptability after a long tenure as an expert in Sasquatchology, it is a chance to re-establish his intellectual cred with a bang. He is hoping to be helped along by Vicky Xu, who had started out merely looking to do a film project on Dr. Bernard for her graduate thesis, but who sees the outing as a great opportunity. Vergil Barnes is Jute’s best friend and co-founder of the Basic Bigfoot Society of Basic, Montana, population 484. He has reason to think it may be his last, and he does not want to disappoint his buddy. Vergil’s daughter, Rye, is in from college, and tags along to help look after her father.

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This zoomed-in image shows a creature resembling bigfoot. Shannon Parker took the photo Sunday, Oct. 8, 2023, while departing Silverton on the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad. She used an SLR camera with a 300 mm lens. (Courtesy of Shannon Parker) – Image from The Durango Herald

There are the usual odd things you might expect on such an adventure. Rapid, unexplained changes in weather, discoveries of clues, such as a casual acquisition of a very old, and relevant notebook. Some mysteries are not well explained, which can be irksome, but, whatever.

So, the bottom line in all such novels comes down to “is there or isn’t there?” I will not spoil it for you here. It is the journey of course that matters, or the journeys, as all six may all be on the same trail but travel their own roads. Is there magic in the world, and if so, of what sorts? Searching for Sasquatch is a journey of self-discovery for all of them.

The journal entries offer a nifty myth-making tool to keep them connected to the past and strange possibility. But the absence of harder evidence roots the tales of BigFoot in oral tradition, where most lore is communicated.

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Bigfoot allegedly caught on cam near Braxton County, in 2019. (The source has since been determined to be from Jeffrey Stoffel and Jenna Oleson.) – image from West Virginia Explorer

Vergil faces an existential threat. Rye is there to support her ailing dad, but hears the voice of her late mother. Jute’s challenge is his need for the whole truth. Will he find it? He is a good sort, and you sure hope so. Dr. Bernard is up to cynical no-good. His journey is more annoying than not for his eagerness to dismiss all evidence, even any suggestion of possibility. Vicky abets him in this. Her struggle is less fraught than Bernard’s but providing evidence for him is why she is there. Some of the characters’ struggles are more engaging than others, but overall there is enough buy-in to keep you turning the pages for the next twist, surprise, and peril. Their concerns are serious, touching on religion, the endangered planet, and connection to family and community.

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Image from The Keystone Newsroom

There is an explanation offered at end that was no more unbelievable than any other, maybe even a bit better than most. It is a nice-to-have, but the generally warm-hearted, open-minded, exploratory take of the book makes this an easy Summer read. Whether your piggies are petite or prodigious, and however distant your extremities may be from your face, it will definitely be worth your while to take a large step into American Mythology.

MAGIC PROTECTS THIS SPACE TURN BACK NOW

Review posted – 07/25/25

Publication date – 07/15/25

I received an ARE of American Mythology from Doubleday in return for a fair review, and destroying all copies of that map. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating.

This review is cross-posted on Goodreads. Stop by and say Hi!

=======================================EXTRA STUFF

Links to Cromley’s personal, FB, Instagram, and Twitter pages

Profile – from the book

Author Bio: Born and raised in Montana, GIANO CROMLEY is the author of two young adult novels and a collection of short stories. He is a recipient of an Artist Fellowship from the Illinois Arts Council and was a BookEnds Fellow with Stony Brook University. He is an amateur woodworker, a certified wildlife tracker, and an English professor at Kennedy-King College, where he is chair of the Communications Department. He lives on the Southside of Chicago with his wife and two dogs. Residence: Chicago, IL Hometown: Billings, MT.

Interviews
—–Talking Scared- 245- Giano Cromly & Our Friends in the Forest
—–Chicago Review of Books – The Proof Is Out There: An Interview with Giano Cromley by Rachel Robbins

Item of Interest from the author
—– The Tao of Bigfoot

Items of Interest
—–BFO – The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization
—–The Keystone – Bigfoot fever grips Pennsylvania as reports of strange footprints and howls surface
—–BFT – BigFoot Times

My other BigFoot book review
—–Devolution by Max Brooks

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June 27, 2025 · 12:01 am

The Ghost Woods by C.J. Cooke

book cover

Oh God, there it is, lit up by the car’s headlights. Four pointy turrets and dark stone walls laced with red ivy. It looks like Dracula’s holiday home.

Something unspeakably evil is stalking the grounds of Lichen Hall.

Two women, from different backgrounds, at different times, (1959 and 1965) find themselves in the same position, pregnant without a mate in a period in which that was not considered socially acceptable. Such women were often shunted off to mother-and-baby homes. You may have heard of the Madgalene laundries of Ireland. They were awful, and were not restricted to the Emerald Isle. But Mrs. Whitlock’s Lichen House is soooooo much worse. There is plenty of strangeness about the place and some of its inhabitants, well beyond garden-variety human unpleasantness.

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C.J. Cooke – image from Curtis Brown

In 1959, seventeen-year-old Mabel Anne Haggith finds herself five months deep in a family way, despite never having had sex. Her mother and stepfather have sent her off to be seen to, out of sight of the neighbors. She is truly a clueless innocent. She feels that there are ghosts in her body. In 1965 Pearl Gotham, twenty-two, a nurse, is likewise facing emerging problems, an unreliable bf among them. Both are taken in by the welcoming, if somewhat chilly, Mrs. Whitlock. The house seems likelier to generate nightmares than comfort to women in need. In fact, it has much in common with the abusive mother-and-baby institutions of its time. More about that later.

Mabel is very much a pleaser, eager to fit in, even when hazed by those already there. She is shy and unsure of herself, working class, uneducated, and for all intents and purposed alone in the world. Until she finds a friend in another young woman there, Morven.

Pearl arrives with much more confidence. A nurse, she is aware of the seriousness of the lack of real medical care at Lichen House. She is also much more worldly, more socially able, not just with the other young women but with Mrs. Whitlock as well. In addition she is charged with tutoring Mrs. Whitlock’s decidedly odd grandson.

Cooke offers a cornucopia of detail that gives the creepiness texture and provides a constant source of surprising revelations. There are mysteries to be sussed out. The overarching imagery of the story has to do with fungi. The house itself is seriously infested with molds of various sorts, and is rapidly sinking into decrepitude.

I follow her gaze to an enormous mass of yellow fungus creeping up the side of a wall. What looks like a series of giant ears are bulging from the gap in the doorframe, right down to the floor. As I draw my eye across the length of the vestibule I spot more fungus spewing from cracks in the tiles and the window frames. The vaulted ceiling is sullied by black blooms of mold. Black frills poke out from the wooden steps at my feet. And at the end of the staircase, a plume of honey-gold mushrooms nub out from the newel post, perfectly formed. It makes me feel physically ill.
“What happened?” I ask, burying my mouth in the crook of my arm.
She sighs wearily. “An infestation of fungus. I still can’t quite believe it. This house has been standing for four hundred years. It has withstood bombs, floods, and a bolt of lightning.” She folds her arms, exasperated. “Fungus can eat through rock, can you believe that?”
“Good God,” I say.

The woods manifest spots of light that can lure one in. Mrs. Whitlock celebrates every birth with a puff of fairy dust toward the newbie. Mr. Whitlock maintains a Micrarium, a sort of mini- museum, a cabinet of curiosities focused on fungi. He makes a big deal about cordyceps, which may be familiar to fans of The Last of Us.

There is plenty of strangeness. Who posts a “Help Me” poster in one of the rooms? Who is that little boy Pearl sees dashing about, the one the other young women deny having seen? Mrs. Whitlock seems particularly averse to making use of the medical profession, forcing her guests to give birth in the house, with only the assistance of the women living there. What’s up with that? Mr. And Mrs. Whitlock were reputed to have had a son who died in an auto accident, but his body was never recovered. Huh? Who is the mysterious, threatening figure in the woods?

“So there’s a story about a witch who lives in the ghost woods out in the forest.”
“I’ve heard of that,” I say. “Mrs. Whitlock mentioned it. At least, the ghost woods part. I don’t believe she mentioned a witch.”
“Well, I heard about it when I first came here,” Rahmi says, and I see Aretta give her a look, as though to warn her not to say more. Rahmi notices, and bites back whatever she was going to say. “I’ve seen her,” she says guardedly.
“Who, the witch?” I say, and she nods. I study her face, expecting her to say “Boo!” or something, revealing it all as a big joke.
“Well, then,” I say, raising my glass of water as though it is a crisp Chardonnay. “I shall seek out this witch in the ghost woods. A little bit of spookiness will spice this place up nicely.”
“Don’t,” Rahmi says, though I’m not sure how much I should take this at face value. “It might be the last thing you ever do.”

As the story goes, Nicnevin was a witch who had lain with a girl who had fallen asleep in the woods. When the girl gave birth, it was to a monstrosity, and it was killed. Nicnevin made the family mad before killing them, then took over the family hall to be a place of rot and ruin, naming it Lichen Hall.

In addition to the ample gothicness of the novel, there is plenty of character and plot content to keep you flipping those pages, and maybe loading up on bleach. Both Mabel and Pearl are sympathetic. What will happen with them, with their babies? What kind of danger are they in? You will definitely care.

There is also plenty of payload beneath the overlaid story. In an image of how women were treated in the 50s and 60s, the awfulness of Mrs. Whitlock’s Lichen House offers a vibrant image of a decaying institution, controlled by ill-meaning people, enforcing wrong-headed social norms, and crushing any people or behaviors falling outside the prescribed lanes. It is a moving, powerful, effective tale.

The Ghost Woods is, first and foremost, a gothic novel, the last installment of a thematic trio that considers our relationship with nature, motherhood, memory, and trauma (the previous two installments are The Nesting and The Lighthouse Witches). I suppose the question could legitimately be asked whether motherhood, gay rights, reproductive rights, and gender inequality have any place in a gothic novel. For me, the gothic is exactly the space to explore darkness of any kind, and the practice of othering is one of the darkest corners of human history. – from the Author’s Note

Review posted – 06/27/25

Publication date US trade paperback – 4/29/25
First published UK – hardcover – 10/13/22

I received an ARE of The Ghost Woods from Berkley in return for a fair review and a pinch of fairy dust. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating.

This review is cross-posted on Goodreads. Stop by and say Hi!

=======================================EXTRA STUFF

Links to Cooke’s personal, FB, Instagram, and Twitter pages

Her personal site was strangely unavailable when I was testing this. I am hoping it has been restored by the time you see this.

Profile – from GR

C.J. (Carolyn) Cooke is an acclaimed, award-winning poet, novelist and academic with numerous publications as Carolyn Jess-Cooke and Caro Carver. Her work has been published in twenty-three languages to date. Born in Belfast, C.J. has a PhD in Literature from Queen’s University, Belfast, and is currently Reader in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow, where she also researches the impact of motherhood on women’s writing and creative writing interventions for mental health. Her books have been reviewed in The New York Times, The Guardian, Good Housekeeping, and the Daily Mail. She has been nominated for an Edgar Award and an ITW Thriller Award, selected as Waterstones’ Paperback Book of the Year and a BBC 2 Pick, and has had two Book of the Month Club selections in the last year. She lives in Scotland with her husband and four children.

Interviews
—–Rachel Herron – Ep. 208: CJ Cooke on the Thrills of Contemporary Gothic Horror – video – 33:29 – begin at 8:10 – not specific to this book, but interesting
—– Murder by the Book – – C.J. Cooke in Conversation with Rachel Harrison

My review of prior work by Cooke
—–The Lighthouse Witches).

Songs/Music
—–The Beatles – I Want To Hold Your Hand – referenced in Chapter 2

Item of Interest from the author
—–Insta – CJ holds forth on the mother-and-baby homes theme from The Ghost Woods on her insta page
—– Google Play Books – Excerpt – audio – 10:36

Items of Interest
—–Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan – a great novel re the Magdalene laundries
—–Wiki – Magdalene laundries in Ireland
—–What Moves the Dead – another novel involving fungi

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June 14, 2025 · 12:01 am

How to Win Friends and Influence Fungi by Chris Balakrishnan, Matt Wasowski

book cover

Nerd Nite is an event usually held at a bar or other public venue where usually two or three presenters share about a topic of personal interest or expertise in a fun-yet-intellectual format while the audience shares a drink. It was started in 2003 by then-graduate student (now East Carolina University professor) Chris Balakrishan at the Midway Cafe in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston. In 2006 Nerd Nite spread to New York City, where Matt Wasowski was tasked with expanding the idea globally. – from Wikipedia

Be There and Be Square – Nerd Nite logo

There was a nerd magazine in 2012, a Youtube presence, and occasional podcasts. This is the first Nerd Nite book.

Misophonia can attach itself to any repetitive sound, but the most common ones are things, like chewing, breathing, sniffing, and throat clearing. It can be hard for sufferers to talk about because of how difficult it can be to tell someone politely that the sound of them keeping themselves alive is repulsive to you.

There are 71 entries, taken from live presentations done by the authors of each piece. (TED talks for those with short attention spans and a need for alcohol?) Nerd Nites have been held in over 100 cities across the globe. The material here covers eleven scientific areas. (see below) All the entries are brief, so if one does not appeal to your mental tastebuds hang on a couple of minutes for the next one, or just skip past.

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Chris Balakrishnan and Matt Wasowski – editors – image (from some time ago) from Facebook

You can digest this book a few morsels at a time, and not have to worry about the fate of a fictional hero or put-upon victim. Nope. The heroes here are the scientists, the presenters. One of the great failings of popular science books, IMHO, is the absence of humor, or poor attempts at it. Not here. There are many moments in this one, and humor in almost all of them. That made me very happy. Of the 71 pieces, almost all are very pop-sciency, understandable by most readers, even me. There were only one or two that made my head hurt. It makes an excellent bed-side read. It was an upstairs book for me, to be read before nodding off, hopefully. Sometimes that takes a while. This is not an all-inclusive list of the articles, but lets you know what might be in store in its eleven sections

1 – Creature Features – on weird animals
2 – Mmmm…Brains – strangeness with how we learn and adapt
3 – Bodily Fluids – on things like coping with poo in space. (In space, no one can hear you fart?)
4 – Doing It – like it suggests, on sex, human and non-human, (no, not with each other. Don’t be weird.)
5 – Health and (un)Wellness – human smells (See Paul Giamatti in The Holdovers) – on therapeutic maggots, adolescent medicine, et al
6 – Pathogens and parasites – on birds, bacteria in birds, zombies, the scotch tape test (don’t ask), viruses
7 – Death and Taxes – mass extinction, cancer, algae
8 – Space, the Big and the Beautiful – ignorance, asteroid avoidance and use, life on Europa?, artificial gravity, studying a pristine meteorite, Webb telescope
9 – Tech (High and Low) – GMOs, dating app, human powered flight, cyborging humans, domesticating bacteria, nuclear fusion
10 – Math is fun – a seminal experiment, the math of gossip, the golden ratio, infinity, cryptography
11 – Careers – things removed from dogs, useless inventions, myths about death, animals CSI, amputations, fermentation, flames.

there are approximately 100 trillion microorganisms (mainly bacteria), representing as many as 30,000 different species, living in every crevice, nook, and mucosal cranny of your body that you can imagine.

I would include a list of my favorite articles, but it would wind up as long as the parts list above. But ok, because I have the sense of humor of a twelve-year-old, the one that made me laugh the most was To Boldy Go: Dealing with Poop and Pee in Space. Apollo 10 astronauts were gifted with the visual, and no doubt olfactory, treat of a turd meandering about in their capsule. This begins a talk about how one handles bodily waste in zero G. Another on bladder control, or the absence thereof, was sidesplitting. Others, on camel spiders and hangovers, generated a fair number of LOLs.

Some were fascinating, like one having to do with making a brain on a chip. (Can it be served with Salsa?) The pieces on bacteria and their importance to human life, heck, to all life on Earth, were fascinating.

There is plenty of weirdness, about diverse forms of milk, the proper use of maggots in healing, zombie parasites, asteroids, artificial gravity, and here we go with another bloody list. Sorry. Take my word, there is a wealth of material here that will broaden your knowledge base, and serve up plenty of conversational hors d’oeuvres for cocktail party chatter.

It worked quite well for me. There is a downside, though. Because all the articles here are very short, one is often left hungry for more. On the other hand, that limitation might provoke you to sate that desire with a bit of extra research, which is always a good idea. So, never mind.

If science piques your curiosity, if learning new and diverse things makes your heart race, or if you like to laugh, then this book is for you. How to Win Friends and Influence Fungi is a very filling read, one nibble at a time.

Review posted – 06/14/25

Publication dates
———-Hardcover – 02/01/24
———-Trade paperback – 11/04/25

I received a hardcover of How to Win Friends and Influence Fungi from St. Martin’s Press in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks.

This review is cross-posted on Goodreads. Stop by and say Hi!

=======================================EXTRA STUFF

Author/Editor links

Chris Balakrishnan – Program Director at the National Science Foundation – His personal and FB pages
A list of his articles

Matt Wasowski – Director of New Business and Product Development, Events at SAE International – His FB, LinkedIn and Twitter pages

Items of Interest from the authors (really editors)
—–Soundcloud – excerpt – 5:01
—–Birdsong: How the Twittering Set Learns to Speak
—–“Nerd Nite Published a Book!” by Matt Wasowski – Nerd Nite Austin 155, January 2024

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