1895 / Audiobook / 296 pages / UK
***
Not bad for a businessman's first crack at fiction, even if its complete lack of distinctiveness consigns it deeper down the bin of Victorian supernatural literature that you'll eventually get around to a couple of decades into your reading. It's always nice to go back for another round, even if the spark reliably fizzles out early yet it goes on.
2000 / Ebook / 56 pages / Slovenia
**
Well, that's certainly cleared that up.
Rhys Hughes, Stories from a Lost Anthology
1995-2002 (collected 2002) / Ebook / 304 pages / UK*****
More accessible in their twisted magical (sur)realism than show-off genre pastiches this time around, though still a slave to the irresistible pun. This usurped his previous collection to become my new favourite anachronistic Book of the Year until some of the later stories let the side down by outrageously not making me laugh, but that padding doesn't diminish the stupendous ones. I was always preemptively disappointed that Neil Gaiman's short stories weren't exactly like this.
Fave: Jellydämmerung!
Fave: Jellydämmerung!
2006 / Ebook / 373 pages / USA
***
A little more restrained than the follow-ups, since it needs to get introductions and cast profiles out of the way, but this was the classic era for freeform speculation (seasons one and two) and it's nice to get back into that headspace. She was always overzealous with the numbers-spotting, but it gave her something to do between seasons.
2012 / Ebook / 94 pages / UK
***
For students, a self-consciously short summary of the main themes with handy quotes from the text and across critical history to make your essay a piece of piss. For postlapsarian graduates, a nice celebration of the text on its own terms without bringing too much theology or politics into it, apart from some gender reassessment because it's the 2010s.
