I think I know by now what evil really is

[sovay]

I am evidently not the target audience for Tim Powers' Hide Me Among the Graves (2012), which rushthatspeaks has been reading and describing to me; I think that if one of your central characters is vampire John Polidori, people should always be asking him if he got it from Lord Byron and he should be so tired of having to tell them ("Byron wasn't even a vampire, damn it!") no.

Comments

[drwex]

Anubis Gates, which I love for its convoluted multi-threaded looping plot weirdness (*) and On Stranger Tides, which is WAY better than the near-awful Pirates of the Caribbean movie it inspired. I love OST for its depiction of magic which is very down-and-dirty, mud-and-spit-and-chicken-feathers and dialect. It was, when I first read it, a wonderful antidote to all the high-elven glass-and-glitter airy mystical magic that dominated fantasy at that time.

(*) I once was in a week-long writing workshop that had Powers as one of its teachers and he admitted over drinks one evening that the only way he was able to keep the plots of Anubis Gate straight was that he took a long piece of butcher paper and stretched it across the apartment, using it to trace the lines of each character and... again, I don't want to say more because spoilers.

[sovay]

and On Stranger Tides, which is WAY better than the near-awful Pirates of the Caribbean movie it inspired.

I would expect so, even without having seen the movie in question. Someday I will bother to see whether someone has excerpted the relevant mermaid scenes on YouTube and watch those; otherwise I will stick to the first movie and the mythological portions of its sequels.

the only way he was able to keep the plots of Anubis Gate straight was that he took a long piece of butcher paper and stretched it across the apartment, using it to trace the lines of each character and... again, I don't want to say more because spoilers.

I am genuinely pretty spoiler-indifferent.