I remember seeing this book laid out on a table of half-price bargains downstairs in the big Easons in Dublin when I was ten or eleven.  I was there with my dad.  I’d already read his tattered copy of Alan and Sally Landsburg’s In Search Of Myths and Monsters so this was right up my street. That was over twenty years ago. I can’t remember why I didn’t buy it, or at least try to pester him into buying it for me.

I’ve had that cover image lodged in my brain since that day and I don’t think a month has gone by that I haven’t thought of it and wondered what it was called.

I found the picture while reading about the sad news of John A. Keel’s death on Cryptomundo.  You’ve probably seen the film based on Keel’s book The Mothman Prophecies. I had no idea he’d also written the book that has tormented me for twenty odd years.

But now I know. To ebay!

Some kindly soul has put up several old clips of Jeff Lint’s seminal but often misunderstood cartoon Catty and the Major on youtube.

My first exposure to Lint was around fifteen years ago when a work colleague loaned me a tattered, weather beaten copy of Lint’s début novel One Less Bastard, along with a “like new” copy of 1966’s Prepare To Learn.

And learn I did.

My friend refused to take them back, and that was fine by me.

Unfortunately, both books were lost in a fire some years ago.

Just noticed that scfi.com have the full text of Thomas M. Disch’s classic short story, Descending, in their archive.

It is magnificent; a story which starts off as innocent and playful as a kitten with a ball of yarn but soon turns into a syphilitic eight-cocked demon with an utter absence of empathy in its eyes that wants nothing more than to make you pay for all the awful things that you’ve done.  At least, that’s the mood I took away from it.  Your experiences may be entirely different.

You can read it here.

Disch shot himself in his New York appartment on July 4th, 2008.

Crossed by Garth Ennis and Jacen Burrows.

It has everything the regular Ennis reader expects from a comic: murder, rape, cannibalism, infanticide, nuclear explosions and, of course, copious amounts of buggery. And Burrows’ art is, as usual, brilliant.

Issue two just came out from Avatar.

Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy

Before this the only Chomsky book I’d (attempted to) read was Fateful Triangle.  That was a bit bloated and dry but this one is excellent.

A close and worthwhile look at the smegma festering beneath the wizened patriotic foreskin of Imperial America.

Steve Aylett’s biography of pulp sci-fi author Jeff Lint. Ye fucking gods, this is one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. Three random lines . . .

Lint would allude to this time in his story ‘Ghostly Hens Forever, Forever’, published as ‘The Man With the Stupid Arm’ in issue 87 of Terrible Stories.

Lint said the painting was ‘better than it looks’.

The cover of that issue showed an oriental magician beckoning some sort of horned kangaroo out a sewage outlet.

It is a masterpiece, worthy of the great man at it’s heart.

This is the cover to the UK edition.