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Short Fiction Month ends this weekend, on Saturday, I believe. I’ve entered a bit of a dry spell in the last few days, reading some stories that I didn’t much like. As of right now, I have read 44 stories by 31 authors.

:: Maybe I’m just not reading the right Charles de Lint stories, but it seems that whenever I dip into his work, I find him sounding like…well, Neil Gaiman giving a sermon. I read his story “In the House of My Enemy”, and while I enjoyed it, I also found a tone of “preachy-ness” that I always seem to find in de Lint’s work. Weird. The Gaiman-esque urban weirdness is there, but so is the “moral lesson”. (I’m probably doing both Gaiman and de Lint a disservice by thusly comparing them; de Lint’s been around for years and Gaiman’s work encompasses a lot more than urban fantasy. I just can’t think of any other way to convey what I’m trying to say this morning.)

:: Last week I was at the library, and on the New Books shelf there was a collection that looked intriguing: Much Ado About Murder, which is a collection of mystery shorts inspired by or based upon Shakespeare. What’s not to like about that? Well, a story called “The Serpent’s Tooth” by P.C. Doherty, for one. This tale generates a murder mystery out of the Bard’s own death, and…well, it reads like a cross between an episode of Matlock and the “Who Shot Mr. Burns?” episode of The Simpsons. This thing was ghastly. I haven’t read anything else in the collection, and I’m not sure I intend to.

:: Just last night I corrected a major oversight of mine, for a guy who writes horror, among other things: I finally read “The Call of Cthulu”, by H.P. Lovecraft. It’s a classic, of course, and I don’t have much to say about it except to note that I loved the imagination and the imagery, but the subtly racist elements of the story were a bit squirmy, and Lovecraft’s prose several times threatened to boot me right out of the story.