Teddy Bears Never Dieby Cho YeeunGenres: Horror Pages: 304 Rating: Synopsis: The horrormance genre mash-up you've been waiting for - from the award-winning Korean author Cho Yeeun comes a new novel where a young girl and a teddy bear team up to enact revenge! A poisoned city - A grieving daughter - A boy trapped in a bear's body. When the fledgling coastal town of Yamu is rocked by a mass-poisoning attack at The Seaview Parc, the luxury high-rise meant to revitalise the city, Hwayoung is one of…

Today, I ran across this article on Librarianship Studies, well… more of a collection of blurbs and quotes on why librarians from all around the world love their jobs. Besides being an entertaining read, it got me thinking about why I love being a librarian. I’m a bit long winded, so I am not sure I can condense my feelings on the topic of librarianship down into a single sentence, so I thought I would dedicate an entire blogpost to the topic instead. Lucky you! I first came to librarianship…

Watched: Tenzing 🍿 Extremely well-done. Incredible visuals, and truly unbelievable costuming. The found/archival footage was nearly indistinguishable from the modern film. I also really enjoyed getting more flavor on a story about which I basically knew only the Hillary/Norgay headline.

after my last post (and also poem and technical article to a much lesser extent) I’ve posted blew up I’ve sorta had this writers block where I don’t know where to go from here. I know I started this blog to write casually, and to keep posting little things but between my PhD program and a general lack of motivation I’ve found it really difficult to keep writing. I want to write about my image intensified astrophotography setup, so I can then share the astrophotos I took then, but in order to…

Write as if nobody is reading, and even if nobody is reading or engaging. The point isn’t likes, comments, or a follower count. The point is who you become by writing. The discipline it gives. The clear thinking. The daily practice. The body of work. The way we look at the world to hunt for stories. Write as if nobody is reading and keep writing because you don’t know who’s doing it. That’s the one of the mantras that has kept me writing for years. Writing daily is one of the habits that has…

“The Greatest Benefit to Mankind – A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present” by Roy Porter was published in 1999. It’s a magnificent 848-page book that I’ve now read. Many people, I’ve discovered, own a copy but have dipped into it rather than read it through. I hope that I might do medical history, the world at large, students of medicine (surely all of us), and Roy, whom I knew and who died suddenly aged 55 in 2002, a service by posting extracts of his book on my website.…

I'm reading all of Stephen King's fiction in publication order, starting with Carrie. I know there's someone out there already typing a comment to tell me that King published plenty of short fiction before Carrie came out. I'm aware of that. A lot of it was collected later in books like Night Shift and Skeleton Crew, and I'll read those stories when I get to the collections. The stuff that predates Carrie and has never been collected I'm going to try to track down. Much of it is juvenilia, and…

Book title: The Will of the Many Author: James Islington Rating: 4.5/5 That last chapter... Why is Islington doing this to me? I wanted to take a break before reading the next book. What a read. Unsurprisingly, it kept reminding me of Red Rising, but it's different enough to stand on its own. The worldbuilding is insane, and the magic system is clever. Or so I think, we've barely seen it in action. And the number of unanswered questions? I need to know what all of this means. So much for taking…

Went to Homebrew Writing Club — Writing Edition today, which raised a lot of thoughts: I’m curious what makes writers choose a particular format for an idea? (e.g. blog post versus comic versus zine versus poetry) how much of working in a format is learning what ideas suit it, and figuring out an approach to starting a piece in that format? (e.g. I wouldn’t know how to approach writing a poem) James mentioned “remixing” several blog posts into a new post — I might try this to extract good ideas…

When I was in Canada earlier this year, I was keen to add more books by Ethel Wilson to my shelves. I’d enjoyed her writing for a while, but was fully bowled over by how brilliant The Equations of Love was, which I read for another club year. One of the books I bought was her second novel, The Innocent Traveller, which fortuitously fits into the 1949 Club. The Innocent Traveller covers the lifespan of Topaz, and it is a long life – about a century, from the 1840s through to around the time of…

Heaviness of Sleep (1938) by John Armstrong. • Suntup Editions are reprinting two stories by Arthur Machen: The Great God Pan and The White People will be presented together in a single volume, with corrected texts printed in letterpress. The book will also feature eight tipped-in lithographs by Flora McLachlan, and an afterword by Henry Wessells. • “While it mines much of the same material found throughout the horror genre, The Shout belongs to a parallel cinematic lineage—more art-house than…

The other day I was walking in Gloucestershire again, with my brother and walking friends – this time a stroll beside the Severn from Deerhurst to Tewkesbury and back. Deerhurst (a name that sounds more Kent than Gloucestershire) boasts a very remarkable Anglo-Saxon church – a large, complex building which is still not fully understood, but is unmistakably an impressive survival from those times, with later changes and additions. I'm no fan of Anglo-Saxon architecture, which seems to me…

read the e-zine versionHERE...

Book 36 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year – I did it, and early! I will continue to read books through the rest of the year to see how far I get. My link to the book is through my bookshop.org affiliate account, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy from there. It’s nice that the final book of my goal for the year is the latest book by my friend Jendia Gammon, whose work I’ve featured several times on my blog this year! This time I read her most recent Appalachian horror…

[I don’t often write what might be called ‘diary entries’, but for some reason I felt compelled to write this one. I don’t keep a diary, so I had to post it here. Caveat Lector] I seem to be losing the motivation to do things — to do most anything, really. I’m not depressed or unhappy about this, or anything, just uninterested in doing things that would seem to require considerable focus, attention, and energy. Sign of age, perhaps. For example: I have almost entirely ceased reading fiction,…

How many △ do you see? (The Void, 2016)One of the prompts on Prismatic Wasteland's blogging list is: "the scariest monster you can imagine that has 2 arms, 2 legs, and no magic abilities".As cliché as it is, I think it's humans acting in strange ways. Which is why I think cults endure as such common and strong antagonists. A couple of recent examples that spring to mind are Midsommar and even Obsession, or Firefly's reavers. Oh, even The Purge might be a good example.I think the creep factor…

🏚️🏚️🏚️🏚️ 3.5/5 Black Houses - The world outside of Gormenghast is just as a mad. The post Titus Alone (Gormenghast #3) by Mervyn Peake appeared first on The Wallflower Digest.

🏰🏰🏰🏰 4/5 Castles - Drama, action... romance? It really has everything! The post Gormenghast (Gormenghast #2) by Mervyn Peake appeared first on The Wallflower Digest.

CompleteTheHaiga is a haiku, senryu and tanka prompt project with images created by Josiah. All haiku by Cendrine Marrouat. Source

Not far from where we live in London there is a domestic house that hosts art exhibitions, the postROOM gallery. Their most recent show featured these wall texts by Thomas A. Clark, whose work I've discussed frequently on this blog. He has exhibited similar texts at the Cairn Gallery, as you can see in the YouTube clip I've embedded below. In this video he explains the significance of colour, font and location, e.g. blue text (blue is "always a matter of shades and tone of subtlety and…

Hi. Sorry about the silence: I've been busy redrafting the current-newest novel in progress (it's back with my agent), and now I just flipped over to rewrite the much-rewritten novel before that (which ran into a brick wall in late 2025 for structural reasons, and which I set aside while I was working on the next book, figured out a fix for in late 2026, and am now fixing). As you can imagine, slaving over manuscripts isn't the only thing I do on a computer. Along the way I'm browsing the…

She Woke to Darkness (1954) is the 25th novel in the Michael Shayne series by "Brett Halliday," a pseudonym of Davis Dresser, who celebrated this milestone by taking his hardboiled private eye series into meta-fictional territory – making himself the central character. The book opens with an "Author's Foreword" explaining the previous twenty-four novels were secondhand, fictionalized accounts of Shayne's real-life cases, but this case is a firsthand account ("this story happened to me, Brett…

After a busy week last week with lots of library books and lots of reading, this week’s been a bit quieter! Books acquired this week This month’s British Library Crime Classic was their Christmas release, which is how they usually do things, and that dropped onto my doormat this week: That’s it, after the recent excesses, hahaha. I haven’t been back to the library this week, since I haven’t done a lot of reading in that time. Posts from this week Time for the usual roundup! Reviews first, and…

Jesse Schedeen / IGN: In what is easily one of the most exciting comic book-related announcements to come out of NYCC 2026, IGN can exclusively reveal that Paper Girls creators Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang are reuniting for a new project at Image Comics. That series is called ROAM, and it’s their first collaboration in over a decade. I’m a little ashamed to say it took me a week to post about this, because Paper Girls is one of my favorite comics ever (an easy recommend if you’ve never…

Tt's quite a striking cover this week, don't you think? Totally black-and-white except for the flesh tones on Hirschfeld's caricature of Jackie Gleason.* Even the famed TV Guide logo has been stripped of its color.*By the way, have you spotted "Nina" yet?It's no surprise that Richard Gehman would take a snarky approach to this article on Gleason, the first of a three-part profile of the star. "One can gauge the depth of his lonliness by how high Gleason flies," is the psychoanalytic subheading…

A few months ago, I went to see Dr Hutchinson record his stand-up comedy special for the BBC - it's about his experiences working in the NHS as a Black doctor. As the title of the book implies, some of the public can be a mite suspicious that anyone with even a hint of melanin can rise beyond being a porter or, at a push, a nurse. Much like Adam Kay's "This Is Going To Hurt", this is part biography, part rant about the NHS, and part humorous look at what it takes to be a modern doctor.…

It’s time for a Q3 progress review on Nic’s (Dragon Rambles) Law of Fives reading bingo challenge! I’ve now read 40 books for this challenge, with most of them counting… The post Q3 2026 Law of Five Reading Bingo Progress – BINGO! appeared first on The Wallflower Digest.

Space Dwarf Attribution What Works Well? What Works…Less Well? Opportunities What’s Adaptable? Six Years Hence: Where Are the Joneses? part 4 Coming Attractions This week, our Free Culture Book Club plays Space Dwarf. To give this series some sense of organization, check out some basic facts without much in the way of context. For Clarity : You can best think of these posts like their titles suggest, as the seed of a discussion group (“book club”) to spark conversation about a Free Culture…

Laura by Vera Caspary published 1943 [A young woman's body has been found in a New York apartment, and the case has attracted a lot of attention...] Laura had become a Manhattan legend. Scarlet-minded headline artists had named her tragedy THE BACHELOR GIRL MURDER and one example of Sunday edition belles-lettres was tantalizingly titled SEEK ROMEO IN EAST SIDE LOVE-KILLING. By the necromancy of modern journalism, a gracious young woman had been transformed into a dangerous siren who practiced…

Best of the blogs ▷ brandib laments the loss of easily obtained (i.e., at the local department store) good quality professional clothing. Read When Did We Agree To Settle For Less? ▷ I gave up Twitter/X years before Elon took it over and made a bad place worse. But now John Gruber is saying — and I think he’d be among the last to say it if it were true — that the service has re-found its footing and there’s less political content there than on the other tweety services. Read X Once Again Marks…