What are we reading for October and Halloween?

Any plans for the month,any special items for Halloween?
I am going to take it as it comes,mostly weird tales by old 20th century masters like Bierce,Blackwood,Lovecraft and Machen and the like. Maybe some fave old comfort reads ,I could certainly do with some comfortin these grim times.
I will probably start with Alfred Noyes Midnight Express.I amunfamiliar with his fiction,have only readhis poem The Highwayman

I'm participating in the group read of The October Country by Ray Bradbury. Non-Halloween themed SFF planned for October include: Ruin and Wrath by John Gwynn, finishing his The Faithful & The Fallen tetralogy, Prelude to Foundation by Isaac Asimov, and Sailing to Sarantium by Guy Gavriel Kay.

No themed October reading for me, and I expect to slow a little on fiction while I do some research for a paper I'm due to present in November.

In Progress
Sindbad: The Thirteenth Voyage
Conan and the Gods of the Mountain

On Deck
The Cleft
Lies, Inc.
Aurora

Added to precede "On Deck" books: Shadowland

I am also participating in the group read of The October Country. No scifi right now, working my way through The Fatal Shore too.

I'm reading along in The October Country too.

I have in hand Glass Houses, The Dead Cat Tail Assassins, In Ascension, The Blighted Stars, and Dreadful.

An old 50's anthology of Strange Tales of the Supernatural.

>2 ChrisG1:, loved the Sarantium Mosaic.
>4 Karlstar:, just finished The Fatal Shore myself! It's a long haul but well told.

In addition to working on my regular novels (still current Sheine Lende), I've also begun dipping in and out of The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 8. I usually read these very slowly, across many months, doing one story at a time in between other things.

I was rereading The October Country , but the library won't let me renew it as someone else wants it. If I want to finish it with the group, I will have to get my own copy. Sheine Lende is waiting for me to pick it up from the library. I am halfway through Bag of Bones for the Halloween Challenge on Worlds Without End. I might read In Ascension, but I read a lot of heavy nonfiction last month and kind of want to read some lighter fare this month.

I’m also participating in the group read of The October Country. There have been a few great short stories so far in that collection. I’m also finishing up Gibson’s Agency. So far I’m really enjoying it. After that, I’m not sure. Maybe Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horror and Others or Ellison’s Deathbird Stories neither of which I have yet read.

Only Shirley Jackson I've read is the Lottery, so I'll read The Haunting of Hill House.

I've got a few that I've been saving and I'm not sure which ones I will get to. The candidates are:

Zoo City
Book of Night
Blood Communion

>8 Cecrow: I spotted your review of The Fatal Shore, it helped convince me it was worth starting.

>12 Cecrow: The opening paragraph of The Haunting of Hill House is an absolute classic. The whole book is, but that paragraph sets the pace.

In >3 paradoxosalpha: I said I wouldn't do any seasonal reading, but I've changed my mind. I'm putting Shadowland on top of my fiction TBR pile.

Enjoyed Dreadful, which turns out to be firmly in T. Kingfisher territory. Less about a woman learning their own worth and more about a man who wonders how he came to be such a toxic loser.

I just finished Lafferty's Sindbad: The Thirteenth Voyage and posted my review. It sure was a Lafferty book!

Romping my way through Artificial Condition. Not as enjoyable as All Systems Red, but especially with serial fiction, some stories need to be told for the development of the characters.

Dean McLaughlin, The Man Who Wanted Stars (1965). This starts off with a promising premise: Four years before the first moon landing, McLaughlin anticipated that space travel would have a short life – people would get bored and the government would abandon it, leaving it to one VERY driven man to try to get us back into space.

But the book flies off the rails for a few reasons. The plot development depends on not one but two bits of miracle science (one biological, one chemical) which are both hard to believe in themselves, and the implications of the biological leap are not well handled at all.

McLaughlin also pushes way too hard on the ruthless unlikability of his protagonist – you keep expecting someone to at least TRY to kill him, and it would really be the only way to go: “If you strike at a king, you must kill him.” Although the denouement does not acknowledge this.

I am still confused about the snow buggy passages in Part Three (of five) and would like someone to please explain. Also why that one young woman never seemed to be wearing any clothes…

It really is overall kind of a mess.

Finished Artificial Condition, now started on Kim Newman's Dracula cha cha cha - set in the universe of his Anno Dracula, wherein after the death of Prince Albert, Queen Victoria remarries into minor Romanian nobility and things go downhill from there. This story is set in Rome in 1959, and already I'm tripping over Easter eggs left right and centre. To begin with, a major (vampire) society wedding is to take place in the Palazzo Otranto, and that's just on page one...

I'm enjoying Shadowland, and I'm going to further deprecate my sf and fantasy TBR items by setting them beneath Going for a Beer, in light of the author's recent demise.

Finally finished Sheine Lende, and I've started in on The Neurodiversiverse, an sf anthology I got from LT's EarlyReviewer program.

Finished Demon Blues, digressing to detective for Q is for Quarry.

Just finished Wrath by John Gwynne, the 4th & final volume of his "The Faithful & The Fallen" series. If you like fantasy with lots of battles, this one's for you. The author is an admitted fanboy of David Gemmell, & this is much in the same vein.

Just wrapped up The Dead Cat Tail Assassins; not bad, but also not my flavor of fantasy. I come away from this book thinking that it was probably not long enough.

I found a Clark Ashton Smith short story was suited perfectly for Hallowe'en reading, and finishing it reminded me I could dip into one or another collection of Lord Dunsany stories as follow-up.

I don't usually do a lot of Halloween reading, but was inspired by earlier posts here to re-read We Have Always Lived in the Castle for the first time in some years. Enjoyed it just as much, though I'd forgotten how relentlessly sad it is. The relationship with, attitude towards, the villagers reminded me of The Sundial. I imagine some Bennington longtime residents might be a bit uncomfortable with her depiction of small town folks... the biography by Ruth Franklin talked about Bennington & the Jacksons.

Finished and reviewed Dracula cha cha cha. As ever with Kim Newman, great fun, even if there are lots of Easter eggs that go over your head (if that's not mixing metaphors too wildly). Some of those Easter eggs aren't even direct quotes, but more of an atmosphere that recalls scenes from well-known genre film or tv.

>29 RobertDay:

That series is on my wishlist and I'll admit to a slight worry I won't get 90% of the allusions and references. Are you aware of any reference work that annotates the stories?

I'm not worried that I won't enjoy it regardless, but recognition of the unending in-jokes seems a fairly significant part of the pleasure for many readers.

>30 elenchus: The thing is, most of Newman's in-jokes are about media - film and tv - and reflect what he (and I) grew up watching. So in Dracula cha cha cha, there are plenty of walk-ons by recognisable international stars, but the British ones are liable to pass you by. Meanwhile, I'm fairly certain that many of the Italian equivalents passed me by.

Some of the references, whilst British, will have international recognition (if you're the right age). For instance, there's a conversation between two characters who mention an inspector in the Paris Surété who was demoted to traffic duties after a pretty spectacular failed case, and it's immediately clear that they are referring to Peter Sellers' character Inspector Jacques Clouseau from the Pink Panther films.

The earlier books are probably easier, being set in the Victorian era (Anno Dracula, with plenty of Sherlock Holmes references, and The Bloody Red Baron, set in World War I (it's a while since I read those, so I don't recollect who the walk-ons were in the second book especially). There are fewer opportunities to reference characters and personalities who are quite so nation-specific in those books; but Dracula cha cha cha, being set in 1959, draws on film and tv of the era. For instance, there's a walk-on who is a society avant-garde artist by the name of Anthony Aloysius St John Hancock. Brits (and probably Australians and NZers) of my era will immediately recognise the radio and tv comedy actor Tony Hancock; I suspect he wasn't so well-known on your side of the Atlantic.

I suspect Kim Newman would be appalled at the idea of people subjecting his novels to the sort of analysis you're thinking of. Perhaps the best idea would be to get a couple of popular reference books on British tv, film and radio and keep them by you to check up any unfamiliar names that seem to be bandied about with a particular sense of tongue-in-cheekedness. The thing is, it's all done very much in jest, so it doesn't impact the plot all that much.

(The alternate history series Newman wrote with Eugene Byrne based around the fix-up novel Back in the USSA probably suffers from the same problem.)

Finished Q is for Quarry, started Salvation.

Knocked off Glass Houses. As I suspected, this is more of a murder thriller than a SF novel, but if you like stories where bad people do bad things to other bad people it might be your cup of tea.

Finished Prelude to Foundation by Isaac Asimov. Provided a good bridge from the Robot stories to the Foundation sequence. Gave me a nice surprise toward the end, but I'll resist the spoiler...

>34 ChrisG1:, I liked that one too, then found Forward the Foundation to be a little shakier.

Finished up In Ascension, and was somewhat underwhelmed by its elegiac tone. Maybe if there wasn't some new development in the news pissing me off every morning I might have had a better attitude towards this story.

Today, I started Translation State.

I finished Agency a couple of weeks ago. I didn’t find it as engaging as The Peripheral. There was lots of potential. On the other hand, I wonder if Gibson was playing with the title. You assume that agency refers to the AI gaining agency. But at the same time the primary human characters have little to no agency. The one main character is literally along for the ride.

I am now reading Timescape. A little sexist in parts, but that is likely because Benford is trying to portray life in the 1960s. Is it better in the 1990s timeline? Hmmmm… I am finding it interesting how Benford writes of the climatic calamity brewing in the background with out much panic or fanfare in the 1990s. It feels very prescient to how we are responding to climate change in the 2020s, unfortunately.

>38 Neil_Luvs_Books:
I very much took it as Gibson referring to the personal efficacy of the characters as well as the marketing firm. I further extend that reading to commentary on the world we live in, "we" readers, but perhaps that's grandiose on my part.

I picked up Emily Carroll's A Guest In The House from my local, and typically for graphic novels completed it in more-or-less one sitting. Started (deliberately I thought) with a premise very similar to that of du Maurier's Rebecca and went in its own direction(s) in the second and third acts. A good Hallowe'en read: trauma begets trauma.

Finished up The Blighted Stars, a thoroughly modern space opera which I thought was okay; I suspect that one's enthusiasm depends on how much you like the trope of the author "shipping" antagonistic POV characters.

Finished Translation State fairly quickly; I enjoyed it, though I detect some similarities with Martha Wells' Murderbot and the story does have an element of touchy-feeliness about it, which may not be a bad thing. I have posted a review.

I recently read a paper in Foundation on Leslie F. Stone, a pre-Golden Age writer in the pulps, and the varied reaction to a woman writer in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The debate seemed strangely contemporary, with women readers saying "We want SF stories with exciting super-science, but we want feelings and relationships too", whilst some male readers had a more hostile reaction, saying "We want exciting super-science but we also want intellects cold and hard and super-rational, and the more unfeeling, the better". In the end, that attitude prevailed, especially when John W. Campbell came on the editorial scene; Campbell rejected a Leslie Stone story, saying "We don't need this sort of thing in science fiction". And the identification of SF as "boys' stuff" set in and hasn't gone away, even amongst those who should know better and despite a lot of trying. Now I understand why his name got taken off that award.

Now started on a doorstop-sized anthology, The Science Fiction Century. There will be some material in the book I've not read before, and some I've not read for a while. First story up, for example, was James Tiptree Jnr's Beam us Home, which I last read possibly twenty years ago and which I see was first published in 1969. Yes, it happens in a different future to our reality, but it still comes up as relevant and engaging, perhaps because in part it is about Us.

I started The Hydrogen Sonata, one of the two Iain M. Banks books I haven't read yet.