Something Fishy...



Hey Yard-Apes... please don't be offended, but my first blog post in many weeks is not here, but over at Tor.com, for Monster Mash week: Swimming with the Fishes. I hold forth on the pallid charms of creatures beneath the sea for quite some time, skimming the surface, as it were, on such subjects as the Cthulhu Mythos, Jaws, and the extraordinary work of Catalan author Albert Sanchez Pinol in his novel Cold Skin.

If I haven't commended you to this guy's work, let me do so now. Cold Skin is a short novel, about an encounter just past the turn of the last century, between a depressive north-European and a race of Lovecraftian mer-people, on the beaches of an island near Antarctica. It is a bleakly beautiful novel of isolation, obsession and perversion. It goes where H.P. Lovecraft hinted, but dared not venture. It sets up Pinol's second novel, Pandora In The Congo, magnificently.

You should please go read it, before the movie adaptation comes out.