I've finished the two books I planned to read for Halloween. A few comments:
Twice As Dead by Harry Turtledove is an urban fantasy, set in Los Angeles in the years following World War II. The protagonist is a mixed-race detective. There are vampires, ghosts and other supernatural beings. The detective has a talking cat who periodically kills rats that are sent by the detective's enemies to snoop on him. I thought it was one of Turtledove's better books.
The Return by Walter de la Mare has a protagonist who falls asleep at a graveyard. When he wakes up and returns home, he and others discover his face has changed to resemble the person who was buried where the hero took his nap. There is not much else that actually happens in the book and the reader is left wondering if the protagonist is experiencing everything he describes or suffers from mental illness. At first I was a little disappointed by the book, but then I started noticing how atmospheric and poetic many passages were. I started marking them.
"After all, what is every man?" he talked on; "a horde of ghosts -- like a Chinese nest of boxes -- oaks that were acorns that were oaks. Death lies behind us, not in front -- in our ancestors, back and back, until -- "
Another passage:
The still grave face beneath the shadow of its veil had never turned, though the moon poured all her flood of brilliance upon the dark profile. And once when as if in sudden alarm he had lifted his head and looked at her, a sudden doubt had assailed him so instantly that he had half put out his hand to touch her, and had as quickly withdrawn it, lest her beauty and stillness should be, even as the moment’s fancy had suggested, only a far-gone memory returned in dream.
One of the characters is named Herbert Herbert, so I wondered if Vladimir Nabokov referenced the novel when he named the main character in Lolita Humbert Humbert. But whereas Humbert Humbert liked very young girls, Herbert Herbert surrounds himself with very old books.
De la Mare also wrote ghost stories and I plan to hunt them up.
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