Book 29 for my 2025 goal of 30 books for the year! As is now default for me, my link to the book is through my bookshop dot org affiliate account.
Near the “official” end of my book goal for the year, well ahead of schedule! I’m currently in the midst of reading several other books, but I thought I’d take a brief detour and read a book by the prolific and talented horror author Brian Keene, Alone (2011).
This is perhaps cheating a little bit in my book goals, as it is a short novelette — 46 pages — but I’m counting it, dammit!
This past Friday, I celebrated the Halloween season by going to a ghost story reading at Daniel Stowe Botanical Gardens. I sat around a campfire with a bunch of other people with a glass of wine, listening to a staff member read stories as the daylight faded and darkness overwhelmed. The stories were a mix of some stories specifically written about the Gardens themselves and some that were more traditional sounding stories about monsters in the woods and ghosts haunting rural cabins.
I had a great time, and it got me thinking about how I would love to read ghost stories to people around a campfire, and also started thinking about what stories would be fun to read! I posted a random list on Bluesky, and I had so much fun thinking about it I thought I would share the list here and elaborate on it.
Unlike my Halloween Treats posts, the stories I’m suggesting here are not necessarily public domain: I am thinking more about what would be fun to read aloud instead of what is free to read! I provide links to books whenever they are not freely available.
In my opinion, part of what makes a story good for reading aloud is having a really “punchy” ending, which these stories have!
Book 28 for my 2025 goal of 30 books for the year! As is now default for me, my link to the book is through my bookshop dot org affiliate account.
Not long ago, Titan comics sent me a review copy of a recent compilation of Conan the Barbarian stories, which I was delighted to read and discuss on the blog. Not long afterward, they offered to send a copy of the new Solomon Kane comic series, Solomon Kane: The Serpent Ring, with art and writing by Patrick Zercher, and I jumped at the chance. Not only did I start my blog in part to talk about the stories of Robert E. Howard and related authors, but the title of the blog — Skulls in the Stars — is the title of one of Howard’s best Solomon Kane stories.
Every year since I’ve started this blog, I’ve published a few classic open access stories of horror for the Halloween season! In recent years, I’ve started to make a theme for each year.
This year, the theme is “haunted houses,” which probably needs no further explanation, so let’s get into some stories! The only note is that we stretch the definition of “house” as we proceed…
Illustration of The Shunned House, from Weird Tales, October 1937.
The Shunned House, by H.P. Lovecraft (1937). A doctor and his nephew investigate a strange house that has been shunned for decades, not realizing the danger lurking within it and the horrible thing that lies beneath it…
The Haunted and the Haunters; or, The House and the Brain, by Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1859). Another classic haunted house story, in which a rationalist attempts to exorcise the spirits from a house with a particularly strange haunting. The link is to a copy of the original text on the Internet Archive, which includes an often-removed epilogue beginning with “But my story is not yet done” that makes the tale even weirder.
Number 13, by M.R. James (1904). A twisted tale of missing space from the master of ghost stories M.R. James. A man staying in room 12 at the “Golden Lion” inn notices that his room appears smaller at night and that a room 13 appears next door that was not present during the day.
The Whistling Room, by William Hope Hodgson (1910). Carnacki the Ghost Hunter is called to investigate a chamber in a mansion that exhibits an eerie whistling sound. He soon finds himself trapped with a malevolent supernatural being that could consume him utterly.
The Upper Berth, by F. Marion Crawford (1926). Sharing again one of the most effective ghost stories ever written, with one of the best closing lines of any such story, as well! When the sailor Brisbane takes an Atlantic voyage on the ship Kamtschatka, he is assigned the lower berth in room 105. Soon he realizes that his chamber may be occupied by something not quite human.
The Fall of the House of Usher, by Edgar Allan Poe (1839). Poe’s classic story of the last family members of the House of Usher and how their house itself is tied to their own fate.
The Vacant Lot, by Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman (1903). Sometimes the haunting persists even when the building is gone. A family finds themselves troubled by strange happenings that seem to be connected to the vacant lot next door to them.
Negotium Perambulans, by E.F. Benson (1922). A man returns to his childhood village, intrigued by the stories of a monstrous creature that haunts one of the houses in town. When he learns that an old friend, an artist, has taken up residence in the house, he has an opportunity to experience the horrors it contains first-hand.
The Man From America, by Michael Arlen (1925). This story is absolutely wonderful and has a twist for the ages! Two Londoners make a bet with a gentleman from America that he can’t spend the entire night in a haunted house. This bet will end in a place that none of them are expecting.
Happy Halloween, and I hope the stories give you a few fun chills!
Book 27 for my 2025 goal of 30 books for the year! As is now default for me, my link to the book is through my bookshop dot org affiliate account.
Chuck Tingle honestly has yet to disappoint in even the slightest. His latest book, Lucky Day, just came out in August and I finally got around to reading it this week, and it is another fantastic novel of weird fiction.
Four years earlier, the world was rocked by what became known as the Low-Probability Event: a tragedy in which eight million people died within a few hours by exceedingly unlikely coincidences. Vera, once a statistics and probability professor with an optimistic future, was traumatized by the events of the LPE and now barely lives at all, isolating herself at home and surviving primarily on ramen noodles. The LPE was so random, cruel and pointless that it has shaken Vera’s very sense of purpose in life.
Then Special Agent Layne of the Low-Probability Event Commission visits her, seeking her help. The Commission has found a seeming connection between the LPE and the Great Britannica Hotel, a Las Vegas casino that manages to turn a profit despite actually having games that favor the guests to win. Vera had studied the casino herself before the world tragedy, and Layne wants her input in pushing the investigation further.
As the two dig deeper, they find that there are more improbable events happening, and even events that go against the known laws of physics. The very survival of the world may hinge upon whether they can uncover the secret of the Great Britannica and put an end to it…
Second, I was asked for an interview on BBC Crowdscience to answer questions about — what else? — the physics of how cats land on their feet when they fall! The interview just went up today in a segment of answers to listeners’ questions and you can listen to it here.
I always enjoy outside interviews and collaborations, and I hope you enjoy my participation in them as well!
I’m now in my mid-50s and my parents are in their 80s and are starting to experience the age-related cognitive problems that most of us will eventually encounter if we live that long. My dad in particular has very poor short-term memory now and is living in a senior home, a situation he finds rather dull considering he spent his life being a wanderer both at home and abroad.
To help keep him entertained, I’ve been finding boardgames that we can play together when I visit. This turns out to be a non-trivial challenge for several reasons. Memory issues make learning any new game rather challenging, so rules have to be relatively simple and intuitive — no Magic Realm for us! This means that most of the games available are ones that are tailored more towards children, but this is also not ideal because neither my dad nor I are in the mood to play Candyland. There are classic games that he still has a recollection of how to play, like Monopoly, but that game is absolutely terrible and genuinely not fun. As I told my dad, Monopoly is only fun because of the people you’re playing it with. Another constraint is time — I don’t want to play a game that takes several hours for a single session, so games with a 20-30 minute turnaround are ideal. That way we can play a couple of different games and multiple rounds when I visit.
So I’ve been experimenting with various games to find a set that we can play regularly, are easy enough to learn, fast to play, and entertaining enough to play repeatedly. I thought I would share my results and give a ranking of their suitability for this purpose.
NOTE: all the games I mention here are good games in general, so my ranking is not about whether they’re good in general, but all about their suitability for playing with seniors with memory issues.
Tsuro: 9/10. I’ve had this game for ages and it is good for all ages and pretty much any occasion. Players take turns laying out a path tile in front of their token and following the path as far as they can go. The goal is to be the last one run off the edge of the board. Very simple rules that are quick to learn and follow, and the game has a nice mix of randomness (tile drawing) and strategy (choose one of three tiles in your hand to place). The only limitation for aging seniors is the abstract nature of the game — I noticed that it is perhaps a little harder to follow simply because it doesn’t represent situation in the real world to give context and help the player remember the objective and the strategy. Still, one I’ve played the most with my dad.
Book 26 for my 2025 goal of 30 books for the year! As is now default for me, my link to the book is through my bookshop dot org affiliate account.
I have long had a huge fascination with the ancient Near East, fostered by my dad’s lifetime love of ancient Egypt. In fact, when I was in college, I was required to take a history and a language course, and I took a course on ancient Near East history along with a course on ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. So when I saw that one of my internet friends Moudhy Al-Rashid had written a book on the history of Mesopotamia, I knew I would have to read it as soon as possible. Between Two Rivers came out in mid-August, and it finally made it into my hands over this past week.
This book is one of the most wonderful things I’ve ever read. Of course I may be biased thanks to my love of the history of the region, but I was captivated throughout the book and Al-Rashid made the civilizations that thrived there come alive in a way I’ve not experienced before.
I’ve recently been trying to “relearn” thermodynamics, a subject that I haven’t really looked at, or had to look at, for years. I put “relearn” in quotes because I never really learned it well in the first place! One of my jokes is that every student takes a thermodynamics course from someone who doesn’t really understand it, and then that student goes on to become a teacher who doesn’t really understand it, perpetuating the cycle of educational violence. I’ve been using a book on Basic Thermodynamics by Gerald Carrington that I’ve probably had for 30 years but never delved into in detail; it is a decent book, however, because it has a large number of exercises and provides answers to those questions that are numerical in nature.
It’s been a lot of fun — and a lot of work — trying to relearn these concepts, and I thought it would also be entertaining to talk about some of them here! One of the big fundamental concepts in thermodynamics is the Carnot engine, which operates on the so-called Carnot cycle, named after Sadi Carnot, so let’s take a look at it and why it is of such fundamental importance. A small warning: we’ll do a little bit of math here, but only simple algebra, which we’ll use to prove Carnot’s theorem about the maximum efficiency of heat engines.
As folks are probably aware from this blog, I am a big fan of Dungeons & Dragons and a longtime player. I got my start in the hobby the way a lot of people did: through reading classic sword-and-sorcery stories like Robert E. Howard’s Conan tales and wanting to play through some of that adventure myself. Thus, when I came across Appendix N: The Eldritch Roots of Dungeons & Dragons, edited by Peter Bebergal (2020), I had to read it!
A little background information is needed to understand the title. When the first edition of the Dungeon Master’s Guide for D&D appeared in 1979, it included an appendix, Appendix N, that was Gary Gygax’s personal list of “Educational and Inspirational Reading.” This included classic sword-and-sorcery like Howard’s Conan series, high fantasy like Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, adventure novels like A. Merritt’s Dwellers in the Mirage, and stories that fall into a mix of fantasy and science fiction like Sterling Lanier’s Hiero’s Journey. This list is a treasure in and of itself, albeit one from a single person’s perspective, and others followed Gygax’s lead. For the 1981 Basic D&D set, Tom Moldvay included his own inspirational source material, and 5th edition D&D had its own list.
The author of Skulls in the Stars is a professor of physics, specializing in optical science, at UNC Charlotte. The blog covers topics in physics and optics, the history of science, classic pulp fantasy and horror fiction, and the surprising intersections between these areas.
Skulls in the Stars 