Because I'm being evicted from my home for several weeks (which I shall be spending at the beach) for HVAC replacement and asbestos removal, I won't be able to continue writing and posting my Memoirs during that time. This will no doubt bring relief to the hearts of all but a few--according to the stats on the latest post, about a dozen or so loyal readers. To them I recommend the following reading during my absence; a brief compendium of the cynical and humorously degenerate works that I have deliberately "channelled" while writing my own:

Ambrose Bierce - The Devil's Dictionary

Needs no introduction.

Les Liaisons Dangereuses - Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

Still miraculously even better than the various movies adapted from it, some quite brilliant in their own right.

Memoirs of Jacques Casanova

Be sure to read the Arthur Machen (legendary horror-writer, author of the classic "The Three Imposters") translation, which adds its own unique flavor to this staggeringly singleminded and hypnotically repetitive work. And hard work it must often have been..

Fancies & Goodnights & The Complete John Collier - John Collier

Sympathy for the devil in us all by the master of the whimsical short story.

The Life and Loves of a She-Devil - Fay Weldon

Exquisite women's revenge fantasy, beautifully written and made into a cruelly funny TV mini-series. Ignore the Rosanne Barr film version.

Satan: His Psychotherapy and Cure by the Unfortunate Dr. Seymour Kassler, JSPS - Jeremy Leven

A flowering of wit and diabolical cleverness from an otherwise undistinguished film-writer.

It Happened in Boston? - Russell K. Greenan

A slacker goes slowly insane as he attempts the greatest act of alchemy of all: becoming god. A forgotten masterpiece.

Masque of a Savage Mandarin - Philip Bedford Robinson

A miserable agoraphobic tormented by noisy neighbors wires together an oscillator out of revenge that ultimately causes them to lose their hair, leeches the calcium from their bones, and eventually kills them. The ultimate urban fantasy, the sole work of fiction from this prolific British technical writer.

The Devil Rides Out & To the Devil a Daughter - Dennis Wheatley

Friend to Ian Fleming and Alistair Crowley, Wheatley cheerfully admitted to being a dreadful writer but an excellent story-teller. Moreover, he was genuinely in love with the occult and made every attempt to accurately describe its rituals--a few of his novels were later made into Hammer films.

Jurgen & The High Place - James Branch Cabell

At one time considered the greatest of American writers, a master of delicately humorous allusion whose timeless yet polite observations about gods, devils, and male sexuality will resonate as long as men still find magic in dusty old books.

The Flat Earth - Tanith Lee

Imagine "Conan the Barbarian" rewritten by Susanna Clarke for Penthouse Magazine, and you'll have some idea of the style and content of this quartet of short novels. A mad mythic meditation on the frailty of demons and the folly of humankind that transcends genre.

Consider the Lilies - Auberon Waugh

More darkly comic than anything his famous father ever wrote, this is the story of an Anglican vicar who drolly sets out to murder his wife in order to advance himself socially.

The Upstart - Piers Paul Read

The definitive novel of social revenge and snobbery, a modern Monte Cristo laced in the subtlest of irony.

Dom Casmurro - Joaquim Machado de Assis

A masterpiece of the madness of jealousy, by one of the most astounding literary talents in history, this gentle satire of his own Othello-like emotions inspired other classics of the genre, such as Milan Fust's "The Story of my Wife" and Martin Amis' "The Information".

A Man With a Maid & The Pearl - Anonymous

If dogs wore clothes, drank wine, and could type, this would be the result.

Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K. Jerome

My astutest readers will have already noticed the names "George" and "Harris" in my "Memoirs", which I have stolen from this famous short novel. Most people don't know that it was actually written about Jerome's own honeymoon. An Anglo-Czech failed actor, he had a torrid affair with a married woman who divorced her husband (rare in 1880s Brtain) and married Jerome a week later; the famous account of their misadventures on the river became a best-seller, remaining steadily in print to this day, after he substituted his friends George and Harris for her, writing it in a week after their return. Both George and Harris became well-known London figures in their own right, and modern research has suggested that both were inveterate rakes, a gay one in the case of Harris. Which just goes to show there's nothing new under the sun.

My attention from the start was to have these two characters go off with the protagonist on a long, disaster-filled car trip to follow the mirage named "Natalia". If there is sufficient interest, I plant to resume this purely self-indulgent narrative--embarrassingly, based for the most part on actual events--upon my return. "Sufficient interest" would consist of the dozen pairs of interested eyes that still remain...

Happy June!
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