The Supernatural Minnesota books are just so damned good. The MD will remain one of the greatest literary horror novels of all time, but the other three are in no way to be sneezed at.

The Priest seems like an appropriate read at the moment. When it came out the various scandals that were rocking the Catholic Church were pretty bad, but few could have imagined the deluge to come. Well, Disch did, in a kind of murderous, tragic, apocalyptic way. Now there's a new pope and the taint of scandal has been irrevocably ingrained into the substance of the Church, and Disch's gothic vision of conservative Catholic values run amok in the modern world is pretty much a spot-on piece of savagely satirical entertainment.

In The Priest, a paedophile priest - an ephebophile, really - is blackmailed into, amongst other things, getting an enormous tattoo of Satan on his torso. Passing out while under the needle, he wakes up in the time and body of a medieval bishop in the throes of the orgy of torture and slaughter that was the Albigensian Crusade. Worse still, the medieval bishop wakes up in the priest's time and body. Hi-jinks ensue.

Oh, what a tangled, nasty tale. Disch's trenchant anti-catholcism is in full flight. With anyone else that might have led to something rather unsatisfying, but Disch's focus on the documented evils, while taking a side-swipe at a thinly disguised cult founded by a science fiction writer that's half Hubbard, half Streiber, and his merciless dissection of human vanity, means that even with the supernatural body and time jumping elements, this is a meditation on all-too-human and all-too-banal acts of evil. It's also a gut-wrenching exercise in mounting suspense, and the moment when the bishop is loosed on the pregnant girls trapped in the cells under the cathedral is agonising.

In the ongoing series of where-was-I-when-I-first-read-this, I borrowed The Priest from Cork City Library and read it on breaks and during lunches while working in Dunnes Stores in Douglas sometime in the mid-nineties. Hell of a book.

Amy and friends take part in a competition with other schools and institutions on the streets of London. The outcome has some drastic consequences, not least of which is the mysterious broken doll that haunts Amy's dreams, but that's to say nothing of the new educational regime the Remove is subjected to, and the cunning and cruel game of secrets they are forced to play for prep. Brilliant stuff - Murder Most Unladylike with British old-school superheroes.

I always did like Rita best of all the Dolly Birds - punkish, dyslexic make-up artist deeply unimpressed by JJ and his various ways. in the grand scheme of things she meets him not long after the 'plane crash' which killed his wife and left him a mess, so he's not at his best. Still, though, this voyage some things don't sit quite right, such as Rita's apparent homophobia (it's probably just her resentment at JJ being expressed through the casual contemporary homophobic language because of the sort of hilarious comic misunderstanding that were the primary utility of homosexuality in various forms of fiction at the time) and an incredibly cringey bit involving blackface and imitated pidgin dialect. Aside from that, there's a twisty complicated thriller involving murder and drug smuggling and assorted tropical islands, and it's all good fun and there's a brilliantly nasty and tense bit where they get hijacked on the edge of a tropical storm that's about to turn into a hurricane that's worth getting through the now-cringey bits.

Hilda settles in to trollberg, joining the Sparrows and working on badges, but gets distracted by sympathy for an evicted house spirit. But soon more evicted house spirits are everywhere, and there's a big black dog going around eating people. Gorgeous stuff.

This book does a pretty good job of surveying the growth of the viking world, both east into modern Russia and west across the Atlantic to Greenland and Vinland, using lots of archeological evidence as well as ancients texts and runes and sagas. The couple of centuries invading, threatening and settling in centuries in England are always fun, and the Norman invasion of 1066 is counted as a Viking one, but the most interesting insight here was how what seems to us a stretched-out series of outposts and settlements across vast distances and formidable seas was to Vikings, used to maritime travel as an easier alternative to overland, perfectly manageable.

In her entry in the Encyclopedia Of Ireland, Dorothea Herbert is described as suffering the worst fate of any writer, that of all of her works being lost. What did survive are these retrospections, but on reading them, one is left in no doubt that she considered the fate she suffered while alive as being far worse, and it's difficult to disagree, and it's a hard heart that wouldn't break for poor Dorothea, unlucky in love, shattered by grief, subjected to mystifying abuse by a once-loving family, which may or may not be the product an mental and emotional breakdown.

This collection, originally published in two parts in 1929, one hundred years after her death,
and 1930, are a memoir of her life growing up in rural Ireland from her childhood to her seclusion, from 1770 to 1806. They provide a fascinating and often delightful and frequently distressing insight into a way of life and a society mostly understood today through the pageantry of historical fiction and drama. The daughter of a country rector who enjoyed reasonable financial security compared to most, she was educated and clever and witty - comparisons with Jane Austen are unavoidable, albeit Dorothea's life was far more rustic and was enlivened by tithe wars and rebellions and French invasions going off in the background. Nonetheless she seems happy enough. Though lowly enough in their social setting they enjoyed many high connections, resulting in lots of visitations and gatherings. As children Dorothea and her siblings seem utterly wild and carry a propensity for bizarre tricks and pranks well into young adulthood, until the boys are sent to school and her close friends and companions begin to marry.

Dorothea's own love affair seems odd and repressed to modern eyes, and her beau, the bould John Roe, remains opaque, even as she brings him to life on the page, describing him and his behaviour and his manner meticulously. Poor Dorothea plumbs the depths of her own emotions, and can be gently caustic about other women and whole families, but the hearts of most men seem not just off limits but alien to her. She does, at the last, attain the crushing insight that she loves him even though he was always unworthy of that love, and that the weight of that is going to fall entirely on her. The social and legal freedoms afforded, constrained only by strength or decency of character, provide fragile protections to vulnerable women. Dorothea does not get a happy ending, and these were written not for posterity but to distract her and channel her pain. We're lucky to have them, in that sense, though whether it was worth it for Dotty is moot these centuries later.

Highly readable, witty, charming, and ultimately heartbreaking, this is a wonderful and invaluable book, and the foreword by Louis Cullen provides historical and social context.

We're doomed.

This one is pretty much off the hook, all-out chase and action from the very beginning as Hap and Leonard rescue a girl on a flooded highway on the middle of storm and bad guys with guns come after her. Bad guys and worse weather, it's an intoxicating mix and a fast read, smoother than usual as there aren;t many opportunities for the guys to just straight up hang around being lovable assholes becasue they're too busy being redneck paladins to the rescue. Absolutely ripping.

The impending doom finally impends, also Doom descends and everything ends and we learn that the ultimate doom of all the universes turns out to be: a crossover! Well, these are comics universes, after all, so it's actually quite appropriate.

Ted Lewis meets Stephen King, and it all reads a bit like a Micheal Marshall Smith story, which is as heady a brew as you could hope for in this fast, slick, sinister, creepy tale. A teacher takes up a position in his old school in an isolated mining town, but he's not planning on staying for long. The distant past and the uncomfortable present are both closing in on him as he revisits the disappearance of his young sister. Staying in a cottage that was the scene of a recent ugly murder-suicide and chased by nasty people for gambling debts, he is not in for a comfortable time. Twisty, turny, well-written and somwhow succeeds in keeping the protagonist mostly sympathetic without letting him off the hook.