Project Gutenberg has made available a great many Public Domain works for easy reading. When the Baen system isn’t publishing what I want right now, it’s a wonderful backstop. It’ll take me a long while to exhaust even the cream of PG. Against that far off day: write faster, Bujold-Ringo collective!

Through PG, I found this collection of Lovecraft, focusing on his less-mythos horror. It features “Herbert West, Reanimator,” a story about how even blond, blue-eyed men of good European blood can perform unspeakable medical experiments, and how such may be immoral even when performed on poor Blacks and wanderers. He was writing in the twenties.

These stories were quickly written, and writtwn to sell. It’s easy to see the cliches and unsurprising plot twists now—but is this like calling the Silmarillion derivative of Eddings? Surely the basic systems of horror, even weird horror, must have been set before then!

Books read this year: 35