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I'm confused. I assumed they were putting the thing corpses in the tree of the vicar but I'm finding out now, now that owen, the tree's owner, is dead, that they put them in owen's tree. Why did they gently caress with owen?
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Oct 26, 2023 00:24
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Krinkle posted:I'm confused. I assumed they were putting the thing corpses in the tree of the vicar but I'm finding out now, now that owen, the tree's owner, is dead, that they put them in owen's tree. Why did they gently caress with owen? Owen was the one who threw the drugged meat into Snuff’s yard several chapters ago, so I assume it’s tit-for-tat.
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Oct 26, 2023 00:58
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Krinkle posted:I'm confused. I assumed they were putting the thing corpses in the tree of the vicar but I'm finding out now, now that owen, the tree's owner, is dead, that they put them in owen's tree. Why did they gently caress with owen? Owen, it turns out, was an Opener and therefore an excellent target for fuckery. Plus, yeah, attempted Good Boy murder early on.
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Oct 26, 2023 00:58
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October 25th Greymalk and Snuff investigate the remains of last night's bonfire. The Scooby Gang burned three monsters last night, but the authorities are carting away four bodies. Three of them are obviously inhuman and are probably being carted off to Victorian Britian Area 51, but the fourth is human; Owen himself. It seems like some unknown party threw an extra shrimp on the barbie after everyone left. Cheeter is... well frankly he's more upset that the oak tree got a bit singed. He wants out of the Game now that his Master's dead, and he needs Snuff and Greymalk's help to do it. See, he used to be a normal dumbass squirrel until the Druid uplifted him to superintelligence by stealing his shadow, and now he wants to go back to acting on animal intuition rather than having to constantly think about everything. Snuff is quite confused about the murder, and how it could relate to Rastov's death earlier. It's easy to imagine, say, the Vicar killing an enemy Closer and taking his magic loot, but not even Vicar Roberts is dumb enough to kill a fellow Opener. And here Cheeter introduces a wrinkle that not even Quicklime knew about : Owen was in discussion with Rastov about convincing him to switch sides, appealing to his liberal revolutionary sympathies. Did Rastov turn? Is someone killing Openers? Cheeter doesn't know, and he doesn't care. He just takes Snuff and Greymalk to the arcane diagram painted on the workshop wall, his severed disembodied shadow pinned to the design by silver nails. I appreciate that we don't get a lot of time with Owen, but this gives the impression that he was one of the more mystical of the Players. I like to imagine that while he was laying low all this time he was just doing a lot of divining and arcane SigInt while Cheeter just discretely evesdropped. Even though nobody here is super well versed in druidic sorcery, Greymalk manages to figure out how to undo the enchantment with some advice she got from the High Purring One back in the Dreamlands, a bit of his "small wisdom." Cheeter happily exits the Game, back as a mundane animal.
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Oct 26, 2023 03:07
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I finished the book today, it sure did pivot there at the end in ways I really did not expect but like all good books it left me wanting more
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Oct 26, 2023 03:10
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Len posted:like all good books it left me wanting more Zelazny had a habit, with all his novels, of writing a whole separate short story featuring his protagonist(s), then discarding it, just so that the characters were "larger" in his head than just the one story, and had a life outside it. Some of those short stories have been found or were later published separately, others as far as I know haven't been. I'm not aware of anything else published by Snuff. I was recently linked this from Deviantart: https://www.deviantart.com/viaestelar/art/Lonesome-October-566528215 Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 03:15 on Oct 26, 2023 |
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Oct 26, 2023 03:12
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Asterite34 posted:October 25th And no longer a flying squirrel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c712fBpXcWI
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Oct 26, 2023 03:14
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Zopotantor posted:Again a Lovecraft reference. I can't identify the "n'gah-kthun" bit, but the other one is a reference to a little ditty from The Horror at Red Hook. went down a rabbit hole... turns out Lovecraft didn't really write that line. It was pulled from an Encyclopedia Britannica article on magic, which was itself paraphrased from the Refutation of All Heresies, book 4, chapter 35, where it's described how a self-styled sorcerer might trick people into thinking they can summon fiery demons using drugs, hidden partners in the audience, and speaking really spooky stuff like: quote:Infernal, and earthy, and supernal Bombo, come! it's the kind of thing I'd expect in Ricky Jay's library
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Oct 26, 2023 04:27
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Zelazny had a habit, with all his novels, of writing a whole separate short story featuring his protagonist(s), then discarding it, just so that the characters were "larger" in his head than just the one story, and had a life outside it. Some of those short stories have been found or were later published separately, others as far as I know haven't been. I'm not aware of anything else published by Snuff. Oh wow, there's some really good stuff under the "lonesomeoctober" tag. Including a set of chapter illustrations: October 1-8:  October 9-16:  October 17-24:  Linking October 25-31 for spoilers.
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Oct 26, 2023 06:46
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Has anyone played this? https://store.steampowered.com/app/1334580/October_Night_Games/ Someone made a game based on the book and it sounds neat
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Oct 26, 2023 19:24
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It's close enough to the end. Maybe that was larry?
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Oct 26, 2023 21:28
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October 26th Pretty quiet day, which we haven't had in a while. No reason to make the rounds of the house, all the Things are dead. Not much going on at the other Players' houses either. Guess everyone's turtling up at the moment now that there's rumors of someone going around killing Openers. Nobody's in the mood to talk. Well, scratch that, at least one person wants to talk. Snuff bumps into Larry out in the woods, except... it's not Larry. It's a different enormous wolf, whose new in the area. Wants Snuff to tell him if this is a nice place to spend the winter. He's very curious about what the humans are up to, with Snuff telling him to stay clear of them, they're gonna be up to some crazy poo poo at the end of the month. The wolf keeps pressing for details though, keeps asking for the whys of it all, poo poo a random animal really shouldn't be caring about that much. Snuff books it, and the wolf calls after him by name, despite Snuff never giving it. Who the gently caress is this guy? It's been a while since we had a kinda slow chapter, which is nice since the last three or four have been kind of a rollercoaster, Players are dropping like flies. But even though not a lot happened, what DID happen is... intruiging.
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Oct 27, 2023 01:58
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Oct 27th was another short chapter. Just a bonus random guy digging in the graveyard for body parts, loving up all the dog math. None related. Bubo you scamp. If Just a Random Rat can fake being in the game, what did cheeter need to be uplifted for? He lost his animal instincts so I had expected when he ran off to be Just a Squirrel he'd have lost his speech or intelligence or something but he says "goodbye" as he left so it's left me confused and wondering. If it doesn't mean his ability to articulate I guess I don't know what he lost or gained but for the fact that it felt bad to not have it and he wanted it back. Was Peter Pan uplifted every time his shadow hosed off? Well Bubo is just a civilian and I'm glad he gets to live with snuff. RIP good doctor. Does the math change when players die or how does that work?
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Oct 27, 2023 18:16
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October 27th Snuff and Greymalk take a break from recuperating from the Vicar's bullshit a couple days ago to go check out the Good Doctor's place. Or at least, the smoldering ruins of the Good Doctor's place. They find Bubo lurking amongst the wreckage who informs them that it wasn't foul play, the Doctor and his Experiment Man just had an altercation, and accidentally started a fire. No idea if any of them made it out or not, but at least Snuff can't immediately see any human remains. Bubo is not at all cool with Greymalk's presence, and ends up blurting out my favorite twist in the whole book: Bubo was never actually in the Game to begin with. He's not a Familiar, and the Doctor was never a Player, never a magician of any sort, and wasn't even aware any of this was going on. He was just a mad scientist who moved out to the country for some privacy and happened to set up shop in the middle of this whole kerfuffle by pure coincidence. Bubo just saw all the Familiars geing treated like bigshots and decided to go along with the mistaken perception that he was in on all this so he could get some respect. This makes so many things make sense. The calculations for the ceremonial site weren't giving garbage results because there was a Player missing, but because there was a Player extra. Snuff's in such a good mood from this all finally clicking into place that he volunteers to let Bubo stay in Jack's house. Greymalk even agrees not to try and eat him, a bit of professional courtesy for a "fellow Player." Krinkle posted:Oct 27th was another short chapter. Just a bonus random guy digging in the graveyard for body parts, loving up all the dog math. None related. Bubo you scamp. I think squirrels are just exceptionally dumb and rats are just exceptionally smart, by the standards of animals. Like Bubo could keep up this whole charade without the need for enchantment, but non-uplifted Cheeter would just ask them for nuts and wouldn't have, like, complicated plans. quote:Well Bubo is just a civilian and I'm glad he gets to live with snuff. RIP good doctor. Does the math change when players die or how does that work? The pattern seems based on the Player locations on the New Moon. Before that things can shift around, but after that point people can die as much as they want and the math will stay fixed.
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Oct 27, 2023 20:10
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Krinkle posted:If Just a Random Rat can fake being in the game, what did cheeter need to be uplifted for? He lost his animal instincts so I had expected when he ran off to be Just a Squirrel he'd have lost his speech or intelligence or something but he says "goodbye" as he left so it's left me confused and wondering. If it doesn't mean his ability to articulate I guess I don't know what he lost or gained but for the fact that it felt bad to not have it and he wanted it back. Was Peter Pan uplifted every time his shadow hosed off? Binding an animal as a familiar - or in Snuff's case, summoning an eldritch horror, putting it into the shape of a dog, and then binding that - seems to give them both additional reasoning capabilities and magical powers, some of which are related to the opening/closing. We know from Cheeter's chapter that he traded instinct for reasoning, the ability to think through complex problems, presumably because being involved in the game forces you into situations where squirrel-instinct isn't going to help. The binding also gave him his gliding ability, and possibly made him useful to Owen in a role as a diviner, a calculator (like Snuff), or some other arcane function. It's also implied, although never outright stated, that the familiars must do their master's bidding, which is important in a situation where the stakes are this high. In all the politicking between companions, there's never any attempt to get a companion to betray their master: the humans (and human-adjacent players) make the calls, and the companions are along for the ride until the end of October. Jack and Snuff seem to be the exception, since they're both quasi-immortals who have played the game many times, and have grown into a comfortable friendship over the long years.
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Oct 28, 2023 02:55
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Kestral posted:
While it's true that we never see a Familiar betray their master, I'm not sure if it's a necessary magical compulsion. Cheeter might just be under a more strict involuntary version of the familiar ritual, the specifics of it seems to vary from Master to Master to the point that the magical systems involved are largely mutually unintelligible. It might be possible to switch sides, Nightwind makes the offer to Snuff on the 31st. Although context doesn't make it totally clear if this offer extends to both Snuff AND Jack, or if it's a serious offer and not just Nightwind smugly mocking them.
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Oct 28, 2023 03:25
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Bubo is the reader self insert. We figured it out as we went like we were eavesdropping and we don't have to explode when the book ends.
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Oct 28, 2023 16:15
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October 28th Bubo has set up shop in Jack's basement, and him and Snuff get to chatting. Bubo reveals exactly how much he's managed to figure out about the Game despite never being formally inducted into its mysteries, and we also get a title drop: quote:And he proceeded to tell me the story of how a number of the proper people are attracted to the proper place in the proper year on a night in the lonesome October when the moon shines full on Halloween and the way may be opened for the return of the Elder Gods to Earth, and of how some of these people would assist in the opening of the way for them while others would strive to keep the way closed. For ages, the closers have won, often just barely, and there were stories of a shadowy man, half-mad, a killer, a wanderer, and his dog, who always showed up to attempt the closing. Some said that he was Cain himself, doomed to walk the Earth, marked; others said he'd a pact with one of the Elders who secretly wished to thwart the others; none really knew. And the people would acquire certain tools and other objects of power, meet together at the designated spot and attempt to work their wills. The winners walked away, the losers suffered for their presumption by a reaction from the cosmic principles involved in the attempt. Then he named the players and their tools, adding an awareness of the calculation, of divinations, of magical attacks and defenses. Snuff is impressed as all hell. It really does bear repeating: Bubo isn't a magic superintelligent Secret of NIMH rat, he's just a regular rat, who by mere eavesdropping and bluffing managed to infiltrate this cabal of esoteric occultists well enough to pass as one. The big question is, of course, why? Bubo initially says it was necessary to survive among the various Players and their machinations, but Familiars are pretty good about trying to keep civilians out of the crossfire of all this. He could have just told the truth at any point and walked away from all this, if anything posing as a Player painted an unnecessary target on his back. In reality? He was curious, and was drawn in by the cryptic nature of it all, and the more he learned about the grand cosmic importance of the Game the more he, well, wanted to feel like he was part of something important. Rats aren't important in the grand scheme of things, Bubo was destined to live in a dark hole somewhere, eat garbage and best case scenario die of natural causes at age three. It felt good to pretend to be a Player in the Great Game, if only for a little while. Snuff treats Bubo to dinner at the travelling caravan, a friend's night out. On the way back he heads to the top of Dog's Nest and does some mental math. Figuring in the locations of all the Players, including the Count's extra crypts, and subtracting the Good Doctor and Larry's place, the center of the ritual site is... the spot he's standing on. Dog's Nest was the site all along, with its old standing stones and connection to the Dreamlands and prime central location. Jack and Snuff talk about these developments, and how the other Players will probably figure it out themselves before too long. It seems there was at least one occasion where for whatever reason no one ever actually found the ritual site, and everyone just got drunk and had a laugh about it and went their separate ways. This... isn't gonna be the case this time. You get a good sense of Jack and Snuff's cameraderie as they commisserate about how strange and tangled this Game has been, the friends they've made and the difficulties that's going to pose. This is gonna be a close one.
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Oct 29, 2023 01:53
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Asterite34 posted:October 28th This is one of the scenes that makes me wish for a version of the story where we get a lot more Jack and Snuff dialogue. I want to see them just hanging out for a while, problem-solving some arcane weirdness, talking about the other players, etc. Zelazny had this clear image of their relationship that comes through in so few words, and it's great, but damnit I want more words.
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Oct 29, 2023 03:12
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Another short chapter, the streak of which has been giving me anxiety about the end. Like 11% of the drat book is the last chapter now. Unless he's thanking 20 pages of people who helped him write it I'm going to have to block off so much time to read this. The great detective nails snuff to the wall about having language skills and intelligence after saving him from getting nailed to the wall by the vicar. He says talbot doesn't know poo poo about herbs and is going to gently caress up his dosage, demands to see dog nest.
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Oct 29, 2023 19:16
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I was about a week behind and finally caught up. Things I really appreciated on this re-read: 1) the description of how the Count moves is just wonderfully staccato 2) The dream chapter reminds me more of Lord Dunsany's prose than Lovecraft's, which is appropriate of course because "The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath" is deeply Dunsany-inspired 3) Dzzp! Such an evocative! 4) A lesser writer would have kept all of Jack's murdering off-screen, but no, Zelazny shows us a full scene, and makes it perfectly acceptable to see a bunch of murdering, too. "I'd guess you've never met a man as really knows how to cut". Hah.
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Oct 29, 2023 23:04
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October 29th After lunch at Jill's place (with Bubo invited along to get over his cat phobia), Snuff is taking a bit of a walk and quietly reflecting. He checks in on the barn next to the ruins of the Good Doctor's place to see if the Experiment Man is hanging around, and finds Needle of all people. Seems he avoided the staking that got the Count, and he's been recreationally eavesdropping. He was in Own's attic the night he and Rastov were talking, and he can confirm that after all the debating, Rastov remained a Closer to the end. So now the question is, who the hell would murder a Closer AND an Opener? The discussion is interrupted by Vicar Roberts who has Snuff in his crossbow sights and is blocking the door. Seems he's got Snuff dead to rights... until his interruption is itself interrupted by Linda Enderby, asking why he's hassling ol' lovable Good Boy Snuff. As deranged as the Vicar is, he has enough self-control to not do anything crazy and violent around a civilian witness. gently caress it, he can live, it won't matter in a couple days anyway. Snuff is about to leave when Linda tells him to drop the stupid dog act. The Great Detective knows. He knows everything. He knows about the Game, about all the Players, about familiars. He knows about the supposed cosmic-scale consequences of their big get-together on Halloween, and... certain unspecified recent events leaves him open to the possibility it's legit. He also knows that everyone involved in this has committed a shitload of crimes, but he's not being paid to care about that right now. Right now he's concerned about Lynette and her likely human sacrifice. Snuff communicates that no, he's not cool with it either, and Talbot has a plan to enact a rescue. The Detective is skeptical, because 1) he doesn't think that Larry has got the formula right for his not-go-insane potion, and 2) the Vicar knows there's a werewolf involved and has melted down some of the church silver for special bullets. He's willing to help as Talbot's backup, but he needs to know where everything's gonna go down. Snuff agrees to show him Dog's Nest. I dunno how to feel about this big reveal. In some ways it feels less impactful than Bubo doing something similar a couple days ago. Like he was a rat whose whole body is smaller than Sherlock's brain, and he managed to full-on pass himself off as a Player. But I guess Bubo had the advantage that the Familiars don't really care about keeping it a secret from other animals, they're animals, they don't have a Masquerade, they aren't gonna have their minds blown to know that magic's real. The Great Detective had to pry the info from a bunch of deeply suspicious jerks who were all on the lookout for him. Plus it involved Sherlock loving Holmes having to throw up his hands and admit that sure, Magic is real I guess. SO I guess it's all about even.
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Oct 30, 2023 02:58
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Oh and Needle is still in the game even if the count is dead. Did I get that right?
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Oct 30, 2023 03:14
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Krinkle posted:Oh and Needle is still in the game even if the count is dead. Did I get that right? He obviously didn’t feel the same way about it as Cheeter did. Maybe he has his own stake in the game.
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Oct 30, 2023 21:23
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Yeah, from Snuff's conversations with Cheeter and Quicklime it seems pretty clear that familiars can be part of the game even if their humans have been offed. Needle is just the first one who's actually had that inclination.
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Oct 30, 2023 22:34
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I just remembered the first week when snuff heard a howl of "lost!" and I kept thinking I'd find some animal whose human got murdered. I guess either it won't have mattered or I'll find out tomorrow.
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Oct 30, 2023 23:21
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Krinkle posted:I just remembered the first week when snuff heard a howl of "lost!" and I kept thinking I'd find some animal whose human got murdered. I guess either it won't have mattered or I'll find out tomorrow. That happened on a full moon, btw
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Oct 30, 2023 23:51
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Double post October 30th Welp, tomorrow is the Big Day. Around midnight, everyone is gonna head up to Dog's Nest, build a big bonfire, and work their mojo to try and open/close the Gate to the Elder Gods. Everyone's gonna use the various arcane reagents they've been gathering for the last month, as well as the various Tools of the game. The Openers are probably in possession of the Icon, the Bowl, the Ring, and the Opening Wand, while Jack has the Closing Wand. The first three will empower whichever side has them, but the Opening Wand only opens, and the Closing Wand only closes. Honestly, the deck seems pretty stacked against Jack, who is the only remaining Closer and kinda lacking in resources. But it isn't a foregone conclusion, this is magic we're talking about, there's a certain amount of unpredictability involved in these things. Honestly, there's not much left in terms of preparations to make, but Snuff should at least warn Larry that the Vicar is packing heat that could feasibly actually harm him. He finds him in his back yard Japanese Zen garden, in a meditative trance to get the Inner Animal under control for the big night. There's no way to know if he's cognizant enough of the outside world to hear his warning. All Snuff can do is let out a howl to purge some stress and hope for the best. This chapter is also neat because I think this is the only Gahan Wilson illustration of Snuff himself.  Huh. Kinda looks like a bloodhound. Go figure.
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Oct 31, 2023 02:52
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It's after midnight. I had to. better nate than lever e: can't believe i read a shaggy dog story any port in a storm, goddamn it Krinkle fucked around with this message at 20:33 on Oct 31, 2023 |
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Oct 31, 2023 07:25
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Asterite34 posted:Double post October 30th There is another one of Snuff dragging the policeman. e: October 10: Snuff drawing lines. October 16: Dragging the corpse. Zopotantor fucked around with this message at 19:51 on Oct 31, 2023 |
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Oct 31, 2023 19:45
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For the hell of it, I said nothing about horses though.   
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Oct 31, 2023 22:13
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Happy Halloween! Welp, tonight's the Big Game, and we gotta leave everything on the field. Things are super-awkward between Snuff and Greymalk, he's being shut out of the big Opener strategy session. Greymalk does have one thing to say though: she and Snuff should stand together in the big final ritual, with Snuff very specifically to Jack's left. Why that exact position? The High Purring One's small wisdom told her it would be optimal, though not necessarily why. He's probably got Greymalk's interests in mind way more than Snuff's, but cats do like to be abitrary when it amuses them... After that it's back to looking for Larry Talbot to warn him about the Vicar's silver bullets, but instead he runs into an old friend. Quicklime has some important poo poo to tell him, a favor from a former familiar. Seems the old snake picked up some bad habits from Rastov and was drowning his sorrows with fermented fruit. Sleeping it off underneath one of the caravan wagons, he overheard something big. Rastov WAS killed by the Vicar, taken out after Owen's attempt to turn him failed. Owen was, in turn, killed in retaliation, to send a message to Roberts to watch his back. Killed by who? The Count! That's right, the Count knew he was gonna be targeted by everyone who wanted the scariest Player out of the equation, so he beat them to the punch by dressing up a skeleton in his Dracula cape and faking his own death so he could operate covertly, with his casket being guarded in the caravan wagon by his lackies. Honestly this seems like a tactic that more Players would utilize. Maybe the Count's ambiguously alive status meant it was hard for anyone to use divination to confirm or deny his death compared to a normal human? I dunno. Now, did he kill Owen just as an excuse to gently caress with a priest getting too big for his britches? Or...? But anyway, time for the Big Event, the banefire on top of Dog's Nest with all the Players and their Familiars. Vicar Roberts has got his stepdaughter drugged and positioned on the sacrificial altar, with all his stolen magic artifacts. Everyone's gathered... including the Count, who officially places himself on the side of the Closers. Seems that he likes the world's current status quo of himself being the apex predator of mankind and doesn't like the notion of some squid-freak from beyond the stars loving up the good thing he's got going. The gathered participants throw their offerings onto the flames, and when things get weird. It wouldn't be a Roger Zelazny story without at least one phantasmagorical vision quest as everyone starts transmogrifying and swapping heads and the moon starts dripping blood and poo poo. The mystical ayahuasca hallucination i interrupted by Larry Talbot, seemingly somewhat in control of his faculties in wolf form, trying to retrieve Lynette from the altar. The Vicar just shoots him a couple times before he can drag her more than a dozen feet away. Still, it's enough, as it's a rule that if the sacrifice moves out of bounds, it's a foul I guess. Or at least that's what the Count says, and he backs that up by effortlessly snapping Morris and McCab's necks instantly. He tries the same thing on Roberts, but vampire vs priest is a bad matchup and he's incapacitated with some sanctified bullshit. Of course, all this is sufficient distraction for Lynette to be retrieved by Larry's backup, the Great Detective...who is ALSO a werewolf. It seems he managed to extract the secret of voluntary lycanthropy from Talbot. That wolf who was grilling Snuff for info a few days ago? That was his best disguise yet. A thing I love about this book is that, keeping all the actual plot events the same, several characters could just have easily been the main character of substantially different stories. Imagine if this was a story about Sherlock Holmes investigating an occult ritual and learning how to turn into a werewolf, or a story about Dracula doing Bourne Identity poo poo to save the world from Cthulhu, or Quicklime doing proper John le Carre covert spy stuff, or Greymalk doing a story about divided loyalies to her ideals and the reality of the petty cruel followers of her petty cruel gods, or a story about Bubo bluffing his way through uncovering an arcane conspiracy just for fun. But all these stories end here and now, with Jack using the Closing Wand and Jill using the Opening Wand, the Gate slowly swinging wider and wider no matter what anyone does. And then there's Bubo, hiding all this time in Jack's pocket, freaking out that everything's going wrong. You see, Bubo was not unaware of how pessimistic the outlook was for the Closers, but he still wanted to make a difference and maybe salvage the situation if/when everything went to poo poo. So he hatched a plan for the Openers to sabotage themselves in the likely event Jack and Snuff were taken out. When no one was looking (probably on the 29th when he was at Jill's house for dinner with Snuff) he snuck around and... swapped the Opening and Closing Wands. I guess they're just visually indistinguishable. Unfortunately, Bubo didn't expect the Closers to actually make a comeback with the Count's help, so now Jack's loving everything up and opening the Gate without realizing it. Carpe Baculum. Seize the Wand. Snuff grabs Jack's left arm to disrupt him using the Opening Wand. That leaves Jill to use the Closing Wand to start unwittingly loving up the ritual while the Experiment Man has wandered into the proceedings and is giving Greymalk the Lenny treatment and stopping her from interfering. Amid all this, Larry Talbot summons up a last bit of strength to tackle Vicar Roberts and himself through the Gate to the other side. Kinda sucks for Larry, but he's one of the few beings who can probably survive on the other side, somewhere where his Inner Animal can only hurt objectively evil things. And he's probably gonna fare better over there than the Good Vicar, who is now in the realm of Gods who don't appreciate failures. Jack throws the bottle of Slithering Things into the closing portal to properly gum it up ("Any Port in a storm," ugh) and the Experiment Man scoops up the Count's comatose body to carry him to safety. Everyone runs like hell, thoroughly sick of all this magic poo poo for a while. I guess the High Purring One did have Greymalk's best interests at heart. The way things played out, both her and her friend Snuff survived, everyone was on the winning team by virtue of Jill being a Closer by pure accident at the last minute. quote:Jack and Jill went down the hill. Grey and I ran after. Yep, that line is the whole reason this book exists. Bit of a shaggy dog story, huh?
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Nov 1, 2023 02:24
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I love this book so much. I'm so happy we all got to read it anew together. Here is a photo of Snuff as a puppy 
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Nov 1, 2023 03:02
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I love this book so much. I'm so happy we all got to read it anew together. A Snuppy
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Nov 1, 2023 03:19
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I love this book so much. I'm so happy we all got to read it anew together. A very good book, and a very good boy! Look at that faaaaace, that's the face of dog who would carpe a baculum for you any day. And thanks to you, HA, for being a tireless advocate of this lovely book for so long on SA, and to Asterite34 for posting the thread and making the daily recaps, and to all the posters who came around here to enjoy A Night in the Lonesome October together  Bored posted:For the hell of it, I said nothing about horses though. I love these, and they are getting saved to my Lonesome October folder immediately. Asterite34 posted:A thing I love about this book is that, keeping all the actual plot events the same, several characters could just have easily been the main character of substantially different stories. Imagine if this was a story about Sherlock Holmes investigating an occult ritual and learning how to turn into a werewolf, or a story about Dracula doing Bourne Identity poo poo to save the world from Cthulhu, or Quicklime doing proper John le Carre covert spy stuff, or Greymalk doing a story about divided loyalies to her ideals and the reality of the petty cruel followers of her petty cruel gods, or a story about Bubo bluffing his way through uncovering an arcane conspiracy just for fun. It's amazing, isn't it? I love books like this, where it's clear that there's so much movement going on beyond what the reader is explicitly shown. Maybe that's where my love of haunted house stories comes from, too. Asterite34 posted:Kinda sucks for Larry, but he's one of the few beings who can probably survive on the other side, somewhere where his Inner Animal can only hurt objectively evil things. And he's probably gonna fare better over there than the Good Vicar, who is now in the realm of Gods who don't appreciate failures. Not to worry, if Neil Gaiman has anything to say about it: he wrote Only the End of the World Again as an explicit tribute to A Night in the Lonesome October, with a Larry Talbot who gets tangled up in another attempt to bring the Elder Gods back to earth. Asterite34 posted:Yep, that line is the whole reason this book exists. Bit of a shaggy dog story, huh? Zelazny's puns were too powerful for this earth, gods bless him. "Any port in a storm" is one that gets me every. single. time.
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Nov 1, 2023 03:20
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Asterite34 posted:Yep, that line is the whole reason this book exists. Bit of a shaggy dog story, huh? The fit hit the shan
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Nov 1, 2023 04:31
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Spazzle posted:The fit hit the shan  This person knows(Everyone go read Zelazny's Lord of Light if you enjoyed this, it's so good)
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Nov 1, 2023 04:42
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Asterite34 posted:Happy Halloween! I love how he never says this outright. It just hits you sometime afterwards. A delayed blast.
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Nov 1, 2023 04:43
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