Thank you -- thank you all. That means so much. We just got a call from Allison a short while ago; she's going to be in the hospital another couple of days, mainly because of the pain, but she's otherwise doing pretty well. I really feel she's out of the woods, but we won't stop holding our breath yet. She's getting really good care, and her friends who live near her are going out of their way to help.

Best always.

It's been a trying few months. My wife, Peg, had surgery the day after Christmas for bone spurs in her shoulder and a reconstruction of a bad knee. Last month, my mom was diagnosed with uterine cancer and had to have a hysterectomy (which went well, and we believe there won't be any complications). This past week, we received the rather shocking news that my daughter Allison was hospitalized with a blood clot in her lung.

We got the news on Thursday afternoon, so that night, Peg and I drove up to Maryland, where Allison lives. We've spent the past couple of days there with her, and we left this afternoon and are now at my mom's in Virginia. Allison is still in the hospital, but we expect her to be released on Monday. She's doing reasonably well, but is still in a lot of pain. The doctors believe that the clot is a result of her taking birth control and being a smoker -- evidently, not a good combination.

Her prognosis is generally good; she's on blood thinner to help dissolve the clot (and will be for the next few months) as well as high-powered painkillers, as this thing is quite excruciating and interferes with her breathing. The word is that there's only a minute chance that it will move and cause further damage, but needless to say, her mom and I remain concerned about that. On the good side, she's had excellent medical care, and we're fairly confident the worst of it is over.

Some of y'all met Allison at a couple of the DS gatherings a few years back when she came to hang out with the scary folks. Please keep her in your thoughts and prayers, if you would. The kid means the world to me.

I personally find Lovecraft's fiction quite addictive. The Lurker at the Threshold and The Thing on the Doorstep are great yarns both of which have a DS sort of atmosphere about them. I guess you'll either love it or hate it. It's difficult to be indifferent to HPL!

"The Lurker at the Threshold" is actually one of August Derleth's "posthumous collaborations" with Lovecraft -- meaning that Derleth wrote the novella based on some notes Lovecraft left for a tale he never fully realized. It's an enjoyable enough story, but it's 95% Derleth, whose horror work is generally considered rather pedestrian. I doubt it was in any way intentional, but the Leviathans actually have more in common with Derleth's expansions of the Cthulhu mythos than with Lovecraft's own work.

No connection to Lovecraft whatsoever. Now if Quentin had turned into a cat instead of a werewolf... maybe then. (Lovecraft was extraordinarily fond of cats and occasionally presented them as heroic figures.)

It's not about Dark Shadows, alas, but Horror Library has posted an interview with yours truly -- mostly about the good old days of Deathrealm. Now, I did run a Dark Shadows feature in Deathrealm way back when, so by way of Rainey's Theory of the Transitive Property of Irrelevance, it could be considered on-topic, but then only just.

Regardless, I've got a new interview up at Horror Library, conducted by Ed Schubert, editor of Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show. Somebody messed up the italics in the article, but it wasn't me.

The Horror Library Interview

Hi Marie -- Nice to see you around these parts. Don't be a stranger.

I've finally started reading TSB; I'm about halfway through it and have found it generally enjoyable, though Lara's mannerisms constantly threaten to derail me. The most egregious example is on p. 114:

"'I would have expected more genteel behavior from an...English gentleman.' She placed the epithet in verbal italics, her tone sardonic."

That one damn near sent me closing up shop and moving on to Jonathan Maberry's Ghost Road Blues. But I have persevered.

I've generally done better selling them individually. I haven't checked them out for a while on Ebay, but you might look to see if those particular titles are being offered and what kind of prices they're getting. On the other hand, the way Ebay has increased its fees in recent days, it might be more cost effective to sell the lot and see if you can get a good price for them; fees on individual listings for relatively low-priced items have really begun eating into potential profit.