So this week I’m reading Bad Radio by Michael Langlois, in which an eternally-youthful former Army Ranger and the granddaughter of one of his old World War II army buddies have to stop a necromancer who is apparently plotting to set up a transmitter, call in an Eldritch Abomination, and destroy the world. Or something like that. At this point all I know is that the “bad radio” in question seems to be a metal ring with eight spikes on it, and it is apparently powered by sticking the spikes into the eye sockets of four people. Ouch.
In addition to the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day Radio, this book contains one of the better descriptions of the “thin shell of reality” that I’ve encountered, in this scene where Abe is trying to explain to his new sidekick how the world really works:
“Now picture the world like a pond, frozen over in the winter. We’re on top making ice and thinking the surface is the whole world, when most of it is really underneath us, and it’s not frozen at all. We walk around right on the top edge of the world, confined to the smallest part, and we think we see it all. But, of course, sometimes there are cracks in the ice and things get out. Sometimes those cracks are natural, and sometimes people make them trying to fish for particular things.”
Hence the cover art:
I don’t think Abe is talking about lake trout.
Meanwhile, the last print-out and mark-up of The War of the Ravels is finished, which means one more pass of editing on the computer, one more printout to catch any last typos, and then it will be time to (finally) roll it out and wrap up the saga of Mercy and Bernard as they (wait for it) try to save the multiverse from an Eldritch Abomination. Or something like that.
The growth of the Æther had, for many years, remained steady and inexorable; nothing halted the unraveling of the fabric of the world on whose face they walked, neither wishes nor walls nor witchcraft. Some wounds could not be healed; the spread of some infections could not be checked. All they could do was watch it happen, and write it down, and remember what had been lost.
Viscosity 