So recently I’ve been motoring through my pile list of unread books on the Kindle, not because I suddenly have more time to read, but because about a year ago — that’s how far behind I am — I evidently picked up a number of stinkers from BookBub and/or Pixel of Ink. This surprises no one who has seen my Netflix streaming queue. (In case you’re wondering why you haven’t seen a series of one-star ratings from me on Goodreads, it’s because I have a sort of policy about not rating books unless I get a good way into them, say, 10-15%, before I quit. Ah, the digital age, when we measure our reading progress in percentages rather than pages. But I digress.) But fortunately, I just arrived at The Uncanny Valley.
Not where the Keebler Elves make cookies.
Now as I mentioned, I picked this book up well over a year ago, so I had forgotten what it was about. And since I typically don’t re-read the book descriptions when I start a book, I was sort of expecting stories about robots or other creatures that look almost, but not quite, human. The postulated “uncanny valley” effect is illustrated in this chart from Wikipedia:
Everybody likes a stuffed animal, but nobody likes a zombie.
Or to illustrate it another way:
But this is not what The Uncanny Valley: Tales from a Lost Town, by Gregory Miller with illustrations by John York, is at all. It’s Dandelion Wine, if the wine had been filtered through “Trick ‘r Treat“.
I asked who was it? She said it was her. Then she turned it over again. She tapped a bit of writing on the back. I looked. It was a date. The date was 1654.
1654! That is a long time ago. Her name must be Dorian. Uncanny! And speaking of uncanny things, I am now on page 146 of editing on Television Man:
The mountaintop was too broad, too smooth; and who would build a facility like this smack on the summit of an Adirondack peak, anyway? The winters would start early and end late, and be horrific in between.
Hmm. Sounds like this last winter in most parts of the country, no Adirondack peak required …
