Dear Edgar 45 ~ A Tale of the Ragged Mountains

Posted on October 31, 2025 by Mark Hayes

Science Fiction is awash with tales of procession or bodily transference, not by satanic forces though they are plenty of those, but stories told by a protagonist who processed for a time the body of another. Often these processions are in an earlier or later time and place, or someone is fully transported to another time and place. There are many variations on the theme but the theme is very much the same each time. It is a stranger in a strange land, not sure of themselves nor the world they find themselves in.

It is not an uncommon device. The other great literary Edgar, Edgar Rice Burroughs who is perhaps best known for Tarzan, wrote the Barsoom series set on Mars, in which John Carter a 19th century American spends a lifetime living on a Mars that may or may not have corresponded to the Mars of his own time period. Lovecraft used the device multiple times but never more so than in his seminal ‘The Shadow out of Time’. Michael Moorcock uses it frequently, perhaps best in his Oswald Barnstable novels, but the Ekerose incarnation of the enteral Champion, was very much a man repeatedly placed out of his time and place. And this is without even saying anything about Stephen Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant novels. When it comes down to it even Freaky Friday uses the same basic device… And there are many many other examples I could spout.

All these stories have something in common, a thread that goes back to this story by Poe. There may be earlier examples that inspired Poe but I struggle to put name to one. So it is not impossible that Poe was the first to use the idea of processing the body and mind of another in another time and place, and did so as the central conceit of this story. Which is something of a shame, as the story itself somewhat lacks luster, is a bit fuzzy in places. This is not to say ‘A Tale of the Ragged Mountains’ is a bad story, it isn’t but as it is somewhat ground breaking in literary terms it is disappointingly a little bland. Possibly this is because of the Mad Max handcuffs paradox*.

*The Mad Max handcuffs paradox In brief…

At the end of the first Mad Max movie, Max handcuffs the Toecutter to a car that is rigged to explode. He gives Mr Cutter a hacksaw and tells him he can either saw through the hardened steel of the cuffs in half and hour, or his hand in a couple of minutes, and it si up to him… This is not the paradox…

The paradox is to do with the movie SAW. I was watching Mad Max at a UNI movie night, (I was there because the film club were showing Mad Max on the big screen, so why wouldn’t I go along, they had done Bladerunner the week before). “Meh,” one of the Media studies students said afterwards. “I saw that handcuff thing in SAW, how unoriginal…” The student in question was missing the salient point. Mad Max predated SAW by over twenty years. He was unimpressed by the ending of Mad Max because he had seen a movie that borrowed the same idea twenty odd years later.

This then is the Mad max paradox, otherwise known as Media Studies students are not always collectively the brightest…

The point here is that ‘A Tale of the Ragged Mountains’ is not in anyway a bad story, it just doesn’t seem awfully original… Not when you are someone who read Edgar Rice Burroughs, Michael Moorcock, and Lovecraft, etc, long before he ever read ‘A Tale of the Ragged Mountains’ a fairly obscure Poe story that doesn’t have the grandeur you would want from something truly original. It isn’t for this particular kind of science fiction what ‘The Murders on the Rue Morgue’ is for detective fiction.

This strikes me as a bit of a shame…

The story itself is, as I said, a little fuzzy, and being told to us second hand by an unnamed narrator, but is mostly the account as told to him of strange events that were experienced by Augustus Bedloe, prior to his death. Augustus a young man of independent wealth but fragile health, had employed an old doctor called Templeton who was a devotee of Mesmerism, which when Poe wrote this was not a forgotten fringe alterative medicine, but a mainstream medical theory. In much the same way the use of leaches would have seemed a perfectly reasonable medical practice to Chaucer. This is to say our dear Edgar did not write this story to poke fun at Mesmerism, rather it was a current medical theory that fit the needs of his story.

Bedloe benefits from the administrations of mesmerism by Dr Templeton and starts to take long walks in the hills and mountains that surround his Charlottesville home. It was on one such walk, that became longer that pervious ones, Bedloe encountered a thick mist in a gorge, just as (tellingly perhaps) his prescription of morphine was kicking in. So he walks into it, as it looks pretty.

He steps out the other side to find he is no longer in the ragged Carolinian mountains, but is instead somewhere else entirely. Something he realizes when a half naked man of eastern extraction rushes past him pursued by a hyena. Recovering his senses somewhat he discovers he is in what he takes to believe to be the the middle east or perhaps India. Eventually he stumbles across a city of minarets and archways which he makes his way through before finding himself besieged with British officers as a battle rages in the streets. Then he is shot in the head with an arrow and dies. Only to find himself once more in the ragged mountains. Whence he goes home and recounts his story to his friends the doctor and our unnamed narrator.

Dr Templeton is shocked by all this. Not so much by the strange events Bedloe claims to have experienced, but that they are events he knows. Before coming to America as a young man he had served with the British out of Calcutta and was at the siege of Benares, almost forty years before. What Bedloe described as his death was the exact way the Doctors friend Oldeb had died.

Shortly afterwards Bedloe dies and in his obituary someone spells his name without the e at the end. The narrator notices with no small surprise at that point that Bedlo is Oldeb backwards…

This is all fine but the problem is there is a whole lot of implication as to what is actually happening, but it is all very fuzzy. Did the doctors mesmerism awaken the memories of a pervious life perhaps. Was Bedloe his old friend Oldeb reincarnated, perhaps… Does that explain the odd repour between them, or did Bedloe go back in time in spirit then processed Oldeb? The little twist at the end seems tacked on and that just adds to the confused nature of the story.

This is not to say its badly written, It’s Poe, of course it isn’t badly written. Nor is it a poor story, it is more that I am just not sure it has the courage of its convictions. To the mast of the uncanny and rum it was not nailed. Instead Poe left a whole, ‘it was a dream’ possibility open, even with the tacked on twist at the end. It would have worked better had he leant heavily into the strange time travel and procession of another body, or else to mesmeric influence causing him to have delusions that stem from the doctors memories. Or any other explanation come to that, it is all a bit ‘well it could be this, it could be that.’ Which gives it a all a bit ‘meh!’ feel.

I don’t dislike the story, but if a story like this crossed my desk for an anthology today I would send it back to the writer and suggest he give it another pass, sharpen it up and decide what the story really is about. Which seems an arrogant thing to suggest when the writer of this story is Edgar Alan Poe, but this while perfectly ok as a story, is just that, its ok… nothing more.

Where as it could have been The Murders on the Rue Morgue of procession fantasy…

THREE MILDLY CONFUSED RAVENS ALL A FLUSTER

Should you read it: Well yes, perhaps, possibly, I mean sure, why not, but meh!

Bluffers fact: Mesmerism, which also goes by the name Animal Magnetism, is the theory that everything that lives has an energy field around it. This was first proposed by Frank Mesmer in the 18th century, hence the name. His name is also linked with hypnosis which is occasionally referred to as being mesmerized. Louis XVI of France was so taken by Mesmer’s theories that he organized not one but two Royal Commissions into the field, One of these Commissions was with the French Academy of Sciences, an august body that included among its ranks the ageing American Ambassador to France, Benjamin Franklin who served on the commission.

Benjamin Franklin was far from the lone famous name upon the commission, among it ranks there was a middle-aged Scientist and Physician who like Frank Mesmer was to lend his name to something the would out live him in the public mind, and indeed it was to leave quite an impression on Louis XVI . His name was Joseph-Ignace Guillotin

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Dear Edgar 44 ~ The Spectacles

Posted on October 29, 2025 by Mark Hayes

For all the weather-beaten world-worn cynicism that I may occasionally be accused of by those that know me. A weather-beaten world-worn cynicism that our own Dear Edgar could have been said to share. I am at heart a romantic, which is to say while I do not believe there is such a thing as love at first sight, I wish to live in a world where such a thing exists. It has always struck me as somewhat unlikely however.

The Spectacles is not a short story about love at first sight. It is instead a story about love at first myopic blur. As someone who went through the trauma of going short sighted around the age of ten, when I started to realize I could not read the large projection in the school assembly, I have some sympathy with Poe’s protagonist in this tale. I hated discovering that I needed to wear glasses, hated wearing them then and if I am honest still do. So I would avoid doing so whenever I could, while I could get away with it.

And that is the essence of this entire story, which is by way of a long form, somewhat over elaborated, joke. Its the kind of story a standup comedian my tell in a five minute bit with a lot of weaving about. The summery of which really does comes down to love at first myopic blur. Everything that happens in the story is entirely determined by the unwillingness of the protagonist to wear his spectacles.

The protagonist has the somewhat preposterous name Napoleon Buonaparte Simpson, having changed his last name from Froissart in order to inherit a large sum of money for a distant relative. That change in last name is important to the twist in the tale, which is really three twists, the first of which is set up in a potted family history. The second by the little Corsicans namesake falling in love ‘at a distant’ with Madame Lalande who due to his unwillingness to wear his spectacles he confuses for a much younger woman.

And that is that, it is a long winded about a man who for vanities sake will not wear his glasses and ends up marrying an octogenarian, as until they are wed he never sees her properly. Who he then discovers, just to add another twist is also great aunt, her own last name having changed when she wed her deceased husband Mr Lalande, she too was previously a Froissart.

There is one final twist, which is the whole wedding was a fake set up by his friend and Madame Lalande, to teach Napoleon a lesson. One he duly learns and is never seen about without his spectacles again.

Like many of Poe’s comedies this is partway a farce, but unlike some of them it does hold up as a comedy but it has a predictability about it. This is Mr Magoo gets married, and beyond that central conceit is lacking somewhat in finesse.

In essence then this is not the kind of story for which one reads Poe, its a story anyone could have written and had it not been Poe would have been long forgotten. It has charm but not enough. It is clever in some regards with the set up, but not so much in execution.

TWO MYOPIC RAVENS STARING AT THE SAME CARCASS

Should you read it: there is no reason why you should not, but it is more a question of why you should. Your day will not be particularly better for doing so.

Bluffers fact: Spectacles were invented in northern Italy in the thirteenth century by monks in order to read manuscripts. They were simple things at the time. It wasn’t until Edward Scarlett opened his ‘Old Spectacle Shop’ in 1725, some 500 years later, that anyone thought to puts sides with hooks to go around the ears on them. So for 500 years peoples glasses were constantly falling off. No doubt this was hilarious…

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Friday book news

Posted on October 24, 2025 by Mark Hayes

Because one is as ever behind on reviews, as well as general book news here is a catch up in general on my book news and a few new releases form authors I have reviewed before and recommend.

Firstly this month saw the release of the sixth Harvey Duckman anthology 3 Turns Widdershins, a project I remain immensely proud of, producing high quality anthologies from a vast array of talented writers. There is of course more to come from Harvey and the next anthology is in the works , as is a special ‘Welcome to our Worlds’ book that will be out later this year.

If you want to find out more about Harvey you should go to the website HERE

Two of my fellow Harvey’s have new books out this month, Kate Baucherel has released her sixth and final Simcavalier novel, rounding out the second trilogy. I have not yet read this one, but I will as I love this series of near future cyber crime

Meanwhile Ben Sawyer, who at this point must be Yorks favorite son, is releasing his third Holly Trinity novel on Halloween As its not up yet here is a link to the first of this increasingly wonderful series

Stepping away from Harvey, six months ago I read the third of Shelley Adina’s Lady Georgia Brunel mysteries. I have been meaning to write a review but I read it in a busy period and the need to write a review slipped my mind, as sometimes happens. In any case a short review is as follows:-

This is wonderful, read it.

You might want to read the first two beforehand, you don’t really need to, but why would you not. If you have read them you don’t need me to tell you to read this one. Shelley’s cosey steampunk/period mysteries are a delight. They have a gentleness to them, Georgia and her maiden-aunt Millie fall into adventure once more and fight their way through without ever losing a sense of decorum, despite the chickens they seem determined to keep aboard their airship. The world need more of Georgia and Millie, luckily there is plenty to come I am sure.

Another book I read, enjoyed, and put on my to review pile then forgot I had a to review pile (this is a serious problem) is Laura Liptrot’s debut novel Dreamcatchers, which is a delightfully chaotic romp of a book that hops around and makes only as much sense as it needs to at times. As I am a tad chaotic at times I quite enjoyed the splintered narrative of childhood. There are layers to this novel, it reads at first like a child’s fantasy novel but it has a deeper resonance to it than first appearances. It is pure escapism , and who doesn’t need a little of than now and again

Finally, in the previous blog I published the introduction to a non-fiction book on quantum physic, philosophy and paganism I am sort of writing currently between the more important work of making stuff up… Since I published it I had time one boring lunchtime to do an initial pass at a cover, I quite like the one I put together. I also needed a better title as what is been written is not entirely what was first envisioned, though it is very much the braod sweep.

So here is the cover reveal of a book I might writer (about 10k in the file now so it is actually being written, but how long it will take is anyone guess, and at some point it will take a back step for the next novel )

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The Quantum Pagan an Introduction

Posted on October 20, 2025 by Mark Hayes

Last week, because I don’t have enough to write, I started work on a project that has been kicking about for a few years. While it may never see the light of day, as it is in part a personal project, I have been encouraged through conversations with a few people to write a book on pagan mysticism, faith and quantum physics…

With that in mind, as I needed a distraction, I wrote an introduction piece for the book, which was going to be short and intended to be humorous, it got a tad out of hand and required some additional research as these things are bound to do… but it inspired me to keep on with the project and I went on to write a couple of chapters as well and got to just shy of 10000 words last week, as well as sketching out in note form the rest of the book. There is a lot of work to do and there will be much revision, and exactly when if ever the book will see the light of day is another matter. But I thought i would put the introduction here, as some of you may enjoy it. In any regard, I present the introduction (in its present 1st draft form, please bare that in mind) to the book on paganism I am sort of writing that has no firm title as yet

The Quantum Pagan an Introduction

50,000 years ago, amidst a great plain that would one day be called the Serengeti, a man sits cross-legged before at a smouldering fire pit. He is not paying attention to the fire as it splutters down. Instead, he is staring up at the lights in the sky.

His people, the people of the south and the east call him Hura’tuoi, which means he who wonderers.  The people of the north and the west snigger at this and call him Hura’tuoa, which means he who wanderers. It will be fifty millennia until this terrible play on words is funny once more. In another time and another language. Humanity will have learned a great deal in those intervening years, but will not have gotten any better at puns…

It is a clear night, the vista of the stars moves slowing through the heavens as Hura’tuoi watches and tries to ascribe meaning to the lights he sees. He has left his people and walked out into the bush alone, here to camp and contemplate. His people think him strange, and in truth he has always been a little strange. He thinks too much and feels too little, they say of him, but this is not true. He feels everything and when he stares at the sky he is seeking connection. He is seeking to understand what he sees and in doing so understand, perhaps even define, his place in the cosmos.

Hura’tuoi believes there is a connection between the heavens and earth. He perceives patterns within the stars, patterns that he does not understand but longs to. In the millennia to come his peoples descendants will give those patterns names and tell stories of them. But that is in the time to come, Hura’tuoi like his kin, of necessity lives in the now. His stories are the stories of the hunt and hunger. His stories are the ones that tell the people where to find the fruits and edible roots as the season turn. Where the antelope will be, come the days of rains. Where water will flow in the days of drought. Hura’tuoi and his people are connected to the world in the most direct of all possible ways. Most of his people are locked in a daily struggle for existence, He is the exception, the shaman.  He is one who finds time to wonder about the universe, rather than just where the next meal is coming from. He is the foreshadowing of the humanity to come. A humanity that will seek to understand the cosmos in ways he could not comprehend, on the African plains fifty millennia ago.

He is among the first of his kind, a human who stares up at the stars, wonders what they are and wonders about his place in the universe. Hura’tuoi stares up at the stars, as his untended fire dwindles to ash. He wonders at the majestic turning of the heavens. He wonders at the cosmos he seeks to connect with.

Right up to the moment he is mauled to death by the pride of lions that has been stalking him.

It would be close on to forty thousand years until people like Hura’tuoi could stare into the night sky, wonder about the cosmos, and be able to be reasonably safe in the knowledge that large predators were unable to stalk them. Sometime between 10000 and 9000 BCE by our best estimates, around 11000 years ago, in the fertile crescent of Mesopotamian, small neolithic farming settlements began to appear as humankind figured out how to plant and harvest grains. In the years between Hura’tuoi and the birth of civilization, many humans must have looked up at the heavens, wondered about our place in the universe and told stories. Some of them may also have been mauled to death by lions… It wasn’t until we achieved a level of civilization that allowed for the next meal to be more of a certainty than a mere possibility that humanity was truly in a position to wonder about those strange lights in the sky, but by then we had already learned to use them, both as reference points for navigation and as measure of the passage of time.

Gobekli Tepe, situated in the southeast of modern turkey, is one of the oldest sites of human habitation. The earliest parts of the complex are thought to have been built by nomadic peoples as a place for mysticism and ritual. Just why they chose this site is a matter of speculation but what we do know is they were a people amidst a transformation from a society of hunter gatherers to one of farming and animal husbandry. The site which probably began as a ceremonial hub was occupied to one extent or another between 9500 and 8000 BCE. That’s one and a half thousand years. To put that expanse of time into some form of context one and a half thousand years ago from today a newly fragmented Europe was emerging after the final collapse of the roman empire, the Sui dynasty was reunifying China and the Mayans were building ziggurats.

Fifteen hundred years is a very long time, at least in human terms. Longer still when you consider in modernity a generation, the period of time it takes for a person to be born, raised to adult hood and have children of their own is around thirty to thirty-five years or so, in the developed world. In the neolithic world the average generation would have been between only fifteen to twenty years. It is not a stretch to say Gobekli Tepe was inhabited for something around eighty-five generations. Again, to put that in perspective, going back eighty-five modern generations would put us somewhere in the middle of bronze age Greece…  

To be succinct humans lived at Gobeki Tepe, for a very long time

However, they also left it a very long time ago. Arguably, the most famous neolithic monument in the world is Stonehenge. The Circle of stones in the plains of Wiltshire that was constructed around 3000 BCE or 5000 years ago. This was around the same time period as the construction of the megalithic temples of Malta. Both those temples and Stonehenge are aligned with the stars and the equinox’s, as indeed are some aspects of the Gobeki Tepe complex. But for a little more perspective, as we sit her in modernity we are closer in time to the forgotten builders of Stonehenge and Malta’s temples, than the builders of those wonders were to the builders of Gobekli Tepe, and we know very little about any of them. What we do know is Gobekli Tepe was not alone. There are many other sites around the world where humans have come together to build sites of mysticism and spirituality that align with the stars, and the turning of the seasons. Gobeki Tepe is merely one of the oldest that has not been removed by the ravages of time.  

What Gobeki Tepe, Stonehenge, the temples of Malta and all the rest are is proof, if ever it was needed, that our most common trait as humans is a desire to understand our place in the cosmos and to connect to it. A desire that predates Gobekli Tepe, that predates even my poor unfortunate Hura’tuoi. Humanity has had a concept of the spiritual for a very long time. While religion and religious practices almost certainly developed as far back as 50,000 years ago in the Upper Paleolithic in the form of shamanic rituals. There is sporadic and disputable evidence of such things stemming from even further back. The simple truth is we have no idea how far back in time humans have been staring out at the universe seeking something more than themselves. Prehistoric cultures are by their very nature, before history, but we have been seeking the divine for a long time.

Modern paganism, as practiced by myself and others, does not look so far back in time. The deepest back in time we look in any real sense is probably back to the Minoans and Crete a thousand years before the Greece of Plato and Aristotle. Modern druidism, which is but one branch of paganisum, has no real roots with the builders of Stonehenge but is based on 19th century romanticism. Modern pagans look back on ritualism from the Greek, Roman, and latterly the dark age societies of northern Europe for answers. Others look to the native religions of the America’s and other cultures that have been subsumed into western religion. We have little connection with the builders of Gobekli Tepe, or indeed the builders of Malta’s temples, or Stonehenge. Except in one very important way. Modern pagans, like their ancestors before them, right down to Hura’tuoi and beyond, are still seeking a connection to the universe. Seeking a spiritual link to the cosmos. Seeking to find their place, and in doing so to find that which is divine…

Modern paganisms many branches are all reaching outwards, while looking back to the past. There is nothing wrong with this, but while this form of paganism brings a sense of belonging, connection and fulfillment to many, it has never felt entirely right for me… While I feel that same desire to find and connect with something of the divine, to be part of a greater spirituality, part of the world and the universe, I also worship at another altar. For while paganism calls to me, I am and always have been, fascinated by science and more importantly physics. On the face of it, it may seem difficult to conciliate the philosophy of quantum physics with any form of Pagan mysticism. Certainly, it has taken me more than a few years to find my own way, my truth, if you will. This book is, however, an expression of that truth, and my search for it.

I am not looking for converts, I am not going to presume to teach anyone how to be. I will however tell you whom I am, the path I have chosen and perhaps cast some light upon the journey it took me to get here.

Now, importantly, while I have my back to the fire, I can feel its warmth, and I have checked for lions.

 So, I think it’s time to stare at the stars again, for a while…   

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Feline Economics

Posted on October 14, 2025 by Mark Hayes

A pre-warning, this is not really a post about cats, it does feature a cat, and some cat related jeopardy, so to put your mind at ease, Tommy the cat, who is the cat in question, is fine now. You don’t need to go worrying about the cat. Okay, moving on.

On Friday in the wee hours of the morning I got a text about my sons cat Tommy. Tommy was ill, and my son was in a bit of a panic. Mid morning on Friday I got a phone call from my son saying eh had taken Tommy to the vets first thing and things were not looking good. The early prognosis was that Tommy’s kidneys were shutting down due to infection and he was likely to need an operation. My son was justifiably worried about this. There was every chance the cat would not survive with the operation and a near certainly he would not survive without it.

My son loves his cat. As many people love their cats. In much the same way that some people love their dogs… But my son is a barman, going through a messy break up, who has no money. Vets are not free. there is no such thing as a NHS for pets. And while he had pet insurance he wasn’t sure how it worked and if it was going to be covered.

Luckily, he also has a dad who just got paid to write a book on H.P. Lovecraft*. For all of old tentacle huggers many flaws did love cats, and even without the Lovecraft book money I am lucky enough to have the resources to cover the vets bills so it was not the issue it could have been. I told my son not to worry about money I could cover the bills, and he could worry about the insurance afterwards

*I will talk of this in another blog at some point i am sure…

So I drove down to Leeds and did what any vaguely adequate parent would do in the circumstances and was there for my son, and only made the obvious joke about how much cheaper it would be to just get a new cat once. Friday was a long day, a day that left my wallet a couple of grand lighter. Because vets are not cheap, and stays in pet hospitals comes at a premium.

Luckily as I said my son has pet insurance, the costs should be reclaimable, though nothing is guaranteed, insurance companies are buggers for finding loopholes… But my son been reunited with his now healthy cat (all be it requiring a special diet from now on) is worth more to me than money ever is. As was the below Instagram post from my son earlier today…

So all’s well that ends well…

There are certain right wing politicians in this country, politicians who have well documented connections to private medical companies, who express the opinion that the National Health Service should go down the route of funding via medical insurance. Basically, changing to the American model.

Now, I am aware that this blog has a fair number of American readers, and I am aware some Americans are adamant that a free at the point of use, state funded, universal health care system is a symptom of a socialist hell scape. I have long suspected this is because American politicians have gone on record saying this is the case for decades, while pocketing the campaign contributions form insurance companies. Stating the American system has produced the best hospitals and standards of care in the world… This is not entirely incorrect either. But only if you can afford the medical bills…

Yes, you may say, but Americans have the choice to buy medical insurance, while we have to contribute through taxation whether we use the medical facilities or not… Which is true… But I will take the latter rather than the former any day of the week. I would also point out that on average what a tax payer in the UK pays towards the NHS is significantly less than the average Americans medical insurance, for those who can afford it.. But back to cats…

All cat owners love their cats. My son, a cat owner, has just enough money and just enough sense to have pet insurance. Not all pet owners do however, usually because it is an expense they can not afford on the off chance they need it. What happens then if a cat owner with no insurance goes to the vet because their cat is ill.

Well, they could just pay out what they need to pay, but if they could not afford/justify the cost of, insurance then it is doubtful they can cover the bill out right. Most vets will offer easy term repayments, or ‘pet loans’ to cover the cost, but again if you could not afford the insurance, then can you afford the pet loan? Some might say if you could not afford the insurance you should not have had the pet, but people love their pets… For some a pet might be all they have at times.

How is this circle to be squared, well there are other options, take the pet home and do what you can to stop them dying in pain alone. Or ask the vet to do what I imagine is the worst part of a vets job, while knowing an animal could be saved, but that the owner can not afford to save them…

That their is feline economics. The cat lives if you can afford the cost of keeping it alive, otherwise, good night fluffy, and this nice woman in the lab coat is going to help you go to sleep.

Humans are more expensive to keep alive than cats. Medical insurance isn’t cheap, and the older you are the more it costs , because the older you are the more likely you are to need it… In America right now the Trump administration is in the process of removing Medicaid from up to 15 million of its citizens in order to give the richest 1% more tax cuts. Average medical insurance premiums are likely to double. More people will be unable to afford medical insurance and will roll the dice on staying healthy. From beyond the shores of America this seems insane. Here, in the rest of the civilized world where we have universal health care and no one going into bankruptcy due to medical debt the whole American health care system has always seemed insane, but this is new levels of madness.

The American system, it seems to me, is the same system we use for cats. With the same kind of feline economics…

Meanwhile at this side of the pond, the NHS has many flaws, and yes there are waiting lists , and doctors appointments are not always easy to get. But it is free at the point of use and no one has ever had to decide if they can afford the bill. I would suggest people keep that in mind when next this visit the ballot box when snake oil salesmen are trying to suggest you would be better off without it…

Anyway that enough politics, normal service will resume shortly with some Poe stuff , a book review or two and the usual withering on.

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3 Turns Widdleshin’s: For she is Devine

Posted on October 9, 2025 by Mark Hayes

There is a forth verse, I shall not repeat it here… To do so would seem unwise…

‘For She is Devine’ is the last story in the new Harvey Duckman Urban/Dark Fantasy Anthology. You do not need to read the other seventeen stories by seventeen other writers before you read that one, but you should. Its the only way to be sure…

Whom ‘She’ is, is a matter for your conjecture. She could be ‘The Sibel’ of ancient Rome. She could just be a woman who claims that is the case to add mystic to her illegal den of vice and corrupted youth. A dark forbidding goth club named for an ancient standing stone.

This is in no way draw from the authors experiences and he has shed no blood on these pages…

No more than usual anyway

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Dear Edgar 43 ~ Diddling

Posted on October 3, 2025 by Mark Hayes

“Man was made to mourn,” says the poet. But not so:—he was made to diddle. This is his aim—his object—his end. And for this reason when a man’s diddled we say he’s “done.”

‘Diddling’, or to give it it’s original title ‘Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences’ is by way of a humorous essay pretending to be an academic work, rather than a story. It is certainly a fun little read, as long as one accepts this central conceit.

The text exhorts the virtues of the diddler, by going through a series of short cons, or diddles. These are all the kinds of cons you see in movies and TV shows when they are introducing a likable rogue or conman. You know the kind of thing, a man pretending to be a store keeper, to pocket your deposit on goods that aren’t his to sell. Another selling a fake ring to a credulous pair.

When I was a child, in the early 80’s the A Team would come on, and everyone love BA Baracus, played by the indomitable Mr T , but I preferred ‘Face’ the quick witted conman of the team. One of my favorite movies growing up was ‘The Sting’, fast talking con artists are fun folk heroes as long as they are stealing from the credulous greedy folk who are as bent as the conmen involved.

That is always the line by which we are sold a story about conmen, the victims of the con have to be greedy criminal types themselves. In the sting its a mob boss they are trying to con, in the A-Team it was always the ‘bad guy’ or those who worked for them. Grifters grift those who deserve to be grifted…

Of course in reality the people who get conned are the weakest and most venerable and conmen are not people to be put on pedestals, but criminals making off with pensioners life savings…

Poe’s essay on the art of the diddle is a fun read, but little more than that. It also make no effort to make the victims deserve to be conned. Its clever, quick and moves form one short con to another in rapid first succession but its not a story and if anyone but Poe had written it it would be a long forgotten piece in the Philadelphia Saturday Courier that filled half a page with nonsense for a quick pay day for the writer…

You could almost say it was a con… and the editor got diddled…

TWO RAVENS, ONE HOLDING YOUR ATTENTION WHILE THE OTHER PICKS YOUR POCKET…

Should you read it: I had to, you can chose to pass

Bluffers fact: Lord Gorden Gorden, who had nothing to do with Poe, and was really active 20 years after Poe wrote this story, was a diddler of the old school. He claimed to be descended from the ancient kings of the Scottish highlands. His real name was John Crowningsfield the bastard son of a Lancashire clergyman and not even Scottish.

He was a conman who was so successful when he finally fled America with ill-gotten gains form swindling a railroad tycoon it almost lead to a war as thousands of Minnesotans volunteered for military service to invade Canada after three future members of congress were arrested in Canada when they tried to abduct him.

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Monsters in the to-read pile

Posted on October 2, 2025 by Mark Hayes

The to-read pile on my bedside table is out of hand, it has taken on a life of its own, it sneers at me in the night and bides its time. I fear it has achieved sentience, or been processed by some forgotten old gods spirit* and one night soon it will take its moment and collapse upon me. Braining me with a copy of the complete works of Poe, two dozen paperbacks I have promised myself I will get read, several more hardbacks including one about pre-teen cannibalism, a history of dragon infestations in the modern era, and at least one book I had forgotten I even owed involving sheep.

*the to-read piles has over the years held many a volume on myths, paganism, and Lovecraftian horrors… it was bound to happen

I have little doubt one day the police will break in my house after i have been ‘missing’ for several weeks to discover my body, under this pile of books. There are worse ways to go.

Among the Lovecraftian horror of the to-read pile are a couple of books by friends and fellow Harvey authors Kate Baucherel and Ben Sawyer. Books I have been planning to read for well over a year, books in a series that both authors have new books coming out for this month.

Yes, they have managed to write entirely novels while their previous ones sat on my to-read pile, gathering sentience and planning my demise…

Yes I feel guilty about this…

Monster at the Gate, A Holly Trinity novel by Ben Sawyer.

I read my first Holly Trinity story in a early Harvey Duckman anthology (the original series), which I believe was the Christmas edition. It was one of the stories that really stood out. Ben had submitted it to Harvey after he met Gillie and the crew at Scarborough SciFi earlier that year. I was delighted when Ben followed the short story up with the novel he had been working on about his supernatural protector of York.

The pages of Harvey have been filled with many a Holly short story since (as well as other stories by Ben who is an annoying good writer) I read and reviewed the first Holly book, Holly Trinity and the Ghost of York, way back in 2021 and said at the time I was looking forward to the sequel. I see Ben at events and occasionally share a table with him, and say how much I am looking forward to reading the sequel, and it has sat in my to-read pile for over two years staring at me….

So anyway, with his next book due out this month, and in order to placate the forgotten old god of the to-read pile, I made myself pick up Monsters at the Gate, and of course when I started to read it, this turned out to be no chore at all. It was instead a joy…

With the ever present back drop of ancient haunted city of York, which is a character in its own right, its sleeping protector is awake once more, and her past is coming back to haunt her… I know, irony…

Holly Trinity is awake, the arch-bishop has turned to the strong stuff, because she fears what it might mean, the Gjallarhorn has sounded, via text alert, the horned man is running amok in the city streets. Luckily Holy has a new umbrella, with a zip line and The Hounds of Love on mp3 on her phone.

Mira has her own problems. Which is to say she has to keep lying to Sam about what she gets up to on her galivants with Holly. However exactly do you tell your significant other you off saving the world from monsters with the King under the mountain, when you are supposed to be working in a bookshop… And what is he doing with that Delia girl from the archeological dig?

Then there is Treasury House, the most haunted house in York , which is like saying the most chocolatey chocolate in a Rowntree’s chocolate box… Bad thing happened there in the eighties, and for Holly the memories are fresh…

Someone wants to bring about the Ragnarök, They have been planning for this a long time. Luckily while Holly doesn’t have a plan, no one has realized she is making it up as she geos along, she hopes…

Monsters at the Gate is a wonderful ride through the streets and history of York. there is Mystery, horror, and humour, which is a tricky mix, Ben pulls off perfectly. As before I can not wait for the next one… So it will probably end up on my to read pile and become and old god before consuming me in a deadly book-slide, which is like a landslide with books… Or I may just read it straight away, which seems wiser.

Bens new book The Masque of the Mummers a Holly Trinity Novel , is out later this month but not yet available on pre-order so I can not link it here, I have not even see the full cover yet as Ben seems to want to keep that to himself, Though this is some of the art work… And isn’t that a thing….

Monster at the gate and the original Holly Trinity novel are well worth a read while you wait.

Now I am off to lite some incense and offer blood sacrifices to the forgotten old god in the to-read pile. Hopefully that will placate it a while longer…

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Dear Edgar 42 ~ The Black Cat

Posted on October 1, 2025 by Mark Hayes

The glee at my heart was too strong to be restrained. I burned to say if but one word, by way of triumph, and to render doubly sure their assurance of my guiltlessness.

If, as I posited, The Tell-tale Heart is much beloved of English Lit teachers the world over for its use of a corrupt narrator, this tale is its companion piece. Buoyed by the critical success of ‘The Tell-tale Heart’ which had been published in January 1843, in the spring of that year he put pen to paper on a second such tale and wrote ‘The Black Cat’. The similarities between the two stories are easily drawn*…

*hence its popularity with English teachers who like a lesson plan that writes itself…

Both stories have narrators that make claims as to their sanity, and in both cases that sanity is clearly questionable. The central theme in both cases is guilt, and in both their increasingly irrational behavior leads to murder, and there eventual arrest as the guilt drives them over the edge. They are in effect quintessential phycological thrillers, a genre that owes much to these stories.

There are however a few issues with The Black cat when you compare it to Tell-tale heart, one of which is the very nature of a story written to a formular. The success of the first story influenced the structure and telling of the second which leaves it reading a little forced in places. It does not quite have the flow of tell-tale. There is also an added element in which Poe preaches from the pulpit of abstinence. The narrators deteriorating mental state is attributed to his alcoholism.

Edgar’s brother Henry had died some twelve years earlier from complications brought on by alcoholism. Poe had witnessed this decline and had his own problems with the demon drink, he had lost jobs because of it and was at periods in his life a drunk, then tee total, then fell off the wagon. the Black Cat was written due in a period of sobriety and written with all the virtue of an ex-smoker coughing loudly as he passes the smoking shelter. This is to say he was a reborn abstainer and evangelical in his condemnation of those who drink…*

*Till the wagon hit a bump and he bounced off again…

In any regard, The Black Cat is a story told to us by a condemned man awaiting the noose. A man who first makes claim of his sanity before professing a loves of animals. All animals. A man never happier than in the company of a faithful dog, or cuddling a rabbit. A man who marries young to a woman of similar disposition. All is joy in the house hold of many pets, sand would have continued so had not the man found another love, that of the bottle. In his cups he has a temper, in his cups he might kick out at a hound or throw something at a rabbit. The animal come to fear him in his drunken states, as does his wife who he admits to rising a hand to when he is worse for drink.

All this is very candidly told, as is his treatment of the couples large black cat, Pluto. Pluto who unlike the other animals has not becomes afraid of him , but one drunken night, when the cat scratches him, he takes out his pocket knife and blinds his pet cat in one eye. He then becomes oddly resentful that the cat then becomes scared of him. Imagine… developing a fear of the thing that took one of your eyes…

As an aside, as a former cat owner before Boomer died a couple of years back, anyone who has ever owned a cat will tell you getting scratched is something that happens with even the most even tempered of cats. Play with a cat and eventually it will claw you in its own playful way. Gauging out their eyes for doing so is something of an over reaction one feels … But back to the story.

Resentment builds and the narrator end sup hanging Pluto from a tree in another drunken rage. I must admit sympathy for what happens to the cat murdering drunk after this is somewhat lacking in myself and I expect in the average reader… Also, no one seems to spare a thought for the poor tree in all this though. Did the tree ask to have a feline nailed to it? You just know all the other trees are going to mock her now and call her ‘cat-tree’.

“Oh look at her, acorns are good enough, oh no, she was poor defenseless animals hanging form her boughs.”

The woods can be very catty at times…

Having killed one cat, and given a poor oak tree a complex, the narrator comes to won a new cat. One which looks almost exactly like the other cat. He could have bought a ginger tom, or a nice little tabby, but no he obtains another black one, a black cat entirely like the Pluto, even to the extent of only having one eye, except for a white patch on its belly, a white patch that comes to resemble a gallows.

Drunk once more and incensed by that patch of white fur that seems to taught him with his cat murdering crimes he tries to kill the new cat with a hatchet. And when his wife tries to stop him, he kills her instead, and without a great deal of remorse he walls up her body…

The feline has the last laugh though, as when the police come they discover the body because the cat has been walled up with it and is still very much alive, and its howls cause the police to discover the wife’s body. Hence the narrator is now a condemned man

There is a lot going on it this story, and sympathy for the drunkard is minimal all considered. The tale grows ever wilder, and aspects of the supernatural are ascribed to the black cat who the narrator almost in passing remarks are known in folklore to be witches in disguise. The supernatural nature of the second cat is heavily hinted at and guilt plays a part, as does the occult reputation of Black cats.

Where the story falls down however is it is trying to be The Tell-tale Heart, but the narrator is not as obviously insane. A drunk is not as interesting as a mad-man, and though the narrators actions are horrifying, he knows this in his sober state, and does not try to justify them. It is all a little too twee, and a little too preachy. But the biggest problem is perhaps that I was reading The Tell-tale Heart only a couple of blogs ago, had there been more stories between them the unfavorable comparison would be less presented I suspect.

English Literature teachers should take note of this…

FOUR RAVENS, NONE OF HUME ARE HAPPY ABOUT BEEN AROUND A CAT…

Should you read it: Well yes, but perhaps not too soon after The Tell-=Tale Heart

Should you avoid it: Trigger warning abound, domestic violence, animal cruelty etc…

Bluffers fact: Pluto the cat was not named for Pluto the planet. Pluto the planet was not discovered until 1930 (though one suspects it was always there…) which was almost ninety years after this story was written. Instead he was mostly named for the Roman god of the underworld… Pluto was also the Latin root verb for wealthy, hence a plutocracy is governance of a society by the wealthy… As if there has ever been any other form of government.

Unrelated, but worth a mention, I have a story in the Harvey Duckman Anthology, Justice for Pluto. A book which does not take its name from the cat in this Poe story

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Eventing

Posted on October 1, 2025 by Mark Hayes

It is eventing season…

No not prancing about on horses, which I do not do having no wish to inflict a poor horse with my riding skills, the other kind of eventing season… This October I will be at out there meeting reader and trying to seem like a rational normal human. While talking to a man in a Deadpool costume, a girl carrying a large foam sword and arguing with a dalek..

So you can find me, in the company of a couple of other writers , kite Baucheral and C.G Hatton at a number of events in the North.

I will be the one in the bowler hat, kilt and Newrocks….

If you are near any of these, pop along we would love to see you. I’ll be happy to talk nonsense about books, the blog, Lovecraft, Poe, and anything else…

(there are also other things happening at each of them clearly)

there is another event in November as well but i am buggered if I can put my fingers on the details right now

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