A terrible book
and other stupid facts now that it's December
We bought a house.
It’s taken a long time1, but we have purchased a property in Melbourne. A 1930s Art Deco unit with high ceilings, a wine cellar, five bedrooms, two glorious bathrooms and a hedge maze2. Turns out, houses here are expensive. The median house price in Melbourne is, oh I don’t know (I’m certainly not going to tab out to find out), at least ten million dollars. I suspect it’s only going to get worse, so we had to strike while the iron was luke warm. (Note: it’ll probably get better now that we’ve purchased. Prices will plummet, a crash will come, buyers will rejoice, we’ll have made an awful decision, we should have waited, yada yada. Welcome to my brain.)
Anyway. we bought a house. And I read a book. Many books, I should add. OK not that many, but enough that I can look back at my Goodreads list for the year and feel some satisfaction that I’ve spent some of my free time doing something useful, reading some damn fine books (Bolaño, I love you; you’ll never read this because you’re dead, but I love you) and that my arbitrary and short reading target has been met.
There’s been some good books in there, some excellent books, but not the last book I read. That was Joe Hill’s King Sorrow. More like King, Sorry, because perhaps that’s what Joe is saying to his father.
Ouch. That’s harsh. Sorry, Joe. I just … it’s just I wanted this to be your IT, you know? The description made it seem like it was going to be your IT, that strange and epic piece of horror and adolescence, the 1000-pager that left such an impression on me that sometimes when the weather is bad I go stand in the pouring rain and make paper boats that float toward drains. I thought this was going to be your IT and that’s my mistake, and really it’s fine that it isn’t IT, but it’s just not good. It’s not good at all. What I’m trying to say is that King Sorrow is not a good book. It’s a rambling, 900-page hot mess of contrived ideas and with characters so thin that Georgie could have folded them into boats to float toward drains.
[I started this post a few weeks ago, days after closing out the final page of Joe’s quote-unquote masterpiece, but we’ve moved house since then and right now I couldn’t tell you a single thing about King Sorrow other than it has a dragon and metaphors and something something secret government trash. Yeah. I can’t remember anything about it. Take of that what you want.]
I’ve been listening to podcasts about The Book of the New Sun again. I can’t escape the influence of Wolfe’s writing and all it makes me want to do is to return to the books for another read, to reabsorb Severian’s tale. Obviously that’s not possible, because how then would I be making a dent in the functionally infinite number of other books there are still to read?
I’m going to get a tattoo.
This hasn’t happened yet, but I’m going to get a tattoo of a solenoid. I’ll engrave the solenoid into my skin, perhaps on my forearm, and at night whilst I’m asleep a current will flow through the length of my arm, something electrical or magnetic or that defies the known physical laws, a slight hum emanating from my skin and audible only to our cat who’ll come padding into the room and sit in the corner watching as my arm floats and eventually descends. And then I’ll wake up, never having known that my arm had been suspended, feeling only a slight tingle that will persist until midday.
I want to return here.
I want to return here and just not care about what I’m writing. I don’t mean not care, as in to pen careless things, but to simply not care about whether I’m trying to write for a reason or an audience, or to second guess myself. I just want to experience the freedom and joy that was how this all started. To nurture the creativity. To actually get to read posts from the wonderful others who are such wonderful writers.
In many ways, it’s been a pretty shitty year. A lot has happened. A lot hasn’t happened, but in the end I’m taking solace and excitement in this new chapter we’ve started in our new home, the break from work that is about to commence, and what 2026 will bring.
If you’re still with me, if you still receive these posts and open them and read, then thank you. You’re awesome. Let 2026 mark the return of regu-slake-arity.
Seasons greetings, and all that.
It’s why I’ve been absent. *Laughs*
Only some of these facts are true.
I don’t know, even when Slake didn’t appear in my inbox weekly, it never felt like you were absent. In the same way a seed buried under earth isn’t absent, only invisible potential—the potency from seasons past no doubt is carried forward. Weird, but true. You’ve made a lasting impression here so sorry, you simply can’t go missing!
I was picturing you and Jo playing hide and seek in the hedge maze. And I was so happy to think that, at least in Melbourne, some homes still have actual hedges-turned-mazes. And that you and Jo had managed to score one, which did not surprise me at all because if anyone would be clever enough to wait and find one, it would be Josephine! And then I read your footnote and thought: Well dang it all! He's done it again. There never was a hedge maze. Now, how do you always know The One Thing your reader desperately wishes were true??
This is your Secret Sauce.
Please come back and cook up some more for your most gullible reader! :-)