The primary interest of this book, for me, was the unproduced screenplay of Nostromo, which was to have been directed by David Lean, who died before any filming started. That it contains another screenplay which was actually filmed, wasn't much of an attraction. So here are two screenplays by Christopher Hampton, based on two novels by Joseph Conrad. I watched the film of The Secret Agent, which as a film, when you don't know the original novel, is fairly good. With Nostromo, you don't have the visuals, just the words on a page, and it's very disappointing. Read the novel instead. What the magic of David Lean as cinematographer might have done with Nostromo is left to the imagination. And I'm not saying that anything is really wrong with Hampton's screenplay. I've just found, time after time, that the process of adaptation ruins the key factors in a book that make it exceptional. Perhaps it's best to avoid seeing adaptations of books one has read and admired. Original films, designed and written for the screen, are another thing entirely. Adaptations, by their very nature, are diminutions from the original work of literary art.
I saw Joe Jackson and his band perform twice, the first in 1979 in a huge concert when his popularity was in rapid ascent, the second in a small venue some years later when it had precipitously declined. I've admired his music for years, though I haven't kept up with his recent work of the past few decades. A Cure for Gravity, published in 1999, is a kind of musical coming of age story. It's well written, and engaging, but it basically only covers Jackson's musical life until he was 25 and had just issued Look Sharp in 1979. I really wish it would have continued at least through his albums of the 1980s. As it stands, one gets a rather selective view of his life. He writes a bit about his ambiguous sexuality, but only tells of his girlfriends and wife. No hint of his coming out via the double album Night and Day, and how his sexuality (and other aspects of his life) affected his music. I'm glad to have read it, especially for Jackson's views on the early London punk scene and his considered reflections on finding his own place as an artist and musician. 
The volume for 1998 has six stories by men writers, plus Adrian's informed introduction and notes. All of the men writers made their names in writing fields other than the supernatural. The stories by W. Somerset Maugham ("Told in the Inn at Algeciras") and Hilaire Belloc ("The Unpleasant Room") are the most commonplace. Belloc's story is a time-slip one, telling of a nights pent in an old residence that rotted decades previously. E.C. Bentley's story ("Exactly As It Happened") tells of a man staying a night in a haunted house. John Buchan's "Ho! The Merry Masons" tells of a curiously haunted room, in whose bed sleepers die of suffocation; it is a kind of follow-up to Buchan's Runagates Club stories. The best stories in this volume are those by Ford Madox Ford ("The Medium's End"), in which a fraudulent medium actually manifests the six-fingered hand of Anne Boleyn; and by Arthur Ransome ("Post-Mortem"), in which two men attend a seance and find that the voluminous spirit-writing relates to an autopsy that one of the men had performed years before, from the victim's point of view.
I can't recall how long ago it was when I first heard Peter S. Beagle had a new novel entitled Summerlong coming out. It was certainly before 2005, and probably around 2003. Already scammed once by the crook Connor Cochran (for lots of details, see: http://fansagainstfraud.com/ ), I certainly did not order it whenever Conlan Press announced it (and never published it). So now it's finally coming out in September from Tachyon Press as a trade paperback original. I got an advance reader copy. 
Somehow or other, I missed reading John Christopher's Tripods series when I was younger. There are four volumes, the initial trilogy, The White Mountains (1967), The City of Gold and Lead (1968) and The Pool of Fire (1969), followed a decade later by a prequel, When the Tripods Came (1988). I've now read only the first book, The White Mountains, and though I enjoyed it, I'm not inclined to read any more. Basically, it's a tale of the post-apocalypse, where aliens have taken over and rule the populace by "capping" them as the children reach puberty---literally by placing metal caps on their heads, which diminish the curiosity of the person capped. The White Mountains is a tale of some boys who rebel, and run away to escape being capped. The scope is rather narrow, and the ending is abrupt and not very satisfying, clearly setting the reader up for the inevitable sequel. My problem with the book is that the whole post-apocalypse scene has been done so many times already, and done better, since this book came out in 1967. Perhaps back then it felt fresh and new, but from fifty years later it seems simplistic and contrived. 
A few years after the death of C.S.Lewis, Owen Barfield, one of Lewis's long-time and closest friends, tried to describe the change that went over his friend in the 1930s. Barfield noted that Lewis had adopted some kind of posture, that Lewis had ceased to write in the mode of "I say this" but rather in the mode of "This is the sort of thing a man might say." This observation has long perplexed me, as in my reading Lewis (predominately his fiction and literary essays, not the apologetics) I've never really noticed this before. But I have now, in the reading of A Grief Observed, which (supposedly) contains the notes from four of C.S. Lewis's notebooks written right after the death of his wife in 1960. (The book was published under a pseudonym in 1961.) Though there are passages of apparent actual grief in this book, there are also a lot of passages that feel like Lewis is posturing, that the exercise basically is Lewis setting up straw men arguments about the absences or cruelty of God in order to wriggle around them later. This makes the whole book (which fortunately is short) an essay in what Lewis calls "rhetorical chicanery." I cannot imagine anyone finding anything of worth in these rantings unless one comes to them already as a Christian seeking confirmation of one's pre-existing superstitions. This edition has an additional essay on Lewis by Chad Walsh, which is far superior (but with occasional lapses) to Lewis's own writing in this slim book. 
Publishers are idiots. In the blurb on the back cover of this book, The Wolf in the Attic (2016) by Paul Kearney, the prospective reader is told upfront a plot-point that doesn't happen until half-way through the book. And indeed, the book starts out so slowly that the reader is itching to get to that plot-point to see if it will go anywhere. It does, but in the end it isn't very rewarding. Basically this is the story of a young Greek girl, Anna, who came to Oxford, England, with her father in the mid-1920s escaping the wars in Greece. It is now five or so years afterwards, late in 1929, and soon in the new year Anna will turn twelve. For the first half of the book, Anna tries to find a place as an English girl. It is very boring. For the second half of the book, she becomes involved with some gypsies who represent one side of an ancient quarrel. The Roadmen, chasing the gypsies, represent the other. Anna now finds herself set-up to take sides in the old quarrel. This, too, is not very interesting. C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien make cliched cameos in Anna's story, and the cynic in me would suggest that the only reason for their appearance in this book is to get blurb-makers to make comparisons between this novel and the two classic (and bestselling) fantasists. Otherwise they serve no purpose. Yet this isn't entirely a bad book. The set-up takes way too long, and the whole backstory is rather muddled. But basically, this is a young-adult novel, the first-person narrative of a twelve year old girl, masquerading (presumably another decision made by the idiot publisher) as an adult fantasy novel. Thus misrepresented the reader expects something much different from what this book actually delivers. I will certainly have second thoughts before buying another book published by Solaris, for obvious reasons, and I won't be actively looking for further books written by Paul Kearney, for other reasons.
At least I knew going into the reading of C.S. Lewis's Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (1956) that the earlier part of the book was going to be a lot more interesting than the later part. Even the blurb on the cover gives away the fact that the book tells of Lewis's "spiritual journey that led him from the Christianity of his early youth into atheism and then back to Christianity." One wonders why a smart lad who had progressed to the putting away of childish things like religion, should revert back to the superstitions of his early youth. It turns out the reasons are mostly all psychological Lewis's mother had died when he was nine. And after studying at Oxford, he took a tutorial post and was then elected a fellow in 1925. He found that his friends were turning into Christians (of various sorts) and all his fellow dons were Christian, and obviously a lot of the medieval materials he studied related to Christianity. So after his father died in 1929, both Lewis and his only sibling, a brother, gravitated pretty quickly back towards Christianity. Lewis seems also to have been affected by the curious affair the had carried out with a married woman twenty-five years his senior, since around 1919, which he had tried to keep secret from his father, and which Lewis only hints at in his memoir ("I must warn the reader that one huge and complex episode will be omitted"). Lewis would never talk about this to any of his bewildered friends, or even explain it to his brother. So when Lewis describes himself at the time of his conversion as "the most dejected and reluctant of all converts in England" one simply can't believe it. Lewis rushed back to his youthful suckling on the teat of Christ to restore an old order to his life. This leaves a sense of tragedy. Just think of what Lewis might have written if he stayed the course with his logical rejection of theism in all its aspects. Instead of brilliant work we got stuck with loads of proselytizing crap.
I've rarely ever felt the urge to burn a book, but this one, Lovecraft (2003), makes me feel like burning it. Ostensibly it is a comic book-styled biography of H.P. Lovecraft--a fictionalized one. That doesn't bother me. It treats Lovecraft's stories as real aspects of his life (i.e., young Lovecraft finds his mad father's copy of The Necronomicon). That doesn't bother me. It trivializes real issues of Lovecraft's life and makes them into one-dimensional cliches (prissy young Howard is queer-bashed by other children; insensitive mother tells Howard to stop talking nonsense when she's aware of the reality of his nightmares; and that's just for starters). This bothers me. The writers of this crap should be embarrassed. The illustrations aren't much better. What a botched and mistaken enterprise.
I read the novella Wakulla Springs by Andy Duncan and Ellen Klages because I have enjoyed the work of Andy Duncan in the past. And this is a good story too, well-written, covering four generations of an African-American family and their ties to the Wakulla Springs jungle in northern Florida, where some films were made like Creature from the Black Lagoon, and some of the Johnny Wiessmueller Tarzan films. This novella was nominated for a Nebula Award, and a Hugo Award, and won a World Fantasy Award. The question is not whether this story is award-worthy, but why was it deemed eligible for such awards when there is no fantasy elements at all in the story? Probably the answer is that the authors are known for fantasy and science fiction, and the making of a fantasy/science fiction film (Creature from the Black Lagoon) is at the heart of the story. Still, that shouldn't be enough for eligibility even given the fact that mainstream award-givers would pay no attention to it. A good story, but a frustrating scenario surrounding it. 
I’ve intended to read something by Robert Charles Wilson for
a long time. For no particular reason I selected
Mysterium (1994), his seventh novel,
which won the Philip K. Dick Award for Best Novel, 1994. A blurb on the back for Wilson’s previous book notes that it “reads
like a combination of Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen King.” This also applies to Mysterium, though I’d say this book
reflects Stephen King more than Arthur C. Clarke. 
Patricia A. McKillip wrote some of the best
fantasy novels of the 1970s, including The
Forgotten Beast of Eld (1974), and the three volumes of the Riddle-Master
trilogy, The Riddle-Master of Hed
(1976), Heir of Sea and Fire (1977),
and Harpist in the Wind (1979). Beginning
in the 1980s, she began writing novels with smaller scopes and smaller
plots. They are well-written, and they
hold a reader’s interest and attention, but something is missing. The books are
so gossamer-like and ephemeral that a day or so after reading one the memory
holds very little of what it was about. There remains only a half-lingering aura
of modest enjoyment. I haven’t read all of McKillip’s novels, but this is true
for most of the post-1980 ones I’ve read.
Solstice Wood (2006) is one of
these, telling of a small town in upstate New York where some families protect their locale
from incursions from the fairy world. Or so they believe. Long-standing beliefs
are challenged after the death of one of the elders brings back to the town a
woman who had fled years ago, fearing the secrets that are now all unraveling.
Again, it’s an enjoyable read, but one really hopes for something more from a
book like this.
Dahlov Ipcar (b. 1917) is perhaps best-known as an artist, and secondarily as a writer and illustrator of children's books. A fine retrospective is The Art of Dahlov Ipcar (2010) by Carl Little. Though she published some thirty books for children, and three young adult novels, she wrote only two books for adults, the novel A Dark Horn Blowing (1978) and a collection The Nightmare and Her Foal and Other Stories (1990), the latter including sixteen stories dating from 1958 through 1988. 
