The Woman Who Fell to Earth, by R.B. Russell

The ingredients used to make this novel promise something delectable. There is a deceased and disreputable writer,  Cyril Heldman, who wrote weird and occultish tales and who died under very strange circumstances. His literary executor, Catherine Richards, whose house is crammed full of books, papers, newspapers, herself dies bizarrely in the first chapter: by falling from the sky onto the nearby roof of her longtime friend Tanya Sewell, who is also Catherine's niece, after meeting and marrying Tanya's widowed uncle years earlier. Tanya inherits Catherine's house, which she had known in childhood, and becomes involved in several mysteries, particularly to do with an online forum devoted to Heldman that has its usual share of cranks and trolls. Add to this an unscrupulous book dealer and a collector of occult artifacts, bent on finding Heldman's relic called the Sixtystone (lifted from one of Arthur Machen's tales), which was the subject of one of Heldman's novels, and you have the basics of an intriguing literary weird tale. The writing, too, is fine, but somewhere along the line, the characters begin to act in ways that don't fit with how they were established, and they make decisions that move the plot forward at the expense of literary belief; and the workings of the Sixtystone, never really set forth, are variable enough to belie concrete aspects of the plot and leave important points (like the methodology of strange deaths) without any context. The result is somewhat unsatisfying, but it is a mostly pleasant read to reach the end of the novel. 

Fifty Forgotten Books, by R.B. Russell

I like books on books, and I'm a sucker for books highlighting forgotten books, or books that never have received their due attention. In his "Introduction" Russell warns that the word "forgotten" is a slippery word, and that in recent years some of the books in his list have been revived, some by Tartarus Press, run by Russell and his wife Rosalie Parker. In fact, what Fifty Forgotten Books really is, as a book, is a shadow history of Tartarus Press and other books that have led Russell in that direction as a reader and publisher. The result is a pleasant, light-reading traipse around Russell's book collection, including memories of shops where he bought various books, and of the friendships he made because of them. Oddly, this small paperback has an attractive cover which is hidden by a more plain dust-wrapper.