The Maracot Deep, by Arthur Conan Doyle

Arthur Conan Doyle is best remembered for his Sherlock Holmes stories, but he wrote many other types of books. The Maracot Deep is a very late work. Most of it appeared in The Strand Magazine from October 1927 through February 1928, but it was followed by a chapter sized sequel in The Strand in April. These installment were collected, with other works, in The Maracot Deep and Other Stories in 1929, the year before Doyle’s death. Later editions, like the one I read, contain only the single work. And it is an odd one. Professor Maracot and two companions descend into the ocean and discover survivors from the destruction of Atlantis many thousands of years earlier. Mostly, the story is underdeveloped, and often it is even silly. The science of the deep ocean is laughable now, and must have seemed ridiculous nearly a century ago when the story was first published. In the final sequel chapter Doyle adds an encounter (conveniently left out of the earlier recounting) with a very long-lived demon, which causes the materialist Maracot to succumb to spiritualism. The result is a strange hodge-podge of a book, not particularly worthwhile for reading.

The Book of Ballads and Sagas, by Charles Vess et al

This is an odd collection of more than a dozen old folk ballads, retold by authors such as Neil Gaiman, Charles de Lint, Delia Sherman, Emma Bull, Midori Snyder, Jane Yolen and others, each illustrated by Charles Vess (entirely in black and white) as a short graphic novel, collected together as The Book of Ballads in 2004, and slightly expanded as The Book of Ballads and Sagas in 2018. (The new, unfinished saga item is based on Old Norse legends.) The whole product is reminiscent of the various fairy tale retellings edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling (the latter provides an introduction to this volume) in the 1990s and 2000s. One tires rather easily of such retellings, even when some new ingredient is added. But how many versions can one stand of Tam Lin, Thomas the Rhymer and other ballads--things that were pretty ephemeral and unengaging in their original forms. Vess's illustrations don't really help, and I'm afraid I found the whole collection tired. Others may feel differently, of course, but there was nothing in here that even mildly piqued my interest.