Dominic

A liminal, hallucinatory, dreamlike story that borders on death/life and other/self. Darker than “The Dreams in the Witch House” and more poetic than “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The Blind Owl” is rumored to lead its readers to madness or suicide (I thankfully succumbed to neither). It is a book fueled by opium and wine... melancholy and shame, with a narrator occupied by a sexual stupor concocted from memory and imagination set across a bleak Iranian backdrop.

The prose is gorgeous and evocative of imminent insanity, but is also remarkably comprehensible and clear. Hedayat (and translator Costello) slips through the narrator's perceptions effortlessly, managing to avoid the opaqueness of Surrealism. The narrator seems mostly unsure of who he is, where he is, or when it is, but as a reader I wasn't confused by random, out-of-place imagery. At the end of the book it all made sense, but I wanted to read it again to peel back another layer of reality.

“The Blind Owl” is beautiful horror full of delirium and despair in a shadowland of morbid lust. I won't spoil it by reviewing the symbolism, plot, or any interpretation. The reading of this story is its own experience – out-of-time yet hauntingly present.

I missed this book of BASIC games in 1984 but I guarantee I would have been way into it. As the title says, it's a collection of weird computer games with names like Tower of Terror, Monster Wresting, Flying Witches, and more. Here you go, I took the liberty of typing in Tower of Terror for you and saving as a .cas file for your favorite TRS-80 emulator. I used JS Mocha since it runs in a browser. In Tower of Terror, you race up a tower avoiding ghosts, skeletons, trap doors, and headless axemen. You must keep your heart rate under 150 bpm before you make it to the top.

terror.cas

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0By2PNqVBxbgQR005aUJsdnVzOEk/view?usp=sharing

These might be real skills, but it's pure entertainment for basic folks like me who want to pretend they will ever have the day in a life of a “violent nomad”. This kind of non-fiction is better than any spy novel or video game because it lets you imagine for a few hours that you may actually need to survive in hostile territory or engage in covert activity. Reminds me of the children's Spy Handbook that I was obsessed with at the age of 9. Very fun.