A Night in the Lonesome October

I read this a chapter a day with some friends this year, and it was so much fun. I highly recommend reading the book this way.

I have an audio version of the author reading it, and it's very good, if you can find it. But I don't have a way to play the CD right now, so I picked up the ebook, which has the original illustrations. A great experience either way.

Happy Halloween to all my Goodreads pals!

This was a very different book. It was a fun read. Light and moved very quickly. The main characters are animals and the humans are their secondary characters. The main character is a dog named “Snuff”. You really do not know what it going on right away. It took a while to catch the rhythm of the book. But once I did I had a hard time putting it down.

It is very hard to describe the Zelazny writing style- it starts in the middle of many things and beginnings are often explained at the end. But the books are never confusing and just fun reads. The book follows a cosmic battle from the point of a dog familiar. Even over the wonderful Amber novels, this is my favorite Zelazny story.

Zelazny was a writer of talent and promise who often seemed to underachieve: even when I like one of his books, I feel that he had it in him to do better. In this particular case, I'm not sure: he may have achieved with this book just what he wanted to achieve, but I'm not the sort of reader he was aiming at, so I don't fully appreciate the result.

It could perhaps be described as dark fantasy, but there are touches of humour in the way it's told, and some of the characters seem more friendly to each other than one might expect in such a tale. It's fluently told and readable, but I really don't know what he was trying to achieve with it, and in the end I'm mystified.

This is my first time reading Zelazny. I hadn't heard of this book before. The more popular pick seems to be Lord of Light.

Someone in my book club suggested doing a chapter/day starting on September 30th because each chapter is a day. This worked well for me because most of the chapters were short and could easily be consumed while doing a simple task around the house like making lunch. There are a few exceptions to this including the final chapter which was by far the longest.

My interest in the book was up and down, with some day's events keeping my attention more than others. I'm not a classic monster/horror/literature guy. So while I mostly followed who the various unnamed characters are (The Count, the Great Detective, etc) I'm sure there is a lot of stuff that I just didn't get.

Overall the story was fine, but didn't really grab me. I think if I had tried to just listen to this as my normal book and not doing 1 chapter/day I might have enjoyed it less.

I listened to the audiobook version of this because it was included with my audible subscription. I thought the narrator did a pretty good job with a variety of voices for the different characters.

This was my October read for the Sword and Laser podcast. This book is a fun read for the spooky season. As you can guess from the title, it takes place over the month of October, with a chapter for each day. (Apparently some people like to read it that way - one chapter for each day, so if that sounds good to you you'll have to put this on your calendar for next year??) Our protagonist for the book is a dog, which is also fun. Through his eyes we slowly learn about a “game” being played by a variety of humans and their animal companions.

If you are a fan of spooky season and/or other horror tropes, you should give this book a try. Spoiler alert - I am a spooky season Scrouge so I think a lot of this was lost on me. Clearly I am supposed to “get” who all the “players” are at some point (maybe? I think?), but alas I was lost on probably half of them (including the protagonist). I did figure out The Count, who sleeps in a coffin and has a bat companion, though! Despite this I did enjoy the story, so I'm not mad about it, just clearly a book that someone else would enjoy more than I did.