Hm. I read Black Cocktail first. And then, I think, Bones of the Moon. My favorite is From the Teeth of Angels, but Land of Laughs & A Child Across the Sky are very close.

(So I dispute your theory. Nyah.)

Oh, I would advise people who haven't read Carroll: if you have trouble with unlikable protagonists, he may not be for you.

Teppy, the bookstore is called Borderlands, I think.

That sounds right.

Oh, I would advise people who haven't read Carroll: if you have trouble with unlikable protagonists, he may not be for you.

See, I was reading Amazon.com's reviews of Land of Laughs, and several of the reviews referred to the protagonist as unlikable, but I don't get that. He seems fine to me.

But you haven't finished the book yet, right?

But you haven't finished the book yet, right?

Nope. (And I started to say that in my previous post, but thought it was stating the obvious.) I did, however, get to the part where he has lots of sex with Anna, which I felt was obviously inevitable. And yet I still don't find him unlikable. Yet.

I feel like I shouldn't say anything specific. I didn't mean, "Everyone who reads it will hate the narrator." I don't think that's the case. I don't dislike him; I don't like him. It hardly ever occurs to me to judge a character that way.

If I knew someone who often said things like, "I love this book because the heroine is so sympathetic and admirable," and "I hated that book because the main character was such a horrible person," I would not recommend he try Carroll.

I was browsing through a book at Cody's at lunchtime that would be of interest to many Buffistas, though Betsy, Jilli, JZ, DXM, Ginger and Micole come particularly to mind.

The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana by Jess Nevins.

It's huge and covers tons of Victorian popular genre fiction, mostly by character (a curious way to go, but then you get to look up Clarimonde and Dyson and Usher, Roderick, and Black Bess).

Nevin does a god job of linking up all the little tributaries and trends that run into the big rivers of the popular characters which survive to our time. How and when the Byronic hero informs the vampire, for example.

Much like the literature of that time, it has a very gothy bent with lots of stuff on Machen and Gautier as well as the usual suspects (Poe, Doyle, Verne, Wells et al).

Jess Nevins is very cool. And compulsive.

Jess Nevins is very cool. And compulsive.

Yeah, I've referred to his annotations for Alan Moore frequently.

Oh, the LoEG notes were priceless. I kept wishing he'd do the same for Planetary, since I'm sure I miss half the references.

I love that book!

I'm with Strega (or even more so) -- I found the narrator so profoundly unlikeable by the end, and the entire sensibility of the book so... cold, I think, that I won't be reading any more Carroll. It's not that it's badly written, it's just rather alien to me, and discomforting. Which is not to say I didn't find it interesting -- but I also thought the ending kind of fell apart, as well.

It's not a book I regret reading, but I have no desire to read any more of that type.