The Weight of Words (art by McKean) edited by Dave McKean and William Schaefer (Subterranean Press) is an anthology of eleven new pieces of text inspired by McKean’s art, creating a highly collectible package to be savored. The stories are a mixed bag of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, the best dark piece by Maria Dahvana Headley.
The Rooms by Stu Horvath and Yves Tourigny is a fascinating little puzzle book made up of a horror novelette by Horvath and the amazing paper/ design work of Tourigny. It’s a kind of choose your own adventure. If you’re a game player and patient (I’m neither), you’ll love it.
The Grief Hole Illustrated: An Artist’s Sketchbook Companion by Keely Van Order (IFWG Publishing) is a beautiful complement to multi-award-winning Australian writer Kaaron Warren’s acclaimed 2016 novel, The Grief Hole. The original novel contained illustrations and cover art by Van Order. Consider these—as Nick Stathopoulos, who provides the introduction does—the extras on a Blu-ray disc
Some Notes on a Nonentity by Sam Gafford, illustrated by Jason C. Eckhardt (PSI Books), is a fascinating rendering of the life of H. P. Lovecraft as a graphic novel. The 120-page book covers his life from birth to death. The title is taken from an autobiographical essay that was published in 1963.
BETTER YOU BELIEVE
CAROLE JOHNSTONE
It’s all downhill on a descent. The oldest climbing joke of the lot, but only because it’s true. If I like any bit of it at all, it could never be that slow, painful climb down from the highs of before and the bone-deep exhaustion of after. People make mistakes on a descent because everything’s against them: altitude, time, their bodies. And always their mind. No one gets excited about survival—not like they do about standing on the top of the world. And no one gets a good write-up in Nat Geo or Time for managing to get back down a bloody mountain in one piece. Unless they’re Jean-Christophe Lafaille, I guess.
The air is raw, thin, dry. Acke Holmberg’s cough is worse; when ice walls throw up rare shelter, I can hear it rattle up from his lungs hard enough to start doing damage. Nick likes to tell me about the gross stuff when we’re in bed, warm and lazy, blissed out. One guy he climbed with ruptured his esophagus on Nanga Parbat, a few thousand feet above base camp. The blood spray froze in mid-air, Nick said with a grin, before pulling me back under the covers and him.
The wind is a demented banshee. Only fifty k, Nick said maybe twelve hours ago; on the summit it beat around our heads so hard we had to crouch. Some of the Swedes were convinced they were going to be yanked off into the swirling white void. As if they’d be fuckin wheeched off, Nick said with usual scorn. As if it had never happened, when I know just how many dozens of times it has on this peak alone. But he’s earned the right to be scathing, I guess. Until today, Annapurna was the only eight-thousander he hadn’t summited.
But things are different now—I know that without being able to either see or hear him, somewhere further down the Lafaille line and attached to the same fixed rope. It’s dark and growing darker. It’s too late—much too late—I can barely see the low sun beyond Gangapurna’s peak, some 7,000 meters above the Marsyangdi River. The weather is moving. And the mountain is getting jittery; I feel its hackles under my frozen feet, like we’re ticks that just won’t quit. We’ve been inside the Death Zone for too long, but we’re too slow, too tired, and have too far to go.