Hehehe

[avevale_intelligencer]

Reading Kim Newman's Secret Files of the Diogenes Club (with much enjoyment--he's good), I derive a brief flicker of amusement from the fact that he has two characters lecturing each other on how silly it is to think that God might have created the world complete with fossil history to seem older than it is...in a book whose cover is designed with the appearance of ripped cloth and worn corners to seem older than it is.

I hope it's a deliberate irony.

Comments

[dickgloucester.livejournal.com]

Tell me about this book. Amazon doesn't bother to describe it al all.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

It's a set of linked short stories, or possibly novellas. Newman has taken the idea of the Diogenes Club (of which Mycroft Holmes was a member) and run with it, making it another one of those shadowy organisations like the Talamasca, the Watcher's Council, Torchwood, the Legacy and so on. He has, as I do, a stable of characters and other entities who keep cropping up in various guises across his stories, and recognition of these and of other fictional allusions (of which there are plenty) is part of the fun of reading his work...but he tells a good story as well, and all his books stand quite happily on their own without need of the gimmicks. The first story concerns two missing children, apparently taken by "the gypsies in the wood," and what happens to them. I'm only a little way into the next one, but it seems to centre round one of the incidental characters from the first.

I'm enjoying it a lot.

[dickgloucester.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I've only recently come to Sherlock Holmes, and I have to admit that the description of the Diogenes Club tickled me greatly, so your mention of this book made me prick up my ears. I'll go and bung it on my wish list for a gloomy day after Christmas.

[aunty_marion]

Yes, sounds like something I might enjoy too!

[bedlamhouse]

So basically it is possible that fossils and geological strata are merely the cover art for a vast multi-dimensional cosmological trashy novel?

Hmm. That would explain a lot.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Wouldn't it just?

Or not just the cover art. We could be one of those lovingly crafted facsimile editions of the kind of universe they used to make back in the old days.

[batyatoon]

... I'm almost sure there's a midrash about Genesis that states/suggests that this is not the first universe God made.

Hmmmm.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Perfectly possible. Also possible that ours is not the first God to make a universe. Certainly won't be the last.

[catalana.livejournal.com]

*grin* Of course, holding authors responsible for cover art is probably not entirely fair...cue "There's a Bimbo on the Cover of my Book."

[pink-sweater-uk.livejournal.com]

On a purely gleeful note, isn't "Mr Leech" on the cover the dead spit of George Spiggott from Bedazzled?

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Yes! And the voice fits as well. His lines sound exactly right in Spiggott's voice.