Originally published at LonPrater.com. You can comment here or there.

Y: The Last Man, Vol.4-10.  Like a handful of  must-see seasons of the best possible TV.  Sad to see it end.  Mature themes and mature thoughts in abundance.  At its heart, it had so much going on it could be the source of somebody’s Master’s thesis.  (Probably is already.)  But the parts that got to me the most were the humor, the strength of the characters’ affection for eachother, the surprising plot twists, and one of the dominant themes: the ways gender and race and sexual orientation and  religion and politics and fear all keep us fighting one another, and how it’s all such a senseless, fricking shame because in the end what matters most is love.

Elfquest, Vol. 1. Nostalgic fun re-read.  It’s aged fairly well, all things considered, though the highly expository storytelling style felt to me like the comics version of 19th century literary motifs.

Strange Adventures of H.P. Lovecraft #2. Everything a weird tale about H.P. Lovecraft should be:  disorienting, weird and madness-inducing.  I’m lovin’ it.

Originally published at LonPrater.com. You can comment here or there.

I’m torn as to which of these from my shelf I should read next, so I’m putting it out there on the internets for a vote.

In this corner, we have Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.

First published in 1959, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House has been hailed as a perfect work of unnerving terror. It is the story of four seekers who arrive at a notoriously unfriendly pile called Hill House: Dr. Montague, an occult scholar looking for solid evidence of a “haunting”; Theodora, his lighthearted assistant; Eleanor, a friendless, fragile young woman well acquainted with poltergeists; and Luke, the future heir of Hill House. At first, their stay seems destined to be merely a spooky encounter with inexplicable phenomena. But Hill House is gathering its powers-and soon it will choose one of them to make its own.

And in this corner. . . Kindred by Octavia Butler!

Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana’s life will end, long before it has a chance to begin.

Place yer bets–err, votes, folks!

[Synopsis info from bn.com.]