BOOK AND PODCAST REVIEWS - FICTION

The Sacred Book of the Werewolf (2004) Victor Pelevin Linger Awhile (2006) Russell Hoban   The Poe Shadow (2006)  Matthew Pearl    The Mephisto Club (2006) Tess Gerritsen    Black Magic Woman (Morris & Chastain #1, 2008) Justin Gustainis    Two cautions about Pelevin's The Sacred Book of the Werewolf . Waterstones put this on their horror shelf but it is not a horror novel and it adds nothing consequential to the werewolf genre. It might just slip into the dark fantasy category but only at a stretch. It should sit nowhere else but under general fiction.    The second is the claim on the dust jacket that it is 'very funny' or 'outrageously funny'. It is not - in English. It can be mildly amusing at times but I think you have to be a post-Soviet Russian to get this book. I would bet that it probably is 'funny' in Russian to Russians, though perhaps not 'very' or 'outrageously'. It is like that type of joke where the teller loo...

The Dedalus Book of the Occult (2003) Gary Lachman The Dedalus Book of Russian Decadence (2007)   Kirsten Lodge (Editor) The Dedalus Book of the Occult (subtitled The Dark Muse ) is one of Gary Lachman's lighter weight excursions into the history of the esoteric but it is well worth having in the Library. In effect, it is a series of suggestive and rather entertaining biographies from the Enlightenment world of Swedenborg, Mesmer and Cagliostro to the modernist occultism of the much less well known Daumal, Milosz and Lowry. There are just over 40 of these pen portraits under five occultist headings (Enlightenment, Romantic, Satanic, Fin de Siecle and Modernist) with good short introductions to each section. It is a book that can be usefully 'dipped into' whenever one of the 40 pops up somewhere else. The last quarter or so is a smattering of original texts, perhaps somewhat hard to fathom out of their full context and in an order that may have its own occult mea...