Reviewing the Mail: Week of June 14, 2025

This is slightly a cheat; these four books were birthday presents that I got a week ago Saturday. So not "in the mail" and not "week of June 14," either. But the point of these posts is to list new books, and these are new books, and now is the time I have to make a post, so here I go.

The first two are ones I bought myself and had wrapped so I could open them. I've said it before: one of the great things about being an adult is you can buy the presents you want for your own events and no one will stop you. (The last two came from my brother, who knows me almost as well as I do.)

I bought Alastor, another mid-90s omnibus of Jack Vance novels from Tor; I've been running through Vance over the past few years, hitting the big obvious series that already exist in omnibus editions. (This might be the last one of those; I might have to dive into Lyonesse next.) The Alastor series, as I remember, is three loosely-related novels from the 1970s - but we'll see what I find when I read them this time.

Also from myself: The Worst We Can Find is a history of the MST3K TV show and it's various successors, by TV writer Dale Sherman. I've been watching MST3K episodes with my kids - first back when they were tweens/teens, and again recently as we re-started the tradition of watching a movie together once a week. So I guess, as I do, I'm over-intellectualizing again and want to know more about things that I could just take as they came. (I should really just relax.) This book looked to be the best of the serious/historical/explanatory ones about the show - I've seen one that's pretty solidly academic, and I'm sure there are others.

Speaking of which, Twenty Five Mystery Science Theater 3000 Films That Changed My Life in No Way Whatsoever is a memoir, of a kind, of the series by Frank Conniff, who was a writer and performer on the show for the first half of its original life and was also the one who did the initial choice of movies for the show. (Which means that he had to watch even more bad movies, including a whole bunch they never did on the show.) This is a slim book of, as it says, twenty-five essays about twenty-five movies.

And last is S. Petersen's Field Guide to Lovecraftian Horrors, an omnibus of the two slim Petersen books from Chaosium from the '80s - as I recall, one was Cthulhu Mythos and the other was Dreamlands. At some point in the past twenty years or so, the two were combined into this one book and republished, which is nice for me since I lost my originals in my 2011 flood. This is probably officially a resource for the the Call of Cthulhu game, but it works just fine outside that context.