Goth Chick News: Kelley Armstrong’s Bestselling Otherworld Series Celebrates Its 10th Anniversary and Hollywood Digs Up an Old Fav
It’s only September 1st but the bales of hay and plastic skeletons have already lined the shelves of the local craft stores for over a month. Though I dutifully grouse about Christmas music echoing through the malls in mid-October, Halloween accoutrements in July simply means that for a few short months of the year, my home décor is in trendy step with the retail market.
And though I won’t amp up the props that send the neighbor kids screaming back down the sidewalk until the official start of the “the Season” on October 1st, the appearance of jumbo bags of assorted candies and plastic Iron Man costumes at Target means I’m well within my rights to break out the black food coloring and a few bottles of Vampire Wine.
Which I will drink while sinking my fake pointy teeth into some awesome, pre-season offerings.
Believe it or not, I learned it’s been ten years since Bitten, the first novel in Kelley Armstrong’s New York Times bestselling Otherworld series. In that time hundreds of thousands of you have ravenously devoured the adventures of Armstrong’s witches, demons, and werewolves.
In her latest outing, Spell Bound, Armstrong pulls out all the stops, bringing all of her supernatural characters together in what is clearly the first battle of an Otherworld war; and I can’t wait to dig in.
William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki outlived his creator with a tenacity that Hodgson, a bantam rooster of a man, would have appreciated. Thomas Carnacki, resident of 472 Cheyne Walk, London, first appeared in a series of five stories (“Gateway of the Monster”, “The House Among the Laurels”, “The Whistling Room”, “The Horse of the Invisible”, and “The Searcher of the End House”) in The Idler Magazine in the January through April, as well as June, issues of 1910. But despite Hodgson’s death in World War I, Carnacki carried on in a further four stories (“The Thing Invisible”, “The Hog”, “The Haunted Jarvee” and “The Find”) retrieved from Hodgson’s papers by his wife. 
The parade on the second planet continues in Lost on Venus. This is one of the most controversial works that Edgar Rice Burroughs ever published, although it surprises me that enough readers managed to get through the lackluster first book, Pirates of Venus, to want to pick up the sequel and be able to argue about it. But here it is, so get out your anti-tharban gear and be ready to test your genetic purity!
The show that so enthralled me is Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. The series is set in an alternate world in the 1900s, one very similar to our own, except that alchemy works. Those talented and diligent enough can transform matter from one state to another — fix a broken radio into one that works, or transform a metal bar into a sword. The story’s protagonists are a pair of young brothers of tremendous talent who used their powers to commit the ultimate alchemical taboo: they tried to bring their dead mother back to life. They paid a terrible price when the transmutation went horribly wrong, and spend much of the series trying to put things right.
I’ve been thinking over the past few days about last week’s post on 
