Unwinnable

Welcome back to Unwinnable’s Pulp Book Club. In honor of Halloween, we’re discussing Roger Zelazny’s A Night in the Lonesome October, a relatively recent (1993) novel that chronicles the events of The Game, a month-long magical ceremony that will result in opening the way for the return of Lovecraftian entities into the world – or keep them shut out. The players and their animal familiars are a host of characters from literature, history and film – Jack the Ripper, Dracula, Frankenstein, Rasputin, Sherlock Holmes and more – and The Game is played out through a series of deals, murders and other skullduggery in a rural suburb of Victorian London.  (more…)

I am a watchdog. My name is Snuff. I live with my master Jack outside of London now. I like Soho very much at night with its smelly fogs and dark streets. It is silent then and we go for long walks. Jack is under a curse from a long time ago and must do much of his work at night to keep worse things from happening. I keep watch while he is about it. If someone comes, I howl.

And so begins A Night in the Lonesome October, by Roger Zelazny, a book I have read every October since I first spied it sitting on a low shelf of the Waldenbooks at the Ocean County Mall.

That was in 1994. (more…)