Giant Tentacled Love

You ever have one of those weeks when, if you pulled back the curtain and found the Wizard manipulating the world, you’d just punch the bastard right in the face?

So….in no particular order…

I went into Waterstones during the week. I didn’t have a jacket with me. This is only cos the sun had shone for the five seconds it took me to look out the window that morning. Sneaky fecker. Which is how I ended up walking, suddenly accosted by pissing rain and howling wind, down to St James Centre from Filmhouse to see about getting a new pair of glasses, only to realise I’d left my prescription at home. And there’s really nothing worse than having no-one else to blame for your own utter stupiditiness. So I walked home again, only stopping into Waterstones when it got too windy to stand upright.

I looked at the board and it said that Horror was on the ground floor. I must have walked around the ground floor five times before I gave in and went to ask a monkey what was going on. Now, as a horror reader, I am used to the section getting smaller and smaller and mostly being one wall of King, one of Herbert and one of Laymon. Yes it’s depressing, but occasionally they fuck up and stock something interesting.

I found a staff person and said ‘have you finally made the horror section so small it’s disappeared completely?’ and he said ‘yeah, pretty much….did you want a Stephen King book?’

I was still wondering if he’d heard the almighty TWANGGGGG!!!! of my back going up when he added that ‘Herbert is now in Fiction, everything else is in Science Fiction.’

I hate actually feeling a foul mood land on me like wreckage from a mid-air collision, but that’s what happened. I wanted to say something but what do you say? I mean, HOW THE HOLY FUCK did Horror become Science Fiction?? I don’t even really know where to start with just how wrong that is. The appalling thing is that I was vaguely hoping to find an anthology or a writer I didn’t know or just experiment and buy someone I’ve never read before but if I want to do that, I have to wade through all the baggy-sleeved, dragon-poking wank that seemed to populate the shelves of the SF section. I gave up and left, though not before I’d noticed just how extensive the true-crime and crime sections have got. Now, I know that Waterstones will soon centralise all their book-buying meaning that they are about to get as far from the way they set out as it’s possible to get and it’s kinda worrying that inconvenient genres are just getting absorbed and disposed of along the way. What a crock. And now that HMV own them and Ottakars, what does that bode for the future of any kind of independent writing and publishing? I await the day I go into a book shop and there’s only one label for everything and it just says ‘general’ on it. Bastards.

A million other things happened this week, some of which were superb and others which were bloody awful. I went dancing and had a blast, I survived another five days in a boring temp gig and the week ended with these two links from Bobby:

Giant Squid Caught on Camera!

Hypo-Knob-Squid-Sex!

and I guess it can’t be an all-bad week if it ends with giant squid sex.