BOOKS THAT ARE TOO SCARY WHEN YOU'RE YOUNG

I am reading The Delicate Prey by Paul Bowles, something I've hauled around for many years.  He is one of those writers I was probably too young to be reading in my 20's.  I had missed or dismissed the note at the front of the book: for my mother, who first read me the stories of poe and so the distance required to enjoy the macabre and the grotesque was missing.  The book just made me more anxious than I already was.  I got that the prose was perfect, but that just made me more insecure, double damnation!

Twenty-six years later these stories are dreamy, entertaining, weird, funny, sad, startling, and adventurous.  In the same way I have come to appreciate and love the music of Nick Cave and The Fall.  

They also resonate with the Paul Theroux novel I read a few months back, The Lower River.

  
Doodles--they just keep comin'.