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3.52 AVERAGE
3.52 AVERAGE
dark
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
mysterious
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
adventurous
dark
mysterious
slow-paced
dark
mysterious
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Devastated William Sloane only wrote two books, because they are both incredible. Cozy 1930s cosmic horror that plays out in a much more humanistic way than his contemporaries like Lovecraft. There's something endlessly readable about these books.
Where To Walk the Night was cosmic, The Edge of Running Water is a more traditional mad scientist story (easily one of the top 5, probably a codifier of the genre I bet) with a focus on the afterlife. And despite being light on action, it's so enthralling and exciting. Basically only 4 characters for 99% of the novel, but Sloane weaves their relationships and machinations together perfectly.
Also, I know that they turned this one into a movie back in the 1940s but I'm going to give my dreamcast anyway because this book was basically one of the rare feature length films in my head:
Farley Granger as Prof Dick Sayles
Vincent Price as Prof Julian, duh.
Samantha Sloyan as Mrs. Walters
I never got a good read on Anne; maybe 90s Moira Kelly or someone.
Film it in a whitewashed Cape Cod on a densely wooded cape; call me, Netflix!
Where To Walk the Night was cosmic, The Edge of Running Water is a more traditional mad scientist story (easily one of the top 5, probably a codifier of the genre I bet) with a focus on the afterlife. And despite being light on action, it's so enthralling and exciting. Basically only 4 characters for 99% of the novel, but Sloane weaves their relationships and machinations together perfectly.
Also, I know that they turned this one into a movie back in the 1940s but I'm going to give my dreamcast anyway because this book was basically one of the rare feature length films in my head:
Farley Granger as Prof Dick Sayles
Vincent Price as Prof Julian, duh.
Samantha Sloyan as Mrs. Walters
I never got a good read on Anne; maybe 90s Moira Kelly or someone.
Film it in a whitewashed Cape Cod on a densely wooded cape; call me, Netflix!
Ehhh - that's my takeaway from this novel - just a simple shrug of the shoulders. Whereas Sloane's first 'cosmic horror' novel, 'To Walk the Night' delighted me with its slow burn pacing and unreliable narration, 'The Edge of Running Water' felt simpler and less thoughtful. It tells the story of a college psychology professor visiting his old colleague, an eccentric electrophysicist, in rural Maine. The recluse Julian Blair is grieving his recently deceased wife as only an eccentric academic knows how, by throwing himself fully into a pet project. Building a machine that he believes will allow him to talk with his dearly departed, Blair enlists the help of a medium, Miss Walthers. This combination of high academic rigor in the world of pseudoscience should have been more interesting to me than it was. The conceit seems fantastic enough, but the discovery of the true properties of Blair's machine and its implications were telegraphed from the beginning. It doesn't help that the book traffics heavily in elitist distrust of the rural mob. Almost every native Mainer character is depicted as superstitious and backwards. It heightens the fact the narrator has stepped into another world, but it reads as more cliched than what I imagined Sloane intended. As a whole, the book lacked in atmosphere, setting, and plot, none of which could carry what should have been a fascinating exploration of the edges of life and death, the known and unknown.