The Aleatory Randomness

This blog is the author's make-believe fantasy world, me. Establishes opinions on different topics and provides general access to satanic themes.

One of the funniest, cruelest & most savagely revealing books about American life ever written, The Magic Christian has been called Terry Southern's masterpiece. Guy Grand is an eccentric billionaire — the last of the big spenders — determined to create disorder in the material world & willing to spare no expense to do it. Leading a life full of practical jokes & madcap schemes, his ultimate goal is to prove his theory that there is nothing so degrading or so distasteful that someone won't do it for money. In Guy Grand's world, everyone has a price, & he is all too willing to pay it. A satire of America's obsession with bigness, toughness, money, TV, guns & sex, The Magic Christian is a hilarious & wickedly original novel from a true comic genius.

In 1960, Edward Gorey prepared a set of his inimitable pen-and-ink drawings to illustrate a new edition of Wells's The War of the Worlds for the legendary Looking Glass Library. Characteristically quirky, elegant, and entrancing, Gorey's visual take on Wells's seminal tour de force has been unavailable for close to fifty years. This special hardcover edition from NYRB Classics brings back for today's readers a richly rewarding collaboration between two modern masters of all that's wonderful and strange.

Edward Prendick is shipwrecked and finds himself stranded on an island in the Pacific. Here he meets the sinister Dr. Moreau, a vivisectionist driven out of Britain in disgrace. Strange events soon cause Prendick to uncover the full horror of Dr Moreau's activities on the island. This science fiction classic mixes discussion on the divide between humans and the animal kingdom and chilling macabre horror in an unrivaled fashion. Its questions about how far science should go will ring as true today as they did when it was first published in 1896.