“Nor Limestone Islands” is the hit single of the Fortean stories. It has a sticky title, and, out of that group of stories, it is centripetally Fortean because. Like  “Fall of Pebble Stones,”  it grows directly out of passages in Fort’s  The Book of the Damned  (1919), as if it were a demonstration of Fort. Lafferty quickly tired of using Fort in this way. It is unfortunate that the story's critical discussion is so thin. The story appears in the underachievingly assembled Th

The greatest loss of life from a "natural disaster" in the United States occurred on September 9, 1900, when a category 4 hurricane struck the boom town of Galveston, Texas killing at least 8,000 people, destroying about 7,000 buildings and leaving more than 10,000 people homeless. In comparison, Hurricane Katrina, a Category 5 which struck the New Orleans area in 2005, killed about 1,800 and displaced about one million people. The city of Galveston as it was, never really re

A while back, I put together a broad programmatic statement for the blog, and I thought I’d jot down a few thoughts that help me read Lafferty. The “you” in these thoughts is really me. Lafferty, in interviews and correspondence, said he never meant to confuse readers, but he did so at times while trying to do something difficult. I believe him. This is one of the ways in which Lafferty is not a modernist who throws out contingent difficulty for the aesthetic pleasure of con