This post is a first attempt to chart Melchisedech Duffey’s peculiar sexual life and aspects of antisemitism in More Than Melchisedech , situating them within the blog’s broader exploration of neglected sides of Lafferty's fiction. It confines itself to presenting textual evidence, without advancing interpretation beyond highlighting the link between Melchisedech Duffey’s sexuality and antisemitic tropes in the Argo legend . In the novel, Duffey is blackmailed for pedophili

Sheryl Smith did not write much about Lafferty, but everything she wrote is worth looking at closely. Here is her most groundbreaking...

Prose fiction was a narrow thing. As a valid force it was found only in Structured Western Civilization (Europe and the Levant, and the Americas and other colonies), and for only about three hundred years, from Don Quixote  in 1605 to the various ‘last novels’ of the twentieth century. The last British novel may have been Arnold Bennett's Old Wives' Tale  in 1908 or Maugham's Of Human Bondage  in 1915. Both of them have strong post-fictional elements mixed in. The last Russi

Lafferty’s In a Green Tree  contains the titles of many works and makes allusions to others. Here is a partial Green Tree  reading list:...

“Noël! Noël! Noël! Noël! A Catholic tale have I to tell!” — Hilaire Belloc, "Noël! Noël! Noël! Noël! "(1910) "I stand by all that I wrote in the ‘TOLKIEN AS CHRISTIAN’ essay, but I don’t understand why Tolkien acted and wrote as he did. One of my friends has insisted that ‘EVERYTHING that Tolkien wrote was in a sort of cipher.’ Well, I haven’t been able to uncipher it, nor to uncipher the effect he has had on so many people." — Lafferty, Letter to Al Doty, September 4, 1993 “

Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) ​​​R. A. Lafferty unequivocally, categorically denied the Jewish Holocaust. This is sad, and inevitably complicates any discussion of his work, though the fact itself is not complicated. I used to be annoyed by Robert Silverberg’s comment that people knew there was great sadness in R.A.L. It was patronizing, and it didn’t make sense, but it is coming into focus for me. The Holocaust materials should be documented in the Tulsa archive in the McFarlin

This post is prickly and polemical. Deliberately so. The Science Fiction Encyclopedia  and its online iteration are important resources...

When I started reading Lafferty’s novels carefully, I relied heavily on whatever overviews and blog posts I could find. Reflecting on...

The Execution of Thomas More in 1535 by Antoine Caron (1521-1599) I’m working through Past Master  to create an annotated outline, and a...

Holy Allegory by Giovanni Bellini, Uffizi Galleries Lafferty’s use of allegory is complicated. One of the most effective critical tools...

"R.A. Lafferty's Escape from Flatland; or, How to Build a World in Three Easy Steps" (Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 41, No. 3, November...

Lafferty’s Dotty offers a glimpse into what his literary career might have been had he pursued fiction outside of genre marketing...