“I came ashore, swimming and wading through turbulent water. It was early morning. The shore was muddy with engendering mud, and full of promise. It was the year 1923, and I was a young man of no more than a quarter of a century of physical years. I went up that muddy shore and entered into the green and burgeoning years of my life. If I remember to do it, I can come back to that same shore, and to that same year, and have another sixty green and burgeoning years to my life.

Hiroshi Inoue recently completed a Japanese translation of More Than Melchisedech (unpublished) and published this truly excellent commentary in a Japanese fanzine. The English translation below restores Lafferty’s original wording wherever Inoue quotes the novel. I agree with most of his argument, including his account of how the novels relate to the short stories. He lays it out with exceptional clarity.

“Molasses is a little like amber,” Diogenes said. “It flows so slowly that sometimes it seems to be solid. Creatures can be imprisoned in it and apparently be held motionless in it. They must deceive themselves as to their own time scale, for if they do not deceive themselves they will be dead . . . . Things can not have been going on for the orthodox time at the orthodox pace.” — "Out of the Molasses Trap" “There are no duplications in the Pristine World, and there are no no

Today, an Argo Atlas, to be combined with a Coscuin Atlas at some point. As I put it together, I thought it would be fun to mention some connections between Finnegan and Dana Coscuin, too. Readers who come to The Devil is Dead without having read the Coscuin Chronicles meet a character named Angela Cosquin in chapter seventeen. She is a Basse-Terre barmaid with an odd last name, and the reader learns that her father drew treasure maps for confidence men. Nothing in the novel

Jackson Square, New Orleans Refrain: Great day! Great day, the righteous marching; Great day! God’s going to build up Zion’s walls! Great day! Great day, the righteous marching; Great day! God’s going to build up Zion’s walls! 1 Chariot rode on the mountain top, God’s going to build up Zion’s walls! My God spoke and the chariot did stop,* God’s goin’ to build up Zion’s walls! [Refrain] 2 This is the day of jubilee, God’s going to build up Zion’s walls! The Lord has set His

V. Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine. R. Et lux perpetua luceat eis. Fidelium animae, per misericordiam Dei, requiescant in pace. Amen. "Promontory Goats" is a Lafferty piece that I don’t know what to do with. It is one of Lafferty's most ambitious and theologically serious works, and it is funny, weird, dark, hopeful, slippery, offensive, and Origenist in ways that puzzle me. It is also one of the Lafferty stories that is just impossible to summarize. If one looks at Laffer

And Duffey, dipping into the Sebastian mind, found that there really was a countess and that she was now twelve years old. Duffey even extracted the information (not from Sebastian — he couldn't have known it — but from the fates somewhere) that he, Duffey, would someday make the acquaintance of this Countess and that she would be his close friend. – More than Melchisedech “They never take very long to make things anymore,” Oread was continuing, “not since that time, you know

Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585) They were very friendly little girls for about ten years, from the time they were eight or nine years old. — More Than Melchisedech "Ce premier jour de May, Helene, je vous jure" (“This first day of May, Helen, I swear to you”) — Pierre de Ronsard, Sonnets pour Hélène The effect of Eva was similar — and of Roberta and of Helen (who had three little daughters as like her as three golden apples) . . . . This post moves into tricky territory. Signpo

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 pedophilia by

I am speaking literally about a real happening: the end of the world in which we lived till fairly recent years. The destruction or unstructuring of that world, which is still sometimes referred to as 'Western Civilization' or 'Modern Civilization’, happened suddenly, sometime in the half-century between 1912 and 1962. That world, which was ‘The World’ for a few centuries, is gone. Though it ended quite recently, the amnesia concerning its ending is general. Several historiog