The second change in the nature of Suspense was at the time of the Redemption (those of other orientation may call it the End of an Era or the Anamnesis, but they must recognize that something happened then). The suspense was not abolished; perhaps it was sanctified. Some of the dread was removed, but the bow itself was not unstrung. The tension was likely increased, but tension in grace became more possible. Suspense is now a requirement of the pleasure principle, of the vic

He welcomed them as one of the rarest and heartiest foods ever. They entered into him. Ah, the salt and the sulphur of them would stand him well in his crux hour when it came. By eating its brains, he would always have a certain mastery over this enemy. Advanced Lafferty today. Reading The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Monsters (2025) has me thinking again about Petersen’s idea of the ecomonstrous, which Petersen writes about in his dissertation. Lafferty fans who want to think

“Is there an anti-Christ — the man who fled naked from the garden at dusk leaving his garment behind? We know that both do not keep the garment at the moment of sundering.” I’ve been thinking about “Camels and Dromedaries, Clem,” one of my favorite Lafferty stories. Daniel Otto Jack Petersen has recently considered it alongside “Splinters.” He and I find it interesting for different reasons. His essay develops a metaphysics capable of accommodating the story’s events; I want

It seemed, until I thought of it a bit, that I had written quite a few novels, and many shorter works, and also verses and scraps. Now I understood by some sort of intuition that what I had been writing was a never-ending story and that the name of it was “A Ghost Story.” The name comes from the only thing that I have learned about all people: that they are ghostly, and that they are sometimes split-off. But no one can ever know for sure which part of the split is himself. Da