“Do you understand what had to be done? The world had to be unvoided; the chaos had to be unchaosed; the spoil had to be unspoiled; and it must be continued. Everything has to be patterned and structured, continuously. That is the real beginning: the patterning." — Rich Horton, Strange at Ecbatan (blog), November 2020. "Love Affair with Ten Thousand Springs" is an important Lafferty story, though you might not know it. It has been mostly overlooked in favor of other works. P

On August 8, 1971, a book by Lafferty received a rare notice in The New York Times Book Review . The review drew attention to the heady blend of “politics, poetry, [and] magic” in The Flame Is Green and noted the bright splashes of humor threaded through its moral symbolism. Unfortunately, the final two volumes of the Cosucin tetralogy remain unpublished. Taken as a whole, the Cosucin novels constitute a major work, worthy of being set alongside Argo and Green Tree . Until

A while back, I shared some thoughts on East of Laughter in response to a discussion about certain obiter dicta on pornography in an...

While thinking about Past Master (1968), I returned to Lafferty’s short story "Condillac’s Statue or Wrens in His Head." It offers another take on how to construct a Programmed Person. In the story, the philosopher Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1714–1780) creates a statue out of frog-colored travertine granite on his estate near Beaugency. The occult doctor Jouhandeau helps him enliven this statue—“Old Rock” or “Rock-Head”—with sensory abilities one by one: smell, hearing, si