I'd like to put forth the Monster Blood Tattoo trilogy. Written by D. M. Cornish, it follows the adventures of Rossamund Bookchild, an orphan boy with a girl's name, living in a world very similar to Dickensian England but with a countryside overrun by monsters. Monsters are kind of a big deal in this setting, and humanity has developed a broad range of techniques for killing them, from brewing up deadly chemical poisons and repellants to surgically implanting specially grown organs into people to give them super powers. It is also the most richly detailed setting since Tolkien, with its own history, vernacular, culture, and so forth.
For being a great book series, nobody I know has ever heard of it and I've found it in Books-A-Million's discount bin on two separate occasions.
SckizoBoy said:
Drunkbot said:
That said, many would rather give up on Lovecraft instead of keeping a reference book handy for the big/archaic words.
o_0' I've never needed that to understand Lovecraft... *shrug*
Well some people definitely do. My little brother was thinking about getting a tattoo of Cthulhu, despite not knowing anything about him or the works of H. P. Lovecraft in general. He just thought he looked badass. I loaned him a copy of
The Call of Cthulhu, but he said it was too hard to read. I believe he was sixteen or seventeen at the time. Such a problem had never occurred to me. I'm smart enough that I can read "squameous," "noisome," "vertiginous," etc. as easy as anything.