New Items on the Wish List

Venture Bros.: Radiant is the Blood of the Baboon Heart (July 25, 2023)

“Doc's latest invention will either bankrupt team Venture or launch them to new heights, as Hank searches for himself, Dean searches for Hank, the Monarch searches for answers, and a mysterious woman from their pasts threatens to bring their entire world crashing down on them.” -Amazon.

“The Venture Bros.: Radiant Is the Blood of the Baboon Heart is an upcoming 2023 American direct-to-video adult animated science fiction action adventure film based on the Adult Swim animated series The Venture Bros., where it will serve as the series finale. The film is directed and co-written by the series creator Jackson Publick and writer Doc Hammer, who serves as the film's executive producers and features the voices of the show's returning principal cast, James Urbaniak, Patrick Warburton, Michael Sinterniklaas, Publick and Hammer. The film centers on a nationwide manhunt for Hank Venture, which leads to a coming darkness from the past that involves the Venture Family, the Guild, and the Monarch themselves.” – Wikipedia.

 Tolkien's Faith: A Spiritual Biography (Hardcover – August 28, 2023), by Holly Ordway

Tolkien described The Lord of the Rings as “a fundamentally religious and Catholic work” and declared, “I am a Christian (which can be deduced from my stories).” Yet he insisted his writings were not allegories, and Middle-earth is loved by millions who do not share his religious beliefs.

How were his faith and his fiction related? Holly Ordway answers that question biographically, focusing on Tolkien’s spiritual development, a dramatic story that previous accounts of his life have left largely unexplored.

Tolkien’s faith was hard-won. His Anglican upbringing was overturned when his mother converted to Catholicism. Soon afterward, she died, leaving Tolkien under the guardianship of a Catholic priest, who forbade him for three years to see his Protestant sweetheart; he eventually married her nonetheless. The Great War, in which most of his close friends were killed, deepened Tolkien’s reliance on his faith but was followed by a barren stretch in which he “almost ceased to practise” his religion. Friendship with C.S. Lewis and success with The Hobbit were followed by another war and by turmoil in the Church that sternly tested Tolkien’s commitments.

The challenges and triumphs in his religious life are reflected in his masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings, that epic tale of endurance against the odds. As Ordway shows in her expertly researched and richly illustrated study, Tolkien’s faith and Tolkien’s fiction are intimately related, though in subtle and complex ways. This long-overdue spiritual biography gives new insight into his works by shedding fresh light on their author’s deepest-held convictions.

My Brother's Keeper (Hardcover – September 5, 2023) by Tim Powers

This is a ghost story. It is a story about werewolves, and things that go bump in the night. It is a story of an ill-fated land, the pathless moors of Northern England so well chronicled in Wuthering Heights. And it is the story of a real family whose destiny it is to deal with this darkly glamorous and dangerous world.

When young Emily Brontë helps a wounded man she finds at the foot of an ancient pagan shrine in the remote Yorkshire moors, her life becomes contentiously entwined with his. He is Alcuin Curzon, embittered member of a sect working to eradicate the resurgent plague of lycanthropy in Europe and northern England.

But Emily’s father, curate of the Haworth village church, is responsible for having unwittingly brought a demonic werewolf god to Yorkshire forty years ago—and it is taking possession of Emily’s beloved but foolish and dissolute brother. Curzon must regard Emily’s family as a dire threat.

In spite of being at deadly odds, Emily and Curzon find themselves thrown together in fighting werewolves, confronting pagan gods, even saving each other from the lures of moorland demons. And in a final battle that sweeps from the haunted village of Haworth to a monstrous shrine far out on the moors, the two of them must be reluctant allies against an ancient power that seems likely to take their souls as well as their lives.

So it seems that The Venture Bros. will finally be getting the series finale and climax that it always deserved. It began in 2003, twenty years ago, but it seems a lifetime. Well, I suppose if the length of a generation is defined as 21 years, it nearly is. Thank goodness they got around to this before any of the major voice-actors died.

Holly Ordway continues on her insightful investigation into Tolkien's life, and has quickly established herself in my mind as one of the go-to scholars in that area. It's amazing how things have gone from a fandom to an academic subject within my lifetime. 

And Tim Powers adds to what can only be termed as his 'supernatural Romantic authors' saga, begun in The Stress of Her Regard and continued in Hide Me Among the Graves. It should make for some fine reading in the coming autumnal penumbra.