Title A Night in Lonesome October Series --- Author Roger Zelazny Cover Art By James Warhola Illustrator Gahan Willson Publisher AvoNova - 1994 First Printing 1993 Category Gothic horror Warnings Some bloody and gross scenes Main Characters Won't list them all since that would ruin the fun of figuring them out. But Snuff and Jack are our protagonists. Main Elements Anthropomorphic, vampires, werewolves, monsters, witches, elder gods, mad monks and great detectives...

All is not what it seems...

In the murky London gloom, a knife-wielding gentleman named Jack prowls the midnight streets with his faithful watchdog Snuff - gathering together the grisly ingredients they will need for an upcoming ancient and unearthly rite. For soon after the death of the moon, black magic will summon the Elder Gods back into the world. And all manner of Players, both human and undead, are preparing to participate. Some have come to open the gates. Some have come to slam them shut. And now the dread night approaches - so let the Game begin.

Hmm...what can I saw without giving much away? The pleasure of this book is figuring things out as you go, even researching obscure references to try to get extra hints as to what is going on, and I find both the book cover and the blurb on the back give too much away already!

So maybe I'll talk about how one can go about reading this. First, it's fun to read it with a group of people, this way you can discuss ideas and take advantage of each other's knowledge of the time period and classic gothic literature to pull apart the little details. Second, the book is broken down to one chapter a day, so much as it's tempting to leap ahead, stick to it so you can get the big payoff on Halloween itself.

Then, here are the kinds of things you can try to figure out:

• Who are the Players
• What is the goal of the Game
• Who is on which side
• What are articles of power and who owns which one(s)
• If you have the book with the Warhola cover, try to map each character in the book to their representation on the cover
• Try to see how many references to gothic and other literature you can find, some are subtle, but anything that's explicitly pointed out is probably there for a reason (as it is in all of Zelazny's works)

I thought this process was incredibly fun and though we didn't figure everything out by the end, even reading with someone who has read and researched it many times before, that's also a Zelazny thing, to not give all the answers. But don't worry, the important ones are there. You need to be clever in reading this, as it's a first-person narrative you only get to learn from one character's POV and you can't trust what the other characters tell you. Even your protagonist Snuff will drop little hints of his past in passing, but you'll never get a clear info dump. It's a challenge and a pleasure to read, and for the most part not really scary (except one scene where there was a place for mutilating animals!!!!) but it's also not for kids, there's one hilarious but grotesque scene in a graveyard that will stick with me forever.

I will definitely be reading this book again, since now I know how things turn out and which character is on which side, I can read it from a completely different perspective and probably catch some glaringly obvious hints that I completely missed on the first pass through. I highly recommend this to fans of gothic literature, as it weaves all the classics (and some so obscure we weren't quite sure about it) into a masterpiece of a mystery worthy of Sherlock Holmes himself.