It’s amazing, if you think of it, how the covers of science-fiction paperbacks are so often completely misleading. This is true to some extent for paperback novels in general, but it seems to be the case most often in the sci-fi genre. I have no...
The 1.8-mile-long elevated railroad Loop, which turns 120 on October 3, is not an official Chicago landmark — but it should be. Over the past 40 years, Chicago has publicly affirmed that some 200 buildings, sites, objects and districts as...
Machine, the young man who has become Alyx’s lover, has disappeared into a hole in the snowscape, fallen into an ice chimney. He can be seen at the bottom, crumpled like a puppet with no strings. Machine is one of eight civilians on the planet of...
Consider the difficulty of those who pore through the dust and shards of earlier civilizations. You pick up a small sculpture which, to your Western eyes, seems to depict a deformed and twisted body. It looks ugly to you. But how did the people...
In this secular age, many writers striving to create literary works are uncomfortable with or antagonistic toward religion, religious faith and religious subject. For myriad reasons, faith isn’t hip. Yet, one doesn’t have to be a believer to...
Chicago’s elevated Loop, completed 120 years ago on Oct. 3, 1897, was the product of the audacious resolve of financial manipulator extraordinaire Charles Yerkes. To get the Union Loop, as it came to be called, built, Yerkes deceived, deluded and...
First things first: Everything we think we know about King Arthur was made up out of whole cloth. There are no historical sources for a flesh-and-blood Lancelot or Merlin or Guinevere or Round Table or Camelot or Arthur. There’s no other...
I have seen all the deeds that are done under the sun, and, look, all is mere breath, and herding the wind. (1:14) When you look behind fantasy football, and binge-watching Game of Thrones on Netflix, and the morning commute to work, and CNN and...
T.S. Eliot was a great admirer of the novels of Charles Williams, calling them “supernatural thrillers.” These handful of novels, written between 1931 and 1945, attracted other fans, such as C.S. Lewis, author of the seven-book Chronicles of...
Christopher Moore has written a lot of comic novels in which supernatural — otherworldly — figures play havoc with the everyday, humdrum world we live in. These novels feature vampires and angels and lust lizards and various gods of violent...
Originally published in 1990, Good Omens — the novel co-written by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett when both still early in their writing careers — was reissued in 2006 by the Science Fiction Book Club. It was one of 32 important sci-fi titles...
Solomon was a kid, but he was already wise. In the first book of Kings, God appears to the boy-king, saying, “Ask something of me, and I will give it to you.” Solomon doesn’t ask for money or revenge or a long life. What he wants is “an...
Martin Luther, that flawed saint, had a lot to say about the biblical book of Genesis. His 16th-century rebellion against the Roman Catholic hierarchy also involved a revolt against the long-popular approach to the Bible, particularly Genesis, of...
For the last month of his short and tragic life in the summer of 1972, he was known to Chicago simply as Johnny. Forty-five years ago today, he died. He was the West Side six-year-old who’d been beaten and kicked and slammed into a coma by...
For the last month of his short and tragic life in the summer of 1972, he was known to Chicago simply as Johnny. Forty-five years ago today, he died. He was the West Side six-year-old who’d been beaten and kicked and slammed into a coma by his...
A half century ago, on Aug. 27, 1967, local residents, poets, painters, photographers and gang members gathered to dedicate the “Wall of Respect”, a mural painted on the side of a dilapidated tavern on the southeast corner of 43rd Street and...
The book covers of mass market paperbacks are often strange and, many times, wildly inaccurate in terms of illustrating the book inside the covers. There should probably be a scholarly study about what they say about Western civilization — and...
Picture this: You and your friends, fearful and confused, are gathered in a room, overlooking a garden perhaps, and a great noise comes from the sky like the strongest wind, like the gale of a storm, and fills the entire house, from top to...
Fast Falls the Night, the sixth of Julia Keller’s series of novels set in fictional Acker’s Gap, West Virginia, is, like the others, a mystery. Its puzzle is solved in a sharp and scary twist in its final three pages. In fact, there are several...
It may seem odd today, but, at one point, a half century ago, the top-selling popular song in America was made up of lyrics from the Bible — specifically, from the third chapter of the Book of Ecclesiastes. The song, written in the late 1950s by...
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