The fifth dimension, a janitor, painting: books read

While I haven’t reviewed it yet, I recently watched the 1940s film The Undying Monster which was enjoyable but not great. Someone recommended the source novel, Jessie Douglas Kerruish’s THE UNDYING MONSTER: A Tale of the Fifth Dimension and it’s much better.

For centuries the Hammond family in their gloomy mansion have been haunted by the Hammond Monster, a creature that attacks when one of them is out in the woods at certain times, killing their companions but never them, though the family member who sees the attack often goes mad. Now the beast, whatever it is, has returned: can the family head’s strong-minded sister and a female psychic investigator banish it? The result makes more sense than the film and the female characters are much stronger, though the pseudoscientific rationale is rather strained (a lot of pseudoscience from a century ago I’ll accept in fiction without batting an eye).

VERN, CUSTODIAN OF THE UNIVERSE by Tyrell Waiters has a jobless young black man reluctantly accept his grandmother getting him a custodian’s job at the Quantum high-tech company. It gets more interesting when his boss Jess sends Vern into parallel universes to clean up the mess the company’s made there. It turns out there’s a lot Jess isn’t telling him … whimsically amusing.

BRIGHT EARTH: Art and the Invention of Color by Philip Ball is an exhaustive look at how art and chemistry have been fellow travelers for most of history, whether it’s artists searching for ways to make newer, better colors or chemical discoveries making new colors or paint media available. A very dense book looking at art, the chemistry of paint and the practical challenges of applying it, the challenges for historians of figuring out terminology (“scarlet,” at one point, meant a fine woolen cloth rather than a color) and the distortions in our history caused by paintings fading or basing our views on color plates in a book (“Four photos can give you four different perceptions of a painting’s color schemes.”) and on computers (like the Camille Pisarro painting above). Dense in its information but very interesting.

#SFWApro.