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This book is alternately enlightening and infurating. On the one hand, it is a seminal text for game design because it integrates games into the existing traditions of literary theory in a more thoughtful way than had previously been done. On the other hand, at the time it was written, it seems to have been intended primarily as a volley in an ongoing culture war in a tiny corner of digital humanities.

Aarseth calls bullshit on certain then-widespread claims about hypertext by pointing to actually-existing hypertext systems like StorySpace and the World Wide Web and noting that they don't provide the claimed capabilities -- and here, he is right. Then he extends the criticism to Ted Nelson, whose ideas about hypertext Aarseth understands no better than Tim Berners-Lee did: a mistake, because Ted's proposed (and prototyped) systems do, indeed, have those features. This is a pattern Aarseth repeats throughout the book: he makes perfectly valid and trenchant criticisms of an existing idea, only to either extend those criticisms beyond reasonable bounds or propose a 'solution' that has exactly the same problems.

This book is also an interesting time capsule of ergodic literature in the 90s. The MUD transcripts show that internet culture has not changed since 1996 (being, as they are, a bunch of furries role-playing that they are licking and cuddling each other). The section on Racter has a very 80s flavor but demonstrates exactly the same kinds of problems we see in modern entertainment-oriented "AI" systems.

This is a fun book to read (especially if you like to be angry about things that don't matter), and it's a historically important book. It is also an enlightening book, because it reframes now-common experiences in interesting ways that have not seen widespread use.

This book was interesting to read from a historical perspective, because of the trajectory of both King and Straub's careers. In some ways, it feels like a trial run for both Straub's Shadowland and King's It (both of which would come out only a few years later); in other ways, it shares elements from The Stand and Ghost Story that otherwise don't show up much in these authors' respective ouvres. So, it's kind of a missing-link book.

It's also a historically important book, because (as Matthew Kirschenbaum notes in Track Changes, his cultural history of word processing) it is the first published book to be collaborated upon electronically. King and Straub were both early adopters of consumer word processing technology, and though they used different types of machines, they had a highly technical friend set up modems and a format converter and they swapped revisions once a day over the phone lines. As with Bruce Sterling and William Gibson's later collaboration on The Difference Engine, they successively went over each others' prose until it blended, and so parts of this book feel very King and parts feel very Straub and occasionally they feel like both, but they never are entirely recognizable.

That said, for all its length, The Talisman doesn't contain a lot of genuinely new-feeling content. It manages to feel extremely modern, which King and Straub's other books from this period don't, but it also feels like a rehash of ideas done better in their other books. It is also a portal fantasy, with a twist that is not as original as the authors seem to think and whose relatively limited potential is nevertheless squandered by a focus on other things. Also, if you are uneasy with some of King and Straub's more problematic fixations, they are here in full force: one major plot point involves not just a magical negro martyring himself for a white boy but the fact that said white boy cannot tell old black men apart; another involves this boy balancing his need to hitchhike with being completely irresistible to gay men. Ultimately, this book also has what might be the most anticlimactic ending of either King or Straub's career.

I recommend this book to completionists or folks who are interested in the career history of these giants of horror fiction, but not to folks who want a scary yarn -- because it ain't that interesting and it ain't that scary.

A collection of previously-published essays, sophomoric in both style and character, and ranging from mediocre to unpublishable in quality.

If you are a practitioner of magick or have an intellectual interest in its intersection with art, this book is not for you; if you believe that "sjws are ruining magick" and would like someone to agree with you at length without supporting his points, you will find that this book meets your needs.

The experience of reading this slog was made even more disappointing by the occasional hint of potential: every few essays, Abrahamsson will make half of a good point, or reference a potentially interesting idea, only to drop it. Had he kept to the ostensible topic of his essays or explored interesting points rather than lazily going back to flogging the same dead horse in every section, he might have written something worth reading, but: what is good here isn't new, and what is new here isn't good.

I like and respect Erik Davis, Mitch Horowitz, and Gary Lachman, and would have loved to read the book they were describing in the glowing blurbs that somehow got attributed to this hunk of dry rot.

Only repetition could allow a 244 page book to be this shallow.

The author's doctorate in religious studies should have made her well-qualified to meaningfully expand on Jacques Vallee's Passport to Magonia (of which she claims to be a fan), but she instead betrays an ignorance of its contents, presenting material covered in it as though original, failing to mention important and relevant insights from it when covering that detail, and at one point, incomprehensibly claiming (apropos of nothing & against all evidence) that Vallee couldn't possibly be familiar with the work of Swenenbourg.

The book is framed by an extended narrative section in which the author repeats the claims of a cartoonishly obvious con artist.

Structurally, the book is a mess. In the narrative sections, we often jump around in time three to four times in a single paragraph. Even outside of those sections, sentences are choppy and confusing: consistently too short, with clauses clearly edited in from other, barely-related sentences.

Aside from a vague gesture in the direction of media theory that would work better as a Guardian op-ed and a couple catholic-miracle deep cuts already covered better in Vallee, there is nothing here that someone with a casual interest in UFO lore would not already be familiar with (including the idea, repeated about 20 times in the first chapter and only slightly less often throughout the rest of the book, that religious studies scholars do not make judgements about the object-level validity of religions -- something everybody who has heard the term 'religious studied' knows).

I wanted to like this book -- or else I wouldn't have spent twenty five dollars on it. I'm not mad; just disappointed.

Not quite as dense as Sex and Rockets (and about even with Lachman's Crowley biography, in terms of readability), this book nevertheless demonstrates both a breadth and depth of scholarship on occult history that's remarkable. It's not a casual read but one that might serve as a gateway to research into other works -- a starting point for looking up the details of individual movements that might catch your eye, connecting them together on a macro scale.

I always find Lachman's books to be a slog to read, simply because their prose is workmanlike rather than polished, but he always pulls his weight in terms of sheer subject-matter knowledge. In this case, he draws out a complex genealogy of occult-informed and occult-adjacent political thought -- a chain of influence from the gnostics to the rosicrucians to Evola to Left Behind -- and illuminates the various ways certain ideas twisted over time and the infighting between occult-influenced individuals and groups over the political significance of esoteric ideas.

Just as the personal is political, the metaphysical and religious is personal: one's worldview is a continuous landscape, and categories of convenience like "politics" and "religion" rarely adequately fit, only explaining things vaguely and only for large group whose differences can be ignored for polling purposes. Occult politics is about people who don't easily fit into these categories and who often themselves work to redefine how the general population looks at the world.

I came to this expecting something that would show how to create compelling narratives from spreads (sort of like is done with the StoryForge deck), and this is not that kind of book (and instead focuses on variations of more traditional readings geared toward long-term creative projects). It presents spreads and card interpretations that push tarot closer to Oblique Strategies rather than closer to StoryForge. (This is OK: tarot is a lot more symbolically potent than Oblique Strategies and the spreads this book presents are good ones.)

Another thing this book did that kind of blew my mind was the organization. Rather than organizing first by suits and then by cards, all minor arcana were organized by number and then by suit, illuminating relationships between (say) the five of cups and the five of wands which I had never considered before. (Perhaps this isn't unique to this book, but I haven't read a tarot book that did this before.)

This is a breezy volume: it was almost 300 pages but I finished it in a single sitting without fatigue. I strongly recommend it for people with a casual interest in tarot, even if they aren't professional creatives, because it cuts through the bullshit pretty effectively.