Atacama, by Jendia Gammon

Posted on May 17, 2026 by skullsinthestars

Book 13 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year! Still keeping a decent pace.. As usual, my link to the book is through my bookshop.org affiliate account, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy from there.

I’ve been internet friends with Jendia Gammon for quite a few years now, have read some of her first science fiction novels, and have kept an eye on her career with interest! She has more recently been in a publishing boom with works coming out in science fiction, fantasy, and horror, and even a Choose Your Own Adventure book. I decided it was time for me to fully catch up on her writing and we did a book swap — I sent her my popular science books and she sent me a few of her recent books. My first choice to read was her speculative thriller/horror novel Atacama (2025).

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Cork balls, Edwardian magazines, and optical physics

Posted on May 11, 2026 by skullsinthestars

Okay, let’s look at a really cute physics demonstration that I found in a really unusual place and which has unexpected connections to optical physics! The demonstration in question is set up as follows: attach a string to a 1 inch diameter cork ball, and swing the ball into a stream of falling water from a tap. The result? The ball feels almost magnetically attracted to the stream of water! A photo of my attempt at this is shown below.

Note that the string is at an angle. If it were free to swing, one would expect the ball to fall out of the water till the string is vertical. In fact, one might intuitively expect that the ball would be forced out of the stream of water, but instead it is held within it!

In case you think this is a trick of still photography, here is a gif of the phenomenon.

As we will see, this trick has been around for quite a long time, and it is not only a great nonintuitive demonstration of some fundamental physics but can be used to illustrate a really important technique in optics!

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The Night Guest, by Hildur Knútsdóttir

Posted on May 3, 2026 by skullsinthestars

Book 12 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year! I’ve basically rallied and caught myself up. As usual, my link to the book is through my bookshop.org affiliate account, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy from there.

Social media is a really good place to encounter authors and works that are new to you! Recently, I came across Hildur Knútsdóttir’s book The Night Guest (2025) through her Bluesky account and was intrigued to read a horror story set in Reykjavík, Iceland and written by an Icelandic author!

And I’m glad I did! The Night Guest is a short and fast-paced novel that manages to build up an incredibly amount of dread over its 224 pages.

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An interview with author Ramsey Campbell!

Posted on April 25, 2026 by skullsinthestars

I’ve posted many times on this blog about the work of Ramsey Campbell, and he is not only my favorite horror author but one of my favorite authors of all time. In my opinion, his ability to build a sense of subtle dread in the mundane aspects of modern life is virtually unmatched, and his stories are some of the few that have genuinely unsettled me when reading them.

I recently received a complimentary copy of his recently reprinted novel Incarnate from Flame Tree Press, and the publisher also offered me the opportunity to do an email interview with him, which I jumped at the chance to do — once I decided I had some interesting questions to ask! In this post, I share the full interview, which was a delight to do!

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The Lost Village, by Camilla Sten

Posted on April 23, 2026 by skullsinthestars

Book 11 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year! Largely caught up at this point. As usual, my link to the book is through my bookshop.org affiliate account, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy from there.

I am a sucker for stories about old creepy abandoned places. An abandoned mine, an abandoned house, an abandoned ship, an abandoned village: all literary catnip for me. So when I came across Camilla Sten’s The Lost Village (2022), I didn’t hesitate to snap it up.

Sten is a Swedish author and The Lost Village apparently first appeared in Swedish in 2019 and was translated into English in 2022. The book was a critical and international success, launching the career of the now prolific Sten.

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What Stalks the Deep, by T. Kingfisher

Posted on April 13, 2026 by skullsinthestars

Book 10 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year! Catching up a bit now. As usual, my link to the book is through my bookshop.org affiliate account, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy from there.

Sometimes I don’t even remember when or why, exactly, I bought a book to read! After purchase, they get put on one of several “to read” piles throughout my house and I very often lose track of them for a while. While tidying up this weekend, however, I happened across What Stalks the Deep (2025), by T. Kingfisher, and it seemed like a perfect read for the weekend.

This is the third book in the Sworn Soldier series, after What Moves the Dead and What Feasts at Night, which I haven’t read. You might wonder why I started with the third book, and I wondered too when I came across my copy again, but then I read the book blurb and I understood: it’s about people venturing into a mine that may be haunted!

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Dead Astronauts, by Jeff VanderMeer

Posted on April 11, 2026 by skullsinthestars

Book 9 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year! Still running a little behind but not catastrophically. As usual, my link to the book is through my bookshop.org affiliate account, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy from there.

I’ve long been a fan of Jeff VanderMeer’s writings. His 2009 horror science fiction novel Finch is one of my favorite books of all time, and his Southern Reach trilogy is one of my favorite trilogies of all time. I haven’t read anything by him recently, however, so I decided it was time to check out his 2019 novel Dead Astronauts.

Dead Astronauts is a sequel to VanderMeer’s 2017 novel Borne, with the same setting (kind of — more below) but different characters. I had read Borne when it first came out and only dimly remembered it but feel I can safely say one doesn’t need to read Borne to follow the newer book (kind of — more below).

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Choose Your Own Adventure Cryptid Chronicles: Mothman, by Cristin Bishara

Posted on March 29, 2026 by skullsinthestars

Book 8 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year! Still running a little behind but not catastrophically. As usual, my link to the book is through my bookshop.org affiliate account, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy from there.

Sometimes I end up reading a book just out of spite! In this case, it so happens that I follow author Cristin Bishara on Threads and a week ago she was lamenting that someone accused her of using AI to write her Choose Your Own Adventure book Cryptic Chronicles: Mothman (2025). This made me so irritated I immediately went out and ordered a copy.

For one thing, it makes me pretty angry to see talented authors getting their hard work accused of being AI generated, and so I wanted to show some support. It also happens that I’m a little behind in my reading goal for the year, so reading something short and light would help to get me back on track. Also, I have always had a great fondness for the Mothman legend, and The Mothman Prophecies (2002) is one of my favorite movies of all time!

Finally, I’ve been reading Choose Your Own Adventure books since the very first one, The Cave of Time, came out in 1979! Going back and visiting the series again was a nice bit of nostalgia for me.

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Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Posted on March 22, 2026 by skullsinthestars

Book 7 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year! Running a little behind but should be able to make it up pretty easily. As usual, my link to the book is through my bookshop.org affiliate account, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy from there.

Back in 2024, I read Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Gods of Jade and Shadow, a modern fairy tale set in the Jazz age of Mexico, and was charmed by its creativity. Moreno-Garcia is a Mexican-born Canadian writer and her works are steeped in Mexican culture and history, making them a wonderful departure for someone like me who is often reading works set in the United States.

A few weeks ago, I decided to check out Moreno-Garcia’s follow-up 2021 book Mexican Gothic, which as the title suggests is a gothic horror novel.

The book is a slow-burn of mystery and dread set in 1950s Mexico that builds to a genuinely horrific revelation!

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Coulomb’s remarkable experiment in electricity (1785)

Posted on March 19, 2026 by skullsinthestars

Though people have studied and been fascinated by electricity and magnetism, including such luminaries as Benjamin Franklin, we can really trace the beginning of modern electromagnetic theory to one specific experiment in 1785, in which the French physicist Charles-Augustin de Coulomb quantitatively measured the force between two electrically charged objects. The law of attraction he found, known as Coulomb’s law, set the stage for all of our understanding and progress in electromagnetism, including the computer and internet you’re reading this on.

I was a little bored this week and it so happens I have an electronic copy of Coulomb’s original paper1 of 1785 and decided to translate it from French and write about it! As always, I used a mixture of my own crude understanding of French combined with Google translate to do this. Coulomb’s experiment is truly amazing, important and beautiful and it was quite fun to see the details of how he did it.

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Posted in History of science, Physics | Tagged , , | 1 Comment