I have very much been working on Monstrous Descents to the point that it has become a singular obsession to the exclusion of nearly everything else. Probably unhealthy! But also fun! I'm the world's foremost expert on Ghouls this week. Last week it was Ghosts. Next week, I'll forget all about Ghouls and probably move on to Zombies. I keep texting bilingual friends to translate weird phrases for me. In my spare time, I've been watching old horror movies, Kolchak: The Night Stalker and Night Gallery episodes. In my D&D game this week, the players spent most of their time talking to a crabby book collector that, in retrospect, was maybe more of a self-insert than I intended. It's gonna be weird in a month or so when the book is done and I have to think about things that aren't monsters. Maybe this is how Daniel Cohen wrote like 80 books on monsters? Maybe he started thinking about monster and just never stopped...

In other, entirely related and intertwined news, my recreation of the Kearny Public Library Unexplained shelf circa 1984 is just about complete and, appropriately, piled just under a print of Trevor Henderson's excellent Cryptids poster. It has been fun rapidly gobbling them up because, unlike RPG books, these are cheap! A lot of them are in the inventory of big book warehouses that have bought up like millions of second-hand books, library books and book donations in the last decade or so -- I find these sellers sketchy as hell, especially since they post stock images as covers and have boilerplate for their item descriptions, but I also, possibly irrationally, worry that should paper prices skyrocket, their warehoused books might wind up being more more valuable as recycled paper pulp. So, gotta get 'em now.

Also gotta figure out a better shelving solution than heaped on a chair. But that's for another day.

Oh, back to the weird book vulture warehouses for a second. There is one in Philly that has, currently, the only copy on the internet available for sale of Thomas G. Aylesworth's The Story of Werewolves. When I marked it as watched on eBay, it was 30-something bucks, which was too much for a ratty 50-year-old ex-library book. Then, literally every time I looked at it, the price inched up. It is currently listed for $693. I emailed the seller to ask why and Karl from Customer Service said, "There is a technical issue in our system that led to the price skyrocketing. ​We would strongly advise you to buy this item from another seller while our technical team is looking into the issue."

Thanks, Karl, I guess?