CARCOSA

I'm just now watching TRUE DETECTIVE's first season on Amazon Prime. When it first aired it was in early 2014 and most of you reading this know that February of that year involved my living on little or no sleep, watching my father in a hosp[ital bed after two brain surgeries, and shoveling ninety inches of snow just so we could get more than one car into our driveway, or an ambulance, should it have been necessary. Which it was.

Anyways. It is almost exactly four years later as I am typing this after first hearing the mention of Carcosa on the show. And I recognized the name right away, because of my love for the work of Ambrose Bierce. He wrote a story about a mythical town that might actually be removed from reality in the sense of death or just a simple slipping through the cracks of day to day history. Wiped from existence, washed up on Carcosa. "An Inhabitant of Carcosa". So I'm intrigued as to where this is headed.

There was an incredible bookstore in Evanston, just north of the city, Bookman's Alley, which closed in...2014. Huh. No, it closed in September of 2013. Good. My brain didn't burst. It was an incredible place. I have a 1947 edition of Nelson Algren's THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM that I bought for $20.00. And this very good edition of THE COMPLETE WRITINGS OF AMBROSE BIERCE, a third printing from 1952. $15.00, marked down from $40.00. 

As I was taking a photo of the Table of Contents, I saw that Bierce also wrote a story with the title "A Holy Terror" which is close enough to THE HOLY TERROR to make my brain pop after all.