A while back, I shared some thoughts on East of Laughter  in response to the topic of pornography and some obiter dicta  in a Lafferty...

While thinking about Past Master  (1968), I returned to Lafferty’s short story "Condillac’s Statue or Wrens in His Head." It offers...

Rock Candy Patent Drawing, 1881 There are quite a few reasons for thinking about Lafferty not as a science fiction writer but as a writer...

Lafferty’s description and visual imagery are as idiosyncratic as every other aspect of the man's work. Today, I want to consider a trick...

Wallpaper Design by William Morris (1834-1896) “So long as a man was graceful in every circumstance, so long as he had the inspiring...

Critics sometimes distinguish two types of authorial distance: emotional detachment from characters, and the gap between the implied...

"And they threw her down, and the wall was sprinkled with her blood, and the horses trod upon her." 2 Kings 9:33 "But one of the...

G.K. Chesterton once wrote: “It is the partisans of divorce, not the defenders of marriage, who attach a stiff and senseless sanctity to...

Completed in September 1977 and first published in 1995, "Happening in Chosky Bottoms" is an intriguing Lafferty story .  On one hand, we...

Lafferty’s short sentences fascinate me. For several weeks, I've tried to understand how they work, especially those sentences that carry...

Lafferty completed "Horns on Their Heads" in June 1971, though even that date feels late. The writing belongs to the late 1960s, when he...

"Oddly, it is only the maladjusted who are able to stand the passages." – Past Master , Chapter 2 "Man, what a reversal in polarity!" –...

When I started reading Lafferty’s novels carefully, I relied heavily on whatever overviews and blog posts I could find. Reflecting on...

Paolo Uccello's St. George and the Dragon  (c. 1470) Then the great thing swooped and struck upward: a thousand kilograms of center bulk...

"I am a very disordered and very often a very bad man, but I know that there is this clarity and order and certainty: the Procession of...

Skulls from Hallstatt "The skulls made an impressive show in their niches on the rude wall." “It is only that definitions have lost their...

"I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that is the...

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, 1571 – 1610, The Supper at Emmaus, 1601. "The light from the sky turned ordinary light black, and...

In the rough diamond between them was a country so harsh as to make even the feral strips look tame. This was deeply muscled country that...

"But it isn't imagination that the Christ gold is of universal, though uneven, distribution. It is found forwards and backwards in time,...