Last week I walked an old trail out of the pages of Robert Frost.

​My house abuts wooded conservation land, some 45 acres that contains a few walking trails. The McLaren Trail, a well-maintained railroad bed that was once part of the Boston and Maine railroad line, is my usual stomping grounds.

This day it was time for a road less traveled.

In contrast to the McLaren Trail the Marshview Trail is rather ill maintained. It has trail markings, a few small directional arrows placed on trees supplemented by small circles of yellow spraypaint. But certain places are poorly marked and the trail hard to follow. A few treefalls add to the general uncertainty.

I like it this way. I wanted something not 100% clear and planned, not 100% safe, though I was never anything but safe. This area is too small to get lost in. But it’s not too small to get out of the here and now and find yourself somewhere else.

Off to my right was a spectacular marsh view, beautiful and desolate, not a single human habitation marring its broad perimeter. I passed abandoned fieldstone walls, so old that in places they’d tumbled and spread out into the earth, or have full grown trees standing up through their aged lines.

I wondered who laid down these walls, what became of the bones of the old New Englander who pulled drew them out of the stubborn soil with horse or oxen over years of hard farming.

I found what looked like an old teenager hangout, with rocks that might have been a firepit and the shell of an old disused boom box radio that looked like it had been abandoned 30 years ago.

The Marshview Trail ends in an wide-open field of unmown grass. It came up over my knee as I walked through.

I enjoyed every second of that stolen hour on an otherwise mundane work at home Thursday. At times I did not know if I’d wandered off the trail. I felt, at times, like I had left something unwanted behind and changed it for some necessary new scenery.

The woods wait without judgment or distraction. They take nothing and ask for nothing in return. They will be there after we’re gone.

I plan to get out in them some more this fall.

Happy retirement, Ian Hill

Judas Priest founding member and original bassist Ian Hill announced his retirement last week after 57 consecutive years with the band. Arthritis had finally caught up with him. I wish a happy and very well-earned next phase.

I recommend cranking “The Rage” off British Steel which features a cool opening bass line and some of his best playing.

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Hill was the band’s backbone, literally. He always played at the back of the stage, out of the limelight, no fuss, no muss. Just a solid presence and a good player.

I have a small claim to fame with Hill. In 2014 I got to meet he, drummer Scott Travis, and guitarist Richie Faulkner in a backstage meet-and-greet at the Tsongas Arena in Lowell. He was never the same after my series of dumb questions. You can read about this amusing escapade and others like it in Growing Up Metal.​

Current "horror-ble" reading and watching

It’s October which means all horror, all the time. Here’s what I’m reading/watching.

• Just finished: Horror Hunters, a pretty good paperback anthology published in 1971. You can read my review on the blog (spoiler alert: H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Unnamable” was my pick for best story, with a couple close runners-up by Fritz Leiber and Algernon Blackwood).
• Currently reading: Masters of Horror, a 1968 paperback anthology. I’m almost done with the first entry, Clemence Housman’s “The Werewolf,” a semi-obscure little tale that is admired by werewolf aficionados like me. Housman also wrote the wonderful Arthurian story The Life of Sir Aglovale De Galis which I will continue to recommend until I am bones and dust—and maybe I’ll continue to do so after the grave, or at least in the Wayback Machine.
• Currently watching: Here’s a recommended video by Secret Fire Books, “Read These 10 Dark Fantasy Stories for Halloween!” It’s a solid list of 10 horror infused S&S/S&S adjacent stories perfect for the Halloween season.

Horror and S&S share much in common; though he loathed the term, Karl Edward Wagner described S&S as “a fascinating synthesis of horror, adventure, and imagination … the common motif is a universe in which magic works and an individual may kill according to his personal code.”

​I did something similar five years ago for the blog of Goodman Games. From that, my ten: 1. “Reflections for the Winter of My Soul,” Karl Edward Wagner; 2. “The Barrow Troll,” David Drake; 3. “Thieves House,” Fritz Leiber; 4. “The Beast of Averoigne,” Clark Ashton Smith; 5. “Hellsgarde,” C.L. Moore; 6. “Worms of the Earth,” Robert E. Howard; 7. “Liane the Wayfarer,” Jack Vance; 8. “The Sustenance of Hoak,” Ramsey Campbell; 9. “The Tale of Hauk,” Poul Anderson; 10. “The Gift of the Ob-Men,” Schuyler Hernstrom.

And here’s Tim’s: 1. “Hellsgarde,” C.L. Moore; 2. “Reflections for the Winter of My Soul,” Karl Edward Wagner; 3. “Kings in Darkness,” Michael Moorcock; 4. “Thieves House,” Fritz Leiber; 5. “Northern Chess,” Tanith Lee; 6. Warrior Witch of Hel, Asa Drake; 7. Dead Beat, Jim Butcher; 8. “The Empire of the Necromancers,” Clark Ashton Smith; 9. “The Hills of the Dead,” Robert E. Howard; 10. “The Witch, The Man-Eater,” Esteban Maroto.

As you can see we share a few overlaps in bold; read these this Halloween if you read nothing else. And given Tim's enthusiasm for Dax the Damned I am reminded I should dig out my old copy of Warren's Eerie #59.

What's your current October reading? Send Brian a suggestion.