Hieroglyfics Recs

Kowalski and Vecchio get stuck in an elevator. I’ve found it hard to read Ray/Ray lately, because one Ray is always Ray and the other is Kowalski or Vecchio, which irritates and confuses me. But this story is in first person, and that neatly sidesteps the problem - plus, when POV-Ray thinks of himself, it is as ‘Vecchio’, and Kowalski calls him Vecchio, and, I dunno, it just works for me. Plus, slyly funny and hot like burning.

Brideshead Revisited, Charles/Sebastian, NC17. Charles gets drunk with Sebastian, and falls. Fabulously in-character and with the feel of genuine Waugh. And the fact that I am, of course, picturing the young Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews as they were in the miniseries doesn’t hurt.

Sharpe/The Prophecy crossover, Lucifer/Sharpe. In India, Sharpe (and this is bookverse Sharpe, pre-movie-series) encounters a stranger. I have not seen The Prophecy, in which Lucifer is played by (as you might guess) Viggo Mortensen, but the Devil is recognizably enough the Devil that I didn’t need to. And I am entirely in love with this story, from the younger, more venial Sharpe (I recall reading somewhere a quote about Bean playing great villains, and that Sharpe is a villain that happens to be one of the heroes) to the casual and tiny reveals of the Devil’s identity that speak to the reader but that Sharpe doesn’t recognize. (I adore the unreliable narrator aspect of this, the complicity of the reader in the underlying truths of the story that are hidden from the narrator!) Fabulous.