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I appear to have magically lost about 3.5 pounds overnight (or over two nights). Perhaps the pizza finally flushed out of my system?

Not going to weigh myself until Thursday. I think this is overdoing it.

In the meantime, it is NOT easy to fulfill those munchy urges when you have very little in the house to munch on except your nemesis of peanut butter and jelly (on whole wheat flour bread, of course).  So tonight I'm making the kids their favorite fancy "macaroni and cheese" variation called "Creamy Pasta with Peas". Only this time, heh heh heh, I'm sneaking in some whole wheat pasta and some endamimes (which they don't particularly like) but I figure constant exposure will eventually win them over to the healthy side of dinner.

Clive Barker (post updated)

WOW, who knew? I really did not know about the supercomplex novels that Barker wrote. All I knew about were his iconic horror movies, full of horrible and horrific images, like Pinhead, and people sinking into steaming ground, and so forth. 

To clarify: I'm a compulsive reader of the end of novels in order to see if the writer packs ALL of their endings in one big package at the end. I can't help it. I *usually* prefer books that are a little more complex, unless I'm feeling particularly brain-dead.

In the Great and Secret Show, for instance, I read ahead, hadn't heard of ANY of the characters (they weren't there in the first ten chapters of the book, and had to plow on ahead into the book proper in order to find out what was going on. In TGaSS, Barker actually introduces the heroine of the story 125 pages into the book!  And the last character you hear from in the novel, he's a character from Barker's other short stories (and was played by Scott Backula in The Master of Illusions) but I didn't know who he was, exactly.

Of course, this book is the first in a trilogy (only two books of it have been written). Barker writes about stepped evil. Some characters are evil, but some or more evil than others, and the good characters, well, they're not always going to survive, and if they do, not in the way you think they will. ANYthing seems to go in a Barker novel. Also, like Stephen King, Barker references Christianity in his books. It's something that seems intimately connected with modern horror; braiding it with Christianity. However, Barker's version of it in his stories is distinctly different from King's. His characters are also everyman/everywoman type characters, but not quite to the same type of depth that King likes to take his.

Where Straub is cerebral, where King is character driven, Barker is pulled by mysticism and the mysteries of the afterlife and hell.

I tried reading Barker a while back, but couldn't get into his style at the time. But now, it's much easier to get into his stories and characters. I can't wait to get into Imagica, his magnum opus. It's HUGE. But I've got a ton of reading to do before I hit that brick of a book.