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Study 141 - There Are More Things / The Book of Sand (Patreon)

Published:
2025-09-04 18:44:01
Imported:
2025-09
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It's a double-feature of Lovecraftian tales by Jorge Luis Borges: There Are More Things & The Book of Sand!

Special thanks to reader Andrew Leman! Behold Purgatory Chasm, The H.P. Lovecraft Experience, Audio Props and so much more at the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society!

Here's that video of Borges on English, and his appearance on Firing Line.

Next up: The Tehama by Bob Leman followed by The Second Wish by Brian Lumley, plus Feedback on last month and an Extra Credit 'cast with Mr. Leman himself!

Comments

Ben Schultz

Seeing the "Next Up" my first thought was - wait, Bob Leman is still alive?? A quick Wikipedia check disabused me of that notion, but a chat with Andrew is a great consolation prize!

HRPrice

I’d like to think that whatever the narrator of There are More Things saw was so incomprehensible that can’t he find words to finish the story. Not even to say “…and then I left the house.” I imagine him standing in front of me, vaguely gesticulating with his hands, just utterly speechless.

Allison Albright

I loved these both. I gotta say, I'd love a book like the Book of Sands, but I probably wouldn't have the strength to get rid of it.

Dion Winton-Polak

Non-consecutive pages… Illustrations… Impossible to find where you just were… Man, I *freaked out*, suddenly sure I have the Book of Sands on my shelf. Turned out to be a regular Choose Your Own Adventure book. Meh.

Jason Thompson

I used to actually watch horror movies late at night with our little dog next to me in bed. Her total indifference to even the creepiest movies and scariest jump scares always reassured me.

Newk

I've never heard of this author before. As with several others you have covered on your show over the last several years. I enjoy it when you cover authors that I do know because then I get to see your guys' point of view of some of the stories I like. More so I think I like when you cover authors I don't know though. Like the saying goes "when you speak you're only repeating what you know but when you listen you may learn something new" and I have learned so much new stuff from listening to you guys. Thank you

Pagurus

Great to finally have some J.L. Borges on the show! Another Argentinian you might want to have a look at is Horacio Quiroga - El almohadón de plumas (1917), Los buques suicidantes (1917), Gloria tropicál (1921) and El simún (1921) are all short and positively strange. I'm not sure, but there must be an English translation available somewhere.

Richard Horsman

William F. Buckley being a rude bloviating douche? Well I never!

Richard Horsman

The indescribable interior of the house in the first story made me think of Jim Woodring’s art. His interiors and landscapes are full of weird structures, furnishings, and objects; sometimes being used by odd creatures, sometimes simply there and unknowable. Examples here: https://www.jimwoodring.com/artwork/gallery/

Matthew Alderman

I loved Borges when I was in college. I took one of his collections to a football game to read during the slow bits. Given it was Notre Dame, where football is…serious business, I’m not sure that was well-received by the people sitting around me.

Matthew Alderman

PS. I think the “leaf in a forest” line may be a reference to the GK Chesterton story “The Sign of the Broken Sword” in which a murderous military officer hides a corpse in the midst of the carnage of a battle he started.

Matthew Alderman

There’s a wonderful novel by the author of “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell” called “Piranesi” that is inspired by the artist’s work but is a fantasy reminiscent of CS Lewis’s grown-up fiction.

Karl Haikara

Happy about a return to some Lovecraft inspired stories. I love Borges but haven't read these stories now I need to! Borges is a perfect author for the podcast

Markus Lauerer

Borges has been my absolute favorite author since I first discovered him a number of years ago. I've read everything he published multiple times by now and haven't grown tired of his stories or essays even one bit. Thank you for finally covering him on here! A small note: Chad, you pointed out that putting the Book of Sand next to the 1001 Nights means putting the elusive book next to something firm and countable. It's actually rather the opposite: Borges was an avid reader of the Arabian Nights in multiple editions and languages. He's written multiple essays on the topic, in one of which he argues, that the "1" in 1001 Nights - rather than rendering the stories finite and countable like a simple "1000" would do - transforms them into something mystical and infinite, where there's always one more story to tell. In the end, that's the whole conceit of Scheherazade's ploy, even if her stories do come to an end at some point, of course.

Our old pal Brendan Gardiner

In the early 1980’s I had a run-in of my own with a book of sorts that gave me a glimpse of infinity and the futility of reaching for it: a sticker album put out by the Topps baseball card company. Each Major League team had a two page spread within, with spaces for every player on that team’s roster. Your job was to buy packets of stickers for $.25 each at Walgreens all summer long and stick them in the spaces and grow excited as the pages became populated with faces, and success - completion - loomed near. At first, of course, every sticker was one you didn’t have, and packet after packet provided great satisfaction. It was just a matter of going through the house every day- sometimes two or three times - scooping up quarters wherever I could find them, be that my mother’s change jar in the kitchen or the places where my older siblings carelessly emptied their pockets on top of their dressers without any thought that an addict lived among them. Followed by a quick jog to Walgreens. For weeks on end it just was about the only thing I really gave my attention to. As the book filled, however, progress slowed WAY down. The packets yielded fewer and fewer stickers that weren’t ones I already had, and the need to find ever more quarters took on a very real desperation. I did not know at this time the concept of approaching zero without ever getting there, but I was living it. The rate of success fell off dramatically without ever stopping fully, and the costs mounted. Finally, with maybe a quarter of it left unfilled, I took the album in hand and walked the neighborhood until I found a young kid to give it to. He thought I was being generous, but I just needed it gone. It was such an enormous relief.

Jim Cannon

Yes, you beat me to it. 1001 is a finite but its shorthand for infinity, much like seven times seventy is used in the Bible to mean "uncountable."

Jim Cannon

I like that image of a bison style minotaur. I guess that's Buffalo Woman, but she's way more benevolent than a man-eating minotaur.

It's a Ghost.

I remember having those kinds of sticker books in the 80s and the fun of getting a new pack of stickers and putting them in the book! I'm pretty sure I had more than one, but the one I definitely remember having had a The Real Ghostbusters theme. Also, I'm pretty sure I never completed any of the books either.

Artemis

I get upset about ill-conceived open floor plans too

James Anthony

The talk of tesseracts made me think of a story from the Encyclopedia Mathematica that I read as a kid. In it a California architect learns about tesseracts and decides the 3d version of the shape is perfect for central air conditioning, so builds one. An earthquake hits and the house collapses in on itself becoming a tesseract. Not going to spoil it, but it seems up the alley of these kinds of stories.

Philip Cowan

The book of Sand is like the Necronomicon on acid. I think old HPL would have loved these stories, and would have happily admitted he’d been outdone in the cosmic horror and literary sense. I have seen the name, Jorge Louis Borges, but have never until now known what weird and wonderful fiction he wrote. Thanks for the frightful delight. I don’t know which will haunt me more: the ending of There Are More Things or the idea of the endless book.

Aaron La Vene

The book of sand is such an awesome concept .

Cgkucey

I recently rewatched The Shining and immediately thought that there are a lot of elements in common with There Are More Things. The maze and Minotaur as well as the time dilation, specifically. One quick Google search later and I can confirm that Kubrick was indeed a Borges fan. Good to see that my English major brain has not totally atrophied.

Mooncubus

The book of sand reminds a lot of The Library of Babel. Originally from a short story, it's a library with every single possible combination of letters. There could be literally everything in there, the cure for cancer, Chad's inner monologue, even this exact message I'm writing right now. But it's nearly impossible to find anything of worth in it. Anyways, you can actually browse the library for yourself here: https://libraryofbabel.info/

Drix

I tried to be quadruple-agent in one of those back in 4th grade and got murdered.

Drix

Really glad you guy's covered him; I'd heard this author bandied around for a few years now, particularly as an influence on Thomas Ligotti, but hadn't got around to reading him yet. This made me an instant fan. I like the concepts of both stories quite a lot, and he's now on my list of must grabs if I spot his name in a book shop. "The Book Of Sand" in particular resonated; being a big fan of Ligotti, I can definitely see the influence Borges had on him. A strange merchant offers a reclusive fellow an incomprehensible tome, and then vanishes utterly from the narrative. Shades of Ligotti's "The Medusa" and "The Library of Byzantium" there, amongst others. Sidebar, when I read that description of the furniture in "There Are More Things", my first takeaway was how good of a delivery it was on the Weird aesthetic, it hit the spot adroitly. My second takeaway was that classic Far Side comic "Cow Tools", so there's that too...

Colm Kearns

I know it's trite to read older literature in light of social media, but the narrator's obsession with reading the Book of Sand put me in mind of social media in the age of the infinite scroll. That compulsion to keep looking at something, not because of its contents but because of the continual promise of more contents. The vague but unshakeable notion that sooner or later you'll find something worth looking at if you just keep looking, so the hand reaches for the phone over and over again.

REO Jackwagon

I handed the idea of The Book of Sand off to my DM. Cursed object. WIS roll to avoid compulsive transcribing, hints of knowledge never resolved in the tradition of The Voynich Manuscript. He LOVED the idea and I look forward to our wizard running afoul of it. Sorry, Aaron!

KateSherrod

Now there's two more authors you need to explore on the show someday. I know I've told you about Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky before; his story "Quadraturin" (in his short story collection Memories of the Future) would fit this month's theme exactly - a guy uses an eldritch paint that expands dimensions to make his tiny apartment bigger (only on the inside) and the resulting geometric distortions play havoc! Another you should explore is Adolfo Bioy Casares, who was a friend of Borges (they even collaborated on the script for this movie https://youtu.be/TkZp39MEDGA?si=cezX0Z1ougpof7YX) and whose novella The Invention of Morel also begs to be Strangely Studied.

KateSherrod

It's so good! And so weird. And also a bit Borgesian.

Runninghead

Even Chad's inner monologue?! Sign me up! 😂 The Infinite Library of Babel is my favourite Borges. Strangely prescient of the internet itself maybe? I've attempted to draw it (and model it) so many times but failed to do it justice. It haunts my dreams beautifully.

Runninghead

I'm on holiday and just popped in here to catch up and browse, then I saw the thumbnail of Andrew and for a second I thought- wait a minute, isn't that John Lithgow? Silly I know because I've seen Andrew before but somehow whenever I hear him speak I always picture Laurence Olivier. If anyone here's NOT looked up Chris & Chad yet, I'd love to know what you imagine they look like, from voice alone. 😁 Not that it matters of course, just for fun.

Gideon Falcon

Ooh! I got that reference! There Are More Things describes some of the artwork in the weird house as in the style of Pyrinesse; this was an artist who drew these insane, sprawling architectural landscapes, made of massive structures so ludicrously vast that it feels as if they weren't made for human occupation, despite the seemingly human style.

Anne Ominous

+1 for the Book of Sand! Best story of the year so far. Infinitely ominous in only 6 pages. Had a gnawing horror like Chambers' work but way more economical! So much fun!

MonsterTalk

I keep wondering if this book was actually a subtle commentary on Improv comedy? I mean the whole thing is "Yes, sand..."

Richard Maier Art

Awesome site! Thanks for sharing. It has a subreddit too! r/BabelForum

Richard Maier Art

So happy that you guys are delving into Borges! Should be perfect for the show, with all those wonderful short stories. I'm pretty sure that there's even a great review of the show somewhere in the Library of Babel! Of course, there's a bad review too, but no need to focus on the negatives.

Robert Curtin

My dad used to tell me his game sessions as bedtime stories too! That was so awesome.

Ledge

The Firing Line host is a straight up arsehole.

Tom Lippincott

I remember watching a video of Chris and Chad after having listened to the podcast for a while, and I found that Chad looked nothing like I had imagined but Chris looked almost exactly as I'd always pictured him.

Tom Lippincott

Long time listener, first time commenter here. I was inspired to write because of an interesting intersection that happened concerning Strange Studies. i recently came across a movie on Amazon Prime called "Necronomicon." At first I assumed it was the 1993 film where Jeffrey Combs portrays good old Howard. But wait, this was a more recent Argentinian movie. What little I could find online about it described it as kind of a mashup between HPL and Jorge Luis Borge. I'd heard of Borge, including in influence on Thomas Ligotti that someone else mentioned, so of course I was intrigued. I ended up really enjoying the film and thought the Lovecraftian elements were deftly handled. And I was left definitely curious about Borge's writing. Then, lo and behold, only a couple of days later, this episode comes up on my feed. Although the book in the film is called the Necronomicon, it definitely has some Book of Sand going on as well. I quite enjoyed the discussions of the two Borge stories and definitely plan to read this author's work. Furthermore, as the episode was closing out, I had the surreal experience of hearing Chad say "and I'd like to thank Tom Lippincott." My 1.5 seconds of fame! The mind reels with the synchronicity. Anyway, I highly recommend the above film to any Strange Studies listeners, and would love to hear an Extra Credit covering it at some point.

Runninghead

I can't now remember what I imagined Chris and Chad to look like- been listening since the start, so the memory's totally faded, but I recall that when I looked them up I was surprised- they looked way cooler than I'd imagined but both in very different ways. I guess it's always going to be a weird reveal moment! 🙂