My new book, The Black Archive: Horror of Fang Rock, the 33rd in Obverse Books’ essential series of monographs exploring the universe-spanning televised narrative of Doctor Who, is out today. Order a copy! If you have an interest in the show—or in the relative lighting power of oil and electricity, or the scavenging habits of coastal Scots, or the hidden 19th-century history of tentacular monsters, or Leslie Stephen’s anti-materialist philosophy, or the numerology of the tarot, or Guglielmo Marconi’s marital misadventures, or Odysseus consulting with the dead—you will hopefully find something interesting. They always said the Beast of Fang Rock would be back….

Across the room someone struck a chord on the grand piano. The room went silent. As in most Washington drawing rooms, the piano’s essential function was to serve as an altar on which to display in silver frames the household gods: photographs of famous people known to the family.

—Gore Vidal, Washington, D.C.

Announcement: thanks to my wife’s brilliance (asking her to marry me remains one of the very few good decisions I have made in my life), in a few weeks, Soho the Dog HQ will relocate from the greater Boston area to Washington, D.C., capital and swamp. We’re packing up the files, the audio archives, the gilt Art Nouveau rotary hotline, the cache of exotic spirits, and the Casiotone arsenal; and later this summer, we’ll hit the road with Roving Correspondent and Traffic Reporter Mabel in tow.

What am I going to do? Do what I’ve always done: make it up as I go along. I was telling someone the other day that acquiring a Library of Congress reader’s card is as far as I’ve gotten in plotting the next iteration of my wayward career. But, at the very least, I look forward to quieting the room via underutilized pianos, whether figuratively or literally. Come August, drop a line if you’re in the DMV.