It's fitting, I suppose, that this column wraps up in the same way it began. The more wonderful and attentive readers among you may remember the first "Please Kill Me", which featured comments from Michael Cunningham, the literary writer who was thrilled and amazed that some science fiction qualified, to his mind, as literature. And the guy wasn't just faking the funk; his readings inspired his subsequent pretty good semi-SFNal novel-in-stories Specimen Days.

Last time, I discussed the mainstreaming of H. P. Lovecraft, and since then the pace has only picked up. Tales (Library of America, $35.00) made the cover of Bookforum, the book pages of the Village Voice, and was reviewed in the New York Times Book Review by Daniel Handler, better known to children as Lemony Snicket. Like Laura Miller in Salon.com, he performs the trick of reading and mocking the earliest of the stories on the chronologically arranged collection. However, he wasn't giggling on Wednesday, May 25th, 2005 when in San Francisco he took the job of putting the cherry on the mainstream cake by taking part in a celebration of the English translation of Michel Houellebecq's H. P. Lovecraft: Against The World, Against Life, (Believer Books, $18.00) an extended essay on Houellebecq's childhood literary hero. The job of giggling was mine.

One of the more annoying things about readers of science fiction, fantasy, and horror is the obnoxious double-bind in which they place themselves and their favorite writers. They'll howl at their college professors, at the publishing industry, at bookstores, and at the New York Times Book Review, demanding the respect they feel that their favorite books and stories deserve. Coming soon to a university near you: English 375: The Star Wars Novel and Its Discontents.

In September 2002, Paula Guran wrote an article called "Tribal Stand" for Locus Online. In it she complained that following the decline of the horror market in the late 1980s, the small press was surrendered to incompetents. "And the tragedy is that the most self-aware among this new breed know they don't measure up to Real Writers, and are happy to tread water in an eddy that is 90% pointless, derivative crap, appearing in dreadfully-conceived anthologies full of amateurs, or excreting another novel-length waste of time about vampire cockroaches," she said.

Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley Jr. are currently in prison—Echols awaiting execution, the others serving life sentences—for the 1993 murder of three little boys in West Memphis, Arkansas. The evidence against the trio? There is virtually none. No physical evidence ties any of the three to the scene or to the murders. Only Miskelley's confession—which was gained unconstitutionally and was at any rate both internally inconsistent and at odds with the forensic evidence—connected the boys to the scene.

One of the many conversations that make me want to kill myself is the one that begins with the dumb question, "What science fiction or fantasy should I give to people who don't like reading science fiction and fantasy?" Its dark mirror, "What sort of literary fiction should I give to someone who only reads science fiction?" leads to nothing better. Invariably, a single strategy is developed--the lightest and most literary (by pedigree, not form or fashion) SF for the former, the literary fiction with fanboy pretensions for the latter. So we trade Galatea 2.2 or The Night Country for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay or The Ice Storm. Oh thankgodthankgod at least the first two novels have complex sentences and suburban angst. One is even about a writer exploring his own personality and identity, just like everything else we've ever read. Our literary fans are safe. As easily appeased are the SF readers, thanks to great dollops of comic book goodness in the Chabon and Moody titles. Horizons have been extended, but only so far. No extra thinking required, and we can all spend an evening patting ourselves on the back for dipping our toe into the merely familiar instead of performing our usual cannonballs into the pools of the intimate.

In what is almost certainly a misguided attempt to increase Fortean Bureau's readership without resorting to pornography and to infuse it with a bit more literary currency without appealing to either facts or reason, the Tolberts have asked me to write a little something for them every month. Welcome to it. Please kill me.