I hope I remember that correctly; it’s warm, and I’m too torpid to track down The Language of the Night on my disarrayed bookshelf – it’s Ursula Le Guin, quoting a phrase from a long ago pulp SF novel. The saurian ooze lingers in a marvellous riff she contributed to Dave Langford’s Ansible, in response to the statement that `Michael Chabon has spent considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it.’ Ruth Franklin (Slate, 8 May 2007). It begins …

Something woke her in the night. Was it steps she heard, coming up the stairs — somebody in wet training shoes, climbing the stairs very slowly … but who? And why wet shoes? It hadn’t rained. There, again, the heavy, soggy sound. But it hadn’t rained for weeks, it was only sultry, the air close, with a cloying hint of mildew or rot, sweet rot, like very old finiocchiona, or perhaps liverwurst gone green.

… it continues …

With thanks to Ed Willett, on the SF Canada listserv.