VARIETY PUZZLE — As far as I can tell, this is a new entry in the variety puzzle pantheon, and I found it really tough, but fair. To me, acrostics are pretty meditative and absorbing. A puzzle like today’s involves a lot of discrete brain tricks which add up to a whole. Yet I found myself needing to walk away at times to let the harder examples percolate a bit. I think I finished this puzzle completely during four short sessions over two days.

I also think the instructions made things sound harder than they were, which can happen with these multi-step challenges. I tend to just start with the first step in these cases and see what develops, so I focused on solving as many examples in Groups A and B as I could and then went from there.

It’s hard for a constructor to insert a lot of personality into a game with short segments and rules like this but John Suarez got a little goth on us. I noticed CREMAINS; ENTRAILS; DAMNATION; MASSACRED, PILLAGER, TORMENTOR, MANDRAKE. Very Addams Family Fun day , if you get me.

I fully understood the holistic purpose when I figured out the second entry in the Combined column, “French author.” First of all, it’s key to know that each answer in that column will have SIX letters — three plus three. Second of all, it’s frankly helpful to have such a perfunctory knowledge of a category that your roster of possibilities has only two names on it: I could think of only Proust and Sartre for this spot.