THE DEEP ONES: Fall 2015 Planning Thread

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THE DEEP ONES: Fall 2015 Planning Thread

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1paradoxosalpha
Sep 3, 2015, 8:40 am

This thread is for nominations and voting on stories for inclusion in the October-December weekly discussion reads in this group.

As in past rounds, any story that gets more "No" than "Yes" votes won't make the cut; otherwise they'll be prioritized according to net-yes-minus-no, and the final list will be in OPD sequence. Ties will be broken in favor of author and period variety.

To propose a story for voting, place the title and author between HTML-style angle-bracket tags. The open tag says vote (in brackets); the close tag says /vote (ditto). Multiple polls seem to need multiple posts. If you put the name of the author in double square brackets, it will make it a linked "touchstone" for the LT database, and first publication dates of nominated stories are appreciated. Feel free to include remarks about your nomination motives, and/or a link to an online version.

VOTING WILL END ON THE FIRST DAY OF FALL: September 23.

The summer reading schedule runs through September, and fall will pick up on Wednesday, October 7.

2paradoxosalpha
Edited: Sep 3, 2015, 8:42 am

Vote: "Remnants" by Fred Chappell (2010)

Current tally: Yes 6, No 2, Undecided 2
Carried over from summer nominations. Art wrote: "The final, and perhaps most unusual, tale in Darrell Schweitzer's excellent anthology Cthulhu's Reign; it's also been collected in Lovecraft's Monsters. I would love to hear my fellow Deep Ones' thoughts on it."

3paradoxosalpha
Sep 3, 2015, 8:42 am

Vote: "Buried in the Sky" by John Shirley (2003)

Current tally: Yes 5, No 3, Undecided 2
Carried over from summer nominations. Kenton wrote: "Found in New Cthulhu."

4paradoxosalpha
Sep 3, 2015, 9:34 am

Vote: "The Thing on the Doorstep" by H.P. Lovecraft (1937)

Current tally: Yes 11, No 0
I think this is story is more conceptually central to HPL's oeuvre than it ordinarily gets credit for being. It's certainly past due for our attentions!

5semdetenebre
Sep 3, 2015, 11:34 am

Vote: "A Witch Shall Be Born" by Robert E. Howard (1934)

Current tally: Yes 9, No 2
Karl Edward Wagner considered this to be one of the best of the original Conan tales.

6semdetenebre
Sep 3, 2015, 11:37 am

Vote: "Pages from a Young Girl's Journal" by Robert Aickman (1975)

Current tally: Yes 10, No 0, Undecided 1
Won the 1975 World Fantasy Award and is available online.

7semdetenebre
Sep 3, 2015, 11:41 am

Vote: "Blackwood's Baby" by Laird Barron ((2011)

Current tally: Yes 11, No 0
One of the finest contemporary writers of cosmic horror. Available online.

8semdetenebre
Sep 3, 2015, 11:44 am

Vote: How the Day Runs Down" by John Langan (2008)

Current tally: Yes 8, No 1, Undecided 1
Langan is another interesting contemporary writer of weird fiction. Available online.

9semdetenebre
Sep 3, 2015, 11:46 am

Vote: "The Birds" by Daphne du Maurier (1952)

Current tally: Yes 12, No 0
DuMaurier's original story has more in common with a certain 1968 zombie film than with what Hitch came up with. Available online.

10paradoxosalpha
Edited: Sep 5, 2015, 3:58 am

Vote: "The Big Fish" by Kim Newman (1993)

Current tally: Yes 10, No 1
A story in Newman's Diogenes Club series (I gather it's something like a cross between The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Charles Stross' Laundry Files, and deriving originally from a Sherlock Holmes story). This one is an homage to H.P. Lovecraft and Raymond Chandler.

Ubiquitously reprinted in, e.g. Cthulhu 2000, The Book of Cthulhu II, Shadows over Innsmouth, etc.

ETA: Also online, evidently.

11paradoxosalpha
Sep 4, 2015, 11:36 am

Vote: "The Death of Ilalotha" by Clark Ashton Smith (1937)

Current tally: Yes 11, No 0
A Zothique story, often collected.
http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/short-stories/38/the-death-of-ilalotha

12RandyStafford
Sep 4, 2015, 2:14 pm

Vote: "Lazarus" by Leonid Andreyev (1921)

Current tally: Yes 9, No 1
Available many places, including Project Gutenberg, this follows the biblical Lazarus after his resurrection by Christ.

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?66662

13RandyStafford
Sep 4, 2015, 2:18 pm

Vote: "The Man Who Made Friends with Electricity" by Fritz Leiber (1962)

Current tally: Yes 7, No 1, Undecided 2
Techno-animism that, in some ways, prefigures cyberpunk.

Available several places: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?74494

14artturnerjr
Sep 4, 2015, 10:50 pm

Vote: "The House and the Brain" (aka "The Haunted and the Haunters") by Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1859)

Current tally: Yes 8, No 2, Undecided 1
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14195

Suggested by our discussion of Fitz-James O'Brien's "What Was It?" (http://www.librarything.com/topic/192931).

15artturnerjr
Sep 4, 2015, 11:02 pm

Vote: "The Mark of the Beast" by Rudyard Kipling (1890)

Current tally: Yes 10, No 0, Undecided 1
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/5777/5777-h/5777-h.htm#link2H_4_0024

Weird fiction from the Nobel laureate. "Rudyard Kipling has often approached {the weird}; and has... handled it with indubitable mastery in such tales as... “The Mark of the Beast”... which no reader is ever likely to forget." (HPL, Supernatural Horror in Literature)

16artturnerjr
Sep 4, 2015, 11:16 pm

Vote: "Sensible City" by Harlan Ellison (1994)

Current tally: Yes 6, No 4, Undecided 1
http://tinyurl.com/nv2p2ux

The acclaimed author's tale is also included in Eternal Lovecraft: The Persistence of H. P. Lovecraft in Popular Culture and several other collections.

17paradoxosalpha
Edited: Sep 5, 2015, 12:09 am

Vote: "The Ring of Thoth" by Arthur Conan Doyle (1890)

Current tally: Yes 10, No 1
In various collections, most recently The Weiser Book of Horror and the Occult, also available online.

(Not a Sherlock Holmes story, but rather a Victorian Egyptological horror story.)

19paradoxosalpha
Edited: Sep 5, 2015, 3:20 am

>18 artturnerjr:

But S.T. Joshi and many other authors pan it. Let's read and discuss.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_on_the_Doorstep#Reaction

20artturnerjr
Sep 5, 2015, 10:33 am

>19 paradoxosalpha:

Yeah, you won't get an argument from me. Controversial stories are always more fun, anyway. :)

21paradoxosalpha
Edited: Sep 5, 2015, 4:41 pm

Vote: "Down by the Sea Near the Great Big Rock" by Joe R. Lansdale (1984)

Current tally: Yes 7, No 2, Undecided 1
Often collected since its original publication, and also available in an audio podcast. Have we not yet read any Lansdale? He is a prolific and distinctive contemporary writer in the genre.
http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?62618

22RandyStafford
Sep 7, 2015, 11:50 pm

Vote: "The Striding Place" by Gertrude Atherton (1896)

Current tally: Yes 8, No 1
Having just finished her novel The White Mountain, I'm curious about this widely anthologized story: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?94606.

24paradoxosalpha
Sep 9, 2015, 9:06 am

Vote: "The Shadow on the Doorstep" by James P. Blaylock (1986)

Current tally: Yes 6, No 2, Undecided 3
To go with the "Thing"?
Repeatedly collected: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?42552

25paradoxosalpha
Edited: Sep 12, 2015, 12:55 pm

Vote: "My Boat" by Joanna Russ (1976)

Current tally: Yes 5, No 3, Undecided 1
I really enjoyed "I Had Vacantly Crumpled It into My Pocket ... But By God, Eliot, It Was a Photograph from Life!" and our discussion of it. I'd like to try this one by the same author, which has been collected many a time:
http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?50399

26paradoxosalpha
Edited: Sep 14, 2015, 3:18 pm

Vote: "The Haunted Chair" by Richard Marsh (1902)

Current tally: Yes 10, No 1
Richard Marsh was the grandfather of Robert Aickman, and the author of The Beetle, which competed with Dracula for the Victorian weird fiction market. This ghost story is available online:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/37966/37966-h/37966-h.htm#div1_haunted

27elenchus
Edited: Sep 16, 2015, 1:23 pm

Vote: "Bird of Prey" by John Collier (ca 1952)

Current tally: Yes 7, No 1, Undecided 2
Picking up from another thread, I'm nominating this one primarily as it's online and I don't recognise the author.

The Collier story is online here:

http://faculty.uml.edu/bmarshall/John%20Collier%20-%20Bird%20of%20Prey.pdf

28RandyStafford
Sep 16, 2015, 2:01 pm

>27 elenchus: I understand Collier was quite popular in his day. There seem to be a lot of tv adaptations of his work.

29paradoxosalpha
Sep 18, 2015, 11:02 am

Just five days left to vote on these.

30semdetenebre
Sep 21, 2015, 8:48 am

Two days left to vote!

31paradoxosalpha
Sep 23, 2015, 8:52 am

Voting closed. Results momentarily!

32paradoxosalpha
Edited: Mar 19, 2016, 1:58 pm

This message has been deleted by its author.

33paradoxosalpha
Edited: Mar 19, 2016, 1:58 pm

This message has been deleted by its author.