Off Topic - Lit

I'm about halfway through Neal Stephenson's 1000+ page opus Reamde. More of a mainstream novel for the author of Anathem, etc. but not without its own enjoyable forays into uber-geekery. It's definitely a page-turner.

Have to put it aside for a while in order to turn to Robert Marasco's Burnt Offerings for some Hallowe'en reading, along with Vampirella Archives Vol 2 from Dark Horse.

Just started the new James Lee Burke novel Feast Day of Fools. I think that over the past decade or so, Burke has become one of the very best of all American writers (and a good number of respectable critics would seem to back this up). His prose incorporates profound observations of human foibles down to the bleakest descriptions of the violence and depravity, while still retaining a kind of weary sanity and kindness behind it all. Burke is most famous for his New Orleans-set "Robicheaux" series, but this new one features another great character in 65 year old, 6'5"" Sheriff Hack Holland.

Another extremely good series is by author Alan Bradley featuring "detective" Flavia de Luce, a precocious 11-year-old chemistry whiz with a penchant for poisons. The new book is I Am Half-Sick of Shadows. It's rather amusing that the 60-something Bradley didn't hit it big writing until the first Flavia book came out a few years ago, written from the point-of-view of an 11-year-old girl. The great thing about these books is that they are written for adults and are quite sardonic, sinister and hilarious. Edward Gorey would have loved Flavia and her odd family. Set in 1950's rural England.

I am having more difficult than usual "settling in" on a book right now. I have a few speculative fiction anthologies out from the library, have actually polished off a pretty good hunk of one of them (David G. Hartwell's The Science Fiction Century), and should probably settle down and finish them before they're due back, but I've also just figured out how to download books from the net onto my cell phone and have kind of been going nuts with that - got a couple of Edgar Rice Burroughs novels (as mentioned in another thread), The Picture of Dorian Gray, Huysmans' Against The Grain, and a really unsatisfactory version of Almuric with microscopic print that I can't seem to enlarge. I THINK I've settled in on Dorian Gray, just 'cause I knocked off the 1st couple of chapters this morning & Wilde has definitely got his narrative hooks in me. As someone remarked over in the Movie/TV thread, there's almost too much stuff out there, particularly for those of us that read a lot of pre-WWII fiction and have all that lovely public domain stuff floating around the world wide web just waiting to be snatched up.

ETA: Started to read Lovecraft's description of Dorian Gray in Supernatural Horror in Literature when I realized there are spoilers in it. *Shakes fist in the direction of Providence* Damn you, Lovecraft! You already screwed up The Turn of the Screw for me - wasn't that enough?!?

It's not possible to spoil Against the Grain! The thing is practically plotless and perfect.

>4 paradoxosalpha:

I've been wanted to read that for years, mostly being intrigued by the fact that it has been championed by two favorite writers of mine who have absolutely nothing in common with one another - Lester Bangs and H.P. Lovecraft. My logic is that if it was enjoyed by two men of such vastly different sensibilities, there must be something in it for me, too. :)

Read the Lovecraftishly-entitled Batman graphic novel Arkham Asylum and posted a review here:

http://www.amazon.com/review/R3AKC51YZ19CSW/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

(Paradoxosalpha, you'd enjoy this one - Aleister Crowley makes a cameo appearance. (Batman, Arkham, and Crowley - all in the same comic! How can you go wrong? :D))

> 6

Thanks for the tip, Art. It's been years since I read Arkham Asylum and I had forgotten about the Crowley cameo. Accordingly, I've added Crowley to the LT CK character entries there.

I agree with your review pretty much. I do like Morrison a lot when he's at his best. My favorite of his is The Filth, followed by his All-Star Superman work. Arkham Asylum is the book that "made" him financially and gave him the creative independence to do more even more interesting things later.

McKean is pretty awesome all around. His collaborations with Neil Gaiman -- including the Mirrormask film -- are some of the latter's best work, I think. McKean also did the images for an original Tarot deck with Alejandro Jodorowsky.

>6 artturnerjr: & 7

http://grantmorrisonmovie.com/

Haven't seen it yet.

Good review, Art - this reminds me that I still need to get to Arkham Asylum myself. I just ordered the nearly 500 page Legends of the Dark Knight: Marshall Rogers, which will hopefully come out this week. These late-1970's stories represent some of my all-time favorite Batman comics.

> 8

I did see it, and I liked it. It was a point in favor of my reading Supergods (although I haven't yet), despite its decidedly mixed reviews.

>7 paradoxosalpha:

"Accordingly, I've added Crowley to the LT CK character entries there."

That's an interesting page. Is Crowley really mentioned in A Moveable Feast? I don't remember that at all.

"I do like Morrison a lot when he's at his best. My favorite of his is The Filth, followed by his All-Star Superman work."

Suprisingly, I've read very little of Morrison's work. I've read ARKHAM ASYLUM, the 1st ALL-STAR SUPERMAN collection, that prose story he wrote for The Starry Wisdom, and that's about it. I wasn't crazy about ALL-STAR SUPERMAN (although I love Frank Quitely's artwork) but I liked the other 2 quite a bit.

"Arkham Asylum is the book that "made" him financially and gave him the creative independence to do more even more interesting things later."

In the afterword to the 15th Anniversary Edition of AA, Karen Berger says it "remain{s} the best-selling original graphic novel in the entire comics industry." Wow! I had no idea it was THAT popular.

>10 artturnerjr:

Yes, even if misspelled:

In A Moveable Feast, Ford Maddox Ford claims to have "cut" a man he thinks was Hilaire Belloc, but which in fact turns out to be "Alestair Crowley, the diabolist."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Moveable_Feast
http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleister_Crowley

I haven't read A Moveable Feast myself, but my Other Reader, whose word I trust unhesitatingly, assures me that these references are accurate.

>11 paradoxosalpha:

Outstanding. Thanks for the info.

I really enjoyed AMF, mostly because it's a lot of fun to imagine being a brilliant young bohemian in Paris in the 1920s. 8)

>4 paradoxosalpha:

It seems I'm having trouble getting away from that book.

Here's the deal: I'm about halfway through The Picture of Dorian Gray, right? I come to the part where Dorian discovers "the yellow book" that his friend Lord Henry has sent him ("Oh my gosh!" I think to myself at this point, "He's sent him a copy of The King in Yellow! :D ). He starts reading it and describes it thusly:

It was a novel without a plot and with only one character, being, indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian who spent his life trying to realise in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own, and to sum up, as it were, in himself the various moods through which the world-spirit had ever passed, loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin.

I say to myself, "Gee, that sounds familiar," and indeed, a quick check of Wikipedia reveals that the book in question was in fact inspired by Huysmans' À rebours, aka Against the Grain.

Wheels within wheels... wheels within wheels.

(N.b.: this post is an egregious theft from the Book Talk group)

So what were everyone's favorite reads of 2011 (weird or otherwise)? Counting rereads, here are mine:

NOVEL - The Island of Dr. Moreau - H.G. Wells

NOVELLA - The Machine Stops - E.M. Forster

SHORT STORY - "The Deathbird" - Harlan Ellison; "Nethescurial" - Thomas Ligotti (tie)

POEM - "The Centaur" - Clark Ashton Smith

PLAY - James Blish's imagining of the fictional play THE KING IN YELLOW in his short story "More Light"

GRAPHIC NOVEL - Essential Fantastic Four Vol. 3 - Jack Kirby and Stan Lee; David Boring - Daniel Clowes (tie)

NON-FICTION: Life - Keith Richards

I did an awful lot of reading this year, so these picks are difficult.

Novel: Desolation Road by Ian McDonald
Short Story Collection: Sea-Kings of Mars and Otherworldly Stories by Leigh Brackett
Poetry Volume: New and Collected Poems 1964-2007 by Ishmael Reed
Graphic Novel: Conan: Black Colossus by Tim Truman
Criticism: Fearful Symmetry by Northrop Frye
History/Philosophy: Nietzsche's Corps/e by Geoff Waite

ETA: I have full reviews of each of these on LT, so click through if you like!

I'm not going to break it down too far, and I was a bit surprised to find that my short story reading has mostly been what's been discussed here, along with dippings into American Fantastic Tales, and random volumes pulled from the home stacks here and there.

Novel:
Reamde: a Novel by Neal Stephenson
Our Lady of Darkness by Fritz Leiber (the new edition from Centipede press)
For Your Eyes Only by Ian Fleming
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley

Graphic Novel or Comics:
Unknown Soldier Vol. 4: Beautiful World by Joshua Dysart
Vampirella Archives Volume 2
Locke & Key by Joe Hill (ongoing)

Biography:
Karloff: More than a Monster by Stephen Jacobs
I Am Providence: The Life & Times of H.P. Lovecraft by S.T. Joshi

Autobiography:
Boy by Roald Dahl
Life by Keith Richards

>14 artturnerjr:

By the way, Art, I also read The Island of Dr. Moreau this year, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It's still a disturbing read. If you get a chance, check out the recent Criterion dvd or blu-ray restoration of the 1932 film Island of Lost Souls, which is even better!

I also read Life by Keef and thought it was a blast, and waaaaay better than I expected it to be.

>16 gwendetenebre:

The Weird Tradition Group Mind is at it again. 8)

Wells is a giant. To realize how much influence that man had on so many fields of endeavor is (that word again) staggering. This is about as close as I've seen to a decent summation of his accomplishments in a few paragraphs and it still misses out on the fact that dude basically invented the modern popular history book and wargaming with minatures:

http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2010/09/0921hg-wells-birthday/

Agreed on Life - it's a gas, gas, gas. 8)

>13 artturnerjr:

I'm halfway through Dorian Gray now myself. I haven't gotten to the part with a yellow book though so I stopped reading your post there. :P

>18 Thulean:

I've got about 40 pp. left - might finish it off tonight after I am done running errands, etc. It is totally surpassing my expectations - can't believe I never got around to Wilde until this year.

The books I enjoyed in 2011
Jan
Agent Zigzag
The Dark Domain
Mar
The Old Man and the Sea
Surface Detail
Apr
Our Tragic Universe
Jun
Dark Matter
The Dervish House
Jul
Last Call
Aug
Post Office
City of Bohane
Oct
Field Grey
Nov
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
AngelMaker
The Life and Writings of James Owen Hannay
Dec
There are Little Kingdoms

I did not list the books I did not enjoy reading. (Now, does that mean I didn't include the books that I read and didn't enjoy reading or is it all the books I have never read that I might enjoy reading?)

>18 Thulean:

Finished The Picture of Dorian Gray on Saturday - very, very impressive - knocks The Island of Dr. Moreau out of the top spot for Favorite Novel Read in 2011 (although I would still highly recommend Moreau).

>20 pgmcc:

I thought The Old Man and the Sea was excellent - a truly timeless piece of work.

#21 artturnerjr

I agree about The Old Man and the Sea. For such a small book it seemed to say so much on so many different topics.

My list for the 2012 TBR Challenge group (http://www.librarything.com/groups/tbrchallenge):

MAIN LIST
1) Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson
2) The First Men in the Moon - H.G. Wells
3) The Food of the Gods - Wells
4) In the Days of the Comet - Wells
5) Cthulhu's Heirs - Thomas M.K. Stratman (ed.)
6) Utopia - Sir Thomas More
7) Vathek - William Beckford
8) The Scarlet Letter- Nathaniel Hawthorne
9) Ape and Essence - Aldous Huxley
10) A Voyage to Arcturus - David Lindsay
11) The Silver Stallion - James Branch Cabell
12) A Game of Thrones - George R.R. Martin

ALTERNATES LIST
1) Nickled and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America - Barbara Ehrenreich
2) Civilization: The West and the Rest - Niall Ferguson
3) The Histories - Herodotus
4) Deeper Into Movies - Pauline Kael
5) When That Rough God Goes Riding: Listening to Van Morrison - Greil Marcus
6) Lost Highway: Journeys and Arrivals of American Musicians - Peter Guralnick
7) Essential Amazing Spider-Man, Vol. 1 - Steve Ditko and Stan Lee
8) Mighty Avengers Vol. 1 - Brian Michael Bendis
9) Batman: Dark Victory - Jeph Loeb
10) Transmetropolitan: Back on the Street - Warren Ellis
11) Hard Boiled - Frank Miller
12) Sin City: Booze, Broads, & Bullets - Miller

Not too much weird stuff - only Cthulhu's Heirs and maybe Vathek fit into that genre - I figure I'll get my weird fix with the Deep Ones. 8)

> 23

Vathek is a favorite of mine. I hope you like it.

I was thinking of reading A Voyage to Arcturus this year myself. Give a shout when you start it, maybe?

Among the graphic novels/comics items on your alternates list, Transmetropolitan is a standout best. I just finished reading his recent Doktor Sleepless collection, and I'm also a fan of his Planetary.

>24 paradoxosalpha:

Vathek is a favorite of mine. I hope you like it.

I've wanted to read that ever since I learned it was a major influence on H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith and particularly when I saw it was an influence on HPL's The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, which is a particular favorite of mine.

I was thinking of reading A Voyage to Arcturus this year myself. Give a shout when you start it, maybe?

Will do. :)

Among the graphic novels/comics items on your alternates list, Transmetropolitan is a standout best. I just finished reading his recent Doktor Sleepless collection, and I'm also a fan of his Planetary.

I've been meaning to read Ellis' stuff for a while now, but was unsure of where to start; collections in the the TRANSMETROPOLITAN series have been coming up in my LT automatic recommendations a lot, so I figured I'd give one of those a go first. I really want to get to the PLANETARY books soon - I am a huge fan of Philip Jose Farmer/Alan Moore Wold Newton/League of Extraordinary Gentleman subgenre of speculative fiction where a bunch of pulp/speculative fiction/superhero genre characters are thrown together/deconstructed/otherwise messed around with. Ellis' AUTHORITY books sound interesting, too, for similar reasons.

Who can tell me about Jack Cady? I'm reading The Horror Hall of Fame: The Stoker Winners and his story "The Night We Buried Road Dog" blew me away! Great storytelling! I know that Centipede Press did a collector's edition of his novel THE WELL a couple of years back. I just put his 2003 short story collection Ghosts of Yesterday on my Amazon wish list. His novels sound pretty intriguing, too. How'd I miss him?

Lovely little package of goodness received from Amazon earlier this week (it seems to be the week for that - I saw elsewhere that paradoxosalpha got one, too). Contents:

- Strange Relations by Philip Jose Farmer - a mmpb collection from Baen of two novels and several short stories by "science fiction's grand master of controversy" (as the back cover blurbs)

- Alan Moore's The Courtyard - comics adaptation of the excellent Lovecraftian neo-noir short story by The Bearded One (review to come)

- MAX FLEISCHER'S SUPERMAN: 1941 - 1942 (http://amzn.com/B001OD8E4G) - DVD cover blurb (their caps): "Superman: The Max Fleischer Cartoon Collection Is Intended for the Adult Collector and Is Not Suitable for Children" (!)

- 2112 - Rush (http://amzn.com/B000001ESF) - an album I fell in love with when I owned it on audio cassette(!) in high school; am incredibly just now upgrading to digital on it

>27 artturnerjr:

For the serious adult DVD collector! :)

There have been so many atrocious and incomplete public domain releases of the Fleischer Superman cartoons over the years - maybe that 2009 2-disc set does them right.

>26 gwendetenebre:

I found a used copy of the Cady book on Amazon. Actually a signed Night Shade Books paperback in great shape for all of two bucks!

Up next for me is J.G. Ballard's High Rise: A Novel.

Last night I started reading The Physiognomy, and I'm not surprised to like it. I made the mistake of reading the author's introduction first, though. It's an introduction to the second edition that is mostly about the writing process of the novel -- really the sort of thing I'd rather read after diving into the text itself.

>29 paradoxosalpha:

That sounds..unique! Will you be writing a review?

I'm currently finishing J.G. Ballard's High Rise

Up next for me:

Confessions of an English Opium Eater - mainly for "Suspiria de Profundis", which has an important connection to Fritz Leiber's Our Lady of Darkness

Don't Look Now: Selected Stories of Daphne du Maurier - DON'T LOOK NOW is one of my very, very favorite horror films. Never read du Maurier before.

A Moment in the Sun - I usually admire John Sayles' work as director/screenwriter. This gigantic historical novel looks like the literary equivalent of a Dagwood Bumstead sandwich.

> 29 Will you be writing a review?

Always! I've gotten to the point where I don't feel that I've finished reading a book until the review is written.

>28 gwendetenebre:

For the serious adult DVD collector! :)

Actually, having watched all the cartoons now, the disclaimer on the cover doen't seem so silly. It seems highly improbable that a young kid would be able to put the racist caricatures in the WWII propaganda cartoons into any kind of meaningful historical context.

There have been so many atrocious and incomplete public domain releases of the Fleischer Superman cartoons over the years - maybe that 2009 2-disc set does them right.

I can't really speak to how they compare to other remastered versions of the 'toons on DVD, but they sure look better than the crappy p.d. versions you see on YouTube, etc. Since these shorts are almost decadently voluptuous even in the crap p.d. versions, you can imagine how good these look. :)

Almost finished with Aldous Huxley's Ape and Essence. Thus far, it is perhaps the most profoundly misanthropic novel I have ever read.

Finished Ape and Essence (the misanthropy of which is mitigated by a relatively upbeat ending, but can still be rather hard to take) and The Mighty Avengers Assemble (semi-random comics selection that actually turned out to be a super-entertaining read; Brian Michael Bendis might be writing the best dialogue in superhero comics these days, and I love Frank Cho's zaftig women); just getting started on The First Men in the Moon.

> 34

Is that Frank Cho art all the way through? If so, I might give it a try.

>35 paradoxosalpha:

It collects MIGHTY AVENGERS #1-11. Cho did the art on #1-6 (the first story arc); the art on #7-11 is by Mark Bagley, whom I find competent but unspectacular. Bendis wrote the whole thing.

I've finished reading The Physiognomy and posted my review.

>37 paradoxosalpha:
For a log-time BRAZIL fan, that is an intriguing review. What do you think of The Illuminatus Trilogy?

> 38

I loved Illuminatus! when I first read it, in high school. I tried to re-read it a few years later and was shockingly underwhelmed: it did not hold up.

Illuminatus! opens with a quote from Mumbo Jumbo - that's your next level!

Now, Mumbo Jumbo does hold up on re-reads!

>39 paradoxosalpha: I had just about the same reaction when I tried a re-read a couple of years back. I also have The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles somwhere, which I've never read. Mumbo Jumbo, hmmm? What's the skinny?

I read The Earth Will Shake, but my memories of it have been fully eclipsed by Memoirs of a Gnostic Dwarf, a far superior book in a similar vein.

Mumbo Jumbo is a Neo-Hoodoo conspiracy yarn. Imagine if Dan Brown were a poet into jazz music and trance evocation.

>42 gwendetenebre:

"Set mostly in the 1920s, when the forces of Western civilization conspire to stamp out the dread plague of 'Jes' grew' - a dance craze rooted in the African-American community - not understanding that without the plague civilization cannot survive. Of course, the question of who's really civilized comes up, too. This great book is a dream of revenge, finally opening up into a psychogeographical map on which anyone can find a place."

Greil Marcus, from his list of "Best Pop Music Fiction", in The New Book of Rock Lists

>40 Soukesian:/43/44

Mumbo Jumbo just entered my TBR list. Thankyewverymush.

Another conspiracy novel for those who have cast the Illuminatus! training wheels behind them:
Gravity's Rainbow

Also: Foucault's Pendulum, not to mention Eco's latest The Prague Cemetery.

#46 I enjoyed The Prague Cemetery a lot. Part of its initial appeal for me was the fact that the main character's apartment was in a part of Paris where I ate lunch with my daughter just a short while before starting to read the book. (Note: While lunch in Paris is to be recommended it is not essential to the enjoyment of this book.)

Foucault's Pendulum was about 400 pages too long for the story it told in my opinion. It did contain a very funny description of vanity publishing.

My bedside TBR pile is going to eat me. After I finish Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, it's:

Where the Summer Ends: The Best Horror Stories of Karl Edward Wagner
Walk on the Wild Side: The Best Horror Stories of Karl Edward Wagner
Thunderball
The Ghost of Fear
Don't Look Now: Selected Stories of Daphne du Maurier
A Moment in the Sun
The Spy Who Loved Me

Confessions of an Opium Eater for the "Suspira de Profundis" section, which provides a title and partial inspiration for Our Lady of Darkness by Leiber. The Wagner books mainly so I can have "Sticks" and "Where the Summer Ends", in hardcover (plus they're Centipede editions). Ian Fleming because I'm steadily working my way through his amazing JB series. The books absolutely blow away those silly movies. With extreme prejudice. Du Maurier because I've heard so many amazing raves about her work, and have never read a word. Plus DON'T LOOK NOW is a favorite film of mine. A Moment in the Sun because I really like John Sayles' work as director and screenwriter, and this is just a huge historical novel that sounds great.

I should declare a book-buying moratorium, but I can't! Look for my upcoming work, "Confessions of a North American Book-Eater"...

> 48

If you're enjoying Ian Fleming, you should definitely give The Jennifer Morgue a go.

>49 paradoxosalpha:

So are these merely amusing, or are they actually chuckle-inducing? Sounds kind of like that DR WHO offshoot.... now what was that series called?

> 50

They're completely LOL for the geek set. You're thinking of Torchwood, and Stross' Laundry is far more Traditionally Weird. The Jennifer Morgue was written directly for fans of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" and "The Call of Cthulhu." I can hardly imagine what sense it would make to those who hadn't read the requisite HPL.

>51 paradoxosalpha:

*Sigh* And so another title gets added to the Amazon wishlist.

:)

> 52 the Amazon wishlist

I borrowed that one from the public library, as it happens.

Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas de Quincey turns out to be not much of a 19th-century Junky, disappointingly enough. It is more of a digressive, dissembling, and barely coherent rant of despair and mourning. There are some affecting, memorable passages, though, such as the author's doomed friendship with a young prostitute, and the description of his youthful breakdown at the death of a toddler-friend. The "Suspira de Profundis" section which follows "Confessions" is better, and is technically a sequel. The "Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow" chapter, which inspired the title and major problematic deity found in Fritz Leiber's masterwork Our Lady of Darkness is, in fact, the best part, as it introduces us to Mater Lachrymarum, Mater Suspiriorum, and Mater Tenebrarum - Our Ladies of Tears, Sighs and Darkness, respectively.

I don't really know what to do with it genre-wise, but I just finished and reviewed Hadon of Ancient Opar. It wasn't terrific, but it did go fast, and since it left me with a cliffhanger, I'm moving on to the sequel Flight to Opar.

So Stephen King has announced DOCTOR SLEEP for 2013. A sequel to The Shining. Here is a link to the Cemetery Dance announcement:

http://www.cemeterydance.com/page/CDP/PROD/o_king82

Anyone interested? I'm not sure. "This is an epic war between good and evil..." tends to make my eyes instantly glaze over.

I like how "The Shining by Stanley Kubrick" comes up when using the LT brackets :D

Uh, that's confusing. I've already got a different Doctor Sleep on my TBR pile. Not to mention hoping for a second TPB collection of Doktor Sleepless.

ETA: I finished reading and reviewed Flight to Opar.

>56 gwendetenebre:

Anyone interested?

Yeah, I am. El King has been discussing this one for quite a while now, and I must admit my curiousity is piqued. Question is, when will I get to it? I've already got From a Buick 8, Cell, Blaze, and Duma Key sitting atop Mt. TBR. :/

I just finished reading (and reviewed) a very intriguing piece of nonfiction: The Cosmic Serpent by Jeremy Narby. Something I didn't mention in my review is that it can give you a whole new set of spectacles for reading "The Call of Cthulhu"!

Just finished Don't Look Now: Selected Stories of Daphne du Maurier. Wow! I find it hard to believe that more of her stories haven't made their way into various horror anthologies. Her writing is very clear and concise, easily guiding the reader wherever she wishes, then BAM! A moment of revelation hits you and leaves you stunned.

"Don't Look Now" was made into one of the all-time great horror films by Nicholas Roeg. It follows the original tale fairly closely, and even du Maurier was reportedly pleased with the results. Both the original story and the film adaptation let the reader have it with both barrels at the end. This is one great horror tale! I never liked Hitchcock's THE BIRDS. Du Maurier didn't either. The story itself is astonishingly grim and atmospheric - I was actually reminded of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD at points. Brilliant. I was also quite impressed by the rest of the contents, especially "Split Second".

I liked this collection so much, I jumped over to Cemetery Dance and ordered their new release of The Doll: The Lost Short Stories.

#60
You will love the stories in The Doll: The Lost Short Stories. What amazed, and scared me, was the fact that she wrote these stories when she was between 20 and 22 years old.

>61 pgmcc:

Great to hear that you liked The Doll. I knew that du Maurier was pretty young when she wrote most of those stories. I wasn't sure how they'd compare with what I'd just read, but I knew I needed more! I don't know how I managed to miss her writing until now, but I'm making up for it. Powerful stuff.

During my air-travel time over the last few days I read The Place of the Lion by Charles Williams, and this morning I posted my review.

I just finished Jeffrey Ford's Memoranda, which was terrific. I posted a review, of course.

The Doll: The Lost Short Stories I'm taking slowly. Even at an early age, du Maurier's work is quite powerful. "The Doll" is a perverse gem of a short story.

Hide Me among the Graves by Tim Powers I'm a little more than halfway through. It's an enjoyably different take on Victorian-era vampires, with the usual historical characters that Powers likes to include, but it's not quite as involving as some of his other novels. Maybe I'm just sick of vampires (and zombies), period. Grotesqueries abound, however, so it still classifies as a fun read.

Just received Creole Belle by James Lee Burke, one of the very best writers out there, period. Also The Croning by Laird Barron. Barron seems to have garnered a bit of a rep, including accolades from the likes of Norman Partridge and S.T. Joshi. I'm curious. This new novel seems like a good place to start.

I've just started Deals with the Devil, an anthology that includes stories by Sheridan Le Fanu, Dunsany, Kuttner, and others.

>66 paradoxosalpha:

I do love a good deal-with-the-devil tale. Do you have the edition that the LT link goes to? I do believe that's a vintage Richard Powers cover. Nice!

> 67

Yes, that's the edition I have. It's in fairly fragile condition, being a pocket paperback well over fifty years old. There's no printed credit for the cover, but Powers's signature is visible in yellow behind the "Ballantine Books" at the bottom.

I'm a fan of all things Faustian, but my favorite deal-with-the-devil story is Cabell's The High Place.

>68 paradoxosalpha:

Don't know the Cabell story! Marvin Kaye's Devils and Demons: A Treasury of Fiendish Tales Old and New is a really well-done anthology with a similar bent. My favorite deal-with-the-devil story is actually the 1942 film THE DEVIL AND DANIEL WEBSTER:

http://www.criterion.com/films/622-the-devil-and-daniel-webster

Interesting that I was listening to Robert Johnson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Johnson) right before reading you guys' posts about Faustian bargains. =:^O

Reading Ed McBain's Eight Black Horses. I love the 87th Precinct books. The series lasted from the 1956-2005! Quite a run. After this it's back to du Maurier.

I finished reading and wrote a short review of Deals with the Devil. I've progressed to Wheatley's The Satanist.

>72 paradoxosalpha:, After reading a Fortean Times article on Wheatley's life and works and given your knowledge of "esoteric traditions", I'll be curious of your review of The Satanist}. I've also seen the Hammer films based on him but haven't gotten around to reading the man yet.

>72 paradoxosalpha:

Nice review, PA. :)

Finished reading Cthulhu's Heirs, one of the early entries in Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu Fiction series. There are maybe five above-average pieces out of 21, and couple of real stinkers, so not something I'd really recommend unless you pick it up on the cheap like I did. I'm also finally starting Vathek, which I'm actually pretty excited about.

>74 artturnerjr:

Let us know about Vathek, Art. It's on my list, too, thanks to PA.

I'm just finishing the well-above-average Cthulhu's Reign and I'm about halfway through Horns by Joe Hill, which is quite a page-turner.

>75 gwendetenebre:

Finished Vathek this morning. A bit of a letdown, I'm afraid - I found the "pride goeth before a fall" plotline to be a little banal, although I am willing to cede that it probably seemed a little less so in the 18th century. Also, there's no shortage of cool weird (weird as in weird fiction and weird as in strange) imagery in the book, particularly toward the end - it's certainly not difficult to picture Clark Ashton Smith, for one, poring over it, making copious notes as he went along. It was also a fairly quick read - it wasn't like I was gonna finish In Search of Lost Time in the span it that took me to read it.

Re: Joe Hill - is it fair to say that Dad would be proud?

To my current reading: I've currently got Dark Gods along with a couple of graphic novels from the library (Kick-Ass and 9-11: Artists Respond, Volume One) sitting in a little pile on my computer desk. Hmmm... which to start first...

>76 artturnerjr: About six years ago, inspired by Lovecraft's Supernatural Horror in Literature, I tried to work my way through the list of Gothics he mentioned. (Never made it to Charles Brockton Brown.) So I read Vathek, but it's one of those books that's pretty much left my memory though I did read Clark Ashton Smith's addition.

C.A.S. wrote an addition? Wow - will have to track that one down.

>78 Nicole_VanK:

http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/short-stories/217

This story also appears to be set in the milieu of Vathek:

http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/short-stories/80/the-ghoul

Well, I must read that.

> 79

The first link appears to be a translation or edition by CAS from a Beckford original.

>77 RandyStafford: It's called “The Third Episode of Vathek: The Story of the Princess Zulkaïs and the Prince Kalilah" and can be found in The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith, Volume 4: The Maze of the Enchanter.

According to the notes for that stories, Beckford wrote a series of separate stories called The Episodes of Vathek. The princes awaiting damnation along with Vathek recount the events that brought them to their ultimate fate. The story with the above title was unfinished by Beckford. An English translation from the French was done in 1922. Lovecraft owned that translation and suggested Smith finish the story.

Smith also wrote a story called "The Ghoul" which was set in the Arabic kingdom of the Caliphate Vathek.

>76 artturnerjr:

Joe Hill takes chances in his stories and can be quite unpredictable, although I think you can definitely see that is Dad has had a heavy influence on him. He is still developing his own unique style, though. I did not read Heart Shaped Box, but his work on Locke & Key caused me to take a second look. I'm glad I did. His short stories are excellent, as his his writing on the comic book series The Cape and its currently-running sequel THE CAPE 1969. Horns is pretty harsh as the protagonist learns the true feelings that his friends and loved ones actually have for him thanks to some unwanted powers he gains after he wakes up one day to find that he's sprouted devil-horns on his forehead!

>83 gwendetenebre:

I've had a copy of Heart-Shaped Box sitting in my TBR pile forever. Don't know when I'm going to get to it - next year, maybe?

Currently working on The Scarlet Letter, which I'm finding to be much closer to plain sailing than I did when I attempted it at 16 (19th century fiction not being particularly my cup of tea then).

I reading a delightful anthology called The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures.

Anyone doing any particular reading for Halloween season? I usually create an advance lineup of lit, film, music and comics for the month, but this year I'm just going to flow free-form with whatever strikes my fancy. I just started the massive second volume of The Century's Best Horror Fiction, which seems a fitting place to kick off from. While Russel Kirk starts the festivities off nicely with "Uncle Isaiah" from 1950, I was somewhat mortified to find that in this otherwise nifty volume Cemetery Dance has misspelled the title as "Uncle Isiah". How'd they miss that!

>87 gwendetenebre:

I started H.G. Wells' The Food of the Gods last week. Didn't really think of it in terms of Halloween reading when I picked it, but there are certainly parts of it that are creeping me out (Giant earwigs? YIKES!). It's also definitely not hard to see how it has provided fodder for various B horror films over the years.

>88 artturnerjr:

Funny you should mention it, Art. I have GNAW: FOOD OF THE GODS 2 in my Netflix queue. Might get to it it time for Halloween!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nE_PPZCc_u4

It's not especially Hallowe'eny, so far as I can tell, but I just started The Course of the Heart. This is the first M. John Harrison I've read, and I'm liking it so far (40 pages in or so). It's blurbed glowingly by Iain Sinclair and Clive Barker.

>90 paradoxosalpha:

A bit of Jerry Cornelius through a 19th-century lens?

> 91

You mean The Brothel in Rosenstrasse (not the Harrison)? Maybe. But Ricky von Beck is no secret agent; he's just a hapless dilletante whose aims are entirely personal, and poorly-defined even there.

More than the central character, the side character Clara -- nicknamed "Rose" -- seems to be a parallel for other Roses and Rosies in the larger Moorcock ouvre. (All of them apparently inspired by some certain actual person.) She was really the most sympathetic character in the book for me, btw.

>92 paradoxosalpha:

Huh? How did I even get to your "Brothel" review!?

I understand the possible "Rose" reference now, thanks.

>87 gwendetenebre:

Back to The Century's Best Horror Fiction Vol. 2, Everil Worrell's "Call Not Their Names" from 1954 started to annoy me and put me to sleep simultaneously, so I jumped to Robert Aickman's "Ringing the Changes" from the following year and woke right up. Aickman is great!

> 93

You probably got there through the link I posted in "The Dreaming City" Deep Ones thread.

Patiently waiting for payday so I can go pick up the new Pete Townshend autobiography:

http://amzn.com/0062127241

Finished and reviewed Wheatley's The Satanist.

I started reading 'In the Drift' by Michael Swanwick, not traditional horror for the halloween season, but it's got genetic mutants and vampires in a post-apocalyptic future where '3-Mile Island' in Pennsylvania has become a nuclear wasteland. It's the closest thing I got in paperback, I don't like taking my hardcovers on the go. It's a good read so far with plenty of promise.

Since I didn't feel like lugging the 900 pound gorilla that is The Century's Best Horror Fiction to and from work, I was rooting around in the boxes that contain my still-unpacked library and found Laird Barron's novel The Croning. I'm hooked after 30-some pages. This one has potential!

I read The Beetle off of Project Gutenberg. I thought it was decent but nothing great. Apparently, it was quite popular when it first came out. Even more popular that Dracula which came out the same year. It's got some well drawn moments of tension and terror but also some over the top attempts that come off as silly. A bland romantic element doesn't help.

After being mostly wowed by Laird Barron's first novel The Croning, I'm going back for more. Just ordered his second short-story collection The Imago Sequence. Barron is one to watch. Also up is the new Flavia de Luce novel Speaking from Among the Bones. Flavia is a totally innocent yet pleasantly sardonic 11-year old with an almost unnatural love of chemistry (and poisons). The books are for grown-ups, trust me. Set in 1950's England. I love this series completely.

I've also been craving some fantasy (happens every holiday season). I've sort of narrowed it down to re-reading Roger Zelazny's "Amber" books or possibly some Moorcock... And I still have Dunsany on the TBR pile!

My reading seems to have synched up with the calendar.

I've just read the fourth Locke & Key volume, which is set in the wintertime. And I'm reading The Greater Trumps by Charles Williams, with an Xmastide setting.

Arriving sometime this week is John Russo's Undead, a compilation of his novels Night of the Living Dead and Return of the Living Dead. Russo co-wrote the screenplay for NotLD with George Romero. I've never read the novelization of the film, although I liked the RotLD paperback when I read it long ago (waaaay before zombies got boring). It will be nice to have both of these in one purty Cemetery Dance volume.

I highly recommend Thomas Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race to everyone here. While it's primarily a wonderfully sardonic examination of such philosophical bents as antinatalism, determinsim and pessimism and features the likes of Schopenhauer, Nietzche and Zapffe, it simultaneously looks at humankind's moth-to-flame fascination with horror. In particular, it draws a line between the scary yet ultimately feel-good horror of something like Blatty's The Exorcist and the infinitely more troubling cosmic horror of Lovecraft and identity horror of Roland Topor. I also enjoyed Ligotti's brief comparison of Hamlet and Macbeth in the context of the volume's themes.

Just started Erik Larsen's In the Garden of Beasts, a nonfiction account of an American family living in Hitler's Berlin. If you having read Larsen's The Devil in the White City yet, do yourself a favor!

#104 KentonSem

I am a great fan of Ligotti and while I have The Conspiracy Against the Human Race on my shelf I have not read it yet. It now goes on my 2013 planned reading list.

My 2013 lists for the TBR Challenge group (http://www.librarything.com/groups/tbrchallenge):

MAIN LIST
1) Black Wings: Tales of Lovecraftian Horror - S.T. Joshi (ed.)
2) The Food of the Gods - H.G. Wells
3) Deathbird Stories - Harlan Ellison
4) The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories - Michael Cox and R.A. Gilbert (eds.)
5) Rendezvous with Rama - Arthur C. Clarke
6) From a Buick 8 - Stephen King
7) Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos - James Turner (ed.)
8) The Lovers - Philip Jose Farmer
9) Flesh - Farmer
10) Strange Relations - Farmer
11) The City and the Stars - Clarke
12) Dark Gods - T.E.D. Klein

ALTERNATES LIST
1) Modern Fantasy: The Hundred Best Novels - David Pringle
2) Lovecraft: A Biography - L. Sprague de Camp
3) The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books - J. Peder Zane
4) The Communist Manifesto - Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
5) Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies - Jared Diamond
6) In Cold Blood - Truman Capote
7) The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
8) The Fortress of Solitude - Jonathan Lethem
9) Pulp Fiction (screenplay) - Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary
10) Superfolks - Robert Mayer
11) Justice Society, Vol. 1 - Paul Levitz et al.
12) Squadron Supreme by Mark Gruenwald - Mark Gruenwald et al.

Already finished Modern Fantasy (which I enjoyed) and started on The City and the Stars (fascinating scenario, somewhat slow beginning). Much more weird fic stuff this year than on the 2012 lists (which you can see in post #23 above). Cheating a bit as I have read at least some of the stories out of all the short story collections except (I think) Strange Relations. So it goes.

Interesting choices, Art. I've only read 5 of those titles.

>107 gwendetenebre:

Thanks! As Joseph Campbell would say, I'm following my bliss. :)

Speaking of "off topic," I just finished reading and posted my review of Sex Secrets of Ancient Atlantis.

109> Thanks for the review. I thought I recognized John Grant's name -- and checked his entry out in the Science Fiction Encyclopedia.

>109 paradoxosalpha:

Outstanding review, PA. Where on earth did you find this particular tome?

> 111

Thanks! I picked it up at a little used bookshop in my neighborhood. I recall spotting it on the shelf, pulling it out, and wheeling around to the shopkeeper to cry, "Sold!"

Thanks to the privacy-eradicating capabilities of LibraryThing, you can actually see every book I've ever bought from that shop (a list of 18). Of course, the selection has more to do with my interests than their total stock -- but they do manage to meet my interests often enough.

>112 paradoxosalpha:

You found the PB novelization of The Brotherhood of Satan there!? Some bookstore! I love that movie.

I'm really digging Clifford D. Simak's 1967 SF novel The Werewolf Principle. Bioengineering ethics and a kind of synthetic were-creature. Ahead of its time!

>114 gwendetenebre: I should read that one again. I was pretty young when I read it, and it seemed pretty weird, but it introduced me to Simak, an author I like.

Broke down and bought 11/22/63 by Stephen King. It's better than I expected. Time travel conundrums as they apply to the rules laid down by King are handled well. It's also good to pay a visit to malevolent old Derry, Maine and I enjoyed the cameos from some It characters. I'm about a third of the way through and haven't even arrived in Texas yet.

Even though there are a lot of other things I need to be reading right now, I just let myself start off on Stross' third Laundry book: The Fuller Memorandum.

Also: I recently finished (and reviewed, natch) the very fun Doctor Sleep by Madison Smartt Bell. The more I think about it, the more it seems to be a perfect hybrid between Daemonomania and Fight Club.

>118 paradoxosalpha:

Funny you should mention that title - it's been recycled:

http://www.cemeterydance.com/page/CDP/PROD/king07

Also of Weird note is the Warren Ellis project (abandoned mid-stream, it seems) Doktor Sleepless.

Recently finished reading Arthur C. Clarke's The City and the Stars, the cosmic scope of which reminded me quite a bit of late-period HPL tales like The Shadow out of Time. Here's my review:

http://www.amazon.com/review/R2JYZYSF4XWSPM/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

> 121

Wishlisted on the strength of your review.

In the process, I noticed a 2001 edition bound with The Sands of Mars, another Clarke I haven't read. Given my appetite for Martian stories, that goes on the list too.

>121 artturnerjr:

As much as I love Kubrick's film, I've never read Clarke. I'll remedy that soon enough. I've been meaning to catch up on a lot of vintage SF, and began recently with The Werewolf Principle. The new Library of America American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s set is also on my list.

I just read and reviewed the third of Stross's Laundry books: The Fuller Memorandum.

>122 paradoxosalpha:

I think you'd enjoy it, PA - there's a mythic quality to the storyline that I think you'd find very appealing.

In the process, I noticed a 2001 edition bound with The Sands of Mars, another Clarke I haven't read.

That's the one I got from the library. Unfortunately, it was due back before I had time to read The Sands of Mars. :/

>123 gwendetenebre:

As much as I love Kubrick's film, I've never read Clarke.

Clarke has always been my favorite of science fiction's Big Three. Asimov has great ideas but I don't really care for him as a stylist; Heinlein is usually very entertaining but is a little too baldly didactic for me most of the time.

I've been meaning to catch up on a lot of vintage SF

Me too - there are a lot of classic authors in the genre that I haven't read anything by. I've found the website Worlds Without End (https://www.worldswithoutend.com/) to be an invaluable resource in this regard; unfortunately, it's also a crazy huge time sink, so beware! :D

>124 paradoxosalpha:

Stross's Laundry books

God, I gotta get to those soon; every time I read about them, I think, "He wrote those for me, didn't he?" :D

>101 gwendetenebre:

Just finished reading Laird Barron's novella The Broadsword (out of Black Wings: New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror). Holy shit! That is one twisted piece of cosmic horror fiction. Definitely seeking out more by this author.

>126 artturnerjr:

I'm currently reading Barron's collection The Imago Sequence. Absolutely top-notch stuff.

Interesting interviews with Mr. Barron here...

http://charles-tan.blogspot.com/2008/09/feature-interview-with-laird-barron.html

...and here...

http://shirleyjacksonawards.blogspot.com/2008/05/charles-tan-interview-with-lair...

Sounds like he'd fit in pretty well around these parts. 8)

>128 artturnerjr:

Thanks for those, Art. Barron mentions the story "The Tale of the Black Sloth" in each interview. It's a particularly disorienting and nightmarish story. I've noticed in my readings so far that Barron seems to have a fascination with sinister old women who take on monstrous qualities. And his Lovecraftian touches are masterful.

>129 gwendetenebre:

A quote that I liked from another interview I read with Barron (at http://booksaremyonlyfriends.blogspot.com/2010/01/more-questions-with-laird-barr...:

People often come to a bad end in my stories, but it's not because I've lowered the Hammer of the Gods on them for their promiscuity or doping, it's because the universe is a meat grinder.

Though it's not the language he would have used, I find the sentiment very Lovecraftian.

>131 artturnerjr: I've liked the Barron I've read so far. His "Gamma" from Fungi even references "The Whisperer in Darkness".

Last year Centipede Press asked its customers for a list of their top 30 horror novels of the twentieth century. For what it's worth, mine follow (in order of publication). I'd re-do it a little based on recent reads from Michael Cisco and Laird Barron, but I'll post it unedited. If anyone else would like to play... please post yours.

The House on the Borderland by W.H. Hodgson (1908)
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward by H.P. Lovecraft (1927)
At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft (1931)
The Werewolf of Paris by Guy Endore (1933)
Conjure Wife by Fritz Leiber (1943)
I Am Legend by Richard Matheson (1954)
Some of Your Blood by Theodore Sturgeon (1961)
Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury (1962)
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson (1962)
The Other by Thomas Tryon (1971)
Hell House by Richard Matheson (1971)
Harvest Home by Thomas Tryon (1973
The Search for Joseph Tully by William H. Hallahan (1974)
Salem's Lot by Stephen King (1975)
City of the Dead by Herbert Lieberman (1976)
Our Lady of Darkness by Fritz Leiber (1977)
The Shining by Stephen King (1977)
The Face That Must Die by Ramsey Campbell (1979)
Ghost Story by Peter Straub (1979)
Shadowland by Peter Straub (1980)
They Thirst by Robert M. McCammon (1981)
Fevre Dream by George R.R. Martin (1982)
The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers (1983)
The Ceremonies by T.E.D. Klein (1984)
The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks (1984)
The Song of Kali by Dan Simmons (1985)
Summer of Night by Dan Simmons (1981)
The Cipher by Kathe Koja (1991)
From the Teeth of Angels by Jonathan Carroll (1995)

Received American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s. Wow - this is gorgeous! The slipcase and both volumes feature different pieces of Richard M. Powers artwork.

Library of America has created an astounding online companion piece to the books that is well worth checking out:

http://www.loa.org/sciencefiction/

>133 gwendetenebre:

A useful tagmash:

http://www.librarything.com/tag/20th+century%2C+horror%2C+novel

>134 gwendetenebre:

Yeah, that site is great!

>135 artturnerjr:

Hey - that tagmash actually reminds me of a few titles I need in my collection.

>133 gwendetenebre:

I think I'd have to bump From the Teeth of Angels in favor of The Divinity Student by Michael Cisco (1999).

>133 gwendetenebre:

The way that The Wasp Factory has been described to me, it seems like something I'd... well, enjoy doesn't seem like quite the right word... get a lot out of, let's say. :D

>137 artturnerjr:

I recall being somewhat stunned by what that book has to offer. I need to read it again one of these days. I believe it might be also on the roster for a Centipede Press edition at some point.

Wasp Factory is the single most disturbing book I have ever read - terrific stuff!

Ok, I'm officially sold; The Wasp Factory is on my 2014 tbr list. 8)

ETA: Also added Conjure Wife and Some of Your Blood to my Amazon wish list.

Just handed to me while I'm attending a boring webinar: Generation Zombie: Essays on the Living Dead in Modern Culture. Ah, the perks of working in a library!

I just posted my review of the fourth and latest of Stross's Laundry books.

I should be posting my 500th book review to LT sometime soon, and I'm trying to decide how to celebrate. My Other Reader said I could buy myself a book. It seems like a good excuse.

My 500th review turned out to be for Smith of Wootton Major.

Well done, para... Congratulations.

I enjoyed your review.

>143 paradoxosalpha:

Nicely done, PA. Your critical prolificity is humbling. :)

James Herbert has died. I particularly enjoyed The Survivor when it came out and Others more recently.

http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-21870413

> 146

That's a shock. There's been an upturn of interest in his work in the UK, probably off the back of the BBC adaptation of The Secret of Crickley Hall last year.

I remember a paperback copy of Lair (or, as the cover had it, "the Rats have found their LAIR!") at my school, almost being a real-life example of the "banned-book-secretly-passed-from-hand-to-hand".

For lack of a better place to post it (that I can find, anyway), I'll mention here that I just started L. Sprague de Camp's Lovecraft biography.

I'm currently riveted by Shell Shocked: My Life with the Turtles, Flo and Eddie, and Frank Zappa, etc. by Howard Kaylan.

Kaylan dishes the dirt in a humorous low-key manner. I like the Turtles and Flo & Eddie, but I mainly got this because I am a Zappa fan. Good stuff!

I'm currently reading Nomad Codes, a collection of essays by Erik Davis which promises on pp. 114-135 "Calling Cthulhu: The Magickal Realism of H.P. Lovecraft." I may hate the spelling magickal -- I do hate the spelling magickal* -- but I like Davis's writing a lot, and I'm looking forward to that one. I've previously read and enjoyed his magisterial exegesis of Led Zeppelin's fourth album.

* Magick is an adjective as well as a noun. If you want a third syllable, drop the K! If I had been editing Davis's subtitle, it would have been Magick Realism, since the intent is clearly to both allude to and distinguish from the literary genre of "magical realism."

Got The 20th Century's Greatest Hits: A Top 40 List by the late Paul Williams in the mail on Saturday and got sucked into it immediately. A great read, but it's making me miss him even more; Williams was truly sui generis.

>149 gwendetenebre:

I learned an interesting bit of trivia in Howard Kaylan's Shell Shocked: My Life with the Turtles, Flo and Eddie, and Frank Zappa, etc.. Seems that Kaylan and Flo & Eddie's long time drummer Joe Stefko went on a horror and fantasy first edition book-buying binge while on tour in in 1987, spending thousands of dollars in the process. Kaylan mentions books by Stephen King and Harlan Ellison in particular. Turns out that they liked this doing so much that Stefko went on to co-found Charnel House press. Kaylan had two short stories published. One was in Martin Greenberg's Phantoms of the Night. The other was Nancy Collins's Forbidden Acts.

Who knew?

My Other Reader is currently in the home stretch of Meyrink's Walpurgisnacht. It has kept her riveted, and sometimes literally gape-mouthed. Last night she read me from it an address given by Lucifer that was pretty excellent stuff. I like Meyrink a lot, and I'm sure I'll get to this one eventually.

>60 gwendetenebre:

Dame Daphne Du Maurier died today in 1989. THE DEEP ONES will be tackling "Don't Look Now" in June.

#154 Thank you for pointing this out. I am currently just over halfway through Rebecca.

I must seek out Don't Look Now. It is not one that has come to my attention before.

She was a pretty lady in her day, wasn't she?

>155 pgmcc:,156

Yep - she was one twisted little cutie pie. I believe that photo was taken not long before she began writing the unnerving tales that can be found in The Doll: the Lost Short Stories. Interesting tidbit I just ran across: "Neville Chamberlain was reading Rebecca when he flew to Munich to meet Hitler in 1939".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/mar/03/daphne-du-maurier-sisters-jane-dunn-...

>157 gwendetenebre:

she was one twisted little cutie pie

My kinda gal! :D

Finished reading Lovecraft: A Biography. Here's my review:

http://www.amazon.com/review/R28VITRW9L4OX0

Just started: Deathbird Stories by Harlan Ellison.

>159 artturnerjr:

Good review, Art, and point well taken on "why two stars?" - sounds like you were definitely reading about Lovecraft through a distorted lens. I suppose it's still a worthy volume to have in your Lovecraftian library, if only to have the Derlethian view at hand for comparison's sake. And Deathbird Stories remains a heavy hitter, even after all this time.

I'm having a blast with Doc Savage: Skull Island. It's a perfect homage to both Doc and Kong, with headhunters, prehistoric beasts, a contest-to-the-death and more adventure than even Merian C. Cooper could have shaken a spear at. A lot of Doc's personal history is revealed. He's about 20 years old in this story, a little bit cocky and headstrong, but the reader definitely gets a good idea that he will become the Doc we are all familiar with. The story actually features three generations of the Savage family. I'm also really enjoying Will Murray's descriptions of the creatures of Skull Island. He really brings them to vivid, often truly hideous, life.

Happy to see that the next Dan Simmons novel, slated for October 2013, will be The Abominable.

http://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/dan-simmons/the-abominable/9780316198837...

On a Simmons-related sidenote, AMC will be producing The Terror as a series.

I was in a bookshop today and checked the shelves to see if there were any new Simmons or Stephenson books out. Your posting is very apropos.

(Yes, I did buy some books. Shshshsh! Don't tell anyone, please. The wife will kill me.)

Hidden Treasures:

Herbert Lieberman wrote a number of suspense novels, but three in particular are masterpieces of grim police procedural and sicko killer mayhem. Best of all, they bring the period of 1970's / 1980's New York vividly to life and they can be extremely creepy.

CITY OF THE DEAD is the one to start with. The Chief Medical Officer of New York is not only dealing with the discovery of a lot of violently dismembered body parts, but his grown daughter has vanished. This one actually goes waaaaaay beyond grim and exists in a stark mortuary-light of its own.

Next up comes the rooftop-cinder-block-dropping killer of NIGHT BLOOM, who may not be quite as twisted as the hypocondriac sociopath who also figures in the plot. And finally we have the doppelganger serial killers of Shadow Dancers.

Thanks to mass media saturation of CSI-whatever to DEXTER and on to the latest arch-fiend-serial-killer best seller ad infinitum, the genre is pretty much yawn-inducing at this point. But the Leiberman books are something special - that's why I keep going back to them over the years.

>156 artturnerjr:

Happy birthday Daphne Du Maurier! 106 years young!

Just finished Deathbird Stories. My review is here:

http://www.amazon.com/review/RY3SRD7GLVI29/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

>165 artturnerjr:

Nicely done review, Art. Ellison celebrated his 79th birthday yesterday! He has a new graphic novel called Harlan Ellison's 7 Against Chaos coming out in July. I've heard that it's really good - I have it pre-ordered.

>166 gwendetenebre:

Thanks, Kenton. That was a nice bit of serendipity, wasn't it? Hard to believe that the former enfant terrible of American genre fiction is pushing 80!

Harlan in his prime. I haven't watched it yet, but I'm told it's great: http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2013/05/video-tom-snyders-1994-interview-with-h....

>168 RandyStafford:

I actually watched most of the Snyder interviews and a bunch of other Ellison arcana via YouTube a couple of weeks ago. Ellison is one of my fave subjects. Always fascinating. The recent documentary Dreams With Sharp Teeth is very well done and worth seeking out.

>168 RandyStafford: I'll definitely second the recomendations for Dreams With Sharp Teeth.

>169 gwendetenebre: & 170

I'll third it. Probably the most fascinating documentary about someone in the creative arts since Crumb (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109508/).

Just started Rendezvous with Rama, which we will be starting to discuss over at TBR Challenge in a couple of weeks if anyone would like to join us:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/154994

PS Heading out to the library today - think I'm gonna have to see if they have Dreams with Sharp Teeth in so I can watch it again. 8)

Currently reading Ramsey Campbell's short 1979 novel The Nameless with a Candide chaser.

My current re-reading of Campbell's The Nameless reminds me of just how very very good he is. There I am, cruising along, enjoying his signature surrealistic terror riffs when BAM! a moment of purely physical horror whips out and hits hard. I'm talking some pretty extreme stuff. This made me check out the huge amount of his work recently done by PS Publishing. Besides the hardcover editions - often signed - I see that they've been publishing new paperback editions of his oeuvre under their Drugstore Indian Press imprint. I just ordered the collection Told by the Dead. Might have to collect these.

http://www.pspublishing.co.uk/drugstore-indian-press-57-c.asp

It must be noted that the great Richard Matheson has passed away. There is just no end to all the great work he did, from I Am Legend to Hell House, the Twilight Zone tv show, not to mention The Night Stalker and Duel. A true giant across several genres! He was 87.

>175 gwendetenebre:

Jesus. Just the influence of I Am Legend alone is gigantic. As Wikipedia notes:

Though referred to as "the first modern vampire novel", it is as a novel of social theme that I Am Legend made a lasting impression on the cinematic zombie genre, by way of director George A. Romero, who acknowledged its influence and that of its 1964 adaptation, The Last Man on Earth, upon his seminal film Night of the Living Dead (1968). Discussing the creation of Night of the Living Dead, Romero remarked, "I had written a short story, which I basically had ripped off from a Richard Matheson novel called I Am Legend." Moreover, film critics noted similarities between Night of the Living Dead (1968) and The Last Man on Earth (1964).

Stephen King said, "Books like I Am Legend were an inspiration to me". Film critics noted that the British film 28 Days Later (2002) and its sequel 28 Weeks Later both feature a rabies-type plague ravaging Great Britain, analogous to I Am Legend.

I just read and reviewed Doctor Orient: A Mind Adventure into the Occult.

>177 paradoxosalpha:

"Susej"! :-D

Just read the novel Alice Walks by Michael Aronovitz in a single day. Haven't done that in a while! This recent Centipede Press volume is quite enjoyable and, although it's told from the point of view of a 14-year-old boy, works well as diverting, serious adult horror fiction. I'm not sure that I really believed the central conceit that, due to impending litigation against the maker of a faulty crypt-sealer product, the coffin of a young girl has been pulled out of the wall of her small family "lawn tomb", opened up and then just left there for days on end, casket lid up and decaying contents exposed. Well, there is some yellow police tape draped over the locked crypt entrance, but still. Maybe that actually happened somewhere, but something tells me that in the real world the corpse would have been temporarily removed or at least... repackaged. Anyway, the rest of the novel is a fine read, with a few good scare-scenes added here and there. After reading it, I thought "well, that was a good little ghost story", but then, after considering it for for a bit, I changed that to "Wow - that was a GREAT neo-gothic tale!" The denouement in the form of a letter packs a particularly nasty punch. The novel really fits into the tradition quite nicely.

I must recommend Tarzan and the Valley of Gold by Fritz Leiber! Seems Fritz took on the assignment of novelizing the screenplay for the 1966 film of the same name and ended up writing a really exciting 300+ page, 25th volume to the Tarzan series. As often happens, the Ape-Man finds himself far afield, this time in South America. The jungle tropes still manage to be there (lion, chimp, "boy"), but it's all logically done. With the addition of seething arch villain Vinaro and his stone-killer, karate-chopping sidekick "Train", I was reminded of nothing so much as a really good James Bond novel, minus the sex scenes (Tarzan is a married man, right?). Leiber even dedicated the novel to Fleming (and A.C. Doyle, ERB, and a few others). Not that there aren't some unusual erotic undertones. This is Leiber, after all. There are even some moments of genuine horror along the way. This is really a pretty gruesome book. When Tarzan advises Major, the lion, to attack a baddie. The beast bites the man's face off. "Crunch"!!! Tarzan also fights dirty when he has to!

On the way: Harlan Ellison's new graphic novel, Seven Against Chaos and Light of the World by James Lee Burke. It's always exciting to begin a new Dave Robicheaux novel!

I'm three-quarters of the way through the new Dan Simmons novel. The Abominable is fantastic! It's a work of historical fiction, which Simmons does so well, this time dealing with a 1925 attempt to scale Mount Everest. The intricacies of mountain climbing are painstakingly detailed, allowing the reader to feel like he too is hanging off of a mind-numbingly high vertical drop, attached only by only crampons, ice hammer and "miracle rope". Additional suspense is added to the mix as the mission also involves a search-and-recovery effort. Now I know what kind of physical trauma is actually inflicted on the bodies of those brave souls who lose their lives climbing these giants. Not to mention a Buddhist "sky funeral" for a fallen Sherpa. Yikes! Despite what the title intimates , the yeti have only been fleetingly mentioned once or twice so far over the course of 400-some pages, and I'm not about to go out on the interwebs looking for spoilers. Knowing Simmons, I'm betting that there will be something beastly out there in the snow for the last part of the book, even if it's only human nature. To be continued...

Wow - I kinda forgot this thread even existed!

The standout of my recent non-weird fic reading has to be Truman Capote's magnificent In Cold Blood, a riveting and empathetic account of the murder of a family in a small Kansas town in the 1950s. Highly recommended.

I'm about 3/4 of the way through Doctor Mirabilis by James Blish (the author of "More Light!" among others), which is an extremely well-researched medieval story about Roger Bacon. As the author cautions, it would be going too far to call it "fictionalized biography," since the positive facts about Bacon's life are so scant. It's a great read, though.

>182 gwendetenebre:

I won't say if any Yeti are actually encountered, but the last quarter of The Abominable is a nail-biter, and it wraps up beautifully. Funny thing is, despite the extravagantly detailed passages regarding mountain climbing, the core story reminded me of nothing so much as a Doc Savage adventure! In a good way. I'm sure it wasn't intentional on Simmons's part, but he can now add the pulp novel to his long list of genres conquered.

>185 gwendetenebre: Sounds like a good one, Kenton. I like those cold novels, and I liked The Terror.

If you enjoyed the 80's & 90's period of the great horror 'zines, from Sleazoid Express and Gore Gazette to Slimetime, Shock Xpress and waaay beyond, you need to get the 800+ page book Xerox Ferox: The Wild World of the Horror Film Fanzine by John Szpunar. This is one of the most addictive books I've encountered in many a moon. It features dozens of interviews with the creators, editors, and writers of these highly knowledgeable, opinionated and often hilarious periodicals. The book itself is heavily illustrated in full 'zine-mode. Of course, the likes of role models Fangoria and Castle of Frankenstein are included too. The author mentions in the forward that Michael Weldon of the amazing Psychotronic magazine is a glaring omission. I would love to see an interview with Weldon one day. His mag still gets referenced often enough to provide some background. I was really pleased with the inclusion of my fave, Steve Puchalski of Slimetime and Shock Cinema and also by the late Bill Landis of Sleazoid Express, whose in-depth chronicling of 42nd Street in the days before it was Disneyfied constitutes in its entirety an important historical artefact. Highly, highly recommended.

I've just read Umberto Eco's The Prague Cemetery. Part of its attraction for me comes from its debouchment into the occult scene of the Yellow Nineties (and the last part of the book does include an excellent Black Mass), but the point of the thing is something else altogether, as I note in my review.

#188 @paradoxosalpha, I enjoyed The Prague Cemetery and you are correct to extrapolate Eco's ideas to other areas of prejudice. A general point I took from the story was the general unreliability of sources on historical detail, a topic which is the cornerstone of Baudolino.

I recently acquired his collection of writings entitled, Inventing the Enemy, in which it explores the vilification of nations or sections of the community as a tool for unifying a country or particular group, something that is only too obvious over the past few decades.

I wondered if the "who am I?" conundrum facing the imaginary Simonini in The Prague Cemetery wasn't the driving question that inspired Eco in his formulation of the novel: "What would the person (or people) authoring The Protocols of the Elders of Zion be like?" For all the period color in the story, the answer to the question is all too easy to imagine.

I ended up following The Prague Cemetery with Myerink's Walpurgisnacht, which brought me just a few years forward, and a couple of notches more Weird. My review is up.

I am currently reading The Golem. I do not know why it took me so long to get around to it. It is much richer than I had expected.

#191 I enjoyed your review of The Prague Cemetery. I agree wholeheartedly with your parallels with present day Russia and the U.S.

Thanks! I've read The Green Face and The White Dominican, both of which were superb. The Golem is on my shelf, and The Angel of the West Window is on my wishlist.

#194 I just had a quick look at the books we share and I did not notice any works by Stefan Grabinski. You might enjoy his stories. He has been described as the Polish Poe, but I think that takes away from his own uniqueness. "The Polish Poe" is a great attention grabber, but his work has its own value.

Thanks for the tip!

Been dipping into two topics of long-standing interest for me this year - music criticism and superhero comics. The music criticism has been in the form of two books in the 33 1/3 series (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33%E2%85%93): Kevin Courrier's Trout Mask Replica and Carl Wilson's Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste. The latter is probably the more interesting of the two: in it, Wilson uses his loathing of the music of Celine Dion to explore the nature of and the socio-economic functions of taste.

Superhero comics-wise, I've been picking up Marvel's reprints of the Alan Moore run of Miracleman, the recoloring and restoration of which is, well, marvelous. Also checking out Alex Ross' Justice, which features a (thus far) intriguing story told through Ross' trademark photorealistic painted images. Neat stuff.

I've read two of the 33 1/3 books. The one on Aqualung was okay, but I really enjoyed the one about Led Zeppelin IV.

I see I gave the 33 1/3 on the Kinks' 'Village Green Preservation Society' album 4 stars but I can't remember what precisely struck me about it at the time. Actually it might be the wealth of detail in the book, as opposed to the rather more personal or impressionistic approaches that some books in the series take. I think it's this book that informed me Ray Davies' spoken sections in the track 'Big Sky' were supposed to be a Burt Lancaster impersonation(!)

>198 paradoxosalpha: & 199

My local public library seems to have just about the entire series in its collection. I can definitely see reading several more volumes from it; for a music geek like myself (and an albums-over-singles guy to boot), they seem to me to be the epitome of a quick and entertaining read.

Based on recent rave reviews by Harlan Ellison and others, I'm reading Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime That Changed America. This, of course, is the crime that inspired Ellison's short story "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs". The new book separates the real story from the urban myth that instantly sprang from Kitty's murder. The history of Queens and lower Manhattan (i.e. Greenwich Village) plays a large role so far. Fascinating.



Personal quibble - Ellison's name is misspelled "Harlon" on the acknowledgements page. "Harlon"? Really!? Shame on Norton & Co. for missing that one.

ETA

Not the acknowledgements page. The mistake is in the bibliography.

>201 gwendetenebre:

Kitty Genovese's murder has played a fairly significant role in popular culture in general (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Kitty_Genovese#In_popular_culture). Alan Moore fans, for example, will recall that her murder plays a very significant role in the origin of Rorschach in Moore and Dave Gibbons' graphic novel Watchmen.

>202 artturnerjr:

The book describes those very panels at one point. To his credit, Moore doesn't say that "at least 38 neighbors watched", which is part of the myth (the artwork plays it a bit differently). There were perhaps 7 or 8 eyewitnesses, only two of whom really understood what was happening. Also, three people did phone police.

Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime That Changed America is a powerful work that allows anyone with even a passing knowledge of the crime to take the blinders off. It also ends in an interesting manner. Instead of the kind of post-events wrapup that many true crime books utilize, it goes back to describe the entire sequence of tragic events on 3/13/64 as they actually happened. The result is as heartbreaking as it is compelling.

I don't see much difference between "almost 40" and "at least 38."

>204 paradoxosalpha:

I was a bit unclear. What's key is that Moore says that the neighbors heard the event, which is closer to the truth than the myth-version, which has them actually watching from their windows. The original, now infamous, New York Times article begins, "For more than half an hour 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens". That line is not accurate, but it gave birth to an urban legend and would help to shape entirely new schools of thought in social psychology.

Speaking of Alan Moore, I recently finished reading his graphic novel From Hell. My review is here:

http://www.amazon.com/review/R3QE8LCIK5FUMW/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=...

James Ellroy's novels always do a number on my head. His latest, Perfidia is no exception. Being the first book in the "Second L.A. Quartet", it's kind of a prequel, taking place in Los Angeles just after the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941 and featuring younger versions of some characters whom we've already met in other books. Reading Ellroy is kind of like reading bebop. I think Stephen King says it best in a blurb on the back cover:

"Ask me to name the best living novelist who's fierce, brave, funny, scatalogical, beautiful, convoluted, and paranoid... and it becomes simple: James Ellroy. If insanity illuminated by highly dangerous strokes of literary lightning is your thing, then Ellroy's your man".

The scariest thing is that I suspect that Ellroy's historical fictions usually aren't too far off from the actual truth.

Wow, I think I forgot this thread existed!

I recently finished rereading A Princess of Mars for the third or fourth time in preparation for 2015, during which I'm planning on reading the Barsoom series (https://www.librarything.com/series/Barsoom) all the way through for the first time. The novel's flaws become more apparent upon rereading, and yet it's flawed in a charming way. Like The Lord of the Rings, it's a novel where it's fairly obvious that the author has not been formally educated on the "proper" way to structure a novel, and as a result it has a couple of clunky spots. It's not a major deficit, however: like his fellow fantasists Tolkien and Robert E. Howard, nobody ever had to school Burroughs on how to tell a good story. Also like those authors, his soaring imagination remains affecting after all these years.

>207 gwendetenebre:

I've had a copy of Ellroy's L.A. Confidental sitting around for years but never seem to get to it. I'll have to make it a point to do so soon; I don't think I've ever heard a uncomplimentary word spoken about his work.

Just started The Fifth Heart by Dan Simmons. Featuring the Dynamic Duo of Henry James and Sherlock Holmes in America. This being Simmons, I expect the book to go light years beyond mere Holmesian pastiche. So far, so good. It's rather humorous and very strange. Holmes suspects that he is really nothing more than a fictional character, you see.

>209 gwendetenebre: I am always dubious about books that use historical figures or existing fictional characters. I was dubious about Simmons's Drood and read The Mystery of Edwin Drood before reading Drood to have a sense of the original first.

Simmons work, while he took liberties with some things, wrote a good book. Since reading Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion I have always been keen on his books.

I now have the same feelings about The Fifth Heart but as it is Simmons I am likely to read it and enjoy it.

The point about Holmes suspecting he is really a fictional character reminded me of a radio play I listened to in the car many years ago. In the play Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was amazed at the popularity of his Holmes stories and was amazed at how people talked about Holmes and Watson as if they were real. On a whim he pays a visit to 221b Baker Street and finds Watson at home but goes away with letting Watson know who he is. He plans to return later when, as Watson had informed him, Mr. Holmes would be at home.

Unfortunately I arrived at my destination and had to stop listening to the radio. I never did find out what happened at the end of the play.

I have a strong feeling that The Fifth Heart is going to end up in my possession very soon. Thank you for your post.

>210 pgmcc:

And of course in the Simmons book, Holmes does seem to exist as a real-life person in the world of Henry James. I'm looking forward to finding out how DS will address that in light of Sherlock's suspicions.

On a trip to London last week I visited Waterstones flagship bookshop off Piccadilly Circus (it's in an art-deco building that used to be Simpsons - apparently the inspiration for "Are You Being Served?").

They now have a bookcase full of second-hand Horror and Fantasy titles - modern first editions, older editions, and hard-to get titles. The prices were eye-watering* and I didn't buy anything but I was interested to see some Arkham House titles (rarely seen in the UK, although some turned up in Forbidden Planet a few years ago - that's where my set of Arkham House Lovecraft titles came from).

What intrigued me most, I think, because I haven't even seen pictures of them before, were a couple of Neville Spearman UK hardback reprints of Arkham House Clark Ashton Smith titles. The UK paperback editions are fairly common, I think. The hardbacks don't have very attractive covers though. They're the sort of photographic cover of a mocked-up decaying severed head that used to adorn things like the Pan book of Horror series. Still, it was interesting to find and see them.

* Foe example, the 1973 Folio Society selection of M. R. James - which I bought for a few £'s in a second hand shop maybe 10 years ago - now £50.00.

I've just posted my 666th LT review: The Devil Is Dead by R.A. Lafferty.

>213 paradoxosalpha:

Perfect. It looks like you and I have the top two "hot reviews" on LT right now (mine's for the eBook omnibus John Carter: Barsoom Series). Three cheers for the WT! :D

I read Stross's latest Laundry Files book over the past three days, and this morning I posted my review.

I like Mo very much, so I'm happy to hear she's received a promotion from the author. Can't wait to get to this one!

There's been something odd going on with the review posting functionality lately. I just posted a review of Straub's The Hellfire Club. Could one of you find out if you can see it on the work page, because I can't!

I see it ok from both the review link you posted and also on the work page.

Thanks!

It's perplexing. I've got two reviews that I can't see on the work pages or in my review page. They display in my catalog view in the review column, though, so I know they're in the database.

I know there's a bug on this one being worked by the LT staff, and I hope they get it fixed soon.

I'm having the same problem: I've seen the posts about the bug, but wasn't experiencing the issue myself. I am now!

In this case, I can see your review for the Gnostic Notebook (Volume Two), but not mine except in the review window. I've saved it offline, but am guessing it's visible to others even if not to me in the standard way.

When I posted my last couple reviews, they seemingly disappeared into the aether when I hit submit, but when I navigated back to the work page, they were there. Have you tried nagivating away and back, paradoxosalpha?

>221 AndreasJ: Have you tried nagivating away and back, paradoxosalpha?

Oh, yes. And cache clearing, and working with different browsers, off different machines, etc. It's a non-trivial bug. My recent reviews are all newly visible to me today in my Reviews page, but still not on the work pages for those books.
Here are the relevant Bug Collectors threads:
http://www.librarything.com/topic/204289
http://www.librarything.com/topic/204807

Elenchus, I can see your review on the work page for Lambert's Gnostic Notebook: Volume Two, and on your Reviews page.

I bought myself a little gift for xmas: English Gothic: Classic Horror Cinema 1897-2015. A beautifully produced hardcover that is ridiculously inexpensive on Amazon. I've read Rigby's companion volume American Gothic: Sixty Years of Horror Cinema, which was excellent, so this one was a must-have.

Interesting interview with the author:

http://diaboliquemagazine.com/english-gothic-interview/

Just got Dennis Dunaway's memoir, Snakes! Guillotines! Electric Chairs! My Adventures in the Alice Cooper Group. In the early 70's, this was one of the best bands on the planet. Bassist Dunaway's book has been getting good reviews - can't wait to blast Killer and read this!



At a highly caffeinated diner breakfast this morning, my most excellent pal Barney gave me a copy of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward: A Graphic Novel.

Hope everyone has a great holiday. What books did you get?

I just finished reading (and reviewed, natch) Doctor Copernicus, The Boy Who Lost Fairyland, and Casino Royale. During my commute this morning, I started reading Songs of a Dead Dreamer, and Grimscribe.

I'm about two-thirds of the way through Norman Spinrad's difficult and disturbing science fiction novel The Iron Dream. Wikipedia describes it (in part) as follows:

The Iron Dream is a metafictional 1972 alternate history novel by Norman Spinrad. The book has a nested narrative that tells a story within a story. On the surface, the novel presents an unexceptional pulp, post-apocalypse science fiction action tale entitled Lord of the Swastika. However, this is a pro-fascism narrative written by an alternate-history Adolf Hitler, who in this timeline emigrated from Germany to the United States in 1919 after the Great War, and used his modest artistic skills to become first a pulp–science fiction illustrator and later a successful science fiction writer, telling lurid, purple-prosed adventure stories under a thin SF-veneer.

Spinrad's satirical targets are pretty wide-ranging here, although I suspect what would stand out most to members of this group is how much the Mary Sue protagonist's obsession with "racial purity" (a phrase that must occur at least two dozen times in the first few chapters alone) recalls Lovecraft's (there's also a post-apocalyptic monstrosity that the protag's forces encounter when Heldon (read: Germany) invade Wolack (Poland) that strongly resembles a shoggoth - probably not a coincidence).

I'll write a full review when I'm finished. I'm going to have a lot to say about this one, I suspect.

>225 paradoxosalpha:

Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

I ordered a copy of that one on Sunday from Amazon, along with some other goodies. It should be here in the next several days.

I keep meaning to read some Spinrad. He seems like an author I'd enjoy, but I haven't gotten around to him.

Same for me. Not sure why I never did when a teen, I was reading tons of SF. Guessing I simply never found a copy at school or in the library, and I wasn't good about seeking things out by interlibrary loan then.

I read Spinrad's Riding the Torch long ago. Decidedly message-y, which I gather The Iron Dream also is. If you can live with that it's pretty good.

Just ordered Ramsey Campbell's collection of non-fiction pieces, Ramsey Campbell, Probably from PS Publishing's Drugstore Indian Press.



Nice J.K. Potter cover.

Also, thanks to a fascinating NPR interview, The Whites by Richard Price, "The electrifying tale of a New York City police detective under siege-by an unsolved murder, by his own dark past, and by a violent stalker seeking revenge." I've been reading my old fave Ed McBain recently, too.

This 1920's autobiography sounds interesting. Maybe paradoxosalpha can shed a little more light?



From Amazon:

The incredible life story that inspired the forthcoming new musical, Tiger Woman Versus The Beast Dancer, singer, gang member, cocaine addict and sometime confectionist, Betty May's autobiography Tiger Woman thrilled and appalled the public when her story first appeared at the end of the roaring twenties. 'I have often lived only for pleasure and excitement but you will see that I came to it by unexpected ways' Born into abject squalor in London's Limehouse area, May used her steely-eyed, striking looks and street nous to become an unlikely bohemian celebrity sensation, a fixture at the Café Royal, London, marrying four times along the way alongside numerous affairs. 'I wondered why men would not leave me alone. They were alright at first when they offered to show one life, and then at once they became a nuisance' ,iShe elbowed her way to the top of London's social scene in a series of outrageous and dramatic fights, flights, marriages and misadventures that also took her to France, Italy, Canada and the USA. 'I learnt one thing on my honeymoon - to take drugs' Her most fateful adversary was occultist and self-proclaimed 'Great Beast' Aleister Crowley, who intended her to be a sacrificial victim of his Thelemite cult in Sicily, but it was her husband - Oxford undergraduate Raoul Loveday - who died, after conducting a blood sacrifice ritual. Betty May's vitality and ferocious charisma enchanted numerous artistic figures including Jacob Epstein and Jacob Kramer. A heroine like no other, this is her incredible story in her own words, as fresh and extraordinary as the day it was first told.

Wow. Tiger Woman is back in print? Forthcoming new musical? Its highlight is a plainly libelous account of May and Loveday's time at Crowley's Abbey of Thelema in Cefalu. Whoever wrote that amazon summary is great too: "intended her to be a sacrificial victim of his Thelemite cult" indeed!

Decent overview here:
http://asketchofthepast.com/2013/10/08/tiger-woman-betty-may-and-the-abbey-of-th...

>231 gwendetenebre:
>232 paradoxosalpha:

More here:

http://siderealpressblog.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/betty-may-david-garnett-and-dope...

>232 paradoxosalpha:

Thanks for that link. I'm not sure that cat's blood would really prove that deadly. A parasite or some such from an impure water source sounds more likely, although there are plenty of other things that could have been the cause. Was there an autopsy?

>233 housefulofpaper:

Another good link, especially for the info coming from those other, related volumes.

Betty May was a striking woman. I'm curious to see the actress chosen to play her in the musical. It sounds like her book might be enjoyable enough, if taken as near-fiction.

ETA

From the Betty May wiki:

"As of 2014, a musical show, Betty May – Tiger Woman versus The Beast, is in production. Based on May's life story it contains 18 original songs written by Celine Hispiche with musical arrangements by Philippe Jakko. It is being produced by DeSapinaud Production"

Being a long-time X fan, I had to order John Doe's "personal history of L.A. Punk", Under the Big Black Sun.



Also, Grant Morrison's Wonder woman: Earth because Wonder Woman!

I didn't realize Morrison had written some Wonder Woman. I'm interested. That cover looks like it's more than a little influenced by Frank Cho, too.

Edited to add: Ah, clear Adam Hughes influence, rather. Those guys sure can do cheesecake.

I read The Nightmare Stacks, Stross's latest Laundry book, and posted my review today.

The Nightmare Stacks, by the way, just barely qualifies as fairy weird to my mind.

>238 paradoxosalpha:

Because of the Dunsany references? That is a tempting aspect of the book, definitely, as I'd recently read The King of Elfland's Daughter and adored it.

I've put the Laundry series on the list of books I won't seek out specifically but would snatch up if I come across a suitable copy. I still think I want to start with Accelerando, though, not yet having read any Stross novel.

>239 elenchus:

Yeah, because of the Dunsany references, but also because it engages the whole fairyland myth. It has more than a taste of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell to it, albeit slathered with 21st-century yog-sothothery.

a couple books that should be of interest from Brian Showers at Swan River Press:
swanriverpress.wordpress.com - go look

I'm reading Dashiell Hammett's The Dain Curse, a novel split into 3 parts across a couple generations. It's very much a hardboiled noir, as expected, and features his Continental Op character. Part 2 focuses on a San Francisco cult, suspected to be shysters, and based upon "an old Gailic Church of Arthur Machen". Hammett drops enough other detail to persuade me he's read into occult history, and isn't throwing on the page a straw man or eye-rolling caricature of the occult -- or at least, is doing so from a position of understanding and not merely adding window dressing to a B-movie villain. I've not finished the novel yet, but I'm hopeful this angle will prove to have relevance to the entire story arc, and in fact might make a secondary character more central to the plot than seems the case, at first.

Anyway, his description of the Weird encounter by the Continental Op reads up there with some of the best short stories from Deep Ones, even if he explodes it all as a con at the end.

I believe the novel was filmed, but haven't seen it myself. Curious whether this part was kept for the film, it would truly be genre-bending.

This weekend I finished my read of John Fowles' The Magus. (My review is up, of course.) It's not Traditionally Weird, but it's indulgent in ways that might appeal to us readers of yog-sothothery.

I seem to recall variant endings in different editions (well, at least 2)

Fowles can write

lol
eureka
I read your review after

>244 bookstopshere:

Fowles changed the ending (I don't know how much) when he made the revision. He's also noted for having written a novel with multiple alternate endings in the final text: The French Lieutenant's Woman. (The Magus was evidently made into a very bad movie, and The French Lieutenant's Woman into a rather good one.)

>243 paradoxosalpha:

The Magus is the only novel that I'm aware of that's on both David Pringle's Modern Fantasy: The 100 Best Novels list and the Modern Library's 100 Best Novels list. That alone intrigues me enough to want to read it.

I recently finished reading and posted a review of The House of Rumour, which is an impressive arrangement of a history of science fiction, fragments of occultism, episodes of sexual queerness, utopian religious movements, and other equally strange stuff, embedded in matrix of espionage and disinformation ("black propaganda"). Recommended.

It also turned me on to Gresham's Nightmare Alley, which went right on to my wishlist.

>248 paradoxosalpha: Liked your review of The House of Rumour.

I was kind of harsh on that book when I reviewed it upon release.

But it's stuck in my memory after all this time, so I'd recommend it too.

I look forward to your of Nightmare Alley after coming across a reference to in it, as I recall, The Skeptical Inquirer. There's a film version too which I haven't seen.

>248 paradoxosalpha:, >249 RandyStafford:

The Gresham novel is pretty intense, and I highly recommend it. The film version is a noir classic and is likewise absolutely worth tracking down.

>249 RandyStafford:

Thanks for pointing out your own review of The House of Rumour. I haven't read all of the earlier LT reviews of the book yet; I was avoiding them as a reader and reviewer, once I decided to read it myself.

It's true that Arnott is writing "on the shoulders of giants" (e.g. the magisterial Crowley biographies of the early 21st century and Secret Agent 666), but he does it well. As one of those "who once had to satisfy our cravings for outré occult and conspiracy esoterica by haunting used bookstores and mailing away for obscure catalogs rather than laying on the couch with a laptop" myself, I was delighted to see that such a book could be written at all, and I think its depth betrays a more significant involvement with the material. In my view, it surpassed Masks of the Illuminati (possibly the closest comparandum, now that I think about it in the terms of your review) in prose style and historical detail. Unlike, say, Dan Brown's trash, it doesn't actually impair the reader's enjoyment to have prior familiarity with the genuine facts of the subject matter, as much as they've been established by responsible research. And ultimately, Arnott doesn't advance even a single conspiracy theory. It's a literary novel set in the world we live in, not a sfnal alternative world, and it doesn't really offer any unified explanations, just some compelling descriptions.

Like you, I was excited to find out about Constantine/Burdekin, who was news to me. I also thought that the sexual diversity theme was handled with greater verve than I've seen in comparable novels.

Based on both your reviews,THoR goes onto my recon / loose wishlist. I'll not seek it out, but I'm keeping my eye out.

Just completed a Raymond Chandler story, "King in Yellow", from the LOA edition of his Stories and Early Novels. A character (not the shamus) confirms the allusion is deliberate, noting the book specifically but not naming it. As far as plot, though, the reference ends up being a pun for the baddie: he's named King, and he's found dead in yellow pajamas.

I wonder what motivated Chandler to make the reference. The story originally appeared in Dime Detective (I think), so fair to expect many readers would know the book. Was it a nod to his audience? Did he like Chambers enough to want to make the reference? Did he just like the pun?

Interesting, too, in light of the more recent True Detective series and its Chambers influences.

>253 elenchus:

Good questions! We have that LOA volume here at the library I work at - I'll give the story a read at some point. When I was checking to see if it might also be available online, I ran across the following article, which is a decent run down of TKIY's literary history, along with TD references.

https://unwinnable.com/2014/02/21/have-you-seen-the-yellow-sign/

Hot off the presses from Hippocampus Press. Just received my copy. Letters to and from C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner, Fritz and Jonquil Leiber, Harry O. Fischer, and Frederic Jay Peabody.

>255 gwendetenebre:

I've got the volume of letters between Lovecraft and Clarke Ashton Smith, but haven't had the opportunity to start reading it yet.

A little light reading for Halloween:

Is that a focus on the publishing industry, or more a grab bag of selected individual novels & authors?

Regardless, that cover reminds me of that list of cover art I posted in the Hallowe'en thread!

>258 elenchus:

I think the focus is on author/artist, with some background as to why it was published. There is supposed to be some info on the various publishing houses too. My copy should be delivered today.

That was a great list you posted over in the H-thread!

>257 gwendetenebre:

It turned out to be an enjoyable, if rather frothy read. I did get a few chuckles here and there. Kind of a random stroll through tropes, with an occasional brief feature on a particular artist/important book/writer. Not much in the way of criticism, although the author is entirely dismissive of the entire "Splatterpunk" oeuvre, which I don't agree with, and he seems to have an allergy to heavy metal. For the price, though, entirely worth it for the glorious cover reproductions alone.

I'm finally getting around to reading Michael McDowell's 6-volume Blackwater series. I'm sorry I missed this riveting Southern Gothic saga with its many surprise twists and scenes of really stunning violence when it was first published in 1983. As Poppy Z. Brite points out in the intro to the Centipede edition, the late McDowell claimed HPL as an influence and the town of Perdido was essentially his Arkham. The story itself might be seen as a kind of veiled homage to Lovecraft's Deep Ones. Anyone here ever read them?

I remember liking McDowell's 1980 novel Cold Moon Over Babylon very much. Might have to track it down again. Candles Burning, his unfinished novel which was completed by Tabitha King is worth reading, too.

Here's a book that might/should be of interest to the group - Nina Antonia's THE GREENWOOD FAWN

here's a quickly swiped review:

Antonia’s lastest work, ‘The Greenwood Faun’, is a gorgeously outré, supernatural novel infused with the spirit of the mystical Welsh author, Arthur Machen (it takes up where THE HILL OF DREAMS LEAVES OFF.) Published by Egaeus Press, The Greenwood Faun is acutely described by cult musician and author David Tibet as “shot through with decadence, poetry, opium and incense . . .this is a beautifully written poem: witty, crepuscular, enchanting, surprising”.

lovely production - and THOD is a favorite of mine

Currently reading Powers of Darkness: The Lost Version of Dracula, which is basically a 1901 Icelandic re-telling of Dracula with Bram Stoker's participation and consent. Both the history and the text are fascinating. I wouldn't say it's better than the novel we all know, but things like having Dracula lead a murderous Satanic cult and placing the action squarely in London while referencing the pre-Ripper Thames Torso Murders is eyebrow-raising stuff. The three vampire wives have been whittled down to a single blonde temptress in a Hammer-esque low-cut bodice. A distinctly Norse point-of-view is obvious, too. Recommended!

https://tinyurl.com/kh3l5qj

>263 gwendetenebre:

I used to have that one on my wishlist, but apparently removed it in one of my periodic purges. I'll be adding it back.

>263 gwendetenebre:
I read a rather dismissive review of this books when it was first published. The reviewers assumption was that it was a free adaptation that was brought to a premature end, presumably due to public disinterest or outright hostility (since the author was also the editor and publisher of the paper it appeared in). The suggestion that he has access to Stoker’s previous drafts is interesting and perhaps puts a different light on things. It would certainly give Powers of Darkness more legitimacy than is enjoyed by all the innumerable retellings and continuations that have appeared since Dracula’s original publication.

There are many indications (fully detailed in the introduction and annotations) that Stoker had a fairly active role to play in enabling Asmundsson's translation/rewrite. It should be noted that the adaptation is focused mostly on Harker's experience at the castle. That's ok with me, though, as it's not meant to challenge the original novel in any way, but it does explore some really fascinating possibilities.

I did think Harker's journal from the castle was the best part of the original book ...