R. A. Lafferty

I've read little Lafferty, but I gather he's a cult author.

Neil Gaiman, who once corresponded with Lafferty, said on a recent podcast discussion of Lafferty that he wrote some dark fantasy/horror stuff in the late 1970s and 1980s.

Does anyone know about that?

Should we be educating ourselves with some Lafferty next quarter with the Deep Ones?

I've never read R.A. Lafferty, but his Wikipedia page provides some interesting detail. Centipede Press has a Lafferty edition coming out soon, so his dark fantasy/horror must surely be of merit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._A._Lafferty
http://www.centipedepress.com/sf/manmademodels.html

Deep Ones: most certainly!

Interesting! I own a science fiction title inherited from my grandfather, but have not yet read it. Assume it doesn't fall into the Weird / dark horror tradition, but perhaps I'd be surprised.

The Devil Is Dead, http://www.librarything.com/work/128237/book/37777894

I am a great Lafferty fan. At one time I aspired to write like him, but I found that he is inimitable. I wouldn't think to group him with the (capital W) Weird tradition, but the weirdness of his writing is wonderful indeed.

The Devil is Dead is on my (very short) schedule of novels to re-read. I read it in the mid-1980s, when I ordered it by interlibrary loan through a suburban Chicago public library, and received it from Fort Benning, Georgia. It helped to make me the mutant I am today.

Oh, by the way, Lafferty was a perennial contributor to Orbit, Universe, The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, and kindred annuals. Although I love his novels, most readers seem better able to enjoy his tales in small doses, and one thing he does share with the Weird tradition is a predisposition toward the short story as a paradigmatic format.

I am going to move Lafferty up in my own queue, and look out for any installments in the DEEP ONES.

My granddad keeps surprising me with his reading preferences, I really regret not figuring that out when he was alive. The conversations we could have had ....

I've read about a handful of tales by him, but the only one I can remember is "Been a Long, Long Time".

That doesn't say anything about their quality -- just about my brain.

5>Maybe you can steer us towards a Lafferty title worthy of the Deep Ones.

Further evidence that Lafferty might reasonably be considered Weird: he remarked (per this tumblr),

It seemed, until I thought of it a bit, that I had written quite a few novels, and many shorter works, and also verses and scraps. Now I understood by some sort of intuition that what I had been writing was a never-ending story and that the name of it was ‘A Ghost Story.’ The name comes from the only thing that I have learned about all people, that they are ghostly and that they are sometimes split-off. But no one can ever know for sure which part of the split is himself.

I'd love to nominate a Lafferty or two for the Deep Ones, but I'm a little concerned about accessibility of the texts. It seems one of his fine short story collections Nine Hundred Grandmothers was once online at scifi.com, but is now relegated to the Wayback Machine.

Perhaps "The Six Fingers of Time" (1960), which is on Project Gutenberg. It's on the dark side for Lafferty, who I don't think ever fully abandons his sense of whimsy.

>8 paradoxosalpha: Yes, the rarity of Lafferty does argue against his nomination as a Deep One study.

I wonder if the recent interest in reprinting him indicates a lot of his work is still under copyright.

For WT members who might be interested, I have available a brand new copy of the Centipede edition of The Man Who Made Models. Still in shrink wrap. Send me a PM if you are interested and I'll provide details.