THE DEEP ONES SUMMER 2015 Discussion Schedule

1-Jul "The Invisible Eye" by Erckmann-Chatrian (1857)
8-Jul "What Was It?" by Fitz-James O'Brien (1859)
15-Jul "The Terror of the Water-Tank" by William Hope Hodgson (1907)
22-Jul "Beyond the Wall" by Ambrose Bierce (1907)
29-Jul "Casting the Runes" by M.R. James (1911)
5-Aug "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" by H.P.Lovecraft (1919)
12-Aug "A Voyage to Sfanomoë" by Clark Ashton Smith (1931)
19-Aug The People of the Black Circle by Robert E. Howard (1934)
26-Aug "The Cloak" by Robert Bloch (1939)
2-Sep "Horrible Imaginings" by Fritz Leiber (1982)
9-Sep "The Boy in the Tree" by Elizabeth Hand (1989)
16-Sep "The Ocean and All Its Devices" by William Browning Spencer (1994)
23-Sep "The Red Tower" by Thomas Ligotti (1996)
30-Sep "Augusta Prima" by Karin Tidbeck (2009)

We had 5 nominators and at least 11 selectors.

The highest net vote (+11) was for "Casting the Runes." There were five nominees with net votes of zero or lower, and the lowest was -2 for "Born with the Dead" by Robert Silverberg.

There was a three-way tie for the +4 cutoff, with the persistent nomination of "The Ocean and All Its Devices" cheating out the following two nominations:

"Remnants" by Fred Chappell (2010)
"Buried in the Sky" by John Shirley (2003)

These will be seeds for the autumn voting.

I count 5 authors new to our discussions along with a solid assortment of big names. It's always good to see Leiber make the cut! Thanks to all who voted- try to join the conversations as often as you can. As always, many thanks to paradoxosalpha for tabulating and posting the results!

Gratified to see that the Tidbeck made the cut this time (persistence pays off, evidently), and hope y'all will enjoy it.

No stories from the '20s, that's gotta be unusual? A reasonably strong showing from the '30s compensates I guess.

Many thanks, PA. Looks like a strong line-up - all of the Weird Tales "big three" are represented, along with many earlier and latter authors. I'll try to get as many links to online versions up as I can today.

PS Happy Father's Day to all the dads!

Online versions:

"The Invisible Eye":
http://amzn.com/B0083ZMPWA (free eBook)

"What Was It?":
http://amzn.com/B004UIUU9Y (free eBook)

"The Terror of the Water-Tank":
http://www.strangeark.com/cryptofiction/terror-water-tank.html

"Beyond the Wall":
http://amzn.com/B0082YSTW2 (free eBook)

"Casting the Runes":
http://amzn.com/B0082UEA9W (free eBook)

"Beyond the Wall of Sleep":
http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/bws.aspx
https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/l/lovecraft/hp/wall/

"A Voyage to Sfanomoë":
http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/short-stories/237/a-voyage-to-sfanomo%C3%AB

The People of the Black Circle:
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/42259

"The Cloak":
http://www.unz.org/Pub/Unknown-1948q1-00048

"The Red Tower":
http://weirdfictionreview.com/2011/12/the-red-tower-by-thomas-ligotti/

"Augusta Prima":
http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/augusta-prima/

No online versions of "Horrible Imaginings", "The Boy in the Tree", or "The Ocean and All Its Devices" yet found.

***

Interesting to note that both "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" and "Horrible Imaginings" take their epigraphs from William Shakespeare.

Excellent! Thanks for the links, Art!

>6 gwendetenebre:

No problem.

A lineup spanning 150 years of the Weird Tradition, that's gratifying.

For those of you who are looking for an online/electronic version of Bierce's "Beyond the Wall", you might want to find one other than the one I linked to in >5 artturnerjr: (Amazon's free version of Can Such Things Be?). In it, the opening line of the story reads, "Many years ago, on my way from Hongkong to New York, I assed a week in San Francisco." :D

PS - The version here does not have that error: http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/btw.html

Oh I dunno, that adds an entirely new layer of significance to the story.

On Wikisource I find

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Beyond_the_Wall
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Casting_the_Runes (not a pretty copy--maybe copied from Project Gutenberg)
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Weird_Tales/Volume_31/Issue_3/Beyond_the_Wall_of_... (a good copy, as per that issue of Weird Tales)
http://wikilivres.ca/wiki/A_Voyage_to_Sfanomo%C3%AB (believed copyrighted in the United States)
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_People_of_the_Black_Circle (first third transcribed from Weird Tales, rest copied from online)

>11 prosfilaes:

Thanks for posting those!

>11 prosfilaes:

Thanks for those. I don't usually check the versions I link to for typos, etc., so it's always nice to have at least one more version of each story (if it's available) in case the first version sucks.

"The Boy in the Tree" is online here:

http://tinyurl.com/o3xby64

>14 artturnerjr:

Much appreciated! As I'm going to be moving soon, my books are gradually being packed up in boxes and put in storage. Don't know how long it'll be until I'll have easy access to them again, so I'm going to have to rely on online versions for some time to come.

>15 gwendetenebre:

You're welcome, and good luck with your move!