THE DEEP ONES: Winter 2024 Planning Thread

This thread is for nominations and voting on stories for inclusion in the January-March reads in this group. Please feel free to draw on the ongoing brainstorming thread for nominations, but don't limit yourself to items discussed there. There is no further obligation--even to participate in the resulting discussion if a nomination is selected! It's perfectly okay to gamble on stories the nominator has never read, although also welcome for nominators to put up stories they've enjoyed and would like to revisit. In all these years, we've never been known to dog anyone for nominating a story where readers end up taking a dim view of it.

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

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


A useful resource for general bibliography info including OPD and inclusion in collections is ISFDB.

You can see a sortable list of all previous discussions here. The persistent brainstorming thread is here. Nominations repeating old discussions will be disqualified, but revival of dormant discussion threads is always welcome. "That is not dead which can eternal lie," etc.

VOTING is scheduled to END on the Winter Solstice: Thursday, December 21.
Voting for your own nominations is permissible and encouraged.

Held over from last quarter's cutoff.

RandyStafford writes: A Whitehead story chosen at random. He was, of course, a friend and correspondent with Lovecraft.

Widely anthologized.

Held over from last quarter's cutoff.

I wrote: A very brief tale of mutation frequently included in many (the majority?) of collections of PKD's short fiction, along with the textbook anthology You and Science Fiction.

Held over from last quarter's cutoff.

RandyStafford wrote: An early zombie story from a writer that popularized the concept.

Wildly anthologized.

Based on a dream from Long's friend H. P. Lovecraft.

Moderately available in print and ebook editions and at https://cthulhufiles.com/stories/long/long-the-horror-from-the-hills.html.

A crossover story featuring a meeting of Moore's two most famous characters, Northwest Smith and Jirel of Joiry.

Online in two parts.

I haven't actually read this, but Laidlaw's "Leng" seemed to be appreciated when we did it some years ago, and this one is available online.

The seasonal semi-random pick from The Weird, this is a tale of transformation told by the titular entity.

A tale of a robbery brave and doomed. Online e.g. here.

I enjoyed this quarter's Shirley story, and S.T. Joshi says of this tale that it "draws upon Lovecraft's own personal idiosyncrasies to convey terror and weirdness." First published in Black Wings of Cthulhu 2, it has been reprinted in Shirley's own Lovecraft Alive! along with a couple of further "Best of" anthologies. (bibliography)

Weird Tales described this as "An unusual weird-scientific tale, about vegetable vampires that lusted for animal and human food".

Available online.

Howard Wandrei was Donald Wandrei's brother, better known as an illustrator, but also penned some stories.

Laird Barron referenced Karl Edward Wagner, Don Webb, Michael Shea as "the three heads of Cerberus" in neo-yog-sothothery. We've read two of them, but not Webb--despite my intermittent nominations. This particular story was in The Starry Wisdom, and later in Webb's own collection When They Came. It benefits from readers well-versed in "the mythos."

A few pages by Blackwood in his naturalist mode, concerning wild fires in England. Included in two often-reprinted Blackwood collections: Pan's Garden and Tales of the Mysterious and Macabre.

2021 Shirley Jackson award nominee for best novelette. Found in The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories: Volume 1 and The Secret Life of Insects.

The Deep Ones covered Lawrence's enjoyable folk horror "Morag-of-the-Cave", in Summer 2022. This tale of paganism is available online.

https://pseudopod.org/2020/03/20/pseudopod-694-robins-rath/

The Vandermeers wanted to include this in The Weird, but could not because of copyright issues. Still, it has been widely anthologized and is available online.

https://www.ndsu.edu/pubweb/~cinichol/CreativeWriting/323/MarquezManwithWings.ht...

Chappell's 1968 novel Dagon is a must-read for Lovecraftians. This one can be found in Schweitzer's Cthulhu's Reign and Datlow's Lovecraft's Monsters.

Mark Samuels died earlier this month. I thought at least one of these stories has already come up in our discussions but apprently not.

>19 housefulofpaper: I believe we did "The White Hands" but nothing else. There certainly is a lot to choose from in his works.

Good crop of nominations, everyone! I'll count votes tomorrow.

I am starting the count now.