THE DEEP ONES: Spring 2024 Planning THread

This thread is for nominations and voting on stories for inclusion in the April-June 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 Vernal Equinox: Tuesday, March 19.
Voting for your own nominations is permissible and encouraged.

Apologies for the late posting, and thanks to AndreasJ for the reminder.

Eleven days should be enough for us to put it together, if history is any evidence.

A.k.a. "Beach-Combers of Mars," widely anthologized, included by Robert Price in The Klarkash-Ton Cycle as "Cthulhu Mythos fiction" by CAS, and of course available online.

Alternately titled "Sweet Sixteen," and widely anthologized.

Gresh, better known as an author of children's books, has recently published several volumes of weird horror short fiction. This story appears in Black Wings of Cthulhu 3, New Cthulhu 2, and Gresh's own Cult of the Dead and other Weird and Lovecraftian Tales.

Another Enríquez ghost story. Should appeal to anyone who liked "My Sad Dead".

Online here:
https://shortstoryproject.com/stories/the-little-angels-exhumation/

I've been meaning to read more Llewellyn after encountering her "Horses" years ago.

Online at https://weirdfictionreview.com/2012/12/the-engine-of-desire/ and described as "equal proportions weird, dark, sexually charged, unsettling, and transgressive."

Said to be a compelling mad scientist tale set in the Arctic.

Available online at https://archive.org/details/Weird_Tales_v31n01_1938-01_sas/page/n107/mode/2up

and reprinted in Polar Horrors

Humankind has fallen to the Old Ones in this bleak tale found in Black Wings IV and Houses Under the Sea.

In his classic anthology Dying of Fright, Les Daniels said that this tale is "a brilliant distillation of Gothic ingredients, achieving in a few pages what had taken his predecessors volumes".

Besides the Daniels volume, it's easily found online:

https://www.online-literature.com/hawthorne/134/
https://tinyurl.com/ne38nhnn
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/46088/46088-8.txt

Les Daniels remarked, "Although it might be considered less of a horror story than a story about horror, it is nevertheless one of the most grotesque tales in English, and one that is difficult to dislodge from the memory."

Found in a number of Leiber collections and elsewhere.

Another pick from The Weird, by the author of "Rashomon" and "In the Grove". It's apparently a weird masterpiece set in medieval Japan.

A strange story about a distinctly unusual dancing place. Online here at Uncanny Magazine.

The SF Encyclopedia calls this Bierce's single most famous story, and says it "should perhaps be read as nonfantastic" - I think the ambiguity might be interesting. It concerns the execution(?) of a condemned spy.

Online at Wikisource and variously collected.

Kuttner's first published prose story, a Lovecraftian piece featuring some extraordinary rats.

Online at Wikisource and frequently collected.

Brian Stableford has gone on record as being a great admirer of Clark Ashton Smith, so, presumably, this story taps into that.

Unfortunately, it's available in only one place The Madness of Cthulhu, Volume Two

I don't think this story's already been discussed. Unfortunately my computer is playing up and I can't access the spreadsheet to check.

I recently read this one in Dark Forces (under the shorter title "The Peculiar Demesne") To be honest, the author's politics (briefly outlined in Kirby McCauley's introduction) inclined me against it, but it reeled me in anyway.

Also collected in Watchers at the Strait Gate, 1984.

I couldn't find any online versions.

We have a healthy crop of nominations here. I will tabulate the votes tomorrow, so please make sure your voting is how you want it!

The equinox proper isn't until evening, so you still have all day to vote.

All right; I'm going to start the arithmetic now.

Calculated, and ready to post.