So whatcha readin' now, kids? - Volume Five

Starting a new thread because the last one was a little on the long side.

Currently reading a novella in Wakefield Press's "The School of the Strange" series of Franco-Flemish fantastique literature. They've included their editions of Jean Ray books in this series.

The book I'm reading now is The Impersonal Adventure by Marcel Béalu, originally published in 1954.

https://www.librarything.com/topic/345069#8617368 - Yarbro’s hero is identified as the real-life Saint Germain, the allegedly unageing adventurer and alchemist.

... and so I find myself at half past three in the morning worrying about Andromache's battle axe in The Old Guard. Apparently, this is the same battle axe passed on to her by her mother some six and a half thousand years ago. Now, if she's been keeping a good sharp edge on this thing for six and a half thousand years, surely she must have sharpened the head right away before this? Is it like Trigger's sweeping brush in Only Fools and Horses? He's always had the same brush, but it's had three new handles and half a dozen new heads ...

>2 alaudacorax:
LOL

310 robertajl - Guy Davenport wrote an essay "The Geography of the Imagination," included in his book of the same name.

Dammit! Been reading the reviews and that's yet another book I've just got to buy.

Okay, a question that's really bugging me:

The Cambridge History of the Gothic: how is it that for volumes 1 and 2 the ebooks are £23-99 to the physical books' £119-39 while for volume 3 the ebook is £90-99 to the physical version's £108-23? I mean, that makes no sense at all. Those are Kobo prices, by the way, but the Kindle prices are similar, so it's not a typo. In fact, the Kindle ebook for 3 is £114, so it's actually more expensive than the physical job! And I've just checked US Amazon where a similar thing happens, so they're definitely not typos.

I'm sitting here with one of those big cartoon question marks floating over my head!

>5 alaudacorax:

Apologies, didn't really know which thread fitted this—they're obviously not my current reading ...

>5 alaudacorax:

Yes, last night I had one of those bright, money-saving ideas that's probably going to cost me a fortune.

For the last week or so I've been trying out the experiment of replacing my mouse and mouse pad with a cheap drawing tablet and stylus. I'm quite liking it. Then I thought, "I wonder if I can get an eReader with a stylus?" I never read academic works on my Kindle because I can't annotate and highlight as freely as I like, but they do tend to come considerably cheaper—around 50% seems typical. My current Kindle is getting old and slow and keeps trying to pick squabbles with me. If could get a new eReader with a stylus ...

Well, it turns out you can. Not only that, I can get one where I can annotate and highlight in different colours. This is a definite bonus because I mostly give up on highlighters because they tend to show through strongly on the other side of the page.

So I started looking for ebooks of some of the books I've been lusting after. And one of the first was The Cambridge History of the Gothic. Ouch ...

>7 alaudacorax:
Lol.
Que Sera Sera!

I always have too many books of many types in progress. Seven currently are Gothic or adjacent:

Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer
Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, Uncle Silas
Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast
Edgar Allan Poe, Complete Tales
Erckmann-Chatrian, The Man-Wolf and Other Tales

The Austen and Brown novels, and many of the Poe stories, are re-reads after a number of decades.

I don't like writing in my books, except to supply an omission or make a correction (e.g. writing in the errata to The New Annotated Dracula). It does mean any insights or ideas I have will be lost. Maybe I should keep a commonplace book!

I have lots of books on the go, I wanted to read spooky or Gothic books for the season but work is eating into my reading time. right now I need sleep more than anything. I'll aim to write more, and more coherently, later in the weekend.

But I'll mention some relevant books I'm trying to read now:

I have been reading The October Country for The Ray Bradbury Readalong and also Something Wicked This Way Comes
The Everyman edition of Horace Walpole's Selected Letters (I couldn't find the touchstone for the correct edition) is something I've been inching through a couple of letters at a time. There hasn't been very much Gothic content (but lots of enjoyable gossip, including a real-life fop at George II's funeral (I think), caught standing on another aristocratic mourner's ermine cloak to keep the chill of Westminster Abbey off his feet.), but I've now reached a whole chapter about the building and furnishing of Strawberry Hill.
And prompted/shamed by >5 alaudacorax:, I've started volume two of The Cambridge History of the Gothic.

Speaking of academic approaches to the Gothic, this appeared on YouTube today:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lc17l3Fehc0

>9 PatrickMurtha:

Me too. That's why a few days ago I gritted my teeth and ruthlessly culled my 'Currently reading'. Now I have only three in there and it's the first time the number has been so low for years. I SWEAR that I'm not going to pick up another book until I've got those read.

>10 housefulofpaper:

It's academic works that are the problem. I just can't be sure I'm really understanding and absorbing them unless I'm copiously annotating and underlining. It doesn't help that so many academics are poor writers. I'm sure half of them don't reread and revise before they publish. It's just a question of cutting out the fat and rewriting the odd bit to make it flow more smoothly and it's shameful when someone writing about literature, of all things, doesn't.

>12 alaudacorax:

To be honest, I think some are shovelling in woffle to build up the word count (like I used to do at school).

>11 alaudacorax: I have a system for reading a lot of books at once, but it would only work for me. I have a particular type of memory that compartmentalizes everything neatly, and I also keep notes, so I always know where I am in the flow of a given text. I start new books freely, but I am always finishing plenty too.

>14 PatrickMurtha:

Hmm ... I envy you.

>15 alaudacorax: Oh, my way of reading would drive anyone else crazy, so don’t worry it. I must say, though, that I am loving retirement, because I can read in a number of different books every day, and it is continually stimulating.

Since I wrote >7 alaudacorax: I've found that with a lot of academic titles there is no great saving from buying the ebook rather than the softcover: for example, 'The Cambridge Companion to ...' series will typically retail at somewhere around £23 for the softcover with the ebooks around only £1 cheaper. I've even found cases where the ebook is substantially the more expensive: for example, the paperback The Near East since the First World War: A History to 1995 is currently £29-20 to the ebook's £44-64!

I've been reading up on the matter as much as I can online and, as far as I can see ... well, I'd better not write it and risk being accused of libel.

In the meantime, I would have to buy hundreds and hundreds of pounds/dollars' worth of ebooks—perhaps even into four figures—before the savings over paperback would cover the cost of the kind of eReader I was thinking of. And going on the Kindles I've owned, the thing might have packed-in before I reached that point anyway.

So where does that leave me? Damned if I know ... other than pissed-off ...

>17 alaudacorax:

Oh ... and just to complicate matters, the eReaders I was looking at are not Kindles. If I bought one OF COURSE I'd never do anything as illegal as to transfer my Kindle ebooks to it. Just supposing I was hypothetically inclined to do so, though, I've read online that Amazon is actively looking at ways to block the software I'd use to do it. Might already have achieved that for all I know.

To complicate things even more, I'm more and more finding the basic concept of ebooks a whole new can of rip-offs. They've got me paying for the right not to own my own books while I could probably certainly have bought dozens of yards of shelf space for the cost of the three Kindles I've owned thus far.

>17 alaudacorax:, >18 alaudacorax:

Apologies. I'm 'thinking aloud' on LT again when I should be putting this stuff in my private journals.

>19 alaudacorax:

... or I could have been reading a book ...

Well, I for one was interested in your musings.

>21 pgmcc:

Thanks Peter.

The daft thing is that I'd never dream of 'buying' digital films from Amazon because you don't get them out of Amazon's grubby fingers and onto you own hard drive to own your own copy. Yet that's essentially the way I'm 'buying' Kindle books. Which raises two further points. Who actually 'owns' my Kindle if the books on it are not mine and Amazon has very real control over and access to them? And ... it's a bit of Newspeak worthy of 1984's Big Brother that they've got all the websites that discuss the matter using the verb 'to buy' about ebooks.

I’ll just chip in from work while waiting for my computer to stop misbehaving…I watched a YouTuber recently saying he was going to stop using his Kindle, but would use other e-readers, for the same reasons you’ve given. He had used some software package (only in the last month or so) to migrate all his books from Amazon’s clutches.

And while we’re talking about Amazon: two books ordered from major publishers via Amazon UK have been POD. There are arguments about the environmental benefits of POD and no doubt the publishers are happy not to pay for hundreds of thousands of back catalogue books to be sitting in warehouses, but it makes Amazon almost unavoidable if you are looking for a specific title.

Another thing about print on demand is that it screws up the book data in your personal catalogue. The last book I had from Amazon was POD and the copyright page says it was published in the US in 2022. The little note on what would be the back free endpaper (if it was a hardback) said printed in the UK, 2024.

>7 alaudacorax:, >17 alaudacorax:, >18 alaudacorax:, >22 alaudacorax:

So I've thought really hard about this ereader business, carefully weighed the respective merits of Kobo and Onyx and what have you, done a lot of muddled thinking about the whole concept of ebooks, and generally thought myself round and round in circles. So I've decided to grit my teeth, cut the Gordian knot, short-circuit the whole process, and a pile of other metaphors I can't think of offhand.

I've ordered a bread maker instead.

>26 alaudacorax: I just use my iPad. I have the Kindle for iPad app for ebooks I get through Amazon. Otherwise, most of what I have are iBooks, kept on the iPad but also in the iCloud. I also read ebooks through the Scribd / Everand app.

About half my reading is ebooks, convenient here in Mexico; about half hard copy, which I do prefer. When I have shifted midstream from an ebook to an actual book - say when a title suddenly goes unavailable on Scribd - the latter experience is MUCH better. On the other hand, I just can’t afford to get hard copies of everything down here to Mexico; I have to pick and choose based on a number of factors.

I don’t do audiobooks at all. I would not consider that to be ME reading; it’s someone else’s performance / interpretation of a text.

>26 alaudacorax:
lol
Love it.

Speaking of bread, A Gothic Cookbook has been published and my copy was delivered last weekend. It'd designed so that there's an introductory section about a particular novel or story (ranging chronicologically from Frankenstein to The Gilda Stories, followed with receipes directly drawn from, or inspired by, the tales. The only receipe I've tried so far was the paprika hendl recipe (from Dracula) that was included in the promotional material when funding was being raised for the project (the book has been published in the UK by Unbound, which uses a subscription or crowdfunding model, although their books do also have bookshop distribution).

News about a new series of books from Penguin: Penguin Weird Fiction

To be honest, the initial selection of titles is a bit disappointing, but mainly because I've got the majority of the contents in other volumes already.

The five titles are:
- Algernon Blackwood - Ancient Sorceries. Confusingly, Penguin have published at least two previous Blackwood titles with the same name. But this one consists of all the Dr John Silence stories.
- Gertrude Barrows Bennett - Claimed! - this is the one title where I didn't recognise either author or book title. Gertrude Barrows Bennett published under name "Francis Stevens", as which she had a story (yes, the same story) recently included in American Fantastic Tales and The Weird. This particular novel was apprently praises by H. P. Lovecraft.
- William Hope Hodgson - The House on the Borderland. Penguin issued this novel in a previous "designer-y" A-format paperback as recently as 2009. I've currently got it in two separate editions.
- Robert W. Chambers - The King in Yellow - Looking at the Amazon preview, this seems to be only half of the book as originally published. As I'm written before, the original collection seemed to be very carefully designed as having two mirroring sections. There's always a strong romantic element in Chambers' work, and the Weird or Fantastic drains away from the stories as one reads the collection, and the romance element increases. But past the half-way point, although the stories stay in the real world, the horrific element ramps up again, climaxing with a story set during the Franco-Prussian War.
- Weird Fiction - An Anthology - no surprises in the selection of stories.

Realistically, there's no reason for me to even consider buying any of these titles, apart from the Bennett/Stevens. But it's not just the texts, there's the book as object to consider too. Take a look:
https://www.penguin.co.uk/series/WEIRDFIC/weird-fiction

I do find these designs very attractive. Obviously there's a very heavy influence from the 1960s science fiction titles (designed by Alan Aldridge - very Yellow Submarine!), even down to the title font - currently getting some hate in the "Good Show Sir! — bad science fiction and fantasy covers group" :)

But I also get a 1970s school text book vibe from them, and maybe the sort of New Age publications that the '60s and '70s were awash with.

I did see Weird Fiction - An Anthology "in the flesh" in Waterstones yesterday - not out for sale yet but delivered to the shop and on a wheeled cart (awaiting the official publication date or some sort of processing I assume). I confess I would (I will) find it hard not to buy it.

>29 housefulofpaper: I like to read cookbooks that have connections to places. I will check on this one.

Hi all,

housefulofpaper, I've got to salute you.

In post 101 thereabouts, you gave me a list of where to go in Paris, that have a "Gothic" flare/background, or architecture---and we tried & found at least 2-3 of them,

The Auberge Nicholas Flamel, a Yr 1400 thereabout building, where the 1st and 2nd floor are a French restaurant. My wife absolutely loved the restaurant. We walked to it from our hotel, which was next to Palais Garnier (Opera house). Not only was it an interesting building, but it was a great experience.

https://www.bing.com/search?q=auberge+nicolas+flamel+restaurant+paris&qs=SC&...

You recommended going to Saint Chapelle. Now despite the chaotic wait (didn't matter whether you had a "timed ticket, there were about 200-300 folks waiting, for a little over 1-hr): we found Saint Chapelle to be absolutely breath-taking.

https://www.sainte-chapelle.fr/en/

Then we walked over and looked at the Notre Dame. Despite it's being under complete renovation, there's a viewing stand, it was a busy place, with lots of visitors.

Paris---what a beautiful & maddening city. We walked during most our time there (Montmartre food tour. The Louvre, The Versailles, etc., etc.). Without smartphone maps... gosh, who designed that city ?

Back to read, I've got some catching up to do, Uncle Silas is waiting.

>32 benbrainard8:
Uncle Silas is very enjoyable.

It sounds like you had a great time in Paris.

>32 benbrainard8:

Thank you, it's good to know that my suggestions were useful.

I need to make a proper visit to Paris, I still only know the walk between two train stations!

If I could read French, the Librairie Jousseaume, Antiquarian bookshop, would have gotten me into all sorts of---- note re. the bookshop owner, "Intrigued by Asian culture, François Jousseaume particularly enjoys recommending Lafcadio Hearn’s work to his clients. Hearn was a Greco-Irish author who led a storybook life and collected traditional Japanese tales."

https://www.houseandgarden.co.uk/gallery/librairie-jousseaume-paris-book-shop

Paris has so many literary treasures, points of reference(es), and I recommend walking it as much as you can.

We also made it to the Shakespeare and Company, which is quite an interesting place to peruse:

https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/

Though I can confess being amused this bookstore had its "newer' horror/Gothic works on same shelves....as it's Sci-Fy/Spec. fiction.

>35 benbrainard8:

Thanks for the link to the House and Garden article. I spotted a Penguin paperback of The Last Battle amongst the French antiquarian titles!

>30 housefulofpaper:

A correction: Ancient Sorceries isn't complete. It's missing one story: The Camp of the Dog.

I never got round to finding a scary film to watch for Halloween last night. I did finish reading A Discovery of Witches though. I came across a number of novels about witches, witchcraft while doing the latest Treasure Hunt and A Discovery of Witches seemed to be the most highly-regarded of them. And it was very cheap for the Kindle.

And having written all that, I have to admit that it is probably going to join my list of trilogies ... The Hunger Games, His Dark Materials ... where I've read the first book and really can't be bothered to go any further.

I thought the plotting was too slow unfolding. I thought the characterisation was weak—characters inconsistently drawn as well as not really standing out to me as real personalities. The hero, especially, reminded me too much of youthful reading of my mother's Georgette Heyer's or Mills & Boon's novels—a sort of exaggerated and shallower Mr Darcy and very stereotypical.

I repeat, though, that it seems well-regarded online, so don't let me put you off.

>38 alaudacorax: - ... characters inconsistently drawn as well as not really standing out to me as real personalities.

Probably the first was the reason for the second ...

>38 alaudacorax:

I reread Practical Magic before that. Again, because the LT Treasure Hunt brought it to mind and because I found I could remember very little of my first reading that wasn't tangled up with the film.

I actually upped my rating by half a star on this one. I thought it had something to say about familial relationships—probably more depth than I gave it credit for first time round.

Anyway, a bit fed up of modern supernatural fiction now; I feel it's time to dive back into the past. I'm trying to figure out what I did with my copy of Melmoth the Wanderer.

>38 alaudacorax: - ... my list of trilogies ... where I've read the first book and really can't be bothered to go any further.

Tolkien has a lot to answer for ...

>41 alaudacorax:

Okay, so I'm probably being unfair to Tolkien. I'll link this before someone else does:

https://reactormag.com/the-trilogy-why-for-art-thou/#more

Ouside pressure (usually work) seems to always interfere with my plans to have a proper spooky Halloween - to really indulge in the season - and this year was no different. Even so, I have managed to get some appropriate reading done in October (plus a sideways move to take in The Anchor Anthology of French Poetry, which nevertheless includes Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Jean Rollin's favourite, Tristan Corbiére, so maybe it counts).

I reread The October Country and Something Wicked This Way Comes, and two short books. There was an "enriched" edition of H. P. Lovecraft's vampire story The Shunned House (enriched with annotations and three essays as appendices), and a novella by C. E. Ward, Legionnaire, an attempt (says the author) to combine the worlds of M. R. James and P. C. Wren.

I didn't manage to finish Wylding Hall before the end of the month. This is another short book. It that takes a novel approach to folk horror.

It tells the story of a folk rock band holed up in the countryside recording what will be their legendary album. The conceit of the novel is that it's made up of interviews with the surviving band members 40 years or so after the event, and the story is advanced, and the reader slowly finds out more and more, as the various voices follow one another in short alternating passages (as they would be edited and arranged in a TV documentary).

I did very badly in this year's Treasure Hunt. I'm not reading very much contemporary fiction, so I dont' suppose it should be a surprise.

I stopped reading His Dark Materials after the first book too, but I actually enjoyed it a lot. I just felt it was a dense read, like a heavy meal, if that makes sense. I wanted a bit of a breather before starting the next volume, and that little gap between books has just kept growing.

>40 alaudacorax:
Wednesday was the 200th anniversary of Maturin’s death. Melmoth is a great book.

>45 pgmcc:

... and I STILL haven't found it ...

>44 housefulofpaper:, >43 housefulofpaper:

Has Wylding Hall been made into a film? Your plot outline, though not the title, is ringing a very recent bell with me. I think I've lately come across it when browsing film blurbs.

>46 alaudacorax:
:-(

I searched high and low for my copy only to find it in the middle of the shelf at the centre of my Gothic bookcase. Basically right under my nose. That Melmoth guy is always playing tricks.

>48 pgmcc:

Yup ... still haven't found it. It's really weird the way things disappear around here. And then they turn up a week or so later in a place I'm sure I've already looked in!

>49 alaudacorax:
I know the feeling.

By experience I found the most efficient way to find a mislaid book is to buy a replacement copy. You are guaranteed to find the missing copy as soon as you arrive home with the new one. Never fails.

>47 alaudacorax:

I don't think Wylding Hall's been filmed. Might the book or the audiobook have popped up on Amazon? Mind you, the film of Starve Acre appeared without my being aware of it.

>38 alaudacorax:

I just opened up IMDb to look up something and, somewhat to my surprise, a TV version of A Discovery of Witches was facing me. Didn't know there was one and, after reading that first book, I'm probably not going to watch it. But ... Matthew Goode as the dark, brooding, powerful, dangerous, vampire hero? The cuddly gay best friend from The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society? Poor abandoned Heck from Imagine Me and You? As a supercharged Byronic hero? I don't care how good an actor he is ... no ... just, no ...

And now I can't for the life of me remember what I went to IMDb for in the first place ...

>52 alaudacorax:

I mean, the character's got to have been written with a Buffy-era David Boreanaz hovering somewhere in the back of the author's imagination. Matthew Goode?!

... and now my tea's gone cold ...

>54 alaudacorax:
I love your posts about your adventures and misadventures. I just heated my tea in the microwave.

>54 alaudacorax:
I haven't read any of these books but I did see bits and pieces of the TV series when it was broadcast on Sky. I spotted some faces that had been in Doctor Who and/or Torchwood (it was made by Bad Wolf Studios, which was set up by two ex-BBC producers who had previously been involved in the 2005 return of Doctor Who, and is now making the current series).

One of the locations used seemed to be the Bodleian Library in Oxford but this article says (as I should have expected) that it was a set. Plenty of genuine, and Gothic, locations however (very many in Wales).

https://www.atlasofwonders.com/2018/08/a-discovery-of-witches-where-filmed.html

I've read a novella issued as a single hardcover book in 2013. I saw it in a catalogue from online SF specialist seller Cold Tonnage books. I was drawn by the title - The Réparateur of Strasbourg. (it's four years since I was last in that city, which seems hard to believe).

The story turned out to be pretty grim. It starts off with a secret commission to paint a mysterious woman's portrait during the ancién regime, goes forward a couple of decades, then a couple more and climaxes during the Reign of Terror. There's a supernatural element but I want to avoid spoilers, so I'll say no more.

And now I've started reading The Art of Darkness by John Robb. I left a bit of a gap after reading Season of the Witch since they will inevitably cover a lot of the same ground.

80 pages in and we're still in Goth's prehistory - I'm about to hit a section about The Stooges.

I wish I'd bought the hardcover. The oversized paperback (from Manchester University Press) is very tightly bound and impossible to hold open without incurring some damage to the cover.

>58 housefulofpaper:

I hate books like that. At some point you flatten them out from exasperation and ... CRACK! Really makes me wince. I have to say that I haven't come across one for a long time, though.

>59 alaudacorax:

Actually I need to correct myself. I saw the first edition of the book on a YouTube clip last night (in the hands of Chris Packham, no less) and evidently it was a softcover - but a larger format than the current paperback edition and a lot "floppier", for want of a better word.

As I've got older and accumulated a few aches and pains, I've come to appreciate books that don't actively push back on your hands when you're trying to read.

>58 housefulofpaper: I'll be curious to know what you think of John Robb's book. It was bit of a primer for me in many respects. But a few portions left me...well, flummoxed. I'll tell you which after you've told us about your take on the book.

>61 benbrainard8:
I'm about to start chapter 27 (of 37) which should mean I've read enough of the book to have an opinion on it. It's a different experience for me, because I remember quite a lot of what John Robb writes about (even if it's second-hand from the contemporary music press - I bought the New Musical Express every week for at least five years from the mid-80s onwards - rather than being present myself) and of course I read the same story told by Cathi Unsworth in Season of the Witch just a few months ago.

I was a little concerned reading the opening pages where the style seemed a little jumpy, too keen on snappy little phrases, but in the main things settled down once we were into the artists' and bands' stories.

On tracing the influences on Goth, I think John Robb puts more emphasis on the previous decade or so of British music scenes or styles - Psychedelia, Heavy Rock, Glam, Punk (and Reggae and Dub), Disco, even - whereas Cathi Unsworth gives more weight to the influende of US bands. I don't think there's a "right answer" because every individual involved will have had their own unique experiences, and their own take on the wider cultural scene, and cultural history can only be a composite of all those experiences.

Obviously it's not easy writing about music, and I have been going off to YouTube to find clips or uploads of tracks to see, for example, what The Gun Club actually looked and sounded like.

There were a couple of places where I was disorientated for a moment - the chapters that focused on movements rather than artists or locales, and I suddenly stopped and went "oh, we're in the '90s/'00s now..." but nothing (yet) that I would say flummoxed me.

>62 housefulofpaper:
I ought to own up to being sent to the dictionary several times by Mr Robb - atramentous, skreegh, caliginous...

>63 housefulofpaper:

Specifically, I think 'skreegh' is what the black-headed gulls are calling out front at the moment. Probably someone trying to get bread or cake past them to the swans and mallards ...

>63 housefulofpaper:

I guessed 'atramentous' meant 'wasting away' ... got that wrong, then. I guessed 'caliginous' had something to do with ladies with big bottoms ... embarrassingly wrong!

Venus Callipyge wouldn't mind the thought nevertheless. :)

Hello all,

I've finished read Uncle Silas, subtitled "A Tale of Bartram Haugh", yesterday. It had me reading up on some of the events of the time period, including the Opium Wars, what novels had already been published.

The Uncle Silas seems to be what they called the "locked-room mystery subgenre," type of novel. It seemed to have fears of peril, bad actors, and intrigue. Main protagonist being a 17-yr old girl and a miserly, laudanum/opium-addicted Uncle, and the "nasty French governess type", it moved along in an interesting manner.

I enjoyed the descriptions of the two manors: mansion at Knowl and the manor where Uncle Silas lives, Bartram-Haugh.

I've put below some descriptions from Wikipedia, about movie and television versions of the book, as I'll look for some of them to watch:

'"A film version, also titled "Uncle Silas" (though initially released in the United States as "The Inheritance"), was made by Gainsborough Studios in 1947. It was directed by Charles Frank, with Derrick De Marney as Silas and Jean Simmons as the heroine (whose given name was changed from Maud to Carolyn).

A feature-length British television adaptation was made for the Thames Television series Mystery and Imagination (1968). Maud was played by Lucy Fleming with Robert Eddison as Silas.

In 1977 a West German series Uncle Silas was produced featuring Hannes Messemer in the title role.

"The Dark Angel", a further adaptation starring Peter O'Toole as Silas, premiered on BBC Television in 1989, and was broadcast on PBS in the US on 21 March 1991.

In October 2021, principal photography began on an adaptation financed by Fís Éireann/Screen Ireland. It is being directed by Lisa Mulcahy, with Agnes O'Casey as Maud and David Wilmot as Silas. It was released in 2023 under the title "Lies We Tell."'

The online content I found also mentions that The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins, is also compared with Uncle Silas.

>67 benbrainard8:

You've reminded me that I've long intended to read up on the history of British pantomime and how it matches up with Le Fanu's timeline, but never got round to it. I've long suspected that Madame de la Rougierre has some connection to the traditional Pantomime Dame. I can't remember chapter and verse right now, but the novel has tiniest hints here and there that she might have been a man. She's a caricature of a woman. Again, I suspect that this is all tangled-up with my belief—again, which I've never got round to properly researching—that panto might have evolved from the Gothic theatre of the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century—a watered-down and family-friendly version, as it were.

>68 alaudacorax:

there seems to be a strong resemblance between pantomines and renaissance masques.The question would be, is there an unbroken line between the 17th and the 19th Century? Well, The Tempest at least was never out of print, and was adapted to suit Restoration taste, and turned into an opera, before the 17th Century had ended.

And, this may be down to my lack of reading sophistication, but when I read Comus I didn't come away from it feeling I'd experienced a deep theological mediatation on the value of virginity, but rather a very strange episode of Emu's World (Emu's pink windmill, Grotbags the witch, etc).

Has anyone read Gertrude Atherton's short story 'The Dead and the Countess'? It's out of copyright and easily found online. I'd love to know what other readers make of the last paragraph—of the ending, in other words. It's really puzzling me to the extent that I'm wondering if I'm missing something obvious. On first reading, my reaction was simple and crude—they accidentally buried the countess alive and then dug her back up, in the nick of time; but the more I thought about it the more I came to doubt that this was what Atherton actually meant; and now I'm thoroughly confused.

I'm about to dive into Cathi Unsworth's book, Season of the Witch: The Book of Goth, but I've already come across two paragraphs that sum it up nicely, for those of you that don't want to take a 500++ page dive. And it doesn't have spoilers, so:

" Goth in the time of Thatcher was a form of resistance against stupidity and ignorance. It was, to use the word that Murdoch has attempted to make the dirtiest in our language, elitist. It feasted on high art, challenging literature, sublime cinema and intelligent discourse. But as we have seen, it was also a meritocracy. Those who created the best music of the 80s came from all backgrounds and many of them overcame all manner of abuse, poverty, and neglect to climb through punk's portal and make their own opportunities, educating themselves where public policy and/or their own parents had failed them."

" So if anyone picks on you for being different in any way, please use this book to hit them on the head with the facts and rest assured, you are in good company. Goth has been ridiculed and derided for decades as being miserable, morose, and moronic- when in fact, it is anything but. It stands for all the essential forces of creativity, friendship and vision, not to mention humor- it's just that, until things get brighter, it'll still be wearing black. Forty years on, I think it's time for the curse to be lifted and the words spoken in darkness to be heard in the light.

I am a Goth."

>70 alaudacorax:
I had The Bell in the Fog & Other Stories in the loft waiting to be read. The ending of 'The Dead and the Countess' left me wondering too, but I think your initial reading is the correct one. I suppose we are to imagine it was a Poe-style catatonia that the Countess was suffering from, and that she had only just been interred on the day that the priest came to his senses.

I did look online for clues and it seems this was first published at Christmas, which I think maybe puts it all in context. I mean if it's an example of the sub-genre of Dickensian ghost story, then the coincidences, sentimentality, and happy ending would fall into place.

>72 housefulofpaper:

Good point about the Victorian sentimentality (if one can say 'Victorian' about US authors). Perhaps I was subconsciously looking for a modern ambiguity or ambivalence in the ending which would probably have been anachronistic for what I was reading.

It's this old business of buying stuff for my Kindle and then completely forgetting about it. I was doing a bit of tidying-up on there last night and came upon The Third Ghost Story Megapack. From my LT catalogue, I bought it in 2016, yet I'm sure I've I'd never read any of it, not even that first, Gertrude Atherton story.

>71 benbrainard8: - Goth has been ridiculed and derided for decades as being miserable, morose, and moronic ...

Probably by those who never bothered to find out anyway. It sort of drifted by me, hardly noticed, as a culture of a rather younger generation than my own and it was only when I joined this group that I learned there was any more to it than clothing and makeup fashion.

>70 alaudacorax:, >73 alaudacorax:

Finished reading The Third Ghost Story Megapack in the early hours. A tin of biscuits: it's all I've been reading for the last week or so and I didn't intend reading it in the first place, but once you've had one you can't stop.

I've given it four stars—as a quick guess; I sometimes star each story and work out the average but was too lazy this time. Twenty-six stories and the majority were 'satisfying' but conventional, if you know what I mean: I'm probably not going to remember them in a few weeks' time, but they were quite good when reading.

There was a small handful that stood out. I mentioned Gertrude Atherton. Her second story, 'The Bell in the Fog', was the stand-out for me (which reminds me that I was puzzled by its title and meant to look into it a bit more). Powerful, unusual and somewhat disturbing on the non-supernatural level, it could stand rereading and a bit of thinking over. Leopold Kompert's 'Oman' is another that's in my memory. He struck me as a sort of Jewish version of Nathaniel Hawthorne and his story is another that seems to be demanding a bit of pondering. 'The Secret Chamber' by Margaret Oliphant I thought rather more straightforward, but one of the best conventional ghost stories I've read in a long time.

There were a couple of flaws I have to mention. One is the proof-reading or, rather, the absence of such. The book is really liberally sprinkled with typos. Another of the curses of the Kindle, I suppose. The other is the presence of Henry James's 'The Jolly Corner'. This bloke's tortuous syntax gets right up my nose. I mean, it has me reading back over my own LT posts for fear I'm inflicting this kind of contortionism on you lot—it makes you paranoid. And there's no difference between the narrative voice and the dialogue he gives to his characters. When you are reading a story you really shouldn't be fantasising about setting the author's trouser-legs on fire.

>75 alaudacorax:

I forgot to mention Lafcadio Hearn; yet another of those writers I've long been meaning to explore but but never got round to ... and this book doesn't help. There are two stories, 'The Cedar Closet' and 'The Tale of the Porcelain-God', and they couldn't be more startlingly different. Having read, to my memory, only these two, I couldn't give any guess as to his writing style. The first has some echoes of Poe, and in a female narrative voice, just to confuse the issue further; while the second seems in Kai Lung territory, though with a rather darker tinge. I may be unfair in that judgement and it may have a more authentically Chinese voice than I'm giving it credit for.

Another complaint I have about these 'Megapack' books: surely it couldn't be that difficult to stick in publication dates? It took me not a little hunting online to figure out that 'The Tale of the Porcelain-God' was probably written before Hearn left the US. And now I'm too hungry to hunt up a date for 'The Cedar Closet'.

>75 alaudacorax: & >76 alaudacorax:
I loved these two posts, especially your fantasising about setting the author’s trouser legs on fire.

Last night I started reading a Wordsworth edition entitled Classic Victorian & Edwardian Ghost Stories. One story* down, twenty-four to go.

*The Tapestried Chamber by Sir Walter Scott.

>75 alaudacorax:
By the way, Classic Victorian & Edwardian Ghost Stories also fails to include any dates written of published for the stories. The closest information given is the birth and death dates of each author. Quite frustrating.

By the way, "The Tapestried Chamber" was nice simple story of a haunting. The second story, "The Spectre of Tappington" by Richard Harris Barham was very entertaining an contained plenty of humour.

Henry James...I started reading Tartarus Press' volume of his "Ghostly Stories" in 2016 and I've got as far as page 159. Strangely, a BBC adaptation from the '70s turned up on BBC4 a few months ago and I found myself drawn into it.

I think I'd understood Lafcadio Hearn to be almost an anthropologist and folklore collector with his Japanese stories. He had also worked as a journalist earlier in his career, and as a translator (of Theophile Gautier for example), so I think I came to his work expecting quite a lot of variation.

>77 pgmcc:

You really shouldn't encourage my psychopathic tendencies ...

>79 housefulofpaper:

I really should get round to Lafcadio Hearn. I bought a 'complete' for my Kindle about nine months ago, but haven't looked at it yet. I look at his Wikipedia page and it's quite astonishing and has me wondering why on earth I haven't started on him. Actually ... no ... I'll put what I was about to say on the Southern Gothic thread.

When I was in Jp last year I purchased this book, Japanese Ghost Stories, Lafcadio Hearn, Paul A. Murray (Editor)

His name in Japan is Koizumi Yakumo. He's got such an interesting life story.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lafcadio_Hearn

I suppose The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories and The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost stories are the core of my ghost story collection, although lack of space has exiled them to the back of a shelf in the loft. These books do include first publication details. "The Tapestried Chamber" was first published in The Keepsake (1829), an "elegant and fashionable annual".

(Scott's story is in English Ghost Stories, by the way. From the introduction: "There is no inconsistency in selecting stories from Scottish, Irish, and American authors: the British stories have no Celtic element and are part of the mainstream of English literature, while the American stories"..."display quite clearly their English roots". That was written way back in 1986...)

>83 housefulofpaper:

Interesting viewpoint: this is probably a comment for the other thread, but I'll be curious to see if and how Poe and then the Southern Gothic authors were consciously breaking away from 'English roots'. It's not something I've given a lot of thought to.

Can you go back? You can go back ... you can't go back ... dunno ...

I mentioned over on the film thread that I'd been reading H. Rider Haggard's She. I said that I

... loved Rider Haggard when I was kid but I was braced to be disappointed ..."

It's probably been sixty years or more since I last read him, I only had the vaguest memories of reading She, and experience tells that revisiting your youthful tastes can be a bit chastening. In this case, though, I enjoyed it. Rather in 'ripping yarn' territory.

Likewise, I only have the vaguest memories of reading Ayesha, the Return of She; though, as far as I remember, I enjoyed it as I enjoyed all of Rider Haggard's books. Well, on rereading, it's quite a different beast to She. It just plods along, continually stopping to graze, and keeps sending me to sleep in the evenings. I'm getting the impression that HRH didn't plan it out beforehand—didn't really know where he was going when writing. Both books were serialised in magazines before being published as novels, but this one really reads like it.

So now I've had this collected HRH on my Kindle since 2012—there must be fifty or sixty novels if they're all on there—and it wil have taken me all this time to read just two of them ... and I really don't know if I want to read any more of him or not. It's not easy being a reader ...

>85 alaudacorax:

... and, according to Amazon, I shelled out a WHOLE £1-97 for that collection ...

>85 alaudacorax:

Finished Ayesha, the Return of She. To be fair, there were some exciting and colourful passages in it, but, as I said, really long-winded.

Like She, however, I'm still in two minds whether it actually is or is not Gothic literature. Looking it up just now, I see Wikipedia has it as 'a gothic-fantasy novel'; I'd been pondering over where are the dividing lines between Gothic and Fantasy. I am now wondering whether it is really possible to put dividing lines in there at all. Things just bleed into one and other, messily.

Reading these two books, especially Ayesha, the Return of She, I was frequently minded that Tolkien must have been quite familiar with them. Which must put them somewhere early in the line to contemporary Fantasy. How to relate them to some of the classics of Gothic literature, though, I'm much more doubtful about.

It seems to me that in Gothic literature there is an element of engagement with the contemporary culture, however allegorical or symbolic, that separates it from the pure escapism of Fantasy. I should add a caveat that I really haven't read a lot of Fantasy—so I'm quite probably wrong.

And speaking of caveats: all that lot is just ramblings off the top of my head—I haven't really thought it through.

Edited to put a 'the' in front of 'contemporary' ...

I should report that the Gertrude Atherton book consists mainly of non-supernatural stories. It's in Wordsworth Editions Horror and Supernatural series but after "The Bell in the Fog", "The Striding Place" (which I'd already read in American Fantastic Tales) and "The Dead and the Countess", it's really be stretching the truth to claim the remainder as suspense stories or psychological horror. Oh, and there's a "prologue to an unwritten play" (i think, I'm quoting from memory) which is so overwrought it reads like the sort of thing that the plays supposedly written by Ernie Wise were sending up.

>87 alaudacorax:
I've got a vague half-memory that Haggard had to write his later books for money. I have got a copy of Ayesha - The Return of She. It's in an omnibus edition with She, from an Indian paperback publisher, that was in a discount bookshop (I was going to go on to write "remember them" but I suppose The Works is still around. It's not the same though. Don't expect to find a reproduction of the Morte D'Arthur illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley, or dirt cheap recent US hardbacks, there).

>88 housefulofpaper:

You mean 'wot Ernie Wise wrote'?

>88 housefulofpaper:

Oh, that's a disappointment. I'd quite taken to her from reading the few I have, but they are the three you mention, so ...

I've been reading The Third Macabre Megapack: 25 Classic Tales of Horror (and now I've written that I realise that I've not kept LT up-to-date on what I'm reading—I was lackadaisical enough even before having to wrestle with the new work page).

One of those translation puzzlers again: I've been really impressed by a story called 'Vera', by Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, 'translated from the French by Hamish Miles'—so, once again, I'm pondering over who, exactly, it is who is impressing me. As it stands in English, however, I think this one really transcends the horror genre—an unusually powerful and absorbing story for the context and up there with any author one would care to name.

'The Outgoing of the Tide', by John Buchan, has me floundering for what I think of it. I've read a lot of Buchan's novels and short stories over the years and I generally quite like him, but this one has me puzzling over his attitudes towards women, towards religion, and over the relationship between the authorial voice and the narrative voice*. I don't know how he wants me to read it—intriguing.

I'll almost certainly be revisiting those two for more pondering.

On the other hand, I don't know whether to be annoyed or amused by 'A Tragedy of High Explosives', by Brainard Gardner Smith, the literary equivalent of unexpectedly getting a wet finger shoved in your ear.

* I would better have said 'between the author and the narrative voice'.

>92 alaudacorax:

The Third Macabre Megapack: 25 Classic Tales of Horror—bought October 1st, 2016, never looked at again till this week ...

I must put in a word in its favour: unlike The Third Ghost Story Megapack it has a 'Copyright Info' page; you can find out when a story was first published.

>93 alaudacorax:

I finished The Third Macabre Megapack: 25 Classic Tales of Horror a few hours ago.

There were some good stories in it. In >92 alaudacorax:, I mentioned that Buchan story; it's difficulties paled beside the at least three times racist 'The Grove of Ashtaroth', which we treated here at some point, and which still manages to be a powerful story. I was very taken with Gertrude Atherton's 'Death and the Woman', Grant Allen's 'Wolverden Tower', Mary Keegan's 'Twilight Zone' and Ouida's 'A Lemon Tree'. And now I've written out those four I realise that, along with >92 alaudacorax:'s 'Vera', they make me look like some kind of depressive. So be it.

Brainard Gardner Smith's 'A Tragedy of High Explosives' I thought verged on the silly. It was meant to be humorous, of course, but I don't think he (or she) quite pulled it off. I could say much the same for Jerome K. Jerome's 'The Haunted Mill'. Loved him when I was young but I've rather grown out of him.

On the whole, though, I thought it quite a good collection.

Note that I couldn't touchstone Mary Keegan and the book's 'Authors' pages doesn't don't know who she is either.

Note, too, that all mentioned are out of copyright and easily found online.

I’ve been dawdling through the Cambridge History of the Gothic. The last chapter I read, and we’re still only near the start of volume two, is all about the collection of translated German ghost stories read at the Villa Diodati by the Shelley’s, Byron, etc.

(Still only have my phone so these will be short tweet-like posts). The article traces the originals, compares them with the translation and editorial decisions of the Compiler of the French edition. And makes a case for themes and scenes or at least images turning up in Frankenstein, in a work of Polydori’s, and a couple of Byron’s poems.

Then coincidentally just after reading that, I found out that there was an English translation of the book published in 2023.
This actually consists of the English translation of the French edition, but because this in its turn was altered by the English editor, it is augmented with translations of the material in the French edition that was omitted in the English. So it tells the story of the text’s transmission from the halfway point, but does let you read everything that the Villa Diodati gang (can I call them that?) would have read.

The book is called Fantasmagoriana Deluxe subtitled “A Combined Edition of Fantasmagoriana and Tales of the Undead”. Although the stories held my interest there was nothing with the impact or intelligence of Frankenstein. I can’t remember if Mary Shelley writes that they were sure that they could do better than what they found in the book, rather than we inspired to try to emulate it, but that’s what I imagined happened, after finishing the book.

Something I thought I noticed was an evolution in the stories- from pseudo-medieval apparently artless sequences of events, as per the earliest 18th Century Gothic short fiction, to fictions written for 19th Century periodicals/journals/newspapers - the milieu of E T A Hoffmann’s fiction of a little later.

Something I should have said in relation to the Cambridge essay- it says the selection of material in the French edition bears evidence of being chosen because it mirrored the subject matter of then-current phantasmagoria shows (echoed in the very name of the French edition, of course). These included demonstrations of galvanism in addition to magic lantern effects, apparently. And the essay goes on to say pirate versions of essentially the same shows were on in London, and the Shelley’s saw them. Which obviously makes them yet another possible source of inspiration for Mary Shelley’s novel.

Although it often feels, when such suggestions are made, that Mary’s achievement is being played down - Percy’s editing job on the 1818 version practically makes him co-author; or the book is merely a fictionalised version of Percy and Byron’s table-talk; even that the book’s roots in Mary’s personal traumas somehow belies the conscious and artistic achievement of writing a novel.

>101 housefulofpaper: - Although it often feels, when such suggestions are made ...

Do you mean that you feel the Cambridge essayist is playing down Mary's achevement? That's surprising for such a recent publication. Or is it? Not sure now I've made the statement.

Still green with envy every time you mention The Cambridge History ...

>102 alaudacorax: - Still green with envy every time you mention The Cambridge History ...

I've been very good—I haven't bought a new book (or second-hand) since last October (and those were a couple of really cheap Kindle editions) and I made a New Year's Revolution to not buy another book until I've read five already-owned non-fictions. But there's no sense of achievement or virtue—more like a nagging itch: I've got this small pile of books I really, really want my own copies of ... and some of them are quite expensive ... and now I've got to add Fantasmagoriana Deluxe! Houseful strikes again!!! And then there's The Cambridge History ...

What I really need, of course, is a lottery win, a move to a much bigger house and a shipload more bookcases ...

>103 alaudacorax: - ... and a shipload more bookcases ...

Just had a thought. What if I ended up with unused bookcase space? The thought brings me out in a cold sweat.

>104 alaudacorax:
…unused bookcase space

I am not familiar with this concept. Could you explain it to me, please?

>103 alaudacorax:

Senior moment—I lost track of where I was going, there. It had occurred to me that I could probably have bought the first volume of The Cambridge History for the probable cost of all the books I hadn't bought since last October. But then there's that little pile of books I mentioned. How to factor them into the equation? And then I start thinking things like, "I could buy the whole lot for the price of a dozen take-outs and I really shouldn't be eating all the yung-chow fried rice and szechuan special I put away last night, so, in reality, it would be quite virtuous to lash out on a whacking great pile of books". Knowing full well that I'd spend a pile of money on the books and a week or two down the line be irresistably craving a tandoori grill or a pizza or some such. My mind has just flashed back to a lecturer of some fifty years back telling us, "You set too much store by sensuous pleasures!"

Don't mind me. I'm just thinking aloud in public again. Bad habit. "I don't believe there's an ounce atom of meaning in it."

>105 pgmcc:

I'm sure it could make the basis for a good horror short story.

>106 alaudacorax:

'Atom', not 'ounce'. Plonker. Always check your quotations before hitting the post button.

>102 alaudacorax:
Stephen E. Andrews on his "Outlaw Bookseller" YouTube channel, doesn't miss a chance to mention Percy's involvement in the writing of Frankenstein. My view, based on the transcript of the manuscript published by Oxford a few years ago, is that Percy deserves credit as editor, not as co-author.

The relevant essays in the Cambridge book don't, as far as I can recall, follow exactly the Outlaw Bookseller's line but they do focus on the event's in Mary's life and the culture and scientific events of the time and look for sources for events in the novel, as academics would do, I suppose but like i wrote earlier at the cost of downplaying the creative act of writing, which is f course different from scientific or philosophical speculation.

Somewhere recently - and this is slightly tangential but I think relevant to this discussion - I read of the 1831 revised text of Frankenstein as the preferred text in that it had no input from Percy Shelley and was therefore purely from Mary's pen.

Talking of restraint in book-buying, I realise I've really come to the limit of what my house can accommodate. Also, it's increasingly unlikely I'll live long enough to read all of these books even once. and yet I won't accept a "100-book challenge" (it's something on the "BookTube" part of YouTube, a read-what-you-own challenge whereby one reads 100 owned but unread books before buying any new ones (there's one YouTuber on a 500 book challenge!)) because I've fallen into the trap of buying from small presses and (1) I feel almost obligated to support them (2) if I miss a volume, trying to buy it on the second-hand market is likely to break the bank.

I've got my MacBook back by the way, it seems to be working but my iTunes library and photos had to be exiled to an external drive.

Hi all,

Two for above.

I often wonder what the "real-time" reactions were to Mary Shelley's classic, in her day? Are there any reading materials online or in print that would have actual literary reviews, or something similar? It sort of boggles my mind, to imagine that she wrote this book...when she did. Stunning!

I'm going to review whatever I can find, here were a few AI driven notes:

Reactions to Frankenstein when it was written:

---Most critics assumed the author to be a man, and the discovery that it was Mary Shelley caused consternation.
---Initial critical reaction was often unfavorable, but in the twentieth century critics began to analyze the novel from various new perspectives.
---The novel was published anonymously in 1818 and is one of the most recognizable and enduring novels in English literature.
---Some reviewers criticized the novel as blasphemous and absurd.

a more lengthy online description: "When Frankenstein was first published anonymously in 1818, it was extensively reviewed by many of the important journals of the time. These reviews are notable for three main points. First, most critics simply assumed the author to be a man. The eventual discovery that it was Mary Shelley caused some consternation: the blasphemous ideas expressed were considered particularly unseemly for a woman. Secondly, the style of the novel was generally praised: most agreed with Blackwood's (March 1818) assessment of 'the author's original genius and happy power of expression'. Finally, while being impressed by the power and vigour of the work, many reviewers criticised the subject matter and the author's refusal to moralise about Frankenstein's blasphemous act. The Quarterly Review of January 1818 provides a typical complaint. After summarising the plot and declaring it to be a 'tissue of horrible and disgusting absurdity', the reviewer concludes: 'Our taste and our judgement alike revolt at this kind of writing, and the greater the ability with which it may be executed the worse it is – it inculcates no lesson of conduct, manners, or morality.'"

this is great & I'll reread it a couple of times https://knarf.english.upenn.edu/Reviews/quarter.html

Of the restraint of book-buying. um, I confess with my very small 250-300 books, I can only say, I'm a complete chicken. I've not yet bought any more than the three cabinets I've currently had. And I admit to now doing what I call double-parking, where you line books up in front of other books (yes, blocking the books in the back row). But the book buying you all do...wow. I can't get my head around it. Can you donate really large #s of books to any library, and would they (ever) accept them? Do you have to keep a "book will"?, so family will know what to do...you know, in case meeting the wonderful pearly gates.

>111 benbrainard8:

I don't have as much writing about Frankenstein as I do about Dracula; I don't know if I have anything specifically about the novel's critical reception, especially in popular culture. Is 1818 a bit too early for the growth in middle-class literacy (with magazines and lending libraries and so forth)? But I do know that Frankenstein was adapted for the stage soon after publication, and Mary Shelley attended a performance (she received no money for it, nor did she have any say in whether or not it could be adapted and performed).

On the question of what will happen to my books. There's no library that would take them. They could be donated to Oxfam (as I've written here before, I've benefited from evidently large donations made to the Reading branch by Brian Stableford and David Langford. These days, Oxfam also list books online.

I do need to think about making a Will. My niece, who is twelve, has volunteered to act as Executor but is under the impression that simply means inheriting everything! At least the mortgage is paid off so there should be no tearing urgency to clear the house in just a few days.

>111 benbrainard8:

I still haven't got a real understanding of all this stuff. I can understand that there would be some male feathers ruffled by her. Just compare it to what Jane Austen was doing at the time, or even Mrs Radcliffe a little earlier and it is rather more 'masculine', if the times equated masculinity with unveiled intellectualism (Miss Austen was clever at veiling hers). But, at this distance at least, it seems absurd to me that they could think the author was refusing to moralise—it almost sounds like some of the rubbish our present-day politicians spout about each other. Frankenstein hardly got away scot-free, did he? I wonder if there was still at play a refusal to recognise the novel as a 'proper' art form, so that it had to be nit-picked at any cost?

>113 alaudacorax: - ... so that it had to be nit-picked at any cost?

Especially if it 'got uppity' by showing real depth.

>106 alaudacorax: - And then I start thinking things like, "I could buy the whole lot for the price of a dozen take-outs ...

So, I've bought the books I wanted ... and committed to not eating another take-out (Is it a 'take-out' or 'take-away' if you have it delivered?) until May. It DID help that I was absolutely horrified at working out my average spend on ordered-in-food(?) over the last ten weeks.

>115 alaudacorax: - ... I was absolutely horrified at working out my average spend ...

Though I did manage to do it eat it all without putting on any weight ... so that's something ...

>116 alaudacorax:
It was probably your worry about spending so much on order-in-food that caused you to lose any weight the food was putting on you. Win-win!

>117 pgmcc:

Hah-hah! We live in a 'guilty society' these days: should I be eating this?; should I be laughing at this?; should I be watching this kind of film?; should I be reading him? should I be buying those?

Thank you for above.

I've just looked up Oxford UK, it's a thrift place, charity, and will take book collections? Sorry if I'm looking up the wrong organization. Yes, to my knowledge our local library here in NW will take only some collections of books. And we've got some very good new-used book sellars that will take books, though I'm sure it's more a method of downsizing. With a collection that are as extensive as all of yours, I'd most likely try to keep it "in the family".

Well, it's great if you family can take your items too!

>119 benbrainard8:

Yes, as it says on their website, Oxfam was was founded in 1942 as the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief, in response to the Allied blockade that had caused famine in Axis-occupied Greece. It now has charity shops (thrift shops? Welfares? in the US) in most British towns. Some locations are specialised second-hand bookshops, record shops, or clothes shops.

If my books can't be kept together and/or passed onto someone, then far better they are redistributed via eBay or charity shops or however, to people who want them, than that they end up getting pulped.

I've been somewhat surprised, lately, to realise (attendant on my reading of The Palgrave Handbook of the Southern Gothic) that I've never read The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. I'd thought that I'd read all of Poe's fiction, at least in the dim and distant past if not in recent years, but definitely not. Can't say I'm enjoying it very much—rather bored really(I've got as far as when he and his companion get rescued from the wreck), too much like one of the 'boys own' stories of my childhood rather than the well-known short stories.

>121 alaudacorax:

Appropriately I've been reading "The Flemish Poe", Jean Ray. The 1999 hardback My Own Private Spectres, described in passing in The Weird as famed and hard-to-find, but which turned up from a Belgian seller on AbeBooks at a reasonable price.

Very little of Ray's fiction had been available in English until recently. As far as I know, there were a handful of appearances in Weird Tales, then a 1960s US mass market paperback (Ghouls in my Grave), belatedly followed by a translation of his most famous novel, Malpertuis in 1998 and this collection the next year.

Finally, a proper series of translations of the original volumes (sort of the originals, as Ray's publishing history is confused by multiple pseudonyms, a spell in prison, the Nazi occupation, and reprints with differing contents) is coming out from Wakefield Press, mostly translated by Scott Nicolay (the 1998 translation of Malpertuis by Iain White has been reissued as part of Wakefield's series). The next in the series, a translation of Les Derniers Contes de Canterbury is up on Wakefield Press's website, due for publication this autumn.

I think it's fair to say that My Own Private Spectres was easily the best collection of Ray's fiction in English a quarter of a century ago, but the current ongoing series is inevitably going to eclipse it.

That said, about half of the stories in the book haven't been put out by Wakefield Press yet, and a couple of them, originally in Dutch and as by "John Flanders", may lay outside of their publishing plans altogether.

In an old review, LTer (and member of this group) Soukesian says the emphasis in the selection of stories is very much on Ray's Surrealist tendencies. Fair enough I suppose, and admittedly there's one story I think I need to reread to try to make sense of what was going on!

But also, the Belgian Poe is quite a chameleon: he can at times read not so much like Poe but rather the Belgian Hope Hodgson, or the Belgian Lord Dunsany; I've seen him compared to Jack London and even Chaucer (as in, Les Derniers Contes de Canterbury). Just having all these facets - spiritual and/or extra dimensional horrors stealing into stuffy bourgeois households, the seafaring weird, a rather (from the perspective of a native) looking-glass "Dickensian" England, notorious criminals, lowlife on the Docks of London or the Low Countries - in one not overly-long book is in itself disorientating.

As to the translation, by Hubert van Calenbergh, it reads well for the most part. There were one or two instances where I was scratching my head a bit - is this the right word?; has this one been left untranslated?, but certainly no major issues (of course I haven't read the original French and Dutch versions of the stories). van Calenbergh's language is rougher than Nicolay's where some low-life character's are concerned. I assume it's rougher than the originals too.

I should for completeness say that Ray also wrote or edited (or "edited" but really wrote) a lot of stories about Harry Dickson, "The American Sherlock Holmes" and some of these are now being made available in English translations, from various translators and in various formats. I've got one book, so far, but as of right now, it's still unread.

I bought the new Wordsworth Editions selection of Arthur Machen, a fat paperback edited by Stephen Carver entitled Between Two Worlds: The Weird Tales of Arthur Machen. It has a lot more material than either the Penguin Classics or Oxford World Classics and a good introduction. One word of caution, it extracts the famous stories "The Novel of the Black Seal" and "The Novel of the White Powder" (with "The Novel of the Iron Maid", too) from their places in The Three Impostors rather than choosing to reprint the whole novel. It is complete in the Oxford collection. Or two words of caution: the book may not be very robust. The cover isn't laminated and, even with what I hope was careful handling and after only reading the introduction and a couple of stories, some marks of wear were evident.

More Arthur Machen from a Darkly Bright Press, a small publisher that specialises in "Exploring uncommon literature and liturgical Christianity". A Reader of Curious Books (a print on demand paperback via Amazon) reprints some very early work of the 1880s, short book reviews and articles for Walfords Antiquarian Magazine. Very niche, but I enjoyed reading it.

A Disease of Language was published in 2005 and I've had it for a while but only managed to read it yesterday. The book consists of two comic adaptations (illustrated by Eddie Campbell, Moore's collaborator on From Hell) of theatrical works that Moore created and performed soon after he publicly declared that he had decided to become a magician. The last third of the book reprints a long interview conducted with Moore by Eddie Campbell, focusing on his then-new magical ideas and endeavours in comics and other media.

One of the comics/graphic novels, entitled "Snakes and Ladders" is a psychogeographical investigation of the part of London around Red Lion Square (which I knew fairly well in the '00s, as the Folio Society's members room was close by. I choose to collect my orders rather than have them posted to me. I used to be able to leave in the cloakroom of the British Museum (that's gone now) and spend a couple of hours looking at the exhibits, which included Doctor Dee's obsidian mirror). There is a lot about Arthur Machen who lived nearby when his first wife died, and he suffered a breakdown, or had a mystical experience.

I finished The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket tonight. Of interest to the student of Poe, and I personally was reading it because it is treated in The Palgrave Handbook of the Southern Gothic, in a section I've yet to read; but as a novel on its own merit I was quite perplexed by it. It leaves you with so many questions.

>126 alaudacorax:

On the subject of The Palgrave Handbook of the Southern Gothic, I now find myself somewhat undecided over when one should read such a book and if I actually should be reading it. I've read very little that could be described as Southern Gothic and I was rather thinking of the Handbook as a guide or introduction to the genre. But is there really any point in reading the book when you don't know the subject matter? I've just read The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket because one of the first chapters deals with it: if I'm going to do that with every work treated I'm going to be reading the Handbook for years rather than weeks or months. And I'm not even that sure that I want to read Southern Gothic—at least not to the extent of setting aside other reading I want to do. I had a dog like me once, constantly being distracted by everything that came to her attention ...

>127 alaudacorax:

Obvious answer—now I'm thinking while properly awake (last post was 3:25 in the morning my time). Use it as a reference book: read the relevant section if and when I've just read one of the works discussed.

>128 alaudacorax:
A totally logical conclusion from a wakened mind to a real conundrum. Not every world problem is solved in dreams.

I've been reading Mike Ashley's biography Algernon Blackwood: an Extraordinary Life. There is a revised second edition, but this is the first edition, which turned up in the Oxfam bookshop in 2016 (it took that long to get around to reading it).

I was aware of Mike Ashley as an editor and compiler of anthologies but this is the first extended work of prose, of his, that I'd read. It's an engaging and professional piece of work, any concerns I might have had as to uncertainty of pace or tone were totally misplaced - it reads like what it is - the work of a professional author.

Turning to Blackwood's life, two things stood out on this reading. In broad strokes Blackwood's life surprisingly echoes Aleister Crowley's - born into a wealthy and fundamental religious household which he rebels against, unusually well-travelled and athletic in early manhood (mountaineering for Crowley; walking, canoeing, and skiiing for Blackwood), the involvement in magical secret societies, which morphed into a pioneering New Age interest for Blackwood (Unlike Crowley, of course, Blackwood seems to have been the kindest and widely-loved of men).

The other thing is how the events of Blackwood's life directly inspired his writing. The horrible time he had trying to make it in business in Canada and then New York, for example, was what triggered his initial slew of supernatural "horror" fiction.

There are some surprises along the way, much of them coming from Blackwood's wide range of acquaintances - the note that, when visiting Capri, he stayed with either Axel Munthe or Gracie Fields (of all people!) in particular made my eyebrows shoot up in surprise.

>130 housefulofpaper:

A few months ago I'd got myself in a silly position whereby I had ten or fifteen books in my 'Currently reading'; which wasn't working, of course. The Mike Ashley was one of those transferred to the 'Long-term reading' pile, which really means 'totally forgotten about'. So many books, so little time (or, 'so badly-organised time'). On the plus side, while I was looking for it just now I finally found my field guide to butterflies, which I've been looking for since the weather turned milder, plus an unexpected DVD of Frankenstein The True Story which I'm sure I haven't watched. So that's something ...

>131 alaudacorax:

Ah. According to Amazon, I bought that DVD in October 2021. So I've hardly had time to watch it yet, then ...

My memory is really not what it was. I came across references to Robert Louis Stevenson's short story 'Olalla' while browsing online, and then, of course, I had to hunt it up and read it (and now it's quarter to three in the morning), all the time under the impression I was reading it for the first time. The daft thing is a quick search of the Talk threads shows me that I've read it before, even wrote about it here (at https://www.librarything.com/topic/134532#3364416) and, from that, obviously thought it a great story.

I just have to give it another shout out. There is so much to unpack in it. First off, the skill and richness of the prose is intoxicating. The shadow of Mrs. Radcliffe hangs over it—a 'proper' Gothic tale. For the story itself, there is so much vaguely alluded to but not spelled out, leaving you with so many questions. The commandante telling the story is surely an unreliable narrator, which may or many not help, and how much are we to take Olalla herself as reliable in what she believes? On this last point, how do the attitudes of Stevenson himself and the time of composition (published for Christmas, 1885) factor in? And then there's the ending: I've just seen it referred to as 'weak', but it seems quite powerful to me, foreshadowing for the reader something much more heart-breaking and horrific than the pitchfork and flaming torch ending in the Frankenstein film.

Anyway, I've now been reminded what a great writer Stevenson was ... and that I really need a 'collected' of him ... and that I still haven't read Jekyll and Hyde ...

>133 alaudacorax:
I couldn't remember if I'd read "Olalla" or not - I have, it's in The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales but the details of the story have faded. As ever, that's a reflection of my memory rather than the quality of the story. I have two collections of Stevenson's short fiction - a two-volume selection from The Folio Society and a one-volume from Tartarus Press. Both still waiting their turn to be read, I'm afraid.

My current reading has been rather less elevated. Have we discussed "Harry Dickson, the American Sherlock Holmes" before? As I understand it, this started life at the beginning of the last century as a series of unauthorised German-language Sherlock Holmes pastiches.

In the 1920s, a Dutch publisher proposed to republish the stories, but (I assume for legal reasons) changed the character names and made some other changes to created Harry Dickson and his assistant, Tom Wills. Soon after the stories were reprinted in French editions under the editorship of non other than Jean Ray but Ray pretty much wrote brand-new stories around the cover illustrations for the old German stories. Despite Dickson's tag-line as "the American Sherlock Holmes" the action centres around London. The stories themselves are pulp adventures which bring Sax Rohmer to mind more than anything else.

>134 housefulofpaper:

Slightly off-topic, but I watched the Robert Downey Jnr, Jude Law, Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes yesterday evening or the evening before. I don't think I'd seen it before but I have vague memories of it being discussed here. It was very much in the line of a traditional Gothic horror tale of the Radcliffean, supernatural-horrors-explained-away-at-the-denouement sort. I was quite absorbed. I must, at some point, hunt out the second one they made. My first thought was that Robert Downey didn't really look a Sherlock Holmes, but I almost immediately forgot that and quite believed in him. I suspected a lot of influence on the Benedict Cumberbatch TV series but I'm too tired to think it through (been up all hours watching the LA Sevens last couple of nights—bit zombified).

Recent reading:

The String of Pearls (the original Sweeney Todd novel, or rather, "Penny Dreadful" serial). The Wordsworth Classics edition has a very informative introduction by editor Dick Collins. He describes The String of Pearls as the last of the original run of Gothic novels that start with The Castle of Otranto (most authorities would choose Melmoth the Wanderer) and suggests both Mr Hyde and in particular Dracula, draw on the character of Sweeney Todd and on incidents in the serial. Although the incidents and characters that Collins talks about as specifically influencing Dracula only appear in a much rewritten and over-extended reissue of 1850 (that is, three or four years after the original). He also thinks that the original author is unknown and whatever involvement James Malcolm Rymer and/or Thomas Preskett Prest may have had, it was no more than to rewrite and extend a property that publisher Edward Lloyd had gotten hold of.

This was only the second Penny Dreadful I'd read after Varney the Vampyre and is a much shorter and tightly-constructed narrative. It still goes of following different plot threads with tonal shifts, from comedy to suspense*, and some threads getting lost along the way...the unoriginal comparison would be with a modern soap opera.

* and from the fustiest, corny "oh woe is me" dialogue and indeed monologues (as if spoken on stage to a sentimental Victorian audience), to surprisingly modern and/or tough-minded sentiments - certainly comparing favourably, on that score, with the contents of the Yellow Book anthology I finished not long before, which was nearly half a century later and aimed at a self-consciously sophisticated readership.

>135 alaudacorax:

Just some, probably unconnected, thoughts that your post prompted.

The '80s and '90s as a self-conscious high-water mark for accurate TV portrayals of classic detectives. Jeremy Brett's Sherlock Holmes of course, Joan Hickson as Miss Marple and David Suchet as Poirot. There was also Derek Jacobi as Brother Cadfael, Peter Davison as Campion...(there was also a short -lived series starring Powers Boothe as Philip Marlowe, that I think had some British financing despite being primarily a US production. Wikipedia certainly lists some British talent behind the camera. In fact I think I remember a TV Times cover featuring three notably faithful literary adaptations, Brett's Sherlock Holmes, the Powers Boothe Marlowe, and, just a little different from the others, the Cosgrove-Hall produced, stop-motion The Wind in the Willows (David Jason voicing Toad)).

The early 1970s series The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes had three former Holmes actors playing characters who were not Holmes - John Neville, Robert Stephens, and Douglas Wilmer. I wondered if there was any problems in differentiating the characters from Holmes and from one another, especially when Holmes himself can be played as more of a standard action hero (Robert Downey Jr for example) - more Sexton Blake than himself. Maybe that's why the Rivals producers cast Donald Pleasence as Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder (a Carnacki of a lower social class than his Country-Squire clients, and one who drinks to steady his nerves...very different from William Hope Hodgson's character).

As to who looks most like Sherlock Holmes, there was a Strand Magazine illustration (not by Sidney Paget, but I can't recall who the artist actually was) used on the Penguin The Uncollected Sherlock Holmes (some editions at any rate) that looks (facially, anyway) spookily like Clive Merrison, who played Holmes in adaptations of ALL the novels and short stories for Radio Four.

In A Study in Scarlet, Sherlock Holmes is first described by Dr. Watson as a lean, tall man with a hawk-like nose, sharp, piercing eyes, and a high, occasionally strident voice (that's from an "AI overview", apparently but it matches what I remember). Nicholas Rowe, who took the role in Young Sherlock Holmes (forty!years!ago!) struck me as being perfectly cast for that original description.

>136 housefulofpaper:
I enjoyed The String of Pearls. Sweeney Todd struck me as a true anti-hero; he had no a single good attribute and there was nothing that gave the reader cause to pity him, not a single saving grace. This is in stark contrast to the screen adaptions I have seen, especially the Tim Burton Johnnie Depp version in which the merged the good guy’s history with Todd’s.

>137 housefulofpaper:

Lord, I'd quite forgotten—fell asleep to that Cosgrove-Hall The Wind in the Willows last night—slept to well past dawn with whatever streaming service it was I was watching moved on to some unpleasantly dodgy film about naked women time-travelling.

Anyway, I only saw, perhaps, five or ten minutes of The Wind in the Willows but I have to say I was finding it rather creepy—didn't like those stop-motion figures at all. Between them and the time-travel thing I'm surprised I didn't have nightmares. Teleportation, not time travel. Apparently, if you want to teleport a naked woman from one place to another, you have to strangle her to death with a rope at the first place at the point moment she's starting to appear at the second place. I've just recently bought yet two more copies of The Wind in the Willows; now I'm probably never going to think of them the same way again ...

>139 alaudacorax:

Hah! Just checked my watch history and I apparently slept through two more films between those two. "Switch telly off after supper ... read a book ... set an alarm for bedtime ..."

Not the way to start my early a.m., but this article was fascinating and a bit sad, too:

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20250516-how-historys-brutal-witch-trials-st...

So, I needed some humor to counter-act:

https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=monty+python+how+do+you+kno...

>141 benbrainard8: - "This article contains violent details some readers may find upsetting."

Really? I'm absolutely sick of these bloody warnings everywhere. We need to stop pandering to these drama queens and virtue signallers who pore over the media looking for things to be offended by, and, indeed, we need to bring back the public pillory especially for them.

Right, I'll carry on reading the article now.

>142 alaudacorax:

Hang on ... I'm back for a moment.

I saw a warning not long ago to the effect that 'this programme contains mention of violent acts' (my italics). Not long before that I saw a warning of distressing scenes on a documentary on the great tsunami of some years back.

>144 alaudacorax:

I'm back again. It's just occurred to me that, to be consistent, there should be warnings outside churches: "This church may contain a depiction of a man being tortured to death on a cross."

I’ve neglected to give update on the chapters I’ve read in The Cambridge History of The Gothic.

‘The Mutation of the Vampire in Nineteenth-Century Gothic’ by Jerrold E Hogle I found a bit daunting, as it makes more reference to Theory than the previous chapters, but the story of the idea of the vampire and the presentation of the vampire in various media agrees with what I had gleaned from other writings on the subject, chiefly how Polidori’s ‘The Vampyre’ fused the 18th Century vampire of reports from Eastern Europe with the image and persona of Lord Byron, and this was transmitted through translations and stage adaptations, becoming an image that can be reached for mid-century (from descriptions of Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights to metaphorical use by Karl Marx to political cartoons). There’s also a parallel thread running from ‘Christabel’ to ‘Carmilla’. Until by the end of the century, Count Dracula conflates “virtually all of the most standard vampire features that developed on the stage and the page since ‘Christabel’.

The next chapter is ‘From Romantic Gothic to Victorian Medievalism: 1817 and 1877’ by Tom Duggett. This is all about the political and sociological hopes and theories attached to the architectural style at the two different points in time - in Regency times at the start of the industrial revolution and then at the height of the British Empire. Dense (I’ve already forgotten some of the details) but an interesting read throwing some sidelights on the development of British culture and history.

The next chapter is also all about architecture and what it meant in the culture. ‘Nineteenth-Century Gothic Architectural Aesthetics: A. W. N. Pugin, John Ruskin and William Morris’ by Alexandra Warwick.

Back to literature (or at least, back to fiction) with Anthony Mandal’s chapter ‘Gothic Fiction, from Shilling Shockers to Penny Bloods’

This explains the difference between Shilling Shockers and Penny Bloods/Penny Dreadfuls and explains their evolution - from the broadsides and chapbooks sold by itinerant vendors to the “bluebooks” 1770-1830 which consisted of short original Gothic narratives plus a lot of abridged retellings of famous Gothic novels. These are the things that Romantic and Victorian writers from William Godwin to Walter Scott reminisced about reading in childhood and adolescence.

Increased adult literacy and a reduction in the cost of paper was the reason this new type of publication took off.

Fiction had appeared in magazines since the 1740s but as the author writes, “these early examples were not representative of their period, unlike the serialised fiction that characterised the 1840s to 1870s”. He mentions Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, which pioneered the ‘tale of terror’ during the 1820s and 1830s (and were an influence on Edgar Allan Poe).

“The sixpenny or shilling bluebooks were displaced by cheaper penny publications, such as The Penny Novelist, The Calendar of Horrors and The Romancist, and Novelist’s Library. These often “recycled” material originally “aimed at upper- and middle-class readers, making them available to a new audience at a fraction of the original price”. which has obvious comparisons to the paperback revolution a century or more later.

From the mid-1830s the cheap reprints were replaced by the penny bloods, which were gruesome combinations of Gothic and crime melodrama, typically on eight pages of cheap paper per issue. Mandal explains that strictly, the penny dreadfuls were marketed to boys, replacing the penny bloods on vendors’ shelves from about 1860 onwards. The chapter ends “It is satisfying to see…that recent and ongoing scholarship is, at last , acknowledging the central and transformative role played by street fiction in the history of Gothic…”

>145 housefulofpaper:

Don't know if I mentioned it here, but I treated myself to the first book of The Cambridge History of the Gothic a couple of months back, but then I decided to reread my The Short Oxford History of English Literature (which is quite a hefty volume) first, to give myself a base line from which to start, as it were. So I'm still on that currently. I'm looking forward to starting on the Cambridge History, though. A real kicker was that, after humming and hawing over it for, perhaps, years, and being put off that it was only available in hardback, which I hate underlining and annotating (essential for me when reading non-fiction), I finally gritted my teeth and shelled out for a copy ... only to see, just a few weeks later, a listing on Amazon of the forthcoming release of the softcover for a fraction of the price—it's released in August. And it had been annoying me that the later volumes were available in softcover, so commonsense should have told me that if I only had patience the softcover would turn up at some point.

The Hogle stuff is familiar to me, presumably from The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction for which he was editor and a contributor. As it happened, I reread 'Christabel' just a few nights back and (as I've written elsewhere here) I rather take issue with the idea that Geraldine in that is actually a vampire. Unless Coleridge wrote elsewhere of an intention to make her so, of course—the poem being unfinished. The consensus seems to be that she preys on Christabel, whereas to my reading I think there are some overheated imaginations at work and that she simply neutralises Christabel—though with a little tittilation thrown in to spice things up—with C's father being the actual target for some not-yet-specified evil.

>146 housefulofpaper: - “these early examples were not representative of their period, unlike the serialised fiction that characterised the 1840s to 1870s”

Don't quite understand that and I look forward to reading about it. I'm feeling a bit out of my depth on the 1740s magazine stories and the 1770-1830 stuff—can't, honestly, remember reading any of it or about it, though I must surely have done the latter at least. More to look forward to ...

>147 alaudacorax:

Oh. That is a lot cheaper (but if I'd managed to hold off and ended up buying the paperback edition, I'm sure a part of me would be hankering after the hardbacks). I'm surprised CUP have done this to be honest. The impression I got was that they favoured publishing e-book editions as the affordable versions of their books.

I need to reread 'Christabel', my memories of the poem aren't sharp enough for me to say if I would lean more towards your reading as opposed to what seems to be the current academic consensus.

Reading it again, I have to confess I'm not sure what point is being made about early short story publishing. I think it's saying that it didn't take off and become popular in the way it did in the next century. There's a footnote reference to The English Novel in the Magazines, 1740-1815 if you or I, or anyone else reading this, feel the urge to follow up on the comment.

All of this does seem to contradict something I've encountered in a lot of places, the assertion that Edgar Allan Poe was the creator of the modern short story.

>148 housefulofpaper: - ... the assertion that Edgar Allan Poe was the creator of the modern short story.

That's interesting. Not sure that I was aware of that. I suppose it depends on how 'modern short story' is defined. Hah ... now you've started me thinking of it my brain is going round like a hamster in a wheel ... I had a two or three lines of comment in the place of this sentence, but I'll be more honest and plead ignorance for the present.

However, your mention of Poe has me questioning my wisdom in reading The Short Oxford History of English Literature. English literature doesn't exist ring-fenced from that of the rest of the English-speaking world or that of other languages in English translation, but that's how Sanders seemingly treats it. The index doesn't have entries for Poe or, for example, The Arabian Nights, both of which must have had significant influence. Reading his book doesn't look as if it's going to shed any light on my ignorance in my second paragraph, at least not as far as Poe is concerned. And the later edition than mine, 'revised and updated for a 21st century reader', has seemingly no change in focus and now I'm seriously questioning that focus' legitimacy.

Why is life never simple?

>149 alaudacorax:

Sorry. Thinking aloud in public again.

>149 alaudacorax: - Why is life never simple?

Well, not stopping for a good think about it after reading Sanders' introduction didn't help ...

>148 housefulofpaper: Hi all. I've read in many places that Poe is given credit for writing the first detective story & series, but I've not read he's the creator of the modern short story. It'd be interesting to figure this one out. below is brief snipped of the online search:

'Edgar Allan Poe is credited with creating the modern detective story. His story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," published in 1841, is widely recognized as the first modern detective story.'

I'm not certain if the Smithsonian magazine is authoritative, but here's any article pertaining to the topic & his titular Detective, C. Auguste Dupin:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/edgar-allan-poe-invented-detective-sto...

Maybe the modern short story originated in multiple places. I'd have thought of Gogol before Poe... but they were almost exact contemporaries.

>152 benbrainard8:
Unfortunately I don't usually keep notes or write in my books. Perhaps riskily (ever more riskily as I get older) I try to rely on my memory. I'm sure I've seen the claim made that Poe created the modern short story (not just certain genres, such as the detective story) because I remember it brought me up short. It seemed too big a claim, even without my, at the time, being able to point to or the earlier magazines discussed in the History of the Gothic essay, let alone non-anglophone writers such as Gogol.

Coincidentally, I acquired a hardback copy of The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales today (an utterly unnecessary upgrade from the paperback) and it lists the sources of the selected stories (which are in chronological order). The sources of the stories prior to Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" (dating from 1773 to 1836) are: a collection of (and named) Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose; The Lady's Magazine; another magazine; a chapbook; a collection of chapbook texts (the story in question a condensed and unattributed version of The Italian; another collection; a French short story collection (the only non-anglophone entry so far); what's called by editor Chris Baldick a penny dreadful, but per the essay must have been a blue book or a penny blood.

I finished reading The Second Macabre Megapack a couple of evenings ago. The usual mixed bag and I've given it three and half stars, but there were some quite good stories in there. I was particularly impressed by 'The Secret of the Stradivarius' by Hugh Conway and 'Lazarus' by Leonid Andreyev.

I really must mention 'Extraordinary Indian Feats of Legerdemain', by David Dawson Mitchell, too—this was lousy, couldn’t really suspend disbelief in this, too far-fetched to the point of silliness, and I really can't understand how they put it in.

I also thought they frequently stretched the point on the use of 'macabre'. Some entertaining, quality stories in there just didn't match that adjective. I'm not complaining—a good story's a good story—but you can't help noticing as you read.

>155 alaudacorax:
I found 'Extraordinary Indian Feats of Legerdemain' in an online copy of The Southern Literary Messenger. Perhaps it works better there, as a "true report" in the double-columns of a magazine that seems to be aiming for the - what should we call it? militant rationality, perhaps - of the previous century.

>156 housefulofpaper:

Quite a few of the stories came from The Southern Literary Messenger. I may have got this wrong—writing from memory—but dating from before Poe's spell as editor.

One story, The Doom, by 'Benedict'—an extremely dark, Greek tragedy of a story—quite intrigued me in that it had a definitely disapproving original publisher's note appended. This implied that they included the story only because of the writer’s assertion that it was ‘founded upon actual occurrences’. I couldn't, for the life of me, make up my mind whether the Messenger editor was genuinely expressing his feelings, adding the note for effect, or covering his tail in case of condemnation for publishing the thing in the first place. It was one of those stories that leaves you genuinely not knowing what you think of it. Without spoilers I can't say much more than that the story was horrific without violence or the supernatural, but I can imagine it might have been a bit strong for the average 19thC reader..

>157 alaudacorax:

That last sentence might be a reflection of a lack of experience of early 19thC literature on my part. There's a list of books as long as your leg that I've 'always been meaning to' read ...

I've been dipping into something between a magazine and a book. For the life of me, I can't remember when I bought it - it feels recent but the publication date according to online sources, not to mention the date on Kim Newman's preface, is 2022. It is Sight and Sound Presents the History of Horror Part 1: Vampires, subtitle (or just cover copy) "Features, reviews and interviews from the Sight and Sound and Monthly Film Bulletin archives". Much of the book/zine consists of contemporary reviews of films from Black Sunday (a belated 1968 UK release) to the latest I think being What We Do In The Shadows and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (both 2014), and includes obscurities like Incense for the Damned and 1986's feminist quasi-doumentary The Mark of Lilith (which is now available on one of the BFI's Short Sharp Shocks discs).

However, there are also archive retrospectives going back to Nosferatu (1922) and broader review/essays, plus a couple of director interviews.

Although the various reviewers and authors (including Iain Sinclair, with a piece prompted by Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula; and Kim Newman, as I suppose is to be expected as an expert on the genre) generally didn't have the benefit of hindsight I haven't seen any opinions I'd seriously depart from. In fact there are a number of places where Kim Newman in particular had, 30 years ago, put into print thoughts about e.g. that growing romantic anti-hero theme in retellings of the Dracula story, that I've been groping towards here in the last couple of years.

There are also illustrations on every page. Highly recommended, if you see a copy in the wild.

Just finished Frankenstein Unbound, Brian Aldiss' 1973 "Science Fantasy" wherein a limited nuclear war "within the orbits of the Earth-Luna system" seems to spare the population of Earth (but not the Moon colonies) until the unexpected damage to spacetime causes "timeslips", which lead to Aldiss' protagonist becoming stranded near Lake Geneva in 1816, and, reality being even more damaged than the timeslips would indicate, encounters the Frankenstein family, and Victor's creation, before then meeting Mary Shelley and the Villa Diodati group.

This was a reread for me, after a long gap of over 40 years. I recently acquired a UK first edition hardback for a reasonable price. I'd forgotten a lot of the details but I had a vague sense of the novel. Encountering it again in my late 50s, it seemed like a different book: a quicker read, not as heavy as I remembered, which I suppose points to my not yet being a mature reader by the early '80s. Also, there were a number of philosophical or political discussions throughout the book, either the protagonist talking to himself (the book is a first-person narrative, supposedly dictated into a futuristic (2020!) cassette recorder, or with Frankenstein or the creature, or Byron, Shelley, or Mary Shelley. In some ways it felt like Aldiss was using the book to air his contention that Mary Shelley's book was the first science fiction novel, but it certainly felt like a "proper" novel and its concerns are sadly still relevant.

I've read - 34 years after buying it, so maybe there's hope for my huge TBR pile (If I never buy another book!) - Brian Aldiss' belated sequel to Frankenstein Unbound, Dracula Unbound.

It's actually closer to being a sequel to Roger Corman's 1990 film. The main character is an inventor and industrialist whose experiments drive the plot (of the film and to an extent of the sequel), rather than the out-of-office Washington insider of the first novel. But there's a kind of multiverse thing going on in that book that arguably explains away these discrepancies.

The characterisation feels more brittle in Dracula Unbound, dare I say Dallas- or Dynasty-like. And most of the reviews I've seen describe it as a lesser book than Frankenstein Unbound. Indeed, it apparently started life as a proposed script for a sequel to Corman's film. So the novel is arguably a novelisation (albeit of an unmade film). And Aldiss himself described it as a "romp". Actually, I felt it improved - characters more realistic and more sympathetic, ideas scientific and moral/philosophical deepening, and (minor spoiler) going back in time to an 1896 that feels much more true than recent Steampunk versions that I've encountered, about halfway in (that probably sounds damning but it's a short book, only 200 pages long).

Here are the covers of the two books. Both are the UK first editions.

The cover for Dracula Unbound is by Chris Foss. His science fiction book covers tend to look like generic spaceships or robots or some kind of futuristic industrial machinery. They rarely seem to be illustrating the book they been attached to. This one, however, is definitely representing the start of the novel.

I have a question.

Over the last couple of days I read Vivian Shaw's latest 'Greta Helsing' book, Bitter Waters. I found it a little disappointing: it's a novella and I got the strong impression that she had ambitions for a more substantial piece of work but ran out of steam. It was quite fun while it lasted, though.

The online blurb:-
When a barrow-wight shows up on Greta and Varney's doorstep one night with an 11-year-old girl who's been newly - and forcefully - bitten and turned, it's up to Greta and her vampiric friends to find out who did this to her, and why.

For those who don't know, a conceit of the 'Greta Helsing' books is that the landmark works of Gothic literature are actually grossly distorted versions of true stories. So Greta herself is a descendant of Abraham van Helsing; Sir Francis Varney and Lord Ruthven are central characters; and so forth. And Dracula gets involved part way through.

My question: At one, rather throw-away point, Greta wonders whether the coincidence of the little girl's name is going to cause uncomfortable memories for Dracula. Her name is Lucy Ashton. Lucy in Bram Stoker is Lucy Westenra, of course. 'Lucy Ashton', for me, is the bride in Scott's The Bride of Lammermoor—nothing to do with Dracula. But there might be something in the back of my mind connecting Lucy Ashton to Dracula; just a vague feeling but I just can't get at it. Some film, perhaps? I've tried hunting online but haven't brought up anything. So, has Vivian Shaw simply misremembered Stoker's Lucy's surname or is there some bit of post-Stoker Dracula lore that I'm missing?

For what it's worth, ever since I've been thinking of this I've had the face in my mind of someone who I'm sure is Hammer-type film starlet—pretty, blonde starlet, and I don't know why. But do you think I can pin a name on her to look up her roles? I was struggling with her last night and woke up to her still niggling me this morning.

>165 alaudacorax: re: Lucy Ashton.

It has been strongly suggested that Stoker named Lucy Westenra after Scott's Lucy Ashton, influenced at least in part by his admiration of the actress Ellen Terry. See Daughters of Lilith: Transgressive Femininity in Bram Stoker’s Late Gothic Fiction by Brigitte Boudreau and «Number one, the lunatic asylum man» Dracula and the Limits of Institutional Psychiatry by Michela Vanon Alliata.

I'm just re-reading Dracula, in the Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult edition, inspired by watching the 1977 BBC adaptation, Count Dracula starring Louis Jourdan the other day.

>165 alaudacorax:
>166 DuncanHill:

Could the actress be Susan Penhaligon? She played Lucy in the 1977 BBC adaptation.

Brian Aldiss touches on Stoker's admiration for Ellen Terry in Dracula Unbound. I'm not sure I'd read about it before reading the novel. Aldiss has a note at the end of the book giving his sources, which include Daniel Farson's biography of Stoker, The Man Who Wrote Dracula.

Finished re-reading Dracula, have now started on The Werewolf of Paris by Guy Endore. I've never read it before, though I have watched both The Curse of the Werewolf and The Legend of the Werewolf. In fact I don't think I've ever read anything by Endore before. So far I'm getting along well with it, he writes good clear prose. As with Dracula this is in the Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult edition.



The next volume in the British Library Tales of the Weird series is due to arrive tomorrow. I have a subscription, a book a month.

>168 DuncanHill:

Yet another of those books I've been meaning to read for decades but never got round to ...

>168 DuncanHill:, >169 alaudacorax:

I'm a little surprised how scarce and expensive editions are. I suppose it's not up there in reputation with Dracula or Frankenstein but I was expecting to see as many editions as for such well-known Gothic novels as, Carmilla or The Haunting of Hill House—but it seems not.

>170 alaudacorax:
Decades ago I read a lot of Wheatley but have been amazed at how his works do not appear more frequently in discussions or appear on the shelves in bookshops.

>170 alaudacorax: Yes, it took me a long time to find a copy in the Wheatley edition (I was collecting the whole set). And it was not cheap!

>171 pgmcc: I read a lot of Wheatley when I was a teenager, mainly borrowed from friends or the library. About ten years ago a junk shop in Brighton was selling off the "Heron" edition of Wheatley's works in individual volumes for a pound or two each. Not sure if they had them all, and they had multiples of some titles. I was utterly skint at the time alas.

I wonder if the lack of his works on the second-hand market is down to people not letting them go once they've got them? That and the unfashionable nature of some of his more "gung-ho" books.

>172 DuncanHill:
I can empathise with your discovering a bunch of desirable books at a reasonable price and being skint.

My Wheatley reading was like yours; library and borrowed.

In the 1970s, my grandparents had the Heron edition of Wheatley in a bookcase in their living room. I knew the name, vaguely, by reputation and cultural osmosis, but to be honest was scared of him, and them, and had no desire to read them. When my grandparents passed away I was offered the books but said no thanks. Nevertheless I have the books now. I think they must have ended up in my Dad's lock-up until he finally gave up work, and stopped renting the lock-up.

I have to own up and say I've only read The Devil Rides Out, and that in a recent-ish Wordsworth paperback, before the Heron books came into my hands.

There's been some interest in Wheatley this century - a no-budget BBC4 version of The Haunting of Toby Jugg, pastiched in one of Mark Gatiss' Lucifer Box novels - but I get the impression that a combination of his old-fashioned style, and distaste in some quarters for his politics, has kept him out in the cold.

Phil Baker's biography of Wheatley, The Devil is a Gentleman was very entertaining. The old rogue!

I suppose I should also own up to owning the Centipede Press edition of The Werewolf of Paris - look, they sell out in minutes now, and reach stratospheric prices on the secondary market, but I bought this one at cover price 15 years ago - from Amazon!

Well I finished The Werewolf of Paris, enjoyed it greatly. Asks some interesting philosophical and political questions, and I now know a lot more about the Paris Commune than I did before.

I raced through The Haunted Library by Tanya Kirk. Some good tales, and most of them new to me, though I'm sure I'd read Midnight Express by Alfred Noyes recently. Unfortunately it must have been before I started recording my reading. Probably in my big stack of Odhams anthologies from the 1930s.

And now I've started Moonchild by Aleister Crowley, again from the Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult. Like The Werewolf of Paris although it's fiction it makes reference to a lot of real people and events (characters are well footnoted, to say who they were based on), which tends to slow me down as I disappear down google rabbit-holes.

>175 DuncanHill:
I don't think I'll be able to restrain myself from getting that volume of the British Library Tales of the Weird series (no surprise, being on this site!), but it wasn't in my local Waterstones when I looked earlier today.

Current reading/intended reading is being driven by some uncharacteristic theatre-going on my part.

You're probably aware of the horror spoof Garth Marenghi's Dark Place from 2004. This series of six half-hour episodes was purportedly a 1980s horror series (in the vein of the "Paperbacks from Hell" horror of the time) made on a shoestring by writer Garth Marenghi (Matthew Holness) and his shady publisher Dean Learner (Richard Ayoade). The storeis were interspersed with "present day" interviews with the cast.

In 2022 Matthew Holness produced a whole pastiche "Garth Marenghi" novel (actually three connected novellas) and also toured as Garenghi - a mixture of readings and character comedy (as a character, Marenghi is at least as pompous and unintentionally self-revealing as Alan Partidge).

The third Marenghi book (or "Terror Tome") has just been published and Holness has a show for this book as well, which came to Reading last Sunday. I hadn't got round to reading any of the books but managed to read all bar the last 10 pages of the first one before I had to leave the house to get to the show (in the Concert Hall inside the old Town Hall, a venue which, when it was put to the vote we (the people of Reading) chose to name "The Town Hall! - well, as I can attest, once you get to a certain age you don't like things changing their names).

I didn't read much trashy/schlocky fiction back in the '80s but I think I'm picking up on the references nevertheless. I think it's fair to say that the books aren't as multi-layered as the TV series, as that could parody vintage written and televisual horror, and bad acting/film-making, plus it had a strong cast of comedy actors (as well as Holness and Ayoade, Matt Berry and Alice Lowe were regular cast members), and of course the second layer of present-day commentary (the in-character commentaries and bonus features on the DVD provided yet another layer). They're still very enjoyable though, and I've jumped straight onto the second one.

Carrying on with the theatre-going, I mentioned that I saw "Inside Number 9: Stage/Fright" two weeks ago and that it includes a pastiche Grand Guignol play.

I'm going to have to talk about another Centipede Press book. This one is their second edition (i.e. not so fancy)of Tales of the Grand Guignol by Maurice Level. I tracked it down from the (literal, in this case) to-be-read pile. I planned to read the stories on-and-off as I understood they were quite short and to be honest might be a bit much taken all together. However the book includes, and kicks off with, Level's short novels, so I will at least finish the Garth Marenghi first.

I read the introduction though, and apparently a night at the Grand Guignol didn't just involve representations of psychological torture and eye-gougings and the like, but comedy as well. Which makes me think that the live experience I had was even closer to the original experience in the Paris theatre than I'd imagined (and what's more, the Grand Guignol was a small venue - a converted church or chapel I believe. The New Theatre Oxford, where I saw the show, has a capacity of just under 1800).

One final thing of note. Although they contain no supernatural elements, two or three of Level's short stories were translated into English and appeared in Weird Tales Magazine (and a few more appeared in American crime pulps).

Hello all,

I'm going to dive in again to this wonderous collection of stories, The Vampire Archives, Otto Penzler, (Editor)

The contents, and I confess even many of the titles are fairly awesome...:

Pre-Dracula:

Good Lady Ducayne, by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
The Last Lords of Gardonal, by William Gilbert
A Mystery of the Campagna, by Anne Crawford
The Fate of Madame Cabanel, by Eliza Lynn Linton
Let Loose, by Mary Cholmondeley
The Vampire, by Vasile Alecsandri
The Death of Halpin Frayser, by Ambrose Bierce
Ken's Mystery, by Julian Hawthorne
Carmilla, by Sheridan LeFanu
The Tomb of Sarah, by F. G. Loring
Ligeia, by Edgar Allan Poe
The Old Portrait and The Vampire Maid, by Hume Nisbet

True Stories:

The Sad Story of a Vampire, by Eric Stanislaus Count Stenbock
A Case of Alleged Vampirism, by Luigi Capuana
An Authenticated Vampire Story, by Franz Hartman

Graveyards, Castles, Churches, Ruins:

Revelations in Black, by Karl Jacobi
The Master of Rampling Gate, by Anne Rice
The Vampire of Kaldenstein, by Frederick Cowles
An Episode of Cathedral History, by M. R. James
Schloss Wabenberg, by Scott Moncrieff
The Hound, by H. P. Lovecraft
Bite-me-not or Fleur de Feu, by Tanith Lee
The Horror at Chilton Castle, by Joseph Payne Brennan
The Singular Death of Morton, by Algernon Henry Blackwood
The Death of Ilalotha, by Clark Ashton Smith

That's Poetic:

The Bride of Corinth, by Johann Wolfgang van Goethe
Giaur, by Lord Byron
La Belle Dame Sans Merci, by John Keats

Hard time for Vampires:

Place for Meeting, by Charles Beaumont
Duty, by Ed Gorman
A Week in the Unlife, by David James Shaw

Classic Tales:

Four Wooden Stakes, by Victor Roman
The Room in a Tower, by E. F. Benson
Mrs Amworth, by E. F. Benson
Dr. Porthos, by Basil Copper
For the Blood is the Life, by F. Marian Crawford
Count Magnus, by M. R. James
When It Was Moonlight, by Manly Wade Wellman
The Drifting Snow, by August Derleth
Aylmer Vance and the Vampire, by Alice and Claude Askew
Dracula's Guest, by Bram Stocker
The Transfer, by Algernon Blackwood
The Stone Chamber, by H. B. Marian Watson
The Vampire, by Ian Neruda
The End of the Story, by Clark Ashton Smith

Psychic Vampires:

The Lovely Lady, by D.H. Lawrence
The Parasite, by Arthur Conan Doyle
Lonely Women Are the Vessels of Time, by Harlan Ellison

Something Feels Funny:

Blood, by Frederik Brown
Popsie, by Stephen King
The Werewolf and the Vampire, by R. Chetwynd-Hayes
Drink My Red Blood, by Richard Matheson
Day Blood, by Rofer Zelazny

Love, Forever:

Replacements, by Lisa Tuttle
Princess of Darkness, by Frederick Cowles
The Silver Collar, by Garry Kilworth
The Old Man's Story, by Walter Starkie
Will, by Vincent O'Sullivan
Bloodlust, by Dion Fortune
The Canal, by Everil Worrell
When Gretchen Was Human, by Mary A. Turzillo
The Story of Chugaro, by Lafcadio Hearn

They Gather:

The Men and Women of Rivendell, by Steven Rasnic Tem
Winter Flowers, by Tanith Lee
The Man Who Loved a Vampire Lady, by Brian Stableford
Midnight Mass, by F. Paul Wilson

Is That a Vampire?:

The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire, by Arthur Conan Doyle
A Dead Finger, by Sabine Baring-Gould
Wailing Well, by M.R. James
Human Remains, by Clive Barker
The Vampire, by Sydney Horler
Stragella, by Hugh B. Cave
Marcius in Flanders, by Vernon Lee
The Horla, by Guy de Maupassant
The Girl With the Hungry Eyes, by Fritz Leiber

This is War:

The Living Dead, by Robert Bloch
Down Among the Dead Men, by Jack Dann

Modern Masters:

Necros, by Brian Lumley
The Man Upstairs, by Ray Bradbury
Chastel (also spelled Chastelle), by Manly Wade Wellman
Dracula's Chair, by Peter Tremayne
Special, by Richard Laymon
Carrion Comfort, by Dan Simmons
The Sea Was Wet as Wet Could Be, by Gahan Wilson

It will make a for a lovely Thanksgiving week-long read, and perhaps some Christmas fun, too.

>178 benbrainard8:
I think I've read 28 or 29 of those stories in other editions. I'm sure I saw the actual Penzler book in UK shops a few years ago.

Just on a whim, I went through the list and counted screen adaptations of eight of these stories, from Hollywood movies to one-off UK dramas, to episodes of The Night Gallery (plus of course a late-ish Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes).

We were recently discussing genre somewhere or other, generally about how slippery genres can be and not as cut and dried as we try to make them. I've just finished The Time Machine and it really brought this home to me.

I started off wondering if I could regard it as any way Gothic. I mean, having people living in the decayed ruins of what was once great, with dark mysteries lurking underground, is Gothic enough—but decayed ruins of the distant future? Then I realised that it didn't really feel like out and out science fiction, either: I'm talking about gut feeling here but it seemed to me nearer the kind of fantasy that was floating around at the time (1895), or horror, even. Then it was not a far step from that to thinking it should really be classed in the Weird. So I've ended up stuck up in the air.

Talking about weird (with a small 'w'), I could have sworn I read it when I was young; but when I got into it I became fairly certain I'd never previously read it and that my memories were shaped by the 1960 film. Except that when I came towards the ending when the Time Traveller travelled literally to the end of the earth I was and am absolutely certain that I've read more or less the same thing quite recently—either I've read that anthologised or someone's blatantly pinched it!

>180 alaudacorax:

Incidentally, I was interested in how implicitly political it was. I haven't read anything other than The Island of Doctor Moreau since I was quite young and now I'm quite curious to read more of his stuff. Actually, I might have said overtly political, now I think about it.

>181 alaudacorax:
Yes, The Time Machine is very political.

The discussion on the slipperiness of genres is pertinent. While genre can be useful for book marketeers and booksellers for promoting and displaying their wares, and to readers to help identify books they may like, genre falls down in being a totally exhaustive method for categorising stories. Many of my favourite books transcend the boundaries of many genres and to classify them as any specific genre limits their worth. The Time Machine is one of those stories on the boundaries of several genres as you point out.

I have read the book twice and, like yourself, it is the politics that has jumped out at me. The Science Fiction element is merely to bring our hero to a place where the politics of inequality can be described without getting into trouble. As the old adage goes, "If you want to tell the truth, write fiction. If you want to tell the truth about the present time, write Science Fiction".

>182 pgmcc:

I gave the book five stars, because it was a cracking good read, but I did wonder what was the point of the 'end of the world' section; it seemed almost an add-on. And I've got sidetracked, now, trying to figure out where I've read it so recently. I think it may be anthologised in one of those 'Megapack' ebooks, but I've got a bucketful of them, so ...

I was wondering why 'Eloi'. Is it supposed to remind us of 'My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?' Considering 'Eloi' literally meaning 'My God', which Wells would surely have known if that was where he got the word, makes it confusing. If Wells took 'Morlock' from the biblical 'Moloch' that's more straightforward—sacrificing children and all that. Or perhaps I'm looking for symbolism where there isn't any, which is quite likely. Perhaps he just liked the sound of the words.

>183 alaudacorax: - I did wonder what was the point of the 'end of the world' section ... I've got sidetracked, now, trying to figure out where I've read it so recently.

I'd probably never read it before ... what was in the back of my mind was a passage from William Hope Hodgson's The House on the Borderland, which was surely inspired by that bit of The Time Machine.

>25 housefulofpaper:

Wasn't the idea of "deep time" new in the 19th century, through discoveries in geology and fossils, and the theory of evolution?

And if the world is billions of years old rather than the thousands of years calculated from the genealogies in the Bible, then you can consider a long future as well, but at the same time not an eternal future: at some point Lord Kelvin gave a rather short timescale for the remaining life of the Sun, as he assumed it was a chemical fire and not burning via nuclear fusion (which to fair he couldn't have known about).

>185 housefulofpaper:

I reread The House on the Borderland a couple of nights ago and I have a strong impression that the relevant piece of text in Wells influenced Hodgson's text, but I have to admit that I didn't go to the trouble of carefully comparing them side by side.

I'm surprised, running a search just now, to find that we've never discussed Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca here. I had thought I at least remembered us discussing the film version with Laurence Olivier and Judith Anderson. It seems not, though.

I have read the novel once before, but decades ago and I can barely remember it now. Anyway, I've started reading it again. Here's the thing; I am absolutely captivated by her prose; to the extent that I've been rereading individual chapters—once through not being enough. I have never had any interest in audiobooks, but I can't help but imagine the narrator's voice—the writing has such an aural quality—and, for the first time, I'm seriously considering getting an audiobook version just so as to hear a good actress speaking the words.

Also, you just know that some of the things written are going to prove to have been foreshadowing stuff—dark clouds on the horizon even in quite comedic passages.

>187 alaudacorax:

It's surprising how the memory gets fuddled-up. I have a vague memory of having read Rebecca long ago and having found it a very good book, but not one of my all-time favourites—an 'also-ran', as it were. However, I can't remember anything of the actual reading. Now, reading through it and finding the prose and the story-telling absolutely rivetting, I'm starting to doubt if I ever actually did read it—am I remembering the film ... or my reactions to the film? I might have had reservations about the film as I always disliked Laurence Olivier as a screen actor and I never found Joan Fontaine particularly memorable; I can't imagine reading the book and having reservations about it (I suppose I should admit, here, that I'm not a long way through it at the moment).

And, on the subject of faulty memory, I'm having thundering déjà vu. I'm sure I remember being in a discussion of film or book, and previously writing that last paragraph or near it, but I've searched again, on both, and we don't seem to have ever touched it. Infuriating.

>188 alaudacorax:
I am reading Life After Life and the main character experiences simial bouts of déjà vu. In her case it is because she has lived her life over with its being terminated prematurally yet leaving her with memories, or at least feelings of dread, as she approaches, for a subsequent time, the circumstances of her early demise in a former life. I am not suggesting you have been living a Groundhod Day style life, but if the cap fits...

The spoiler mask is to save you stumbling over key elements of the story when you may be contemplating reading the book.

>188 alaudacorax:
For what it's worth (I can give no guarantee about the state of my memory) I don't recall a long discussion about Rebecca also the novel must have come up in conversation. I've only read some of Du Maurier's short fiction, but I do have a copy of Rebecca waiting to be read (one of - oh my word - 3,617 at last count).

I'm currently in the middle of Incarcerat,the second "Garth Marenghi" book by Matthew Holness which has a parody of Gothic (rather than gory, trashy '80s horror). There's a writer taking himself off to a remote location to write his next novel, a daughter locked in the attic, a sinister doll, dangerous locals, and so on.

Time for some Yuletide reading. Spirits of the Season in the Tales of the Weird series has surfaced. I didn't start my subscription to the series until number 51 The Human Chord, so although I now have the whole series to date, I haven't read them all in order. I'm trying to a) keep up with all new volumes as they arrive, and b) read at least one from the backlog each month. Of course I need to mix it up with working through other backlogs, eg the Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult, and a host of others too, not to mention life.

I have far too many books on the go at once, but the urge to do some Yuletide reading has hit me, too. But for me, this means going back to the Tartarus Press selection of M. R. James' ghost stories stories that was published last year. I've read all the stories several times before, of course. That's no doubt why I was only two stories in. But if I read one story a day from now on, that should carry me up to Christmas week. And there are two rare (I believe) non-fiction pieces rounding out the volume, On Occult Sciences and On Demonology, which I haven't read (I resisted turning to the end of the book and reading them first, or reading only them, and then putting the book away).

>192 housefulofpaper:
I failed in my aim to reread M. R. James over Christmas. Various reasons - work, trying to finalise present-buying, the fact that I am not going to read a Tartarus Press hardback where it's likely to get damaged. I ended up reading some short books, and finishing an anthology that had had a bookmark poking out from the 2/3rds point for far too long, just to have the satisfaction of getting the number of titles read in 2025 up by just a bit more. Plus Robert Holdstock's The Hollowing, which is the third in the Mythago Wood series or cycle (or rather it's the fourth, if you include the novella, The Bone Forest in your count).

I'm reading The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr but it's taking far longer than I expected. This is again partly to wanting to preserve the actual codex or book object containing the text. It's one of two volumes (the other is a collection of Hoffmann's short stories) in a single slip-case and published by The University of Chicago Press back in 1969 and honestly, it looks (and even smells!) brand-new.

When I finish the book I will start on a reread of The Confessions of a Justified Sinner but as this is a Folio Society hardback, I will be careful where I read this one as well.

I've started another book for commutes and (dare I confess it) reading in the bath, but even here I want to keep the book in as good a condition as possible. The book is The Story of Alice, a subject which I suppose has become Gothic-adjacent in recent decades and is worthy of noting here. In my head I bought this book "a couple of years ago". On checking, it's been in a TBR pile in a wardrobe for nearly a decade. Time is subject to Carrollian changes of perspective as one gets older, as I am learning.

>193 housefulofpaper:

I also failed at an attempt to reread M. R. James over the holidays! I generally read a half-dozen or so of his stories every year, but I had wanted to do the lot this time. I petered out about halfway through the Collected Ghost Stories, but stumbled upon some old favorites that I hadn’t actually read in years (particularly “Rats,” which just gets creepier and creepier every time I think about it). I think part of the trouble with trying to read James in bulk is that he covers so much of the same ground each time, so it’s hard for me to get excited about the reading after I’ve scratched the initial itch of it. That said, while I am only recently an audiobook person—and only during commutes or flights or whatever, at that—I would be remiss if I didn’t sing the praises of the audio version of the Collected Ghost Stories available on Audible: the narrator does a really fabulous job and I suppose it isn’t entirely cheating if many of James’ stories were intended to be read aloud in the first place! The audio versions have helped fill in some of the gaps on my rereading (which is still ongoing into the new year) and have also relieved the tedium of tackling another hairy-thing-in-a-church yarn.

As for my own "readin' now":

This year, so far, I’ve mostly been swimming in the Weird end of the Gothic pond. Lots of Lovecraft and Machen and Bierce and Blackwood and Clark Ashton Smith and all mostly rereads after about a decade away from them. Last week, I read Claimed! in the recent Penguin reprint and really, really enjoyed that. At this precise moment, I’m currently devoting most of my time to rereading the two Robert Aickman collections I own. I’ve been away from him long enough to have forgotten how the stories end.

A recent Gothic-adjacent read, I suppose, was I Am Legend, which I had never read (an odd oversight for me in all my years of reading this horror stuff). I finally got around to it and was happily impressed: it’s one of the better novels I’ve read in months and really quite moving, actually! I think I had avoided it because I’m not a huge fan of the vampire stuff—it’s just never been my “thing.” This was MUCH more up my alley. I enjoyed Matheson’s style so much that I’m now going story-by-story through his Best of Richard Matheson, having only read the Twilight Zone stuff and the more famous pieces (“Duel,” “Prey,” etc.) before now.

And speaking of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, I need to get my thoughts down and in the thread. I’d forgotten how powerful this one is—it’s a real challenge to not get too purple while writing about it!

>194 veilofisis:
Go ahead; get purple. You're amongst friends.

I really enjoyed the ending of I Am Legend. What I really loved was the ending. The film adaptations I have seen had different endings, so it was a nice change for me. I also think the book, as in most cases, is better than the screen adaptations I have seen. The oldest one I have seen is The Omega Man. I understand there is an earlier version that uses the same ending as the book.

Aickman's stories are great. I find they really blur the boundary between reality and someplace not quite real.

Have you ever watched any of Robert Lloyd Perry's performances of M. R. James's stories? He tells them in the persona of M. R. James. I have been to about four or five of his shows in which he tells two stories. His reading of them really brought out the humour in the stories, something I had not noticed when I first read them. His website is nunkie.co.uk There is a link to his Youtube channel and a few of his readings are available to view. I think his performances are the best way to hear the stories.

ETA: The link to the Nunkie website: https://www.nunkie.co.uk/

Hmm ... I saw the Will Smith I Am Legend some time ago. It can't have been that bad because I remember it, but, on checking, I find I never bothered to star it on IMDb or write it up anywhere, and it certainly never occurred to me there might have been a novel behind it; there were so many films floating round on a similar theme. I'm mildly intrigued now but, as usual, I already have too many books and reading projects on the go.

Talking of reading projects, I fell down a rabbit-hole. I'm not sure it's a Gothic-adjacent rabbit-hole though it certainly inspired a number of our writers.

Just after Christmas I quite out of the blue came into a little money ... twice in one week, believe it or not (quite legally—in both cases it was money I had no idea was owed to me).

So, there were these three childhood treasures I've been coveting for years. I easily tracked down two as Henry Gilbert's Robin Hood & the Men of the Greenwood and King Arthur's Knights: The Tales Re-Told for Boys and Girls. Definitely the right books, with the familiar old, Pre-Raphaelite-like, colour-plate illustrations by Walter Crane ... I was happy as a sandbag.

But then for the third—boy, did I fall into a rabbit-hole with the third. It sounds simple—a building-brick-sized copy of The Arabian Nights (not '1,001 Nights' or similar) inscribed on the fly leaf as a gift to a child in either the 1890s or the 1900s—I remember that and the King Arthur being inscribed, but not which was which. What I don't remember is the cover—I only remember it as being covered in stiff brown paper, as ropey old books were in my childhood (I'm talking about a book even then fifty years old, give or take a decade, and near falling apart). And I'm fairly sure, or half-sure, there were no illustrations. But I absolutely loved it and read it over and over.

Well, I'll say first that I haven't found my book after reading a couple of early twentieth-century, 'adapted for young people' editions. However, the publication history of The Arabian Nights is an absolute rabbit-warren. There's a whole tranche of translations into English from the eighteenth-century French translation of Antoine Galland that, as far as I can find, nobody seems to have surveyed and Project Gutenberg hasn't heard about. Many of the nineteenth-century's childhood favourites would have been somewhere in there and, I'm beginning to suspect, so might mine. And then there's my tendency to hare off on tangents. I discovered several modern translations I couldn't resist, as well as Robert Irwin's The Arabian Nights: A Companion which seems to be regarded as rather a classic. And I'm still trying to make my mind up on Sir Richard Burton.

Anyway, I've found a new hobby horse.

>197 alaudacorax:

Incidentally, those 'adapted for young people' editions make no bones about keeping slaves and chopping heads off and whipping people ... but draw the line at Shahryar's queen having it off with the servants ...

>197 alaudacorax:
I got worried about your sanity when I read your using the term "I already have too many books" in >196 alaudacorax: but was reassured by post >197 alaudacorax: and your devotion to hunting down old favourites.

>197 alaudacorax:

Irwin’s Companion is outstanding. He’s also a really talented storyteller in his own right and I think his The Arabian Nightmare (and a couple of his other novels, too) might actually count as Gothic-adjacent reads in their own right.

Wishing you lots of luck on the hunt for your book!

One month of 2026 gone already and a pretty poor showing on the reading front. Just three books read (plus three back issues of The Book Collector - I've fallen behind there as well - and sundry comics. But I did finish The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr, and have made a start on The Confessions of a Justified Sinner. The books are very nearly contemporaries, as Kater Murr (as it is in the translation I read) was published in two volumes 1820 - 1821.

In some sense it's another book that could be described as Gothic-adjacent. As you may know there are two storylines in the book, the cat's autobiography (which in a large measure is poking fun at the excesses of German Romanticism) and parts of a biography of Johannes Kreisler, a musician who is an alter ego for Hoffmann himself (and otherwise appears in stray pieces that are half fiction and half music criticism, and which tend not be appear in English Hoffmann collections other than the Cambridge University Press's E. T. A. Hoffmann's Musical Writings.

The Kreisler story features many plot devices familiar from the Radcliffeian Gothic (and which look forward to the sensation novel and modern suspense novels). But in this context they don't feel "properly" Gothic but instead belong both to Hoffmann's Literary Fairytale genre and to the operatic reportoire of the day.

Of course literary criticism is more interested in Hoffmann's post-modern games. As both texts are supposedly written on torn-up scraps of paper (Murr's narrative on the back of Kreisler's, and Kreiser's story only printed by accident), each alternating "sub-chapter" breaks off mid-sentence and picks up again at a different point - you can almost imagine a partially lost film with a "scene missing" card periodically flashing up.

There may be parallels and contrasts between the two narratives but (despite the positive assertion of Hoffmann's Wikipedia entry) I don't know how deeply the plan runs - maybe Hoffmann felt both stories needed a bit of romance, some intrigue, some conflict, at appropriate points (he was a composer before he was a writer, and an opera composer as he was writing, so I can imagine him thinking in those terms - variation and originality within a set structure. That's just a guess on my part, of course).

What I am sure about, is that he intended to give the Kriesler story a proper resolution, instead of ending with two heroines threatened with awful marriages, the question of Kreisler's happiness up in the air, and other plot developments coming thick and fast literally in the last 10 pages. I'm sure it's not a post-modern joke but simply the result of ill health (Hoffmann died, apparently in the middle of dictating a story, in 1822).

Back after a long hiatus - I was attending to personal matters (you know how it is) and had so little time. Now I hope I have a bit more.

Something that has been keeping me busy is that my animal family has grown to the proportion of a small sanctuary, with currently nine dogs and nine indoor cats. Thank goodness costs are lower here in Mexico.

I may repeat this message (more or less) in some other groups, so if you read it more than once, my apologies! I am going to try to participate in fewer groups this time, here and at Goodreads, because going too big is always my temptation.

I’m aware of starting this post very like a ghost story, but I can’t help myself.

I have absolutely no memory of buying the ebook The Horror of Abbot’s Grange and Other Stories by Frederick Cowles. Running a search of my personal files throws up no mention of him or of buying him, and searching here does not show that we have ever discussed him. An online search throws up a lot of hits on horror story enthusiasts’ sites, but none of them rung rang any bells with me. But there it is: I looked at my LibraryThing catalog a few days ago and it was at the very top, entered on February 16th, last.

Oddly enough, Cowles does not have a Wikipedia or Encylopedia Britannica page. I am a little offended by that. I read it in two days and that is not a reflection on the size of the book—it is reasonably substantial—I just found his style quite gripping and addictive. And searching online shows he has quite a reputation among people in the know.

Bearing in mind that his dates are 1900 to 1949, his style seemed to me noticeably more modern than M. R. James, to whom he seems often compared, and, in places, more modern than his own dates—perhaps just a little more explicit than I would have expected. I wonder if that might have worked against his reputation in his own time? He wrote in a clean and clear style that I found pleasing.

I just have to mention that, bearing in mind those dates again, some of this stories seemed a little derivative (although well done)—you could occasionally see his inspirations. A lot of his stories felt, as far as I am able to judge, quite original, though.

I felt he deserves to be better-known, if not quite up there with the big names of British ghost stories like M. R. James, Algernon Blackwood and so on. I liked this well enough to decide I wanted a hard copy. Fat chance! You can pick up most of his books for £5 or £10 on AbeBooks; as soon as you get on to the ghost story collections, though, you are looking at unbelievable prices—hundreds, and sometimes thousands.

>203 alaudacorax: - I wonder if that might have worked against his reputation in his own time?

What I was alluding to there was the impression I'm getting that most of his books never ran to reprints or later editions. Could be wrong ...

>203 alaudacorax:

I was NOT going to shell out the £550 or more for a hardback The Horror of Abbot's Grange anyway, but I've just realised that it is not the same book as my The Horror of Abbot’s Grange and Other Stories. The latter contains something like twice as many stories, '... all of the ghostly tales published by Frederick Cowles during his lifetime ...', forty-four stories; the former is one of a couple of smaller collections he published. If you want a 'complete' you have to get The Night Wind Howls: Complete Supernatural Stories which you can pick up for any odd £200+ you happen to have lying around and that contains sixty-one stories.

>203 alaudacorax:
>204 alaudacorax:
It does seem odd that Frederick Cowles hasn't had mainstream re-publication. I first encountered him only a couple of years ago. His 'The House on the Marsh' is in the Eerie East Anglia volume of the British Library's "Tales of the Weird" series. Other stories have been included in All the Fear of the Fair, Circles of Stone, and Out of the Past, in the same series which I have a subscription to.

I've got his The Magic of Cornwall, a travel book, as I grew up there. I've read extensively about Cornwall for most of my life, but had never heard of this until I started looking into Cowles.

I've got, and on my to-read pile, The Headless Leper And other Supernatural Tales, which contains both The Horror of Abbot's Grange and The Night Wind Howls. It was published by an independent small publisher after the expiry of copyright on works published in Cowles's lifetime. I think it has the same contents as The Horror of Abbot's Grange and Other Stories. Fear Walks the Night, having been published after his death, is still in copyright.

The very high prices his ghost stories command does indicate a certain level of demand, a "Complete Ghost Stories" from a mainstream publisher could surely be produced at a reasonable price and sell in respectable quantities.

==Edit==
I've just found Fear Walks the Night (the posthumous stories) is available on Kindle for £5.22. I don't usually buy ebooks, but given the unlikelihood of me ever being able to afford a hard copy it will have to do.

>206 DuncanHill: - ... a "Complete Ghost Stories" from a mainstream publisher could surely be produced at a reasonable price ...
Yes—I'd be on that like a shot.

I added Fear Walks the Night to my Kindle yesterday and, as far as I can tell, that, combined with my The Horror of Abbot's Grange and Other Stories, gives me all the supernatural fiction he wrote.

I quite missed that softcover The Headless Leper and Other Supernatural Tales when I was searching yesterday. I swear it didn't show up when I searched Amazon, where it's now showing as the second hit when I search 'Frederick Cowles'. It's basically my The Horror of Abbot's Grange and Other Stories in paperback format. Is your copy a decently-made edition? I'm always a bit shy of these editions marked on Amazon as 'Independently published'.

Looking more into him, I'm trying to restrain myself from chasing after his other writings. Especially as I've seen mention that his travel writings often contained local folklore and ghost stories that he'd picked up.

>207 alaudacorax: re: The Headless Leper and Other Supernatural Tales, it seems reasonably well-made. Perfect-bound, good-sized margins so text doesn't get lost in the gutter, printing is clear with no blotches or lacunae, in the hand it feels like many a mainstream paperback. You can tell it's not from a professional publisher, but it does not feel amateurish. I know what you mean about some "independently-published" books, there are a few shockers about but I was pleased with this one when I got it.

Yes, his other books are enticing! He also wrote articles for the Gypsy Lore Society, I think one of his grandmothers was Romani and that inspired his travels by vardo.

There's currently a copy of The Night Wind Howls available from a third party seller Amazon, priced at £1,266.00 (but free delivery!!).

It's worth taking a look on account of the book description, which sets out how Cowles' ghost stories were rescued from obscurity by anthologist Hugh Lamb. It certainly wins out over Cowles' entry in the 1986 Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural (when that book was published, Cowles' third collection of ghost stories was still unpublished, and was being quarried by Lamb for his anthologies).

According to my catalogue on here, I only own one story by Frederick Cowles, "The Vampire of Kaldenstein", which was included in The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales.

>209 housefulofpaper:

Given that the British Library has committed to publishing a new volume in their Tales of the Weird series (they are offering them on subscription), perhaps one or more Cowles volumes will appear in due course.

>209 housefulofpaper: Looks like you've got All The Fear of the Fair which contains Punch and Judy (set near where I live now), and Circles of Stone which contains 'Lisheen' (set in Cornwall where I grew up, and which feels like it was inspired by local history or folklore. A. L. Rowse wrote a few tales based on Cornish history and folklore, one of which, 'The Stone That Liked Company' is also in "Circles of Stone", and is based on the longstone which was outside my form-room at secondary school).

>211 DuncanHill:
Thanks for pointing that out. I don't complete a full entry for a book (all contributors, etc.) until I've read it. That's why a search only found one story.

It's off topic, but the longstone outside your form room reminded me of the Spitfire in a field used for sports by my junior school...well, we called it a spitfire, although that seems very unlikely.

The land was adjacent to an army barracks and looking at the relevant Wikipedia entry to check some facts might actually explain what it was:
"During the Second World War the 401st Glider Infantry Regiment of 101st Airborne of the United States Army were based at the barracks in preparation for the Normandy landings.".

A 30+ year-old glider, then?

>208 DuncanHill:

Thanks for the reply, Duncan.

>209 housefulofpaper:

'The Vampire of Kaldenstein' was one of the ones I had in mind when I said (>203 alaudacorax:) that some of his stories seemed derivative. A reasonable enough story, though.

I finished Fear Walks the Night last night—Cowles' posthumously published works. Only seventeen stories, but I think it may have been a slightly stronger collection than The Horror of Abbot’s Grange and Other Stories. This sounds an odd thing to say about horror and Gothic literature but I felt this collection read a shade darker. In various places he reminded me how tumultuous his times (1900 to 1949) were and I thought I detected a certain struggle in coming to terms with the extremes of human nature that the times had made evident to him.

I'm very glad I discovered this writer, but I still can't remember how I did so ...

>214 alaudacorax: - ... a certain struggle in coming to terms with the extremes of human nature that the times had made evident to him ...

He wrote a couple of stories about the Holocaust that possibly he or others may have felt read as exploitative. I prefer to believe that he was genuinely trying to work out his personal issues with the horror of learning about those times.

I started All The Fear of The Fair, which as Duncan kindly pointed out contains a Frederick Cowles story but before I got to it I was sidetracked...some months ago I paid a lot of money for a book and it's just been laid on a bookshelf ever since. So I'm three stories into another collection of Jean Ray stories, this one from a strange Bucharest-based small press back in 2009 (The Horrifying Presence and Other Tales).

I think, leaving aside any Harry Dickson ("The American Sherlock Holmes") stories, and four or so stories that were published in Weird Tales in the '40s, I've now got everything by Jean Ray that's been published in English.

>216 housefulofpaper:

I'm sure I've mentioned this before. Ray was apparently something of an Anglophile but in his England-set stories, he has a slightly wonky, "off" version of England that's apparently more a mix of Dickens, Conan Doyle, and early 20th Century Belgium than the real thing.

But if anything it enhances the enjoyment and it makes an interesting parallel to the equally off-key England in the German "Krimis" on the Terror in the Fog box set.

>211 DuncanHill:
What do people from Cornwall think of the ghostly tales of Mary Williams ?

>218 rtttt01: I'm nowhere near as familiar with her work as I should be. I'm sure I read her 40-odd years ago (when I lived in Cornwall, and was devouring books at an enormous rate), but the only stories I have now in my library are No Ticket in 65 Great Spine Chillers and The Dark Land in Circles of Stone. I've just read them both and she is very good at evoking the landscape and atmosphere. The Dark Land (which I'm sure is one I read years ago) reminds me of a few stories based on the events, or at least location, of The Tregerthen Horror. A. L. Rowse wrote one called Night at the Carn, collected in Night at the Carn and Other Stories, and Frank Baker's Talk of the Devil of course. The house is derelict, and was recently up for sale.

Williams herself is something of an unknown - I don't think there's a biography or even an obituary.

She is on my (increasingly long) "must read more of" list. As >216 housefulofpaper: says "I was sidetracked...". Every book I read suggests so many more.

The road goes ever on...

Finishing up Lord Dunsany’s Tales of Wonder, which oddly enough is my first book by him. Not entirely sure what I think yet; I need more exposure to his work.

Finishing up Lord Dunsany’s Tales of Wonder, which oddly enough is my first book by him. Not entirely sure what I think yet; I need more exposure to his work.

>221 PatrickMurtha:

I got hold of two big collections of Lord Dunsany's short fiction at around the same time (I would have said it was about 10 years ago, but my catalogue here says it was longer ago than that).

There are six complete (I believe) books collected in a Fantasy Masterworks, and a selection of stories made by S. T. Joshi for Penguin Classics. I think there was an element of Joshi's introduction to that book guiding my appreciation of Dunsany, but the development from the "pure" myth of the very first title, The Gods of Pegana, to the high fantasy (arguably inventing Sword and Sorcery along the way) to the increasing incursions of "the real world" into Dunsany's literary worlds, is clear to any reader making note of the story's publication dates.

I have yet to read the two novels by Dunsany that turned up in charity bookshops, in the iconic Ballantine Adult Fantasy covers (unusually for the 1970s, some of these US titles were distributed in the UK).

>222 housefulofpaper: Thank you, that is very helpful!

I am very partial to pre-1820 American literature, undoubtedly because I studied it, and can read all of it with pleasure.

Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) is a writer who has interested me ever since I first encountered his work in American literature classes in college. At that time I read Wieland and Ormond; recently I re-read Wieland, along with its unfinished companion text Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist, in the Penguin edition. Now I have started on Arthur Mervyn; Edgar Huntly (also issued by Penguin) rounds out the set of CBB’s four key Gothic novels, although these are hardly his entire work.

Brown’s novels are by no means cookie-cutter Gothic, but represent interesting spins on the genre, incorporating such manifestations as ventriloquism (Wieland), sleep-walking (Edgar Huntly), and disease (Arthur Mervyn - the actual Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic of 1793). All of these Gothic novels are set in Philadelphia or Pennsylvania, so Brown was a regionalist as well. He was a forward-looking individual, an abolitionist and a feminist (this is reflected in his philosophical dialogue Alcuin), and was involved in many reform efforts up until his early death of tuberculosis at age 39. There is no telling what more he might have accomplished had he lived longer.

The Library of America published three of Brown’s Gothics in one volume (minus the long Arthur Mervyn, which originally appeared in two volumes a year apart). But the Delphi e-book omnibus contains just about everything he wrote, at their usual low price.

>224 PatrickMurtha:

I didn't know any of this except for vaguely knowing about Wieland. Thanks for this helpful info. Looking into him further since you posted this, I find him quite an interesting figure.

>224 PatrickMurtha:
I've only read Brown's short story Somnambulism: A fragment, which is the opening story in the Library of America anthology American Fantastic Tales. It's been a while since I read it (I recorded finishing the book in 2011) and have to confess the details have disappeared from my memory. Around the same time I bought the Oxford World's Classics of Wieland but it's still in the TBR pile.

I was aware of Brown though. Even before my interest in Gothic/Weird fiction really blossomed, I'd worked through the entire New Pelican Guide to Literature in English which had a whole volume on American literature (that Touchstone doesn't go to the correct volume, incidentally, but it's the right series). In the nature of such books, it was spoilers all the way! - so I have had some idea of Brown's particular approach and subject matter since, I would guess, the mid-90's.

I went into a bit of a reading slump this year. On the basis that a change is as good as a rest, I looked at my unread comics and graphic novels. That's a much smaller TBR pile- maybe I could actualy clear it?

In practice, because these are mostly US comics that tell serial-type stories in monthly instalments, I've found myself rereading comics, and buying them in order to fill gaps in the story.

Howard the Duck seemed to be extemely atypical in the super hero mileu of 1970s Marvel, but taking just a slightly wider perspective, the idea of a "funny animal" strip as a vehicle for satire and political commentary was a commonplace in newspaper strips, for example, Pogo or in the UK, Flook.

The unique thing, I suppose, was the editorial decision that all their "books" occurred in the same universe - the world of Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four also had to accommodate the Christian God and the Devil, Dr Fu-Manchu, Robert E. Howard's Hyberborean era (the time of Conan), various toy franchises, and Howard the Duck.

The first sight I had of Howard was an issue from the summer of 1976 which happened to take aim at some gothic tropes (which I only vaguely noted at the time: the name "Heathcliff Rochester" passed me by, for example).

The art is by Gene Colan, who was at the same time drawing Tomb of Dracula.





-

I find myself wondering if there were ever any copyright lawsuits regarding Howard the Duck, Daffy Duck and Donald Duck. I've just been looking online and I notice that present-day depictions of Howard the Duck look significantly different.

>228 alaudacorax:

Disney did indeed go after Howard the Duck, enforcing a design change and the adoption of trousers.

There was also a dispute between the creator of the character, Steve Gerber, and Marvel. He felt he should have ownership of the character, they argued it was essentially work for hire and they owned it.

>228 alaudacorax: >229 housefulofpaper: - ... enforcing ... the adoption of trousers ...

Just came close to a ROFL ...

Time to report on my relevant reading since the spring.

After reading the Jean Rey collection The Horrifying Presence (about which, by the way, I'd seen online reports of a confusing, dreamlike air, which was blamed on some problems with the translation. I could compare some stories with those in the recent Wakefield Press translations and they seemed pretty much on a par - the dreamlike atmosphere must be true to Ray's original stories)and finishing All The Fear of the Fair, there was a handsome letterpress edition of H. P. Lovecraft's story The Music of Erich Zann from Nepenthe Press (a little off topic, but when I saw Robert Lloyd Parry's Lovecraft show (not sure that's the right word_ at the Rising Sun Institute in Reading, he performed in a small room with no set, but it happened to have blocked-off windows behind him. They helped -purely by chance, I assume - the window's in Zann's apartment when he performed that story, and then the canvases of Richard Upton Pickman when he did Pickman's Model.

It's a fairly early story of course, and in many ways a more conventionally spooky or "Twilight Zone" type story than his Mythos stories and I believe was reprinted a few times during Lovecraft's lifetime.

Keith Robert's Ladies from Hell is a collection of science fiction stories from 1979. One of the stories, "The Fans", is arguably folk horror, in a Nigel Kneale kind of way.

In his introduction Roberts explains that thinking about Kirlian photography and leylines let to a near-future scenario in which a UK-wide network of wind turbines are connected by buried powerlines (because of those damned environmentalists!) that happen to run along the ancient leylines. What could go wrong? Well, plenty.

I don't know if this was a viable design, but the turbines are imagined as being within housings and mounted on a movable support. Imagine a radio telescope with the dish replaced by an oversized jet engine nacelle.

And the very last issue - number 50 - of Ghosts and Scholars, the small press journal about M R James. This has the usual mix of scholarly articles and "Jamesian" fiction. To the last, design-wise it looked like a '80s fanzine: an A5 size, black and white, stapled booklet.

The magazine started way back in 1979 and was intended to cease with issue 33 in 2001, being replaced with a slimmed-down Ghosts & Scholars M.R. James Newsletter which slowly bulked up, included fiction etc., until in 2018 it changed back into Ghosts & Scholars with issue 34. But now it really is over.

And Reggie Oliver's short story collection Flowers of the Sea from 2013. I had deferred reading this for a while, partly because I had read one or two of the stories in anthologies but also because I gathered that the illness and death of his wife (the actress Joanna Dunham) inspired or informed a number of the stories and I think I shied away from a potentially painful reading experience.

There are indeed a number of stories where the protagonist is a caregiver, or recently bereaved and taken as a whole, I suppose the overall tone of the book is quite sombre. But also there is the expected elegance of the writing and characterisation, and a skill at historical pastiche that (as has been said before) bears comparison with that of M. R. James himself.

>230 alaudacorax:
Same here.

Right! Every morning, repeat to myself ten times, "I do NOT have to read novels in order of publication—I do NOT have OCD!"

If it works, I'll explain at a later date ...

>235 alaudacorax:
But..But…But how else can you read them? I do not understand.

>235 alaudacorax:

It didn't used to be possible read books in order of publication. You were limited by what W. H. Smiths, or the local brach library, or school library, held.

Actually the pain started even earlier...my pre school ("Playgroup") had The Cat in the Hat Comes Back. Once the title had been read to me, I knew that couldn't be the start of the story.

>235 alaudacorax: - Right! Every morning, repeat to myself ten times, "I do NOT have to read novels in order of publication—I do NOT have OCD!"
If it works, I'll explain at a later date …

I’ve been reading the ‘Key Works’ in Punter and Byron’s The Gothic pretty much as long as I’ve been a member of this group. Since I’ve been a member about fifteen years and there are only eighteen ‘Key Works’, that is absolutely ridiculous.

I can see how it happens and that’s where the OCD comes in. I will insist on reading them in order of publication. Which is all very well until I come to one that bores me out of my skull (or, in the case of Caleb Williams, evokes absolute hatred). Then I’ll go for weeks, or even months, hardly able to bear picking the thing up, but with it lying around the place here reproaching me. They’d become a labour of Sisyphus in that I’d neglect them so long I’d have forgotten them and have to start again. And I’d be reading dozens of other novels as pure displacement activity, but never one of the Key Texts because that would be messing with the order. Well, that’s how it happens but why it’s been happening so long rather baffles me now that I come to think seriously about it.

Anyway, >235 alaudacorax: was prompted when I’d got log-jammed for months (years?) on Melmoth the Wanderer, finally plucked up the gumption to set it aside for The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (I won’t say ‘abandon it’ because I didn’t have the willpower to take it out of my ‘Currently reading’ collection), then found myself log-jammed on that, partly because I was so acutely aware of ‘Melmoth’ lurking there unfinished. I’d finally begun to suspect this behaviour might be a touch deranged. I decided, “Sod this, I’m going to read the ones I’ve been wanting to for years and bugger the rest!” Perhaps I’ll circle back on them at some future point—sneak up on them sideways, as it were.

So, since I posted >235 alaudacorax:, I’ve read Wuthering Heights and The Turn of the Screw in four days. And what’s more I enjoyed them both—despite having to wrestle with James’s damnable prose style.

>238 alaudacorax:

I've just remembered: a benefit of having read those two is that I can now allow myself to watch some of the film versions ...

Just finished Nine Ghosts by R. H. Malden. I don't know why I bought this—I honestly can't remember; though I must have had some reason as lots of similar collections turn up in my Amazon suggestions and I mostly ignore them.

I'm afraid I really have to 'damn with faint praise'. From his introduction, he was of M. R. James's circle and saw himself as continuing in the same tradition; but M. R. James he is not. He has some interesting ideas but I don't think they are that well done. The first story, in particular (they are in chronological order), shows signs of the beginner. I found particularly tiresome that he rather overdid this business of leaving some mystery at the ends of stories. It works in some writers' hands but I felt he spoilt stories. Especially as he did it every time, as far as I remember. I struggle to remember all the stories now, after reading them over the last couple of evenings, and I don't think I am going to remember this collection at all for very long.

> 240

I don't think I've read anything by R. H. Malden although the name seemed familiar. I realised that I own at least one book that contains his stories - Friends and Spectres - but it's currently on the TBR side of my collection/hoard.

My reading has continued to skirt around Gothic and Gothic-adjacent subjects:

Anita by Keith Roberts. This is a collection of short stories assembled into an episodic novel. The stories were published early in Roberts' career, from 1964 to the end of the '60s. There was a US paperback in 1970 and a UK hardback in 1976. Anita is a teenage witch living in rural Northamptonshire with her formidable granny. The stories are, in the main, humorous, some even building to a slapstick climax. At other moments the book features evocative nature writing and hints at the themes of Englishness and Deep Time found in Roberts' weightier science fiction. If it weren't for Anita's promiscuousness (and I'm not sure where this comes from - the permissiveness of the Swinging Sixties; or the older tradition of rural romances that, for example, Stella Gibbons lampooned in Cold Comfort Farm) this could easily be a children's book (the themes of magic in modern (=1960s) rural England, and those slapstick moments I mentioned earlier, brought to mind the TV series Catweazle). But I've mentioned it here because I think it might be liable for retrospective rebranding as Folk Horror.

The Original Dr. Shade & other stories. I think this is Kim Newman's first short story collection and the focus on science fiction, including some '80s stories with which he stakes his claim as an early proponent of (a particularly English version of) Cyberpunk. But he's such a gleeful mixer of genres that there's an equal amount of 1980/90s style urban horror. And one story plays with the McCarthy witch trial: what if real magic was used to fight the Nazis, and then the political climate changed in the same way the Communists went from allies to the new enemy?

>242 housefulofpaper:

I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding you here: what was the McCarthy witch trial? First time reading it I thought you were talking about the Helen Duncan and HMS Barham business—I'd forgotten her actual name—but now I'm at sea.

>243 alaudacorax:

Sorry I wasn't clear. Kim Newman's story references the US anti-communist "witch hunts" of the 1950s - HUAC, Senator Joe McCarthy, and so on. Although no doubt he also had Helen Duncan, and Dion Fortune st. al's "Magical Battle of Britain" in mind when the story was coming together.

>244 housefulofpaper:
I assumed you were referring to the McCarthy anti communist trials but was afraid to say. I did not want to be identified as a pinko activist.

Quakes in my boots.

>245 pgmcc:

The UK benefitted: we got inter alia Cy Endfield (Hell Drivers and Zulu), Sam Wanamaker (apart from his film career, that meant we also got the rebuilt Globe Theatre and his daughter Zoe (Edge of Darkness, Doctor Who, Agatha Christie's Poirot, etc), and TV series The Adventures of Robin Hood (no touchstone? it's the series starring Richard Greene).

Meanwhile, the Cambridge spies were actually busy passing secrets on to the USSR.

>246 housefulofpaper:
That is a lovely dichotomy; cultural enhancement and security demise. Of course, The Cold War gave us Le Carré. That makes up for everything.
:-)

>244 housefulofpaper:

Hah! My brain couldn't have been running on all cylinders when I read your post. It failed to occur to me you were referring to McCarthyism, WHILE I was grumbling to myself that searching online couldn't get past all the hits regarding McCharthyism!

>246 housefulofpaper:

Coincidence ... I actually have a book on the Cambridge spies arriving today. I've often wondered what actual, quantifiable damage they did, though. Something I read recently amused me. Apparently, they passed so much valuable information to the Soviet Union that the KGB decided it was too good to be true and ignored most of it as probable disinformation.

I well remember The Adventures of Robin Hood as one of my pre-teen favourites. However, by one of those weird malfunctions of memory we sometimes get, the theme-song is forever lodged in my brain as, "Doris Day, Doris Day, riding through the glen. Doris Day, Doris Day, with her band of men" ... etc. Don't ask me to explain that as I simply have no idea, but it's been stuck in there for decades - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbyYr6L5xQM

>246 housefulofpaper:, >247 pgmcc:

I ordered Enemies Within after years of not being quite clear of the dividing lines and overlaps between the Cambridge spies and Le Carré's books.

>247 pgmcc:

I've started reading Le Carré with Call for the Dead. My secondary school had a copy of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy back in 1978 but I found it too daunting and stuck to science fiction (never mind - I discovered Ray Bradbury and the (very mild) sex scene in Harry Harrison's The Technicolor Time Machine!).

Back to Le Carré - obviously I know Tinker Tailor now, from the TV and film versions; but I also tried to catch the radio adaptations of all the Smiley books, which had Simon Russell Beale in the title role. So it was one of those detective novels that you approach already knowing the solution, and wishing that you didn't.

Oh, and a few years after that, I realised that the James Mason film I was half-watching on a satellite channel, The Deadly Affair, was actually an adaptation of Call for the Dead.

I reread my Penguin, E. V. Rieu The Odyssey yesterday, first time in years—decades possibly (it seems touchstones combines all the translations so I removed them again). If you haven't read it, Rieu's translation is a prose one—no attempt at verse. I always think it reads like a cracking good novel, much like the boys' novels I read as a kid (if you forgive the sex and violence). I've got to tell you, I read the first 'book' (there are twenty-four) about a week ago and didn't pick it up again until yesterday morning. So yesterday I was up about six-thirty and decided to read another book or two before breakfast, then 'just one more', then 'just one more' ... The end was I finished it, looked at the clock and it was six in the evening and I still hadn't had breakfast ...

Anyway, I was pondering over whether some of it mightn't count as Gothic inspiration, thinking about things like the Cyclops' cave and Calypso's Circe's island or Odysseus's visit to the underworld, or even Telemachus and Penelope's travails with the suitors. And that got me back to Walpole's second preface for 'Otranto'. I've never been really clear what were the 'ancient' romances he wanted to 'reconcile' with his 'modern' romances. I feel sure a classically educated gentleman like Walpole would have read The Odyssey, so, perhaps?