THE DEEP ONES: Winter 2025 Planning Thread

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

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

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


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

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

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

Included by Peter Straub in American Fantastic Tales. It draws on a folktale tradition that goes back to the Middle Ages (at least) and is incorporated in what some consider the first ever novel in English, Beware the Cat.

First published in Whispers V and often collected since. Editor Stuart David Schiff compares this particular story to the work of Robert Aickman.

A sf-fantasy-weird adventure tale of a young man's quest through the titular maze.

Available online, in the collection named for it, and sundry further places.

Hamilton was mostly an sf writer, but this, his first published story, is weird science in the vein of A. Merritt.

Online at Baen

The inspiration for the Karloff segment of Mario Bava's classic BLACK SABBATH (1963) and also Adrien Beau's THE VOURDALAK (2023), both of which I highly recommend to everyone here! Available online:

https://americanliterature.com/author/alexei-tolstoy/short-story/the-family-of-t...

One of Du Maurier's masterfully intense yet often overlooked uncanny tales. Found in Mary Danby's 65 Great Tales of the Supernatural and a number of Du Maurier collections.

There's witchery going on in this well-anthologized tale which was completed just several months before Wharton died.

Recently republished by the author in her Thirteen Plus-1 Lovecraftian Narratives, but I'm nominating in part to give myself an excuse to pick up a copy of Black Wings of Cthulhu 6.

First published in Interplanet 3. English translation (as "Night of the Id") in Different Realities #4 (1998). There's a copy online at the Internet Archive, and a different translation was supplied with the recent Blu-ray release of Planet of the Vampires from Radiance Films in the UK.

Bava's film is a loose adaptation of the story - apparently, it was the first Italian film adaptation of an original Italian science fiction story.

A story of, well, perhaps it's astral time travel? The ambiguity may make for good discussion fodder.

Online at Wikisource (and undoubtedly a myriad other places) and anthologized more times than you can shake a stick at.

A sort-of werewolf story, originally published as by James Colvin.

Originally(?) published in The Deep Fix, online here.

(ISFDB being down has hampered my attempts to reseach the original publication.)

I'm not sure how I failed to find The Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass in the list of old discussions before nominating it last week, but I chanced to notice it now, so it's hereby retracted.

A story of insectile horror, filmed over fifty years later as Mimic.

Originally published as by "Martin Pearson".

Available in The Weird, sundry other anthologies, online, and as online audio.

It's only a few days left to the solstice, and if I'm counting a-right we're short two stories for a full quarter, so if anyone is sitting on any further nominations it's time to post them now!

Tallying now.