THE DEEP ONES: Spring 2025 Planning Thread

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

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

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


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

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

VOTING is scheduled to END on the Spring Equinox: Thursday, March 20.
Voting for your own nominations is permissible and encouraged.

A monster tale available online courtesy of Baen.

Available in The Weird, this story is characterized as "a ghost story, perhaps, but also a surreal vision" by VanderMeer. The original title is "Promenade dans la forêt", would would literally be "(A) Walk in the Forest". Bhêly-Quénum is Beninese, which might provide a change from our usual diet of Anglo-Saxons.

(It might be interesting, some day when one has too much time on one's hands, to tally up the nationalities of the authors of DO reads. While there's a fair number of different countries represented -including, off the top of my head, Argentina, Belgium, India, Japan, and Sweden - there's clearly an awful lot of Britons and US-Americans.)

Half a prose poem, perhaps, this is CAS' first published weird tale. Online at the Eldritch Dark and probably further places. Not satisfied by conventional tortures, the inquisitors of Ong set our narrator free in the land of Yondo.

This classic tale of what we'd now categorize as folk horror is not without its weird aspects. Found online at Internet Archive.

Of the three Lovecraft-Bishop collaborations, this is the one we haven't done yet. It concerns the son of a plantation owner who marries a woman who is not what she seems, and the tragic consequences. It's fairly long by our standards, a novelette or novella at a little less than 17,000 words.

Online e.g., here and here.

A tale of a travelling attraction out of the ordinary.

Originally published in Uncanny Magazine, and available from their website.

Oh, and the link in >1 paradoxosalpha: to the list of old discussions is to the old onedrive version, not the up-to-date Google docs version.

>8 AndreasJ: Thanks. Fixed it.

Simon thought he left his fascination with the infamous “Sunshine Killer” and his cult, the “Sunshine Circle,” behind in childhood, but the past may be closer than he realized … Online at Reactor.com.

The plan is to total votes tomorrow, but we are well short of the number of nominations needed to fill a calendar quarter of weeks. Last minute proposals?

Part of Straub's "Blue Rose" sequence, and an extended, Vietnam-set piece from Koko. Pretty well-anthologized.

A segment of the Nifft the Lean, which is comprised of five loosely connected novelettes. Rather like Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser or Elric. Can be read as a stand-alone tale. Very weird heroic fantasy.

Would anyone vote for making the Deep Ones discussions a monthly event? I think we're starting to run out of gas as far as a weekly thing goes...

>14 gwendetenebre: That would suit me okay.

We could do votes on the equinoxes to populate the next six months.

>16 paradoxosalpha:
Sounds good. Anyone else have an opinion on monthly discussions?

First published in the a Christmas supplement to The Daily Express Dublin Edition. Unknown to bibliographers until it was rediscovered in 2024.

I've been unable to keep up with the weekly schedule, monthly may be more realistic, for me at any rate.

Described by Wagner as being inspired by his bitterness about his medical education and described by Ramsey Campbell as a Faustian tale.

Anthologized in In a Lonely Place and two other anthologies (besides Centipede Press editions).

Monthly might be worth trying, it'd probably increase the proportion of discussions I actually participate in.

>21 AndreasJ:

I was thinking that one positive result might be more participation. Can we try it starting with this one? And if there are any dissenting points of view, please post!

I am going to tally up now. If, as I suspect, we fall short of one selection per week for a quarter, I'll post the schedule as one per month for a semester.

We will also need a scheduling decision: First Wednesday of the month?

I like continuing with Wednesday. First Wednesday is fine with me.

I like Wednesdays. Which in a month is immaterial to me.