THE DEEP ONES: Spring 2026 Planning Thread

This thread is for nominations and voting on stories for inclusion in the April-September 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. The top six stories will be arranged chronologically for the next six month's reading.

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


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

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

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

An unusual "ghost" story that should be interesting to discuss. Del Rey seems mostly to have written robot-oriented sf, so this one is outside his usual genre beat.
Widely reprinted.

Jay is a writer of weird fiction living in Bangalore, India. I know him from FB. Interesting guy!

Found online at:

https://lovecraftzine.com/magazine/issues/2012-2/issue-13-april-2012/the-ourorbo...

A haunted-house story that VanderMeer considers among Bloch's best work.

Reasonably widely anthologized, incl in The Weird.

A du Maurier story mentioned in a recent thread. Sylvia Kay Rose had this to say:

Daphne du Maurier's "Kiss Me Again, Stranger" is a psychological thriller set in post-WWII London, delving into themes of deception and horror through the viewpoint of a young mechanic fixated on a captivating usherette. Du Maurier skillfully crafts a dark, gothic ambiance enhancing the turmoil of obsessive romantic attraction.

Online here.

Simmons died on Feb 21, 2026. You can count me amongst those who were turned off by his post-9/11 political stance, which became all too public, perhaps, but at the same time, it didn't seem to quite jibe with much of his earlier work up to that point. Odd. I still love many of his short stories and novels very much. This one is from the collection Prayers to Broken Stones and can be found in a number of popular anthologies.

Doc Brite's fierce tale of divine Kali's female energy manifesting amidst the social horrors of a zombie apocalypse is unforgettable, and well-anthologized.

https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?45105

Transgressive weird horror published the same year as Koja's classic novel, The Cipher. Found in several well-known 90s anthologies.

Removed "Carmilla" as we've already covered it.

And, just to reiterate, it's ok to nominate novellas since we can now accommodate such with our new monthly story schedule.

We already did Carmilla.

(And it's not even close to the longest story we've done, "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" is approximately twice as long.)

>10 AndreasJ:

Thanks! I author-sorted the discussions list (which I know I have to catch up on) and looked under J. Sheridan Le Fanu. "Carmilla" is listed under Sheridan Le Fanu.

I have a couple of others in mind. If anyone else has one... please nominate! :)

A "cheerfully apocalyptic yarn" inspired by monster movies.

Online here

This one had me cringing. In a good way. Winner of the International Horror Guild, Stoker, and World Fantasy awards. Well-anthologized.

https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?92468

When I think of Twilight Zone Magazine's classic 1980's run, I instantly flash on David J. Schow's "Red Light", Melissa Mia Hall's "Wishing Will Make It So", and this one. Found in several popular anthologies.

The slower schedule should allow for both longer pieces and pieces that are perhaps harder to find, requiring a library request, etc.

Relatedly, I think it would be a good thing if the discussion threads went up earlier now. I rarely remember to try and locate stories before the thread goes up, and currently the time available to get hold of a story that's not available online and then read it tends to be very short.

>15 paradoxosalpha:
>16 AndreasJ:

Excellent points - I agree! How about if I start posting the upcoming story about a month in advance? I'll put up the April one as soon as the results are in on March 20, but then on April 1 or a bit after, I'll post the May story discussion info. That will bring it into alignment.

I think it'd be best to post the upcoming story about a week after the start of the discussion of the present one, when, typically, most discussion will have happened. Three-and-a-half week should quite enough to get hold of books generally, and it minimizes the opportunity to confuse which is the current thread and which the upcoming one.

>18 AndreasJ:

I like that.

Said to be a weird take on Middle Eastern bombing campaigns and excerpted from Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials

Available in The Weird.

Said to be a skillful use of some standard horror motifs.

Widely available in various Leiber collections: https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?65408.

I'm counting votes tomorrow!

Working on it now.