So whatcha readin' now, kids?

The old thread was getting a bit unwieldy ...

Marginally Gothic, but I'm slowly making my way through the Chambers pastiches in A Season in Carcosa.

I'm still reading Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith side by side, and probably will be for some time (The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith: A Vintage From Atlantis and The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories), and something's occurred to me that probably should have before this - perhaps it has, and been discussed here, and I've forgotten:

Does Lovecraft have any significant female characters? I know there are a few peripheral characters, and The Shadow Over Innsmouth, for example, has the narrative voice refer to a female ancestor who is quite important to the plot, but I've been fruitlessly racking my brains for a female character who actually has agency, even though it's not that long since I read through The Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H. P. Lovecraft.

Also - and I may be being a little unfair, here - I can't, offhand, remember any evidence of Lovecraft having a sense of humour.

From the above you may guess that I'm finding Lovecraft suffering from the comparison. It's not just the dark humour that attracts me in CAS: I get the impression that in his own way he loves life, whereas Lovecraft fears it.

Perhaps reading the two side by side wasn't such a good idea after all - superficially very similar writers, I'm now feeling that they're really quite different.

>4 alaudacorax:

There's Keziah Mason in "Dreams in the Witch House" and, arguably, Asenath Waite in "The Thing on the Doorstep" (arguably, because by the time we encounters her, she's been mindswapped with her father).

There's a few comedic touches in HPL's oeuvre - "Herbert West - Reanimator", "Sweet Ermengarde", and "Ibid" come to mind. But he evidently didn't feel it had a place in his serious writings.

ETA: "A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson" is another example of a humorous HPL story.

>5 AndreasJ:

I'm sure I've read that Lovecraft had a sense of humour - in company and in his correspondence, not in his fiction (I suspect it was always a bit stiff and arch, living up to the self-defining "Old Man of Providence" persona).

There's an example of a humorous origin to a story, given in S. T. Joshi's notes to "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family" - in a letter to Edwin Baird, Weird Tales' first editor, and published in that magazine in 1924, Lovecraft wrote:

"The origin is rather curious - and far removed from the atmosphere it suggests. Somebody had been harassing me into reading from work of the iconoclastic moderns - these young chaps who pry behind exteriors and unveil nasty hidden motives and secret stigmata - and I had nearly fallen asleep over the tame backstairs gossip of Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. The sainted Sherwood, as you know, laid bare the dark area which many whited village lives concealed, and it occurred to me that I, in my weirder medium, could probably devise some secret behind a man's ancestry which would make the worst of Anderson's disclosures sound like the annual report of a Sabbath School. Hence Arthur Jermyn."

Jermyn discovers that he has a white gorilla in his not-so-distant ancestry.

I'm not reading anything Gothic at the moment but I am making my way through The Art of Memory by Frances A. Yates. This traces memory systems from the ancient world, through the Middle Ages to the Renaissance - at which point characters such as Giordano Bruno start developing these techniques along occult lines.

Yates wrote extensively about the occult thinking in the Renaissance and later, that writers and historians before her had missed. Her work must be one of the ways that the occult emerged into popular culture in the '60s and '70s.

>7 housefulofpaper:

Another of those authors I've been meaning to explore for years (there are so many!) I've had her The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age on an Amazon wish list for years, probably before I joined this group. I think I probably entered it originally for the light it would throw on Shakespeare plays - it's probably germane to your comments over on the 'Gothic films' thread about Jarman's The Tempest.

And now I'm tempted to add this one to my wish lists - houseful has a way of growing my wish lists ...

Over on the 'Interesting editions' thread I wrote about treating myself to fine editions when I got through calendar months without eating takeaways - I'm thinking I'd do better to spend the money on a batch of academic paperbacks from the wish lists ...

>6 housefulofpaper:

The Penguin volume with 'Arthur Jermyn' in it is currently in transit somewhere between New York and the English Midlands (it was much the cheapest offer on Amazon that day), so I'm not going to read the hidden bit of your post till it comes. I shall keep looking out for humour in Lovecraft, though.

>8 alaudacorax:

I can't help feeling that "on a wishlist" is a wiser approach than "bought, but currently still unread, in a box, in the loft" which is the fate of a lot of challenging texts that I thought I would be able to tackle.

I did find some of The Art of Memory a bit dry; the early sections run through classical and medieval memory systems when they were practical techniques. Perhaps its paradoxical, the story that Yates is telling gets more intriguing just when the memory techniques themselves become obscure and (for the researcher) often tedious to study. Luckily Yates shields the reader from much of this (she says so herself when explicating some of Giordano Bruno's "sigils").

>10 housefulofpaper:

I am approaching the final section of the book, which as it covers Robert Fludd and the Globe Theatre, is most likely to point out any occult influences on Shakespeare's work.

I was wondering if the book would conclude that all the esoteric, Hermetic stuff evolved into, say modern library classification, the organisation of Roget's Thesaurus, how book indexes are constructed, things like that. Yates doesn't quite go that far (not yet, any way) but she does strongly suggest that these
researches/ Hermetic religious practices led to the 17th Century Enlightenment (and this was before Sir Isaac Newton's secret alchemical studies became widely known).

She also suggests that these same schools may be the forerunners of the Rosecrucians and the Freemasons.

It's astonishing how my mind can get confused about stuff when I haven't read it for a few decades.

Reading an article about Ray Bradbury in Wormwood Number 5 and, to my chagrin, I realised I've been confusing and conflating him with John Wyndham for many years.

I know I read lots of both long ago, so I must have know better at some point.

>12 alaudacorax:

I've just re-read that same article, in the Tartarus Press collection of the late Joel Lane's criticism, This Spectacular Darkness. I remember being very impressed when I first read the article; ten years on, his insights don't seem any less acute.

Mention of John Wyndham reminds me of a stray thought I had when I started watching the DVD box set of the remaining episodes of Out of the Unknown. The opening story adapts a Wyndham story set on the fantastic Mars of canals and ancient dying races. It was just one alien temple set, and a couple of theatrically-trained actors, but it made me wish the BBC had attempted some CAS adaptations in the '60s.

>12 alaudacorax: - It's astonishing how my mind can get confused about stuff when I haven't read it for a few decades.

I'm still on my way through The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories, and part way through At the Mountains of Madness, to be exact.

I've always remembered At the Mountains of Madness, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and The Dunwich Horror as highlights of my youthful Lovecraft reading. So I'm more than a bit surprised to find that The Dunwich Horror is not the story I've been remembering and is, in fact, one I have absolutely no memory of having previously read.

>14 alaudacorax:

I wasn't surprised to find somewhere in Joshi's notes that Lovecraft never prepared The Case of Charles Dexter Ward for publication. I'm sure Lovecraft would never have let into print his depiction of young Ward's homecoming to Providence after his stay in Europe - it simply doesn't belong in the story and really jars. I think Joshi should have put most of it in an appendix, somewhere.

ETA - I should have said that I found it a really powerful and absorbing story - that hiccup apart ...

>14 alaudacorax:

The discussion we've had (or I've been reading elsewhere) about Lovecraft's racism has made reading him a lot more complex than it used to be.

Reading The Dunwich Horror, I found myself uncomfortable with his talk of degeneracy and inbreeding and so forth, but should I have been? Should I have been viewing the area he described as a purely fictional construct with no connection to any actual place, or does the depiction reflect real prejudices about the denizens of remote farming areas?

There's the fact that the motif of dangerous, inbred, backwoods people exists quite independently of Lovecraft - it underlies all sorts of screen and print stories up to the present day, of course - but then I wonder, did he start it?

Finished The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories. Been enjoying Lovecraft - getting really bored with Joshi ...

>17 alaudacorax:

You probably don't want to bother with his two volume Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction, then.

It's four or five years since I read it; whilst it is an exhaustive survey of the field, the impression I'm left with - after much of the specific details of literary history, and Joshi's critical judgements on individual authors and works have faded from memory - is of a pedestrian prose style that never really sings or is able to embody an insight in a telling or elegant phrase, and a lack of generosity towards authors that he's not in sympathy with.

>18 housefulofpaper:

I'd got the idea of Joshi as a Lovecraft scholar it would be worth my while reading, but ...

First of all, I read the introduction to The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories and he gave away the endings of (offhand) at least two stories.

Then I found there was such a superfluity of notes:
Is it overly condescending if I say that someone whose vocabulary is so narrow as to need all the glosses that Joshi provides is probably the kind of person who never reads the notes anyway?
Then I found plain irrelevant quite a high proportion of the notes that were not to do with vocabulary.
And then I found some instances (carelessly, I didn't annotate, so I can't, offhand, provide chapter and verse) where there appeared to be contemporary allusions* beyond my knowledge and ... no notes!

And while I've been writing this post I've found some apparently damning Amazon reviews on his I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft, which I'd been thinking of getting hold of. Hmmm ...

ETA - * I mean allusions by Lovecraft, not Joshi.

The very last comment on the previous thread was about Clark Ashton Smith's poetry. By a strange coincidence a copy of The Last Oblivion: Best Fantastic Poems of Clark Ashton Smith was offered iby Cold Tonnage Books at a very reasonable price (about 25% of the prices currently being asked on AbeBooks - once international postage rates are included - I'm afraid).

I was, of course, expecting an overripe, gorgeously lush, Swinburne-esque kind of poetry, with many a reference to CAS's fantasy realms (Averioigne, Zothique). Initially I was a bit surprised if not disappointed.

The book's editors S. T. Joshi (it's that man again!) and David E. Schultz have organised the poems thematically and the way it falls out, a lot of the early poems seem to take earlier poets as their inspiration - if not an actual template. There's a definite echo of the opening of Paradise Lost in one poem, another struck me as George Herbert-like. Then, there are a couple of dialogues or dramatic scenes with are Shakespearian, or at least Elizabethan/Jacobean.

Even the cover is disconcerting. CAS was also an artist and sculptor (I presume self-taught; there's a
naivety that borders on outsider art) and one of his watercolours has been chosen as the cover. It features a goofy little dragon reaching for some fruit hanging from a tree. It didn't conjure the atmosphere I was expecting/hoping for, but it reminded me of something - then I got it. In the '70s there was a book of whimsical alien planet scenes by, of all people, Patrick Moore's mother. It was called Mrs Moore in Space and there are actually 7 copies catalogued here on Librarything, so you can see a fuzzy image of the front cover and judge for yourself.

Once you get about a third of the way in, the ratio of poems that feel as if they breathe the same air as the stories increases. I'm sure that reading them in quick succession has diminished their impact, and if I dip into this volume in future, I might well be inclined to increase the 3 star rating I've given the book now (in fact, I've got the poem "Zothique" as a letterpress broadside from Pegana Press, and knowing the poem, it did indeed seem weightier than the poems around it when I came to it in the book. I don't think it's the best poem CAS wrote; it's just that it had been able to get under my skin).

I've had a reaction.

I've been on such a strong diet of Lovecraft and CAS lately - not to mention a rather sharp saucing of the occasional Robert Aickman and Ray Bradbury (I found the latter's 'The Next in Line' particularly discomforting).
Last night I suddenly felt I couldn't face any more of this stuff. I sat down and read one and half Agatha Christie 'Miss Marples' as a sort of palate cleanser - most certainly light relief.

I think I need a couple of weeks off ...

>21 alaudacorax:
Enjoy the last of the summer sunshine, come back for Halloween!

I'm been reading Lord Dunsany, The Gods of Pegana. I can now see where H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith were coming from. I suspect Tolkien read this at some point, too. I'm not sure it counts as Gothic literature, but it's fun to learn these chains of influence.

A first thought was that he was an influence on Bram Stoker: I thought I saw definite influences on his The Crystal Cup and Under the Sunset. Then I realised I'd got my dates quite askew as Stoker was much the older man and the two works pre-dated The Gods of Pegana by at least twenty years. I strongly suspect Stoker was an influence on Dunsany, especially given their somewhat shared background.

I've currently got an infuriating gap in my memory. I think I know a possible earlier influence on all these, but I can't remember the author, the title or, even, the story. Ridiculously, if you could take me back forty-something years to my then local library I could walk right to it - turn left through the doors, turn left again, third bay on the right, fourth shelf up on the left-hand side, a plain, black book without a dust jacket - why the hell won't my memory picture the title and author?! Title and author are tantalisingly just off the edge of my memory and I can't quite get a grip on them.

I had to be in the right mood for Dunsany, though. I tried to read this some time ago and couldn't stick with it. A little too whimsical?

>23 alaudacorax: - I've currently got an infuriating gap in my memory.

Hah! I've been worrying away at that since I woke up this morning. It's finally just occurred to me to google 'early fantasy novels' and up it popped, almost instantly - George MacDonald, Phantastes. I still can't remember the story, though - have to re-read it at some point.

Have we had this conversation before? I'm suffering some serious déjà vu, here.

ETA ... and now I'm suffering some serious déjà vu about writing 'I'm suffering some serious déjà vu' ...

I have started The Castle of Otranto for, I am ashamed to say, my first time.

I have found his prefaces very entertaining and revealing.

>24 alaudacorax: - I have found his prefaces very entertaining and revealing.

Yes, when I first read them I was instantly a fan.

>23 alaudacorax: Your description of the memory being just out of reach is very reminescent of so many "otherness" stories in which one reaches for a memory or glimpses something just beyond their field of vision.

By the way, to make both you and me less worried I shall say, "It happens to everyone."

>24 alaudacorax:, >27 pgmcc:

Thanks. Incidentally, my memory was slightly more fallible than I thought. A hunt on AbeBooks reminded me that the book I was thinking of was actually dark blue - a Gollancz edition without a dustjacket of Phantastes and Lilith in one book.

>28 alaudacorax:. Yea! Happens to us all. Honest. :-)

>23 alaudacorax:

I recently had a conversation, or tried to, where absolutely none of the proper nouns I needed would come to mind!

I guessed George MacDonald, before reading on - the Folio Society has published at least one of his fairy tales and I've got another, printed letterpress, by Pegana Press.

>23 alaudacorax:

The workings of human memory are strange and sometimes a little scary.

Looking for something suitable to read on Halloween, and also wanting to cut my "currently reading" list down to a sensible number, I spent a good deal of yesterday (and finished this morning) a poetry anthology from Valancourt Books, The Graveyard School edited by Jack G. Voller.

They mostly date from the middle of the 18th Century, when the "Augustan" type of poetry (think Alexander Pope) is softening with an increase in "Sensibility" but is still a long way from the directness of the Romantic poets, so it appears in retrospect quite artificial and the product of a rather fallow time for English poetry. That said, the contemplation of nature and mortality, almost invariably in a Christian context (these poems also often feel, or actually are, sermons) provided a great deal of the imagery and language used by the early Gothic novelists.

I was going to read the three versions of Maupassant's Le Horla but instead spent the evening talking with friends in NYC. Really, what's the point of looking for spooks in fiction these days...

>33 LolaWalser: Reading spooks in literature might be a welcome stroll towards the normal after watching, listening to, or reading the news of the real world.

I'll try to provide a brief update on what I've been reading since my post about The Graveyard poets >32 housefulofpaper:.

First then, also read in November (and shockingly, the details are already fading from memory) Sorcery and Sanctity: A Homage to Arthur Machen was the last publication, I think, from Hieroglyphic Press. It's an anthology and features names familiar from the UK weird fiction/small press world (not all UK authors though. Steve Rasnic Tem is probably the biggest name present). The various authors address various elements of Machen's stories, either in tone or subject matter, or referring to specific works by Machen. Inspiration comes from his life as well as his work in a couple of stories. Overall the collection is weighted towards the spiritual rather than the horrific. Only one story, (as I recall) Ron Weighell's "An Image of Truth" captures some of Machen's humour.

The Inklings by Humphrey Carpenter.

From 1978, Carpenter's group biography of J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams etc.

The relevance to this group lies, if there's any at all, in the plot summaries and discussions of Williams' "spiritual thrillers such as War in Heaven. You can also do a "compare and contrast" between the Inklings and their almost-contemporaries across the Atlantic, H. P. Lovecraft and his circle.

Strange Tales Volume IV edited by Rosalie Parker - despite what the touchstone might say!.

This is from 2013 I think. I've really fallen behind with my reading. It's the fourth of an occasional anthology series published by Tartarus Press, of which Rosalie Parker is co-proprietor.

Like the Machen tribute noted in >35 housefulofpaper: there are some familiar names drawn from the pool of UK weird fiction writers. It's a strong collection of generally quiet horror, timeslips, creeping unease. There's a sense of Arthur Machen's shade hanging over the collection - Robert Aickman's too. Tartarus Press was originally founded, I gather, to bring both authors back into print, back in the 1990s.

The Tree: The First Book of the Chronicles of Ana It's a Southern Gothic set in the distant future. There no vampires in it like "True Blood" but with a ghost revenant running around killing people you don't need a vampire.

>38 MusesPublisher:

Hello! We have a thread on Southern Gothic but it's been dormant for over a year. for me, it's very much a subject still to be explored..

>39 frahealee:

Welcome to the group!

I've read Dracula at least twice (that's not particularly impressive I know, but I don't reread novels all that often). I find the retellings of the story, primarily in dramatic form but also in other media such as graphic novels or even dance - Pages From a Virgin's Diary - fascinating for the different hints they can pull out of Stoker's narrative, or the different emphases they place on elements of plot or characterisation.

Ann Radcliffe is an author whose books are on a shelf not 10 feet from me as I type, but who I haven't read yet. Something to aim for in 2018!

>42 frahealee:

With regard to Gothic literature in general, I don't think it's necessary to read Milton but it might be helpful if you wanted to dig into the "prehistory" of the genre. Paradise Lost is cited as one of the sources for a lot of later Gothic and Romantic imagery (the Greek tragedies and Shakespeare are two others that were cited in some of the studies of the Gothic that I've read).

With regard to Clark Ashton Smith's poetry, I was hearing echoes of Milton here and there, which was interesting, but I don't necessarily think that familiarity with Milton would especially illuminate the themes of Smith's poems.

You're right, the UK is five hours ahead, and I'm suffering a bit from staying awake too late last night! It's approaching the witching hour again tonight so I'll sign off now!

>45 frahealee: You might be interested in Bradbury's fictionalised account of working Moby-Dick (the film), Green Shadows, White Whale. Although I found a copy a couple of years ago I haven't read it yet, and so I can't offer my personal impressions of the book. I seem to recall a review - or it might be the Joel Lane piece referred to earlier in this thread - that suggested it was uneven (it's fairly late Bradbury, published in 1992) and the best bits are previously-published Irish stories woven into the text.

I read The Greenwood Faun by Nina Antonia just before Christmas. This is another book from a small UK publisher, and another work that references Arthur Machen. It's a sequel of sorts to The Hill of Dreams, in that it concerns the manuscript of the book written by the hero of Machen's novel and its effect on the cast of characters who come into contact with it (including the real-life poet Lionel Johnson). There book has had some favourable reviews and although I enjoyed it I has some reservations. It's set in late Victorian (maybe early Edwardian) England. Although the language didn't jar the story seemed to move too fast, the paragraphs were too short. There was too much white paper showing on each page. It wasn't dense enough to be a convincing pastiche of the prose of the period (but to be fair, there's no reason to suppose that was what the author was aiming at).

And moving in 2018, I read Who Is Dracula's Father? by John Sutherland. Sutherland - Lord Northcliffe Professor Emeritus at Universiyt College London - has written a a few books of literary detection (with titles such as Is Heathcliff a Murderer), mostly collections of essays on multiple subjects. This one is all about Stoker's novel (with a note here and there to connected matters such as J. Sheridan Le Fanu's "Carmilla". Sample chapter titles: "What colour is Dracula's moustache", "Why does Van Helsing swear in German?" "How rich is Dracula?" - variously use close reading of the text, biographical information about Stoker, and other resources to illuminate aspects of the novel. Having previously read works by the likes of Christopher Frayling and Clive Leatherdale not everything here was new to me, but there are plenty of original insights here.

>47 frahealee:

I read a lot of science fiction, to the exclusion of almost everything else, between, roughly, the ages of 10 and 20. I remember being blown away by Bradbury's lyricism. Nineteen Eighty-Four was one of the books I had to study for my English "A" level - in 1984!

Back then you could, with the assistance of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (now online and much expanded, by the way) feel that you could cover the whole field, at least know about all the writers (and films) from the English-speaking world plus a handful of foreign-language "names". What you could get in paperback was mostly reprints from the US magazines from about the 1940s onwards - the big names like Asimov and Heinlein were still alive and writing. I don't really know what the state of play is now...I do actually have a recent science fiction novel on the go, Adam Robert's The Thing Itself but I got bogged down before Christmas and haven't finished it. I'm a bit ashamed to admit...

Over the last few few days I re-read "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward", because I'd decided to finish the collection Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H. P. Lovecraft after having it on my shelf for about 10 years. I've been reading it in a stop-start way, but put off for months on end by the many misprints (which I feel compelled to correct) - and after all, I have already read all the stories at least once.

I finished re-reading M. R. James' ghost stories in the Oxford University Press Collected edition of a few years ago - the paperback is the current Oxford World's Classics edition of James.

I know there's a belief (most recently expressed in some Folio Society literature about an upcoming edition) that all the "classic" stories are in the first two of James' books - the front half of a collected edition, but I enjoyed all these stories. They do get a bit knotty ("Two Doctors' especially) but still easier to follow than some of Ambrose Bierce's stories, and some basic ideas get recycled, but at least one undeniable classic ("A Warning to the Curious") comes from this later period.

An analysis of Folk Horror in film by Adam Scovell - Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange left me, in the end, unconvinced that it's a uniquely British phenomenon. For example, I thought I detected a strong "family resemblance" in The Ballad of Hillbilly John/ Who Fears the Devil; and Valerie and Her Week of Wonders seems to have been co-opted from the moment the phrase was coined. But then, as with any attempt to define a genre or trope, the edges are fuzzy. Apart from the cover, the book's not illustrated. I only mention this because the Amazon listing was not clear on the point.

Holy Terrors: A collection of Weird Tales is not the Penguin collection of Arthur Machen's fiction that appeared (I think) the year before his death, but a different selection of six stories, being a tie-in to a small budget (very small) film adaptation of them, shot in and around Whitby.

Another small press book is the second edition of The White Road by Ron Weighell. I entered the game too late to see/buy the original edition but I was aware of its rarity. This second edition has I think already sold out. It has slightly revised contents - some stories dropped, a new novella added. The stories are in general either Jamesian tales, or have a more occult flavour than "Monty" would like. Some of them have an Egyptological background. Some stories have continuing/ recurring characters, and the new story brings these characters together.

Finished the Lovecraft book.

Read The Hounds of Tindalos by friend of Lovecraft and early writer of "mythos" tales using Lovecraft's world and ideas, Frank Belknap Long. Or rather I've read half of it. The UK publisher Panther decided to split the book (that is, the original collection from Arkham House) across two shortish paperbacks. That gives what you could reasonably call juvenilia in a Lovecraft vein from the '20s and early '30s, and some more assured fantasy and science fiction stories sold in the '40s. The fantasy points somewhat towards the Twilight Zone style I think (I know Long never wrote for the show, and was on the wrong side of the country to collaborate with the Southern Californian writers - Matheson, Beaumont, Bradbury - who joined Rod Serling's stable of writers). Funnily enough, its the more professional, assured stuff that seems more dated.

and that brings us up to date!

>50 frahealee:

If you think there's distinctively Canadian school of Gothic literature I'm quite eager to explore it. I find the idea quite enticing - I've been aware for some years of a deliciously weird thread in Canadian screen culture and I'll be intrigued to see if there is any kinship.

>49 housefulofpaper: >50 frahealee: Goodness me - I thought I was a prolific reader!

At the moment, I am reading 'In Search of Mary Shelley' by the poet Fiona Sampson (nearly finished this). I can't make my mind up whether this book is good or not. Sampson loses a lot of points by slating every Frankenstein film ever made as 'shlock' or 'camp' horror in the books early pages. She also says the 1931 Universal classic is 'badly acted' - what an insult to Boris Karloff, who gave one of the most nuanced sympathetic portrayals in film history. Sampson uses the present tense which is odd. She makes too many assumptions about how Mary is feeling (how on earth could anyone know?), and the narrative jumps around a lot. On the other hand, many passages are evocative, and I am learning many things about Mary and her circle that I didn't know.

I am also reading 'Something in the blood' by David J Skal - a huge biography of Bram Stoker. Only 120 pages in. This book is fascinating and so detailed about everything around Bram Stoker (his family, his friends, his work ethic, his heroes and heroines, etc) and touches on so much cultural history of the time (probably too much). I am enjoying it!

>53 frahealee:

It's generally thought that Lovecraft's best work is from the latter part of his career, starting with 1926's "The Call of Cthulhu".

Not familiar with the collection you mention; FWIW my own first direct acquaintance with Lovecraft was the Penguin The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, which is a best-of sort of affair including both early and late works. It appealed enough to me to get his complete prose fiction.

>53 frahealee:

I think I'd agree with AndreasJ in suggesting The Penguin The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories. It's the collection that finally got me into Lovecraft after a couple of false starts.

I think the stories are printed in order, either of composition or publication. As Andreas has already said, the selection covers the whole of Lovecraft's career. The earliest stories are heavily influenced by either Poe or Lord Dunsany.

There is a middle period that's less defined. It's not evident until he finds it, that these are stories where he's still trying to find his own voice, or consciously doing less than his best work - a couple of gruesome serials for example, published in humour magazines.

The stories where he really found his voice, and developed the "mythos" of Earth practically under seige from aliens or alien gods trying to use either science or sorcery to "break through" into our reality, are from the latter part of his career. Charles Stross wrote somewhere about Lovecraft constructing his horror stories like detective stories. Lovecraft himself wrote about using the techniques of the hoaxer (or as he put it, the "hoax-weaver").

Have you linked to the Goodreads list you referred to? I've found several Gothic/Horror lists, but I don't think any of them is the actual one.

>50 frahealee:

Algernon Blackwood was not a Canadian author, of course, but he did set some of his stories in Canada, including one of his most famous stories, "The Wendigo".

>60 frahealee:

I suspect you're conflating two Ray Russells - the one of Haunted Castles authorship died before YouTube was invented. Thanks for reminding me, though - I've had that one on my wish list for years. The creator of this group, veilofisis (now sadly AWOL for some time), wrote a glowing review of it and that's pretty much a guarantee of quality.

An interesting list, though (always fascinated by lists!): there are a number of titles and authors I've never heard of ... and a number I've been meaning to read for years but haven't ...

Pleased and slightly amused to see Northanger Abbey on there. Long ago I used to think it was one of Austen's weakest; since I've taken to studying Gothic literature it's become one of my favourites! A little surprised to see And Then There Were None. I don't remember that I've actually read that particular Agatha Christie, but, from what I have read, she's not a name I readily associate with the Gothic.

Ray Russell of Tartarus Press writes as R.B Russell.

>59 frahealee:

Thanks for linking to the Goodreads list. It looks a bit ragged to me, both because it includes short story collections with overlapping contents, and because it includes works that I'd struggle to consider as Gothic - The Black Dahlia is a tough-as-nails crime novel set in 1940s LA and based on a real-life case.

>60 frahealee:

The Wonderful World of Disney used to be a fixture on BBC early evening television. My memories of it date back to the 1970s. As I remember it, the majority of the editions were natural history films. Naturally I was far more excited when it was a cartoon instead.

"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" was one such cartoon edition - but I remember that it scared me and, if it didn't give me nightmares, certainly gave me some uncomfortable moments after night had fallen, for several days afterwards. I've never seen the Disney version again.

I've got Tim Burton's film on DVD but never managed to watch it on the big screen.

>62 frahealee:

Good lord - do they still make school kids read Lord of the Flies? We did it when I was in my early teens - early sixties - but I don't think I read it properly until a few years after I left school - and I've never read it or anything else by Golding since.

I've always suspected its presence on the curriculum was as much to do with some weird shade of political correctness as with literary quality.

In the kids' books of my childhood - including one of my favourites, The Coral Island, which LOTF is supposed to parody - the underlying assumption was that most kids were decent sorts. I suppose LOTF was seen as some sort of counter-culture riposte to those and, thus, cutting-edge and PC. I suppose we were to take it as some sort of warning about behaviour, but all I remember was that 'sucks to your arse-mar' became a pretty popular catchphrase amongst us.

Did Golding really intend it as a children's book? I suspect not.

As I was writing the above, it occurred to me to wonder if Golding was influenced by The Island of Doctor Moreau, which we've looked at here, I think. Oh dear, do I now re-read LOTF or just put the whole thing out of my mind?

>66 alaudacorax:

I didn't really make myself clear in those first two paragraphs. What I meant to suggest was that as a youngster I disliked it because I suspected some sort of worthy warning was being rammed down our throats. I thought it was one of those "You're not supposed to enjoy it - it's good for you!" things ...

>62 frahealee:, >66 alaudacorax:, >67 alaudacorax:

Curious as to why Francine's dad was so set against it, though ...

Something else has just occurred to me on Lord of the Flies. If it's been on school curriculums around the English-speaking world for the last half-century, the fact that it's a best-seller really doesn't mean anything. I suspect that without the schools it would have faded away by now.

>66 alaudacorax:

Outside the Anglosphere, they made us watch a cinematic version sometime around age 15. I think the teacher liked it because he thought it made for good discussion fodder, esp. about whether people are intrinsically good or bad.

>71 AndreasJ: - ... because he thought it made for good discussion fodder ...

Yeah, I suspect that's the nub of its popularity ...

>73 frahealee:

Oh well - I'll have to accept never knowing.

That's rather a lovely story, though (yours - not Golding's).

I've read a couple of Edith Wharton's ghost stories. I got a whole book of them, but it's still in the "TBR" pile. What I have read were good, probably what you'd expect from a turn of the 19/20th Century novelist (I suppose we have to start making the distinction now we're well into the 21st Century) - literary but not post-modern, dramatic irony, and set among the moneyed classes.

>81 frahealee:

But I have started reading Wuthering Heights!

>78 frahealee: - Must there be ... ?

You could spend the rest of your life trying to figure out the parameters of the Gothic - 'fluid' is the word, I think.

The best way to think about it is that there is this whole lot of motifs that typify the Gothic and to be Gothic a work needs a bunch of them but not necessarily all.

Keep in mind that nobody exactly agrees what the whole bunch are, or exactly how many of them a work needs to be Gothic, and everything's as clear as crystal!

... but the woods, the vastness and yet suffocating feel is something quite different ...

... I think these fit quite aptly into Edmund Burke's idea of the sublime, which is so important to lit-theory on the Gothic.

>87 frahealee:
No offence taken at all. Thank you for the kind words. I wish I had enough room for more shelves. A lot (nearly all my paperbacks, for example) are in boxes. but then, even great national libraries have books hidden away in the stacks, don't they?

Recently finished The Castle of Otranto and Wuthering Heights, now I'm starting A Sicilian Romance. I'll have to give some thought afterwards towards what they all have in common.

>90 frahealee:

Recent work commitments have stopped me making much headway with Wuthering Heights, unfortunately, so I don't really have anything to bring to the discussion yet.

I don't really have a settled notion of "The Gothic" either. I hesitate to go into the subject at any length because I haven't checked back on what I wrote on earlier threads; I suspect that I did some harder thinking then, than I've managed now, and if now I contradict my earlier thoughts it won't be to my credit!

Some authorities don't even use the term. Eino Railo, in his book The Haunted Castle surveys a strain in English literature from The Castle of Otranto to, say The Monk or Melmoth the Wanderer (the exact span of the literature under consideration is a bit fuzzy because after analysing specific works in detail, Railo moves in to look at specific themes he's identified in them, tracing them back as far as the Bible in some cases, and as far forward as the late 19th century).

Although this looks like the textbook study of the Gothic, in fact the book's subtitle is "A study of the elements of English Romanticism", and within the text Railo uses terms such as "terror-romantic literature".

On the other hand, Nick Groom in The Gothic: a Very Short Introduction takes just about everything ever named or described as "Gothic" - barbarian tribes, ecclesiastical architecture, musical subculture, (interestingly: "eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, and twentieth- and twenty-first century film and music"), and argues that "they are part of a common history and occasionally share common features."

>92 housefulofpaper:

I'm getting afraid to read houseful's posts - he keeps triggering my book-buying gene.

I really don't need another introduction to the Gothic, but I was intrigued by your first parenthesis - you seem to imply that Nick Groom sees the Gothic genre as, somewhere in the early 20thC, moving from literature to film and music - an interesting idea. I thought I'd just check on Amazon to see if there were any reviews, and he's collected a number of well-written, glowing ones. Then I thought I'd just check the price, and it's quite cheap ...

I should think about it for a day or two ...

To my shame, I've had the Eino Railo here for about six years and have yet to read it - must get round to it soon.

>91 Cecrow:, all new to me. Closest I've previously come was probably Frankenstien, Dracula, Jeyll & Hyde, etc.

>98 frahealee: Belated birthday wishes to your sons!

David Punter has a chapter (on "Scottish and Irish Gothic) in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction - a book I should have thought to mention before now!

>100 frahealee:

The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction is a bit of a slog in places - different writers for different sections - and, if you're anything like me, you'll find yourself unable to go along with some of their theorising. Also, there are one or two sections where the writer is clearly failing to keep a firm grip on his/her material, so the reader has to work extra hard ...

I think it gives a good grounding in literary theory as regards the Gothic, though. Even though I feel some of the theory is intellectually a bit shaky, I feel it's given me the background to know what these people are talking about when reading introductions, reviews, journal articles or what have you, as well as occasionally adding a little extra to the actual reading. I really feel it was well worth the money and effort.

The Gothic and the cultural theory on the Gothic that's grown up in the last few decades are separate fields of interest, I suppose, and, of course, it all depends on how far you want to get into the latter ...

>102 frahealee:

Glad you enjoyed the Blackwood story. I found a brief reference to him in a back issue of the Folio Society magazine from summer 1985 (the magazine had turned up in a charity bookshop). In an article about the short story, David Holloway mentions Blackwood in passing: "Before it developed its mania about 'talking heads' (with camera focussed on one man for a period of time) it was possible for short stories to be told on television. Old Algernon Blackwood was the classic example"...you can sort of see Blackwood in a action on Youtube. Yes he told his stories on television and those programmes are apparently lost. But cinema was not above borrowing televisions stars and stories from its new competitor - that's how we got The Quatermass Xperiment, after all - and Blackwood also recorded some shorts for the cinema, two of which have been found (I hope these aren't blocked outside the UK. I also can't remember if I've posted these links already).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATAOHgHJv3E

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRy4D11qc8I

Curiously, given that the book had been out of print for nine years at this point, the magazine also includes an article on The Castle of Otranto, illustrated with one of Charles Keepings lithographs from their 1976 edition.

And to round off the Gothic thread, the magazine included the results of a competition to update (or "up-date" as they have it - 1985 is a long time ago now) the classics in e.g. working class demotic or the deadly dull language of business (oh, it's all very middle class!). One of the entries is an update of "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" by modern Gothic author Tanith Lee, which starts

"Hey, what's up, professional soldier,
Pale, on your lonesome, hanging about, like?"...

>104 frahealee:

When I look at the opening lines of Paradise Lost, I can't help but hear them in the voice of Sir John Gielgud (I don't think I've ever actually heard him performing it). Religion doesn't really play a role in my life - I come at it via literature, history, art-history, philosophy and not through worship or any personal faith. I was very interested in your explanation of the poem chimed with your Catholicism and your Gothic church.

Milton is identified with Cromwell and the English Republican (Protestant) Revolution (although looking - for example - at his Wikipedia entry, his personal beliefs were idiosyncratic, even heterodox). And living when he did, he was steeped in the Classical world; he definitely would have expected Ecclesiastical architecture to look more like a Roman temple than a medieval cathedral. But every reader brings there own experience to a work of art. I wonder if I've matured, or at least changed, in the years since I read the whole poem to experience it in a significantly different way if I were to tackle it again now?

And it's more than twenty years since I read the Canterbury Tales. I had managed to read and understand the original Middle English, with the help of plenty of notes, but I would need to relearn it now...

My reading's been more than a little disrupted recently, but speaking of Clark Ashton Smith, I read one of his short stories yesterday, The Garden of Adompha - one of his overripe fantasy tales from the thirties that (I would guess) drew on William Beckford's Orientalsim and the Conte Cruel. It's in a small letterpress pamphlet which was particularly expensive because, when I saw the announcement of its publication, it reminded me of the Allen Press Rappaccini's Daughter, and something prompted me to look on AbeBooks...!

I'm glad the links to Algernon Blackwood worked! And that you found the Machen recording (the only one that still exists, apparently). If you are interested in his literary views you might be interested in his book Hieroglyphics. Print-on-Demand copies seem to be available .I..there's a trend developing here...got a copy of the Grant Richards 1902 edition via AbeBooks. Luckily books are my only vice :)

Doods, check out the covers of my cheapo Lovecrafts et al.:



HORRID, no?

Actually not the pics of my actual books, was too lazy for that, but mine are in superb condition, not a wrinkle, not a stain, not a breath of fading.

Why do I post this; because the covers are why I bought them and if I start reading them, it will still be mainly because of these fabulously HORRID covers. :)

>106 LolaWalser:

Splendid. They don't make 'em like that any more. (They also catch something of the streak of shlockiness or goofiness in Lovecraft, in his more unbuttoned moments).

I don't have much to report on the reading front; and only debatably Gothic - rereading Arthur Machen's "N"; H.G. Wells' short story "The Sea Raiders", and two stories into Robert Aickman's 1966 short story collection Powers of Darkness.

(edited a comma to a semi-colon; separating, I hope, the re-read from the newly encountered stories).

>107 housefulofpaper:

Ha, I have you and your mention of the Dunwich Horror to thank for this loot, I don't often look at the pulp horror shelves--and they had just had a treasure trove come in!

On the point on notmaking them like this anymore, I concur and also wonder WHY? Tell me they wouldn't sell like hotcakes!

Oh right--I also picked up an apparently rare ghostly Wells, Tales of the unexpected... but the logging in will be delayed while I ogle Lovecraft's creepycrawlies some more... :)

>108 LolaWalser:

Why don't we get covers like that any more? I've been wondering about that for a while now. My local Oxfam charity bookshop has held a healthy stock of '60s and '70s paperbacks over the past few years and it brings home the difference in how books were presented then, compared to today. Of course the same thing can be said about almost any aspect of popular culture and easily investigated in the case of film, TV programmes, and even TV commercials by wasting hours on YouTube.

I don't imagine either of us would accept the lazy accusation that it's all the fault of "the P.C. Brigade"!

Just limiting the subject to UK paperbacks, I can tentatively suggest some possible reasons for the business trying to "go classy":

- Hardback publishers and paperback publishers were usually separate until the era of corporate takeovers and transnational businesses really got going it the '80s.
- Paperback publishers (Penguin apart) were disreputable, even sleazy; certainly they used sex and shock to sell, when they could get away with it. This also means they had to be smart, look at trends, get in quick to outdo their competitors, and so on.
- Now the paperback publishers are the same "respectable" firms that publish the same authors in hardback (in reality, they are mostly corporate Behemoths, with all the nimbleness and wit traditional in such a beast).
- The distinction between ordinary paperbacks in "A" format and the bigger "B" format books didn't exist until (I think) Picador started in the '70s. I didn't see a spinner full of nothing but assertively classy and literary B format Picadors in a bookshop until sometime in the 1980s. There was a kind of egalitarianism before then, I think. Certainly I've seen some undeniably literary works in populist/cheesy/misleading/exploitative '70s covers in Oxfam.
- The end of the net book agreement, which in practice allowed some cross-subsidising of less successful authors by best sellers, pretty much killed off the midlist. I'm sure that the authors published by, say, Tartarus Press would have been able to shift healthy numbers of paperbacks 40 years ago. So to a degree the books aren't out there any more, but even when they are they get moody/generic covers - for which read boring (I think, actually, it's worst for crime novels. Incredibly generic moody lighting/out-of-focus silhouette(s)/stormclouds over field or city-by-night. Over and over again).
- Maybe the video nasty moral panic had an effect? One of the things that came out of that debacle was a crackdown on the cover art of rental videotapes. Maybe there was some extension of these norms to books?

>109 housefulofpaper:

You've made me wonder where have all the pulps gone, and maybe that's it--there just aren't (m)any being published anymore? Maybe electronic has thoroughly taken over the pulp genres?

My first question was actually way dumber (heh)--I was wondering why those specific covers (editions) aren't being reprinted exactly as they were, but then, as you raise all those points, I guess it's a tangle of publishing decision and probably copyright and whatnot... I mean, I have some notion why Penguin, say, intermittently changed the design for their books--orange stripes, solid black, the greens, the silvers etc.--it's to refresh the look, attract new eyeballs, update design...

But things like those Lovecrafts, one would think, might be even more attractive as time goes by and the style itself becomes a "classic" of sorts. So why not simply reprint them?

Indeed, I don't know about the UK, but in North America in the last... maybe more than a decade, even... there have been lines of reprinted pulps, or issues in "faux-fifties-pulp" look. (I have a few Jim Thompsons and Charles Willefords dressed up like that.) But another thing, speaking of sex in advertising, is that "fifties pulp" style of sexy just isn't the game anymore, because style AKA fashion changes all the time. It gets used and "quoted" ironically, but it's so wedded to the period that it can't be separated from it. Like WWII pinup style. A girl in Marilyn's Playboy pose on the cover would signal, I think, an original old book or a new book playing to nostalgia. The association is too strong to deploy images as if they were new.

Or maybe someone is deliberately creating collectors' items. Some time back my brother asked me if I could get for him some Agatha Christie replacements, but he was looking for specific ones from... I'd guess 1980s, and was it Fontana?--at any rate, an edition with photographed macabre still lifes--and I barely chanced upon one. There's a million of Christies everywhere, but in gajillion editions. Anyone who's after a specific design becomes a collector of (relative) rarities.

>110 LolaWalser:

Photographed macabre still-lifes, I'd guess, would be late 60s-early 70s (that would tie in with the house style for Fontana's ghost story anthologies (actually classy affairs, initially edited by Robert Aickman) and the long-running Pan books of horror series.

The retro-fifties covers are certainly something I've seen, but only the rare lone example outside Forbidden Planet (the specialist Murder One bookshop went out of business and has an afterlife as a shelf in FP). Maybe their UK counterparts would be the golden age/cozy crime reprints from the British Library with their pastiche '30s covers? Although they never aimed at being sexy.

I take your point that 50's sexy isn't sexy any more but nostalgic or tongue-in-cheek...but isn't this just a matter of fashion? 60s paperbacks used 60's sex to sell themselves, 70's books did the same (70's sex is just straightforwardly nudity, as least in the UK publishing world!) - but I don't see the 2010s equivalent on the shelves.

Ok, this may be a local UK phenomenon. I was going to suggest that there are no sexy pulp/genre covers any more (sexy to the heterosexual male viewer/potential purchaser, I should clarify). For all I know you may be able to counter this with loads of right-wing militaristic SF with pneumatic ladies in too-tight spacesuits on their covers, but in the UK, SF paperback covers went rather staid before the end of the '70s. They all had Chris Foss paintings (or Chris Foss style paintings) of spaceships against stellar backgrounds.

Certainly, heading into Reading town centre, looking around Waterstones; and then going to the Oxfam charity bookshop with it's 40-year old stock, it's Oxfam that comes out looking the more louche.

Like my apparently innocent spaceship-covered paperbacks from back in the day, today's genre books may have all sorts of mayhem, naughtiness, and questionable politics between the covers; but they're not directly drawing attention to it.

>111 housefulofpaper:

I'm unreliably informed that any vaguely rocket-shaped spaceship on a cover is really a penis, so those might not be quite so innocent :p

Publishers, at least the big ones, do actual research on what sorts of covers help shift stock, so it may be that lurid covers are simply bad business for books, or certain kinds of books, rather than any more narrrowly cultural factors. Or perhaps rather, the cultural factors one should look at may be among the reading public rather than the publishers.

>111 housefulofpaper:

(sexy to the heterosexual male viewer/potential purchaser, I should clarify).

Ha yes, for those purposes basically "sex"="nekkid women". Although let's note there existed gay pulps too, with lots of shirtless men of chiselled physique etc. So men as sex objects do exists on these covers (I saw this book in the wild yesterday: Gore Vidal: A thirsty evil) but in general it's all very clearly directed at male and straight male audience; no one else need apply.

As for current trends, I run out of info fast because I don't follow contemporary fantasy, horror, sf, but from what I see, I'd say sex in advertising, generally speaking, is very much alive and present and not going anywhere. Recently I passed this on to my brother (he does graphic design) XXX: The Power of Sex in Contemporary Design, it's quite good if you want to get an idea how versatile and clever the use of sex for marketing purposes has got. Also, ubiquitous--and daring--and explicit. We're a long way off from Grandpa Rufus getting verklempt over cancan bloomers and suchlike.

The broad question "why they don't make them like that anymore" is probably too broad to answer from a single perspective. It reminds me of Sherlock Holmes pastiches and all similar products of a desire to have more of something that appealed once. Are they ever the same thing? In the end, it's asking "why does time pass".

>106 LolaWalser:

I encountered those editions when I was young and the covers definitely made me spend my babysitting money. I think the artist was Gervasio Gallardo, although I'm not certain.

>114 robertajl:

Thank you for mentioning this, it's exactly something I meant to explore--unbelievably, the artist isn't named anywhere in those six books (printed in 1973, "in cooperation with Arkham House" or something like that).

Hmmm, on googling Gallardo, I see some covers for Lovecraft (I have a few of those already, I think they are later than the '70s edition) but not the ones above--and the style looks to me rather different?--although it's not out of the realm of possibility for one artist to employ different idioms.

Ah, funnily enough, "gervasio gallardo lovecraft" found this!:

https://2warpstoneptune.com/2014/10/24/john-holmes-h-p-lovecraft-covers-1975-bal...

Never heard of John Holmes (well not THAT John Holmes), pleased to meetcha.

P.S. So Gallardo's covers for Ballantine's Lovecraft editions predated Holmes, according to this blog.

DO check out the Nabokov cover on the bottom!

P.P.S. That famous cover of Germaine Greer's The female eunuch--

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/oct/18/john-holmes-obituary

Just added "Fungi from Yuggoth"--also Ballantine edition--from 1971--and this one DOES note the cover artist, Gervasio Gallardo. Oh, and there's also "illustrated by Frank Utpatel" on the front cover.

Would Holmes being British have anything to do with anything? Possibly there's no rhyme nor reason to these practices.

Well, it's not Gothic but it is one of my favorite mass market covers. In 1984, Volker Schlöndorff directed Swann in Love, starring Jeremy Irons as Swann and Ornella Muti as Odette. I always thought that Irons looked liked Dracula swooping in on Lucy Westenra.

Good grief, I've taken my eye off the ball with this thread.

>118 robertajl: It actually looks a lot like the quad poster for Hammer's first Dracula (though mirror-reversed)(oh all right, Horror of Dracula in the US).

>113 LolaWalser: That book's a few years old now. I really do get the feeling of a different environment in popular culture since the turn of the millennium.

What have I been reading? Ian Fryer's book The British Horror Film. I'd put it to one side for a while - the story of Hammer was just too familiar, not only from Jonathan Rigby's book but from a recent diet of extras and commentaries on recent Hammer DVD and Blu-Ray re-releases. But I picked it up again and read it through over the last week or so. Very informative (and much more benevolent to Milton Subotsky than Mr Rigby!). It's a same that small publishers seemingly can't afford to proofread though.

I've also just started French Decadent Tales, which should include some examples of the fantastique. If the current hot weather sticks around I'll need a paperback that can hold up to several long wallows in the bathtub!

I've been belatedly reading Ray Russell's Haunted Castles over the last week or so. Another of those books I've been meaning to get round to for a long, long time.

Um ... slight disappointment, so far ...

Sardonicus I was familiar with - from anthologies - and it's the best of the three I've read so far.

Sagittarius I thought was a bit of a mess with its series of reveals - or 'not-reveals', don't know - poorly handled. The last twist in the tail I particularly thought poorly done and unconvincing.

Talking about twists in the tail, I worked out the one in Sanguinarius not long after the start - which can't be good. The result was almost disappointment when said twist showed up on cue.

Having said all that, they did keep me reading all the way through.

Four more to go (almost four, I should say - started Comet Wine a night or two ago) - let's keep hoping he hits higher.

>120 alaudacorax:

I've read "Sardonicus" in an anthology (is it the Oxford Gothic anthology? It's too late at night to check..). I've got Haunted Castles but it's unread as yet.

I've just finished reading Cathode Love, an anthology of material that's more The Chapel of the Abyss subject matter than this group's...selections from French 19th century Decadents, Antonin Artaud manifesto for the Theatre of Cruelty, pieces on the cinema of Jean Rollin and Jesus Franco. On the Gothic/Supernatural side, the fiction included "Clarimonde" by Theophile Gautier and Count Stenbock's werewolf story, "The Other Side".

This seems to have been a long-gestated personal projector the editor's that I found out about at the last minute (actually was it from The Chapel of the Abyss? And was it a post from Lolawalser? Thanks for the heads-up, if it was.

Evidently not everything came together as intended, the more prestigious edition was supposed to have an accompanying vinyl LP but this did not come to pass. It did, though, include a film strip from Rollin's personal print of The Grapes of Death signed by his son.

>121 housefulofpaper: - I've just finished reading Cathode Love ... was it a post from Lolawalser?

Now, that's odd - I know I've come across the title in reason days, but a search of LT only shows up your post and one in a long-dormant thread. That's going to niggle me till I remember ...

Got it! Hell of a coincidence - the Cathode Love facebook page cropped up among my facebook recommendations when I logged-on yesterday or the day before. Usually I completely ignore facebook recommendations, but I remember that one looking interesting, amd meant to investigate, then I promptly forgot about it until your post.

Having said that, was there something in my recent online meanderings that caused it to pop up on facebook? Oh dear ...

>121 housefulofpaper:

I'm not sure I'm understanding perfectly. Did they actually cut up the reels of film and send little strips out with each book?

>121 housefulofpaper:

Something else niggling at me - where does that image of the faded rose in the silent music box come from? It's ringing bells like Quasimodo - or I'm suffering from raging déjà vu today.

ETA - Is it from one of Rollin's films?

>121 housefulofpaper:

I surrender ... couldn't resist that (not the box and film strip, just the book - postage seemed excessive, though).

Don't think it was me, houseful, the title is completely unfamiliar. Hi guys, sorry am in a rush can't talk, just wanted to post this:

https://www.amazon.com/Paperbacks-Hell-Twisted-History-Fiction/dp/1594749817

May hold some answers to the question of "why they don't make them like that anymore", regarding horror pulps that is.

BBL

>123 alaudacorax:
Yes they did!

>124 alaudacorax:
Is it from Cocteau's La Belle et la Bete? (It might also be referencing the iron rose ornament that's a motif in The Iron Rose)

>126 LolaWalser:

I've got that book. I've got some ideas about "why they don't make them like that anymore" too, but I can't remember if they're from that book or other sources. Middle ages memory...

I do recall that at one point there's a discussion of why the "mid-list" disappeared in the US market (probably the biggest single reason). It was a totally different reason to the UK (where the abolition of the net book agreement led to the mid-list authors disappearing rom publisher's lists. When popular authors couldn't be sold at discount prices there was a degree of cross-subsidy across publishers' authors).

Oh, and serial-killer detective novels crossing over from horror into crime (when The Silence of the Lambs crops up in lists of horror films it always looks like someone's made a mistake; but I remember that how it was marketed on its original release).

>128 housefulofpaper:

Should have checked your library first... OF COURSE you'd have it! :p

Does it say anything about changes in cover art?

I'm afraid I don't read nearly enough in the usual suspect genres to have fresh ideas about how these things come and go... Speaking of, I bought just the other day 5-6 John MacDonald pulp crime titles, those with "colour" in the title, this is the cover on the one I read:



Something dates that cover irresistibly, doesn't it? (it's from 1964), but what? The fact that it has a girl on the cover, or something about the style of the painting? I think the latter...

P.S. Or her pose, hairdo, make-up?

>129 LolaWalser:

I think you're right about the style of painting. There's also a strong suggestion of Cat Ballou era Jane Fonda - coincidental, I suppose, if the film is from the following year.

A good comparison from the UK might be the covers for the Modesty Blaise series. I've got an examples from the 1960s (much like the John D MacDonald you found) a 1970s photographic cover (model in leathers), early 1980s (how to describe it? designery pastels or architectural sketch but still the subject's a female body in a "sexy"pose. It's unmistakably from the '80s for all that I can't describe it. I'll have to try to post some pictures. The latest reissues I've seen have gone for a retro look with paintings by, i think, the original 1960s comic strip artist. The pitch is clearly going for nostalgia rather than sex this time.

I have just finished a book about the films of Jean Rollin, Lost Girls: the Phantasmagorical Cinema of Jean Rollin from a small Canadian press.

The book consists of essays by exclusively female writers. After reading the book I'm still not sure of the motive. To disarm criticism of sexism or misogyny, or because a male critic, poor thing, can't be expected to see past the on-screen nudity and engage with the deeper themes of the works?

Only one essay was too academic for me, e.g. "Feminist materialism forms an alliance with this culture and discourse in its analysis of matter, and thus the body, the corpo(real)."

The essays look at one or two films in Rollin's oeuvre, or take on themes that run throughout his work, but are arranged to give a broadly chronological overview.

There are plenty of pictures including lots of stills and on-set photographs, and - a word of warning, I guess - of course there is a lot of bare flesh on display.

Reading The Phantom of the Opera. Saw the musical twice but never read the book! Very good so far!

>132 Tess_W:

I'm glad you're enjoying it. I read it not too many years ago. I've seen the Lon Chaney film a couple of times, and the 1940s version - once - but never seen the musical.

There's a connection between Gaston Leroux and Jean Rollin - more than one of the essays explain (and I do this it's "explain' rather than "excuse") the apparent naiveties of Rollin's plots by pointing out his love of the movie serials of the silent era. In France, that means works such as Fantomas and Les Vampires.But they also mention literary inspirations, and Leroux's other work is specifically mentioned. I have actually got a couple of Leroux's novels, other than Phantom,to read.

>132 Tess_W:

Got to read that again. I read it a few years back; find I didn't star it or enter the reading dates or make any notes, and now I can't disentangle it from the films (not the musical - never seen that).

>133 housefulofpaper:

That's a fascinating point about the Rollin connection. I've been meaning to watch Fantomas for ages. I'll be interested to get on with it, and Les Vampires if I can find it, and then watch some Rollins with fresh eyes.

I'm an occasional lurker on the 'The Weird Tradition' group, especially the 'THE DEEP ONES' threads, and on a whim last thing last night I read The Death of Malygris by Clark Ashton Smith. I have quite a collection of CASes but seemingly not including that one.

That's a definite gap - tremendous story - I was riveted. Having said that, their discussion thread starts tomorrow (22nd) so I won't go any further into the story, but ... and having written that I can't decide what I should write ...

Whatever - I'll just repeat that it's a tremendous story and I'm quite looking forward to what they have to say about it.

>135 alaudacorax:

I won't be able to post anything over there until the weekend but yes, I think this is one of CASs best stories as well.

>136 housefulofpaper:

rat-tat-tatted four paragraphs on The Death of Malygris over on The Deep Ones thread. First draft, felt a bit like those cent-a-word fellows of the pulp era.

There's bound to be at least one dreadful typo in there...

This is not about what I'm reading now but what I was reading last week, and I'm probably about to convince you all that I've finally flipped.

Andrew's evocative picture of Strasbourg Cathedral over in the 'More Gothic gossip' thread reminded me of something. Cathedrals bring to my mind gargoyles and ...

Background: One week's holiday on the Gower peninsula last week and my laptop packed in on the first day - I was having to hand-write my holiday journal - picture me in the evenings hunched over a pen and exercise book in the pool of light from a table lamp - nostalgia indeed! Anyway, I was cut off from my websites (actually sort of liberating).

Then someone grievously offended me and I wanted to run to you lot for sympathy and I couldn't - frustrating!

The culprit was Clark Ashton Smith and it was doubly hurtful because he's rapidly been becoming one of my favourite authors. I was re-reading his short stories in the evenings and I'd got to ‘The Maker of Gargoyles’ (here's a link).

This is set in mediæval times and it's actually quite good. However, it includes the following sentence: “The terror that soon prevailed, beneath the widening scope of these Satanical excursions and depredations, was beyond all belief—a clotted, seething, devil-ridden gloom of superstitious obsession, not to be hinted at in modern language” (my italics).

It is that '... not to be hinted at in modern language ...' that so offends me. Breaking the fourth wall? He's pretty much thrusting his arm through and poking me in the eye - ouch! It's almost as bad as that bit in (I think) The Hobbit where Tolkien crunchingly anachronistically likens a dragon to an express train- worse in a way as I regard CAS as much the better writer. Actually, I felt he was starting to lose his grip on the tale's internal reality with 'superstitious obsession', but that final clause is just plain offensive. How could he let that into print? What about his editor?

It completely derailed my absorption in the work and I feel it spoils an otherwise good story. So am I being overly-picky? Over-reacting? Obsessive? Bonkers?

ETA - Or is CAS not as good a writer as I think and I should have been reading him with more critical attention?

Given that CAS had a bit of running battle with editors who didn't appreciate either his archaicizing vocabulary nor his proclivity for "mature" content, I have to wonder if it's a dig at such constraints.

>140 alaudacorax:

Well, if it derailed you, it derailed you, can't be helped. But isn't that sort of address to the reader fairly common in older literature? "You can't imagine what happened next, dear reader..."

>142 LolaWalser:

It's not so much the address to the reader, as the sudden wrenching of the piece completely out of its time context.

David Bunch's Prophetic Dystopia https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/09/12/david-bunchs-prophetic-dystopia/

I've just discovered an unknown-to-me Charles Dickens short story on my own bookshelves. That's the trouble with short story collections - I forget that I'm reading them, or that I haven't read all the stories.

It's 'A Madman's Manuscript' - I gather from The Pickwick Papers, which I've also never read.

It is rather tremendous. I mean, it was quite gripping, but it was only after reading, when I thought it over for a few minutes, that the real depth and grotesquenesses of it hit me. There are quite oblique slants on madness and morality in there. And it cries out and rattles its chains for a good actor to read it aloud ...

>145 agmlll:

Don't know whether I want to put that on the wish lists or not. It sounds pretty unique - a little intriguing and a little daunting.

ETA - Damn! Now I'm worrying if it's grammatically incorrect to qualify 'unique'. Sometimes it's not easy being inside my head ...

ETA, again - It's a bit perverse to be worrying about grammatical correctness whilst willfully leaving out the pronouns - get your act together!

>146 alaudacorax:

I thought you might be looking for a Dickens story apparently entitled The Trial for Murder (I'm sure I've read it, possibly in the Oxford Anthology of Victorian Ghost Stories, but I don't remember it under that name; possibly it's been anthologised under more than one? And I've got Pickwick Papers on a shelf to read - most of Dickens I've still to read, actually. I knew there was at least one ghost story in there that gets reprinted as a stand-alone item, "The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton".

I've strayed away from the Gothic and the Weird for the past couple of weeks but came across mentions, in two separate books on gardening (Life in the Garden and The Curious Gardener) of Humphrey Repton and his designs for the grounds of British stately homes, and contrasting his approach with that of the slightly earlier "Capability" Brown.

The point is, although both men rejected formal garden design for a more "natural" appearance (albeit involving diverting rivers, flattening hills, displacing whole villages if they spoil the view, and so on), their different approaches - Brown going for a classical dream of Arcadia, Repton aiming for "picturesque" roughness and raw nature (faux raw nature) reflected the turn in post-Enlightenment thought, from a serious minded but optimistic to the point of complacency, to febrile Romanticism. (I remember Kenneth Clarke's Civilisation illustrating the change musically - a transition from Mozart to Beethoven. and then of course tying the changing tastes in the arts to the Age of Revolution.)

Penelope Lively's book reminded me that a Repton-type landscape gardener features in Tom Stoppard's play Arcadia and in fact this Classical/Romantic transition is one of its themes. She also cites the artist Claude Lorrain as someone Brown drew on whilst Repton favoured Salvator Rosa.

>147 alaudacorax: David R. Bunch's story "The Good War" is available to read online if you want a sample.

https://lithub.com/the-good-war/

>146 alaudacorax:

I was wondering if A Madman's Manuscript could have been influenced by Poe - it feels sort of Poe-ish - but I don't know I can make dates of publication fit. Now I'm wondering how aware each might have been of the other in the 1830s.

A bit of a "Folk Horror" theme over the past week, courtesy of some books from Wryd Harvest Press. Specifically two books about Folk Horror music - which (apparently) ranges from the 1960s Folk boom unearthing creepy old ballads (with a nod to American Blues and Country), to Occult-themes Heavy Rock, a bit of '70s Prog and "Folk Prog", through to Industrial and Electronica...and after that historical survey, looking at the artists tapping into those musics today whether as Folk acts or nostalgic/creepy "Hauntological" artists conjuring up a lost/never was world of Radiophonic TV themes and Brutalist architecture and coldly officious but also paternalistic Welfare State...yes, if ever there was a genre that can only be defined as "I'll know it when I see it/ hear it" and then pointing to specific examples, this is it!

There was a also a whole book devoted to a one-day event held at the British Museum, consisting of transcripts of the various talks/events that took place. Not just about music, also film and TV, psychogeography, neopaganism, a bit of Magic(k)...

I've also received the latest volumes of Ghosts and Scholars (new fiction and non-fiction pertaining to M. R. James) and Tartarus Press's journal, Wormwood (subtitled "Literature of the fantastic, supernatural and decadent) - always a good, no an essential read.

I have passed the third-way-through point in Melmoth the Wanderer and am enjoying it greatly. There are parallels between it and The Monk and I see strong links to The Unfortunate Fursey and The Return of Fursey as well. The Fursey books were written with humour in mind, but they use some tropes and elements of Melmoth and The Monk, as well as having their own social messages.

>154 housefulofpaper:

Andrew has a nasty way of making my hand twitch towards my credit card ... always seems to find the really interesting stuff ...

>154 housefulofpaper: - ... 1960s Folk boom unearthing creepy old ballads ...

I've possibly written here about this before, but one of my favourite folk recordings from my youth is Ann Briggs' recording of She Moves Through the Fair. I don't think I then picked up on what seems so obvious to me now - that a lot of the words must have been lost down the years. I imagine it originally had a plot to it on the same pattern as The Bride of Corinth (link to thread) - it's a pretty widespread folk/horror tale.

>157 alaudacorax:

... and having just read the Wikipedia page for the song ... perhaps I'm wrong ...

>158 alaudacorax:

Interesting. One of the essays in Folk Horror Revival: Harvest Hymns 1: Twisted Roots describes a similar process, where ballads that began as real-life reportage evolved into something much more non-specific and mythic.

Honestly, I have no sense of single-mindedness. I'm painfully and slowly making my way through a pile of heavy-duty reading (and watching), which I really should have finished by now. But then when my mind wandered I got myself into one novel, then another, neither of which have I finished yet. Then on top of that I let myself get led astray by a 'The Weird Tradition' thread and more or less impulse-bought a rather nice H. P. Lovecraft: The Complete Fiction - the Barnes & Noble 'Leatherbound Classics' one. Arrived yesterday and, of course, the inevitable happened: I spent most of yesterday afternoon and evening re-reading Lovecraft ...

No real plans for Gothic reading in the future outside of a couple things I want to read on my e-reader. I picked up Castle Otranto and Seven Gothic Tales and will add another couple from the weird end of things. I do have The Golem (not sure if it counts) and In search of Mary Shelley hidden away in my wrapped tbr list so at some point I'll discover them.

I saw mention of Agatha Christie, and that reminds me that I'm thinking about re-reading Appointment with Death. I had to track down the title again as I read it back in my teen era but I've always remembered the cast, particularly the former prison warden matriarch of the family, who winds up dead. The family matriarch seems to provide an omnipresent aura of nasty over the group, so I wonder if there isn't some gothic feel in there as well. It's a Hercule Poirot mystery, as I mostly read those. I think it might also be one of the tv productions that I didn't see. I don't remember it. I would like to give some Miss Marple a try. I've only ever watched those, but they're pretty good. I'd like to read A Caribbean Mystery and Nemesis and see how they match up with the shows.

>161 WeeTurtle:

I don't have too high an opinion of Agatha Christie. I do have some favourites, particularly, The Moving Finger, A Murder is Announced and The Murder at the Vicarage and I've frequently looked for another of those but I'm usually disappointed.

I recently read And Then There Were None and the most I would call it is 'competent'. I was a little puzzled, though, that Christie seemed to be quite consciously keeping it non-Gothic - the plot obviously has that potential and I think she might have had to work at keeping Gothicism at bay.

So when I came across Endless Night recently and read some stuff that suggested she might have been trying for a Gothic novel (gypsy curse, shunned old ruin) curiosity got the better of me ...

... and BY THE GODS this thing is slow. At the moment I'm too stubborn to give up on it (gave up on They Came to Baghdad not long ago and still feeling guilty) and I'm forcing myself to read one chapter an evening - and some evenings I just can't face it. According to my Kindle I'm 40% through it and she's done little more than set the scene. And the characters just seem unsatisfactory, somehow - just barely there ...

>163 alaudacorax:

Can't keep switching back and fore between Christie and Lovecraft or Poe - could get severely injured by culture shock ...

I remember trying to get through Murder in Retrospect. To this day I remember nothing of it beyond the title.

I don't have much of a switching issue, but then, I'm that person that wears a vintage My Little Pony shirt (until it got too small) and has bookshelves adorned with gargoyles.

>163 alaudacorax:

Dame Agatha was a sorry hack--not that one can blame her for feeding her public what it wanted. A few early titles have a certain verve, but tend to suffer from other problems... although they sanitised her quite a bit post-war.

I ditched Roald Dahl's Book of Ghost Stories after reading about a half (a few I'd read before); the Best Mention goes to Robert Aickman's Ringing the changes (newlyweds meet zombies by the seaside). Forgettable selection all in all, with a weird touch in Dahl's nasty old man sexist rambling in the intro. What a git.

>165 WeeTurtle:

You've just made me collapse in laughter. I had this image of you walking past your bookshelves with the My Little Pony on your shirt cowering in terror beneath the basilisk stares of groups of gargoyles.

>166 LolaWalser:

The irony is that I'm not really interested in detective stories. It's weird that I've read as many as I have.

A friend introduced me to Dorothy L. Sayer and I really loved her - at her best she transcends the genre, I think. It was pretty much all downhill after Sayer. The same friend was a big fan of Christie, had rows of them, so I read some of her and stuck with it even though the first thing I read was a collection of short stories that contained some really poor stuff. Daft in retrospect.

By far the best things I've come across in that line (apart from Sayer) are some really funny parodies of Miss Marple by a writer called Heron Carvic - probably not respecful of the genre by me.

>168 alaudacorax:

The irony is that I'm not really interested in detective stories. It's weird that I've read as many as I have.

I feel the same. I keep saying I can't be considered a mystery fan but somehow or other it turns out I've read hundreds. Probably a reflection of the genre's ubiquity... Plus of course there's stuff like Simenon that often "transcends" the genre, whatever that means... Have you read Reginald Hill? Like Sayers, he was erudite and a language-lover, but with a great playful streak. And contrary to the usual trend with a long series, his Dalziel and Pascoe novels kept getting better. The last two or three are literary fantasias only a well-established lion can allow himself, at the end of his run.

I finished reading Melmoth the Wanderer last week and have pages of notes on all the themes, allusions, hidden barbs at certain groups in authority, and the links between this book and others. It is impossible to separate the man, i.e. Charles Maturin, from his work. There is so much in this book that reflects elements and experiences of his real life that it is impossible to see this book as anything other than an instrument he used to communicate not just his supposedly austere morality and faith, but also his contempt for the hierarchy who stimeyed his progess within the church when they discovered he was writing Gothic stories.

The book is very much affected by the events of the day and show the views Maturin was expected to hold as a Church of Ireland minister, but could also be interpreted as the views he envisaged his audience wanted to see him hold. We must remember that he was put under financial pressure by being limited to his £90/year curate’s salary because of his writing Gothic literature and it was this very censure that forced him to write more Gothic literature in order to earn enough money to keep his family.

Edited to correct typographical errors. Any remaining errors are totally intended and if you cannot see their meaning then you are not digging deep enough. :-)

>170 pgmcc:

I've yet to read that, but, if I remember correctly, it's another of those works that Punter & Byron's The Gothic regards as a 'key work' of the genre (and you've made it sound fascinating), so I'm going to create a thread for it ...

>171 alaudacorax: I spotted your new thread before seeing your post here. I hope you find it as fascinating as I did. He tends to go on a bit in some parts but I found it worth carrying on. I did not feel the 700 pages passing.

In terms of "key work" I have spotted links between it and a few other works I have read, namely, The Monk, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the two Fursey books, The Unfortunate Fursey and The Return of Fursey. The last two are relatively recent (1940s) and are more humorous/satirical that Gothic, but both worthwhile reads.

>172 pgmcc:

I did not feel the 700 pages passing.

Amazing! Well, in contrast to my experience. One of the worst books I ever read, AND possibly the most boring.

I found the anti-Catholicism amusing and IIRC there was some interest when "Immaculata" (sorry, my pun) entered the narrative, but all that was smothered by the logorrhea and ludicrous structure.

>173 LolaWalser: I found the historic context interesting as it was written when there was a lot of talk and discussion about Catholic emancipation in Ireland that did not happen until several years after the publication of Melmoth. I found Maturin's anti-Catholicism significant as his target audience would have been keenly watching that debate and worried about what would happen. I could see Maturin attempting to stir up fear amongst his Protestant Ascendancy readers. The vocabulary used and the works he referenced all points to his writing for a particular audience. His use of Latin and Greek quotation would confine him to the educated classes and thereby exclude the majority of the Irish population which surrounded the world of his readers.

As you can see, it was more than the story that interested me. It was the historic context, Maturin's motivations in writing it, and the relationship between the content of the novel and his personal experiences in life.

Right, but he doesn't take long to make those points, while the text is like a blown-up pufferfish. Enormous yet largely empty on the inside.

That said, I fully understand why it's more interesting to you. I don't remember much from the notes in the edition I read (this was more than ten years ago)--DID it stir some, er, troubles? :) I mean for anyone other than Maturin himself.

>175 LolaWalser:
I am not aware of its directly causing any civic disorder but it would have been consistent with the general sewing of bigotry and grinding down the natives, something that would have been seen as important to preserving British rule in Ireland and the preserving of the position of the Protestant ascendancy. Giving Catholics the vote, even if it was only property owning Catholics, could threatenthe status quo. Melmoth was published only 22 years after the rebellion of 1798. While Maturin was short of a few bob he was still part of the privileged elite.

I think the worst that hapoened him as a result of Melmoth was his being accused of being an atheist by his superiors, an allegation he strenuously denied, but I am not so sure. :-)

He did overcook many of his points, e.g. the torture of the young monk and the girl’s time on the island. When you look at his motivation to build up disgust at the Roman Catholic church it makes sense to dwell on the torture. On the island he was preaching hatred of Hinduism and Islam.

I could go pn but I hate typing on a phone screen.

I had to finish The Screaming Skull by F. Marion Crawford this morning. I started last night, a ghost story for Christmas, but it had been a full day and I just couldn't stay awake. I italicised 'had to', though, because it had that much of a grip on me - it had great build-up in tension and I had to get back to it.

It's almost all in first-person, but the story is partly told to an old friend the narrator has staying with him in his lonely old cottage and partly happening around them as he is telling it and reflected in his words. The narrator betrays his fears, hopes, indecision and uncertainty about the matter as he goes along. It's very nicely done.

I wish they hadn't let me alone this morning with all these dishes of sweeties around the place - they're a sore temptation ...

>163 alaudacorax: - So when I came across Endless Night recently and read some stuff that suggested she might have been trying for a Gothic novel (gypsy curse, shunned old ruin) curiosity got the better of me ...

I finally finished this. A crime novel with Gothic touches to it is perhaps the best way to describe it. It did pick up pace a bit in the last third or so - much more incident and development - and I didn't see the ending coming. My final impression, though, was that Christie had made a novel out of enough material for only a longish short story.

>179 frahealee: - Are we continuing here in the New Year? I wasn't sure if a new thread was typical at the close of one and the cusp of the next...

No, just start new threads when the old ones get slow to load or navigate.

I don't know how many film versions of And Then There Were None I've seen, but I think all were probably more fun than the book.
Had no idea Toby Stephens was Maggie Smith's son. Somehow, I never thought of her as the marrying, family kind.

Rosemary Pardoe has been involved in the small press/fan press since the late 60s. She specialises in M/ R. James and has published Ghosts and Scholars/ The Ghosts and Scholars Newsletter (the difference being the lack of fiction in the newsletter - although it crept back, and the publication has accordingly just reverted back to its original name) for something like 30 years, maybe longer.

The Black Pilgrimage is an oversized softcover book reprinting many articles on James and related authors and matters ghostly.It's scholarly without being dry or stuffed with jargon.

Howard David Ingham has written a book, based on and expanding on a blog, that in essence is a collection of film and TV reviews of works that can be classed as folk horror. He's another person who is erudite and informative whilst still writing lively and engaging prose. But he also brings in the personal - there are passages of childhood reminiscence, of political anger, used to drive a point home or create a connection with the reader. His criticism too, struck me as consistently sound and illuminating, The book's entitled We Don't Go Back.

Helen's Story by Rosanne Rabinowitz is a novella I've had for a while but hadn't picked up to read. It's a partial rewrite and continuation of Arthur Machen's "The Great God Pan", in which Helen Vaughn didn't die, but lived on into the present day. Helen's unspeakable perversions and metamorphoses, and her effect on others, are neither condemned nor discreetly hinted at here.

Sleeping With the Lights on is a short in page length, but pretty dense and meaty, book about horror by Darryl Jones. It's published by OUP and looks like it might have been intended for their "A Very Short Introduction" series.

The last book I finished reading is, in fact, a genuine volume in that series. The Devil: A Very Short Introduction by Darren Oldridge.

>168 alaudacorax: Last year, I read Agatha Christie's 'The Hound of Death and other short stories' (1933), I believe it's her only collection of supernatural short stories. It was a mixed bag, some stories were dreadful (including the title story), but some were very good - 'Last Seance', 'Wireless', 'The Lamp', and one was outright surreal and ethereal - 'The Call of Wings'.

The British Library has a new and ongoing series of paperback books (with striking covers) under the umbrella title 'Tales of the Weird'. Over Christmas, I read 'Spirits of the Season - Christmas hauntings', which I enjoyed. Some of the stories were familiar to me ('The Kit Bag' - Algernon Blackwood, 'The Shadow' - E Nesbit) whilst others weren't ('The Four Fifteen Express' - Amelia B Edwards, 'The Christmas Shadrach' - Frank R Stockton). It made for good seasonal reading. I shall be getting more in this range.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywo...

>182 Rembetis:

... and such is my love/hate relationship with Christie that I'll probably end up reading The Hound of Death now that you've made me aware of it ...

I second Rembetis' remarks about The Hound... and would add there is a similar strain of "otherworldly" atmosphere and supernatural touches in many (most?) stories in The mysterious Mr. Quinn. (These are not overlapping selections, are they? I'm pretty sure I have both books from the same publisher.) That said, when I started re-reading them recently, at least the first few struck me as markedly weaker than my remembered impression from my teens, so... no guarantees of anything...

>183 alaudacorax: I know what you mean about love/hate with Christie! I have read her since childhood, and return to her almost like a comfort blanket, once or twice a year.

>184 LolaWalser: Thanks for alerting me to 'The Mysterious Mr Quinn'. I wasn't aware that Christie had written another anthology of 'atmospheric/supernatural' stories! This collection predates the 'Hound' by 3 years (1930) - I checked and there are no overlapping selections.

>185 Rembetis:

Not to spoil too much, but it's probably fair to warn the "supernatural" is rather discreet in these stories, really mostly existing around the mysterious figure of Mr. Quin (I see I misspelt his name above...) I found the time to reread two or three during my latest vacation and now they struck me as very naive, but who knows, there may be some charm in that...

Just finished reading Carnacki, The Ghost Finder. The stories held my attention - I didn't lose interest - but they left me a bit unsatisfied. I'm not much of a fan of rational explanations.

Not Gothic literature sensu stricto, but sort of in its neighbourhood--The Case against Satan by Ray Russell (originally published in 1962, a tale of exorcism predating The exorcist) and Das Wachsfigurenkabinett, a collection of international horror/horrorish fantasy with stories dating from the early 19th- mid-20th century. But the special attraction here is illustrations by Alfred Kubin.

I'm going to be utterly deprived of my gothic and weird until I'm done school, unless someone has some suggestions for kid's books from 2-12 range that cover Gothic fiction? I've already got Mary Who Wrote Frankenstein.

>188 alaudacorax:

Also, the common frame Carnacki Hodgson gives each of the stories doesn't sit well with me - for me, it verges on silly.

>189 LolaWalser:

Your post had me googling Alfred Kubin. Quite pleased to find he did a lithograph for 'The Bride of Corinth' - a favourite of mine and which we have a thread for, but now I'm rather frustrated on coming across his painting 'The Groom', being intrigued by it, and not being able to find online a decent-sized, good-quality image of it or an explanation of the subject matter.

>189 LolaWalser: I recently acquired The Case Against Satan but have not read it yet. I bought it on the strength of having found Russell's Haunted Castles very amusing.

>192 alaudacorax:

Is this large enough? (Click on image)

Der Bräutigam (Rhinocerus und Jungfrau)

A cursory google brings up a remark on this drawing within the framework of the exhibition Salon der Angst:

Several mythological motifs are joined together in Der Bräutigam (Rhinocerus und Jungfrau) (c.1903–04, The Bridegroom: Rhinoceros and Virgin): the black rhinoceros above the helplessly sprawled virgin is reminiscent of the classical myth of Zeus and Europa. At the same time, the rhinoceros represents exotic foreignness; it signals xenophobia and the colonial era.

>193 pgmcc:

It's a quick read (it's just that I'm delayed by a million things) and so far amusing indeed. Plus other things.

"I don't drink," said Talbot flatly. "Listen, Garth. Before I opened my own print shop, I used to work as night clerk in a hotel. You learn a lot in a job like that. People come and go--good people and bad, most of them bad. And you get to know everything about them, every mean little nasty vice. The old sugar daddies come in with their eighteen-year-old girls. Eighteen? Seventeen, sixteen, younger! Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Ha! (...) And the priests come in. Oh yes. With their coat collars turned up, thinking they are fooling everybody. But they never fooled me. Yes, the priests come in, Garth. With their frightened little girls. And little boys."

>194 LolaWalser:

Thanks Lola, but that's not the same image. This is the one that's piqued my curiosity:

https://www.wikiart.org/en/alfred-kubin/the-groom-1906

I'm assuming the 'groom' is 'bridegroom' rather 'stable groom' and that he's the weird little (supernatural?), central figure.

Other than that, I can't make head or tail of it. Is the figure with the topper human? What I can make out of the face is weird. What is the little figure to the right and what is it wearing, and is it carrying a bunch of flowers or is something looking round from behind it? Where are they--a forest after dark? The lady doesn't seem dressed as a bride. Are she and her companion stepping down out of a cave? Are there more figures following behind them? It's all rather weird and puzzling. Not least because, in reversal of fairy tale convention, she seems to be tripping forward quite happily while he seems to be being dragged by the scruff of the neck.

>195 alaudacorax:

And having written that, it's occurred to me that the groom might be the chap in the topper and that he might be leaning on the shoulder of the queer little creature.

>195 alaudacorax:, >195 alaudacorax:

Or it's nothing to do with weddings at at all and the central figure is a stable groom being held by the scruff of the neck; in which case I have even less idea of what's going on ...

>195 alaudacorax:

I wasn't sure whether those were labelled correctly, as I couldn't find them on German websites. The rhino drawing pops up more often (at least in my search conditions) and apparently predates the pastels. I presume this may refer to that pastel or a similar one:

In 1901, when he was in his early twenties, Kubin met his first Maecenas, the publisher Hans von Weber. This man prompted the first publication of "Facsimiles of artistic drawings", the so-called "Weber portfolio". The early work already contains what will remain Kubin's interest to the end of his life: the experience and sensation of the demonic, the monstrous and the terrible, in his world and that of the observer. His drawings and books are filled with spirits, witches, gnomes and ghosts.-- Even such a scene as the meeting between the bride and the bridegroom, usually experienced as joyous and happy, in this instance {note: no image given} appears dominated by gloom, and those present--the bridal pair and possibly the witnesses--are almost devoured by the darkness of the forest. At the same time the drawing and especially its protagonist illustrates something else that dominated Kubin: "A certain well-known factor in Kubin's life and work is the sense of ageing...(...) All to the end of his life there will be no letter and almost no written trace from Kubin that doesn't revolve, almost monomaniacally, around the fact of ageing, the decline of his body or even death. {...} It's also possible that in "Der Bräutigam" Kubin processed the death in 1903 of his fiancée Emmy Bayer and his ensuing marriage to Hedwig Gründler.

There are references to some monographs of Kubin's work; not sure whether there may not be more information on sources etc. for specific works there--also, Kubin wrote some biographical books, for example Dämonen und Nachtgesichte (Demons and faces appearing in the night) but that doesn't seem to have been translated in English... pity, it gives a very good general picture of his obsessions.

>198 LolaWalser:

Thanks Lola.

Oh well, I suppose not every picture must have a story behind it. Interesting reference to gnomes--I suppose the central figure could very well be a gnome. And that's sent me off down another path: I've just realised I have no childhood memory of ever reading or hearing a story about a gnome, so I'm wondering how they came to infest British gardens the way the little brutes do. I've seen gardens with whole gangs of them.

I wish I could find a good image of that picture--I've just realised there is something strange poking out of the ground in the patch of light foregrounding the group of figures.

I'm currently reading "The Hidden Children" by Robert W. Chambers and it is quite interesting, also shockingly violent. It would make an excellent historical horror film set during the revolutionary war if handled well. The historical setting is the "Sullivan Expedition" during the revolutionary war which completely destroyed the Iroquois League, the survivors fled to Canada. The book begins with these dark enigmatic verses, written by one Samuel Dodge during the Revolutionary War, which inspired the novel.

THE LONG HOUSE

"Onenh jatthondek sewarih-wisa-anongh-kwe kaya-renh-kowah!
Onenh wa-karigh-wa-kayon-ne.
Onenh ne okne joska-wayendon.
Yetsi-siwan-enyadanion ne
Sewari-wisa-anonqueh."

"Now listen, ye who established the Great League!
Now it has become old.
Now there is nothing but wilderness.
Ye are in your graves who established it."

"At the Wood's Edge."

NENE KARENNA

When the West kindles red and low,
Across the sunset's sombre glow,
The black crows fly—the black crows fly!
High pines are swaying to and fro
In evil winds that blow and blow.
The stealthy dusk draws nigh—draws nigh,
Till the sly sun at last goes down,
And shadows fall on Catharines-town.

Oswaya swaying to and fro.

By the Dark Empire's Western gate
Eight stately, painted Sachems wait
For Amochol—for Amochol!
Hazel and samphire consecrate
The magic blaze that burns like Hate,
While the deep witch-drums roll—and roll.
Sorceress, shake thy dark hair down!
The Red Priest comes from Catharines-town.

Ha-ai! Karenna! Fate is Fate.

Now let the Giants clothed in stone
Stalk from Biskoonah; while, new grown,
The Severed Heads fly high—fly high!
White-throat, White-throat, thy doom is known!
O Blazing Soul that soars alone
Like a Swift Arrow to the sky,
High winging—fling thy Wampum down,
Lest the sky fall on Catharines-town.

White-throat, White-throat, thy course is flown.

I have a new understanding of why upstate New York is so creepy. There are similarities to Chateuabriand's Atala/Rene. I love Chambers prose style, and his vivid descriptions and characters.

Finished reading Agatha Christie's The Hound of Death and Other Stories today--a collection of stories with a supernatural element to them. I think one of you may have mentioned them and brought them to my attention.

In terms of quality they were a startlingly mixed bunch. One or two were really quite good and powerful, some not so much, and some, frankly, irritating.

My reading is still skirting round the Gothic rather than hitting the bullseye.

Kafka on the Shore is my first experience of Haruki Murakami. In fact there are a number of incidents and themes in the novel that in another context would be Gothic, but the tone/mood, and the reading experience are very different. The book has been described as a kind of Japanese Magical Realism (but is that just to give a fantasy novel some critical credibility, I wonder?). I've also been assured that it is VERY Japanese.

The Oxford Illustrated History of Witchcraft & Magic is a book I stalled on a while ago, but I picked it up again and pushed through to the end (it was a fairly dry chapter about witch trials - not the subject matter of course, but the tables of trials in different countries/principalities etc. that had brought my reading to a halt). The focus is on the European witch trials (plus the American colonies) but there chapters on the Ancient and the Medieval World, modern magic, the anthropological approach, and a final chapter "Witches on screen" (which stresses the influence of the US sitcom Bewitched).

And I'm about a quarter of the way through an anthology The Dedalus Book of French Horror: The 19th Century, so far the emphasis is very much non-supernatural tales that reflect the horrors of recent history and - like Mary Shelley - scientific/medical research into the origins or the borders of life (with Alexandre Dumas' "Solange" both themes are combined).

I tried watching Bewitched but was bored out of my skull. Sabrina the teenage witch actually elicited a few chuckles... I guess I'm not a fan of funny witches.

>200 DavidX:

Very interesting. Great atmosphere in that poem. That's not some real Algonquian language, is it? An effective simulacrum, at least, to my barely-acquainted eyes (I'd love another lifetime to explore Native American languages).

>203 LolaWalser:
was bored out of my skull. - thanks for the timely comment. I might otherwise have forgotten how anodyne most classic fantasy-tinged sitcoms are about bought the whole series on DVD (to support the recently reopened Reading branch of HMV - the chain recently fell into administration for the second time in, I think, under five years).

The early episodes of The Addams Family are an exception to the "anodyne" verdict, I think. They have a slight flavour of the Marx Brothers - a former writer and/or producer was involved, I think.

>204 housefulofpaper:

Hey, did you lose bits of your post? I can't see what you thought of Bewitched--you say you bought it? I love the Addamses to bits. Best family values ever, seriously. :)

>204 housefulofpaper:

Yes - where on Earth did it go? I'm sure I typed it out - if I only thought I'd typed it out, I'm in trouble...:)

I meant to say, I might otherwise have bought the whole series on DVD (which currently costs £40, by the way; when I remember that in the mid-80s one Doctor Who story on VHS cost £60, that seems like an incredible bargain. But then, if I had bought the box set I'd have to actually watch all the episodes. And the thought of doing that defeats the acquiring/curatorial instinct. To be honest, I'm still slowly wading through The Munsters).

I think I'm coming round to the idea I don't have infinite resources, infinite storage space, and infinite time to enjoy everything. Melancholy thought.

But yes, The Addams Family is great. And Gomez and Morticia the only television couple (at the time) allowed to be believably interested in one another sexually,

>206 housefulofpaper:

Wow, that sounds expensive, I could swear Bewitched was selling much cheaper in North America. Now I'm going to worry whether you wouldn't have liked it after all... ;) Did you by any chance look to see whether an ep or two may not be findable for a "test-drive" online? I'd only comment that even if you like one ep, it tends to be very samey. (I bailed after the first five or so.)

I know of The Munsters, but I'm jealous of my love for the Addamses. And yes on the Gomez + Morticia 4EVA vibe, that's the relationship I always wanted and never found! :)

>207 LolaWalser:

Honestly, it doesn't seem expensive to me. The box set can be viewed on Amazon UK and the total running time is a little over 103 hours!

That '80s Doctor Who VHS tape though, which would have run a little under 3 hours (of unrestored b/w footage) ...I revalued £60 in mid-1986 and its equivalent today would be £172...

But I have seen Bewitched; I have memories of it either being screened by the BBC in a children's TV slot (as was The Monkees) or in the daytime during school holidays (as was Star Trek); and I think it's been on terrestrial TV in the '90s (when we stopped making lots of TV but had developed more of an archivists or curators attitude to the old stuff). I think approaching it again would be like trying to work through The Munsters...the set up is good, the actors can play comedy well, but just working through the mechanics of the plots, hoping for hints of sly wit or a bit of a satiric edge, gets wearisome.

>203 LolaWalser:
Loved Bewitched as a youngster. I've come across the odd episode in recent times--grown out of it, don't think I could watch all the way through.

>202 housefulofpaper: - The Oxford Illustrated History of Witchcraft & Magic ...
Okay, over the last year or two I've run a few searches for a reasonably scholarly history of witchcraft and I'm ready to swear that book has never come up. It looks just what I was after and I'm sure I'd have bought it if I'd ever heard of it. Ordered it now. Thanks Andrew (or, "housefulofpaper launches yet another strike at alaudacorax's bank account!").

>203 LolaWalser: Ostensibly at least, it is Algonquin, or some phonetic approximation, written down by a veteran of the Sullivan expedition who had heard it first hand. The historical and cultural details seem pretty accurate for a historical romance/adventure novel of this period. Chambers seems to have done his research on New York history. I did some googling. I'm interested because my mother was from that area. She was born in Mohawk, New York. My grandfather even claimed to be part Mohican, but he lied a lot, so... who knows?

>202 housefulofpaper: I never finished all the stories the The Dedalus Book of French Horror. I think I will reread it.

P.S. Speaking of funny witches. Have you read Sidonia the Sorceress? She's a hoot!

>209 alaudacorax: "housefulofpaper launches yet another strike at alaudacorax's bank account!". - Sorry about that!

>210 DavidX: No, Sidonia the Sorceress/ the historical Sidonia von Borcke had flown under my radar, despite my having heard the name somewhere, and being aware of the Burne Jones painting.

Listening to "In the Walls of Eryx." I've been sick and in my convalescence I have found a delightful YouTube channel called "HorrorBabble" that has a number of narrated short stories, with conveniently organized playlists by author, length, narrator, etc. There's a collection of verse as well.

They're UK based, and have quite a collection. So far I've spotted

Algernon Blackwood,
H.P. Lovecraft,
Robert E. Howard,
William Hope Hodgeson,
Clark Ashton Smith,
Edgar Allan Poe,
Saki (never heard of them),
M. D. Vickers (haven't heard of them either)

and a bunch of others I don't recognize. ;).

>211 housefulofpaper: I am still obsessed with witches and am reading The Lancashire Witches by William Henry Ainsworth now, along with The Witch-Cult in Western Europe by Margaret Alice Murray. I plan to reread Sidonia the Sorceress next because I enjoy that book so much. She is so delightfully unrepentant and Lady Jane Wilde's translation is lovely to read.

I'm late catching up with this thread and I'm only now reading >211 housefulofpaper: onwards. By coincidence I was looking at the Burne Jones painting last night in a book I'm currently reading. I assumed she was some friend of B J and thought the dress looked horrible; now I realise it was probably meant to do so. Not that you can be sure of these things from a book illustration.

It's difficult to know what to think of Sidonia from reading the Wikipedia page--as in, were all her lawsuits justified or was she congenitally a pain in a**e?
The dates are interesting: when the witch trials blew up that created her reputation, she would have been seventy-one--a very old lady by the standards of the day. There's a perverse fascination/satisfaction in her metamorphosing from that to a femme fatale.

I'd never heard of Lady Wilde's book (or Sidonia) and now I'm fascinated to read it. Oh well ...

>212 WeeTurtle:

Do have a go at Saki, he's a wonderful short story writer--P G Wodehouse with sharp teeth. I believe (I don't have any proof) that Wodehouse read Saki when he was young and built a career on churning out 'Saki-lite'--sanitised and watered-down for the popular market. He even wrote a number of stories suitable for this group--try 'Sredni Vashtar', 'Gabriel Earnest' or 'The Music on the Hill'. I'm sure there are plenty I've forgotten. He died in the Great War so his stuff should be out of copyright and easily available free online.

I'm probably revealing too much about myself if I say 'Sredni Vashtar' was my favourite short story as a boy. I've just realised I've been able to say Conradin's chant all my life since my early teens ...

... I hope there are no psychiatrists reading ...

>212 WeeTurtle:,>215 alaudacorax:

Just listened to a very effective reading of 'Sredni Vashtar' on 'HorrorBabble'. Didn't quite like his voice at first but he very quickly pulled me into it. Subscribed.

>216 alaudacorax: I've been enjoying HorrorBabble, especially since reading online is proving somewhat difficult (could be the hour that I do it). I'll definitely check out Saki. Right now, I've got Jack London in the line up, and then some (further) ventures into Robert E. Howard.

>216 alaudacorax:, >217 WeeTurtle:

Rather disappointed: listened to HorrorBabble again, the same actor, this time voicing Saki's 'Tobermory' ... and he got the accents so utterly, jarringly wrong for the context that it quite spoiled the reading.

>218 alaudacorax: He's not my favourite narrator, but then, I've heard worse. Since I'm going from YouTube I'm telling myself not to be picky. I was amused when I was listening to the dramatic reading of Pickman's Model, since he definitely has that 'Brit playing as American' tone (no offence to anyone intended, but it does seem to be a thing. I'm sure there's a reverse as well). That made me wonder though, which story it was that involved the house that Pickman was in, since I'm pretty sure there was one. I might search google and see if there's a map of Lovecraft's story connections since I remember bumping into them, along with certain names and people. I recall the protag in Innsmouth's ancestor showing up in another but can't recall which. I want to say The Thing on the Doorstep.

I'm reading Mysteries of Winterthurn, by Joyce Carol Oates. I should finish it tonight. I think it will take a while to get a handle on that book. I'm wondering if anyone else has read it and has any thoughts...

>220 MissPrudence:

Nope, never read it. But you've had me reading reviews here and elsewhere and now I'm quite intrigued and think I shall have to have a go at it.

Joyce Carol Oates is another of those 'meaning to read' authors. I think she's been on my radar since A Garden of Earthly Delights was making a splash--so a lifetime ago--so it's probably about time I got round to her.

I see Mysteries of Winterthurn mentioned as the third in a trilogy. Does that mean I should read the other two first, or is it not that kind of trilogy?

Coraline, if I haven't mentioned already. One more off the kid's Gothic thread. I do think this would have been better if I hadn't seen the movie first, but then, the movie was probably better for not knowing the book. Alas!

>221 alaudacorax: alaudacorax

I've read the first in the trilogy (Bellefleur), but that was a long time ago. I remember thinking it was really good, and now I want to read it again. I haven't read the second volume, but I just bought it on the strength of Mysteries of Winterthurn. Having finished Winterthurn, I definitely want to read more of Joyce Carol Oates' work! It was really complicated, and had so much going on both within and just under the storyline. The edition I read had an author's note in which she talked specifically about choosing her subject matter very purposefully.

So, I would say you don't need to start at the beginning - but as a somewhat compulsive reader, I can't help but wonder if there would be a good progression from starting at the beginning.

BTW, in the author's note, she said Winterthurn is the third of a projected five-volume set - which I'm going to have to research a lot more thoroughly!

Damn! Posted on here last night--I thought. That'll teach me to write posts three-o-clock in the morning ...

>224 alaudacorax:

What I remember of last night's post:

I was very taken with reading Arthur Machen's The Inmost Light.

I was incensed that seemingly every mention of it online gives away the ending (and I was inventively rude about the plonkers responsible).

I'd rarely read a story that started so many hares whilst refusing point-blank to chase them. Or did I mean 'red herrings'?

Machen's ideas about women were weird. Had he met any (other than his mother, I mean)? HUGEThe whole story turns on the fact that a wife was ready, albeit tearfully so, to give up her soul because her husband wanted her to?!

Didn't know what to make of him changing the main protagonist part-way through.

Decided I needed to read it again, some time.

Obviously forgot to click 'Post message' ...

>225 alaudacorax:

I'm absolutely sure that last night's post was brilliantly written and wildly entertaining--wish I could remember it ...

I'm going my practicum at a local library and spotted a book on display called The Asylum of Dr. Caligari. Recognizing the name, I put it in the back to take out later. I'm not sure if it's Gothic or horror, or Gothic horror, but I'm curious about it. I want to see the old silent film but it's annoyingly priced on streaming services.

>227 WeeTurtle:

Pity, it should be way out of copyright everywhere. Here's a link to a copy on archive.org, with the most recent restorations:

https://archive.org/details/TheCabinetOfDr.Caligari1920

Unfortunately it looks as if the intertitles are only in German, but it shouldn't be difficult to chase down a translation somewhere.

>227 WeeTurtle: Thanks! I can see the video there. I might just watch it first and see what comes up just from inference.

>229 WeeTurtle:

You're welcome. If you read a synopsis before watching, that should enable you to follow the film without too much trouble. Note it's a framed story, it begins and ends in a lunatic asylum where the narrator is one of the inmates.

>230 LolaWalser: It occurred to me to check the local library and they've actually got a copy! I'm not sure if it's the original or a remake but I'll check it out.

Quite literally what I've just been reading:

I was actually hunting online for reviews of books on drawing, and I quite unexpectedly came upon Top 10 Best Occult Books For Beginners--instantly derailed, of course--fascinating.

I haven't read any of these and I'm feeling rather a slacker: I feel that as a member of this group I really ought to have. I suspect that some of you will have read several, if not all of these.

>232 alaudacorax:

Of course, for something really scary (don't say I didn't warn you), you could try the same website's 'Top 10 Most Interesting Things On The Deep Web' ...

>232 alaudacorax:
No, not me, I haven't read any of them! I've read a handful of books that touch on the occult and modern magic (or magick), but I've probably picked up at least as much from desultory online reading.

I haven't had any personal interactions with anyone who is actually involved in the occult, apart from visiting the Atantis bookshop in London (but that was looking for out-of-print Tartarus Press books), and a talk (and an overheard snatch of conversation) way back in 2010.

I think I have mentioned the event already, but years ago. In December 2010 Reading Central Library put on a day of events devoted to H.P. Lovecraft. The main draw for me (because I hadn't yet realised I could buy a copy on a region-free DVD) was a showing of the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society's silent film version of The Call of Cthulhu. But a couple of the programmed events went into deeper (creepier) waters.

A talk on The Necronomicon, how it moved from being a fiction to becoming a real magic book (if you accept that there can be such a thing). The version by "Simon" which essentially reprints translated Sumerian prayers and curses "works", apparently, if you believe in it. Or so the panelists said. to be continued...

>234 housefulofpaper:

There was a talk by Dr David Evans (also one of the participants in the previous Necronomicon discussion) entitled "The Fictions of H. P. Lovecraft and the realities of Kenneth Grant".

Notes I made at the time: "Grant's connections to Gerald Gardiner, Austin Osman Spare, Aleister Crowley. His use of fictional entities magical rituals. Dubious facts in autobiographical material. History/magic ~ie verify events one way or the other {sorry, at the distance of 9 years I no longer have any clue what that last sentence is trying to convey!}"

The most striking thing for me was Grant's praying to, or invoking, or whatever it is that the rituals did, totally fictional entities - Cthulhu was the example in the talk (given the subject of the day) but I gather it could potentially be anything. I'm not sure if the idea is that authors "tune in" to things that are already there on some plane of reality, or that anything that can be imagined can be magicked into our physical reality.

Anyway, the conversation that I overheard let off from this idea. As we dispersed for lunch I heard a couple of attendees worrying about the danger of plush Cthulhu dolls, the implication being, I guess, that Cthulhu's spirit could be conjured through, or into, one such a toy (Grant's magick apart, I've since read about the Renaissance Platonists belief that spirits could be summoned into suitably prepared statues).

>232 alaudacorax:

I have number 9 and 10 (I wonder whether that list version of Manly Hall's book is abridged--my own is a hefty illustrated hardcover which would seem difficult to scale to a paperback) but haven't read them. I'm only interested in the occult insofar it informed the imaginary of some writers etc. A source of another type of mythical motifs.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, I've been catching up on my unread Clark Ashton Smith this week. To be specific, I'm finishing off The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith: The End of the Story (and now I see that this is Volume 1 in the series--obviously I've been reading them in the wrong order!)

I'm becoming more and more aware in the reading of what I already knew in theory but had taken no notice of--that CAS was in it for the money (is any writer truly not--I don't know). The stories lurch disconcertingly between churned-out hackery and joyously inventive fantasy. The problem is that I like him so much when he's on form that it's difficult for me to occupy a detached and objective viewpoint. So I'm being made a little sad--I want him to be this brilliant short story writer and he just wants to be a poet ...

>237 alaudacorax:

... and who am I to condemn a man for wanting bread on his table?

>238 alaudacorax:
And during the Great Depression, to boot!

I've been reading a couple of fairly niche things relating to Arthur Machen. Firstly, Tartarus Press have produced a gazetteer of places associated with him - houses and flats, pubs, churches. etc. Current or vintage photos are given for most locations, and a brief description. I find I've seen three of the London locations, all in the Bloomsbury/Holborn area.

The second is a volume produced jointly by Tartarus Press and the Friends of Arthur Machen (and only distributed to members). It's a book containing reproductions of the (largely) occult book catalogues Machen produced for London publishers in his impoverished early years in London. As catalogue entries the actual text has a strange push-and-pull sense of "this is quite dull but I'll read one or two more" :) - it is quite difficult to read a couple of the catalogues as they reproduce as grey-on-grey. In fact I had to buy a magnifying lens with a light so as to make the worst pages out.

At least one interesting nugget has come to light - given the theme of small, dark faerie/troglodyte peoples in his fiction, a book listing, "fairy tales, legends and romances illustrations Shakspeare and other early English writers, to which are prefixed two preliminary dissertations, 1 on pigmies, 2 on fairies", certainly looks like it might have been a source of inspiration.

I've also started reading a Penguin Classics anthology The Book of Magic: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment. About 1/5 of the way through - so far, it's been extracts from the Bible, some Zoroastrian texts (extracts from, rather), and on to ancient Greek and Latin texts. More forbidden texts, apparently, when we get into the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

>240 housefulofpaper:

Is that meant to be a companion to his Magic in Western Culture: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment?

I'm very tempted to get the two. It's an area I've always intended to thoroughly read up on and I've bought a couple of promising-looking books lately which I haven't got round to yet, so I suppose I'd better restrain myself and witch list them.

ETA - Just spotted 'witch list' and I was about to do a strikethrough and correction, but it looks rather apposite, so I'm leaving it.

>241 alaudacorax:
Not as far as the books two publishers are concerned, I'd imagine - but a quick glance at the "look inside" facility on Amazon shows a lot of overlap . Unsurprisingly both books are telling the same story about the history of magic. The Penguin is of course a selection of texts with some commentary and the CUP book (which I didn't know about) would be the better bet as a history of the subject.

>242 housefulofpaper:

Oops! Didn't notice the different publishers. I imagine they would complement each other nicely, though.

Haven't opened it yet, but I picked up The Poet and the Vampyre from the library when I saw it there. Not sure if it's non-fiction or fiction or something in the middle, but I like the idea either way. My Romantic focus was mostly on Keats, and later Shelley, less so on Byron but I've heard of the vampire link a couple of times.

I've been reading The Terror by Arthur Machen ...

... words fail me for this evening.

>245 alaudacorax:

I've just opened a 250gm pack of mixed nuts and raisins. From Tesco. I'm not impressed--further, I'm quite disappointed. There seems to be a hell of a lot of nuts to precious few raisins. It's probably a pretty good metaphor for Machen's lousy story ...

>246 alaudacorax:

Oh. Oh dear.

It's been lauded as a precursor to Frank Baker's story "The Birds" and the much more famous Daphne du Maurier "The Birds", and to sort of signal Machen's disillusion with the War, after the jingoism of "The Bowmen" and other stories of his along the same lines, if that helps put it in a better light...?

Nope. It plods along at an even level--no build up of anything. And the moth thing didn't make sense--well, lots about it didn't make sense.

There were just so many parts to it that I didn't believe. Most of the time, I found it next to impossible to suspend disbelief.

I think I just expected better AND weirder from Machen.

>247 housefulofpaper: - ... and to sort of signal Machen's disillusion with the War ...

You see, to me he came acrosss a rather flippant about the war--or at least ignorant (I don't really know how much non-combatants knew in 1917--when it was published--of the reality of things). Either way he struck me as rather detached.

>252 alaudacorax:

I've just remembered this thread and perhaps need to add that The Terror was originally serialised in a newspaper and - as was not unusually at the time apparently - was written so it could initially be taken for a piece of reportage.

Recent reading has included Wychwood by George Mann. It's a police procedural that, to me at least, seems like it could have been written with an eye to adaptation for television, perhaps a 9:00 pm slot on ITV1. Ritualistic murders in rural Oxfordshire investigated by a female journalist who come back home from London after a breakup, and her old schoolfriend who is now a police detective. I imagine the supernatural elements in the story would alienate a good part of the potential readership.

>253 housefulofpaper:

Okay, I have to bite the bullet and--much as I hate it--type a 'LOL'; because this post really needs a 'LOL'.

... and I've just found online that '... people who capitalize LOL have long been subject to internet ridicule ...', which makes things worse, somehow ...

Anyway, back to the post:

lol, I got excited at the ... it's no good--I just can't do it. Start again:

I had to laugh at myself a few minutes ago. On Wychwood, I completely misunderstood you and got quite excited at the idea of such a modern-sounding premise being written during The Great War. Then it seemed a little too unlikely and I checked the publication date ...

>254 alaudacorax:

I really should have made that two separate posts!

>255 housefulofpaper:

No, the space should be enough--just a senior moment on my part ...

I'm having a lot of fun at the moment reading Peter Haining's Weird Tales: A Facsimile of the World's Most Famous Fantasy Magazine. What is weird—joyously weird—is that I’m getting pleasure from reading it beyond just what comes from the content and quality of the stories (I'm approaching half-way and the standard of the stories is pretty high, so far).

It’s difficult to pin down exactly why, but I’m guessing it’s to do with subconscious memories of childhood reading in such things as The Wizard and The Hotspur some sixty-odd years back. They would have been a similar format—text-heavy with the occasional illustration actually for illustration rather than for telling the story. I can remember little of those ‘comics’ now (not the right word, probably, but that’s what we used to call them), and I don’t remember if they had advertisements in them or not, but the adverts and so on in these facsimile pages, and of course the illustrations, seem to be adding to a nostalgic glow.

I’m tempted to think it’s just something that’s built up since I’ve had the internet, from regularly reading references to Weird Tales and similar magazines and seeing the illustrations reproduced; however, I have an insistent idea that I was aware of them as a child or early teenager and wished I could get my hands on copies but couldn’t.

Anyway, there are a lot of things not getting done around here because I can’t keep away from this damn’ book!

>257 alaudacorax:

I'm sure we've talked about this before, but nothing's showing in searches. Reading these Weird Tales tales I'm becoming more and more convinced that Tolkein was reading this stuff when no one was looking--at least by the time he got to writing Lord of the Rings, perhaps not so much The Hobbit.

>258 alaudacorax:

And it's here, not in The Weird Tradition at all! (see my last post in More Gothic Gossip).