So whatcha readin' now, kids?--vol. 3

A question for those who have Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange--does your edition contain any pictures?

I just received my copy and it's all text. I thought this was illustrated.

In related news, the publication of Of Mud and Flame : A Penda's Fen Sourcebook has been postponed to December 19.

And I picked up a slim volume from Valancourt Books (who are or at least used to be present on LT: valancourtbooks): Love and Horror, a near-contemporary (1812) spoof of Gothic romances. Was it Miss Austen who started the craze? Don't know; in any case, it's nice to see the venerable ancestors had a sense of humour and not just morbid humours.

>1 LolaWalser:
I don't know what I've done with my copy but - no, there are no pictures. I think I remember vaguely someone complaining, maybe on an Amazon review, the they had been led to believe the volume was illustrated, and had been directed to the four photos on the front cover!

Thanks, as long as I know I didn't get the freak short straw... :) For some reason I thought too that it was published by the Columbia U. Press, but no--not that it matters, it just made me wonder if there hadn't been some change of hands.

I’m currently reading—among other things—The Very Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan and I’m quite blown away by her—the best new-to-me writer I’ve come across since I discovered, courtesy, I think, of you lot, Clark Ashton Smith. She wanders genres, though—Gothic, Weird, Fantasy, Horror, Steampunk, Sci-fi … difficult to pin down.

Come to think of it, she is courtesy of this group, too: frahealee linked a documentary on Lovecraft; I watched it; saw Kiernan commenting on H. P.; I’d never heard of her so looked her up, got intrigued, bought the ebook.

She strikes me as often being really, really original, but that brings me slap up against an old bone I regularly find myself gnawing at—that the more I read, the more I realise how much I haven’t read. I’m fascinated to know what are her influences, and I can see writers from Lovecraft to Dashiell Hammett in her stuff, but, reading up on her plus watching the Lovecraft documentary has made me realise how little I’ve read of the relevant literature post the mid-twentieth-century. I know her predecessors, but not the literary culture she’s writing within. Always so much more to read ...

>4 alaudacorax:. I would broaden your point beyond just books. I would say the more you know the more you know you don't know.

I have planning to try Kiernan's work for sometime and your post has encouraged me to make that happen sooner rather than later.

I have read a slim paperback from 1976 - a charity shop find. It's The Mask of Cthulhu by August Derleth, and consists of six "continuations" of Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos written between the late '30s and the early '50s. All but the most recent story appeared in Weird Tales. I think Weird Tales folded before that last story was published, but I suppose it shows Lovecraft's creations expanding beyond their original home.

My heart sank at the essay I'd have to write to put these stories into context, but the review by chevalierdulys does it all admorably, so I'll just be lazy and add by thoughts.

There is an inescapabe feeling of HPL's work being rehashed and with a sense of diminishing returns, unfortunately. "The Dunwich Horror" and "The Shadow over Innsmouth" I thought were particularly rich seams for Derleth to mine. However, the later stories I thought did see him developing some fresh ideas, and not the systematisation and Christianisation of HPLs fictional cosmos.

For example in most of these stories every remote country mansion or shunned homestead can boast a complete set of forbidden tomes, as if they could have been ordered from Sears Roebuck, and it becomes absurd. However in one story there is, rather, a handwritten compilation of extracts from "the Book of Eibon", etc, found amongst collections of herbals and folk remedies.The narrative refers to "Hoodoo" and suggests (to me) a different and more sympathetic view of the country folk than HPL tended to have as well as reminding me, at any rate, that Derleth had a sound reputation as regional writer aside from his Weird fiction, and publishing activities.

There is a generally sympathetic kind-of rewrite of "The Shadow over Innsmouth" where the protagonist embraces the seaborne part of his heritage. It reads much more in the vein of the contemporary stories of an individual discovering his potential as a super-powered mutant or alien. Wish fulfilment, or dreams of power/escape rather than disgust at difference, I suppose.

What else did i notice? There's a thing I wasn't sure was in HPL, or if it is it's not foregrounded - the evil alien entities enter our world through possession of a human acolyte. Which is the plot of Ghostbusters (a film which I remember a review calling the most successful attempt to bring a Weirld Tales-type story to the screen so far).

Interesting to think about Lovecraft's position in popular culture at various points in time; he's been around forever seemingly, but keeps being "discovered" and rediscovered every decade. What follows are random jottings, you might say.

I found an interview on YouTube with Ramsay Campbell in which he recalled how difficult it was to find Lovecraft in paperback, in Britain, in the late 1950s (he mentioned the names of a couple of, I think, obscure fly-by-night British pulp reprint titles which just might ring a few bells, @alaudocorax ...if i can find the interview again I'll put the link here).

Yet by this time Lovecraft, I presume in translation, had already become a favourite author of Italian director Mario Bava (I've seen this claim in a couple of places, I'm sure the blu-ray for Caltiki is one of them).

By the '70s Lovecraft's name sold paperbacks, the cover of The Mask of Cthulhu bears the subtitle "Supernatural terror in the H. P. Lovecraft tradition"...and his was even a name that could be punned upon - there was an anthology of "erotic horror stories" pseudonymously edited by "Linda Lovecraft".

And yet he seemingly had to be treated as a new discovery when Reanimator was released in the mid-80s, and again around the start of the century when he was published as a Penguin classic.

>6 housefulofpaper:

August Derleth has been another of those 'meaning to read' writers since I joined this group. He's one of those names I remember from long, long ago, probably from anthologies, but what by him I may have read I no longer remember (possibly I'm just remembering the name as anthologiser or editor). Between you, though, you and chevalierdulys have quite discouraged me.

First of all, though your post wasn't encouraging, your use of 'Christianisation' piqued my curiosity, if only because I couldn't imagine how it would be applied to Lovecraft's work. Then I read the review, though, and my heart sank: reading that business about good and evil made me wonder if Derleth didn't rather miss the point. Then I felt guilty about thinking that, remembering what a debt Lovecraft fans owe to Derleth. It's all rather perplexing ...

I'm only very faintly acquainted with Lovecraft (I think I've read only the NYRB collection to date, and past some vague impressions of style, retained nothing much) but recently I read something that strongly reminded me of him, some stories by Frank Belknap Long. Not Gothic, so didn't bother mentioning it, but in the vein of Ambrose Bierce/The Twilight Zone/Lovecraftian? "unnameable" and unnamed horror and dread. Hardly the most skillful writing I've encountered, but I wouldn't bet it's worse than Lovecraft.

Any fans?

ETA: the particular collection in question, although it seems it's a subset from other versions: The Dark Beasts

Oh, speaking of Derleth--I picked up some lyrical tribute of his to Thoreau. He loved Thoreau so much he even named his son "Walden".

>8 LolaWalser:
I know a bit about him. He was an early pen-pal/colleague of Lovecraft and I think was the first person to start writing Mythos stories after Lovecraft himself. It looks like I will have read all the stories in the volume you've got (an Edward Gorey cover!) because I have - I believe - the whole of the Arkham House The Hounds of Tindalos split across two 1970s UK paperbacks. My memory is already fading - apart from the title story with the rather clumsy usage of non-Eudlidean geometries (the hounds can only enter our dimension through straight angles so the heroes attempt to keep them at bay by plastering the interior of a room so it's curved like the inside of an igloo), some more rather naive Mythos stories (he was very young at the time of writing them) and some more straightforward "classic" pulp SF from about a decade later. I do actually think that Lovecraft is the better writer. I think I'm correct in saying he also wrote poetry, but i haven't seen it.

I also have a kind of memoir, and a rather melancholy one, by Peter Cannon remembering Long in old age, he and his wife in streightened circumstances, moving around at the edges of fandom, sometimes a demanding or exasperating presence, still always hustling, still writing.

>8 LolaWalser:

NYRB collection?

>11 alaudacorax:

The Colour Out of Space: Tales of Cosmic Horror by Lovecraft, Blackwood, Machen, Poe, and Other Masters of the Weird

Nice collection overall! Recommended if you don't already have it all.

>10 housefulofpaper:

This one didn't have the Hounds story, but I have that in another book. Sad to hear about the Longs' dire straits, it seems to happen far too often to genre writers.

Ah yes, the cover of course was the thing that attracted me first. (I've even bought a few paperbacks I probably won't ever read--Puritan poetry anyone?--only because they were designed by Gorey.)

I have going two other books more or less on topic--the so far so fab Japanese Gothic Tales by Izumi Kyoka (1873-1939), whose work the introducer calls "a major achievement in a minor category" and in that sense compares to Poe, as well as for a shared "decadent romanticism".

And I opened on a whim a Pan Books 1946 compilation Tales of the Supernatural--no editor given--and there are some interesting choices I don't recall seeing elsewhere--yes, Walter de la Mare's Seaton's aunt and Maupassant's The Horla, but also Pushkin's The Coffin-Maker and Bulwer-Lytton's The Haunted and the Haunters.

>13 LolaWalser:

Yep--she's definitely taken up houseful's war on my wallet. As I write, I'm awaiting the postie's knock bringing >1 LolaWalser:'s Love and Horror, and now she dangles Japanese Gothic Tales before my eyes. Hunted up info on it--and now I've just got to have it. And it's quite expensive as paperbacks go.

I'll put it on a wish list for the rest of the month to see if my ardour cools--but I pretty much know it won't ...

>14 alaudacorax: - Hunted up info on it ...

With hindsight, hunting up info is where I fall down, of course--can never bridle my curiosity ... from Dracula to the little Venus fly trap, the victim has to enter of his own free will ...

>13 LolaWalser:

Of course, Lola, you will know about In Light of Shadows: More Gothic Tales by Izumi Kyoka.

See what I did there, folks?

>14 alaudacorax:

Oh noes, sorry about the expense. If it helps at all, you returned the favour in >16 alaudacorax:. :)

I hadn't heard of Kyoka until I saw the book (really should take up some of the gajillion survey tomes I've collected over the years) and didn't plan to look for more until I finished it, but that sounds too good to wait.

>17 LolaWalser: - (Offstage: evil chuckle from alaudacorax.)

*brooding in the wings, biding her time*

Just had an irritatingly unsatisfying half-hour.

I read Honoré De Balzac's short story, The Mysterious Mansion (La Grande Breteche). It's easy to find for free online.

I read it because I heard a trailer for a radio adaptation of it on BBC Radio 4 Ex. The first irritation is right there: the scene they played in the trailer does not exist in the story!

Second irritation: I should think it's impossible to read the story without being irritated, as I was, by the way the narrator gets to hear the story. It doesn't make sense--it's self-contradictory. The result is you get a potentially good story with a whacking great hole in the internal logic.

A minor interest also lies in that, in the bare bones of the story, he beat Poe to the punch by fourteen years. I won't say how in case someone wants to read it--it will be obvious to the reader (assuming they know Poe's most famous tales).

>21 frahealee:

Funny Gothic? Nightmare Abbey perhaps. I think there are plenty of Golden Age Detective novels and stories that had fun with "Old Dark House" tropes.

What I've read since The Mask of Cthulhu in October:
Ghostland (subtitle "In Search of a Haunted Country") by Edward Parnell presents itself as a part memoir/part travelogue looking at England through the lens of classic British ghost stories and film and television. But a second and eventually predominant strand is a more personal memoir about loss and grief.
Black Spirits and White by Ralph Adams Cram is a book I finally picked up and read because one of the stories was chosen for The Weird Tradition "book club" The Deep Ones. Cram became more famous as an architect and these stories have the air of an amateur production - although as I wrote over in that group, I'm not sure if this is in fact attributable to the artificial, even precious, elements of Decadent style. The plots are not always original. There's even a bricked-up nun's ghost in one of them.
The Opal (and other stories by Gustav Meyrink - a book I started a while ago, again for The Deep Ones. Pushed on and finished it. I think these are earlier than his novels and I thought I detected similarities with Saki - also with the satirical journalism of The Vienna Coffeehouse Wits...but this might be because I don't know about better comparisons. Occult elements grow more prominent throughout the book; I presume the stories are in order of composition.
Finished The Folio book of Ghost Stories. A lot of this was re-reads of familiar classic tales.
Charles Stross - The Jennifer Morgue is one of a series of novels that tell Len Deighton-style spy stories set in aLovecraftian universe, although this one riffs amusingly on James Bond.
I bought a new paperback collection of C. L. Moore's Jirel of Joiry stories because it includes the team-up of Moore's characters Jirel and Northwest Smith, co-written by Henry Kuttner.
I have been reading The Complete John Thunstone by Manly Wade Wellman and finished it this month. Thunstone is a brawny occult detective created for Weird Tales in the '40s. Wellman returned to the character for a story and two novels in the '80s. The first novel is set in England which obviously increased the interest for me (you could argue the case for it being folk horror, actually). The second and final novel is unfortunately a bit perfunctory in comparison. The setting (an academic conference on folklore) should be novel but I wondered if a lot of the detail was actually borrowed from guesting at science fiction conventions.
Lastly, a book from a small press (Sarob Press, which started in Wales but moved to France). Their Dark & Secret Alchemy which contains three occult-themed novellas or novelletes by three different authors. Not to everyone's taste, perhaps overwritten at times, but all three succeed in creating a disorientating, dreamlike atmosphere suggesting strange planes of reality and secret knowledge.

Corrected "serious of" to "series of"

Oh, and the booklets in the new releases of At Last the 1948 Show, Do Not Adjust Your Set, and especially the Blu-ray of season one of Monty Python's Flying Circus constitute a detailed history of the comedy writers/performers who became Python.

There's absolutely nothing Gothic in these works (but The Goodies, who emerged from the same Cambridge Footlights/Oxford mileu, put lots of Gothic tropes in their '70s series).

>23 housefulofpaper:

Hmmm--being a huge fan, I'm hoping you didn't find Meyrink a chore... I'm not quite sure about similarities to Saki... whom I'm also very fond of, but experience as a very different type--fey, sarcastic, decadent... I think Meyrink was pretty much a true believer when it came to alchemy.

Have you read Leo Perutz? Many of his fantastic works deal with the supernatural and characters immersed in the occult--Saint Peter's Snow, The Swedish Cavalier, The Marquis of Bolibar, The Master of the Day of Judgement etc.

>25 LolaWalser:
No, not a chore...I think it's simply that I started the book in order to read one story and wasn't quite in the mood to read the rest of it. When I felt in the right mood for it, it was a relatively quick and easy read.

There are no doubt better comparisons to be drawn than "Saki crossed with Karl Kraus" but I don't know them. I was specifically talking about these short pieces that I think were published as "feuilleton".

Leo Perutz is a name I was vaguely aware of, but no, I haven't read him. A book I have read, The Pendragon Legend by Antal Szerb, sounds vaguely in the same vein (I wonder if Pushkin Press were hoping to get some business from Dan Brown fans?)

I think Perutz goes after the fantastic elements more seriously than Szerb (i.e. not tongue-in-cheek). Not humourless, but with more awe and dread. I think I found Zwischen neun und neun--oh it does have an English translation (From nine to nine)--to be the funniest of his works, but keep in mind I speak as someone strongly partial to the zany, macabre, and mixes thereof...

I don't wish to convey the impression that he's frivolous, though, quite the contrary, I find him to be a philosophic writer--but fun. Borgesian.

Not quite sure where to post this, but anyway ...

Peter Haining's The Vampire Omnibus: I bought this some time ago to read a Val Lewton short story, 'The Bagheeta', for a THE DEEP ONES thread; read the story then promptly forgot about the book--probably because I seemed to put the dead hand on the thread--no more posts after mine.

Just re-found it during a tidy-up and read a couple of stories including one, 'The Skeleton Count Or, The Vampire Mistress' by Elizabeth Grey, which has absolutely fascinated me. Haining's introduction to this tale is somewhat confusing. He refers to it as a 'vampire serial story'. There is, in fact, a stand-alone, vampire, short story here, but it is evidently part a not-necessarily-vampire serial the main character of which is the Skeleton Count.

Why I find it fascinating? First of all, it's a really good story--not great literature and showing frequent signs of being dashed off at top speed, but a really gripping yarn. That said, I probably should have made it my first point that it was published in 1828. I mean, Polidori's ink was barely dry. Yet, way back then, and despite having a slight Castle of Otranto feel to it, it manages to really invoke James Whale or Hammer Horrors: it has a beautiful, sexy, raven-haired vampiress preying on beautiful young women and girls (so Hammer-like, it even has a beautiful blonde victim giving a glimpse of breast); it has the howling mob of peasants brandishing pitchforks, etc., and attacking and burning the count's castle; it has the staking. And all this in a story supposedly lost for over 160 years. Even though lost, this story has got to have been a starting point for a lot of later stuff.

ETA - An addition because I'm not comfortable with not mentioning it: reading it, it was so redolent of the cinema of my earlier years that I had just the slightest suspicion that someone had put one over on Haining with some sort of modern forgery; I'd find that difficult to believe, though.

Hmm. The Vault of Evil message boards, visited by British horror luminaries such as Ramsey Campbell and Rosemary Pardoe (until last autumn, editor/publisher of Ghosts and Scholars) has a whole thread devoted to Peter Haining...

>28 alaudacorax:

Annoyed. Downloaded Kindle version, (Amazon ASIN ref: B009WGR1ZU). It had just this bare story and not the rest of the series serial before and after it. I want the rest of the serial!!!

>28 alaudacorax:, >29 housefulofpaper:

I read on Haining's Wikipedia page at least an implication that he seems not to have been above a bit of invention (trying to put that as delicately as I could). As you said, hmm.

>29 housefulofpaper:

Okay ... haven't got round to reading that thread yet ... but I did find this blog - http://john-adcock.blogspot.com/2010/06/elizabeth-caroline-grey.html

I'm starting to get a bit beyond annoyed ...

>29 housefulofpaper:

Just signed-up to Vault of Evil and read that thread. Eye-opener.

So I'm never going to get to read the rest of 'The Skeleton Count', almost certainly.

I'm quite confusticated at the moment--don't know whether to laugh about Haining's cheek or to be annoyed he's beyond the reach of a wax doll and pins (presumably).

>30 alaudacorax:

Just in case anyone's worrying, I got my 99p back from Kindle ...

>28 alaudacorax: to >34 alaudacorax:

Just a short-cut for anyone not clear what these posts are about: it's a fairly safe bet that Haining wrote the damn' story himself!

Haven't had breakfast yet because I've been reading up this stuff for the last hour or more--and I've still managed to get egg on my face ...

>28 alaudacorax:

And that post now reads as SO gullible ...

>33 alaudacorax: - ... don't know whether to laugh about Haining's cheek ...

Just been re-reading Haining's introduction to the story and it's not really so funny--the man was being an arse, pure and simple.

>35 alaudacorax:

If it's any consolation, your suffering is not in vain--I'm sure we're all grateful for the warning! :)

I have... several (at least three, possibly more?) anthologies by Haining so it's good to know in advance about this sort of thing.

My edited-by-Haining volumes are:

Vampires at midnight : seventeen brilliant and chilling tales of the ghastly bloodsucking Undead

The Nightmare Reader - Volume One

The Nightmare Reader: v. 2

The monster makers

The midnight people

The Ghouls Book One - The Stories Behind The Classic Horror Films

I feel bad for raising the matter now, or at least for doing it like I did. All I can plead in mitigation is that, into week three, I'm not over this horrible cold/bronchitis. I've been dragging myself into work and have has spare no energy in the evenings. So a short gnomish post and then off for a long bath and bed was all I could manage.

I suppose we can commiserate with the thought that the Gothic started with literary frauds, of a kind. It depends on whether the first audience took those "fragments" and "from the original Italian" or ~"German" at face value, or not. And some of Poe's stories started out as newspaper hoaxes.

I haven't come away unscathed, incidentally. I bought Hainings's biography of Sweeney Todd years ago.

I've looked at my books by or edited by him. The Todd book apart, they are the Weird Tales anthology, and Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Who - related. I'm confident he won't have slipped anything past those fandoms!

>40 housefulofpaper:

So sorry to hear you're still sick, it's the worst when it drags out like that. I suppose it's too late for a break and a proper convalescence? We discourage people from going to work sick, it's not good for anyone.

Regarding fraud, eh, in cases like these I'm not inclined to get too bothered--genre writing abounds in eccentric characters and weird goings-on--and I don't mean the actual fiction!

I may have mentioned here before a book by John Baxter, A Pound of Paper: Confessions of a Book Addict. It gives a great insight into the coteries of sf/horror/fantasy/erotica writers, collectors, aficionados and their shady penchants and habits. :)

>40 housefulofpaper:

Don't feel bad: I was really sprinting down a dead-end on that one, I'd got so excited about the story. I was bound to have worked that out eventually, but your nudge in the right direction probably saved me a lot more egg on face.

I feel angry both with myself and with Haining. With myself because my surprise at how modern the story read and it's having all those familiar memes did raise my suspicions a little, but I supressed those suspicions in my excitement about it. With Haining because he seems to have been quite maliciously trying to muddy the waters for enthusiasts and academics. He even carries on the deception in his introduction to his extract from Varney the Vampire, the next tale in the book--VtV being no longer the first vampire novel because he's discovered The Skeleton Count.

ETA - Yesterday, I even found myself rushing panic-stricken to the web just to be sure that Val Lewton was the author of that story (>28 alaudacorax:) and not Haining again. I mean, there could be no end to it--I'll be reading everything in his anthologies with suspicion.

>43 frahealee:
I think "The Balloon Hoax" (not originally published under that title!), the unfinished "The Journal of Julius Rodman" (although the story's Wikipedia entry suggests this was an unintentional hoax - members of the US Senate believed it to be true). "The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall". "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar". A blog entry I found suggests a total of six Poe hoaxes, but I'm not sure how far I'd trust it.

My reading has been stuck in a low gear so far this year. I hope finally shaking off a cold will mean I can concentrate a bit better. But I'll have to start devoting time to the garden as well, before too long.

Moved this post to the 'Seven Gothic Tales - Karen Blixen' thread.

I read recently Who killed Sherlock Holmes? and noticed a blurb somewhere (ETA: inside the book) about it belonging to "London Gothic" genre. Hmm, maybe the search is down, or maybe neither Paul Cornell nor Ben Aaronovitch (another author the blurb placed in the same genre) came up here before, really?

Anyway, I had one of those "oh, of course" moments, that "London Gothic" would be a thing nicely encompassing something like Cornell's Shadow Police and Aaronovitch's Rivers of London series.

>47 LolaWalser:

I started reading the Rivers of London books on a friend's recommendation but need to finish Rumo & His Miraculous Adventures - a birthday present from her - before going any further into the series. I did think of them as belonging to a particular genre, but the "occult police procedural/ private investigator" genre - China Mieville's Kraken is another example I've read, and there are plenty of other examples, which are not set in London.

"London Gothic" immediately makes me think of the cliche of fog-bound Victorian or Edwardian London, a stage set for Jack the Ripper, Holmes and Moriarty, and Fu Manchu.

>48 housefulofpaper:

Miéville was mentioned! The City and the City I think (the sentence went something like "...London Gothic in the vein of X, Y, Z...")

Someone else too who now escapes me... oh, Gaiman.

"London Gothic" immediately makes me think of the cliche of fog-bound Victorian or Edwardian London, a stage set for Jack the Ripper, Holmes and Moriarty, and Fu Manchu.

Indeed. So maybe Cornell, Aaronovitch et al. are... neo-London Gothic? :)

Anyway, it made me want to catch up with Aaronovitch's series (I can't remember if I finished last book 2 or 3), and read more Miéville--I've only read Un Lun Dun so far. Lovely book, maybe a bit young--I read it when I bought it for my niece, ages ago. If memory serves, it has some nice occult elements too.

Moved.

Shifted.

Transported.

So far, Walter de la Mare's short stories are posing such a challenge to me that I've decided to move the previous three posts to their own thread.

>50 alaudacorax:, >51 alaudacorax:, >52 alaudacorax:

As long as you aren't wearing a red shirt!

>54 LolaWalser:

You learn something new every day. Didn't get your post till I looked it up ... that had never registered with me when I watched Star Trek.

Really needed an emoji or two in there ...

>55 alaudacorax:

🖖🏼

Crossover dorkitude--one of the less-often bemoaned effects of the lockdown...

Night Terrors: The Ghost Stories of E. F. Benson: if anybody buys this, do not read the introduction till you've read the stories--it's another one where the writer gives away bits of plot. And I didn't twig on till I was about two-thirds through it--why do they do this? To prove that they've actually read one or two of the stories?

>57 alaudacorax:
Gah!, I've already read it. I really should have learned better by now. Lit Crit treats plot the way classical music treats tunes: "it's really a very trivial piece of the whole artwork and its greater cultural significance, we're above worrying about a simple thing like that".

Oh, and Happy World Goth Day, everyone!

Err ... Happy World Goth Day to you, too ...

>59 alaudacorax:
I saw a Twitter hashtag, so it must be true...

I've just been reading Wolf's Complete Book of Terror.

The second story is 'Poor Bibi' by Joyce Carol Oates. I've long been meaning to read some Joyce Carol Oates. Perhaps I'm just unlucky that this should be her first work I've encountered, because I've really hit a brick wall with it. It does not make sense.

The first time I read it I thought I was missing something. So I read it through again, carefullly and thoughtfully. It made less sense and I'm missing nothing.

I've read online that Bibi, whatever he is, is a metaphor for the couple's marriage. That's really straining things. I've read that the story is a re-write of Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis. I can see nothing but the vaguest similarities. I've read that the whole thing is ironic. Not anywhere near my idea of irony. I read somewhere that Oates is 'rewriting the Gothic' with the collection this was taken from. Can't see that in this story, at any rate. I think there is a whole load of emperor's new clothes, here.

.Basically, the story is in three parts: the history of the three characters leading up to the visit to the vet; the visit to the vet; the events after the visit to the vet. The problem is that their interaction with the vet doesn't make any kind of sense whatsoever--it's quite literally nonsensical. With the events prior necessitating the visit and the events after resulting from it, this nullifies the whole story. Can anyone explain to me what the hell is going on here?

In the meantime,I feel seriously disinclined to ever again go near any Joyce Carol Oates.

ETA - My thoughts on it: it's a nasty and pointless little story ...

I've read some of Joyce Carol Oates short stories in anthologies and got a little way into A Book of American Martyrs. There was nothing wrong with it, but I bought it the last time I was in France - a couple of the bookshops in Strasbourg have English language sections - for the train journey home. Once I was home, I had a different mindset I suppose and put it to one side. It's a bad habit I'm starting to develop (one pretty feeble excuse...it's another paperback that doesn't have a laminated cover so i can't read it in the bath!).

Actually I've got some Angela Carter short stories still to read, but there it's more that I don't want to burn through them all at once. i also have one of her early novels to res, which looks to be quite surreal...not sure how I'll get on with that.

>57 alaudacorax:

I have to say, I'm enjoying Night Terrors: The Ghost Stories of E. F. Benson. It's almost like comfort food compared to the more challenging stuff by Joyce Carol Oates and Walter de la Mare I've been struggling with. Proper, old-fashioned ghost stories rather something in the vain of M. R. James (of whom he was a follower, of course).

>65 frahealee:

Hah! Just realised that for years I've been confusing Like Water for Chocolate with Chocolat (which I've seen and enjoyed). Rotten Tomatoes gives it 91%, so it's one for the watch list.

Thanks for the reminder on Trilby, yet another book I've been meaning to read for decades.

Beginning to read "Blood Thirst: 100 Years of Vampire Fiction", first published 1997, Oxford University Press:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/602656.Blood_Thirst

From Good Reads description: "Blood Thirst: 100 Years of Vampire Fiction", by Leonard Wolf (Editor), Richard Matheson, Stephen King, Susan Casper, Suzy McKee Charnas, John Cheever, F. Marion Crawford, August Derleth , Hanns Heinz Ewers, Laura Anne Gilman, Lafcadio Hearn, M.R. James, Tanith Lee, Fritz Leiber, C.L. Moore, Joyce Carol Oates, Anne Rice, Whitley Strieber, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Roger Zelazny, Woody Allen, Charles Beaumont, E.F. Benson, Algernon Blackwood, Edward Bryant, Leslie Roy Carter, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Fredric Brown"

Below is from online reviewer:

"Thirty tales of vampire fiction, from the classical blood sucker to science fiction monster to the comic relief. From such great authors as Anne Rice and Stephen King, to interesting choices such as Woody Allen and Hanns Heinz Ewers, and authors I love such as Tanith Lee and Richard Matheson (who are also great), we get a ton of vampire literature. If there is a style of vampire story you like this is the book to get and the best part is if you discover a new author who pushes your buttons you can go find their works. And if they don't push your button you have 29 other stories to make you happy."

First two stories read are from what are called the "The Classic Adventure Tale" type:

1) Patrick Lafcadio Hearn, known also by the Japanese name Koizumi Yakumo. Short story title: "The Story of Chugoro", first published in 1902
2) British writer M. R. James. Short story titled "Count Magnus", first published in 1904

Am really enjoying how (earlier) short stories are written in such non-emotive styles. It gives them a richness of detail. I feel like I'm reading a Grimms' Fairy Tales.

Question for you all--- do you know of any film/cinematic versions of either of these two short stories listed above? I can't imagine, being they're (really) short...but just curious to know what might be out there.

Best, hope you all are having a great weekend.

>68 benbrainard8:

You can make touchstones here, just bracket the title with square brackets: Blood Thirst: 100 Years of Vampire Fiction. If you click on the link/touchstone I just made, you'll be taken to the title (and I think instructions about touchstones, if it's not clear oops, apparently not...)

Sorry, my memory for plots is rapidly decreasing... just the other day I discovered that I could watch the Rathbone/Bruce Sherlock Holmes movies as if for the first time--I'd even forgotten the whodunnit in several cases!

No idea on those specific stories. Kwaidan--the Masaki Kobayashi movie--contains a segment based on one of the stories Hearn too anthologised (or rewrote). Hmm, can't touchstone different works with the same title, it seems.

>68 benbrainard8:
I'm sure that "Count Magnus" has never been filmed. There were tentative plans to make a television version as part of the Christmas Ghost Stories that the BBC made in the '70s but the budget didn't allow for location filming in Sweden. Apparently the filmmakers discounted transferring the action to Southern England!

One element from the story - the padlocks falling from the vampire's coffin - was borrowed by Hammer Films for The Brides of Dracula (1960).

Hello LW and housefulofpaper,

LW thank you for advice on using the touchstones, I'll remember that for future post. Well, it's easy for forget plot structures, etc., especially since many of the stories out their also borrow from each other, and I mean that in the most positive way.

I didn't think that there would be any cinematic versions of these stories, and when I asked my spouse (who is from JP) if there are any "vampire" stories, she said she'd not heard of any. She said there are a lot of ghost stories though. Patrick Lafcadio Hearn was a translator primarily of both Japanese and Chinese folklore. And Count Magnus reminds me of a particular vicious ghost story more than one of a typical vampire.

>72 frahealee:

War and Peace, that's on my roll of shame---yet another I never managed to finish ...

>57 alaudacorax: Having been burnt by spoiler introductions once too often I now ignore introductions until after I have read the stories in a book. This has led me to, on occasion, never read the introduction at all. :-)

Darryl Jones produced a collection of M. R. James's ghost stories. He starts the introduction with a warning not to read it until you have read the stories. I take my hat off to him for this. He did the same for his introduction to Horror Stories: Classic Tales from Hoffmann to Hodgson.

I think your hypothesis "To prove that they've actually read one or two of the stories?" is probably very close to the truth.

>72 frahealee: - Southern Gothic novel Wise Blood (236p.) and Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor ...

I have to admit to being afraid of Flannery O'Connor. From the reviews I've read, she seems to be the exact opposite of the escapism we might look for in the Gothic. Then I'm attracted by same reviews regularly mentioning her as really good---great, even---at the craft of writing. Perhaps someday ...

>57 alaudacorax:, >74 pgmcc:

Ah yes, I have that M. R. James. Sadly, offences stick in one's mind rather than virtues. I shall endeavour to 'look on the bright side of life' and develop warm, fuzzy feelings about Darryl Jones rather than wistfully thinking on wax dolls with relation to David Stuart Davies (the Benson chap).

.................................................................................

Incidentally, I'm, so far (I'm a little over half-way through the quite hefty Night Terrors: The Ghost Stories of E. F. Benson), rather in two minds about E. F. Benson. I'm mostly enjoying his stories, but I don't think he's quite up to the standards of Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen and M. R. James. I mention those three because I see---I'll call them 'overlaps'---with them all. I haven't so far made any attempt to figure out who was influencing whom.

I can't help thinking of him as 'cosy', meaning the word in the way it's often used about murder mysteries---Agatha Christie and so forth. You can quite imagine some Edwardian telling these stories over the port and cigars, M. R. James-like, but I don't think he manages James's heights of menace and creepiness. I get an impression of E. F. intending to pique the readers' imagination rather than scare the wotsits off them and I imagine him (probably quite wrongly) as too polite to risk giving the reader bad dreams or sleepless nights.

Of course suspension of disbelief is a prerequisite of reading horror stories, but I'm a bit irritated by E. F.'s harping on and apparent genuine belief in spiritualism. Some of the stories smack to me a little of propaganda---or gullibility. I know this sounds a bit perverse of me when writing about tales of the supernatural, but, somehow, E. F.'s handling of the subject quite often just doesn't sit well with me.

But he's kept me reading him, so ... pretty good, overall. Actually, that sentence brought to mind my volume of De La Mare short stories, which I'm currently a bit stalled on. In contrast---well, not just just 'in contrast', but absolutely---E. F. simply isn't in any way a challenging read. As I said above, it's 'cosy' reading---'comfort reading' (echoing 'comfort food'), perhaps.

>76 alaudacorax: I have the Benson collection but have not ventured into it yet.

I found a whole new angle to the M.R. James stories when I attended performances of the stories by Robert Lloyd Parry. When reading them I had not noticed the humour in many of them, and his obvious antipathy towards golf. If you have not had a chance to attend his performances you should take up the opportunity if it ever presents itself. Right through the lock-down he has been doing rehearsed readings of various stories on-line via the Nunkie Productions facebook page. I have listened/watched a few of them and found them entertaining. He has been reading the work of a range of people, not just James. Lovecraft, Conan Doyle, Rolt, Dickens, and others.

I understand your use of the word "cosy".

The Return is the only Walter de la Mer I have read. I enjoyed it a lot, but he did leave a lot to the reader's imagination, an aspect I liked. I have his short stories but have not managed to read them yet.

>77 pgmcc:

You'd mentioned him previously but I'd forgotten about Nunkie. Thanks for the reminder---just subscribed to his YT channel.

>78 alaudacorax:

I haven't been able to to watch any of his live performances, nor catch up on YouTube, so far, but I did attempt his first Facebook quiz (whilst simultaneously trying to cook dinner - what with that and not having watched the performances, I did predictably badly!)

Working from home hasn't freed up a lot of time for reading, I am disappointed to discover. I've also got into some podcasts thanks to a birthday gift of Bluetooth headphones. So my reading is mostly short story collections in paperback, with bookmarks lodged at various points. That same E. F. Benson collection is one of them. One novel - a late Ray Bradbury: A Graveyard for Lunatics. It's one of three very loosely biographical noir-ish thrillers (but not really - at this stage Bradbury's ecstatic eternal-child mode swamps both plot and any genuine chills - for me, at any rate) set around Los Angeles when Bradbury was working in Hollywood. A similarly lightly disguised Ray Harryhausen appears in this one.

>81 frahealee: I am glad you liked them.

Wow, this was unexpected... reading Alifa Rifaat's story My World of the Unknown (in Distant view of a minaret), in which a young woman tells of moving into a new house with her husband. There is something strange about the atmosphere of the house, and then the woman meets a beautiful she-snake who behaves as if very much at home.

... I neglected my garden and stopped wandering about in it. Generally I would spend my free time in bed. I changed to being someone who liked to sit around lazily and was disinclined to mix with people; those diversions and recreations that previously used to tempt me no longer gave me any pleasure. All I wanted was to stretch myself out and drowse. In bewilderment I asked myself: Could it be that I was in love? But how could I love a snake? Or could she really be one of the daughters of the monarchs of the djinn? I would awake from my musings to find that I had been wandering in my thoughts and recalling how magnificent she was. And what is the secret of her beauty? I would ask myself. Was it that I was fascinated by her multi-colored, supple body? Or was it that I had been dazzled by that intelligent, commanding way she had of looking at me? Or could it be the sleek way she had of gliding along, so excitingly dangerous, that had captivated me?
   Excitingly dangerous! No doubt it was this excitement that had stirred my feelings and awakened my love, for did they not make films to excite and frighten? There was no doubt but that the secret of my passion for her, my preoccupation with her, was due to the excitement that had aroused, through intense fear, desire within myself; an excitement that was sufficiently strong to drive the blood hotly through my veins whenever the memory of her came to me, thrusting the blood in bursts that made my heart beat wildly, my limbs limp. And so, throwing myself down in a pleasurable state of torpor, my craving for her would be awakened and I would wish for her coil-like touch, her graceful gliding motion.
   And yet I fell to wondering how union could come about, how craving be quenched, the delights of the body be realized, between a woman and a snake. And did she, I wondered, love me and want me as I loved her? An idea would obtrude itself upon me sometimes: did Cleopatra, the very legend of love, have sexual intercourse with her serpent after having given up on sleeping with men, having wearied of amorous adventures with them so that her sated instincts were no longer moved other than by the excitement of fear, her senses no longer aroused other than by bites from a snake? And the last of her lovers had been a viper that had destroyed her. ...

It hardly needs pointing out how very "vampirical" this reads!

It goes on in that vein, as the woman starts an, er, affair? with the beautiful snake. And there's not just a vampire (lesbian vampire at that) slant to the story, but also a wonderful Islamic twist that, as far as I know, has not been paralleled in the "Christian" vampire lit, and perhaps cannot be paralleled within that tradition.

The snake, you see, is Muslim, a believer, as is of course the young woman, and their affair unfolds secretly to the world but certainly with Allah's knowledge and, if not precisely with his blessing, with the notion that as strange as it may be it is nevertheless within the realm of things that are permissible, even good.

It's very difficult to imagine a vampire in the Christian tradition assuring her victim that Jesus wants them to have sex, let alone a pious vampire.

Anyway, what a marvellous (in every sense) story. Came totally out of the left field within this collection.

>83 LolaWalser:

... and the serpent tempted poor old Eve only with apples ...

Still working on Blood Thirst: 100 Years of Vampire Fiction.

There was an excerpt from The Hunger, Whitley Strieber. Found it to be interesting though not sure if I'll spring for reading the entire book.

Curious to know what you all think of the movie, The Hunger (1983 film)---yay or nay?

It also has excerpt from I Am Legend, is a 1954 post-apocalyptic horror novel by American writer Richard Matheson. But as few of you know from my previous threads, I won't be going anywhere near the book, nor the movie version.

And for today, reading short story,The Unicorn Tapestry, Suzy M. Charnas. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7031807-the-unicorn-tapestry

>84 alaudacorax:

They were very good apples!

Not that I haven't come across different interpretations of THAT encounter too... :)

>85 benbrainard8:

I'd need to watch The Hunger again as it's been decades... unhelpfully, I can only say I remember liking it for the glamourous stars--vampires don't get more chic than that.

>85 benbrainard8:, >86 LolaWalser:

The Hunger has been many years for me, too (I think). I remember being quite taken with it, though. I wonder how much it may have been responsible for the sexy, lovable vampire trope---it was released a year before Ann Rice appeared on screen, though her books were a lot earlier, of course. Anyway, it's definitely worth watching once, if only to see Bowie and Deneuve on screen.

I streamed the film version of The Hunger (1983).

It was better than I thought it'd be, though it has cursory explorations of age/aging, fear of death, addiction, science, Gerontology, and vampirism.

I now want to read The Hunger, by Whitley Strieber to see if the novel has more in depth exploration of its subject matter.

The film itself has some beautiful imagery and the acting is fairly good, Catherine Deneuve is divine. There could have been a lot more character development, it could have been a 3-hr film versus the sparse 97-minutes that it is/was.

There are wonderful musical scores, classical pieces throughout the movie.

Because it's rather pre-CG, I believe it's a movie that could receive a re-make. And apparently the ending of the movie was changed to make possible sequels, though none have ever been made. Apparently Susan Sarandon has an opinion on the end (go to end of this IMDB review, it has a spoiler alert mind you!):

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085701/trivia?ref_=tt_trv_trv

Now I've got to add the book to my long collection of books to purchase or check out a library.

>88 benbrainard8:

It got some bad press over the years for being more style than substance and I think I'd bought into that, a bit, in the past. I watched it again, quite recently, and thought it had more depth, and hung together better as a narrative, than I had remembered. Several factors may be in play - Bowie was still alive the last time I sat down and watched the film, the theme of ageing is more pertinent for me now, I may simply have been paying closer attention this time.

The changed ending does damage the film, in my opinion. For the sake of possible sequels (or just a funhouse final scare) the emotional wallop and logic of the storyline, and Deneuve and Susan Sarandon's characters' "journeys", are pretty much thrown away.

I had a rather delightful reading experience earlier this evening.

I'd got as far in my Night Terrors: The Ghost Stories of E. F. Benson as 'A Tale of an Empty House'. I wasn't long into the story when I realised I knew the setting (he had changed place-names, of course). Then I realised I knew the actual house and even the ford the protagonist waded across.

It gave the thing an extra frisson, somehow.

The overall book is surprisingly densely-packed---there is an awful lot of reading in it.

>90 alaudacorax:

It's happened to me once or twice.

In M P Sheil's The Purple Cloud the hero (believing himself to be the last man alive on Earth after the poison cloud of the title has covered the planet) at one point travels to Reading. He's running a train, with some difficulty, along lines that are clear of other (stopped) trains.

I realised he must have come to the Hunter & Palmers biscuit factory, which used to have its own line running off the main railway station. I was reading the relevant part of the book in my lunch hour at work, in the office block built on the H & P site.

David Mitchell's Slade House, I realised as I read it, had to be set in Reading. He was a bit cagey about this when the book came out, but I later found an interview where even the street in which the titular house is supposed to be sited, is identified.

This "Penguin Horror" line does great covers, they even feel special (a rubbery plastic finish):



Didn't realise the movie was based on a story by Ray Russell. The story so far seems more risqué (unsurprisingly, probably).

'Oh, Whistle, And I'll Come To You, My Lad'.

Neat little story, but each reading I find myself a little more irritated that James should have taken his title from such a seemingly irrelevant poem/song.

It's the more annoying that I got up this morning with the determination to have breakfasted and started work by now. Totally sabotaged by picking up We Don't Go Back: A Watcher's Guide to Folk Horror for 'just a few paragraphs' with my wake-up mug of tea. That was half past six---it's almost nine, now ... between ferreting round the spare bedroom for DVDs of the stuff Ingham mentions ('must get everything catalogued', he says, yet again), reading that story, pondering over the poem ...

... and I've quite forgotten why I needed to re-read that, particular story---I had something in my mind ...

Anyway, breakfast?

>93 alaudacorax:
It's a very good book, isn't it. Regarding "Oh, Whistle, And I'll Come To You, My Lad", I was delighted with the little piece of Latin erudition tucked away in a footnote - that Parkins' Latin isn't good enough to translate Quis est iste qui venit sufficiently to pick up the connotations of "dislike, or contempt, or fear" in the pronoun iste (rather than the standard ille.)

It puts a different slant on the characterisation of Parkins and on the story. It snaps into focus, as it were. Now you can see it as James, the arch traditionalist in Anglicanism and University life alike, constructing a story in which a modern materialist, who hasn't learned his Latin properly (and perhaps scoffs at religion), learns a nasty lesson from the spirit world, which I think James takes to confirm the immortality of the soul and the truth of Christianity - following thinkers such as Joseph Glanvill.

While we're discussing Dr James this might be the place to pass on something from Ghosts and Scholars magazine - I forget who wrote in to confirm this unfortunately - but the recent editions of James' stories with notes from Penguin, Oxford Classics, etc., all state that James got his Bible quotations a bit wrong. That seems unlikely and in fact the commentators are wrong. James tended to quote, accurately, not from the Bible but from The Book of Common Prayer.

>92 LolaWalser: I really enjoyed the stories in that collection. I thought they were the perfect balance between horror and tongue-in-cheek humour.

>93 alaudacorax:, >94 housefulofpaper:

That's why I re-read the story! To see the effect of the Latin translation. I got absorbed in the story and quite forgot why I was reading it in the first place. I've previously felt the note of condescension in the narrator's attitude to Parkins. Also connected here is the use of the word 'ontography' which James seems to have invented. There's a lot of discussion onlline about what the word actually means. You could interpret the word to mean that Parkins was a professor of 'writing about things'! I'm beginning to think the tale is actually a spoof. After all, the protagonist is frightened by the stereotypical white sheet spook which was probably a cliché even back in MRJ's day.

>96 alaudacorax:

Quite tangentially, while I was looking up 'ontography' online I came upon the titbit that MRJ loved Sheridan Le Fanu, hated H. P. Lovecraft. And poor old HPL loved M. R. James. Unrequited love!

>95 pgmcc:

I'm still in the "Sardonicus"! Too many books, too many plans...

I wonder if the designer thought of selling face masks with that illustration... captures the moment perfectly. :)

>96 alaudacorax:
Darryl Jones' notes, in the latest Oxford edition of James' short stories, glosses it as meaning "something like 'Professor of Reality' (fittingly, given Parkins' avowed materialism)."

>97 alaudacorax:

It's probably going too far to say that the story is a spoof; it's one of M R James' most popular - and so, presumably, effective/scary - stories. I can imagine setting himself the technical challenge (or just doing it to amuse himself) of keeping just this side of being a joke.

>92 LolaWalser:

I didn't like those Penguin editions. Not for the covers but the black staining and the grey tone at the edges of the pages. I can't really explain it was just a visceral "no, don't like that". I have got a Penguin edition of the book now, with a relatively restrained "giant skull looming over gothic mansion" cover illustration. It's currently on the unread side of my collection, but I have read the title story - it's in the Oxford Gothic Tales, I think. I read the story before seeing the film - that only happened last year.

The image on your edition seems a strange choice to me, because it doesn't suggest a rictus grin so much as super villain snarl, specifically from Marvel's post Jack Kirby 1970s.

>101 housefulofpaper:

It does seem to call out to the teenage headbanger (or those who feel so at heart) in particular. :)

>100 housefulofpaper: - I can imagine setting himself the technical challenge (or just doing it to amuse himself) of keeping just this side of being a joke.

Yes! I like that idea. For me, having given a bit of thought to that, it really makes the likeliest fit for the story.

I’ve just finished Night Terrors: The Ghost Stories of E. F. Benson (fifty-four stories—quite a hefty read).

I’m a little uncertain what to think of Benson.
On the pro side none of the stories are bad, in my judgement. Some are very good. Some, as far as my reading goes, are quite original. There’s a great variety and a few are quite unexpected.
On the con side he can sometimes be formulaic: I sometimes had the idea of him hanging several stories on the same framework. Of those stories that are dead serious, I never found any as flat-out scary as the very best of Blackwood or M. R. James; authors with whom I instinctively link him.

Indeed, many of the stories are a different animal altogether: one of my favourites, ‘Pirates’, a gentle and moving story, is almost indefinable, but definitely not creepy or scary for the protagonist or the reader—though, fascinatingly, it hints that it may have been so for some, unspecified characters.
Benson can sometimes have a satirical humour when writing about spiritualism, which is a favourite subject of his; and it’s quite difficult to make out his attitudes and beliefs on that subject.

Indeed, that last point echoes all my ideas (or lack of, rather) on Benson. I have not been left with any real sense of the personality behind these stories. Granted, our idea of an author’s personality is probably often quite wrong, but at least it’s there. These stories have left me quite in the dark about his—not that individual stories don’t often give me an idea of his viewpoint, but that others seem to show a different viewpoint.

Which, come to think of it, probably has a lot to do with my inability to pass a judgement on this volume. It would help if I knew if the stories were in chronological order and had some idea when each was written.

The final thing I’m left with is a desire to read the book again: to try to get my ideas in order, for sure, but it has to be a plus for the quality, too, else I wouldn’t be contemplating it, right?

>104 alaudacorax:

I read a mystery of his, The blotting book, and found it very underwhelming. But his memoir (one of), As we were, I thought great. And, although it's been ages since I read them, the Lucia books, as I recall, were a masterpiece of sorts.

Maybe he just couldn't give his best in horror and mystery?

>105 LolaWalser: - Maybe he just couldn't give his best in horror and mystery?

I'm probably giving the wrong impression on the book. He's really quite good here and I wouldn't want to dissuade you from reading---after all, I found it quite worthwhile myself.

>105 LolaWalser:

I've been away from home a lot since your post and I've read all the Mapp and Lucia in the evenings.

Bit of an odd experience: I'd never read anything quite like them but thoroughly enjoyed them. So much so that I decided to re-read them with a view to writing a blog post about them. Didn't work: I really struggled over the first and gave up the idea part-way through the second. Without the advantage of novelty they just don't seem to stand up to re-reading---not so soon, at least. More confection than substance, I think. Also, first time round, I had that thing again of not being able to work out Benson's viewpoint. Lucia was his strongest character, but I could never get a grip on his attitude towards her. He really seemed to love the character; he often depicted her as really unlikeable and unsympathetic---quite odd.

The problem now is that I'm left with some trepidation about my intention (>104 alaudacorax:) to re-read Night Terrors: The Ghost Stories of E. F. Benson. I'm suspecting they won't have the depth to stand up to re-reading, either.

May the gods blast the inventor of the laptop touchpad ...

A rather vague connection to some of the stuff we've been writing over in the folk horror thread. Reading the first one, Queen Lucia (I think), it was a little incongruous in such a light-hearted book to come across a passage showing how well aware Benson was of how the old English village communities had been swept away by wealthier incomers. I was rather expecting something to develop from it, but he didn't return to the subject. There's a basis there for a horror story, I think, but offhand I can't remember that he actually wrote one around the point.

Edited to add: Is 'Mr Georgie' EFB himself?

Is 'Mr Georgie' EFB himself?

I don't know, but could be, at least partially? Benson was gay but I really don't know much more than that about himself--even the "memoir" I read was really about other people around him. He could have been Georgie AND Lucia--and who knows, maybe Quaint Irene too? :)

He really seemed to love the character; he often depicted her as really unlikeable and unsympathetic---quite odd.

Heh, I kinda dimly perceive this--although my memory of the books has been almost completely displaced by the 1980s series with Geraldine McEwan and Nathaniel Hawthorne (it's a gem. Been on my to-buy list forever but I greedily waited for moar discount; now I'd have to order from the UK for even more money...)

It strikes me as an ambivalence toward women displayed by other women (straight) and a kind of a gay man in particular. Only gay men--but by no means ALL gay men, please don't anyone murder me. And, I'm not saying it's something bad, just... that sort of incisive, observant, admiring but critical (to the point where it can get withering) stance toward women is, as far as I noticed, not really known of among straight men. Those are too crazed with lust to quibble. :)

Without the advantage of novelty they just don't seem to stand up to re-reading---not so soon, at least.

Yeah, I can sort of see this... maybe a bit like Wodehouse? I get the yen and then I read a lot and then I'm fine for a good while.

>108 LolaWalser:

Continuing to be off-topic (well, he was a horror story writer), it occurred to me that the great attraction of the books is that it's 'synthetic gossip'. Men probably don't admit to liking gossip, but, in truth, we all like to hear stories about our friends and acquaintances that are---shall I say 'not too complimentary'.

He could have been Georgie AND Lucia--and who knows, maybe Quaint Irene too?
Good point. I'm reminded again that I really don't read enough literary memoirs and biographies and so on these days. I'm curious, but neglect to feed the curiosity.

That's reminded me, once I got a picture of Quaint Irene (I had to look up the wideawake hat)*, I was pretty sure I've seen the exact same image in a modern film (or a film, anyway). Actually, more likely a trailer---if I'd seen the film I'd remember it. Meant to have a hunt round but I forgot.

ETA - * Careless reading! I'd got the image quite wrong and didn't even notice the mistake second time around. For some reason I'd read her loose coat as a cloak. I think it was evoking some vague garbled memories of photographs of Oscar Wilde ... perhaps.

To go against the grain of the thread, this is about what I am not going to read (probably ... possibly).

Amazon, a credit card and ebooks are a totally evil combination, and Amazon is expert at throwing tempting morsels in one's path. I only logged in to look at some computing bits and pieces ... and they hit me with the 'British Library Tales of the Weird' series across the bottom of the page.

Now, I've got a mass of short story collections; so none of this series that I've looked at so far is free of tales that I've already read. But how are you supposed to resist titles like Evil Roots: Killer Tales of the Botanical Gothic or Weird Woods: Tales from the Haunted Forests of Britain? It's cruel, they way they tempt you---I'm surprised Amazon doesn't hiss.

Aw, and now they've put up The Fiends in the Furrows: An Anthology of Folk Horror. That's just taking the ...

>110 alaudacorax:

I've bought three of those British Library books (physical books not e-books). At least one came from Waterstones, so I can comfort myself with the thought that I'm supporting a bricks-and-mortar bookshop (but not an independent, which would have been better, but we don't have one in Reading).

I do regret the current trend for issuing paperbacks without laminated covers; it makes them more prone to damage and too risky to read in the bath.

>111 housefulofpaper:

It's increasingly a question of space for me. Having said that, the problem with ebooks is that they are so easy to forget. I weakened and downloaded The Fiends in the Furrows: An Anthology of Folk Horror (>110 alaudacorax:), read two or three stories, then completely forgot about it until your post reminded me.

Some of you will be familiar with my perennial obsession with the question of how, when, where and why vampires transformed from unmitigated evils into ‘misunderstood, sexy, bad-boy lovers’ (for want of a better phrase). I’ve previously mentioned my thread on this, Pointy teeth sinking into the zeitgeist, and how I realised I should not be pontificating on this stuff when I hadn’t read any of this ‘Vampire Diaries’ and ‘Twilight’ stuff. Well, I’ve decided to very belatedly get back on the horse with this one.

I’ve started by reading (I’m three-quarters through) Interview with the Vampire. I intend to read at least the first in series of the ‘Vampire Diaries’, ‘True Blood’ and ‘Twilight’ books and, perhaps, have a look at some of the screen adaptations. I intend to revisit Dracula, Carmilla and Polidori’s story (can’t remember the name offhand). I also intend to refresh my memories of Lugosi’s Dracula portrayals and keep in mind Coppola’s effort and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

So I have three questions I’m hoping for a bit of help with:

Am I missing anything important from that list? By ‘important’ I mean big popular hits--big enough to really impact, if only fleetingly, on popular culture.

In particular, was there anything I’m missing in between Bela Lugosi and Anne Rice (Interview with the Vampire first published in ‘76)?

How big was Christopher’s Lee’s Dracula in the wider world beyond the UK’s shores? Does he belong on that list?

I’m hoping to eventually get some idea of the progression: where different people were coming from when they were creating their … um … creations—who was influencing whom, and so on.

Finished reading Interview with the Vampire earlier. I bought it some years ago but never got more than a chapter or so into it. This time, I managed to read it straight through.

It's actually not a bad book. I was absorbed and had no problem reading it once I settled down to it. I did find it rather lacking in structure and progression, though, and the main character rather passive, only sparking to life as a mover of the plot in one instance. In fact, Louis' existence was mainly pointless and became completely so in the final chapter or so; and I don't know if Rice intended this to be seen as a tragedy, or if it was simply an accidental by-product of her state of mind at the time.

I've given it three and a half stars.

I enjoyed reading Interview with the Vampire but for some reason the middle book, The Vampire Lestat stood out to me even more. The third book in the series, The Queen of the Damned is fairly decent but seems to get bogged down.

Interesting side notes on film version of Interview with the Vampire---Anne Rice was purported to have based character of Lestat on Dutch actor Rutger Hauer. And among her favored choices to play in the film--- Johnny Depp, Tom Hanks, & Daniel Day Lewis. And even though there was a public row about her dislike of Tom Cruise playing Lestat, she did come around after actually seeing the film, even writing a letter of apology to Cruise for her rather public disapproval of his taking on the Lestat role.

My favorite character would be Armand, played wonderfully by Antonio Banderas in the first movie version of Interview with the Vampire.

I think the Christopher Lee movies do deserve mention, I remember seeing various book covers with his image, while growing up (we're talking mid-70s & 80s), so in many ways his physical portrayal of Dracula seems rather spot on---quite terrifying!

I'd also like to hear of anyone's input into the various literary & cinematic developments, links, etc., between Dracula, and say Twilight, which even though it is half tolerable , being due to its filming in local regions in WA, OR, & CA, is...a bit of a kerfuffle.

>113 alaudacorax:

I think the roots go back a long way. I had thought that the story begins with the 18th century reports of vampires in Eastern Europe - entities much more like post Night of the Living Dead zombies than the current image of the vampire. but I've read things recently arguing that vampiric spirits or demons or creatures go right back to Classical times (if you allow the definition to be loose enough to allow such things as lamias...even Lilith from Jewish mythology). The vampire isn't actually, very sharply defined until very late in the day. Even Count Dracula in Stoker's novel is werewolf as well as vampire. It's not clear if Le Fanu's Carmilla is animated corpse or spirit...she vanishes like a ghost near the climax of the story, but when her coffin is opened her body is inside, swimming in (stolen) blood. I have actually seen the claim that the vampire wasn't codified until Hammer's Dracula (Horror of Dracula in the US) - as late as 1957.

I'm wondering now if the vampire should not be treated as a unique "creature" - at least not when looking at the history and mythology, but should rather included in the occult world of things to be feared, things that might seem seductive but are invariably injurious to the unwary - interchangeable, really the same thing as, Faerie, witches, imps and devils?

Am I missing anything important from that list? By ‘important’ I mean big popular hits--big enough to really impact, if only fleetingly, on popular culture.
I don't think that it was novels that kept the pot boiling between Lugosi and Interview with the Vampire. In the anglophone world I'd guess it was the pulp magazines and after WWII cheap paperbacks but comic books, radio, early novelty rock'n'roll singles, the Universal films being shown on US TV and creating the "Monster Kids" generation (or the first such generation), were all more important in making the vampire a fixture in 20th century Western popular culture.

I can't remember what thread I posted them to, but on my profile page I still have shots of the contents page of Alan Ryan's big vampire story anthology The Penguin Book of Vampire Stories. Looking at the titles I can see a movement through the century to "humanise" the vampire, if not by sympathising with him then by trying to bring some psychological depth.In fact a couple of stories from the 1970s feature vampires not a million miles away from Anne Rice's (I should qualify that by saying I still haven't read Anne Rice's book). The same is true for the comic book Count Dracula, when Marvel comics got hold of the character in the 1970s. i wonder how culturally influential that was (over and above creating the character Blade - as in Blade and sequels).

How big was Christopher’s Lee’s Dracula in the wider world beyond the UK’s shores? Does he belong on that list?
Massive, I'd say. Galvanised horror film production on the continent. Impressed autuers-to-be like Martin Scorsese. Was probably most people's mental image of Dracula in the 60s and 70s (even if a verbal impersonation would always be Lugosi - as strange thing, the human mind). and made him a star and put Hammer on the world stage.

>115 benbrainard8:
I'd also like to hear of anyone's input into the various literary & cinematic developments, links, etc., between Dracula, and say Twilight, which even though it is half tolerable , being due to its filming in local regions in WA, OR, & CA, is...a bit of a kerfuffle.
Barnabas Collins from the supernatural soap Dark Shadows has got to be important as a Byronic, tragic anti-hero vampire. Importantly he was searching for his lost love. This first got grafted to the Dracula story in the TV movie starring Jack Palance (Dan Curtis produced Dark Shadows and this film). It also leaned heavily on the identification of Count Dracula with Vlad the Impaler, "the real Dracula" as I remember learning through cultural osmosis as a schoolboy. Francis Ford Coppola took all this into his 1992 film version.

Sexy Dracula - the Broadway version of the play designed by Edward Corey. Frank Langella on stage and then starring in the John Badham film (Jeremy Brett and Raul Julia both played the role on stage after Langella).

Vampirella, the comic strip sexy vampire from the planet Draculon, in her costume that couldn't possibly stay on in real life (although designed by a female cartoonist, and Angela Carter was (I think) a fan, of the character's image if not necessarily the stories. Her story The Lady of the House of Love was originally a radio play with the borrowed title Vampirella, "the chunky-thighed, horrorzine super heroine with her scarlet garment cut to conceal her nipples while open at the navel" as she explained in New Society magazine (quoted in Inside the Bloody Chamber).

Were there sympathetic vampires in Young Adult fiction (or more likely, "for older readers 11-14" back then)? It's not an area of literature I know much about.

Thinking about it, I realise that in the 1970s ALL Marvel's monsters were sympathetic anti-heroes. Most were far more hapless than the Count. Sympathy for the underdog/sympathy for the Devil. It was in the air.

>116 housefulofpaper:

I may have just had my project whipped out from under my feet. I'd forgotten about Dark Shadows until reading your post. I don't know if I'd previously realised how early it was---on air when Anne Rice was a young woman, well before her vampire books. So I've just been reading the IMDb pages and came upon the passage:

This incidentally made Barnabas Collins the first example of a sympathetic vampire seen on-screen.

I wonder if there was any written stuff around then to influence Sproat and Russell, the writers responsible? Vampirella was a couple of years after that and the stage play you mention a couple of years later again (if I've worked things out correctly), but 'relateable' vampires were clearly in the air around that time and it's tempting to see Russell and Sproat as the source of it.

Of course, the seeds were around almost from the start. In Stoker, Dracula's 'Yes, I too can love ...' is just a hint, but I'm sure later writers and directors were very conscious of it; and there is, of course, much more than a hint in Carmilla (when you think of it, Carmilla is much, much nearer the modern stuff than is Dracula.

I'm wondering how Dracula---or at least vampires---would have developed after Lugosi's Dracula had the Hays code not happened shortly afterwards ...

>118 alaudacorax:

I've ben pondering this question - not continually! but it's popped into my head at odd moments.

I'm a bit vague on the timing of the Code. It was in existence for a few years before it had proper teeth (no pun intended). The Depression had already impacted the presentation of Dracula: if Universal hadn't needed to cut costs they would either not have adapted the novel at all, or would not have used the stage play at the basis of the script. If it happened, it might have been a bigger production like The Hunchback of Notre Dame or The Phantom of the Opera.

It's not answering your question, but Kim Newman imagined Orson Welles adapting Dracula instead of making Citizen Kane (this is in the world of his series Anno Dracula, which I suppose would make it rather as if the film Welles actually made had been called "Citizen Hearst").

Oh, and although the Code tamed Universal's horror films it was the British Empire's timidity in banning them altogether that killed the overseas market, and meant none were made for a period of years.

Leaving all that aside, Universal don't seem to have been much enamoured of the Count, they don't resurrect him for Dracula's Daughter, and he's a minor, rather enfeebled figure in House of Frankenstein (Son of Dracula is ambiguous as to whether or not Lon Chaney Jr is really the Count under a pseudonym or an actual descendant).

Maybe there would have been a strain of vampire movies where they were more like the grubby cannibalistic undead of Romanian folklore (maybe instead of zombie movies, remembering that the British Empire really disliked zombie movies, believing that they would lead to unrest among the "native populations"). (I am not envisaging vampires like Romero-esque, far less Fulci-esque, zombies, but maybe like Alfie Bass' peasant vampire in The Fearless Vampire Killers or Karloff as the Vourdelak in Mario Bava's Black Sabbath).

Or maybe there would have been a Hollywood version of "Carmilla" (although Dreyer's Vampyr had borrowed from it (in fact it borrowed from all five stories in In a Glass Darkly to create an original screenplay) and so too had Dracula's Daughter). Yes, maybe the psychosexual element would have been foregrounded - Freudian vampires.

>119 housefulofpaper: - Yes, maybe the psychosexual element would have been foregrounded - Freudian vampires.

That's what I had in mind when I aired the question. That whole business of a vampire coming into a woman's bedroom and 'putting the 'fluence on her', maybe sucking on her throat, luring her away from friends and family, might be imagined causing Will Hays' ears to burst into flames. I assume only some widespread naivety allowed them to get the 'suggestive' scene in Dracula's Daughter past the censors ...

>113 alaudacorax: and so on ...

I have to put up my hand and admit getting a couple of things wrong.

First of all, my memory of Pointy teeth sinking into the zeitgeist had got garbled. My OP there was concerned with why vampires had got so popular, not why or how they'd become more hero than villain.

On the latter point, though, I'm beginning to think the very question is wrong, at least largely wrong.
I've been reading a few early things lately—Polidori's The Vampyre, Byron's The Giaour (published in 1813), The Bride of Corinth (in English mid-19thC) and one or two others I've forgotten at the moment. I've realised that there really hasn't been much change—the potential for a 'romantic' vampire—vampire as Byronic hero—has been there from the start. As far as I can tell, once the vampire had separated from the folklore, zombie-like figure, the potential for, for example, The Vampire Diaries was always there. Thereafter it was just a matter of degree.

I still intend to watch and read a few things. I'd like to put my finger on exactly how Louis in Interview with the Vampire morphed into Angel in Buffy the Vampire Slayer; although, starting from Dracula or Ruthven, Louis is half-way there (Louis would be a Byronic hero if he wasn't so damned passive ... strike that—Louis is a Byronic hero—I'll give him a pass for the arson).

>121 alaudacorax:

Pages from a Young Girl's Journal may be of interest to you. It is by Robert Aickman and he won the World Fantasy Award for short fiction for this story. I do not know how, but it is on line. See the link below.

https://bristolgothic.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/pages-from-a-young-girls-journ...

It plays with Polidori's The Vampyre and Byron. I shall say no more, but I think you will find it relevant to your quest regarding the evolution of the vampire from demon to ...who knows what.

Apart from that, I found the story very appealing.

>122 pgmcc:

The Curse of the Kindle!!! I've realised that Cold Hand in Mine is yet another short story collection that I never finished! I just can't keep track of things on the Kindle like I can with good, solid, physical books with bookmarks sticking out of them ...

What's of interest to me in connection to this story is that the collection was published in 1975—a year before Interview with the Vampire.

My next move is to watch some of the original Dark Shadows (aired '66 to '71).

To go on a tangent, I'm not sure that 'Pages from a Young Girl's Journal' is that successful; I didn't feel that her transition to full-blown vampire in the latter part of the story was very convincingly or effectively done.. I'm not sure about that, though; and I shall give it another read later on, just to be fair to it.

>123 alaudacorax: - I just can't keep track of things on the Kindle ...

... and making a 'Long-term reading' collection on LT turned out to be really pointless. I have 32 books in it and yet, when I'm looking for something to read, it never enters my mind—in fact, the only time I give it a thought is probably when I'm putting something in it.

Edited to add: Cold Hand in Mine is one of the 32 ... the gods only know how long ...

>123 alaudacorax:

In relation to your comment on Pages from a Young Girl's Journal I did not think so deeply about the girl's transition to a vampire, something I thought was inevitable from the start of the story. What intrigued me most was the playing with Byron's character/myth. I had recently read both The Vampyre and some material about the antagonism between Polidori and Byron. I thought Aickman was having fun mixing the fact and fiction and raising questions that would haunt Byron enthusiasts to their undying days. My focus was on that aspect of the story and it was amusing me so much I did not notice any incongruity in relation to the young girl becoming un-dead. Perhaps I should read it again. I just remember finishing the story and feeling satisfied and liking it.

>123 alaudacorax: & >124 alaudacorax:
On the subject of keeping track of Kindle books, I agree. It is a chore. I have tried to actively record new Kindle books in LT. It is too easy to hit "buy" and be done with it.

In terms of keeping a long-term collection on LT, I find it useful when browsing to check if I already have a book that has attracted my attention. Looking up LT on the smart phone has avoided a number of duplicate purchases while I was in bookshops. With visits to the bookshop out of the question these pandemic-days I have found it easier to flick between LT and the on-line bookshop to verify any current ownership.

My precautions have not, however, prevented all duplicate purchases. In August I went to town for the first time since March. I visited my favourite independent bookshop (Books Upstairs on D'Olier St., Dublin) and came away with three books. One of them was, appropriately enough, The Plague by Albert Camus. When I got home I discovered an unopened bookshop bag that I had left in the study from my last visit to a bookshop in March. I do not need to tell you what I found in it.

In terms of looking at my LT collection to pick the next book I read, I do that about 50% of the time. Often there are new books that come along and grab my attention, but I do browse my catalogue looking for ideas.

I just can't keep track of things on the Kindle like I can with good, solid, physical books with bookmarks sticking out of them ...

Hear! Hear!

>117 alaudacorax: Joseph Caldwell and Sproat, writers on the show, both had backgrounds writing for other soaps. In his memoir In the Shadow of the Bridge: A memoir, Caldwell says that the idea for Barnabas Collins came to them after a long meeting with Dan Curtis, the producer, who, while practicing putting golf balls, said that he wanted a vampire for the kids for the summer.

Sproat and Caldwell went to a gay bar on West 23rd St. to get drunk and figure out what to do. To them, a vampire was basically a serial killer you tracked down and killed, end of story.

After the second or third Manhattan, they decided they would give their character an emotional life by making him a reluctant vampire who mourned his expulsion from the human family. His bloodlust would bring him shame rather than satisfaction. Along with the possibilities for the many tribulations that are at the heart of the soap opera genre, as gay men, they were very sympathetic to the idea of the vampire as outcast. They were quite familiar with feeling like outcasts and being told that their desires were shameful.

The show took off with the addition of Barnabas. This was particularly satisfying because Dan Curtis was openly homophobic, so it gave them great pleasure that his most famous character was created by two gay men.

Caldwell gives a couple more examples of Curtis's fear of homoeroticism. He said a vampire could bite a woman on the neck but a man only on the wrist. A more extreme example was that he went to the writers (Curtis sounds oblivious) and asked them if he should fire Louie Edmonds, who played Roger Collins, because he "was a queer".

Obviously, Caldwell and Sproat stopped him, and forbore adding that Curtis would also have to fire two-thirds of the writing staff, Frid, who played Barnabas Collins, another actor who played a romantic lead, and one of the actresses.

Anyways, that's his origin story for Barnabas Collins. He also attributed the popularity of the show among teenagers to the fact that the show was obviously about compulsive sex, even if the audience didn't realize it. Most teenagers feel, at one time or another, that if they don't have sex, they'll die.

>126 robertajl:

Oh that's a great peek behind the scenes, thanks!

>126 robertajl:

Fascinating, thanks from me as well!

Currently reading Hauntology: Ghosts of Futures Past which is an introduction/ guide to the subject. It's pitched at the level of a Pelican paperback of the '60s and '70s I suppose - for the interested layman, but not too oversimplified. There's certainly more Marx and Derrida (and Herbert Marcuse and Mark Fisher) than I had reckoned on encountering.

There are a few pages to go before I finish the book, but the thrust of its argument is that Hauntology is the ghost of lost futures - roads not taken, that would have lead away from Neoliberalism and late Capitalism and towards something better: jet packs (as shorthand for technological advances) as much as socialism, given that the apparently stalled rate of change in society since the early '70s.

It's an attractive argument but even without the political or philosophical "chops" to counter it I could see problems. It's a parochial view - not even of just The West or even Europe, but 90% of the time it's focused on the UK. Yet it wants to set Hauntology up as a counter to the current world-wide unchallenged supremacy of unfettered market capitalism (in the introduction the author compares Hauntology's capacity to appropriate cultural forms with that of Capitalism itself. Approvingly I think, maybe in the hope it could be a sufficient counterweight to the "End of History" idea.

I'm not explaining this very well - the book starts with Francis Fukuyama (The End of History), and Derrida's riposte , Spectres of Marx; goes back to the Victorian period and looks at cultural ghosts and hauntings (Dickens, table tapping, the Pepper's Ghost illusion in tandem with the politics of the time). Takes things up to M. R. James.

The second section looks at time, and focuses on twentieth century writers, thinkers and technological developments.

The third section is the most speculative and political, asking why Hauntology focuses on the 1970s, and exploring the ideas I oversimplified above.

The final pages of the book promise to discuss the Folk Horror Revival, which (judginging by how the topic was touched on in the introduction) is either a subcategory of Hauntology, or it's one of the cultural forms Hauntology has appropriated.

Edited "jousting" to "judging". It's my Autocorrect that's haunted, I reckon.

>126 robertajl:

An absolutely fascinating post, many thanks for that. As I've said above, I really must watch some of Dark Shadows (and get hold of Caldwell's memoir).

Have you ever seen the fascinating film the Celluloid Closet? As I remember, it only dealt with film; but it's obvious that Dark Shadows really should have been included.

>129 housefulofpaper: - the apparently stalled rate of change in society since the early '70s.
Not just 'stalled', the figures clearly show that the redistribution of wealth has gone into reverse ...

Sounds like a fascinating book though (the third time I've used 'fascinating' this evening). I'll get hold of that.

>131 alaudacorax:
Economically, yes there's no question, I was thinking more along the lines of culturally - you know how fashion changed in the 1970s so fast that you can probably date an episode of Blue Peter to within a couple of months just by the length of Peter Purves' hair and shirt collar. And even though the '80s was the start of Thatcherism (and Reaganism) the impetus of technological change seemed to be propelling things forward - home computers, VHS, even television playing around with Quantel.

I don't remember feeling the same going into the 90s, led alone the new millennium, which would support the book's argument but the rot would have set in a good 10 years earlier (1980 does feel in the past in a way that 1990 doesn't - but I can't discount the strong possibility it's because I was 13 in 1980 and (obviously!) 23 in 1990).

However, the picture would look different for a younger person wouldn't it, and/or for a person from a different ethnic group? Thinking about this does raise questions in my mind about whether Hauntology as expressed in an interest in 1970s horror films and public information films, and music that sounds like the work of the Radiophonic Workshop, is actually a political act in opposition to Late Capitalism, or a middle-aged retreat into the past? (and yet I have to question even that, that archival turn in culture came in, for me, as early as the 1980s when the family bought a video recorder and more vintage television began appearing on television). Maybe it's the weird nexus of left-wing* politics, middle aged white male nostalgia, and nerd culture?

* nostalgia is also a powerful force on the right of politics too, and the far right. The BNP tried to co-opt Folk Music a few years ago, and the poppy appeal gets ever more politicised. It's messy.

>132 housefulofpaper:

Interesting points. I'm still a bit hazy on hauntology, so I really must order that book.

I've especially noticed that business of everything getting more politicised. I don't know if it's, perhaps, an inevitable concomitant of the growth of social media. These days you can't seem to look into anything much online--folk culture, history, the arts--without someone bringing politics into it. Not too long back I was looking for good books on pre-Christian European religion and I was astonished at the amount of quite Nazi-like idealogy there is out there.

Perhaps it's not so much the fault of people--you'd always find some idiot holding forth at the end of the bar--as the messed-up algorithms of big concerns like Amazon and Facebook ...

I've started reading The Vampire Lestat, partly following >115 benbrainard8:'s comments and partly curiosity because Lestat's name seems to have entered popular culture in a way Louis' from the first book hasn't.

I'm only one chapter and a bit in so far, but the plot is setting up to be quite intriguing (it's several orders of quality better than The Vampire Diaries—see my post in the screen thread).

I must be careful not to overpraise things. I quite randomly reread Algernon Blackwood's short story Max Hensig the other night and it gave me pause. Reading a sublime master of the craft like that at work made me realise that my critical faculties get a bit blunted by what I am normally reading. I'm not sure that I have fixed benchmarks and I probably need to regularly read some of the masters to keep myself up to the mark, as it were.

>130 alaudacorax: I have seen it and, as I remember, you're correct and it only dealt with films, and I think it was just Hollywood films. I shared your impulse to watch some Dark Shadows and started at the very beginning. It's got a kind of Jane Eyre vibe to it--spooky, big house on the hill, an orphaned governess, hints of dark doings and all sorts of mysteries. Not much seems to happen except all the hinting. They talk about ghosts but I don't know, yet, if there really is any supernatural hocus-pocus going on. Barnabus doesn't show up until #211, so there's a long wait.

>136 robertajl:

I haven't got round to 'Dark Shadows' yet, but ... #211! Sorry, life's too short to watch that many episodes of a TV show. I'm going to have to sample it here and there.

I've just been reading the synopses or the first season episodes and they read very much like a soap in the style of Dallas or Dynasty.

How are you finding The Vampire Lestat?

It's been such a long time that I should go back and reread The Vampire Chronicles.

>138 benbrainard8:

Not sure how to answer that. I was actually writing about it in one of my journals just a minute or two back (in fact, I paused to look through back issues of the Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies; was delighted to find another issue has come out—the first in a year or more; immediately rushed over here to tell you all; and spotted your post).

It's interesting enough, and well-written enough, the problem being that I'm reading it with my mind constantly on the question of how much influence it's had on popular culture. So, perhaps, I am not quite capable of experiencing it on its own terms. Which is why I was at the IJGHS, looking for articles to short-cut the process.

There is another part of my mind that is getting quite intrigued by Anne Rice's psychology. I hesitate to publicly elaborate on that with a living writer (at least not one whom I have nothing against), but there is a lot of quite challenging stuff in there—the book does have some real depth.

ETA - That last paragraph is, perhaps, over-squeamish: she—and any half-way decent writer, in fact—is going to be well aware of how much of her inner psyche she's putting on the page.

>138 benbrainard8:, >139 alaudacorax:

Over on the 'Yet more Gothic gossip' thread I just made a humorous reference to the article 'Gods of the Real: Lovecraftian Horror and Dialectical Materialism' in the latest Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies. Then it suddenly hit me that 'cosmic horror', in the Lovecraftian sense, is a very really terror horror for Anne Rice's protagonists, and perhaps was for the author herself at the time of writing. She's commented openly on the changes in her religious beliefs.

I find The Vampire Lestat has become a lot more fascinating in the hour or so since I was last reading it.

Thank you so much, I've been reading and re-reading what you've posted.

I've had over 25 years to think about the three books, and I always remember enjoying The Vampire Lestat the most.

I think, and these are only my very humble opinions, and I'd love to hear some other viewpoints from you all, for me, The Vampire Lestat hits a number of points:

---Vampire as existential milieu, a modern day protagonist(s), though also bit hard on him/herself. Though it plays out perhaps more the in first book, with Lestat giving Louis a hard time about Louis' whining. I enjoyed the coldness of Lestat, when he says, and I'm paraphrasing , "we kill because it's of our nature".

---Vampire as rock star, as actor, and celebrity. This comes out far more in The Vampire Lestat but there appear to be varying counterpoints to it, as well. Makes for an interesting read.

---Vampire in our modern psychology: loss, rage, pride, lust, forgiveness, memory, remorse, you name it.....the entire set of the 1st three books have these in abundance.

Perhaps the last one to me might be where others would see Anne Rice's very diverse viewpoints on her own religious, psychological, and sexual moorings (boy that sounds a bit awkward). They say any author injects themselves into their works, despite attempts, deliberative or otherwise, at hiding, obfuscating, downplaying, name your __________;

And I'm sure that another aspect that stays with me from the entire set of the 1st three books, are the depths that Anne Rice gives to the historical & contextual--places, characters, journeys, discoveries---but with sadness & heaviness within the stories/scenes. I always find the stories to give me a bit to chew upon...and yet, remember feeling sad after reading them--wonder mixed with melancholy.

Many readers give Anne Rice and elevated place/standing in Gothic writing. I'm not certain whether or not that elevated status will survive the test of time. We'll see, let's give it another 30-50 yrs. :)

Best to you all. Be safe and be well.

>141 benbrainard8:

Interesting, but I'm only about a quarter through The Vampire Lestat at the moment, so I'll wait a while to comment further.

I'm curious about your mention of three books. Are you seeing Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat and The Queen of the Damned as a stand-alone set distinct from the rest of 'The Vampire Chronicles' novels? Is this a personal thing or a widely-held view?

For me the first three books are stand alone, though I know there are additional ones written afterwards.

I've just finished The Vampire Lestat.

I have to say I was impressed—almost reluctantly so, as I think she took the vampire somewhat away from Gothic towards fantasy (I'm not sure how much the word 'horror' really applies, here). Apart from that, my thoughts pretty much echo what >141 benbrainard8: said. I thought it a much better book than I'd been expecting before starting on Anne Rice. I was somewhat primed for it by reading Interview with the Vampire, but I thought it several steps up from that one.

I can also see it as the starting point for a lot of modern pop culture's 'vampire lore'. For example, I several times read passages that clearly influenced the creators of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Rice gave words to Lestat that suggest she is a big fan of Carmilla but much less so of Dracula. That chimes with my experience of the book. Both Carmilla and Lestat seem to me to hark back to the Byronic hero of the Romantics (to differing degrees), while Dracula is much more firmly the horror-story villain.

So I'm currently seeing the modern 'popular' vampire (I mean of the diary and twilght twilight type) as evolving from Byron's Giaour or Manfred or Goethe's Bride of Corinth, via Le Fanu and Anne Rice and Joss Whedon and his writers, quite bypassing Polidori and almost so Stoker, the latter two, perhaps, in a somewhat distinct thread running into and through the rather more obscure world of 20thC and modern, horror, short stories. 'Currently' as in, 'I may think differently after some more exploring'.

I was a little peeved at the ending leaving me dangling—clearly with the intention of making me buy another book (and I really have to read The Queen of the Damned, now).

I must read and watch some of the Diaries/Twilight/True Blood stuff for completion; but really what I'm eager to do is to hunt up some of Anne Rice's more immediate influences and predecessors (and Varney the Vampire—she seems to have read that and I haven't). I've been making a chronology to keep track of this stuff, and I have a bunch of half-remembered works buzzing round my head that I need to reread/rewatch and date.

Hah! I've been some six hours writing this. Sat down to write 'a quick post before bed'; fell asleep over my laptop; and now it's twenty past five in the morning ...

>144 alaudacorax: I do not comment much here, but I am lurking, and one of the big prizes from my lurking is your exploration of vampire literature. Varney the Vampire is one on my shelves that I also have not read yet.

Let it be known, your effort, and your sleeping at the laptop, is appreciated.

>145 pgmcc:

That post's a pleasant find this morning. I'm flattered. Thank you.

>146 alaudacorax: You are welcome. Just know I am peering from behind the curtains as you carry on with your task.

>144 alaudacorax:

I've turned into a lurker too...I've fallen into the trap of working into the evening, and longer. At least I am still working, even claiming overtime...

I DID read Varney the Vampire a few years ago. I wouldn't recommend trying to read it as a novel but as a serial: little and often. I had the cheap Wordsworth Editions paperback at work and read a chapter each day during my lunch.

It does have the structural issues of something being made up chapter by chapter (it might even have had two authors working on it, apparently). It's really three or four novel-length stories bolted together in a way (I know I've suggested this analogy here before) like the Hammer Dracula and its sequels.

>148 housefulofpaper:

I've had it on my Kindle for a while and, to be honest, it just looks War-&-Peace-like daunting. Especially as I'm more interested in reading to see if I can spot influences on anything else than for its own sake.

Finished reading The Queen of the Damned.

Mixed feelings: at one and the same time I found it more of a page-turner than the previous two and not so good. In places it slightly strained my belief in its internal reality.

It's a different kind of beast again. Put me a little in mind of some early fantasies, Rider Haggard's She most obviously, and one or two others.

For the time being, I'm going to stop at these three, but I have to say I found them fun reading and (at least the second two) quite unexpected. The Vampire Lestat, though, was the one where I felt obvious influence on later popular culture.

I have been reading A Natural History of Ghosts which I gave a rare five star rating, despite some (I thought) harsh reviews from other LT-ers. Short of answering definitively whether ghosts are real or not, and given the book's focus on the British Isles, I don't see how it could have been done better.

As a history of real-life hauntings it only has a tangential relevance to our subject, but some things that caught my eye may be of interest here:

Horace Walpole investigated the Cock Lane Ghost - or took himself along there to see what was going on, at least - two years before the publication of The Castle of Otranto. How much of an influence was this "real life" haunting on the birth of the Gothic novel?
Reading about the ectoplasm supposedly extruded by Victorian mediums I made the connection with the shape-shifting in Arthur Machen's fiction of the 1890s, the pseudopods put out by the changeling boy in "The Novel of the Black Seal" and Helen Vaughn's death in "The Great God Pan".
A long chapter on Borley Rectory - focusing on the human actors - brought a different perspective from Ashley Thorpe's animated film.
A reminder that the Reformation -"the violent abolition of Roman Catholicism" changed the spiritual landscape of England for ever. With the concept of Purgatory outlawed, ghosts could not officially be regarded as the spirits of the dead, who must all have been sorted into Heaven or Hell at death: ghosts were either a hallucination or Demons sent by Satan. Also, and contradicting the official line, the confiscated church properties became haunted by the monks and nuns who used to live in them, or were reputed to have been cursed by them.

On a personal note, the London district of Holborn seemed to crop up quite often. It's the only part of London I feel I know reasonably well. I worked there for six months after leaving school, and much later I'd walk through from Farringdon underground station to the Folio Society's "Member's Room" and pick up my order, then stagger round London with this heavy weight (I used to be able to leave my bags in the British Museum cloakroom; a facility that disappeared even before Covid-19).

It's a part of London that is eerily quiet at the weekend. It's between the West End and the City and literally there can be no one around on a Saturday morning! Spooky, especially if (and this book reminded me) Noon used to be regarded as spectral a time as Midnight.

>151 housefulofpaper:

Oh, tempting post. On Walpole, etc, the question of what was in popular currency when the writers were sitting down to write must be a fascinating subject in itself. And I'd really like to read the book itself; I'm not sure I've read anything like it, oddly enough.

Following on my posts, above, about my vampire reading:

I've just finished the first chapter in Carol A. Senf's The Vampire in Nineteenth Century English Literature—'Blood, Eroticism and the Twentieth-Century Vampire'. To my astonishment, she cites a whole slew of 20th-C vampire films, books and short stories of which I've never heard—some going back as far as the '20s.

I really must make faster progress with all this watching and reading ...

>153 alaudacorax: I am sure no matter how fast you watch and read there will still be more to watch and read.

I remember getting the first edition of The Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction and around 1980, just post Star Wars it seemed to contain everything; or it least such a comprehensive reference work still seemed possible.

But I knew that was because it was a relatively narrow field. If I'd been interested in Westerns or "War" (WWI and/or WWII basically) it would have been much more of a challenge. Not just core books, films and TV, but all the ways the subject had crept into the general culture: toys and games, adverts, sweets, songs, commonly understood tropes in newspaper cartoons and comedians' material, and so on.

I think horror, or even narrowing it down to vampires, is a subject of a similar size.

I finished a collection of E. T. A. Hoffman stories recently (The Golden Pot), which is not Gothic but sort of related - in the similar way to how Alice in Wonderland is being incorporated into the Goth aesthetic. Three of the stories in the collection are long fairy tales. On the surface things seem to occur with the randomness of children's make-believe but the introductory notes assure the reader that there are mystical and philosophical depths - like Mozart's The Magic Flute, I suppose.

One of the stories, "Master Flea", features a minor character named the Leech Prince, who might be regarded as a kind of pre-Dracula vampire figure, but I wouldn't recommend hunting down this story just for that - he's a very minor character. What may be more interesting is how the story hints at the culture Hoffman was working within, where he could draw on fantastical fairy-tale type operas that were being put on ("Master Flea" borrows character names and place names, and presumably some of their lustre too, from recent productions (without comment or explanation)).

>156 housefulofpaper:

I still suspect Mozart and Shickaneder were sloshed a lot of the time they were writing The Magic Flute ...

ETA - Oops. 'Schikaneder'.

>157 alaudacorax: I saw The Magic Flute once as a child, done with marionettes. That was a very long time ago, but from what I remember, that tracks. Though it's possible I was just freaked out by the marionettes. :-)

>157 alaudacorax:
Well that's a possibility :) - but i needed to tell myself there was more to it, when I was reading the Hoffman story, to keep reading to the end. Not exactly a glowing recommendation I know, but it turns out long Romantic (in the literary sense) fairy tales aren't exactly my thing.

>158 Julie_in_the_Library:
I think I slowly became aware of The Magic Flute well before I heard the music or saw it staged (on VHS - I have never been to a live opera performance). I'd like to think it was before the film version of Amadeus(1984), but I can't be sure.

I'm trying to catch up on my reading of The Book Collector - I have a TBR pile of magazines and periodicals, as well as books. I even have the beginnings of a DVD/Blu-ray booklet TBR pile (in my defence, Andrew Pixley has produced a genuine book for each UK Blu-ray release of Monty Python - one for each season (or, as it's a 50 year old UK programme, series)).

Anyway, there were a couple of interesting articles on libraries. Celebrity libraries of a sort, although both celebrities are long dead. Firstly, there was a piece about Horace Walpole's library at Strawberry Hill. The bookcases were based on the design of the Choir door from the Old St Paul's cathedral, taking from an engraving made less than 10 years before the Cathedral was destroyed in the Great Fire. The meant the cases had Gothic Arches obscuring the books on the top shelves, but they could be swung out (like the doors in a Western saloon, is how I imagine it!).

The library itself, in the sense of the books Walpole owned, is long dispersed although thanks to Walpole's cataloguing of it, and the auction catalogue of 1842 (after Walpole's death the house passed to the Waldegrave family; in 1842 the 7th Earl Waldegrave sold all the contents), scholars have a good idea of what Walpole's book collection was like.

The house has recently been restored an opened to the public. In 2017 2,400 books from Aske Hall were given on indefinite loan to fill the empty bookshelves. They were collected by a contemporary of Walpole and many of the books correspond to titles owned by Walpole.

Harry Houdini, at the time of his death, had a library of 15,000 books, 50,000 prints, half a million cuttings, and some four tons of theatrical bills. Although the Book Collector article notes that Houdini had a wide range of somewhat esoteric interests, the three focuses of his library was drama, (stage) magic, and Spiritualism (collected from the viewpoint of s sceptic).

I hadn't appreciated this facet of Houdini's life. Thinking about the figure of the Occult scholar that occurs again and again in Weird literature - urbane but a bit mysterious even sinister, clearly well-educated and financially independent if not outright wealthy- well, such figures must surely have been around before Houdini, but I have to wonder to what extent he must have presented a real-life version for writers like the Weird Tales crowd? - not only did they know of him, the sometimes worked with him; the short story ghostwritten by H. P. Lovecraft wasn't a one-off example.

>159 housefulofpaper:

Your first paragraph on Houdini stopped me dead in my tracks.

15,000 books, alone, elicited a 'Wow!', but I could get my head around it (if only I could afford that much shelf space). 50,000 prints had me baffled at how one man could have put in the time to choose them, let alone take them out and look at them once he had them (or did he own a hell of a lot of wall space above the bookcases?) Half a million cuttings—well, I suppose a wealthy man could pay someone to keep them organised in a private library.

But my imagination just failed at four tons of theatrical bills, just ... stumped ...

>159 housefulofpaper: Well, I certainly wouldn't describe Houdini as "sinister," and I would be leery of anyone who does without a pretty good reason, but he did make something of a mission of disproving spiritualism, so there's that.

And it did affect his relationship with at least one author - his former friend Arthur Conan Doyle. Their falling out was over spiritualism. It's a fun story, though I imagine it wasn't fun for either of them at the time. :-)

I'm surprised to hear that he worked with Lovecraft, given Lovecraft's known sentiments.

>161 Julie_in_the_Library:
Let me clarify that statement, since I was typing after 1:00 am and clearly not taking enough care with what I was putting down.

I had in mind the stage magicians of Houdini's time and the generation before - probably men heavily represented in all those playbills - played around with images of the supernatural, with devils and imps on those playbills, and dressing as a sort of Satan in evening dress. There's a lovely (but expensive) Taschen volume that reproduces many of those posters. I don't have it, but I did have a calendar that was spun off of it.

Generally, stage magicians like to play around with the notion that their illusions are, actually, supernatural - it's just stagecraft (even dear old David Nixon had astrological symbols and so on decorating the sets of his 1970s TV series - and no, i don't have a fantastic memory, some of them recently turned up on youTube).

>162 housefulofpaper: That makes sense. Most of what I know about Houdini is in reference to his quest to disprove spiritualism, rather than his career on the stage, though I was under the impression he was more an escape artist than a magician.

The world seems to be really working hard at putting me in 'grumpy old man' mood, recently.

I'm half-way through reading I Vampire, by Jody Scott. I'm reading it because it was mentioned several times in the opening chapter of Carol A. Senf's The Vampire in Nineteenth Century English Literature, sounded interesting in online reviews, and was only 99 pence for the Kindle.

This is nothing like as clever or as witty as online reviews would have you believe and I'm half way through without figuring out why the author made the title character a vampire in the first place, as the fact seems quite irrelevant. And I can't imagine why Senf considered this book relevant to hers.

Worst of all, having got this far, I can't steel myself to dump it, while it's so boring I can only steel myself to read it in small doses. Which means that it's going to be hanging around making a nuisance of itself for quite a while yet.

My Kindle says I'm 59% through. What are the chances of a novel suddenly changing from bad to good that far in? Would I be a bad person if I dumped it and gave it, say, two stars after only reading 59%? I suppose I could dump it and not star it, but I'm feeling too resentful. Would I be a worse person if I forced myself to read to the end, it got no better, and I gave it only half a star, purely out of revenge?

On the other hand, writing this post has relieved my feelings somewhat. I'm going to be both decisive and magnanimous. I shall dump it and just forget it exists. Having made my feelings public here, starring would be redundant.

>164 alaudacorax:

And then I jumped over to my catalogue only to find that I've neither put it in Currently reading or entered a start reading date. Damn book is pushing its luck ...

>164 alaudacorax: I don't think that you'd be a bad person for dumping and rating it at this point. The fact that it's so bad you could only get through 59% is a valid basis for rating it, and rating it badly. And if you're not getting anything from spending time on it, there's no reason to keep going.

"Worst of all, having got this far, I can't steel myself to dump it" - you might want to look up the sunk cost fallacy. It might help you feel better about dumping the book. I completely get feeling guilty or weird about abandoning a book partway through, but if you're not enjoying it or getting anything of value from reading it, you shouldn't feel bad about walking away. After all, reading is something you do for you. And it's not like you're going to hurt the book's feelings. :-)

>164 alaudacorax:
Heh, I have what I call my "reading dividend". That is, if I can't get into a book, say within the 30-40 pages into it, I just dump it.

This can be for multitude of reasons. One book I had to do that with, Glue, 2001, by Irving Welsh, was just too difficult for me to traverse.

So don't feel bad, there are so many works out there, only so much time, and alas, only so much patience that we can muster.

Now of course, there might be particular subjects that you want to give yourself some patience for, but those are for what you're truly passionate about, so you can usually get through them and even allow yourself extra time and patience for.

There between the middle of the above is where I'd like to find myself.

>166 Julie_in_the_Library: - ... you might want to look up the sunk cost fallacy.

Heh-heh! Yes—excellent point! Of course, it's easy for my intellect to grasp that, but my instinct needs to be sat upon quite firmly. I still can't quite bring myself to star a book I haven't finished, though, but I don't suppose that matters much.

>167 benbrainard8: - ... if I can't get into a book, say within the 30-40 pages into it, I just dump it.

Yes, you're quite right. As I implied in >168 alaudacorax:, it's really that I need to use my brain and keep my instincts under control.

A warning: this post has nothing to do with my current reading, nothing to do with the Gothic and nothing to do with Arthur Machen; but I couldn't resist telling somebody ...

The postie just brought my copy of John Gawsworth's The Life of Arthur Machen. I haven't time to start reading it at the moment, but I couldn't resist reading Barry Humphries' introduction, in which, I was to find, he writes entirely about Gawsworth, not Machen.

This was an unexpectedly fine piece of writing to find in a non-fiction book. He obviously took great care in crafting it, as well as evidentally being a talented writer. The piece is so colourful and evocative, of the time, place and man, and, at base, rather sad.

I felt quite envious, wishing I could write half so well: then I belatedly found that Humphries is an award-winning writer—I'd been thinking of him as 'just a comedian'. Let's hope the rest of the book lives up to the introduction ...

>170 alaudacorax:

I've had that book for a while but haven't got around to reading it yet. But you've prompted me to read the introduction today. I was aware of Barry Humphries interests in, well various manifestations of the Avant Garde over the last century and more - the 1890s, 1920s Weimar cabaret, and so on. I noticed that he lent some of the pictures in Tate Britain's Aubrey Beardsley exhibition last year.

The BBC documentary referred to in the introduction still exists in some form, although not easily available. Through being a Member of The Friends of Arthur Machen (or do I say, I'm a Friend of Arthur Machen?...) I have a booklet by the late Roger Dobson which explains how Friends member, when working at the BBC, found a copy of the colour film - basically the programme minus the credits and some voiceover narration.

The booklet consists of an essay about the programme - both a detailed transcription/description and analysis. AND a DVD copy of the film!

I hope it's OK to post a couple of screenshots (amateurish ones, bearing in mind I'm merely pointing an iPhone 5 at an increasingly knackered television).

With Stephen Graham at 60 Frith Street, Soho.



In Soho Square, ruminating on the statue of Charles II, "I've naturally been a Jacobite all my life and always will be..."



A young Gawsworth (I couldn't prevent a moiré pattern appearing in my photo if the background was light. So much for the final scene shot in a snowy London park).



"I was here from 1933 to '41"..."revisiting ancient haunts of the Moon."

(I've missed out visits to novelist and playwright Kate O'Brien, and the offices of the publisher Ernest Benn)





Greeted by Lawrence Durrell, "Hail, O King!"



In the wine bar with Durrell and bookseller Alan G. Thomas.

A weird - possibly Weird - coincidence!

The Gawsworth documentary does exist online, somewhere, and a link to it is embedded in this piece below, promoting the documentary King Rocker (which was on Sky Arts, at the weekend and was very good indeed).

If you have any way of seeing it, I highly recommend it (it's not, I should add, in any way Gothic).

https://www.dazeddigital.com/film-tv/article/51749/1/stewart-lee-michael-cumming...

>173 housefulofpaper:

MUCHO thanks! Excellent, excellent... Your posts are the first time I heard of Gawsworth, love such characters.

That was so good... I watched it twice through. "Damn You, Poetry!" I hadn't heard of any of those people he championed except Machen.

Cracked up on "avant-garde reactionaries"...

>174 LolaWalser:

Gawsworth's interest in literary figures of the 1890s also led him to being M. P. Sheil's executor, and to his inheriting the kingship of the (quoting Wikipedia) "unrecognised micro nation" of Redonda. The Wikipedia entry for The Kingdom of Redonda is fascinating.

>173 housefulofpaper:

I broke this up into separate paragraphs for clarity, but only made things unclear. I took as read that the Gawsworth documentary holds some interest; it's the King Rocker documentary that I was recommending (and looking at the other documentaries listed in the article, it appears that all four episodes of the Arena special on the life and times of Slim Gaillard have made their way to YouTube. I remember enjoying them, back in 1989.

>176 housefulofpaper:

Yes, I know of Redonda (I think my fave Claudio Magris was a one-time regent). Don't worry, your post is clear, but I jumped on the chance to see the one about Gawsworth in particular as it doesn't seem to be available elsewhere. :)

Others on that page look very cool too...

I'd put The Cambridge Companion to Dracula aside a few months ago about 1/3 of the way through. Picked it up again in the last week and finished it today.

Obviously I'm not using it as an academic, and some of the disciplines referred to I have less than a layman's notion of. But I don't think I missed too much ... none of the contributors wrote in a way that the non-specialist couldn't follow. The final essay, looking at on-screen Draculas since 1960, covered things we've looked at here recently, such as the 1968 TV adaptation with Denholm Elliott in the lead role, and the influence of Dark Shadows on the Dracula/ reincarnated lost love idea (but also, as I did, pointing out this goes all the way back to 1932 and The Mummy).

The previous essay about Dracula on stage (by a different contributor) notes the centrality of the asylum in Liz Lochhead's 1985 stage version but doesn't seem aware that the 1968 TV version and John Badham's 1979 film can both claim precedent there.

And it's just occurred to me that there's nothing about Dracula Musicals, or Ballet Draculas. Or Dracula in the comic books (the Marvel version from the 1970s is well-regarded and inter alia created the character Blade.

>178 housefulofpaper:

Interesting points. Especially about the comic books—I know nothing about them but suspect that's a bit of a serious omission, given the cross-pollination between them and the screen.

I've put the book aside, too, until I've finished Carol A. Senf's The Vampire in Nineteenth Century English Literature—I somehow ended up reading the two at the same time (lack of discipline!)

I'm finding the Senf quite absorbing. It seems to be shaping up (I'm not much over a third through, as yet) as a survey of the academic literature on the subject, and I'm interested from that point.
The first chapter, though, is an interesting survey of the vampire in the 20th-century, and it pretty much confirmed my growing suspicion—I've hinted at it above or on one of the other threads—that I'd been quite barking up the wrong tree in my ponderings over how vampires got from downright evil to sexy, bad-boy lovers. She draws a clear dividing line between the vampire of folklore—pretty much a Romero-style zombie—and the vampire of literature, who is largely independent of the folklore job and who is the source of all our modern popular culture vampirism, and who always was, or at least had the potential to be, a romantic figure. She also makes clear that Dracula (as in Stoker) is rather an outlier, harking back in some ways to the old folklore ideas. Ironically, if we complain that some modern works overly romanticise Dracula, they are really just dragging him back into the mainstream.

>114 alaudacorax: - Finished reading Interview with the Vampire ... and the main character rather passive, only sparking to life as a mover of the plot in one instance.

Reading some lit crit, not really connected with Interview with the Vampire, and a thought struck me. Bearing in mind that the book was published as long ago as 1976, and by a female author, is Louis subliminally female? Perhaps I should have written 'symbolically' there.

He's essentially a passive character, the 'wife' in a dysfunctional 'family' with Lestat as the controlling 'husband' and Claudia the child they only had to keep the 'wife' happy. So is Louis a 1970s, unliberated woman, gradually achieving some kind of emancipation, first through a 'divorce', then by finally becoming an active player towards the end of the novel by symbolically burning down the whole patriarchal edifice?

As I said, just a thought ...

>180 alaudacorax: This is exactly how I felt after reading the book, and even after watching the movie version.

There are are some wonderful scenes in the film version where you see the titular Tom Cruise' Lestat and Brad Pitt's Louis taking the young vampire, Claudia, played remarkably well by a very young Kirsten Dunst, to get dresses made for her, perusing "stores"---- I won't give the scenes away, but they do look remarkably like a young family "out on the town" as we say.

>180 alaudacorax:, >181 benbrainard8:

I'd forgotten I posted that. Oddly enough, it was reading The Vampire in Nineteenth-Century English Literature's discussion of Jane Eyre that prompted those thoughts. Heaven knows what little cross-currents were going on in my mind, but I just had to 'write them out of my brain' somewhere so I could get on with my reading.

>180 alaudacorax:

What's the betting that, somewhere in literary studies, somebody has thought of that already—several people, probably?

I’ve just finished The Vampire in Nineteenth-Century English Literature. I have mixed feelings about it and I’m giving it three and a half stars.

The title is a fraction misleading as she does treat well into the twentieth century, and usefully so. She’s good and very interesting on the drift in nature of the vampire through its literary and popular culture history. I found Chapter Two, ‘The Origins of the Modern Myth’ and Chapter Six, ‘Making Sense of the Changes’ particularly absorbing.

In addition to vampires as actual fictional characters she looks at its use as metaphor and she’s undoubtedly given me a number of new lights for my nineteenth-century fiction-reading. I’m not just talking about Dracula and such, here; she has fascinating things to say about Jane Eyre, Bleak House and others. As usual, there were things I didn’t agree with, but when are there not?

Having said that, I found myself almost constantly aware that the book was published thirty-three years ago, before all the well-known vampire stuff that’s appeared from Buffy the Vampire Slayer onwards. On that point, I’d be surprised if there aren’t one of two works out there, currently unknown to me, to render this one obsolete.

It’s as much a survey of the academic literature as a treatment of the fiction, and I found that quite interesting (but, again, now probably outdated). Also, she might have gone a little further than she needed into some non-vampire aspects, but she held my attention in those cases, too. I suspect, though, that some might find it a little rambling and discursive.

Did not like the cover design ...

I'm reading The Witch by Ronald Hutton at the moment. It's a hefty work focused on the European Witch Trials of the early modern period, but in trying to answer the questions what did people actually believe, were they the same across Europe or were there significant regional variations, and why was the Church and secular response wildly different in different parts of the continent, he ranges over a wider geographical area as well as looking at recent history in other parts of the world - to a degree attempting to rehabilitate the comparative anthropology that was rejected in the 20th century.

So there are surveys of supernatural beliefs in Eastern Europe and in the British Isles too. I was catching hints of how the beliefs - for example in the Slavonic cultural zone, malicious magicians who could take animal form, in the British Isles the seductive but dangerous inhabitants of Faerie - could have fed into and enriched the idea of the vampire (not forgetting its classical Greek roots too, which Byron and Polidori drew on).

I'd already had to correct my belief that the modern vampire can be traced back to the 18th century reports of Dom Augustin Calmet but this was just a (rather late) chapter in a long story and indeed pushes back into the early modern and medieval worlds that Hutton has investigated for a different quarry (not to mention the comment - where did I read it? - that on a second look the Anglo Saxon Elves and Night Walkers are distinctly vampiric in behaviour.

Or maybe its artificial - away from the world of literature - to distinguish the vampire from all the other supernatural terrors. I mean, even Count Dracula, the vampire par excellence for over a century, is also a werewolf.

I was going to say that Dracula an International Perspective and The Cambridge Companion to Dracula have chapters that take the literary vampire story beyond the chronological limit of Carol A. Senf's book, but really I ought to remind myself what they say...

I will say that books in the Palgrave Gothic series, like all academic books, are ridiculously expensive. But, every so often there is an offer of deep discounts - I paid 10% of the normal price for Dracula an International Perspective. And paying extra for a hardcover isn't worth it - it's POD and the text block is just glued into hard covers - no endpapers, no head and tail bands, "perfect bound" not sewn.

How do you find these discounts? Just dumb luck. It was on somebody's Twitter feed (but once you've made an order, you're on the email list, it seems).

>185 housefulofpaper:

Wait, what? How is he also a werewolf?

This just reminded me I got another in the "Underworld" movie series, the second one with Bill Nighy. Anyway, there's a character in it who has the features of both vampires and werewolves, whatever that means.

>187 LolaWalser:

He has an affinity with wolves. He turns into a wolf - or a large dog. This is off the top of my head, but I think the "classic" werewolf mythology is largely the creation of Curt Siodmak for the 1940 The Wolf Man.

I'm not sure that werewolves weren't always shape-changers, not tied to a particular species. There might well be different "rules" in different cultures. I'm still learning about this.

I only watched the first two Underworld films. The Vampire/Werewolf thing there is essentially Mods vs Rockers, or White Collar vs Blue Collar, or Cats vs Dogs, and has nothing to do with any actual folklore that I'm aware of (although the class aspect has been pointed out before - I can't remember by whom - by contrasting Lugosi's Count with Lon Chaney's Larry Talbot (the Wolfman).

In the context of the films, is a vampire/werewolf like a King Arthur who'll unite the warring - not tribes, or nations...the warring "different types of monster"?

>188 housefulofpaper:

I thought the only good thing about "Underworld" was Bill Nighy. Yeah, I see those contrasts you mention. No idea of what they meant to do, I skipped the second movie for the third which is, as I gather, the second and last one with Nighy. Although didn't they have a later one with Charles Dance--if so, I may have to check that one out too...

I suppose the one thing that marks werewolves as significantly different to vampires is the connection to the moon, and the side effect of involuntary change.

>186 housefulofpaper:

I've got the Cambridge Companion on the go at the moment, about quarter-way through; haven't looked at it since starting the Senf; now I can't remember what I've read and I think I'm going to have to start again! I'm a bit 'vampired-out' at the moment, though—think I need a week or so of something non-vampire/horror/Gothic ...

I've seen one of the Underworld films. Can't remember which one, or much about it. I think it was one of those films that are mildly entertaining while you watch and gone very shortly after. I've never felt the need to watch any more of them. I suppose I should enter a caveat, disclaimer, or whatever. Don't tell anyone, but I've never seen the sexual attraction of skin-tight leather. And that's in spite of being a bit of a fan of Kate Beckinsale since Much Ado About Nothing days.

My old, now quite retired boss confessed to me that he utterly loved the Underworld series, and told me to give them a gander.

I was nonplussed watching the few that I did see in their entirety. Though I guess if someone likes seeing Kate Beckinsale in leather, and Bill Nighy doing his cool imitation of "Stern Daddy Vampire Leader", then there's quite a bit to love.

But after watching more than once, and notably (way) out of order...maybe I'm truly showing my cynicism and age (?). Thinking allowed to myself, "What, Vampires versus Lycans?", "Mutant versions of them?", "what am I watching?!"---

They sure look cool, kind of hard to argue about that & let's enjoy the moment of utter cluelessness on my part. I really like Bill Nighy in the Worricker Trilogy and anything with Charles Dance, though I missed him in GoT series.

>192 benbrainard8:

I thought of Nighy as a comedic actor so it was quite surprising to see him such a great, chilling monster-villain. Even so, I don't think I could see "Underworld" twice, at least without fast-forwarding, I barely made it until Nighy's appearance (I think some good 20-30 minutes into the film).

Dance is always a terrific villain. The main reason, with Lena Headey and Sean Bean, that I saw the first season of the GoT.

>193 LolaWalser:
I knew Bill Nighy had a weightier reputation that as a comedy actor, but his credits on IMDb don't quite bear that out.It looks like a sudden jump from jobbing actor to national treasure. I think the answer to the puzzle is his stage career.

I particularly remember Charles Dance as the lead (not a villain) in a 1987 TV movie called Hidden City scripted by Stephen Poliakoff. The details are rather vague now, but I remember an Iain Sinclair-ish atmosphere of paranoia, and possibly occult goings-on in (and under) '80s London.

>194 housefulofpaper:

I'd love to find that, I think Poliakoff is (was?) a great dramatist.

I have just finished reading an art book - a coffee table book? A monograph? A big old book, anyway. I picked up at Tate Britain after visiting the Aubrey Beardsley Exhibition last year (in the brief moment between lockdowns, but London was still eerily empty).

It's a Japanese book but has English text as well as Japanese. Either not a straight translation from the Japanese text, or if it is, it clearly misses some of the original out. The main draw is the reproductions of the various artworks. The book is The Art of Decadence: European Fantasy Art of the Fin-de-Siécle and it throws its net pretty widely, taking in Pre-Raphaelites, Symbolists, Commercial Art, as well as self-identified Decadents. It also ranges well into the 20th century to take in the Surrealists. Any actual Victorian would no doubt object to these all being lumped together but time and distance does smooth out the differences and bring out the common elements. There are Gothic themes that are picked out in the text (some in boxed-out mini-essays that don't get translated, alas).

Megalomartyr? Manducation? Ithyphallic? Yep, I'm getting back on with The Cambridge Companion to Dracula. Obviously broadening my vocabulary ... and that's only nineteen pages in ...

Angela Carter's collected fiction Burning Your Boats.

I don't think I can unpick the Gothic from the Revisionist Fairy Tale from the Post Modern from the Feminist from the Autobiographical though. Despite ranging widely across time and space and changing register from fantasy to realism there's the consistency of one voice, or of one mind.

There's an interview she did where Carter is challenged for being self-indulgent and her answer was (as far as I can remember) a robust "why the F*** shouldn't I be?" which at the time I felt didn't do her justice. The post, surely, is that if an author doesn't compromise (and I think that's the crux of the matter) then there's a richer and more honest one-on-one relationship with the reader than if the author was self-censoring, or holding back, or trying to write for a perceived market.

There are some lukewarm reviews for the book on here but the consistent complaint is that the collection is too rich to take in all in one go. Well, surely the obvious answer is to pace yourself.

I'm looking forward to moving on to the novels now.

>198 housefulofpaper:

Well, surely the obvious answer is to pace yourself.

Here, here! It is someone's life's work, after all, and blasting straight through in one go feels rather disrespectful, somehow; though I don't think I can make a reasoned argument for that. It seems to me that I read short stories 'better' when they are separated by plenty of other reading so that I can bring a 'rebooted sensibility' to each one (or each two or three).

Do you ever find yourself quite irrationally annoyed by something?

I'm currently reading Chapter 11 in The Cambridge Companion to Dracula, so I'm roughly two-thirds through ...

... and it's just dawned on me that whenever they should have used a '1' in a chapter number they've used an 'I' (upper-case 'i'). So '11' is 'II', '12' is 'I2', and so on (and this font has really annoying 'I's—so that's twice I'm annoyed—it rubs salt that the book's font has really distinctive 'I's). Completely derailed me this morning; broken my concentration on my pre-breakfast read ...

I think you're right to feel annoyed--that sounds like an automatised typesetting failure or some such. Certainly a mark of poor editing. I saw something similar recently in a book published by the University of Nebraska Press (uni presses are supposed to be better!), it was a translation from Russian but somehow or other some letters in random words were in the Cyrillic form--for example, what should have been "Ahmedov" was "Axmedov" etc.

>200 alaudacorax:

I'm not so sure. I've checked my copy of the book and it looks like an "I", but it's not the same height as "capital I" so it would have to be a "small caps 'I'" and just happily match the height of the other numerical characters. Or the typesetter carefully set the point size on the wrong character all the way through the book, instead of using the correct one. And it is all through the book, even on the copyright page.

I had got the impression that CUP only used one typeface in all their books. A quick look on my bookshelves shows that isn't strictly true, but there isn't a lot of variation from the house style. Which I would have thought would make a mistake like substitution a letter for a number less likely.

The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (11th printing 2012) also has "I for 1" but The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism (1996, seems to be the first printing) has "I" in the page numbering but "1" in the main text. Compared directly I can see that the typefaces are different.

Maybe the character isn't a mistake but CUP have adopted a typeface that uses "ones that like like I's" as a deliberate aesthetic decision? (Curiously, using a face originally for page numbering for the whole book - or maybe not so curious, as pretty much everything is composed as desktop publishing these days. I know I've retold my brother's story here before, how in the final years of paperback printer Cox & Wyman, publishers would provide books for printing as PDF files. And these publishers said their PDFs were "camera ready" to make the printing plates (actually rubber mats to fit over the press's rollers, as this was an offset litho printer) so they wouldn't pay for the printers to go through the copy and give it a final polish-up. Which is why modern books have so many typos and setting errors).

But why would a face deliberately have a "one" that looks like that? I wondered if it referred back to Ancient Greek (Cambridge University Press being, well, part of Cambridge University, an' all) and I went to my usual source...

The following is from Wikipedia (inevitably!) but the entry comes with a note, "This article contains uncommon Unicode characters. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of the intended characters." So, yes the crucial character in the explanation below can't be reproduced here! Anyway, for what it's worth...

"The Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations' Linear A and Linear B alphabets used a different system, called Aegean numerals, which included specialised symbols for numbers: 𐄇 = 1, 𐄐 = 10, 𐄙 = 100, 𐄢 = 1000, and 𐄫 = 10000.

"Attic numerals comprised another system that came into use perhaps in the 7th century BC. They were acrophonic, derived (after the initial one) from the first letters of the names of the numbers represented. They ran Greek Zeta archaic.svg = 1, Greek Pi archaic.svg = 5, Greek Delta 04.svg = 10, Greek Eta classical.svg = 100, Greek Chi normal.svg = 1,000, and Greek Mu classical.svg = 10,000. The numbers 50, 500, 5,000, and 50,000 were represented by the letter Greek Pi archaic.svg with minuscule powers of ten written in the top right corner: Attic 00050.svg, Attic 00500.svg, Attic 05000.svg, and Attic 50000.svg.1 One-half was represented by ⊂ (left half of a full circle). The same system was used outside of Attica, but the symbols varied with the local alphabets: in Boeotia, Greek Psi V-shaped.svg was 1,000.2"

"Greek Zeta archaic" looks like a capital I in the text on Wikipedia itself.

>202 housefulofpaper:

I'm afraid I'm not following your first paragraph there, partly because with the font I'm seeing on my laptop I can't tell exactly what letter or digit you've got within your quotes. Anyway, here's a scan of what I'm seeing in the book—definitely an upper case 'i' as you can see the cross pieces at top and bottom: Bugger! Can't remember how to do images!

>203 alaudacorax:

By the way, I don't get my books that dirty—I think I need to clean the glass on my printer ...

>203 alaudacorax:

Sorry, hopefully the images below will explain what I was trying to say:

Page number from The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism (1996):


But numerals in the main text from The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism look like this:


Numerals in the main text from The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (text set sometime between 2002 and 2012):


From Wikipedia's entry on Greek Numerals

>202 housefulofpaper:, >205 housefulofpaper: - Maybe the character isn't a mistake but CUP have adopted a typeface that uses "ones that like like I's" as a deliberate aesthetic decision?

I don't know; those 'ones' in your first and third pics look just plain wrong to me. And now I just can't unsee it—had a quick look through The Cambridge Companion to Dracula and they are using that upper case 'i' all through the notes, index and 'Guide to Further Reading'—hundreds of 'em!

>200 alaudacorax: onwards -

And nobody else seems to have noticed; I've been searching online and can't find any mention of it.

>207 alaudacorax:

By a strange coincidence I received a book and an invoice on the 28th. The invoice is from The Private Libraries Association and all the numeral "1"s look like capital "I"s. I'm sure this isn't a clumsy mishandling of the characters, and that there must be a family or families of typefaces that adopt this design.

What do the other numbers look like? I won't screenshot the invoice, obviously, but between addresses, email addresses, invoice amounts etc. all the numerals 0-9 are used on it. "0" is wider than it's tall (sort of a pumpkin shape), the tails or bowls (struggling with the terminology here!) of 3,4,5,7, and 9 are below the line, and only the top bit of the 6 is above the line (you know what I mean I hope - like where bits of letters are described as above or below the body of the letter form - "l" and "f" over, "g" and "y" under, for example).

So far I haven't managed to acquire a book of typefaces (not that I've been actively looking for such a thing...) so I don't think I can delve any further into this.

>208 housefulofpaper:

The same thing coming from another source suggests that it must be some standard typeface or font. If it is I haven't been able to find it. It's a rather difficult subject to formulate online searches for, though.

Anyway, I got so curious I emailed Cambridge University Press. Don't know if they'll answer ...

>209 alaudacorax:

Cambridge University Press sent me a couple of very nice emails.

It seems their font is Adobe Garamond. I've been searching online and it seems the odd '1' is a feature of the Garamond group of types rather than Adobe Garamond in particular. But I STILL cannot find out why that odd '1' was decided upon. It's as if nobody's ever noticed. Or I just haven't found the knack of wording my online searches properly ...

So, there are all these letters and symbols and nine other digits to which I have no objection at all ... and this '1' which is really starting to annoy me! It just looks plain wrong, but I suppose I just have to learn to live with it ...

... and learn to wean myself off all these ellipses ...

>210 alaudacorax:
…I get the sense that you are not ready to move on…and that the pressure is building…

>210 alaudacorax:

I found this online. The "1" in the character map is an Arabic numeral one, the example in the box above, used in a date, looks like a capital i. Still confused.

https://fontlot.com/15206/adobe-garamond/

But I know a bit more. The numerals are "text figures" and were/are fancy/desirable because they don't stand out in a line of lower-case letters. They required extra characters in a set of founts but that's easy with digital typesetting - so, they're back!

As to why the "one" looks like that presumably Garamond or someone in his circle, or someone whose handiwork was misattributed to Garamond, write a "one" like that (sometimes), or cast a foundry-type "one" like that (sometimes), and a modern-day typographer (is that the right word) has historical and/or aesthetic reasons for adopting it in the modern typeface (sometimes!)

>212 housefulofpaper:

... and it's just bad luck I find myself at odds with that 'modern-day typographer'. Oh well ...

It's been a Belgian Fantastique week, reading-wise.

I found out that Jean Ray's short fiction is being translated and published in English in the original volumes for the first time, and promptly bought the first one, Whiskey Tales. And this prompted me to go back to a collection of stories by Thomas Owen which I had started but made little headway with. I've rather skittishly been alternating between them, but it's the Thomas Owen book I finished first.

The book is The House of Oracles and Other Stories. A short introduction gives biographical details and so on - pen name of Gerald Bertot born 1910 in Louvain, corresponding with Ray by 1927, writing his own strange or fantastic tales by the 1940s. The book selects stories from books published in Belgium between 1963 and 1978, although I had a sense that some could have been written earlier. It's hard to pin down why, but the first handful of stories in the book feel as if they belong to an earlier time, pre WWII I think.

I couldn't shake the feeling of the stories being derivative, as if here Owen is "doing" the sort of psychological sex-crime story that the 60s and 70s seems to have been full of (in movies and TV as much as in popular fiction); and then there he seems to be aiming at a Borgesian timeless, riddling fable. Which I hope doesn't sound like I'm putting the collection down. It could be that the nature of selecting a "best of" volume paradoxically doesn't do the author justice (I know I didn't "get" Edgar Allan Poe until I'd worked my way through all his short fiction). Or perhaps I was disappointed that the majority of the stories - what I imagined as the post-War stories (in defiance of the post-War dates of all the volumes the stories are drawn from!) didn't seem distinctively Francophone or Belgian but could have been (I imagined) by Patricia Highsmith, or Roald Dahl, or Jorge Luis Borges. So that would really be a problem with the expectations I was bringing to the book.

>214 housefulofpaper:

Nevertheless sounds interesting, but then, I don't have any idea of what would make for some special "Belgian" makeup.

I came across a very interesting mention of "Gothic", as it predates the usual literary references (Walpole, I guess) by almost half a century--but, admittedly, it's applied to a construction, not literature. But still... the spirit is the same.

In Addison and Steele's The Spectator of Saturday, May 12, 1711, Addison writes (spelling and italics in the original):

In the midst of my Conversation with these invisible Companions, I discovered in the Center of a very dark Grove a monstrous Fabrick built after the Gothick manner, and covered with innumerable Devices in that barbarous kind of Sculpture.

>215 LolaWalser:

That's a teaser of a quote. What was the context? Reads like a piece of a typical Gothic horror tale.

Such a difficult quote, too. I find Gothic architecture so beautiful (mostly) that it's difficult to get my head around that they were so steeped in the classical world and neo-classicism that they could find it 'barbarous'. I've probably written here often that when I read Gothic stories I instinctively think of an older, darker, pre-Gothic architecture—Norman or Romanesque, perhaps. Gothic just doesn't strike me as a proper setting for Gothic!

And that's prompted another thought. Could Walpole, for example, with his love of Gothic architecture, have been so steeped, or previously so steeped, in that Addison-like mindset that he was actually picturing The Castle of Otranto in a Gothic architecture setting? That would make him even more of a rebel than I thought him already.* I'm now thinking of him as a sort of eighteenth-century equivalent of a modern Goth.

* By that I mean—and I'm not sure if it's striking me for the first time or just striking me anew—how much he must have been deliberately going against his background and public opinion. Flaunting it, in fact.

>214 housefulofpaper: - ... I know I didn't "get" Edgar Allan Poe until I'd worked my way through all his short fiction ...

A bit of a tangent, here—and I'm going to commit heresy, so turn away now if you're at all squeamish—but I've had an itch to get it down for a while.

I've been slowly working my way through my Barnes & Noble complete Poe for quite a while now (I have that and its sister Lovecraft edition permanently in reach of where I'm sitting, though I may not touch either for weeks at a time). Anyway (gulp, deep breath), I find a lot of Poe's more obviously satirical pieces tiresome. Half of them I don't understand, anyway, because I just don't have the context (you may remember our group-reading of 'King Pest' as an extreme example). When I do have some understanding, though, I often find myself thinking that I just don't like this chap who is writing.

And then he'll go and chuck in something that's among the finest writing I've ever seen ...

>215 LolaWalser: >216 alaudacorax: Funnily enough, I started (re)*reading The Castle of Otranto yesterday, and the lengthy introduction by E.J. Clery specifically mentions that Walpole was, indeed, flouting literary conventions - what Clery calls "the prevailing mode of realist fiction" - with this book. So much so that for its first run, he published it not as a piece of original fiction, but as a "discovered" manuscript translated from the Italian, just in case it wasn't well received.

That first run was well received, though the second run, in which he came clean in a new Preface, got a much more mixed reaction.

Clery also specifically calls out in a footnote the difference between gothic, the historical time period, which he styles with a lowercase 'g,' and Gothic, "the 18th century aesthetic movement," which he styles with a capital 'g.'

From what I understand, before "Gothic" became the name of a genre and aesthetic movement, the term "gothic" referred to the various "barbarians" then blamed for the fall of Rome. That might explain Addison's description of Gothic architecture as "barbarous" - literally, in the style of the peoples they collectively labeled barbarians.

I'm hardly an expert; all of you know a lot more about the genre than I do. But the coincidence of timing was too much for me not to weigh in a little.

*I did read it when assigned in college. I know I did, because the introduction is highlighted and vocabulary words that I apparently didn't know back then are circled lightly in pencil throughout. But I have only the vaguest of memories of reading it, more a very light sense of deja vu while reading than anything concrete, so it's a lot like reading it for the first time.

>218 Julie_in_the_Library:, >216 alaudacorax:

Reads like a piece of a typical Gothic horror tale.

haha, doesn't it! That's why I had to bring it here.

The piece is an Allegory about False Wit, and not the most amusing essay so far, as Allegories tend to abuse one's patience with attitudes, moods, and other abstractions Personified.

Found a link with the whole text (mind the possible http vs. https complications):

http://www2.scc.rutgers.edu/spectator/text/may1711/no63.html

From what I understand, before "Gothic" became the name of a genre and aesthetic movement, the term "gothic" referred to the various "barbarians" then blamed for the fall of Rome.

Yes, oodles of Goths swept in and ended Rome... although arguably they didn't start the rot. There's no organic connection between Goths and "Gothic" architecture AFAIK, it's pure association.

What thrills me about Addison's remark is that it seems to show some already-existent sense of what will be developed in Gothic fiction--but long before that fiction came to be!

>219 LolaWalser: Thanks for the link!

These days historians are putting a lot less of the blame for the fall of the Roman empire in the west on the Goths, or any singular cause, I think, in favor of a 'multiple causes, some internal, some external, and a gradual failing rather than a single, cataclysmic collapse,' type theory. That's what I get from the history podcasts I've been listening to, anyway.

I've finished The Castle of Otranto. I found it interesting, though I did have some trouble with the formatting. Trying to figure out who's speaking in a book written before the convention of starting a new paragraph for each new speaker, or even the use of quotation marks, definitely slowed me down and made it harder to parse what was going on.

The plot was interesting, and definitely contains the elements we now associate with the Gothic genre. Interestingly, it also has a lot of the hallmarks of the classic tragedy.

From a modern standpoint, the characterization was flat and in some cases even inconsistent, but Walpole hardly seems to have been going for round, believable characterization, and at the time he wrote the book, that wasn't a fault, as far as I know.

And even with that wooden characterization, I still found myself wanting Matilda to get her happy ending, and dismayed when she was killed, which is quite a feat on Walpole's part.

The pacing felt rushed, to me, but again, stylistic differences in fiction writing between the 18th century and now account for that.

All in all, I think it's an okay story whose importance lies in its breaking with contemporary literary trends and its place as the beginning of the Gothic genre. Clery's introduction (my copy is the Oxford World Classics edition, and includes a 36 page introduction by E.J. CLery) was fascinating, and definitely enhanced my reading experience by providing the historical context necessary to get the most out of the novel itself.

>219 LolaWalser:

Oops! I hadn't fully taken on board just how early that quote was. I was about to suggest that Addison may have been reacting to the Graveyard Poets; but he was actually writing well too early for them, too. That really is an intriguing quotation.

... it seems to show some already-existent sense of what will be developed in Gothic fiction ...

Yes, it definitely has a feel that he expects the reader to recognise the style. But from what context? Quite fascinating.

>220 Julie_in_the_Library: - ... it also has a lot of the hallmarks of the classic tragedy.

Interesting you should say that. Like other males of his class and time, he would have been steeped in that stuff, of course, so I suppose he couldn't help it coming out in places. For me it just emphasises how self-conciously he must have been rebelling against that background.

This is a quote from Nick Groom's chapter in The Cambridge History of the Gothic Volume 1. The chapter's title is "The Term 'Gothic' in the Long Eighteenth Century, 1680-1800":

...the eighteenth-century understanding of the Gothic is broadly made up of various recognisable, if braided threads. First, the reception of the history and reputation of the ancient Goths themselves as the barbarians of antiquity. Second, the reputed social organisation of ancient Gothic society: their characteristic system of government, and its influence on the British constitution and contemporary politics. And third, the developing taste for the culture of the Middle Ages, particularly in architecture, design and literature - often tied to a growing sense of nationalistic pride in industry and empire. But very quickly - and at the same time - this Gothicism also became supernatural and mysterious.

This forms the end of the opening section of the (long) chapter and sketches out the shape of the ensuing argument. The second "thread" might provoke some headscratching. What have the Goths to do with the British constitution? How can Britain claim them as their own in some way, and why would they want to? Well, quite simply historians from Classical times onwards had tended to conflate all the Northern "Barbarian" tribes and peoples into one mass, and "Gothic" became a catch-all term "making", as Groom notes, "the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes and Normans" who had settled in the British Isles "effectively Gothic. Moreover, in the revised and abridged version of Camden's Britannia that appeared at the beginning of the eighteenth century, so too were some of the Scots."

This was politically useful both for the Union of Scotland and England (similar antiquarian arguments were put forward with regard to the Welsh, too) and for the House of Hanover's accession to the Throne. Obviously the Goths who migrated from the (mythical) island of Scandza had to be "hardy but also vigorous and martial and fertile"..."values of courage and loyalty, and an instinctive love of freedom and resistance to tyranny"..."In this context the Sack of Rome could be viewed as a heroic resistance against imperial tyranny and decadent corruption." (Groom, again).

Nick Groom tracks a lot of to-ing and fro-ing where different cultural and political factions adopt or reject the idea of Gothic for political or aesthetic reasons (often both at the same time). Shakespeare is Gothic when contrasted with Greek tragedies or the French playwrights who adhered to the Classical unities. Medieval cathedrals are defended against the proponents of a severe classicism in architecture.

Getting back to the quote from Addison in >215 LolaWalser:, this is clearly seeing Gothick as "Grotesque and Picturesque" (to anachronistically quote Poe), which was also a yardstick applied to writing of the period, was there was a movement of compressed, slangy, train-of-thought literature very different from the chilly poise of the Augustans. Sterne would exemplify this type of writing I think. So there's a line from Gothic to the literature of Sentiment (I'm quite chuffed that I had picked up on this independently when discussing Tristram Shandy with frahealee).

As to where the supernatural element comes from, I guess it was just in the air to a degree - just a change of fashion after the clockwork rationalism of the "Age of Reason". Nick Groom notes the popularity of the 1001 Nights. Also, Ossian - the sort-of fake, sort-of stitching together scraps of Celtic legend that was becoming a National myth, for a time.

>223 housefulofpaper:

Very interesting--if anything, one might think Gothic novels were SLOW to show up!

>216 alaudacorax:
The architecture actually associated with the Goths is in Ravenna and Spain I think, and is obviously Romanesque or Byzantine to the untrained (i.e. my) eye.

>217 alaudacorax:
It was precisely the lesser works that contextualised him for me. I had had trouble grasping why Poe was a great writer and why it doesn't seem to be a universal opinion (on this side of the Atlantic anyway). He's not polite. He's not a gentleman (Oh, how he'd hate that!) but he flaunts his learning in your face. He offends good manners with his gorier moments. He mocks the reader (with literary hoaxes, with shaggy dog stories) even as he has to write for a paying public.

In learning his flaws I could understand the celebrated stories in context instead of thinking to myself "if these is so great, why it is so arch here, or why choose to tell the tale as this extended hysterical monologue, etc.?"

In short its different from the classic ghost story or classic "good" writing, both of which are really products of the English public school system and represents their mode of English.

>224 LolaWalser:
Yes. The 17th century was full of incident though. It makes you wonder if a culture, like an individual, can just need a period of calm to recover from a trauma.

Finished The Cambridge Companion to Dracula.

As with all collections of essays, I have mixed feelings. Some sections took a lot of work and some just plain annoyed.

I'm glad to have read the opening chapters, which added a lot to my understanding of where Stoker was coming from in his writing, and the final chapters dealing with Dracula/vampires on screen, which gave me some new insights to chew over.

These academic works are rather like vampires, surreptitiously spreading their kind—I can't seem to read one without adding to my book-bill ...

>226 alaudacorax:

It pointed me to a few more Dracula films I haven't seen, too. I'm going to have to make a list or something ...

Duplicate post ... don't know why I didn't spot it yesterday ...

I'm feeling the need to wean myself off human blood.

Decided to give myself a rest from vampires for a while and make a start on Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic. I've been intending to read Radcliffe's 'other' novels ever since I bought a box set. Last night, I was really quite shocked to find that was back in November 2013!!! Most certainly time to make a start. I shall read some as they crop up in this (said he, hopefully ...)

Doesn't help that I recently went on a rather impulsive buying spree and now I'm starting to panic at the sheer number of unread non-fictions piling up around here. The more academic ones take such a long time to read.

>229 alaudacorax:

I'm sure language was much simpler when I was young. 'Other' is such a loaded term in today's literary studies. I simply meant all the novels that are not The Mysteries of Udolpho.

>229 alaudacorax:, >230 alaudacorax:

Can anyone explain to me why, when I search my books for 'Ann Radcliffe', Jack Kerouac's On the Road turns up top of the list?

>230 alaudacorax: I simply meant all the novels that are not The Mysteries of Udolpho.

That is how I interpreted your words.

Also, now you have me curious about Radcliffe's other books.

>231 alaudacorax:
I have given up on trying to reason why books not related to my search appear in the lists produced, or why some unrelated books appear in the Touchstones.

>231 alaudacorax:

I just tried the experiment, and I got Conjure Wife at the top of the list!

Terrible habit of forgetting stuff I buy for the Kindle, especially short story collections. I bought Weird Tales #363: The Return of The Magazine That Never Dies eight months ago and I've only just finished it. And there's really not a lot of content in it for the price.

Good quality content, though. Some very good stories and I rather liked some of the mixed-in poems, too. Two stories that have really stuck in my mind, Lisa Morton's 'A Housekeeper's Revenge' and Jonathan Maberry's 'The Shadows Beneath the Stone'.

I don't know if all the stories are first time published as one, Hank Schwaeble's 'Payday', seemed very familiar.

I've just used the phrase 'paralysis by indecision' on another thread. That prompted this post.

I finally discovered where I'd put my copy of Punter & Byron's The Gothic (hadn't seen it in months). I discovered I have many times more of their 'key works' still to read than I've actually read. So I've made a resolve to get on with reading them.

BUT ... I'm currently reading Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic and, of course, realising I really need to read her 'other' novels—as opposed to 'Udolpho'—to properly get through this book.

However, I've recently started a project of rereading all of Jane Austen—one of my favourite authors; but I hadn't read most of her in years (hasn't helped that I enjoyed Pride and Prejudice so much that I read it twice).

In another part of my mind (probably when I'd forgot to keep a wary eye on it), I'd decided I really should read some contemporary novels. In fact, my idea of a contemporary novel probably got stuck somewhere around Salinger or Kingsley Amis and I really need to catch up.

I was thinking in terms of a cycle, something like Austen–key work–contemporary–Radcliffe–Austen; but ...

Now I'm totally roadblocked. I'm paralysed by fear of the vast reading list looming over me, feeling I should cut something—but I absolutely don't know which—simply can't make up my mind to any of them.

Do you think I need counselling?

>235 alaudacorax:
I think you need to chill out and read what you are enjoying. As Confucius reputedly said (I have not read any eye-witness accounts to support this allegation), "Even the longest journey starts with the first step."

Also, as Blue-boy advised Uncle Buck, "Even the champion potato peeler only peels one potato at a time." (It might have been Uncle Buck advising Blue-boy.)

There is also relevant elephant advice. What is the best way to eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

Do not focus on the mountain. Focus on the next step.

Just pick a book and read it.

Happy reading. We will be interested in your comments no matter what you read or in which order you read them.

Note: Calls may be recorded for training and quality assurance purposes.

>236 pgmcc:

Trouble is, I really love plans and lists and roadmaps ... and then, when I fail to stick to them, I get utterly depressed about it ...

... and post on LT instead of getting on with some reading ...

I'm currently reading Mrs Radcliffe's first novel, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne. I'm about half-way through.

I have to say I'm quite disappointed. As far as I can work out, she was in her middle twenties when she wrote it (I may have that wrong); but it strikes me as very much a juvenile effort and I could well believe she wrote it ten of fifteen years earlier.

There is so much about it that really will not bear too much thinking about—it's difficult to keep up your suspension of disbelief when there's a screaming lack of logic in something she's just written. It doesn't help that the heroes—there seem to be two of them—appear to be idiots.

It really doesn't chime with my memories of the author of 'Udolpho'.

>238 alaudacorax:

I can see my Folio Society boxset of Mrs Radcliffe's novels from where I'm sitting.

(They're on a shelf of what was supposed to be my "currently reading" books, but I haven't started them yet. And I've got my father's bad habit of letting all flat surfaces silt over with stuff. Working from home has only made this worse. I see my wallet, a hole punch, hand sanitiser and wipes, pens and pencils, but also more bookish debris including a French paperback of Les Fleurs du Mal (not a pretentious pose - who's here to see it? - but reminding me how far I still am from being able to read it) and a rubber bulb with a nozzle - for blowing dust and detritus from the gutters of books).

At least The Castles of Athlin and Dunblayne is the shortest her books.

>239 housefulofpaper:

Disgraceful.

>240 housefulofpaper: If it makes you feel any better I will tell you that your picture presents a much tidier set up than my study. There are degrees of what you have termed disgraceful.

:-)

>241 pgmcc:

That's reassuring

>242 housefulofpaper:
Note, I did not present, nor offer to present, a photograph of my study. Too much reassurance would be bad for you.

>238 alaudacorax:

Finished The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne. It didn't get much better.

It's difficult. It's enthusiastic—if that makes any sense—and I sort of want to like it. There really is a sense of a teenage girl making her first attempt. I don't dislike, but cannot but be aware it's not very good. If, in my current lit. studies reading, I were to find that she actually did write it when she was about fourteen, I'd be happier with it.

I'm enjoying a translated book titled, Japanese Tales of Mystery & Imagination (1956), written by Edogawa Rampo. I first read it in May 1997. Must have purchased it in Japan because the paperback has a sleeve written in Japanese.

Edogawa Rampo, here's what it say briefly on web here about him: "Tarō Hirai, better known by the pseudonym Edogawa Ranpo, also romanized as Edogawa Rampo, was a Japanese author and critic who played a major role in the development of Japanese mystery fiction."

These are ten of his fifty three short stories, and I know that at least two of them have been made into films, one is "Caterpillar" (2010), called "Kyatapirâ" in Japanese.

Enjoyable stuff, very noirish, too. The running joke on the pseudonym (name) Edogawa Rampo is that if you said phonetically 4-5 times, you'll hear the name from which it's based, the Japanese pronunciation of Edgar Allen Poe.

>244 alaudacorax:
I've started reading The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne. Only one chapter in so far, after Devendra P. Varma's introduction (which wasn't, thankfully, the kind of introduction that gives away the plot. But it does work quite hard to sell this first novel as worth reading in its own right. Well, we'll see).

> 245
I've probably got the same book, but in a different cover. Translation (1956) by one James B. Harris.

It's slightly mind-blowing that "Edogawa Rampo" isn't simply a homonym (near enough) for "Edgar Allan Poe" but actually means something in Japanese (or so I read, and have to take on trust!).

If you put "Edogawa Rampo" into imdB, there's a long list of credits, and although there's an anime series with a character taking the same name, there are also screen adaptations of his work. I've seen one of them, Horrors of Malformed Men. If I remember correctly, this is based on a novel but incorporates elements from other of Rampo's stories.

>247 housefulofpaper:

Funnily enough, Japanese Tales of Mystery & Imagination is shelved right next to Whiskey Tales by "the Belgian Poe", Jean Ray.

>246 housefulofpaper:

I don't think I mentioned it, but I wasn't overly impressed by Mr Varma. He had some interesting things to say, but there were a couple of things that really jarred with me.

There was that piece of poetry he claimed Coleridge had written about Mary Shelley. First of all, it didn't make sense (why on earth would Coleridge refer to Mary as 'immortal Boy'?); second it was by Thomas Gray and written before she was born.

Then there was that story about Radcliffe scaring some hack writer. I was pretty doubtful about that one first reading it; but then I did some hunting and found that Ann Radcliffe, A Biography, from which it is taken, is pretty much a work of fiction; see here:
http://webpage.pace.edu/rmartin/studentprojects/mgabriels/GabrielsARppr2002.pdf
Surely Varma must have known that?

>249 alaudacorax:

I didn't make my point; which was that I was left not sure how much I could trust the rest of his introduction.

>247 housefulofpaper: yes, indeed that's the version.

>249 alaudacorax:

From his Wikipedia entry it seems he was more focused on hunting down lost and ignored Gothic works than critical analysis of them. Maybe retelling the hack writer story demonstrates a degree of credulity (okay, it does), but it's not the same as Peter Haining's "improving" on reality.

>252 housefulofpaper:

As long as we don't find he wrote one of 'em ...

Just finished Jane Austen's Emma. I was about to start a post with a humorous reference to it. Something like: 'Just finished Emma. Did NOT find any Gothic bits in it.'

Now, I read it with one eye open for any at all connection to Gothic literature and I'm pretty sure Miss Austen didn't have any thought of the Gothic in mind when she wrote it; but then I thought, given my experience with Sense and Sensibility (https://www.librarything.com/topic/317445#7555126), I'd better check online first, just to be sure.

Only to come upon, in a back issue of the International Gothic Association's journal, 'Labyrinths of Conjecture: The Gothic Elsewhere in Jane Austen's Emma'. The journal is behind the paywall but the matter given suggests the article makes links with Frankenstein yet! And that was only the first of the hits my search threw up.

The main bulk of my post was intended to be of my enthusiasm for my next read, which actually is Frankenstein; but I feel quite deflated now ...

There, there...

Let's read Frankenstein! I never did, can you believe it. And to think I have three copies...

>255 LolaWalser: I'm in! I've read it long, long ago---gosh, over 30-35 yr.s ago as a late teen.

I've got this version, titled Frankenstein, 1818 Text, Oxford World's Classics.

And I want to re-watch the Ken Russell movie Gothic (1986) and perhaps the Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994) with Robert De Niro and Kenneth Branagh.

>256 benbrainard8:

Cool!! I too have the 1818 text, and also the 1831 one. I think I'll read up on the versions but go with the earlier one first.

Heh, speaking of Frankenstein--the other day I saw Paul Bartel's Death Race 2000 from 1975 (A Roger Corman production) and the lead is David Carradine, playing a homicidal race driver called... Frankenstein.

And a little before that I saw Young Frankenstein for the first time ever... Clearly the time has come to tackle the source.

>257 LolaWalser:

Ha-ha! Love Young Frankenstein. I have a copy somewhere and watch it every few years—overdue for a viewing.

>255 LolaWalser:

Oneupmanship alert! I now have five copies. I wanted to read Nick Groom's introduction to the current Oxford World's Classics edition; so just I've lashed out the princely sum of £4-55 ... am I getting obsessive?

>255 LolaWalser:, >256 benbrainard8:, >257 LolaWalser:

Do we need a Frankenstein thread? I've been posting lately on the 'Frankenstein remix' thread; but it's quite possible I'm missing some nuances of the word 'remix'; a word I'm barely on nodding acquaintance with.

>259 alaudacorax:

I vote that you be our Grand Frankenstein Poobah and lead the way. Show of hands?

👋

Yay !

>246 housefulofpaper: - ... after Devendra P. Varma's introduction (which wasn't, thankfully, the kind of introduction that gives away the plot.

Dammit, Varma, why can't you control yourself? He's actually quite a good prose writer, and I was quite enjoying his introduction to A Sicilian Romance. I was swept along, half of my mind happily day-dreaming about looking for a couple of big reproduction books on Salvator Rosa and Claude Lorraine Lorrain. I'd finished the damn thing before I properly took on board that he'd given away the plot!

I really must—really, really must—educate myself into reading the text FIRST.

... or, reading the TEXT first ...

Damn it all ... I have so many books here that I've bought and never read. Well, I'm making a 'Christmas Resolution' this Christmas. I'm going to dig out and do a marathon read of all those books I bought about the history of panto.

I've long suspected—based on nothing much but suspicion, really—that the traditional British panto developed out the Gothic theatre plays popular in the early nineteenth century (I also have a suspicion that Le Fanu's Madame de la Rougierre (Uncle Silas) is connected with the traditional Pantomime Dame). I know about panto's connections with commedia dell'arte and carnival and so on; but I'm sure the actual stock stories were influenced or inspired by the early Gothic.

So that's my Christmas project.

>264 alaudacorax:
You might just have prompted my reading of Uncle Silas. I have a beautiful copy with a slipcase and have not read it yet.

Thank you. That shall be my Christmas project. Not as Herculean as yours, but baby steps are better than no steps at all.

Thank you for that.

By the way, the unread books in our collections are the un-mined wealth of our libraries and are a badge of honourable intent. At least, that’s what I tell myself whenever I am buying another book.

Good morning all,

I write this with trepidation, because you could call my Gothic batch a "baby collection", whopping 40 books that might considered Goth/Gothic genre/timbre...

But I've got to say...though I completely sympathize with not reading the "pre-text", e.g. introductions, author biographies, etc.---- Because as you know, sometimes the plots are given away (inadvertently?). Some of us, esp. me, are so completely lost that we sort of have to rely upon them.

As I wind down my reading of The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ms. Ann Radcliffe, I oftentimes have to remind myself: "yes, she's writing this nearly fully century prior to the release of Dracula" (nearly 104 years to be exact!), or I've got to look up when something was invented, or "Google" certain time periods and countries (bandits in Italy?).

And heavens, don't start me on vocabulary. I've still not 100% certain of what "casements" are---windows. window bays, sitting areas next to windows? (Help!)?

Um, as to what to read next, I've gotten my Year 2021 stash of new books to read, new 18-20 of 'em. Happily, many are (already) on your "must read" list(s). Bad news, I've already come up with a new 15-20 book list to purchase for Year 2022. Sigh.

But it sure is fun, isn't it ? And very satisfying.

Best holidays to you all from our dreary, wet/snowy/gray/grey/dark at 4 p.m. NW.

>266 benbrainard8:

Yes, what are casements, anyway? It feels like a word I've glided over for years and never actually got to grips with - something to do with windows, certainly (I am reminded of our English teacher catching us out, when studying Cold Comfort Farm - the book's a parody of Rural Gothic, by the way - maybe add it to the list ;) - we were challenged to explain the phrase "the mullions and scullions of Cold Comfort Farm". "What are mullions?" "Er...something to do with windows?""Okay. And what are scullions?""Something else to do with windows?" No. no they're not.

Anyway. Casements. Looking online brings up definitions describing a hinged window frame that opens like a door, but the first definition in my Shorter Oxford Dictionary (1993) is the architectural "a hollow moulding especially a cavetto. Also, a matrix made to receive a monumental brass (late Middle English). In an architectural context, a cavetto (from the Italian, diminutive of cavo (hollow), is a hollow moulding with a quadrantal cross-section. Flipping back to the definition of casement, "A vertically-hinged frame with glass forming (part of) a window" is the usual sense. Also used, in a literary sense, as simply meaning "window".

I've read The Devil in Love. I thought that for most of the book, the tone was more ironic, and slightly saucy, Enlightenment philosophical fable - only taking on an air of menace at the end. I did learn from the introduction (I forgot myself, and read it first) that Cazotte had planned a longer work, and the second half as originally conceived would have been closer (in some ways) to something like The Monk.

>266 benbrainard8:, >267 housefulofpaper:

Ah. Reading your two posts, I've realised—just this moment—that it's never, over all these years, occurred to me to wonder what, exactly, Keats meant by 'magic casements' ('... opening on the seas of fairy lands forlorn ...', 'Ode to a Nightingale'). I'll have to give some thought to that ...

>269 alaudacorax:

Correction -

'... magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.'

Now I come to look hard at it, I get whiffs of Clark Ashton Smith, or Lovecraft at his most whimsical.

>270 alaudacorax:

Perhaps you could only see the 'faery lands' through that particular casement (because it was magic) ...

Edited to add ... that really should have been 'færy', I'm sure ...

>271 alaudacorax:

And now I'm sure someone's written a short story about that. M. R. James?

>272 alaudacorax:

Not M.R. James, I'm sure. It's definitely been used, and more than once. I think there's an Aickman story, and another story (which was possible a Deep Ones selection over in The Weird Tradition group) with a window looking onto a medieval castle. Something about different pennants revealing the castle had been taken by besiegers?

>273 housefulofpaper:

I think I was conflating two stories. Isn't there an MRJ story about an old pair of binoculars that looked into the past? And then something else that I can't bring to mind at the moment—possibly a children's story ...

>273 housefulofpaper:

Really confused now: those pennants have got my mind in Game of Thrones (the TV one) and, possibly, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, neither of which are relevant (probably).

>274 alaudacorax:

Yes, "A View From a Hill" is the one with the binoculars. In "Number 13" shadows from the room of the title are thrown onto a neighbouring wall and the protagonist gets a kind of shadow play of the goings-in.

I think mirrors are used more often than windows as a portal to "another place". I wish my memory were a bit more tenacious, then I could identify the Aickman story (there's a house, I think, and the view through the window - looking out from the inside - doesn't correspond with the landscape outside) and the "pennants" story (as far as I can remember it was a window frame rather than a mirror, and it was taken down from wherever it had been erected and hidden away by the protagonist, and he looked in on the scene like a child observing the life inside a glass-sided ant's nest).

I've finished my reading of The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ms. Ann Radcliffe. Reading it was bit exhausting, so am going to do brief respite with read of The Bloody Chamber and other stories, by Angela Carter (1979).

And will then jump back into the breach, reading The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, Matthew Sweet (Introduction and Notes).

>276 housefulofpaper:

Now you've awoken a little niggle in my brain. I know I have one video of 'A View from a Hill' from some years back; but didn't I see recently some new version scheduled for Xmas TV? Online searches are only throwing up the one I have. Perhaps it's been in the schedules recently and that's what I spotted. I really should write things down when I spot them ... keep a notepad on my desk or something.

Edited to add that Mark Gatiss is doing 'The Mezzotint' so it's not him ... and 'A Christmas Carol'.

Hello all,

I've just finished reading The Bloody Chamber and other stories, by Angela Carter (1979).

It's quite the enjoyable book. I especially enjoyed Carter's rendition of "Puss 'n Boots". Her writing is sumptuous, interesting, ghastly, and erotic.

And have just read 1st portion of the introduction to The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, Matthew Sweet (Introduction and Notes). At least Matthew Sweet had the common sense to warn readers that the 2nd portion of the Introduction "will have spoilers, and those readers that don't want to know the plot should read no further...". Looking forward to this book.

Ah. According to LT, I never finished reading 'The Bloody Chamber ...' I remember quite enjoying what I read. Another book to hunt up (must make a new year's resolution to buy bookcases ... must clear space to put them in!)

>278 alaudacorax:

Temporarily took out a sub. to Amazon Prime (for buying and sending Xmas presents). Spent what I think was several hours one day trying to hunt up 'free' films worth watching (it is possible to find a handful, but you need a computer to do it—you'll lose the will to live trying to do it on a 'smart' tv).

That's when I got confused: with their customary informativeness, UK Amazon has Luke Watson's 2005 A View from a Hill listed as 'M.R. James View from a Hill' with '2021' appended. Todgers.

Actually, I don't think I've read or watched a ghost story this Christmas. Must remedy that before the new year ... hate to be breaking with tradition ...

Oh yes I have! I randomly caught the second half of the George C. Scott 'Scrooge' sometime over the last few days. I thought it was quite good and I really must get to see it all.

>281 alaudacorax:

Ah, mystery solved! I glared at your message while I was "at work" (working from home, of course) but didn't get back to it. I thought maybe there was something on Radio 4 Extra, or a reading on YouTube (there seem to be a couple of people muscling in on Robert Lloyd Parry's patch!).

I hope you managed to catch The Mezzotint on Christmas Eve.

>283 housefulofpaper:

Didn't; in fact I completely forgot about it. I refer back to >278 alaudacorax:: I really should write things down when I spot them ... keep a notepad on my desk or something.

>284 alaudacorax:

Stone me! I really am getting senile. I did hear a ghost story for Christmas! Christmas Eve I listened to Michael Hordern reading 'The Mezzotint'. Found it on YouTube along with several others. He was very good, brought out the underlying sly humour, I remember. And if I remember correctly, I watched and listened to Michael Bryant's version immediately after (the Hordern was audio only). Can't remember what I thought of that, though.

>285 alaudacorax:

Bear with me ... really not as young as I used to be ... a revision. Watched the Michael Bryant first; much as I like him as an actor I got annoyed because there were bits missing; gave up and listened to the Hordern. So it anyone's tempted to nip over to YouTube, I'd advise you to skip the Bryant.

Really shouldn't have come on here today ... brain's clearly not up to it ...

>287 alaudacorax:
I feel we may be in the same boat. I started reading Uncle Silas yesterday. I am not far into it but I am finding it very entertaining. The copy I have been reading is a 1988 Folio Society edition that I picked up at a local book fair. The slipcase is in good repair and I was particularly pleased to get it as a professional dealer, who was quite large and very bullish, had more or less forced me out of his way to scan the stall it was at. He was picking books off the shelves and piling them up beside the till. He was being very thorough.

I spotted the gold embossed spine and the edges of the slipcase while trying to get past him.

Finally he was done and started sorting out payment for the dozen or so books he had selected. He was still talking to the stall holder when I brought the beautiful Uncle Silas edition to the till. The bullish dealer who had sieved through the shelves was in shock when he saw the book in my hand. Eyes open wide; mouth agape; hair standing on end. Well, the hair may not have been standing on end, but he was angry at himself for missing. That gave me extra pleasure. :-) The fact that it was marked €18 and the stall had a sign up stating, all books at half marked price, made me feel even better.

After his initial shock had been buried the bullish dealer was good humoured about it and said he would have snatched it up if he had seen it.

I suppose I should have offered it to him for a quick profit. :-)

Anyway, while I was enjoying reading this volume last evening before going to bed, I was rather cautious when continuing to read it in bed, as I do not want to damage the beautiful book that brought me such pleasure when buying it.

I checked my Libraything catalogue to see if I might have a copy more suitable for reading in bed and discovered I have two paperback copies; two Wordsworth editions, eminently suitable for reading in bed without worry of damaging. (I am passing over the fact that I acquired to Wordsworth copies of the same book. That is purely incidental and nothing to do with poor brain function or ageing; honest.)

I have now spent multiple hours trying to find at least one of those two Wordsworth editions. I thought I had all my Wordsworth editions together, but that is obviously not the case. :-(

>288 pgmcc:
I read your comments about your hardback Uncle Silas over in The Green Dragon group. Mine came cheap too - it was from Reading's last non-charity second-hand bookshop. The proprietor hated hardbacks as slow-moving stock and priced them accordingly. I can just make out a pencilled-in "£8" on the flyleaf. The best bargain, thought, was a letterpress "Folio Press" Barrack Room Ballads for the same price!

And, as I'm sure you know, the setting of Uncle Silas is only nominally England but is "really" Ireland (in much the same way that the London of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is "really" Edinburgh) - Le Fanu started using English settings so to be more palatable to a predominantly English readership.

>289 housefulofpaper:
Le Fanu started using English settings so to be more palatable to a predominantly English readership.

I realised that after reading the housekeeper referring to "English girls". The market in Ireland for Irish writers of the Gothic was limited to the Anglo-Irish community which, while in control of the wealth and government of the country, was small in number.

I've just begun reading The Woman in White (Oxford World's Classics), by Wilkie Collins and am greatly enjoying it. I can tell it was written for periodicals, as the plot flows very smoothly.

Supposedly, this is one of first vastly popular works where the story is told via the characters themselves, versus only an omniscient narrator?

Though about 600+ pages, it reads quickly, so hope to get through the 1st half this week. Will talk more about the story/plot in later post(s).

Heh, great enjoying your recounts of getting (rare?) editions. I've really got to get to (any) of our "2nd hand" bookstores, to see if I can enjoy a book hunt. Very unfortunately, our choices of bookstores have decreased markedly (dang you Amazon). But bless you B&N for at least trying to open a few new book and mortar stores.

Er, I'm doubting I'll run into any bullish book folks ---I kept imagining a Guy Ritchie film character, a Vinnie Jones look-a-like book seller/emp., when reading above description.

What should I be looking for other than "gold embossed spine and the edges of the slipcases"? Will anything jump out at me if I should come across, say a Folio edition of a book?

I'm complete novice at buying books like that, have honestly never done so... um, are we allowed to bargain prices down?

>292 benbrainard8:
a Vinnie Jones look-a-like book seller/emp

I can't resist re-posting a link to Iain Sinclair and Chris Petit's 1992 documentary The Cardinal and the Corpse.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7n74W9si1o&t=636s

>291 benbrainard8:
I enjoyed The Woman in White very much.

Supposedly, this is one of first vastly popular works where the story is told via the characters themselves, versus only an omniscient narrator?

I was not aware of that. Uncle Silas was published four years later and the story is told by the main protagonist. Well, the first book is; I am only about 20% into the book.

>294 pgmcc:

It seems an odd notion to me. The eighteenth century had novels told in the first person (some of them presented as factual first-hand accounts), and the epistolary novels of Samuel Richardson.

>292 benbrainard8:
I don't know how common it is to find Folio Society books "in the wild" in the US. It's been an increasingly important market for the Society, since at least when I joined over 30 years ago, but I would guess that the numbers involved are (still) comparatively small - and that goes especially for older volumes printed in the first 40-50 years of the Society.

They don't really have a uniform appearance, unless it's the slip-case (which a previous owner may have thrown away, anyway). If there's a slip-case that's a good indication. Older titles may have the title running bottom to top on the spine. It may look odd because of the absence of a price, or bar code, or publisher's blurb on the cover. Something else that isn't uniform is size. I suppose the majority of the books are the size of an average trade hardback (when I first joined, they were still using the traditional names for book sizes, I think this might be "crown octavo") but they can be bigger - sometimes much bigger - or considerably smaller. There are often comments in the Folio Society Devotees group on here about the new books being too big for comfortable reading.

>288 pgmcc:

Well, I did not succeed in finding either of my paperback copies of Uncle Silas. Still worried about damaging my fancy edition while reading in bed I had a look on-line and acquired a Kindle version fo 41 pence. I have been using this to read the novel, but I am feeling it is very much the poorer option. Apart from preferring to read a physical book, the Kindle edition has typos. It has been poorly proofed. Someone was trying to "quite" one character. "Your" became "You" in another sentence. I have compared the text with the Folio edition and verified that the Folio is better proofed.

I also got the sense that the Kindle edition may have had some of the words changed. While reading the Folio edition I found the language interesting due to the inclusion of words that have fallen out of common usage. Once I started reading the Kindle edition I felt the frequency of finding such words had fallen off. I have not carried out a detailed comparison, but at some stage, when I am felling particularly pedantic, I will compare some of the passages I liked in the Folio edition with the Kindle copy.

The other key comparison is the absence of the drawings of some of the scenes.

>292 benbrainard8:

More thoughts...

Being in the States you may find it easier to get hold of editions from some other publishers.

Easton Press - this company is still going but their product range is variable. There are editions of classic and modern works, facsimiles of old, typically 19th century books, "Deluxe Limited Editions" with newly-commissioned illustrations, and coffee-table books - the interior pages identical, I gather, from the editions available in shops from other publishers - bound into leather covers.

A number of Easton Press books reprint content from the Heritage Press. Sometimes, and certainly in an Easton Press book that I own - reproduced at a smaller size and what had been colour illustrations reprinted in black and white.

Visually, they tend to be much more standardised that Folios - typically leather covers with raised bands on the spine and a traditional stamped design on the front and back boards.

Franklin Library was a division of the Franklin Mint and produced books very similar in ethos and general appearance to Easton Press's offering. These were published between roughly 1970 to 2000.

>292 benbrainard8:
>298 housefulofpaper:

Limited Editions Club (LEC) - I would seriously consider looking for these books. I have put up photos of some of my recent acquisitions (got through the Internet - I only bought one LEC from a physical (UK) bookshop - and paid waayyy over the odds for it). This started over 90 years ago and carried on for a long time. Reportedly the quality dipped somewhat around 1970, and in the '80s under a new owner it changed direction and had a few years of producing livre d'artist volumes for thousands of Dollars a pop.

What is attractive about LEC books is that they were (bar a couple of volumes) all printed letterpress and more often than not, by recognised, even celebrated pressmen. The illustrations were newly commissioned and, starting business in the Great Depression, artists who would otherwise have been beyond the means of the LEC were glad of the work.

Visually, these are more along the lines of the Folio Society in having a slip-case and eschewing a regular size or "brand identity". Reportedly some of the more adventurous binding decisions/materials haven't stood up to the test of time. Once again there is a group on here, the George Macy Devotees (he was the creator and original owner of the LEC).

Heritage Press was a companion imprint to the LEC set up, I believe, chiefly to offer cheaper versions of LEC volumes. These would be offset litho printed, using plates created from (I presume) photographing the LEC letterpress sheets.

That said, some titles were only published by Heritage Press, and some Heritage Press books were printed letterpress. And some members of the George Macy Devotees have expressed a preference for the Heritage Press version of a book over the LEC.

I mentioned Heritage Press earlier because Easton Press bought the rights to reprint Heritage Press books (this is how, for example, my Easton Press Complete Poems of Edgar Allan Poe can be traced back to the 1940s LEC edition).

Not wanting to incur the displeasure of any Easton Press fans reading this (oh, forgot to say earlier - there are Easton Press Collectors and Franklin Library Collectors groups here) if there is a title published by LEC, Heritage, and Easton, I would assume that the quality ranking is LEC at the top, then Heritage, then Easton.

>292 benbrainard8:
>299 housefulofpaper:

I feel a bit of a fraud offering advice on book-hunting because I'm not really very practiced at it. I don't get to frequent lots of good quality second-hand and antiquarian bookshops (especially not in the last two years, of course). I used to benefit from visiting the local Oxfam bookshop often, and noticing changes to the stock (and also from the good fortune of having Brian Stableford and David Langford making big donations to it).

for what it's worth, here are my thoughts:
- don't dismiss a trade edition. A first edition may be worth a considerable sum. Also check for autographs and dedications.
- don't be put off by a book that looks a little "off", homespun or home crafted. you might just have found a hand-bound book from a small press.
- if the spine has faded so you can't see what the book title is, always check.

Oh, and for particular authors check for uniform/collected editions and small press/deluxe editions.

>300 housefulofpaper:

One more thing - check out the groups I mentioned above , and also the Fine Press Forum group. You could learn much by eavesdropping there, and no doubt even more by joining and being an active member.

>292 benbrainard8:
>301 housefulofpaper:

I can post pictures of a couple of Franklin Library and Easton Press books, and Folio Society books, and small press/fine press books if you think it would help identify their like in the wild.

Thank you very much, this has been very helpful!

I'll copy some of the notes above into an email and will send it to myself, so that when I go into one of these bookstores, I can read the notes on my smart phone.

I've double-checked the Folio Society website here in U.S., and there about 20 books that are labeled under the "Gothic" genre. And many have photos of the books, so I'll know what to look for.

Will be interesting to see how the books are kept in the stores that we've got. I know that some stores do keep limited editions under lock and key, even in glass cases. Or you have to review them in-person.

>303 benbrainard8:

I've taken a few photos of my shelves. Hopefully this will be useful.

I ought to sound a note of caution - the Folio Society books you see here tend to be a bit older and therefore a bit smaller than their current publications: they've tended to design larger-sized books for the last decade or so. This is simply what's out on my shelves. And I wasn't able to select only Gothic titles.

Annotating everything would take ages, so I'll add a few now, and maybe will return and add more later.

Two Easton Press Poe volumes (reprinting LEC/Heritage Press titles), a Tartarus Press hardback (larger than the norm), last year's Thornwillow letterpress Poe, an "average" Folio Society book (a '90s reprint of one they did in the '60s (I think), text reprints the Penguin Classics Marco Polo Travels), a letterpress "Folio Press" from around 1990 (Alexander Pope - the antithesis of Gothic!), the Viking hardback of a new (1990s) translation of The Saragossa Manuscript.


Arion Press's letterpress edition of The Moonstone. Peter Grimes is another Folio Press letterpress title. Books of Nonsense is also letterpress, from Incline Press in Oldham


Folio Society, a stapled booklet from the Welsh publisher Three Impostors, Folio, Ash Tree Press x3 (not letterpress but collectable, I believe. As far as I know no longer in business), Centipede Press x2, Night Shade Press (that one turned up in my local Waterstones, somehow), A sewn letterpress volume (a Fritz Leiber short story) from Pegana Press, Centipede Press and Folio Society.


Second attempt at this caption so apologies if it's a bit terse: The Robert Graves is an LEC. That's the back of the slip-case which at some point started to have the book title printed on it. The Allen Press "Rappaccini's Daughter. Both letterpress. Next 3x Folio Society (please ignore the homemade bookmark hanging out of Seamus Heaney's version of Beowulf). The slip-case for the LEC The Turn of the Screw. There's Incline Press' The Owl and the Pussycat between the two Centipede Press editions. The LEC and Incline Press books are letterpress of course. The Allen Press and Incline Press are "handmade" small press editions to boot. Yes, The Turn of the Screw was shelved in the wrong place!


Same shelf, I've turned the Robert Graves around so you can see the actual book's spine. you can also now see the Side Real Press edition of Monsieur de Bougrelon.


Starting with the Petronius, this section goes: Folio Society x3, Zagava Press, Folio Society, Folio Society facsimile of a 19th century edition of The Faerie Queene, the LEC Dracula, another Folio Society book.


Here's that anonymous clamshell/solander box: It's a letterpress edition of the naughty Earl of Rochester! (member wcarter featured his copy over in the Folio Society Devotees not long ago).


And here's the book - half leather (Nigerian goatskin) with hand-marbled paper sides. The guidance is to regularly handle the leather so the oils from your hands keeps it supple, but how to keep them away from the marbled paper?


Downstairs, and some more oversized Folio editions, some in Solander boxes, plus one LEC (The Oresteia) it's assumed that Twelfth Night is a rebound version of letterpress sheets from the Folio Society's letterpress Shakespeare - cf. the two boxes to its right. If so, it's a bargain!


Here's a look at a couple of shelves of myth, legend and folklore. Lots of Folio Society books. There's another Incline Press book, a sort of Folk Horror "golden book", the Reader's Digest Folklore Myths and Legends of Britain (a recent acquisition). Two books about King Arthur published by BBC Books in the '90s - including one that is a tie-in to a radio documentary series! The Chambers Thesaurus is bound in leather (but not printed by) the Folio Society. You can see a Vincent Price cookbook over on the next shelf.


Finally, back upstairs for a look at a Frankin Library book. This doesn't seem to be genuine leather, but it is signed by the author. Evidently there was a series of "signed first editions" - I presume there was a deal whereby these could be published a few days before the "real" first edition (i.e. the trade edition).

Those photographs are very pleasing. I see the same Folio Society Uncle Silas which I finished reading five minutes ago and came here to report its completion. I enjoyed it a lot.

>305 pgmcc:
I thought it was very good. And a brilliant solution to the mystery.

I've got the DVD of the BBC version starring Peter O'Toole. I haven't watched it yet but the Amazon reviews are divided. I wonder if the 1947 film version is available anywhere?

I'm going to have another go at captioning the remaining photos after the last attempt disappeared into digital Tartarus. One picture at a time, I suppose...

>305 pgmcc:

Fully captioned now.

Of course not every book can be displayed (or even stored) the way I'd like.

And this is what I'm actually reading now. Part of me wishes I could concentrate on one thing at a time, but we are where we are...

People in the US who could order the big box full of stuff along with the All The Haunts Be Ours box set, got Of Mud and Flame as one of the... one of the things. So getting the box set (plus some stickers!) prompted me to start on my copy of the book.

The Duchess of Malfi, being a Jacobean revenge drama, is sort of protocol-Gothic. I read the introduction last year then managed to shuffle the book away into a TBR pile. Fished it out a couple of days ago.

And The Shuttered Room is a book I've had for a while. It's not actually by H. P. Lovecraft but stories supposedly based on Lovecraft's story notes by August Derleth.

-

I read Washington Irving's short story "The Spectre Bridegroom" yesterday. It's a Gothic story but falling between the heyday of the first wave of Gothic novels, and Poe's appearance on the scene, the Gothic themes are handled as well-worn tropes and used for gently comedic purposes (not unlike "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow", but the "explained supernatural" resolution did nothing to prevent the Disney version scaring me when I was little).

I noticed a nod to the poem "Lenore", by Gottfried August Bürger in Irving's story, and looking around on the net I found a brief essay on Irving's story, on the Oldstyle Tales Press website. This talked about the poem and makes it obvious that to a degree "The Spectre Bridegroom" is a burlesque of Bürger's poem.

This was clearly a fairly well-known poem, and influential too. Poe borrowed the name for at least a couple of his works, and it's the source of "the dead travel fast" quoted in Dracula.

However I don't think I've ever read it. I've looked through a couple of anthologies of "spooky" verse I have, but it's not there. There doesn't seem to be an English translation currently in print (not quite true - there's what looks to be a couple of print on demand editions on Amazon, but not cheap enough for me to take a chance on).

These are some serious collections of literature in the photos above. Very impressive.

I'm speaking as a complete layman here, but I sure hope that you've got them insured-----do they do that for book collections? And if so, do you have to have them "appraised" by 3rd party?

I've just read through the 400 pages of The Woman in White, and so far, I like it. It moves well, and the plot is very well structured. Does anyone know if there is cinematic version of it?

Watched The Prestige, directed by Christopher Nolan. It had its moments. The weakest link in the film is Scarlett Johansson, who is fairly awful. The film has more of a Sci-Fi bent than I'd expected.

>310 benbrainard8:

Thank you. No, they're not separately insured. It can be done, I believe, but I suspect it would only be for certain titles, and I don't know what the criteria would be - for example I suspect (no, I know) that some of the paperbacks in the storage boxes are worth a lot more than some of the hardcover books out on the shelves.

I decided to address the damp issues in the house before pursuing the specialist insurance question. Things have improved (two dehumidifiers and, outside, an unblocked downpipe) but I need my neighbour's landlord to sort out some issues with their property as well.

I knew there have been dramatised versions of The Woman in White but I haven't seen any myself. Looking on IMDb, the earliest version was back in the silent days. There was a 1948 version (Sydney Greenstreet as Count Fosco) and then it looks like television versions came along roughly every decade.

More surprising, I think, is that there was an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical version. I remember, now, seeing clips of Michael Crawford (in the West End cast) in a fat suit as Count Fosco.

I haven't seen The Prestige yet. I'm sure I have it on disc - I either bought it or recorded it off air. I did read Christopher Priest's original novel when it was first published. I understand the film doesn't use the novel's ending.

>309 housefulofpaper:

Washington Irving: yet another of that vast pile of authors I've been intending to read for years—decades, even ...

>311 housefulofpaper: You are correct that the film of The Prestige does not use the ending in the book.

I have not watched any screen version of The Woman in White but I would watch any film with Sydney Greenstreet in it.

An Andrew Lloyd Webber musical version sounds fun.

I do hope that someday there is a cinematic version of The Woman in White, as it could be quite the experience if well made.

It would take some time to have any large collection of books appraised, insured, and I'm assuming that the need to climate control, safe accommodation, etc. would also be factors. It must be quite the adventure just trying to get everything set-up and comfy, too.

The Prestige worked in Gothic genre if only for the lighting of the film. The entire film seems dark in atmosphere and is surprising in plot twist(s). Haven't read the work from which it's based.

Washington Irving--- I think most American school kids are required to read The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, at some point, as the story is in most of our English/American Literature classes. The Tim Burton version of the story is fairly off but is a lot of fun.

I've now read about 80% of The Woman in White, and I've decided it's more of a great Detective/Mystery/Suspense novel, than perhaps a Gothic novel. I do like the use of characters, especially the Count Fosco character.

>315 benbrainard8:

Yes, by the time Wilkie Collins was writing, the Gothic novel had gone out of fashion. But the new "sensation novels" and the emerging detective/mystery/suspense fictions owed a lot to that first generation of Gothic fiction.

The British Library's "Terror and Wonder" exhibition on the Gothic included maybe five or six screens showing "iconic" scenes on video loops. One of theme was from the 2005 BBC version of Dickens' Bleak House, which I think was written under the influence of Wilkie Collins' mystery novels. The two men had certainly become friends.

>316 housefulofpaper: Dickens met Wilkie Collins in 1851, and they remained close friends until Dickens death in 1870. Dickens wrote 'Bleak House' in monthly installments between 1852-1853 but he could not have been influenced by Collins' mystery novels as they were written much later. 'The Moonstone' was serialised in Dickens' periodical 'All the Year Round' in 1858, and 'The Woman in White' was serialised (in the same periodical) between 1859-1860.

Dickens and Collins wrote some collaborative pieces together, including 'The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices' originally published in five instalments in 1857, which includes a couple of ghost stories. The piece was based on a sightseeing tour Dickens took with Collins to Cumberland, which was actually a cover for Dickens' pursuit of Ellen Ternan who was acting in Cumberland at that time. When Dickens returned home from the tour, he ordered his servants to build a wall splitting the marital bedroom into two - to separate his bed from his wife's bed.

>317 Rembetis:

Thanks for the clarification - I suppose I've reached that point in my life when I can't rely on my memory and need to check everything!

>318 housefulofpaper:

Rather penitent, I attach a link to an article at The Victorian Web, all about Bleak House's Inspector Bucket:

https://victorianweb.org/authors/dickens/bleakhouse/bucket.html

>319 housefulofpaper: Many thanks for the interesting link on Inspector Bucket.

I don't think I can rely on my memory either. On checking today, 'The Moonstone' was written in 1868, not 1858!

Memory can be so unreliable. On quite a number of occasions, events in novels or scenes in films are not quite how I remembered them to be when read or viewed the second time around.

>320 Rembetis: Memory can be so unreliable. On quite a number of occasions, events in novels or scenes in films are not quite how I remembered them to be when read or viewed the second time around.

Rest assured, you are not alone.

>321 pgmcc: Thank you, that's reassuring.

All this talk of fallible middle-aged memory (is it safe to assume we're all within that category now?) made me reflect that carrying a smart phone around means having lots of photos to remind me of important events. And then I looked at the "memories" my iPhone has chosen to preserve for me.

Hilariously, it's turned the Saturday evening last February, when I took pictures of my television as it played that old BBC film profile on John Gawsworth (for screeshots in a thread somewhere hereabouts), into a short film scored against some generic chill-out music...



Special appearance by Lawrence Durrell

>320 Rembetis:, >321 pgmcc:

Looking back at my journals for decades back, my 'clear' memories can be astonishingly different to what I wrote down on the day. I don't think it would be putting it too strongly to say that the memory will, given time, create fiction.

>323 housefulofpaper:

That's actually a little discomforting ...

ETA - I keep a wary eye on what my mobile phone is up to, anyway; but I think that would really unsettle me.

>324 alaudacorax: Neuro-scientists would have us believe our brain keeps changing over time; growing new bits to taken on new experiences; reconstructing memories on the fly; adapting to our current environment. There is an argument to be made that not only do our minds create fiction, but that everything in our memories is fiction.

>324 alaudacorax: Yes, exactly my experience - the brain creating fiction, or, sometimes, a distortion of the truth.

>326 pgmcc: That is a frightening thought, that everything in our mind is fiction! Do you mean in the sense that our memories contain a distortion of the past, or that what we remember may never have happened at all?! I note the 'Rashomon effect' - when an event is described in entirely contradictory ways by the people who were involved.

I've just finished reading The Woman in White. And hope to find among the BBC television series adaptations 1966, 1982, 1997, & 2018 version(s) to rent and view this weekend.

Does anyone have one version in particular they/you suggest as "preferable"? To show you how confounding it might be to decide, look towards the 2nd half portion of this online entry (IMDB for the 1966 version, the 'More like this' section). A lot to sort through:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0424746/

I admit having a "literary crush" on Marian Halcombe. But not Laura Fairlie, who I found to be a wee bit annoying.

And Count Fosco is one of the more interesting baddies I've read in Literature for quite a while...heh! Online descriptions: "Fat, brilliant, cultured, and evil, Fosco"....

>328 benbrainard8: I have seen both the 1997 and the 2018 versions and neither is excellent.

I found the 1997 version very atmospheric and enjoyable, but it only runs 2 hours and the story is not only considerably shortened but annoying changes are made. The cast is very good with Andrew Lincoln, Tara Fitzgerald, Ian Richardson and Simon Callow doing a magnificently oily turn as Count Fosco (though he is underused because of the changes/cuts).

The 2018 version is more faithful than the 1997. It also makes changes to the story and the characters but doesn't take as many liberties as the 1997. However, it takes its time over the story - runs about 4 hours 30 minutes. Although atmospheric and well acted, it was too slow for me, dare I say boring at times.

Your best bet, if you are after faithfulness to the text, might be the BBC 1982 version, which has a very good reputation and is supposed to be the most faithful - but I haven't seen it, and it might be dated.

(Edited to make sense!)

>329 Rembetis: Thank you for the suggestions. I'll let you know what I find, and what I think of the version I watch. I'll look for the BBC 1982 version first.

F/u note that I was able to purchase for streaming "The Woman in White", 2018, BBC mini-series. It was only $10 for entire purchase, so good deal.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6036728/?ref_=ttfc_fc_tt

I couldn't get the 1982 version only because it's available digitally through a British cable channel here in the U.S. called "BritBox", which I'm sure I would absolutely love...but would get chided mercilessly for ("another streaming service!"). Well, can't win 'em all.

Will let you know what I think of this version next week or so.

Now onto reading Green Tea: and Other Weird Stories (Oxford World's Classics), by Irish author J. Sheridan Le Fanu

Watched the streaming "The Woman in White", 2018, BBC mini-series, five-episodes.

It gets minus points for missing some elements of the story, especially the depiction of Count Fosco, who though properly depicted as elegantly sinister, is quite different from the book's portrayal.

The acting is pretty solid, and I especially found Charles Dance doing a very solid portrayal of Mr. Fairlie. And, like the book, the Marian Holcombe character is wonderful. She always impresses, with her strength, tenacity, and directness. The actress playing her is Irish actress Jessie Buckley, whom I've not known.

This series version of The Woman in White does do an admirable job of showing the viewer the psychological and existential sense of dread that you get when reading the novel. And its depictions of the English estate, countryside, and towns seem fairly spot on.

If anything, I wish the series weren't so truncated, but guess that's unavoidable, considering it's a 600++ page book.

>331 benbrainard8: Oh that's great you enjoyed it. I don't believe I have seen any adaptation that sticks 100% faithfully to any book, especially a book as long and convoluted as 'The Woman in White'. As I said before, the two hour 1997 version takes many more liberties than the 2018 you watched.

I agree that the locations chosen for the series were spot on. I also agree about Jessie Buckley. She is a very good actress. She first came to my notice in the BBC 2016 adaptation of 'War and Peace'; and more recently, she supported Renee Zelwegger in 'Judy' (about Judy Garland).

Last book I finished was The Shuttered Room, credited to H. P. Lovecraft (in big letters) and August Derleth (in small letters), but I very much doubt a word of it was genuine Lovecraft. It doesn't even feel like stories worked up from Lovecraft's notes, in the main, but simply taking place in the Mythos world.

Some were clearly retreads of Lovecraft stories, some felt "kind of" original, but only in being more straightforwardly horror comic fare. I think putting Lovecraft's name on this stuff can't have done his posthumous reputation any favours (his literary reputation, I mean).

One thing Derleth is really bad at is misdirection. The thing that happens early on, and is supposed to be the big revelation at the story's climax, you always see it and go - "ah, there's the thing". And the story's climax is no surprise.

I haven't used the Touchstones because different editions titled "The Shuttered Room" are all mixed up. This one is half (I guess) of a 1968 Gollancz UK hardcover collection. This Panther paperback came out in 1970, with prices quoted in old and new money (Decimalisation came in 1971) and a list of "Panther authors" at the back, from William Burroughs and Norman Mailer to, cheekily I think, Geoffrey Chaucer. But there's something to be said for classic and serious and popular titles all seemingly on an equal footing. To my mind it's like having only three television channels - often hated the lack of choice at the time but it meant you could accidently come across a Len Lye animation, or an Open University programme on Andrea Mantegna, or Les Bicyclettes de Belsize.

And of course I had a photo of The Shuttered Room in post >308 housefulofpaper:. That cover painting is intriguingly credited to "Picture Post", and not to a paperback cover artist. I wonder what it was originally illustrating?

I've reread The Duchess of Malfi (also in that picture) now, and just working through the supplementary material at the back of the book. One such is the original English telling of the story from the 16th century is, so far, consisting of very long, rhetorical speeches, and it's heavy going.

Like many a Jacobean drama the play feels like an obvious precurser to Gothic fiction (both on the page and on the stage), but reading The Cambridge History of the Gothic only Shakespeare, it seems, was acknowledged (perhaps that should be "invoked") as an influence. I suppose that fits in with what I had already understood - that the 18th Century was when Shakespeare was raised to the position of National Poet, while the Jacobean Revenge Tragedies were a 20th Century rediscovery.

>334 housefulofpaper:

Searching online, it is surprisingly difficult to find out exactly how the Jacobean tragedies survived down to us. I was wondering how long and how widely they might have lingered in the cultural memory after they'd stopped being performed on stage; but I came up blank ...

>335 alaudacorax:

I mean, would they have been widely-published, with copies in private libraries and handed down in families like favourite novels, or would we have them from just the odd copy lodged with the Lord Chamberlain?

>336 alaudacorax:

For example, The Duchess of Malfi: our source for it seems to be the 1623 quarto. It was 'privately published'; but do you think I can find out how many copies there were or are?

It's surprising how long you can put off doing work around the house just by having a 'quick look in' at LibraryThing ... might as well just forget it and have lunch, now ...

>335 alaudacorax:
I can summarise what happened to The Duchess of Malfi from its initial performance down to today, from the very detailed introduction in my copy. Not right now, obviously, it's 2:30 in the morning...

I think the story more widely for Jacobean drama as a whole is - the disruption of the Civil War and the Commonwealth - then the Restoration. Charles II wants everything to be modelled on France (e.g. Henry Purcell stops writing for consorts of viols and starts writing for "modern" instruments) - the Restoration dovetails into Age of Reason, and for a number of reasons the dramas are thoroughly out of fashion. I'll try to find something more substantial in my Eng Lit books.

This is all cribbed from the introduction in Leah S. Marcus' Arden edition of The Duchess of Malfi.

Malfi first published 1623 (same year as Shakespeare's First Folio) and about a decade after 1st stage performance. Marcus, reports strong evidence of Webster's involvement in preparing this edition.

The play was a success in its 1st performance and revived several times before the Civil War, last time 1630.

Reprinted (Q2) around 1640. Conjectured this was not in connection with another revival but to take advantge of "the play's resonance wth anti-Laudian and anti-absolutist sentiment".

There were (fasfifying my asumptions of French influence after the Restoration) another printed edition (Q3) and further performances. The 1708 text of Q4 is heavily cut but this might reflect what was always performance practice.

"The last known performance of Malfi for over a hundred years was Lewis Theobald's adaptation titled The Fatal Secret, staged unsuccessfully in 1733 and published in 1735. It is one of the period's typical sentimentalizations of early moden tragic intensity: just as Lear survives to bless the marriage of Cordelia and Edgar at the end of Nahum Tate's King Lear (1681) so the Duchess and Antonio miraculously survivr the carnage to reunite at the end of The Fatal Secret."

(Two observations from me here: Shakespeare himself took to giving potentially tragic scenarios happy endings with his Late Romances (although, given that supernatural means are required, perhaps he couldn't bring himself to quite believe it); and doesn't The Fatal Secret sound quite a lot like a Gothic Novel plot?)

(Edited for spelling.)

Webster vanished from the stage but his reputation was maintained in "lists of 'old plays' and in poems and miscellanies". Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt were enthusiastic in the early 19th century.

An edition of Webster's Workspublished in 1830 help popularize the play. Here's me wrong again: "As might be expected , given the Victorians' quasi-erotic attachment to rituals of death and mourning, the play returned to the stage in that era." Many subsequent productions in Britain and America from 1850. The play was a star vehicle for the actress playing the Duchess at this time. These productions had all the opulence and three-dimensional realistic scenary of the Victorian stage and the texts were not (as performances of Shakespeare were not) very faithful to the original.

First performances that attempted to get back the the original text and the presumed bare stage of the 17th century in the 1890s.

"Malfi came into its own - both on the stage and among critics - during the twentieth century. The emerging aesthetic of modernism and the massive, cumulative cultural rupture of two world wars and the Holocaust resonated with Webste's dramatic emphasis on horror, disjunction and extreme suffering."

>340 housefulofpaper:, >341 housefulofpaper:

Very interesting bit of research, Andrew. If we assume the history of 'Malfi' as fairly typical of its type, it seems safe to see Jacobean tragedy as an at least possible influence on Gothic literature.

>342 alaudacorax:

... probably possible; but possibly probable ...

>342 alaudacorax:
It's not research if you only use one source :)
I still need to track down some books that might have a broader view. The multi-volume Pelican Guide to English Literature is up in the loft somewhere, for instance.

One thing that made the Revenge Tragedies seem so modern in the 20th century (or better to say with a bit of historical perspective, made them resonate with the times) was the disaffected, cynical, melancholic-scholar character, almost a detached observer of the action, but ultimately a trapped as everyone else by the forces setting the wheels of the plot in motion. Suddenly you have a sense of an anti-hero, foreshadowing the Beats and Rock-n-Roll countercultural rebellion and all that mid-20th century stuff, three hundred years too early (I suppose in strictly chronological terms they owe their inspiration to Montaigne and Hamlet, but a soured Hamlet-gone-wrong. Also to the historical fact of a lot of University-educated young men not finding suitable employment). I think the characters in a Gothic tale have to be in earnest, in some sense, for it to work. The slightest hint of self-awareness and ironic detachment would tip the whole enterprise into comedy.

>344 housefulofpaper:

Every other post, these days, seems to show up gaps in my reading. I don't think I've read any of the Jacobean plays (other than Shakespeare, of course).

Always so much to read, but I seem to keep hitting road-blocks. Currently, A Sicilian Romance. Boring! I think I've read half a dozen or more 'old favourite' novels lately, purely as displacement activity. Simply treading water, as it were. I must dedicate an evening to it very soon. Who knows, I might find myself warming to it if I force myself a few more chapters in.

>344 housefulofpaper:

Quite irrelevant, but I found myself wondering if your 'cynical, melancholic-scholar character' didn't get into the detective story. I immediately thought of Dorothy L. Sayers' Peter Wimsey; whom she occasionally depicted as some kind of depressive, certainly enough so to come under the old heading of melancholic. From internal evidence alone she was quite knowledgeable on Elizabethan and Jacobean drama and literature.

>346 alaudacorax:
That hadn't occurred to me but yes, that sounds very plausible. Not only because of Sayers' scholarship, but Sayers is Modern (female academic, working in advertising, and so on) and I would assume affected by WWI. Certainly, I remember Wimsey still suffering from shell shock at the start of the series.

I've been making a note of all the books I've read since 1994 which is, for me, this year, half a lifetime ago. Of course it doesn't feel like that. My childhood in the '70s and early '80s streches on forever, but the '90s feel like the day before yesterday. That's just the nature of memory.

Anyway, I looked through the notes for 1994 and was surprised by a few things. I was reading a lot more than I do now - finishing more books at any rate (I have a lot of collections of short stories etc. all on the go at the same time). A lot of them are weightier than what I tend to read now. I may be less serious-minded now, but of course there wasn't the distraction/alternative information resource of the internet (I know technically it existed but, well I'm sure you know what I mean).

The reason I mention it here is that this time looks like the first stirrings of an interest in the Gothic (Gothic literature, I suppose it would be better to say. I first saw the Universal horror films in 1983, but I was quite picky about what I watched until the first decade of this century).

Actually, I think I read Dracula in 1993; but in February 1994 I read Melmoth the Wanderer, in March The White Devil and Vampires, Burial, and Death. In April, M. R. James, Collected Ghost Stories and Casting the Runes and other Ghost Stories. In July (unseasonably) I read Robertson Davies' tongue-in-cheek High Spirits. In August, Iain Sinclair's Radon Daughters (which I need to reread, now I can do so with knowledge of The House on the Borderland). Frankenstein (1818 text) in September . In December, Peter Haining's fabricated Sweeney Todd biography and Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey.

On the subject of Frankenstein, the edition based on the draft manuscript in the Bodleian library, "The Original Frankenstein", edited by Charles E. Robinson, does differ in minor ways from the 1818 published text. These seem to be mostly refinements in the chronology of the story. I haven't spotted anything substantial.

>348 housefulofpaper:

Do you know, I'm more and more wondering if the Kindle isn't worth the bother—I bought a complete Thomas Love Peacock about four weeks' ago and, until I read your post, I'd completely forgotten about it. I mean, when you can get the complete works of so many writers for what's really just small change the Kindle should be a godsend; but it doesn't seem to work out that way for me ...

>350 alaudacorax: I use my kindle for long train journeys and holidays (which are rare for me these days) but very rarely use it at home, even though I have loaded it with lots of stuff that I am very interested to read that isn't available or hard to find in book form (usually the collected works of classic authors, containing out of print rarities or long forgotten biographies about them). I think (dumb as this sounds) it's partly because the material is electronically hidden within the kindle and not visible to the eye on a shelf (or a pile on the floor) to prompt us to pick it up. Also, I much prefer to hold and smell a real book, turn its pages and feel a sense that I am progressing through the book which I do not get at all with a kindle. I also much prefer reading from paper to reading from a screen, plus real books look 100% more attractive to the eye than a kindle.

>351 Rembetis:

Big 'yes' to everything you said there.

I've begun and am greatly enjoying Green Tea and Other Weird Stories, Sheridan Le Fanu. I've never read his stories, other than the famous Carmilla.

I did purposely read the Introduction though the book has an appropriate "Readers who are unfamiliar with the stories may prefer to treat the Introduction as an Afterword", warning, only because I've never read anything about the author's life.

So, far I've read two of the stories, "Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter" and "The Watcher'.

Sheridan Le Fanu is a very impressive writer.

>354 benbrainard8:
I hadn't registered that Oxford had published a new selection Le Fanu's stories. The introduction (I used Amazon's 'look inside' function) is very good: "Gnostic horror" in contrast to H.P. Lovecraft's "Cosmic indifference".

Edited for spelling and to close brackets.

I read Ray Brabury's 1959 short story collection A Medicine for Melancholy and supplemented it with The Day it Rained Forever. The latter book is in essence simply the UK version of the former, but the story order is changed and there are a few substitutions. The effect is to make the UK version more science fictional and also more pessimistic, whereas the US selection seems to be positioning Bradbury for a mainstream audience as the poetic diviner of the human heart.

I also picked up my copy of A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful and Other Pre-Revoutionary Writings. The title essay is important for its aesthetic theories that fed into Romanticism and the Gothic and I read it some time ago, then put the book aside. There doesn't seem to be any direct connection to the Gothic in the other, explicitly political writings in the book, but I suppose now is a grimly appropriate time to read about a corrupt and foolish British Parliament (well on their way, on page 310, to losing the American Colonies).

>354 benbrainard8:
Le Fanu's writing is very entertaining. M.R. James was a great fan of Le Fanu's work.

Now I feel like a mere...amateur.

I'd never heard or been aware of M.R. James nor ETA Hoffmann (see other thread), until....this week. Sigh, I've got a very long way to go.

I read "Green Tea" last night. I think I'm going to re-read it after finishing this collection. I felt a bit lost. Especially regarding the references (direct or indirect?) to Swedenbourg. Boy, perhaps I just mis-read the story, it sort of confused me. But I did enjoy it very much.

I've gone back and edited post 304. It seemed to be implying that books from the Folio Society grow after you've bought them (they don't!).

>358 benbrainard8:
I think that for the purposes of the story, the Swedenborgianism operates much the same as the "irrational/primitive" feelings denied or ridiculed in many a spooky story, but which - "in universe" - are proven to be true. I mean the feelong that somehow one can draw the attention of something supernatural, or of a whole unseen and malevolent dimension.

The naturalistic explanation often given for such feelings, is that it's the manifestation of a hard-wired instinct to beware predators that we've inherited from our hominid ancestors.

Interesting to reread Gilbert Phelps' essay "Varieties of English Gothic" in The New Pelican Guide to English Literature volume 5 after something like 30 years. (The book itself is a lot older than that, first publshed in 1957, revised and expanded 1982).

for the most part the essay reads like a reassessment and rehabilitation of the Gothic (whose critical stock was presumbably pretty low in 1957) and the story it tells isn't materially different from the current thinking in e.g. The Cambridge History of the Gothic; although (alaudacorax) arguably showing too much regard for Caleb Williams and too little for Frankenstein - described respectively as "a near-masterpiece" and "a minor classic").

The conclusions drawn at the emd of the essay, however, do not value the Gothic in itself but only as a stage in the evolution of the literary English novel: "...the elements which the Gothic novelists introduced" {i.e. ways of discussing or representing metaphorically, the unconscious and subconscious, the irrational and surreal} "were ones which the English novel needed, and which would be exploited and consolidated by writers of genius: before long Emily Brontë in Wuthering Heights, and Charles Dickens in a whole series of novels from Oliver Twist onwards, were to show how even the most obvious and negtive stereotypes (including the grotesque, the macabre, and the cruel) could be incorporated into a comprehensive poetic vision".

>360 housefulofpaper:

Hold my drink!

Actually, comment from me is probably redundant after your post, but ...

I could feel all the fur rising along my spine at ' "a near-masterpiece" and "a minor classic" '. Dare I suggest Phelps' rating of Frankenstein as only a 'minor' classic had less to do with reading it with his brain actually in gear and more to do with a reluctance to admit another female author into the canon, or 'sci-fi' or 'horror' into the canon—we are talking about '57, after all. I've probably previously written at tedious length at my utter bemusement at the academics' admiration for the ridiculous Caleb Williams. See my blog if anyone's interested in a rant.

Also, I felt I detected in Phelps a touch of the old snobbery in the mention of Wuthering Heights—he seems to be placing it outside the genre because once regarded as a real classic it must, perforce, not be Gothic—Gothic can't be good, Gothic is not to be taken seriously ...

Alaudacorax rises to the bait! (You know you shouldn't look at LibraryThing when you have things to do in the morning ...)

>361 alaudacorax:

A weird coincidence. I just looked at Twitter and there's a mention of Gilbert Phelps. The context being a (presumably nasty) story he had contributed the the long-running Pan Books of Horror series.

You're right of course, you see plenty of special pleading for works that supposedly "transcend their genre": "because this Western is a very good Western, it isn't a Western", that kind of thing. I don't think Phelps was quite argung that. He seemed to be saying that all the innovations and tropes and eeffects of the Gothic - all the tricks, so tosay - had been absorbed by the mainstream and could be deployed thereafter (albeit improved and alchemised by more talented writers), not to write Gothic novels but mainstream novels that are enriched by a vein of the Gothic. 70 years later, that arguement looks bogus because Wuthering Heights and Bleak House and the rest have been claimed as Gothic works.

Have completed Green Tea and Other Weird Stories, Sheridan Le Fanu. and reread the short story, "Green Tea" this afternoon.

The short stories seem to work on multiple levels. After reading about the background of Green Tea (1872), I enjoyed it more, as it does have some difficult aspects. Found some reference points, one is below:

"at its heart, “Green Tea” is one of Le Fanu’s most psychological tales: like “The Jolly Corner” and “The Turn of the Screw,” it features proto-Freudian symbolism".

It works on multiple levels, I'm hard-pressed to think of cinematic versions of it. Though perhaps those stories that come afterwards (Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde , etc.) make up for that aspect, as I'm sure many stories borrow similar thematic elements and there've been numerous film versions of those subsequent stories/novels.

The story Carmilla, which I reread (wow, 1st time was about 35 years ago), is quite terrifying. I've been disappointed to not find a cinematic version of it, that looks like it's worthy---any suggestions?

>364 benbrainard8:

I think 'no' is the quick answer. There are plenty of film versions—or, rather, versions based on or inspired by it—but I can't say I've ever seen one I could describe as faithful to the book. I could be wrong and I would like to see one if it exists.

>365 alaudacorax:

... and a quick look at IMDb shows a lot of stuff I haven't seen, so ...

>364 benbrainard8:
>365 alaudacorax:

Hammer's The Vampire Lovers is surprisingly faithful to the story, but in tone, and characterisation, it's a different animal altogether.

Vampyr isn't a faithful adaptation, but it might be of interest as the director Carl Theodor Dreyer took elements from all five stories in In A Glass Darkly and used them in his film script.

All the stories (albeit in their original versions, if they were later revised for republication) are also in Green Tea and other Weird Stories.

Not quite gothic, but I'm four stories (plus the forward and introductions) into The Jewish Book of Horror, and I'm very impressed so far.

>367 housefulofpaper: Thank you, I'll look into these !

>368 Julie_in_the_Library:

That sounded fascinating—more so reading Rabbi Carrier's intro. Then I read Josh Schlossberg's 'Origins ...' section, which, in itself, reads like the opening pages of some horror/mystery story.

I bought it ...

Thanks for that, Julie ...

Have just finished reading The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, 1959. It's a fairly good book, enjoyed the psychologically frightening edge to this book and story.

And today to bookend it, watched one of the cinematic version, The Haunting, 1963 film that had Julie A. Harris, English actress Patricia Claire Bloom, and English Actor Richard Keith Johnson. Though not particular frightening, I did find this movie to be fairly close to the book. There is currently a mini-series version of The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix, I'll start watching next week--it'll be interesting to compare two versions that are nearly 60+ years apart.

Now beginning to read The Turn of the Screw and Other Ghost Stories, by Henry James, Philip Horne (Editor), Susie Boyt (Editor).

Guess I'm in ghost, haunted house & haunted mansion mode.

>371 benbrainard8:

Hmm. The Haunting has always been probably my favourite horror film. I've always found it scary (especially the banging on the door scene). And poignant—I think Julie Harris gave a tremendous performance. Having said all that, it's some years since I've seen it. I watched it every Hallowe'en for a while; but I seem to have forgotten it lately. I'm overdue. I shall mount an expedition to the spare bedroom and dig out my copy.

>371 benbrainard8:

The Haunting is also one of my favorite horror films and I love Julie Harris's performance. A nephew, in his mid-twenties, told me he was going to watch the Netflix version, which I hated, and I started complaining about it. He watched the Wise film and, while I thought it would be the black and white that would put him off, it was Nell that he disliked. He found the character rather ridiculous. I think that the type of woman Harris portrays is very out of fashion and he couldn't relate to it at all. Has anyone else seen this reaction?

>371 benbrainard8:

I read the novel over a decade ago (I've just checked, and there are no reading dates against it in my catalogue here). I've just bought the new Folio Society edition so it would make sense for me to read it again soon. But I've got so many unread books...

I think I came to the book after an immersion in late 19th Century fantasy and decadent fiction on one hand, and Lovecraft and other Weird Tales writers on the other. That psychogical element was a real change of pace and demanded more emotional engagment with the material. Of course it was more modern that what I had been reading, but in a way I feel it worked more like the old Gothics, too. It is, to be reductive about it, at its simplest level about an isolated girl in a big scary house.

I'm a fan of the 1963 film version but it gets under my skin rather than makes me jump - the psychological angle again, I suppose. I do have the Netflix version on disc but I haven't watched it yet. The same team followed it up with The Haunting of Bly Manor, based on The Turn of the Screw and some other of James' ghost stories. Again I haven's seen it and can't offer an opinion.

I'm conscious of having lots of books started and not finished, and am trying to reduce that "started reading" pile. So the last things I've finished are an issue of The Green Book from Swan River Press that, rather than featuring the usual "Writings on Irish Gothic, Supernatural and Fantastic Literature", reprinted stories (mostly ghost stories, as it turns our) by Irish writers, from the 1890s to the 1950s. And a collection of stories by Mark Samuels, Written in Darkness. He's a modern writer of Weird Fiction and is aware of his predecessors and contempories, and there are self-aware echoes of Lovecraft and Hope Hodgson, up to moderns like Thomas Ligotti , who is an avowed influence but Samuels unlike Ligotti is a practising Catholic and it seems a rather conservative one. The horrors Samuels describes are sometimes of a spiritual nature of a kind where the impact of the tale is blunted (for me) because I'm not 100% in tune with the tale's sensibiities (or maybe I should be more concerned that I'm part of the problem!).

>373 robertajl:

That's a very interesting point about your nephew and Nell. I shall definitely watch it tonight (went up upstairs and fetched it immediately after reading your post) and I shall have that in mind. I said I hadn't watched it for 'several years': I have no record but I regularly find, much to my surprise, that 'several years' is a much longer span of time than I thought it was. On the other hand, I'm getting on a bit and don't have much problem in putting myself into the mindsets of decades ago. I really don't know how I'm going to respond to it. I suddenly find myself looking forward to it with some excitement.

>375 alaudacorax: I will be watching the Netflix series version starting this week but am ready to accept that it won't be nearly as close to the book at its 1963 predecessor, after co-worker told me about it. I was non-plussed, it sounds like the Netflix series doesn't even have the same # of protagonists, as we know there four primary ones (well, five if we count the house!). But that's ok, I'm just curious to know if it has "similar" characters.

Anyone under certain age might be thrown off the by Nell "voice monologue" that the 1963 film version has. But I found it rather charming. I liked the 1963 version.

>373 robertajl:, >375 alaudacorax:

Just watched The Haunting and I'm still of the opinion it's one of the best of all horror films. I found I still completely believe in Nell. I am now wondering if I am subconsciously putting the film back into its pre-1963 setting; but I tend to think there are still plenty of unliberated, browbeaten women about.

I'd rather forgotten about the red herrings—Theo, the doc and Luke all have their scenes where the viewer wonders if they really are that trustworthy and it all goes into building the air of vulnerability around Nell and keeping the viewer unsettled.

I've finished The Haunting of Hill House (2018) on Netflix. And though it's quite different from the book, I'm actually hesitant to tell people, "Don't watch it". the website Moria (https://www.moriareviews.com/), has some reviews of both the 1963 cinematic version and the 2018 series version. And its reviews excellently point out information about both versions that you might find very interesting (needless to say don't read them if you don't want some spoilers):

https://www.moriareviews.com/horror/haunting-1963.htm

https://www.moriareviews.com/horror/haunting-of-hill-house-2018.htm

I've just gone halfway through The Turn of the Screw and Other Ghost Stories, by Henry James, Philip Horne (Editor), Susie Boyt (Editor). And noticed that that the director of the Netflix version of "The Haunting of Hill House", also does a series version of The Turn of the Screw on Netflix, too. Called The Haunting of Bly Manor, I'll be curious to see its treatment of The Turning of the Screw, first published 1898.

I've enjoyed the Henry James stories, though admittedly, his writing does require a careful reading. I found James's life story to be interesting, too. His writing requires patience that perhaps some readers might not enjoy---e.g., you're not going to whiz through his book the way you would, say reading Stephen King or Anne Rice. His writing is beautifully dense, complex, and take a good patience. But so far, I'm very impressed.

I read one of Henry James' ghost stories, "The Friends of the Friends" (first published in 1896, under the blander title "The Way It Came"). My thoughts over in The Weird Tradition group: https://www.librarything.com/topic/341101#n7813465.

I also read Iain Sinclair's London Overground, an account of a psychogeographical walk around London, following the route of the overground orbital railway. Out of the personal, historical, artistic, and political associations called up a few had a Gothic connection, such as Angela Carter, and Highgate Cemetery, although 20th Century Modernism figures more strongly.

And I finished reading "The Original Frankenstein", that is the edition of the 1816-17 manuscript version edited by Charles E. Robinson. Percy Shelley's editorial amendments are shown in italics, and Robinson supplies explanatory footnotes and a substantial introduction. At the back the text is printed again with Percy's textual additions and amendments (sometimes no more than correcting spelling mistakes) removed.

>378 benbrainard8:

Interesting review on The Haunting. I was, though, inclined to take issue at the beginning with its description of Eleanor escaping 'a stifling life of conservatism'. I feel that everything about her is much more the personal than such generalisaton: in today's terms she was abused at home, downtrodden and exploited by unlikeable people, and I don't think conservatism comes into it. The review is more on the mark with its description of her as 'a frightened, introverted woman': this is true and, what's more, Shirley Jackson and Robert Wise emphasise it with the contrast to Theodora. Once Nell gets the chance to escape to Hill House, there is not, really, anywhere else for her to go because she simply doesn't have the courage and self-confidence to just venture out into the wide world and make a place for herself, and this has a huge bearing on the ending.

Having said that last, the ending has always been a puzzle for me and after >377 alaudacorax:'s watch still is. The ending implies that the dead Nell's ghost now walks Hill House; but is that a tragic ending or a happy-ever-after ending? She really wanted to stay at the last, after all. One can think of a lot of questions, but none with answers: Is the presence of Nell's spirit somehow going to purify the place? Is Nell's spirit forever in a Hill House hell? And so on ...

>380 alaudacorax:, >378 benbrainard8:

Forgot to mention, didn't read the other review because I fancy watching the series some time. Spoilers, etc.

>378 benbrainard8:, >381 alaudacorax:

I'm choosing to regard The Haunting of Hill House (2018) as nothing much to do with Shirley Jackson or Robert Wise.

>382 alaudacorax: Yes, I totally agree with this assessment. Considering that it kind of stands well on it's own, I wish they'd not even referenced the book, that's how different it is. Sometimes, a stretch is just that----a long, long stretch.

I've just finished The Turn of the Screw and Other Ghost Stories, by Henry James, Philip Horne (Editor), Susie Boyt (Editor).

This has been one of my favorite Gothic reads so far.

I think there's a quote from Virginia Woolf that describes an aspect of the short story, "Owen Wingrave", that hits home to me. According to this book's introduction Virginia Woolf said of "Owen Wingrave", 'The catastrophe has not the right relations to what has gone on before.' The author of the introduction agrees with this, saying: "the ghosts aren't necessarily needed or rather, they're already there."

I also greatly enjoyed the other short stories in this collection of his stories, notably:

--"The Romance of Certain Old Clothes"
--"The Friends of the Friends" (mentioned above)
--"The Third Person"
-- "The Jolly Corner" (I'll never see old houses in NYC, or upper NE of US the same after reading this story--I grew up in NY State, living there briefly for 2–3-year period, but it wasn't in NYC)

There are a few other short stories, too, in this collection----- but these above were my favorites. Of course, the main title, Turn of the Screw, most notably, surely one of his most popular shorter (?) stories, stands out.

I've never read anything from Henry James, now I admit that I'm completely smitten with his writing and want to know what else you all would suggest from him---I see there is a long list of books he's written. It doesn't necessarily have to be his Gothic Literature; I'd love some suggestions from you all.

I'm supposing the great joy I feel in reading his literature are his descriptions, and a feeling he gives me that perhaps James was, or at least felt himself to be "truly the outsider", the observer. A crosser of boundaries? His own life story exudes that. I'm envious that he could grow up, live in multiple places (U.S., Paris/The Continent, and UK). He was of a wealthy family, so it looks like he had the tools to do so. But he has an interesting point of view. I'd also like to hear what you all observe in this about him--am I off base?

>384 benbrainard8:

You've read more Henry James than I have! There's a story that kicks off a 1949 anthology of items from The Yellow Book entitled "The Death of the Lion". I enjoyed that. It's not a ghost story. Social comedy I suppose but of course ultra-sophisticated. It hasn't been picked out for mention in James' Wikipedia entry, so presumably this isn't a particularly celebrated example.

I have "The Aspern Papers" to read (Penguin do, or did, publish it in the same volume as "The Turn of the Screw", so presumably they see similarities in mood if not in plot).

I only know the novels from the film adaptations that Merchant Ivory were making in the '80s and '90s. I have read that his style became more convoluted later in his career (and this was at least partly because he had taken to dictating his work, although this does seem quite reductive). I don't know very much about James as an individual. A lot of the information in the Wikipedia entry was new to me.

The last thing I read was the second of three - Novelettes? Novellas? - with the blanket title The Friendly Examiner (touchstone goes to episode 1). In that first episode a young man is taken on as a kind of investigative agent by the French Encyclopédistes and it plays out as a rewrite of "The Crab Spider" by Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian, but with horror replaced by Enlightenment rationality. It's an enjoyable literary conceit (a bit like Stella Gibbons doing over 20th century rural Gothics in Cold Comfort Farm).

The second episode takes a different turn Gothic fiction features strongly. I'm not sure how to discuss it in more detail without giving away the plot. Again the author, Louis Marvick, is having fun with literary history and genre tropes but this one ended on a cliffhanger and I am keen to move onto the third episode and hopefully a happy (or satisfying, at least) resolution.

>386 housefulofpaper:

I'm finding it difficult to discuss books without spoilers. The Friendly Examiner Episode 2 is very clearly written in full knowledge of the intellectual currents of the 18th Century and nicely supplements the discussions on the history of the Gothic that we've had here. But I can't get into specifics without giving stuff away.

I'm feeling the 'reader's curse' quite acutely at the moment. I'm almost at the end of Pan: The Great God's Modern Return and I've been enjoying it; but, by damn does it open up new vistas of reading!

Quite apart from the two other books on Pan I have waiting, and Thomas Taylor's The Hymns of Orpheus which seems to have been a bit of a trigger for the Romantic movement's interest in Pan, Robichaud is reminding me I have a stack of books by and on Machen waiting to be read and that I still haven't read any Aleister Crowley. He mentions the odd Algernon Blackwood and Mary Shelley that I'm sure I've never come across and has reminded me I know very little of Blackwood's life and beliefs. And I'd never even heard of Dion Fortune.

And then there are the non-fictions he references: I've been dithering for years over whether I want Ronald Hutton's The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft and (dealing with a very different period) Robin Lane Fox's Pagans and Christians; and I'm having to really restrain myself from a bookcase's worth of other stuff on Pan, on witchcraft, on pagans, and on so many writers' dabbles with these things (you know, the Golden Dawn lot, and so on). My library has already, for years, been growing faster than I can read it, without me going on another buying spree now.

And all that is quite apart from the other reading I have on at the moment, including some that I've neglected to put in my 'Currently reading' and tend to forget about for weeks at a time.

Robichaud may even have thrown up a film for me to watch. He talks about Rosaleen Norton, 'artist and witch', and I'm sure I saw either a film or a documentary about her on Amazon Prime a few weeks back.

To top it all off, I still couldn't give you a coherent explanation of why Pan became so popular in late Victorian and Edwardian times (you'll have noticed that some of the above concerns wild tangents from that original intention)—I'm seriously thinking of rereading Robichaud before moving on.

It doesn't help that this post is probably displacement activity. I've got gardening and jobs round the house I've been putting off starting for the last couple of hours. Nature meant me to be rich—housekeepers and gardeners and odd-job men and so forth ...

And >387 housefulofpaper: isn't helping. The Friendly Examiner looks quite tempting (from what little I can find online).

>388 alaudacorax:

I've read Pagans and Christians and The Triumph of the Moon. Pagans and Christians was a pre-LibraryThing read but I see the memory was glowing enough for me to give the book five stars. From what I remember it's an engrossing read, with lots of detail and a strong narrative thread or something, at any rate, to make it "a good read". There are some more cogent reviews for the book on here from other LibraryThingers, and (for what it's worth) the Folio Society thought it was worthy of reprinting it as a 3-volume hardback.

And it's nearly the same story for The Triumph of the Moon - I read it a long time ago (pre LibraryThing is pre 2011 for me) but I gave it a rare five star rating when I entered it in my catalogue.

I know. This isn't helping with the library-growing-faster-than-it-can-be-read conundrum.Well, Pagans and Christians was published in 1986 so presumably the scholarship is out of date by now. Maybe?

>390 housefulofpaper: - ... was published in 1986 so presumably ... out of date ...

You see, this is one of the problems of dithering over buying books—I've probably been dithering over buying that one since '86!

I finished Pan: The Great God’s Modern Return, by the way.

It was a really enjoyable read. It sounds a weird thing to say about what is essentially an academic work, but it was fun. I don't know if 'unique' is the right word, but I can't remember reading anything quite like it. I got an impression that he wrote it largely for his own amusement, perhaps as a sort of hobby—though, never having read anything else by him, I can't really be sure of that. And I was overawed by the breadth of the man's reading ... and watching and listening. What can you say about a man who seems to have read most of the academic works on the subject ... and the Wonderwoman annuals ... and Carl Gustav Jung ... and the Percy Jackson books ... Dunsany, Machen and Crowley ... biographies of pop musicians ...

Is it a good book? Would I recommend it? Really don't know at the moment. I want to read The Cult of Pan in Ancient Greece (which I should have read first) and Pan the Goat-God, his myth in modern times (which probably should have come second) before I make up my mind.

Taking a short break, but next book is The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies by Clark Ashton Smith. I've never read this author, so not sure to expect. Anything I should be looking out for?

>393 benbrainard8:
Smith was a poet first of all, something of a child prodigy almost. He worked in the fin de siécle, decadent vein while it was still in fashion on the West Coast, but passé in Europe and the East Coast. When it became out of fashion on the West Coast he turned to short stories and happily found a market in the pulps. The mood of his poetry carried over into his fiction, often "Orientalised" tales, set in the distant/mythical past (such as Atlantis) or in the far future. Usually, to my mind, they have a fairy tale or Arabian Nights structure: a sort of familiarity or poetic inevitability. Don't look for clever-clever twist endings.

I can't believe I wrote "Arabian Knights!" - corrected.

I've begun reading the book, The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies by Clark Ashton Smith.

Well, I don't even know what to say---I enjoy his writing style, he's quite unique and very original in some respects. At same time, it's not really the type of story writing I can understand and find myself re-reading paragraphs (nothing wrong with this either). Right now, I've something of a perplexed and feeble understanding of what I'm reading.

His biography is nearly as interesting as his works. It seems he was quite an interesting person, lived life insular manner. Yet, he was brilliant and wrote prodigious amounts, it says he wrote even more than Lovecraft for the Weird Tales magazine/periodicals.

The first half of the book has prose/short stories, then comes a long section of his poetry. It appears his supporters, among them Lovecraft, George Sterling, and others, greatly supported and praised his writing---- his poetry and prose poetry are considered to be of very high order, so I'm looking forward to comparing it with his short story writing, which was apparently done more to support his ailing parents and, frankly, to support himself.

>392 alaudacorax:
I've read my copy too. I think I have read other things like it. Maybe Electric Eden (credited in the bibliography) or, not read but heard, those single-subject documentaries that Radio Three broadcasts on a Sunday evening.

I think like you, would have appreciated more analysis of how the idea of Pan changed and was used over time, but I suppose if there's a lack of contemporary explanation of why people are using him, the scrupulous historian can only record all those instances.

>395 benbrainard8:
I think I've mentioned it before, but there's a full-length documentary about Clark Ashton Smith. Here's the trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5BJER_eaC0

It was available on disc or for rent on Vimeo was I became aware of it. I have a suspicion I read somewhere or other than it's now on one or more streaming services as well.

Recent reading - two Dracula comics. The first one is the collected The Dracula Files from a short-lived 1984 British horror comic. With the almost brutal storytelling efficiency of the boys' War comics I remember from the '70s, it tells how Dracula disguises himself as a defector and after apprently being injured crossing the Iron Curtain is rushed to "Moxon Hall in Berkshire" (which would seemingly be near me, if it was real!) where a box of his ancestral soil has been hidden since his last trip to Britain. Quickly putting his nurse and an MI5 agent under hypnotic control, everything is going to plan. Meanwhile, in the USSR a Romanian KGB Agent is about to go rogue, and turn vampire hunter, to protect the West from the vampire (his superiors don't believe or if they do, are happy for Dracula to do his worst). Sadly the story barely had time to get into its stride before the comic it appeared in, Scream, was cancelled.

The second one is something I missed when it was put out in 1993, but has recently been collected into book form. It's an adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula by Roy Thomas and Hellboy creator Mike Mignola, also titled Bram Stoker's Dracula (and thereby defeating the Touchstones). The style of Mignola's visual storytelling is very Hellboy-ish and not so much like his earlier superhero work, and it suits the material perfectly. I presume Thomas was working from an earlier version of the screenplay and in fact it gives us some extra scenes that especially flesh out the Dracula/Mina/Harker dynamic. The translation, as it were, from film to comic book works extremely well and I'm glad I picked this one up.

As we all know, part of the joy in Literature, is the addition of new books. I'm rather new at this, so my collection is still small enough that I've not had to buy any new bookshelves, though I admit thinning by donating other types---who needs a 25 + yr. version of an accounting book from university?

It took me about 1-2 hours to peruse my various, "to buy" lists. And then going through B&N online. I nearly got "The Gothic/Edition I", by David Punter, but B&N only had edition II, so I've put that on my B&N saved list, until they've got both. I don't buy books at Amazon online.

Here's what I've just purchased, and greatly looking forward to reading:

---Horror Stories: Classic Tales from Hoffmann to Hodgson, by Darryl Jones, Oxford World's Classics

---The Golden Pot and Other Tales: A New Translation by Ritchie Robertson by E. T. A. Hoffmann, Oxford World's Classics

---Late Victorian Gothic Tales by Roger Luckhurst, Oxford World's Classics

---The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, by James Hogg, Ian Duncan, Oxford World's Classics

---The Devil in Love: Esoteric Classics: Occult Fiction, by Jacques Cazotte

I've been greatly enjoying your Dracula and editions of Dracula threads, and inspiring photos, too.

>397 benbrainard8:
I have the Daryl Jones book and am looking forward to reading it. I was fortunate enough to meet him last October and took the opportunity of thanking him for including a note at the start of the Introduction informing eeaders that if they have not already read the stories in the collection they should go and read them before reading the Introduction.

A man after my own heart.

>398 pgmcc:

Excellent! A writer like that is definitely to be encouraged.

>399 alaudacorax:
He put the same warning in the Introduction to his M.R. James book. As we would say here, “A sound man!”