THE DEEP ONES: Spring 2021 Planning Thread

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

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

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

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

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

VOTING is scheduled to END on the Spring Equinox: Saturday, March 20.

The last entry from my list of low-hanging fruit in the brainstorming thread, another early tale (written 1921, published five years later) about the perils of ignoring the superstitious locals.

A tale in epistolary form "unusual for her as it is set outside her native South."
First published in Weird Tales and variously collected.
Online at https://archive.org/stream/wt_1937_12/wt_1937_12_djvu.txt

Grant would be a new author for us, although he is not a minor name in the field. This story was his contribution to McCauley's Dark Forces collection, and has been variously reprinted and reanthologized.

A story about a haunting by the ghost of HPL, first published in Joshi's Black Wings of Cthulhu and later in an eponymous collection by the author. (There appear to be unlicensed online versions of Black Wings.)

Kecksies and Other Twilight Tales was a 1976 Arkham House title. This story can also be found in the fairly common collection 65 Great Tales of the Supernatural by Mary Danby . Valancourt Press just released The Bishop of Hell and Other Stories.

The Library of America notes, "... the difference in this case is that “The Black Dog” is a parody of ghost stories, and more specifically (in the view of some readers) a spoof of Ambrose Bierce’s tales of horror."

https://loa-shared.s3.amazonaws.com/static/pdf/Crane_Black_Dog.pdf

From the Women's Weird collection, found online at Gutenberg Australia. An online review described it

Cholmondley’s tale is that of a keenly naive academic releasing an ancient evil from its prison in an “exceedingly dank” ossuary crypt, the story slowly building to a chilling and brutal climax. Without knowing any better, based on these narrative elements, a reader would likely assume the story owes a huge debt to the eerie work of MR James. Yet, as Edmundson reminds us, ‘Let Loose’ was first published in 1890, fourteen years before James’ Ghost Stories of an Antiquary.

http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0605331h.html

Mythos tale featuring REH's 11th century Irishman Turlogh Dubh O'Brien.

Much anthologized and found online at http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0608081.txt

Begun by HPL in 1933. Finished by Warnes and published in Ramsey Campbell's New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos.

This, like the Alfred Noyes story this quarter, is another weird take on the sinking of the Lusitania. Available in several Machen collections in print and e-book format.

Quiroga is sometimes called the Uruguayan Poe. This is said to be a gothic tale. (Quiroga is probably the only writer of weird fiction to have a snake named after him.)

English translation available at https://blogicarian.blogspot.com/2012/02/translation-feather-pillow-by-horacio.h... though I can't speak to the quality of it.

A fairly random pick from The Weird - the editors describe it as "naturalistic but still undeniably strange".

Another pick from The Weird, inspired by Lewis Carroll. I missed the previous Wilson story we did, maybe time to rectify?

The lead-in tale from Living with the Dead, a little known yet truly Weird volume of interconnected short stories by Schweitzer. Besides the Subterranean edition, it can be found in Interzone #189, the July 2005 issue of Weird Tales, and the Darryl Schweitzer Megapack from Wildside Press.

Reminder: I'll be tallying these votes on Saturday.

Frankly, I ran across this as it directly follows Angela Carter's "The White Pavilion" in The Weird. The fact it brings Weird to modern warfare intrigues me. It also incorporates an element of W. S. Burroughs' concept of language as a virus.

A quick internet search didn't find any other places to read, either online or in a book anthology. Originally published in Conjunctions number 26.

I'm a little behind schedule, but I'll be totalling shortly.