So whatcha readin' now, kids? - Volume Four

We were practically being ordered to start a new thread, so here we are.

My next completed item of Gothic reading was a collection of Marvel Comics' Tomb of Dracula. American "color" comics were subject to the self-censorship of the Comics Code Authority since the '50's scare over horror and crime comics. The rules began to be relaxed in the early '70s and Marvel started a series continuing the Count's adventures. The book I read (not the one in the touchstone) collects the first 11 issues plus some material from a black and white magazine Marvel also started (such magazines were not subject to the code and could be "more adult", which apparently meant being able to draw bare bottoms).

The series ran for most of the '70s with the same writer and artist and is I believe quite well regarded. There was a bit of a revolving door policy regarding the writers in these first issues though, and there's definite bumps as the tone shifts, and plotlines are laid then abandoned.

I somehow did a double post. Just overwriting this one seems the best way to deal with it, because I have read another book. And this one actually declares itself to be a Gothic. It was published in the US by Paperback Library, a division of Coronet Communications, inc., and prints on the back cover "Paperback Library, Inc. World's Leading Publishers of Gothics".

It's one of the three Dark Shadows novels that I found in the Oxfam charity shop back in 2016, The Curse of Collinwood. This is the fifth in a series of spin-off original novels written by Marilyn Ross, who was actually Canadian author W. E. Daniel "Dan" Ross, using his wife's name. Ironically, because Dark Shadows is a cult TV show, it's easy to find a lot of minutiae about it online.

It was a daytime soap opera that was designed from the outset to be Gothic, but initially had poor ratings and fully embraced the supernatural aspects of the Gothic in a spirit of "what do we have to lose". The gamble worked. The show's most iconic character, its Mr Spock if you will, who debuted in late spring 1967, was the vampire Barnabas Collins.

He's on the front cover of The Curse of Collinwood although he doesn't appear in the novel (you have to wonder if "Marilyn Ross" was writing far ahead of publication (this was first published May 1968) or simply didn't watch the programme or have any connection with the production team. The synposes of the earlier novels, printed at the back of this book, doesn't even get the name of the main location (the house called Collinwood) right until book four).

I have a little knowledge of Dark Shadows around the time of this novel, because I have the stories that introduced Barnabas Collins (including the one broadcast on the day of my birth - quite a dull one!) as a DVD box set.

Briefly, our point of view character is Victoria Winters, working as a sort of nanny or tutor at Collinwood, the house owned by the wealthy Collins family who own the fish processing business in the Maine coastal town of Collinsport. Her love interest, local playboy Burke Devlin, clumsily lets some zombified Collins ancestors get reanimated. They go murdering when it's the full Moon, but who would believe it, especially when a killer Hippie and his girl are in the locale, muddying the waters?

The book isn't bad, but it's not really an undiscovered gem. It starts off briskly with plenty of dialogue, but spins its wheels quite a bit before we're a third of the way through the story. That, to be fair, is not inconsistent with the storytelling on the show itself (which had to fill 20-25 minutes a day, filmed live or as live, and with a small budget), and characterisation seemed consistent with what I've watched of the show.

>2 housefulofpaper:

Ah, right. This won't show up as a new post.

Okay, here are the blurbs for the other Dark Shadows books, as printed at the back of The Curse of Collinwood. I would have been interested to also learn about some of the non-Dark Shadows titles published under the Paperback Library imprint

I've seen and am sure to have some of the "Paperback Library"' editions, but with a name like that they are a real pain to search for, by publisher.

Still running a zero on any Dark Shadows pulp, tho'.

Hello All,

Am greatly enjoying Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories by Algernon Blackwood, S.T. Joshi (Introduction). Have read three of the stories so far and great enjoyed "The Willows", novella.

AB had quite an interesting life. I'm jealous at how well travelled he was. It sounds like he was quite the interesting person, too. I didn't know that he was a BBC radio/T.V. person (is there name for that---like radio/T.V. host?).

Will take my time on this read.

He seems to have such varied, yet inter-related interest: occult, Nature, Nature Mysticism, reincarnation, psychology, pathology, etc. I can see why some people put his writings in fields such as Science Fiction, Fantasy, as well as horror/mystery.

Another introductory mentions he joined or was exposed to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn--occultists society (W.B. Yeates also a member) & was also a member of what was called Theosophical Society--can anyone explain what this was to me? ---I'm bit lost. It sounds like it started in the 1870s.

Am also curious as to what is called "Society for Psychical Research" that he joined in Edinburgh. This was prior to the groups he joined listed above.

Onward, quite bit more to read in this book.

>5 benbrainard8:
I'm glad you're enjoying Algernon Blackwood's stories. I've struggled a bit at times to get "in sync" with the pace of his stories, the moment-by-moment focus on perception and mental states (which Blackwood takes as reflecting psychic and spiritual states). I didn't have any such problems reading the stories in the old Penguin edition, or a story I read just a couple of days ago, "A Victim of Higher Space" (the last story that Blackwood wrote about Dr John Silence).

I think Algernon would have been referred to a radio and/or television personality.

I need to caveat the following, because I'm by no means an expert, but my understandng is that the Theosophical Society began towards the end of the 19th Century, as you say. It started in the US but the main person behind it was a Russian, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. It's somewhere between a mystical philosophy and a religion, I believe, that draws on elements of Eastern religion and of Spiritualism, and the synthesis is presented as the "Truth" that world religions and modern science have been striving towards. This truth, she claimed, was revealed to her by Spritual adepts who sent her to study in Tibet, when that country was largely cut off from the rest of the world and accordngly a place of mystery. I don't know how many people follow Theosophy today, but the movement seems to have been key in spreading Buddhism in the West and the whole New Age movement possibly sprang from it. Not to mention the effect on popular culture - Shangri-La, Doctor Strange's origin story, all those turban-wearing carnival mind reading acts, and so on.

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, on the other hand, was concerned with the Western esoteric tradition (which is much more intimately bound up with Christianity than is generally understood. Certainly Arthur Machen, for example, had no qualms about joining).

Structurally, I believe, it was modelled on the lodge structure of Freemasonry. The order's Wikipedia entry says that Alistair Crowley's Thelema, and modern Wicca, can be traced back to it.

The Society for Psychical Research were Victorian ghost-hunters (although in fairness it needs to be noted that the Society is still going). They were scientific rather than mystical in outlook and approach. They investigated hauntings and seances with, I imagine, the same confidence in their methods, and in the likelihood of soon getting positive results as researchers into psychic abilities in the 1970s.

>6 housefulofpaper: Thank you much for the information.

I've just finished reading Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories by Algernon Blackwood, S.T. Joshi (Introduction).

I bookended by watching two movies very loosely based upon his story "Ancient Sorceries", 1908. These movies are quite different but have little to do with his story. Cat People, 1942, and the Cat People, 1982.

For reading, he is not what I'd call a fast read, and it takes a lot of patience. But he's very descriptive, capturing internal, psychological aspects of people, their surroundings, and many of the fields of interests that AB had----Nature, Nature & Mysticism, the occult, reincarnation among them.

I found two stories, "The Wendigo", 1st published in 1910 and "Sand" which 1st appeared in 1912, to also be particularly interesting and quite wonderful.

Now onto, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, James Hogg, Ian Duncan (Editor).

>7 benbrainard8:
Yes, there's very little of the short story left in the screenplay for Cat People (1942), and I wonder if Paul Schrader was even aware of it when he made the 1982 version.

I've also been reading an author who nobody, I think, would describe as a fast read: Henry James. I've just finished reading The Turn of the Screw first serialised in Collier's Magazine in 1898). I was familiar with the story from two very faithful adaptations, Jack Clayton's 1961 film The Innocents and Benjamin Britten's 1954 chamber opera. It was something I was glad of, as I can lose my way, at times, in James' minute descriptions of reactions to events, and not grasp what actually just happened.

>7 benbrainard8:

Apologies for nit-picking, but I think Lewton abandoned any idea of basing his film on Blackwood. I think the right word for the '82 film is 'inspired' by the '42.

And I've just been struck by the curse of Kindle again. You've just caused me to realise how much I've never read of my Algernon Blackwood: The Complete Supernatural Stories (120 tales of ghosts and mystery: The Willows, The Wendigo, The Listener, The Centaur, The Empty House...) (Halloween Stories) (sorry about the length of that title—only way I could get the touchstone). You had me checking on 'Sand', and I'm fairly sure I've never read it.

Editing ... didn't mean to press the 'Save' then ...

Oddly enough, I've been intending for the last couple of weeks to read or reread some Blackwood. Always one of my favourites.

I'm intending plenty of reading in the next few weeks. Not much choice in the matter—had a heart attack a week ago today. Now it's rest and exercising very lightly with no pushing it.

As I was going to have a heart attack anyway, I'm a bit miffed at all the bottles of wine I haven't drunk since New Year ...

>9 alaudacorax:

I think there are still a few traces of Blackwood's story in the film: a girl who turns into a cat, from a remote village of witches who can all turn into cats; the attraction between the girl and the main male character (and then he rejects her), maybe John Silence suggested Tom Conway's psychiatrist character. But obviously these basic elements were taken and then woven into a very different story.

>9 alaudacorax:

I'm so sorry to hear that. Wishing you a swift recovery.

>9 alaudacorax:

Oh no! Good to hear from you and best wishes for a quick recovery!

>8 housefulofpaper:
I enjoyed The Turn of the Screw. I have a few other Henry James books awaiting attention, but feel I have to build myself up to reading then.

>9 alaudacorax:
Sorry to hear about your heart attack. Get well soon. I am sure reading supernatural tales is the best form of resting.

>9 alaudacorax: I'm sorry to hear your news. Wishing you a swift and full recovery.

>9 alaudacorax: I hope you've a strong recovery, and that few weeks of healthy rest and book reading will give you a needed rest.

AB has been a delight to read, I've been deeply impressed with his writing style. I do admit that he's not the kind of writer you can breeze through. Fortunately, my spouse was on an overseas trip, so I could spend hours reading the AB collection. Found myself reading and re-reading some paragraphs.

I'm envious of AB's life of moving about. Though I've lived abroad, AB seemed to have had opportunities to live in number of places (Canada, NYC, Switzerland, his native England). And his travels---France, southern Italy, Egypt, etc.

And that he was radio & T.V. personality is also interesting to me, I'm going to see if I can find any of this online for viewing, listening to.

Yes, I'd say the two cat-associated films are only very loosely based on his short story. I found the 1942 version to be bit amusing, especially the role of the psychiatrist. It was quite the time period...but I also admit to being in love with the way they dress in the film. Ah...if only I could look good in that type of suit and hat, leisure coats. The 1982 film version was only interesting because of Malcolm McDowell, though it was quite far astray from the "Ancient Sorceries" story/novella.

'Sand' was the story that impressed me the most, and after reading it, I thought much of Lawrence Durrell and his Alexandria Quartet tetralogy of novels. The AB novella has such vivid descriptions of Egypt, the desert. This story reminds me as much about Fantasy and travelogue, as anything approaching Gothic/horror. It's a wonderfully written work.

>16 benbrainard8:

Thanks BB.

I finished 'Sand' last night. Don't quite know what I thought about it. The writing was sort of absorbing and, especially of the last four or five chapters, even hallucinogenic. I was waiting for the World Cup rugby to start—I think 1:30am—and I kept dozing off with the prose seamlessly blending in and out of some strange dreams of my own that aped it and the story. Weird experience. At the same time, another part of my brain was finding it quite long-winded—much more of it than I felt there needed to be to built the atmosphere and so on. And then I found the ending a bit ... I'm struggling for the correct word, here, but 'prosaic', perhaps? I'm assuming it was a matter of inheriting the aunt's fortune?

Edited to add: I meant 'prosaic' in comparison to what had gone before, an element of bathos, perhaps?

I've been reading 100 Creepy Little Creature Stories, which contains a mix of Weird fiction, supernatural fiction, and horror fiction. Some of the supernatural stories cross over into the gothic. I'm only 19 stories in so far, and the stories have varied in quality as well as personal appeal to me, but I'm largely enjoying myself.

I do have some critiques on the anthology itself, though. The stories are presented without original publication date and in alphabetical, rather than publication or even subject matter order. It's like the editors went out of their way to avoid making any commentary on the stories of any kind. It's a little annoying, especially since I don't have a lot of background in these genres, and could do with some context.

Still, as a starting point, it's certainly got breadth, if nothing else.

>18 Julie_in_the_Library:

Yeah, I, too, get annoyed when collections give no chronology. Especially collections by a single author.

>17 alaudacorax: Thank you; this is quite an interesting read.

Though I can't speak to the details of the story, I guess every reader is bringing with them their own experiences, backgrounds, things learned, Literary and cinema favorites, etc.

Among my favorites are movies and literature---are works that have wonderful imagery of deserts --- The Sheltering Sky, 1990, Lawrence of Arabia, are a few among them.

The descriptions of the desert bring to mind many other literary works. But as many know, AB is thought of a premier Naturist, and his words do seem hallucinatory at times. I think that's why I had to re-read sections of 'Sand', to ensure I was interpreting the story events correctly.

In 'Sand', I couldn't help but compare his descriptions of Lady Statham with that of one of the central characters in Lawrence Durrell's Justine, (1957).

First to admit that end isn't exactly solid. It'd even be a great movie, there is enough content.

I finished The Women of Weird Tales recently. It's a collection of stories by four female authors published in Weird Tales between 1925 and 1949. When my reading started to focus on weird fiction about 15 years ago I became interested in what was appearing in Weird Tales alongside stories by "the big three" so I was looking forward to this collection.

If you look at my catalogue you'll see that I give books a star rating - I felt obliged to do so when I joined the site and started adding my books, and then kept at it - but nearly everything gets four stars. So I feel quite guilty about only giving this book three stars.

The fact is that only a couple of the stories really took flight. They tended to be more conventional than anything that HPL, REH or CAS would have produced for Weird Tales...the sort of story that would be more likely to have an afterlife adapted for radio or a "B" feature (or, thirty years later, a Night Gallery segment - that happened to one of these stories). Perhaps I was in the wrong mood for them (annoyingly, as I was determined that I wanted to devote this October to a proper extended spooky reading session).

None of these stories are bad. The one story that was the most fun to read, real "I couldn't put it down stuff", unfortunately gets perilously close to shaggy dog story territory in the denouement (and structurally is close to another, and much-anthologised, story by the same author).

One or two stories go completely bananas (Everil Worrell's "The Gray Killer" starts as a noir-ish suspense thriller and ends in the pulpiest regions of Z-grade sci-fi). There are a couple of very good vampire stories, the last of which, and the most recent story in the collection, feels, if not exactly modern, then that it could have been a 1970s TV Movie (which brought to mind things I'd read about how Weird Tales was still innovative and influential after it had entered into its supposed decline - in sales terms, the decline was all too real - with an editorial focus on telling stories of specifically American, and specifically regional, horrors.

And today I finished Women's Weird: Strange Stories by Women, 1890-1940. This is another collection of overlooked female authors (and some still well known - E. Nesbit, Edith Wharton probably the best known).

This is a more literary selection than was in the Weird Tales book. Although overwhelmingly set in an Edwardian middle class or upper middle class milieu, they weren't too polite to pack a punch. Quite a few featured haunted or possessed domestic items. This perhaps points to a feminine perspective - as per the particular milieu of the stories (and, probably, the authors) but again, they were not tame or twee.

!
My last post...just disappeared.
I managed to read one more - short - spooky book before the end of October. It was The Great Nocturnal by Jean Ray. It's very short (for reasons I don't have the heart to type out again) but good, especially the title novella.

>22 housefulofpaper:

I've got that. Now you come to mention it, I can't remember how far I've got through it; but I know I've been impressed by the quality of some of the stories.

>23 housefulofpaper: thank you for listing this book, I've added to my B&N account. here' s a description of it from the B&N website:

After the commercial failure of his 1931 collection of fantastical stories Cruise of Shadows, Jean Ray spent the next decade writing and publishing under other names in the stifling atmosphere of Ghent. Only in the midst of the darkest years of the Nazi Occupation of Belgium would he suddenly publish a spate of books under his earlier nom de plume. The first of these volumes was The Great Nocturnal.

Published in 1942, the collection, as its subtitle indicates, consists of tales of fear and dread, but a dread evoked not by the standard tropes of horror but what had by now evolved into Ray’s personal brand of fear, drawn from a specifically Belgian notion of the fantastic that lies alongside the banality of everyday life. These tales are laced with a certain mordant humor that bears as much allegiance with Ambrose Bierce as Edgar Allan Poe, and toy as much with the reader’s expectations as they do with their characters.

>25 benbrainard8:
Thanks for providing that write-up. When I tried to describe the book in my mysteriously-lost post, I was surprised to realise that only a couple of stories dealt with explicitly supernatural subjects because there's an air of "the thinning of the veil" throughout the whole book, as well as that "Belgian-ness" - the dangerous low-life dives on the docks and the bourgeois parlours in the town, the rain and the fog and (if we accept Jonathan Meades' thesis, set out in a couple of television documentaries) the fact of a Catholic country situated not in the sunny South but in cold dark Northern Europe.

Latest reading - just one short story, but in a separate booklet or chapbook. Usually 12-16 pages and stapled (depending on the cover photo chosen, they can sometimes look like a pamphlet you'd see in your doctor's surgery).

Author and editor Nicholas Royle (Nicholas Royle (2), on here) has been putting out limited editions of single short stories, signed by the authors, for about ten years. They are "Weird", but range from squarely genre pieces, to experimental, to ones where virtually nothing happens but they capture a sense of unease. Like when you walk home from work and there seems to be a bit of an atmosphere, and you vaguely hope it doesn't mean the area's going downhill.

This one was called "The Country Pub" by David Gaffney. Its compass bearing is between "unease" and "traditional genre". In it, Gaffney and his wife arrive at a country pub at which they have booked a night's stay, based on the promises of its website. In a short span the story "does" two versions of "unsettling British countryside".

For those who have exhausted the classic vampire lore, there's an unexpected contribution by Carlos Fuentes, the late Mexican author. Inquieta compañía collects six stories about various aspects of vampires, necrophilia, Nazi zombies... unfortunately it doesn't seem to have been completely published in English, BUT, the very last story, Vlad (about you-know-who himself), has been. Dracula has come to Mexico City.

And for all we know, may still be there.

>28 LolaWalser:
There's very little by Carlos Fuentes currently in print in the UK, judging by a look on Amazon. I looked in the Oxfam bookshop too, which was always going to be a long shot, but the stock of second-hand books is even smaller than usual. A combination of the usual pre-Christmas push on gifts, cards, and Fairtrade chocolate, and some work being done somewhere in the building. I did find a (slightly scruffy) UK hardback first edition of Black Venus, though.

>26 housefulofpaper: note that I've just ordered The Great Nocturnal, Jean Ray. Will read it after completing The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Tales
by Robert Louis Stevenson.

I'm looking forward to beginning 2nd book, so that I can compare it with the book I've just finished, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
by James Hogg, Ian Duncan (Editor). There have been comparisons that I've been reading online. Though to me The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg, Ian Duncan (Editor) may be called more of a religious parable (?), sorry trying to think of the right terminology.

I read The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner almost exactly ten years ago and the details of the story have faded from my memory. From what I remember (not just of the novel but reading about the novel) it's in part an examination (maybe what a high-falutin' literary essay would all an interrogation) of Calvinist thinking. I have a suspicion religious parables are invariably uncritical of their religion (is that true though? as soon as I wrote it I remembered reading about the long tradition of Jewish religious writing which is in essence arguing with God).

There's lots of doubling, mirroring, "good" and "bad" selves, and doppelgangers in 19th Century fantastic fiction. As well as The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, there's The Portrait of Dorian Gray, Poe's "William Wilson", (Holmes and Moriarty?). Some adaptations have even projected the idea back onto Frankenstein (for example the 1968 British TV play with Ian Holm in a dual role as Frankenstein and the Creature, which I discussed on here a while back.

Recent Gothic and related reading, over the last month or so

The Ballad of Black Tom (1am, with work tomorrow, isn't a good time to try to put my thoughts down about this one. It was good, I'll say that now).

Ghosts of the Chit-Chat (the original versions of M. R. James' first two ghost stories, as read to this Cambridge club, plus stories by other members, with short biographical essays by Robert Lloyd Parry. This was published in 2020 and I wasn't going to let another Christmas go by without actually getting to read it).

Dangerous Dimensions, The Machine in Shaft Ten, The Country of the Blind and Other Selected Stories all tend to the Weird or straight science fiction rather than Gothic as such, but some stories wander over the blurry Genre boundary-lines (The Wells book is the Penguin selection published early this century not the bigger book of the same name (minus "selected") published in Wells' lifetime).

The Art of Gothic - an overview of the music and associated graphic design (mainly record sleeves/covers), fashion and "alt culture" from the late '70s to around 2014. I've written on here before that my idea of "Goth" is stuck around 1983, and a lot of this imagery, well, I would never have described it as Goth, just "not soft and fluffy" (except where, when it's hybridised with strains of Japanese popular culture, or expressed as Tim Burton-esque cartoons, it's that too!).

And more of the single-story Nightjar Press pamphlets or chapbooks edited and published by Nicholas Royle.

>31 housefulofpaper:
When reading Melmoth the Wanderer I was surprised to find the premise of The Portrait of Dorian Gray presented in one of the early chapters, it may even have been the first chapter. Melmoth certainly portrays lots of "good" and "evil" sides of the main subject of the text.

They are somewhat off-topic for this group, but I actually got a couple of quite enticing books for Christmas presents.

I'll jump over Bibliomaniac: An Obsessive's Tour of the Bookshops of Britain and just say I'm quite looking forward to reading it.

But I really have to mention Librorum Ridiculorum: A Compendium of Bizarre Books. Setting aside Planet of the Knob Heads, The Big Problem of Small Organs and Scouts in Bondage as possibly too vulgar for this readership, and The English: Are They Human and Flashes from the Welsh Pulpit as possibly libelous, Premature Burial And How It May Be Prevented might find an interest here ...

>34 alaudacorax: Librorum Ridiculorum rang a bell. I have a book co-authored by Brian Lake, Bizarre Books, published by antiquarian bookseller Jarndyce 20 years ago (a paperback, it was very nearly the only thing in the shop I could afford). It's very much the same kind of thing - weird titles and obscure subject matter, lots of innocently-titled old books with accidently double entrendre titles. I remember used to put some actual books of the kind in their window display.

Unless LibraryThing has combined two different books, it seems this was a reprint of a volume originally published way back in 1985.

>33 pgmcc:
Melmoth the Wanderer also brings to mind London's antiquarian bookshops. When the Folio Sociey published their edition (30 years ago next March, I think), they also held one of their sales for members. But this was when they were between premises and were borrowing or renting space in Henry Sotherans. I went along (feeling, I admit, more than a little intimidated). What I remember chiefly was the originals of the illustrations for the book displayed in the shop frontage (quite bold, if you've ever studied the cover of that editon closely), and the parade-ground shine on the shoes of a Cleric (of what Denomination I couldn't tell you) in full Ecclesiatical garb, rooting through the sale stock.

>35 housefulofpaper:
...and the parade-ground shine on the shoes of a Cleric (of what Denomination I couldn't tell you) in full Ecclesiatical garb, rooting through the sale stock.

That is particularly scary, especially given the role of clerics in Melmoth. :-)

Happy New Year!

>31 housefulofpaper: I'm always grateful when, as many of the OUP editions do, there is timeline of events regarding the author (here RLS) presented.

I was startled to find/read about the events described various readings online, but this summed it up nicely:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Jekyll_and_Mr._Hyde_(1887_play):

excerpt: 'Stage version: Although the book had initially been published as a "shilling shocker", it was an immediate success and one of Stevenson's best-selling works. Stage adaptations began in Boston and London and soon moved all across England and then towards his home country of Scotland.

The first stage adaptation followed the story's initial publication in 1886. Richard Mansfield bought the rights from Stevenson and worked with Boston author Thomas Russell Sullivan to write a script. The resulting play added to the cast of characters and some elements of romance to the plot. The addition of female characters to the originally male-centred plot continued in later adaptations of the story. The first performance of the play took place in the Boston Museum in May 1887. The lighting effects and makeup for Jekyll's transformation into Hyde created horrified reactions from the audience, and the play was so successful that production followed in London. After a successful 10 weeks in London in 1888, Mansfield was forced to close down production. The hysteria surrounding the Jack the Ripper serial murders led even those who only played murderers on stage to be considered suspects. When Mansfield was mentioned in London newspapers as a possible suspect for the crimes, he shut down production.'

I'm finishing up, there are three appendices in this version.

And interesting to read that RLS was a contemporary of Arthur Conan Doyle, and only bit before Oscar Wilde (?). Check me, these timelines do get bit lengthy.

I would really like to see a movie version of Melmoth the Wanderer, boy that'd be something.

>37 benbrainard8:

Yes, Wikipedia says they were all born in the 1850s (RLS 1850, OW 1854, ACD 1859). I think the period roughly 1884-1894 was when they were all publishing work at the same time. RLS died in 1894 and Wilde's trial was the next year, I think.

>35 housefulofpaper:, >36 pgmcc:

Funny how shoes get into my brain. Reading Rembetis' link, https://www.librarything.com/profile/Rembetis, I've just realised, somewhat to my embarrassment, that I have a slight reluctance to listening to Mark Gatiss on the radio stemming from the time I saw him on TV wearing brown shoes with a blue suit. I probably need help ...

>37 benbrainard8:

This sort of thing opens up multiple cans of worms on who was influencing whom, which I never quite seem to get a grip on.

>39 alaudacorax: The horror! The horror! Brown shoes with a blue suit! :-)

>39 alaudacorax:
I think I share your ailment. One of my sons went to work in a blue suit and wearing brown shoes. I expected him to be sent right back home. He wasn't. Apparently the whole world has been infected.

Belatedly watching a YouTube video about Arkham House (been turning up in my recommendations for weeks and I've never got round to it). I imagine we've discussed it here sometime or other—we'll all be fairly familiar with the content.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5k_iug7rWmE

It finally clicked with me—I don't remember previously making the connection—that the reason I have these vague memories of long, long ago reading so much of this stuff—Lovecraft, Derleth, Bradbury and so forth, is that somebody at my little local library way back in the '60s and, perhaps, earlier, was buying this stuff so that it was there waiting for the teenage me to come and devour it. This stuff definitely wouldn't have been approved of by my teachers back in those days; sci-fi, horror, fantasy were all beyond the pale and I remember one of my younger teachers getting grief from the local watch committee only because he'd mentioned The Carpetbaggers in passing. If somebody there was ordering-in this stuff all the way from the USA (How else would they have got it?) and sneaking it in under the radar, as it were ... well ... may the gods bless public library librarians.

>43 alaudacorax:

Knowing how strict the rules where even in the 1970s - remember most paperbacks had "not for sale in the USA or Canada" printed on the back cover - I'd be surprised if Arkham House editions managed to get into the UK public library system. But as you say, the gods bless the librarians, if that did happen!

However, over the past few years I've fond out about some UK reprints, and it might have been these you were reading:

Christine Campbell Thomson edited a series of spooky short story anthologies, named the "Not at Night" series after the title of the first volume. These came out between 1925-1936 and included 100 stories reprinted from Weird Tales. This series saw the first publication in hardcovers, anywhere in the world, of H. P. Lovecraft's fiction.

Around the turn of the '60's/'70s British publisher Neville Spearman published straight reprints of some Arkham House titles (in amongst a fairly eclectic list "which included chess, cookery, espionage, fiction, flying saucers, poetry, reincarnation, sex, spiritualism, and wrestling" (Wikipedia)!. These were the intermediate step to the books getting paperback publication in the UK (often split between two or three volumes).

How times change...in the early '80s we studied Brave New World in English, and had selections from The Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus and Nineteen Eighty-Four as set texts for English O and A level, respectively (we studied Nineteen Eighty-Four in the year 1984). And at one fund-raising school jumble sale or fete my English teacher cheerfully sold a copy of Emmanuelle to one of my schoolfriends...

>43 alaudacorax:, >44 housefulofpaper:

>43 alaudacorax: was a total cock-up! I was listening to that video rather than watching, while sorting old bird watching data elsewhere on this system, and, watching some rubbishy film or other with subtitles on the telly. And then I try to post on LibraryThing! I've really got to stop this kind of nonsense. And, trying to figure out what 'rubbishy film', I've just ruined my first attempt at making a cup of tea ... stewed for twenty-four minutes ... throw it out and start again ...

How was that post a cock-up ... I've forgotten now ... as well as the fatuous attempts at multi-tasking, I've really got to stop staying up most of the night watching YouTube videos and what have you—I don't have half a brain this morning.

Oh for gods' sakes! If one more tw*t phones me talking bullocks about my internet connection ... and they've got the brass cheek to sound offended when I tell them they're talking rubbish ...

That post, what I was going to say: I've belatedly realised I have a clear memory of reading Lovecraft in the yellow, hardcover, Gollancz editions back in what would have been the second half of the sixties. So, with the two imprints you mention, that's at least three possible sources for my reading. Almost certainly, my library would not have had any need to buy Arkham House. I think I may have been misunderstanding that video clip first time round; I think he was making a case for Arkham House keeping the popularity of those, familiar-to-me, old writers alive while I was taking him to be saying that Arkham House would have been the only source of them back then. I imagine August Derleth or Arkham House had some sort of connection to the British imprints—AD's listed as editor on the Gollancz Lovecrafts, at least.

I really, really wish I'd thought of keeping a reading journal back in the day. Like a conditioned reflex, so many of the author names that come up in discussions of such as Arkham House bring back vague, warm memories of youthful reading, but I can't, at this distance, put any substance to the memories—they're really more feelings than memories.

>45 alaudacorax:

Just remembered I meant to make a note somewhere to hunt up the couple of female writers mentioned in that video—never heard of them, to my memory, fallible as it is.

>44 housefulofpaper:, >45 alaudacorax:

... and you can get into some seriously weird (with a small 'w') byways looking for Neville Spearman books publications on AbeBooks ...

>46 alaudacorax:

Nearer half a dozen ...

>45 alaudacorax:
The plot thickens! I had a look on AbeBooks for "H P Lovecraft" + "Gollancz" and a few 1960s titles with their distinctive typography-on-yellow-background covers are listed. The first such was described as an ex-library edition.

August Derleth's involvement was bigger than "editor". The bulk of the titles listed included Derleth's "posthumous collaborations" (some having little of Lovecraft in them, being based on nothing more than an idea from his story notebook).

These books were released as paperbacks (not by Gollancz of course, in line with all the other hardcover publishers, they wouldn't dirty their hands with such a lowly product). I found a couple in the Oxfam bookshop The Mask of Cthulhu, The Shuttered Room a few year ago. I don't think these stories have been in print for maybe 50 years - but the story might be different in the States.

That AbeBooks search also reminded me that Gollancz are still publishing Lovecraft, with the two big collections edited by Stephen Jones, Necronomicon and Eldritch Tales.

>46 alaudacorax:

Evangeline Walton
Cynthia Asquith
Mary Wilkins Freeman
Phyllis Eisenstein
Tanith Lee
James Tiptree, Jr.
Nancy Kress
C. L. Moore

>50 housefulofpaper:

I didn't mean to be so terse, there...I'd watched that Library Ladder upload and jotted the names down as they occurred, then got called away before I could say anything further.

I've read four of these authors, and I've got Evangeline Walton's novel (in a different edition) waiting to be read.

>51 housefulofpaper:

Bit expensive, Evangeline Walton, as far as I could find, but I got some Tiptree and Wilkins Freeman for my Kindle. If I remember, Asquith was difficult to find, too. I'm a long-time fan of Tanith Lee, of course, but, even on my second watch-through, I missed the other authors you've listed. Must have a look for them.

>52 alaudacorax:

Too my surprise, I found Robert Bloch difficult to get hold of, too: used copies at high prices and The Opener of the Way, which was the collection I particularly wanted, virtually impossible. I mean, he's a famous name, Psycho and all that ...

Why do things suddenly start turning up on one's online radar?

I've recently* downloaded and started reading The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson. I know that the final prompt to doing that was seeing it on >43 alaudacorax:'s video, but it had been (vaguely) in my mind for some weeks prior to that. The video prompted me to do some searching; I found it described as 'influential'; the late, great Sir Terry Pratchett was enthusiastic about it; and so ...

But why had it been on my radar? I thought I had been vaguely aware of trailers floating about online for a recent film version and I even had vague memories of watching one of them—it turns out I was quite wrong about that, there's no such beast. The book has definitely been turning up in my Amazon recommendations for some weeks, though, and reviews of it have been turning up in my YouTube recommendations at the same time. I should say here that YT and anything else of Google's that I may use are kept strictly in Firefox containers and not allowed to track me across the web or snoop on my doings—and I don't use their search engine or image search or even Google translate (which is crap anyway). So why, a month or so back, did somebody or some algorithm suddenly decide that I need to read or buy The House on the Borderland? Is it perhaps the ghost of WHH manipulating things from the other side? Really can't dream up any other explanation for it. It's as mysterious as YouTube's secret agenda to get you to watch fluffy kittens ...

ETA - *By 'recently' I mean yesterday or the day before.

/54

Finished The House on the Borderland. This was good, quite a powerful novel with tension and scares and a very vivid imagination.

It was another of these works that has me wondering about influences: who was influencing whom out of Hope Hodgson, Dunsany, Clark Ashton Smith and Lovecraft?

Lovecraft apparently didn’t read it until 1934, which I find hard to believe. I’d also find it hard to believe that Ashton Smith didn’t read it as a young man. Dunsany must surely have influenced Hodgson, and perhaps it’s Dunsany’s influence on Lovecraft and Ashton Smith that’s leading me to link them with Hope Hodgson?

>45 alaudacorax: - I really, really wish I'd thought of keeping a reading journal back in the day.

I realised while looking up dates for >55 alaudacorax: that I've managed to read quite a lot of Hope Hodgson short stories over recent years without ever once making any notes or starring them. So much for my reading journal.

>52 alaudacorax:
>53 alaudacorax:

The supply of second-hand paperbacks seems to have dried up as far as Weird authors are concerned. Not even my visit to Hay-on-Wye last March turned up anything.

Reprints from small presses quickly reach unattainable prices on the secondary market (look at the Centipede Press editons of Witch House listed on AbeBooks).

There are copies of the Chaosium collection of Robert Bloch's Cthulhu Mythos stories listed on Abe...not especially cheap but not sky-high (for that, see his novel Strange Eons on there).

>55 alaudacorax:

The House on the Borderland is due a re-read, especially as I now have the Swan River Press hardcover edition. (I should also re-read Iain Sinclair's pseudo-sequel Radon Daughters. It's nearly 30 years since I read it, and it ought to strike a lot differently now).

Lord Dunsany was popular enough to have been influential in lots of sub-genres but I haven't read enough author's biographies to be able to cite particular cases. I'm not so sure about Clark Ashton Smith though. My understanding is that he was influenced by, and became a part of, a late flowering of decadent poets in Southern California. When he had to turn to fiction writing to make a living he brought that experience and sensiblity to the kind of story Weird Tales was publishing. So any Lord Dunsany influence was possibly/probably at at least one remove (if he had influenced the WT authors Smith took as models for his first stories).

>57 housefulofpaper: - There are copies of the Chaosium collection ...

Thanks, Andrew. I could swear I ran seaches without that showing up ...

ETA - And now I'm seeing a variety of quite cheap Bloch books ...

>58 housefulofpaper:

Interesting point on CAS and Decadence. I actually have Steve Behrends' Clark Ashton Smith: A Critical Guide to the Man and His Work on order; I've been meaning for years to read up on these chaps. However, seeing the ton of unread stuff I already have here ...

I've just ordered The Literature of Terror: Volume 1, The Gothic, Edition 2 by David Punter.

It looks like quite a hefty book. Anything I should be looking out for specifically? Or does anyone have a favorite section of this book?

> I've seen David Punter's name cropping up a lot in my reading about the Gothic, so I'm surprised to see that I don't own any of his books. Obviously I can't recommend any particular section of this book, but looking at the excerpts viewable on Amazon, it seems to be organised chronologically, so I suppose I'd read it in order - the same way I'm (slowly!) readin The Cambridge History of the Gothic. That said, the chapters on "Gothic and Romanticism" and "Gothic and the Sensation novel" intrigue me - seeing how the genres interwine, or how Gothic is subsumed by and/or secretly invigorates another.

I've been reading mystery books lately. I've just finished Margery Allingham's third 'Albert Campion' book, Look to the Lady.

This is one of those books that makes you wonder how many Gothic tropes a book can play with without actually being a Gothic Novel. It has an aristocratic family at its centre, so old as to be one of the few Saxon families to come through the Conquest. They have a family duty and a dark secret handed down generation to generation since before the Conquest. There is a shadowy, sinister organisation lurking in the background, with nefarious intentions. There are hidden passages and secret rooms. There is some unspeakable horror haunting the local woods at night. There is witchcraft.

The average reader may not be aware of the wealth of Gothic detail in the novel, but Ms. Allingham must surely have been deliberately using it. I'm sure she was at the very least familiar with Ann Radcliffe.

ETA - For clarity: by 'mystery' I meant the 'cosy' type of detective story and I meant familiar with Mrs. Radcliffe's novels.

>63 alaudacorax:

I'm constantly being put into 'grumpy old man' mode by the near-constant warnings when I watch British telly. They put warnings on every damn' thing you can think of: "Warning. Contains language typical of its times", or some such; warnings of 'scenes of violence' in documentaries about the world wars—even of 'scenes of violence' in a documentary about one of the recent tsunamis; and the list could go on and on and on. I wonder just how many unspeakable plonkers there are watching telly with the express purpose of being offended.

And now, to my horror, I find it's seeped into my soul to the extent that I was feeling a compulsion, in my last post, to put a warning about Ms. Allingham's occasional racial insensitivity. As if you are all going to be shocked into heart attacks by finding non-PC language in a book written nearly a century ago.

I wonder how long it will be before they make me wear a warning: "Warning: Old, white, male; may make derisory and offensive comments about modern times; approach with extreme caution".

>63 alaudacorax:

I'm still intrigued by and choosing my reading with an eye on the popularity of the god Pan in the early decades of the 20thC. and it's fascinating to pick up on the little clues that Allingham was tuned in to all that; though she doesn't refer to him directly. I see clues she's read some of the same horror stories I have, but can't remember which ones I'm thinking of. It's very untidy that writers read writers, gives you so many threads to disentangle ...

>64 alaudacorax:

And how come they don't put warnings before playing counter-tenors on BBC Radio 3? The buggers offend me with their caterwauling.

>63 alaudacorax:
I think I have all the Campion books. I started when the BBC adapted the pre-war ones with Peter Davison as Campion (so there is a TV version of Look to the Lady). Mind you, I haven't read the post-war novels yet. I've only had them for thirty years, give me a chance!

It's certainly odd how much "Folk Horror" was woven into genre and even straight literature and not really picked out as a thing in its own right until - what, as recently as 10-15 years ago?

But now, you can go back and look at a cozy from novel from the 30s, or a particularly ripe episode of Bergerac - or even the first Doctor Who TV spin-off, K-9 and Company and confidently identify it as Folk Horror.

It wasn't invisible before we had the term, people could recognise what sort of thing they were seeing or reading and know they'd encountered it before, but what would they have called it? Or would it have been treated as sub-categories of one or more genres? "Devil Worship" + "Sinister Rurals", perhaps?

I suppose I could say I’ve been wasting time again—or, at least, I’ve again gone off on one of my wild tangents. I’ve only just made an attempt at getting some sort of sense into my ‘Currently reading’ and ‘Long term reading’ piles, making a deliberate decision while I was at it to temporarily abandon that huge The Collected Fiction of Robert E. Howard ebook I’ve been reading, and then I went and bought and started reading more of the same genre*. C. L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry is another book discovered through ‘The Outlaw Bookseller’ that Andrew linked over in the 'Frankenstein' thread (here)—that chap is very convincing! I’d heard of her as one of the more significant writers for Weird Tales and Astounding Science Fiction and she’s another of those writers I’ve vaguely been meaning to get around to at some time or other. I bought this as an ebook on April 21st and I’m about half-way through.

It is ‘sword and sandal’ stuff and I don’t think there’s much depth to it—‘pulp fiction’ immediately comes to mind—but it is very good for what it is. She's a gripping writer.

I can see her clearly linking into my previous reading. Born on the same day as Robert E. Howard, there is clearly some sort of cross-pollination, though who was influencing whom or whether it was just a matter of shared influences I have no idea. She is distinctly different, though. Most obviously in the central character: I don’t know if Jirel was the first warrior‑woman central character in popular fiction, but she’s the earliest I’ve come across. Her adventures are distinctly different, too, having strong Gothic and supernatural bents to them. Moore was surely influenced by Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and, possibly, Dunsany (I still haven’t read enough of him) and she had clear influences on a couple of my favourite, later writers, Tanith Lee and Terry Pratchett. Pratchett may even have been gently parodying her (or possibly her imitators).

Anyway, I’m quite glad to have discovered her—enjoying the read.

Edited to add - * Credit card, ebooks and the web is an evil combination ...

>68 alaudacorax: - ... I’ve again gone off on one of my wild tangents.

It's just struck me that if you are not off on a tangent you must, perforce, be going round in a circle. I've been using a rubbish metaphor for years ...

>68 alaudacorax:

I'd suggest that credit card, AbeBooks, and the web is an evil-er combination!

One or two of the Jirel stories were selections for the Deep Ones reading club over at The Weird Tradition, and I've read them all now, and the most famous Northwest Smith story, "Shambleau". Both characters struck me as more emotional open and potentially vulnerable thereby, than the usual pulp hero of those times (even the supposedly hard-bitten "proto-Han Solo" Smith).

Although I naively pondered wherher maybe this was because Moore was a woman, I then had the perhaps perverse notion that the best parallel to her characters I could think of was Captain Kirk - quick to fall in love, subject to moments of existential dread (only shared with Spock or Bones, of course), and so on.

As to my recent reading: I've just finished The House on the Borderland, which by chance was in the anniversary week of William Hope Hodgson's death in WW1. I enjoyed it more on this second read. The switch from house-under-siege narrarative to a Cosmic narrative prefiguring the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey was too disorientating the first time (maybe watching The Outlaw Bookseller has helped me get my SF reading chops back?). I read this in the very handsome hardback from Swan River Press.

Iain Sinclair's House of Flies is a short story issued as a chapbook by Three Impostors (it's also, I later learned, to be included in a collection from Swan River Press out next month). Sinclair's fiction always had a large element of autobiography and reportage in it, but the overt fiction seemed to disappear from his work sometime in the mid-90s. There's a return to fiction here (a character returns, if only offstage, from the days of White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings. Fictional and real London characters (comedian Stewart Lee has now joined the pantheon) search for a lost Arthur Machen manuscript.

I heard about Occult Detective Magazine from another YouTuber and decided to give it a go. While the stories so far have been varied in setting, they are turning out to be a little too formulaic for my tastes, although I have to admit they have the propulsive energy of good pulp/genre writing - as proof, I have read 70 pages of the magazine and failed to start my reading for The Deep Ones, Thomas Hardy's "The Withered Arm".

>70 housefulofpaper:

Yes, you've reminded me: I read The House on the Borderland quite recently, for the first time, and I didn't quite know what to make of it, as regards that switch, and I've been meaning a reread. I'll get round to it sometime, I suppose.

Watching The Outlaw Bookseller's videos, I've been slightly surprised at how much SF and Fantasy I must have read back in the day, including the Northwest Smith stories. He mentions book after book that I've read, but noticeably nothing much after the late 'eighties. Now I'm wondering if I should catch up and/or reread. My inability to keep to any reading schedule without going of off on tangents doesn't hold up much hope, though. Not tangents! Think of a better metaphor!

>71 alaudacorax:

He has said in a few videos that, in his opinion, the pace of innovation in written SF slowed right down in the '90s.

I don't have a reading schedule but there are a few vague intentions in my head:
- too many partly-read books. Finish at least some of them! (they are, in my partial defence, short story collections and non-fiction rather than novels).
- M. John Harrison's Viriconium series.
- James Blish's After Such Knowledge trilogy.
- Books published in the year of my birth.
- Mrs Radcliffe's novels and the Northhanger Abbey "Horrid Novels": I've got the Folio sets and so far have read only one novel out of each.

>63 alaudacorax:, >67 housefulofpaper:

I've been at it again: for some reason, lately, I've only been in the mood for light reading, and I've read a couple more of the 'Albert Campion' books.

And Margery Allingham has been at it again! I finished Sweet Danger last night and she definitely added in some Gothic vibes ... or you could say folk horror or just horror story vibes. This is one particularly where you can't say a lot without giving spoilers, but I was struck with how some of it chimed with my current reading in Ronald Hutton's The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft, even though she was publishing some seventy years before him. Again, I'm frustrated that I just haven't read enough of what was going on back in the day. I don't know what may be a case of shared reading with Hutton, or whether she may simply have been reading a lot of horror fiction that I haven't read, or whether she may have personally known something of the old 'cunning people' and/or new magic practitioners of the time. There's no end to it—the more fascinating stuff you read, the more vistas of fascinating research open up before you and there isn't world enough or time. I suppose, just to start, I really need to know what was appearing in whatever was the early part of the 20thC's equivalent of our colour supplements and more sensationalist TV shows. I suppose that would be popular magazines ...

>73 alaudacorax:

I feel as if I should know the story of how the English countryside came, by the first quarter of the 2pth century, to be viewed as full of devil worship and/or pagan survivals, but in truth all I have are some ideas culled from my reading over the years. for what it's worth, I can try put a list together:

I'm assuming it's mostly from ignorance. Although there may be an assumption, either truly believed or gone along with for the sake of telling a story, that the countryside is this way, I don't know any work where this is known and the story is told by an "insider". How did the ignorance come about?

The English class system: most professional writers have been middle class or posher (I'm going with "posher" in preference to "higher"). And looking at rural people with an outsider's eye (even more so when looking at the Scottish, Welsh, and Irish).

From the same class, Antiquarian theorising about "The Druids" and so on - going way back to the 17th Century. Maybe lays the ground for speculation about folk remedies and theologically suspect beliefs having ancient origins.

Didn't the English Civil War and the Commonwealth, and then Charles II bringing in a lot of fancy French ideas, create a big break in continuity of society? So by the end of the 17th Century the culture that Shakespeare grew up and worked in (to take the biggest name active at the start of that century) was history.

And then another big rupture with the Industrial Revolution? Between the massive migration to towns and cities and Enclosure, more disruptive than in other European countries?

Encountering other cultures during the time of the British Empire. That basic horror story trope of the confident Rationalist (or confident Christian) finding his world undermined by some supernatural nastiness - really a playing up and crystallising of those fearful instincts we've all inherited and which no doubt helped our far distant ancestors live long enough to reproduce - taking place in India under the Raj or "darkest Africa", or anywhere distant from London. Then bringing that fear back home ("the Romans worshipped their Pagan gods here, the Saxons and Vikings after them, the Celts before them. Who knows what power was left behind? Do they still have their worshippers?" and so on).

Sort of following on from the antiquarian theorising, there's Sir James Frazer and The Golden Bough at the end of the 19th Century. I'd guess this was the strongest source for the pagan survivals we get in fiction right into the 1970s - the TV Play Robin Redbreast (for accuracy's sake, I'll note that the cult in The Wicker Man was contructed by Lord Summerisle's - grandfather, I think. Not, in the screenplay, a genuine pagan survival).

(I'll also note that The English Year by Steve Roud throws cold water on pre-Early Modern (or even later) origins of most "traditional" English customs).

Of course There a lot of mystical and magical goings on at a higher social level, around the turn of the 19th/20th centuries. The Order of the Golden Dawn, Spiritualism. If it's going on in salons and drawing rooms, wouldn't it be natural to assume there are equivalent things going on in rural cottages and in the woods?

On the other hand, there were cunning men and wise women, and strange murders that seem to have a ritual aspect, and things like that. What would need going into there, is how much "folk belief" is actually handed-down magical works (new and transmitted from classical times) with origins in the renaissance. And how many crime shows and films have presented us with killers who are loners constructing their own rituals?

A thought just struck me. What about the Church? How about sermons from classically-educated clerics imposing their worldviews on a rural congregation? (Some of them went even further and "reintroduced" traditional customs).

Whatever the merit or otherwise of the above list, the ideas must have been in place and already being cliches by the 20th century. Penny dreadfuls, chapbooks, circulating libraris, popular songs, even what we could class as art songs, being picked up by non-professionals (and recorded as folk songs a century or so later).

>74 housefulofpaper:

The English Year ... houseful strikes again! I've been looking online for at reviews and I've just got to have that one.

I've just read The Great Nocturnal by Jean Ray. It's a rather short, but dense read. Enjoyed sleuthing out various words I've not come across (carillon, Carcel lamp, pediment, hake, aspic, etc.).

I enjoyed it quite a bit, so think I'll try to get collections of his other works, "Whiskey Tales", Jean Ray, Scott Nicolay (translator) (1925) and Cruise of Shadow: Haunted Stories of Land and Sea.

Jean Ray had such a curious life; I've got to read up on him.

On to The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories

>76 benbrainard8:
I've read the Jean Ray collections in order, starting with Whiskey Tales, and I've enjoyed them a lot. There hasn't been much of his work translated into English, and I think you need to read more than a couple of stories to get a feeling for him as a writer, and a feel for how his universe works. I have his novel Malpertuis still to read, and the next volume in this series of translations is due to be published in the summer.

I don't know what biographical materials are available in English; the translater's afterwords in these books from Wakefield Press may build to the best one we will have.

My reading, since my last report, has been: more from Iain Sinclair, somebody I've been reading since White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, but who I drifted away from in the '00s; Weird short stories; what could be called "anti-novels", and a couple of the planned reads I listed in >72 housefulofpaper:. But they have strange connections.

I read a collection of long stories by Steve Duffy, The Faces at Your Shoulder. I finished, after twelve years of on-off reading, the massive collection The Weird (which includes two stories by Jean Ray and, about 800 pages further on, one of Steve Duffy's stories from The Faces at Your Shoulder. I reread Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu in an illustrated edition. I read a collection of photographs by Marc Atkins, with commentry by Iain Sinclair from 1999 which I have had since 2001. That was Liquid City. Then I read the new book by Sinclair, Agents of Oblivion. This apprently grew out of the commission to write The House of Flies, and includes that story, adding three more stories loosely build around Algernon Blackwood, J. G. Ballard and H. P. Lovecraft to form a sequence of "linked narratives". It's a mixture of essay, history, reportage, fantasy, fictionalised memoir, psychography, political invective.

Then I finished the recent collection of Algernon Blackwood's short stories from the British Library (edited by, and with brief biographical introductions to each story by, Mike Ashley), The Whisperers.

Then, if Agents of Oblivion is an anti-novel, I read another one, Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan. This is the book published in 1967, although it mainly concerns a fishing trip - well no, the ostensible subject matter is - a fishing trip the author took with "his woman" and their baby daughter around 1960, with plenty of digressions back to childhood, and fantasy sequences and so on. The afterword in my edition cites Apollinaire as a comparison, if not a direct inspiration. My less elevated reading made me see strong echoes of Slaughterhouse Five (the very short disconencted chapters, the non-linear narrative, the tone of voice) and in the, I guess imagist, metaphors employed all through the work, Ray Bradbury in "poetic" mode.

On a whim I looked for more Iain Sinclair books on Abe Books, and picked up the text of a talk given to the Swedenborg Society about William Blake (and inevitably, about London), Blake's London: the Topographical Sublime.

And now I'm reading, not an anti-novel but an anti-memoir, M. John Harrison, Wish I Was Here.

Edited to fix the Touchstone to Wish I Was Here - a much-used book/film title!

>77 housefulofpaper:
Amazon lists 5 of Jean Ray’s books in paperback, including Whiskey Tales and Malpertuis, all of which are also available for the Kindle.

>79 jroger1:

The City of Unspeakable Fear isn't due to be published until next month. Amazon UK also shows further titles in French (including one collection apparently all based around weird golf stories!), but sad to say, my French is still at the "Il est un chat" reading level.

>77 housefulofpaper: thank you much, I'll add Malpertuis onto my list of books to purchase later.

I promised myself to give Lovecraft a go. Dunno why, but even thinking about his writing/works kinds of gives me the creeps---though that must be the aim.

>81 benbrainard8:
For what it's worth, I think the edition you linked to in >76 benbrainard8:, the Penguin Classics edition edited by S. T. Joshi, is the best introduction to Lovecraft's fiction. It's got the balance of "top stories" against "career overview" about as good as it could be done.

New here. Pocket bio: Retired humanities teacher, residing in Tlaxcala, Mexico, with two dogs and six indoor cats. Passionate about literature, history, philosophy, classical music and opera, jazz, cinema, and similar subjects. Nostalgic guy. Politically centrist. BA in American Studies from Yale; MAs in English and Education from Boston University. Born in northern New Jersey. Have lived and worked in San Francisco, Chicago, northern Nevada, northeast Wisconsin, South Korea.

I am currently reading Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (just started) and Sheridan LeFanu’s Uncle Silas (a third of the way through). I just got to the point in the latter when our heroine is about to be shipped off to her mysterious uncle’s, and all I can think is, “You in danger, girl.“

>83 PatrickMurtha:

Welcome to the group!

^ Thank you kindly!

Welcome Patrick!

You are reminding me—I'm long, long overdue for a read of'Melmoth'. Never got round to it, somehow. We have threads here for both books so, looking forward to you weighing in.

Interesting question: is Maud Ruthyn's father the most useless dad in English literature?

I recently had a candidate not for the most useless, but the most horrible, father (and mother) in fiction, the parents of the title character in Simon Raven’s Fielding Gray. Of course there is a lot of competition on this front.

I’ve got an omnibus of the first three novels in the Alms for Oblivion series but it’s one of many many unread books. I think all I have read of his is a ghost story collected in an Oxford Anthology. And I’ve seen Incense for the Damned, based I understand on his novel Doctors Wear Scarlet.

The immediate obvious difference between Raven’s novels and those of other roman-fleuvists such as C.P. Snow and Anthony Powell is the gusto with which Raven gets into bodily functions - screwing (straight and gay), peeing, pooping, side effects of various illnesses, etc. Within pages of the opening of the second novel in story-chron order, Sound the Retreat, we’re getting graphic descriptions of diarrhea as an inevitable adjustment to arrival in India. I love Snow and Powell, but they are Victorian aunts by comparison.

Raven’s series is quite long. Alms for Oblivion is 10 volumes in length, and the follow-up set, The First-Born of Egypt, is seven, so this will keep me going for a while.

I meant to add, but couldn’t find the right words to say it, that I imagined the story and the film to be unrepresentative of Raven’s work as a whole.

Well, I’m not sure. The Wikipedia article on Raven refers to the “darker, mystic themes” that emerge in The First-Born of Egypt sequence.

I meant that the story is more poignant and delicate than anything else, while the film is widely reckoned to be a disaster!

I've got too many books on the go at the moment. I've started Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine (in essence a fond fictionalised remembrance of childhood, with some darker undertones). I'm annoyed that the edition I've got was clearly photolithographed from an earlier edition rather than being reset, and the type is blobby and unclear like a photocopy of a photocopy.

I also started The Shadow of the Wind. My first thought was that the world of second-hand bookselling depicted here was very different from the scabrous demi-monde of Iain Sinclair's fiction - so far, anyway.

I've also been reading Michael Moorcock because whenever you read one thing you find loads of other works that tie in somehow. A book I've had unread since 1989 turns out to be a Jerry Cornelius novel (but not really). It's actually a pastiche of early-50s science fiction written in 1968 to be serialised in and Indian newspaper. It was published in book form in 1975 (and now I've read it, I wonder if it inspired the 1977 Doctor Who story The Face of Evil). Also working through a hardback collection A Cornelius Calendar (there's an ink stamp stating the book was warehouse-damaged and being sold at a special price. The stamp's the only thing wrong with it. I suppose discount bookshops have to get there stock somehow). The story "Gold Diggers of 1977", a rewritten version of, of all things, Moorcock's novelisation of The Great Rock n Roll Swindle, reads, to me at any rate, like a blueprint for Iain Sinclair's 'London lowlife and political commentary' works.

Online search engines can be endlessly fascinating ... or baffling. If you put 'Shadow of the Wind' in IMDb's search box, their fourth or fifth hit down is dear old Barbara Windsor.

But no hit for 'Shadow of the Wind'. Then I remembered that it was so familiar because it was in that online article we were discussing over on the 'gossip' thread. Talking of that list, I'm currently reading The Essex Serpent from that. According to my Kindle I'm 32% of the way through it. I'm not really enthused. I don't say it's bad or boring, and it's probably good enough that I'll stick it to the end, but it doesn't seem to me to be going anywhere much. Does that make sense? Put it another way: if the various strands of the story are moving towards each other, they're doing it in a very slack and leisurely way.

>94 alaudacorax:
Re. The Essex Serpent, growing up reading paperback reprints of Science Fiction that had originally appeared in the magazines, I had assumed it was normal for an author to have a kind of apprenticeship writing short fiction and would work up to writing a novel-length work, like a composer developing their skills until they compose their first symphony.

>95 housefulofpaper:

You've lost me there. Was The Essex Serpent originally short stories? It certainly doesn't read like it. Did it grow out of a short story?

I'm not actually any forrarder—I've taken to picking up one of my non-fictions instead, which I suppose is a bad mark for it ...

>95 housefulofpaper:

Sorry, trying to post here by lying on my back and pecking at my phone makes me even less coherent than usual. The Essex Serpent is a first novel, isn't it? I was saying the authors I was reading went through a kind of apprenticeship. The assumption now seems to be that an author's genius appears fully formed.

Something I meant to mention in >94 alaudacorax:, but forgot. Going on the 32% I've read so far, I don't see why The Essex Serpent appears in a Gothic literature list. I'd be stumped as to where to put it, in fact, though I detect faint hints of Mills & Boon and of Thomas Hardy.

>97 housefulofpaper:

Ah. Second published, at any rate. I really should withhold judgement until I've read some more—I'm probably foreseeing developments she doesn't go anywhere near ...

I just read the chapter in Zorba the Greek that might be defined as folk horror (I knew it was coming). It immediately made me think of David Rudkin’s great play Afore Night Come, which I first read when I was in high school, knocking me for a loop.

Rudkin did another excursion into folk horror later, the screenplay for Penda's Fen directed by Alan Clarke.

>94 alaudacorax: >98 alaudacorax: Sarah Perry does write in a leisurely way (but no where near as leisurely as Ann Radcliffe), but I thought there was alot of incident in 'The Essex Serpent' and I certainly found it gripping from the beginning. As you are 32% in and you are not hooked, I don't believe it is a book for you, I'm sad to say. I can't say that I agree that it has faint hints of Mills and Boon! Yes, it often discusses friendships, relationships and love, but not in an immature, sickly, Barbara Cartland way. There are so many hallmarks of gothic literature in the book that I'm really baffled why you don't believe it belongs on a gothic literature book list. Central to the work is the ancient prophecy of a hideous winged serpent dating back to the 16th century which the superstitious villagers believe has returned to bring death to their village; it's set in the Victorian era, in the atmospheric Essex marshlands; there are quite beautiful and lyrical descriptions of landscape; there are high emotions; and the book's central concern is the debate on the conflict between science, superstition and faith.

>95 housefulofpaper: >97 housefulofpaper: Sarah Perry's first novel was 'After Me Comes The Flood', and she had won an award for travel writing years before that book. But there have been some magnificent first books from people who didn't write any short stories or anything else beforehand, for example, 'Frankenstein' by Mary Shelley.

>99 alaudacorax: - ... I'm probably foreseeing developments she doesn't go anywhere near ...
>101 Rembetis: - I can't say that I agree that it has faint hints of Mills and Boon!

The Mills and Boon probably comes from anticipating stuff that isn't going to be there: sort of at the moment, I'm thinking, "Yep—the vicar's wife is going to die of TB; the heroine and the vicar will find love and moderation of views in each other's arms, marry and live happily ever after; the serpent will turn out to be a huge sturgeon trying to find its way upriver to spawn—all very unGothic and a touch Mills & Boon", but ... all that is in my imagination at the moment and I've probably misunderstood the book completely (don't tell me—I'll find out in due course).

>102 alaudacorax: Ah, I see where you're coming from. I'll keep mum. I don't think you've misunderstood the book. Reading is so subjective. One man's meat is another man's poison. Well respected, even classic books can often read like stinkers by an individual (I didn't enjoy Tolstoy's 'Anna Karenina' one bit, though I very much enjoyed 'War and Peace'). One general point which might potentially be read as a spoiler - there was nothing at all supernatural in any of Ann Radcliffe's seminal work. Every seemingly supernatural event was explained away. So, I think it's another hallmark of gothic literature for rational reasoning to explain inexplicable mysterious events by the end of a book.

>100 PatrickMurtha:
I haven't read, or seen, any of David Rudkin's work for the stage but I was very happy when Penda's Fen finally became available on DVD and Blu-ray. I've also got a DVD of Artemis '81, which I understand has now gone out of print. Apparently there are only two of us with copies on the whole of LibraryThing.

I got the impression from reading about Rudkin's work that there are connections - common themes and images and so on - across multiple works, and it would deepen my understand of, for example, Penda's Fen, if I also knew those other works.

Yes, my impression is that Rudkin’s corpus of work is very much “of a piece”.

Reading A Cornelius Calendar, and then The Opium General and other stories (which consists of the Jerry Cornelius story "The Alchemist's Question" (also in the Calendar plus 100 pages of fiction and essays) has been slightly unsettling and odd.

Collected in 1984, and containing material written in the previous 3-4 years, Moorcock describes The Opium General and other stories as something like "my most political book to date". Although intended to comment on the Cold War, Thatcherism and Reaganism - Authoritarianism generally - too much of it seemed to be speaking to 2023 (due to Moorcock's fondness for Nestor Makhno, there are even plentiful references to Ukraine).

There are also points in the stories or the essays where Moorcock seemed to be looking askance at my current inerests! The Alchemist's Question has a thread of, not Folk Horror, but an allied idea: Earth Mysteries, Earth Magic, the Feminine Principle...the action of "The Alchemist's Question" climaxes at Glastonbury Tor. This is the kind of stuff I started to look into after discovering Arthur Machen et all through Tartartus Press 15 years ago. Moorcock isn't uncritical of it. There's a chapter where he takes aim at the small-c conservatism of British Fantasy (track back from Middle Earth and Narnia to traditional pubs and Cambridge colleges and so forth), and an essay expressing his appalled disbelief that avowed Leftist Radicals can read e.g. Robert A. Heinlein and not see how right wing and Authoritarian his stuff is.

>106 housefulofpaper:

I wasn't wowed by the fiction of his I read (so far) but I like Moorcock's politics. He even acknowledged (apologetically) the blind spots of the past, regarding misogyny in the genre etc. Such are few and far between.

His disdain for Tolkien and similar is famous. I had the pleasure of defending him to the select troglodytes over in the Folio group. Well, I say pleasure... :)

This is a nice, if dated, collection if you can find it: Michael Moorcock : death is no obstacle. (ETA: special plus--intro by Angela Carter!) He's still with us, so maybe something more recent will appear yet.

>107 LolaWalser:
All the copies of Death is no Obstacle on AbeBooks are too expensive, sad to say.

I haven't read a great deal of Moorcock's fiction, to be honest, but The Condition of Muzak and Mother London both made a big impact on me as naturalistic, literary fiction in my mid teens and early twenties, respectively (albeit one is the last of the Jerry Cornelius quartet of novels and the other includes elements of Magical Realism).

Dang, I'm sorry to hear books are hard to get. I do have another (mostly unread) collection of his criticism, Wizardry and wild romance : a study of epic fantasy.

So far I've read in full only Behold the man (was the subject of one of the "oldie sci-fi" threads focussed on representation that I did back in the day) and The Brothel in Rosenstrasse. The latter isn't sf, or fantasy strictly speaking, more of a fanciful literary fiction effort...

>108 housefulofpaper:, >109 LolaWalser:

I can't help feeling some of these North American booksellers are rather chancers. £50 postage on Death is no Obstacle? Really?

>103 Rembetis:

I’ve finished The Essex Serpent and I felt it turned out a rather better book than I’d anticipated—I was misjudging it in anticipating it developing into a Mills and Boon type of story. I still feel it was a bit of a stretch putting it in the Gothic literature bracket, though; more Thomas Hardy than Mrs Radcliffe, I think.

>111 alaudacorax:

I felt the second half (roughly speaking) was rather stronger than the first.

Even early on in Melmoth the Wanderer, I am struck (and am far from the first) by the structural similarity to Jan Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, which I don’t believe had any English version yet while Maturin was writing, but maybe he could have known it in French? He had French Huguenot forebears.

There is a tonal similarity also to E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Devil's Elixirs, which like the Potocki had appeared just in time to be an influence, IF Maturin could read the German original (again, I don’t think there was an English version yet). Probably that similarity is attributable to a common source in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, and the overall commonalities of Gothic fiction in that time period.

>111 alaudacorax: Well, I'm pleased you seem to have enjoyed 'The Essex Serpent' after your initial misgivings! Regarding comparisons with Thomas Hardy, I actually find Hardy's work often has a strong gothic sensibility, particularly 'The Withered Arm' in 'Wessex Tales' and 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles'.

>113 PatrickMurtha: I haven't read 'The Manuscript Found in Saragossa', but have seen the 1965 Polish film adaptation 'The Saragossa Manuscript', and there is a strong similarity with Melmoth's structure of nested stories. Maturin was indeed descended from Huguenot forebears, and I did read that he was a voracious reader, so he may well have read Potocki's book in French. I don't know how common the ability to read in French was at the time, but have noticed how common the use of French was in 19th century English novels, in some cases a few phrases or words, or in others, like Charlotte Bronte's 'Villette', many pages of untranslated French, which assume the common reader understood French (I had to refer to the pages of translations in the notes of my modern edition of 'Villette', and I doubt that was available in the original work).

>115 Rembetis: Great observations, thanks! I happen to be reading Villette at the moment, and yes, reams of untranslated French, which even though I have retained some of my schoolroom French I am still grateful to Penguin for the translations of.

The Potocki novel in the Ian Maclean translation is spectacular. I hear the film version, three hours in the longest cut, does well by it.

>114 Rembetis:

Aha! Another reader of Hardy's short stories! I feel they are a bit underappreciated—they don't seem to get the attention the poems and novels do. They remind me of the stories pensioners would tell you over a pint or two in country pubs when I was a youngster. I've often wondered if that was where Hardy got them.

>116 PatrickMurtha: I hope to get round to reading 'The Manuscript Found in Saragossa' in due course (so many books, so little time!) The Polish film adaptation is a complex, unique, dazzling film (in the full 182 minute version), and well worth seeking out.

>117 alaudacorax: Guilty as charged! You are right that Hardy's short stories don't get the attention that the poems and novels do (e.g. I can only recall one BBC tv adaptation of some of the 'Wessex Tales', back in 1973, whereas the main novels have had quite a few tv and cinema adaptations). The short stories do often have an anecdotal feel, like someone is sitting at your elbow, telling you tales of long ago. I read somewhere (can't recall where) that in 'Wessex Tales' Hardy was trying to capture the people and stories of his youth, so many of them may well be based on tales he was told or behaviour he observed.

Incidentally, I don't know if you caught the Freeview Sky Arts documentary, 'Thomas Hardy, Fate, Exclusion, and Tragedy'? It was an excellent, sensitive, and beautifully filmed documentary which examined Hardy's relationship with the women in his life, and his fictional depiction of women. Included were many clips from adaptations and spoken extracts from his works (the poems were very effectively done). Some enterprising soul has bunged it on you tube if you missed it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXc9ZqBrfIw

>113 PatrickMurtha: I'm waiting and hoping that someday there is an outstanding cinematic version of Melmoth the Wander. It would make quite a film. I'm going to re-read it after completing The Adventures of Caleb Williams.

>119 benbrainard8: Somehow, despite having read plenty of 18th Century literature, I have never gotten around to Caleb Williams, but I hope to in the near term; it is on my iPad.

>118 Rembetis:

I'm fairly sure I completely missed that one. Thanks for the link, R, I've 'Watch later'd' it.

>120 PatrickMurtha:

Probably your survival instincts kicking in. Rarely disliked a book more. Thoroughly enjoyed writing the review, which is a sure sign an author's got up my nose.

Not to put you off or anything ...

ETA - If you were thinking of hunting up that review, don't ... contains spoilers. Which is why it is on my blog but not LT.

>115 Rembetis:
...the common reader understood French...

I know that Maturin's target audience would not like to have been referred to as "common", and they would most likely have an understanding of French. In this context it would be safe to assume that the target audience was expected to understand French. I would say the same could be said of Bronte's audience.

>119 benbrainard8:
I have The Adventures of Caleb Williams patiently awaiting attention.

A cinematic version of Melmoth the Wanderer would be quite a show.

>122 alaudacorax:
Not to put you off or anything ...

Warning noted.

>122 alaudacorax:

At the head of Percy Bysshe Shelley's section of The Penguin Book of English Song there's a longish quote from Literature and Western Man, in which J. B. Priestley describes William Godwin as "the dessicated Prospero to whom Shelley was the Ariel."

Dessicated Prospero. As soon as I read it I thought you might appreciate it.

Edited to correct the Touchstone

>123 pgmcc: Well, a huge subject, and I am no expert. I agree, Maturin, in 1820, would have written with a view to being read by rich, very well educated people who could probably read French. But by 1853, and Bronte's 'Villette', general literacy was improving radically, and books and publications were more widely available and not only to the upper and middle classes in the UK. Could all these understand the French in 'Villette' and other literature of the period?

Perhaps surprising given deprivation, poverty and the likely need to work long hours, working class people had an appetite for learning in the Victorian era. The first Ragged School for the poorest children, was set up in 1818 and thereafter they flourished. By 1844, an Act was passed which required children working in factories to be schooled for six half days a week. About 60% of men were literate in the UK in the 1830s, and this had risen to 90% for both men and women by 1870. The huge Penny Dreadful market, started in the 1830s, was largely aimed at the working class market. By the 1860s, more than a million penny publications were sold every week. Dickens' monthly periodicals cost a shilling, and there is evidence that working class people read Dickens or had Dickens read to them. Alongside rises in literacy, there were circulating libraries which charged a subscription fee, largely I would think for middle class people (the Brontes themselves belonged to circulating libraries). But there was also libraries in places like Miners' Institutes, for working class people to read books. The Public Libraries Act 1850 (3 years prior to the publication of 'Villette') paved the way for councils to establish public libraries free to use for the whole community.

>126 housefulofpaper:

That made me chuckle. I don't know if 'dessicated Prospero' is a back-handed compliment, an insult, a compliment with reservations or what. The Tempest is a favourite of mine but I'm long due a reread. My angle on Prospero has been a bit skewiff since I bought the DVD of the production with Helen Mirren as Prosper-a.

>128 alaudacorax: I never see anyone mention Paul Mazursky’s Tempest (1982), with John Cassavetes in the Prospero role, but it was a quite interesting take.

When John Cassavetes' name comes up, I'm afraid my first thought is his early starring role as Johhny Staccato, a sort of East-coast rival to Peter Gunn. Channel Four screened the series in the 1990s (one of British TV's many (often weird) attempts to attract a post-pub/post-clubbing late night audience. All over by the mid 00's because the advertising revenue wouldn't support it).

When I think of screen Prosperos, I think of Heathcote Williams in Derek Jarman's version of The Tempest, Sir John Gielgud in Prospero's Books, and Walter Pidgeon (as Dr Morbius) in Forbidden Planet (with Robby the Robot as the film's version of Aerial, of course).

>127 Rembetis:
Maturin was living and writing in Ireland and his audience would have been the educated Protestant Ascendancy population. The majority population was Catholic and the penal laws had outlawed the education of Catholics. At the time when Maturin was writing Melmoth the Wanderer, Catholic emancipation was being discussed. 1820 was only 22 years after the 1798 rebellion and many of Maturin's audience would have been fearful of further uprisings. It was turbulent times in Ireland when he was producing his material.

>132 Rembetis: Thanks very much, I don't know anything about Irish history at that time. I wonder if the religious turbulence influenced 'Melmoth'?

It's interesting that Maturin's reach extended to France, where 'Melmoth' was published in a French translation in 1821 (subsequently prompting Honoré de Balzac to write the parody 'Melmoth Reconcilié' in 1835).

>130 housefulofpaper: I need to see more episodes of Johnny Staccato. I am something of a Peter Gunn fanatic.

I've started reading Malpertius by Jean Ray. 50 pages in and I'm greatly enjoying it. It's recognisably from the same author as the prevous four short story collections recently published by Wakefield Press but it feels, so far, a bit more weighty. here's sometimes an air of the pulps around Ray. This does have a different translator - Wakefield are reprinting a 1998 translation by Iain White (that author page needs splitting into at least two separate individuals!) whereas all the previous volumes were freshly translated by Scott Nicolay - but it seems more likely to be down to the fact that Ray took a lot of time over this book, with extensive revisions and rewriting.

Harry Kumel's 1971 film adaptation, by the way, is currrently up on YouTube (but for how long?).

And I have read the first few chapters in The Black Pilgrimage 2, the second collection of Rosemary Pardoe's essays and articles on supernatural fiction.

>134 housefulofpaper:

I've got myself a bit jumbled up with short story collections. It started with another of those 'long been meaning to's—I bought for my Kindle Kate Mosse's The Mistletoe Bride and Other Haunting Tales. It's been on my mind to read this since I read a review somewhere or other probably years ago.

So I started reading those.

Then, when I was trying to get my Kindle a bit more organised, I discovered a copy of The Sixth Ghost Story Megapack. Checking Amazon, I saw I bought this in October 2016 and, checking the first few stories, I realised that I'd never read it!

Well, you know how it goes: you check the first story and end up reading it, and then can't resist the second, and so on. So now I find myself reading the two books at the same time. It's going to be the devil of a job sorting out what I think of which. I certainly couldn't give you an opinion on Mosse at the moment, and I particularly remember a couple of stories (which I consider a good indicator that they're quality) where I can't for the life of me remember if they're by Mosse or an earlier author from the Megapack.

Incidentally, the subtitle of the Megapack is '25 Classic Ghost Stories'. Am I being a bit unfair, or is the use of 'Megapack' stretching things a bit for only twenty-five stories?

>135 alaudacorax:

I've been looking back over what I've read so far.

Kate Mosse is okay, good enough to while away these rainy evenings we've had lately, but she's not Algernon Blackwood or M. R. James. Truth be told, I'm just a fraction disappointed. To be fair. I've only read three so far, so we shall see how it goes.

I've read eight of the The Sixth Ghost Story Megapack so far and I'm part way through the ninth, which is 'The Ghostly Rental' by Henry James. I've so far been quite pleased to find that I've never previously read any of them. Obviously a collection like this is going to be a mixed bunch and it's not really a reflection on the book that this latest story is confirming my dislike of Henry James. Some authors you just take against—can't help it—and I rember trying to read The Portrait of a Lady and finding it torture and this one's a struggle. In fact, I think the standard so far is pretty high. I was quite taken by the sweetest little story—not at all scary—called 'A Pair of Hands' which I could have sworn until a few minutes ago was written by a woman (the narrative voice is a woman), but was actually by Arthur Quiller-Couch. I must read more of him—his name keeps cropping up in my literary travels.

>136 alaudacorax:

I seem to remember Quiller-Couch being cited as a favourite by numerous authors.

>136 alaudacorax:

Okay ... lest someone thinks I'm unreasonably prejudiced against Henry James:

I've just finished that story over lunch. There are several places where the plot takes twists that are just not believable. The main character, who is also the narrative voice, occasionally behaves in a way I find unpleasant but which James does not seem to see as unpleasant. I'd anticipated the main twist of the ending before half-way through, which is never a point in favour of a story. I'm not at all sure James knew what kind of story he wanted to write.

His publisher should have given it back to him and told him to do it again, and do it properly this time.

I've long mentally committed myself to somewhere along the line reading The Turn of the Screw ... I find myself less and less enthusiastic about it.

>137 alaudacorax: Quiller-Couch was certainly Helene Hanff's literary hero (her most famous book being '84 Charing Cross Road'). Hanff wrote a book about Quiller-Couch's influence on her: 'Q's Legacy', which is a good read.

I haven't read much of Quiller-Couch. Just the good short story 'The Roll Call of the Reef' in the British Library anthology 'Cornish Horrors'; and his unfinished book 'Castle Dor' (based on the legend of Tristan and Iseult), which I read in a finished version, with Daphne Du Maurier ending the story.

I haven't read anything of Kate Mosse's that I can recall; and only 'The Turn of the Screw' by Henry James, which I enjoyed.

>138 alaudacorax:
Some scholars admire James’s ability to construct run-on sentences and 2-page paragraphs, but my opinion is that a writer who is hard to read is not a good writer. I can appreciate difficult concepts but not a twisted writing style. I do admire James, though, for some of his story ideas and his insights into the human psyche. “Turn of the Screw” is a worthwhile read and so is “The Beast in the Jungle.”

>138 alaudacorax:
The Turn of the Screw is the only Henry James work I have read. I enjoyed it, but I am aware that his works can be more turgid.

I have read a couple of Mosse’s novels and enjoyed them well enough, but I had issues with both of them. I would agree that she is no Blackwood or M. R. James.

>136 alaudacorax:
While it's too much to expect a million stories, I agree that 25 does seem too few to be prefixed with "mega"!

I was introduced to Quiller-Couch through Rumpole of the Bailey - all Rumpole's quotations of poetry are from The Oxford Book of English Verse.

I think "The Roll-Call of the Reef" is the only story of his that I've read. I have it in The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories. It's also where, incidentally, I read Simon Raven's story "The Bottle of 1912".

>138 alaudacorax:
I started reading The Sense of the Past: The Ghostly Stories of Henry James in 2016 and I'm only on page 128 (of 657). So he's not an author I immediately clicked with (and I can read "difficult" works with pleasure - Ulysses, Moby Dick, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Sir Thomas Browne, but the late-Victorian psychological authors are a struggle).

I have, actually, read "The Ghostly Rental" but flipping back through the book, I have to confess that nothing was ringing a bell. It's already all gone from my memory. That said, I have read some of the stories that "lie ahead", as it were, in other volumes and I'd also put in a vote for The Turn of the Screw - with the caveat that I remember you writing that you dislike Britten's Opera, which felt like a very faithful adaptation in spirit, somehow, as well closely following the story.

>139 Rembetis:

Helene Hanff, of course ... I knew he rang a loud bell somewhere. I read several books by Hanff at some point, but I don't think I've read Q's Legacy. I'm sure I've seen other authors write favourably of him, too, but can't bring to mind who.

>139 Rembetis:, >143 housefulofpaper:

There was another story by Q in there, about a boat crew wintering in a hut in the Arctic. I was impressed as much by how strikingly different the two tales were as by the qualities of either. I'm not all sure you would guess they were by the same hand if without the author's name.

>143 housefulofpaper:

Britten's music is a whole other dislike. I'm just plain allergic to the man. His stuff just irritates me (oddly, with the exception of the 'sea interludes' from Peter Grimes, which always sound to me like a different composer) and I've never been able to figure out why, despite some real trying; so Britten could probably make an opera of one of my all-time favourite stories and I'd still dislike it.

Anyway, I'll get round to The Turn of the Screw at some point. I still have Melmoth the Wanderer accusingly unopened just across from me as I'm faffing around with these short stories. I'm still trying, albeit feebly, to follow Punter & Byron's list of 'key works', so there's 'the Justified Sinner' after 'Melmoth', and then Wuthering Heights (reread), The Woman in White (reread?), Uncle Silas (reread), 'Jekyll and Hyde' (reread?), Dracula (multi-multi-reread and I may not bother), and THEN The Turn of the Screw. At the rate I'm going, if I'm going to get to their last, American Psycho, I'd better make up my mind to live to a hundred!

>147 alaudacorax: - ... Punter & Byron ...

That's their The Gothic, of course. Or not 'of course'—I may not have mentioned it in years ...

>148 alaudacorax:

Not to mention The Gothic is nineteen years out of date (sigh) ...

Still reading very short books, and the last couple have been crime/detection.

Edogawa Rampo Beast in the Shadows, a psychological thriller by "the Japanese Edgar Allan Poe". I think this could qualify as Gothic. It straddles that detection/horror boundary like a lot of 19th century works (Brockden Brown, Poe himself, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, even Arthur Machen's early things. And a great deal of modern crime which I think could easily have been published as horror 30-40 years ago.

And prompted by >130 housefulofpaper: I finally read a book I picked up second-hand perhaps as long ago as the 1990s. It's a UK reprint of a (or perhaps the) Johnny Staccato tie-in novel. As an object this was the grimiest book I think I've ever owned. Dirty handprints (with dried-in food stains possibly older than I am), possible black powdery mould, more food or insect frass between the pages...ugh! At least all the pages were present and I've cleaned it as much as possible/ I've got together a small book restoration/prevervation kit intended for more elevated things, but I brushed things out, chipped off the food, rolled around a pill of a "molecular trap" ("a unique form of non-abrasive natural rubber") and gently cleaned the covers with moistened cotton wool balls.

As for the story, it's set around the music business circa 1960, and the "payola" scandals of the time. It felt like the atmosphere was realistic - apart from the writer's misogyny (i.e. the impossibly pneumatic female characters, apart from the one he doesn't write as attractive and loses no opportunity to say so) and his distain for beatniks. Of course "Frank Boyd" could, for all I know, be a pen name hiding a female author writing to a brief or for a specific market, but it makes difference to the finished product, does it?

Looking on LT the book seems to be rare in any edition. It was a fun quick read but I wouldn't spend £££s (or $$$s) on a copy.

>150 housefulofpaper: I don't often buy books that are as damaged as your copy of Johnny Staccato! I don't mind buying second hand books that have a pleasant aged smell to them, but have purchased some that have a 'bad' smell (like rot or damp) sometimes. I find that putting the book in a sealed airtight container with an egg cup or two full of baking powder on the side does wonders. I usually leave the book there for about a week, sometimes longer.

>150 housefulofpaper:

Ugh, I couldn't deal with a book like that. More power to you!

>151 Rembetis:

I have two "patients" undergoing that treatment now but the condition is stubborn. I only hope to manage to read them and then *whispers* they're for the block. A pity, one in particular is a nice illustrated edition (of La guerre du feu).

>152 LolaWalser: Good luck with your patients! :-) It would be a shame to chuck away that lovely sounding illustrated edition. Maybe sprinkle some more baking powder very close to the book?

I have one patient at the moment, a 1949 Hugh Walpole book 'Mr Huffam and Other Stories' that I got on e-bay for 50 pence (plus postage). One can't complain!

Johnny Staccato mercifully didn't smell damp, it was just stained and dirty. I have had issues with a smell of mould on new books I'd proudly displayed on shelves. There was an unsuspected damp problem (I think I'd mentioned before that a tree planted next to and right up close to my property grew its roots into a downpipe taking the runoff from four adjoining properties) but even without that I don't think that there's sufficient airflow. I've had good results standing the books fanned out in front of a dehumidifier.

I was highly amused reading the above, as I too recently had a "patient" experience, and candidly, it was my 1st one.

Aug. 2022 , I found a used/previously owned edition of Toulouse-Lautrec , Douglas Cooper, Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec, (Painter) (1977), and it had quite the "been in someone's damp basement or kept as a table ornament for 40+ year-old-smell."

Did a lot of research online, and virtually everything said expose it to sunlight. 1st put in some type of clear, sealable container with either a charcoal-based or baking/soda powder based deodorizing bag/item, then wait 1-3 months for it to become magically fresh 'n new.

So I'd put it outside, on top of a yard-waste recycle bin, in a large, long plastic container, whenever it was sunny. Now here in the U.S. NW, we don't get that much sun, but when we do, the days are long (e.g. from 0800 a.m.-8:30 p.m. or even later). I'd go outside throughout the day, rotate it, bring it back in, or take it back outside. I did this for near three months straight.

My spouse was not amused.

She complained that I'd spent $10 (such a bargain!) on something that she'd notice the scent of forever, and that since I'm nose-blind, I'd gleefully peruse it while she threw daggers at me...

Um, I think it worked. Because now it's on shelf downstairs and she's not tossed it out or disappeared it.

Now---stained and dirty---hmmm. I'd be only worried if the book appeared to be bloodstained. Anything else, yeah, go for it.

>155 benbrainard8:

I've learned something new. I could understand the charcoal, but the baking soda was a bit of a surprise. But Wikipedia says it absorbs musty smells and 'may' be a mild fungicide, so I see the point. New one on me. Which did you use, by the way? Or both?

>156 alaudacorax: In general, baking soda works the best, at least cost-wise. The charcoal packets can be a bit pricey. Baking soda alternatively can be used to clean any iron skillet that has badly baked on marks (usually from cooking steak, ribs, etc.).

All the products are effective, it takes a bit of patience. I'd find myself standing outside over the recycle bin perusing the book, turning the pages few times daily, too. So, would leave the book open now and again, and later brushing off pine needles that might have fallen into the pages, we NW-folk love our pine trees.

>157 benbrainard8: You sound like you have the patience of a saint! I'm impressed with the care you gave that poor smelly battered book - tending to it throughout the day, rotating it, bringing it back in, or taking it back outside, turning the pages - for three months straight! Round of applause from me!

(Edited to make sense.)

Yeah, I'm a back alley hack compared to Ben's high street surgeon. :) Today I pulled them out and, good news, the odour is less, but bad news, it's still there. Made a stupid mistake in leaving the clear (plastic) dustjacket on...!

Thank you both for being so kind. My love for books enjoins/bookends my love of film and art.

It's always enjoyable to find that book that you know you'll really enjoy for a long time to come. If I've a difficult book to read, I'll take a small break and look at, peruse my art books now and again. Even more fun to compare them to photos of past trips (museums rule), then do some comparisons. That's when I feel the world is truly intertwined--time, place, people, locales---where people eat, sleep, dream, wander, live, and... eventually die (?).

Silliest question of all time? Do any of you ever find yourself talking to a book while reading it? Or while holding it after you've finished it, picked it up for a re-read, or even after having just purchased it, or checked it out? I've found myself doing that. Even speaking aloud, then catching myself and feeling a wee bit embarrassed. Luckily, I've never been found out doing this at a library, coffee shop, or bookstore.

I guess we all mutter something now and again...

>160 benbrainard8:
In response to your question, I do not recall myself talking to a book, but I feel it is probably something I have done, and am likely to do again. Some of my books are old friends, and I would be a dreadful person if I never spoke to my old friends.

>160 benbrainard8:

I don't know about 'talking to', but I've shouted at one now and again, but those are the ones that are turning out to be rubbish ...

>160 benbrainard8:

Haha, yes. I do. Not all the time (that would be mad!) but often enough... sometimes in disagreement, sometimes in melting love...

>136 alaudacorax:

Just finished The Mistletoe Bride and Other Haunting Tales.

I'm a bit yes an no about it. There turned out to be some quite good stories in there. I'd say seven, possibly eight, out of the seventeen. The rest just didn't do much for me and I can hardly remember them now, let along a week or two down the line.

I'm still only 100 pages into The Shadow of the Wind. It seems to be another book that lots of people rave about and love but that I struggle to get through. 1/5 of the way in, it doesn't feel especially "Gothic" ... maybe somewhere between a modern version of the Sensation novel and a "thumping good read".

>160 benbrainard8:
I don't think I ever have talked to a book. I think it's because they're not alive. I'd talk to an animal (of course - including spiders, and bumblebees - "excuse me ladies" when I've had to brush past the overgrown lavender while they're collecting pollen), maybe to a plant, but not to a book.

>165 housefulofpaper:

I ditched it on the first page or thereabouts.

Novel experience—a book mentioned by both Andrew and Lola that I definitely don't have to read ...

A momentous day, today: I've just finished my Barnes & Noble H. P. Lovecraft: The Complete Fiction—I've been reading it since December, 2018 September, 2019. As far as I'm aware, I have now read all the fiction HPL wrote.

However, over the years I've become more and more sensitive to how nastily racist HPL was—way beyond the common casual racism of so many writers of his time—and I can no longer read him without regularly stubbing my toes on it. At the same time, he was a tremendous writer at his best. And, of course, he's so very influential. The man is just uncomfortably problematic.

From the point of view of this group, I suppose it's a good thing that most of his stuff is more properly in The Weird Tradition's purlieu. But, where I, personally, go from here, I have no idea.

>168 alaudacorax:

Maybe you could mark the end of your Lovecraft reading with The Ballad of Black Tom, in which Victor LaValle retells "The Horror at Red Hook" from the point of view of a young black man from Harlem who gets drawn into the magician Robert Suydam's schemes as well as having to deal with the ubiquitous racism of 1920s New York.

>169 housefulofpaper:

Interesting concept ...

I found this article, which has some HPL "food for thought",

https://www.vox.com/culture/21363945/hp-lovecraft-racism-examples-explained-what...

>169 housefulofpaper:, >171 benbrainard8:

That article inadvertently sums up my feelings on the matter. You can see that the people featured, though despising HPL's views, are reluctant to turn their backs on this really significant body of work, and are, thus, struggling for a strategy to cope with the problem. If you are from one of the peoples he was prejudiced against and you write successful stuff by appropriating his material and twisting it to your own viewpoint ... well ... that's a pretty good and successful strategy; I suppose you've 'earned the right' to read his stuff. He must still be problematic for them, though. And what's open to those of us without that talent or heritage? Vaguely hoping that HPL would have been repulsed if confronted by my Welsh accent doesn't really seem to count, somehow! White, male privilege and all that.

I feel my attitude should be: I've read all this stuff; I have the knowledge to take part in discussions on the Weird genre, to discuss HPL's influences on whomever, and so on—so I don't have to revisit him again. And perhaps I never will read him again—there is so much other stuff I haven't read and I'm not getting any younger. But that's not why I read him in the first place. I read him because I picked him up in my local library fifty years ago and was blown away by his stuff and completely failed to register the evidences of prejudice. He became as significant a part of my reading life as Poe or Shakespeare. And while, literarily, I'm reluctant to compare him to Poe and certainly not to Shakespeare, cutting him out of my reading life would be as much of a loss. And I feel guilty about that.

The old sod is just plain problematic.

>172 alaudacorax:

I'm sure I've written all that stuff before ...

>173 alaudacorax:

It was back in May that The Horror at Red Hook came up for discussuon over at The Weird Tradition and my thoughts are still nowhere near settled on the questions of, yes (despite that Vox article) separating the life from the art, and how much HPL's racist beliefs (more than, or deeper than beliefs apparently - something like an actual phobic reaction, if he found himself in a crowd of non-"aryan" or "nordic" types) are disguised in his work. 15 years ago his racism was acknowleged but it was being argued that the mature work took the visceral "Fear and Loathing" (to coin a phrase - what an odd expression - referring back to counterfeiting currency, maybe?) and gave it power to appeal to universal, basic human fears.

HPL was probably more racist than most of his contemporay writers, but more racist than American society of the time? The time of Jim Crow and (relevant to "The Horror at Red Hook"), the passing of the Johnson-Reed Act; and on the Left all those otherwise progressive people who were committed eugenicists.

If HPL's racism can be set aside or bracketed off, then the question seems to me to become much wider. If presenting the world as a dangerous place where paranoia is the only reasonable perspective, are Noir thrillers racist (in that they are a deviation from a status quo of White privilege) for example.

And of course neither of are American so we do come to these stories with different historical and cultural baggage than the writer of the Vox article.

On a less unconfortable note, here's a YouTube video from The Outlaw Bookseller (Stephen E. Andrews) explaining the different commercial book sizes and giving some historical background over the past half-century or so.

A comment from @FantasyAuthorsHandbook provides a US perspective.

Foolishly pleased to see three books that I own used as examples!


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m15P1-N-wx4&t=20s

>175 housefulofpaper:
Thank you for that video. It confirmed some things, e.g. Trade Paperback, and educated me on things I did not know, e.g. my As, Bs and Cs.

Like you, I was foolishly pleased to see books I own as examples, e.g. the Chandler volume.

>172 alaudacorax:, >174 housefulofpaper:

At the risk of seeming to advertise my own posts, there was a previous discussion about Lovecraft and racism in another thread almost two months ago, where I posted several links including that Vox one, but got no replies.

https://www.librarything.com/topic/121769#8178031

I mention it to show that it's not the case of one individual expressing rare views; that Lovecraft and his work are racist is commonly known, but whether to read him or not is left to individuals, as it should be.

HPL was probably more racist than most of his contemporay writers, but more racist than American society of the time?

Frankly, I don't see the point in these comparisons? Lovecraft isn't being singled out as the only or "extraordinarily" racist author of the era (it would save time and space if we could name those who weren't...), and to be sure, he was racist because the society he existed in was racist. But I mean "society" in a greater sense than just the US. White supremacy is at the root of discriminatory ideologies spread by the European colonialism, so even if, say, there were no slaves in the UK in his time, white supremacist ideologies were alive and well. Lovecraft's ideas were more the norm than not even far outside the US. But as I keep repeating, that normalization doesn't make such ideas less horrible. It just means the past was even more horrible than the present. Sort of how beating children being normalized doesn't mean the beatings didn't hurt back then. They did, and caused damage and trauma, but few cared.

If HPL's racism can be set aside or bracketed off,

But why would one do that? How would one then even read him (or similar)? That actually seems to invite some sort of censorship or rewriting, which I know you don't mean. On the contrary, I would suggest that only by taking the racism into account we can really be said to have read and understood him.

Perhaps the notion of "universality" is the problem here. I think we're too wedded to this idea that literature (especially "great") is or must be "universal". It's probably just one of those patriarchal vestiges, reflection of "Father knows best" about everything and everyone. But in reality "Fathers" banged their own parochial drums like everyone else, and projected chimeras about people unlike themself.

I didn't understand the remark about noir thrillers and white privilege. There are examples of racism in hardboiled pulp as in any other genre of the period.

>173 alaudacorax:, >177 LolaWalser:

Yes, I read all those links you posted, then made several attempts to post but struggled to get my thoughts in order and never did in the end, and hence my feeling that I'd written most of >172 alaudacorax: before.

My problem, to distill it all down to the basics, is that, to me, being a good writer takes intelligence (I'm aware that there is some dissent on whether L. is a quality writer, but take it as fact for purposes of this post) while being a racist signals the opposite—the more racist you are, the thicker you must be. This makes L. quite a conundrum for me. It's tempting to duck the issue and say he had some serious psychological problems, but I'd have to admit I don't really believe that. He's become a problem I can't solve.

>177 LolaWalser:

I feel I should mention levels of racism. There was the casual, pretty much unconscious assumption of racial superiority ... which need not have any deliberate malice in it. But Lovecraft's version openly had real hatred and fear in there. The 'unthinking' or 'attitudes of the times' bag is just not open to his modern reader.

>168 alaudacorax:

This is a cop-out I know, but, having just finished reading him, for the foreseeable future I'm just going to turn my back and decide I needn't think about him any more. Well ... try to, anyway ...

>177 LolaWalser:

Thank you for taking the time to respond so comprehensively to what I know was an intellectually confused thrashing-about of a post. I've tried to consider - reconsider - some of the assumptions I've been operating under for a long time.

Somewhere along the way I have picked up the idea that as a reader I should be impartial. This is in the context of potentially reading anything from any culture or any time period, although in practice most of the time it's merely the injunction "don't import current cultural morés into the past". It's kind of dumb, on reflection, expecting to be moved by some parts of story but glossing over other parts that ought to outrage one with godlike detachment.

The comments about bracketing off and about Noir were linked (at least in my mind). A better way of stating it would have been to simply say that I don't believe Lovecraft's sucessful stories depend on racism for their effects. Noir (I was thinking of the films more than written fiction) conjures up a cold, hostile, paranoid vision of the modern city without grounding it in a racist worldview. A better comparison would have been with Nigel Kneale's Quatermass serials. It's been pointed out by several commentators that Kneale developed his own Lovecraftian space horror fiction independently. Quatermass and the Pit is probably the most Lovecraftian in its ideas and the effects...but it was in part inspired by the Notting Hill race riots and (in the original teleplay) ends with Quatermass delivering a speech about the dangers of prejudice directly to camera (as an aside, I'd note that this is in the context of the Cold War and a nuclear stand-off in the real world, so it's urgent, not theoretical or "airy-fairy").

Damn. It's astounding the way this group steals your time.

I got up this morning wondering, for some reason, if I ever did get hold of some reading by Edogawa Ranpo. Instead of checking my Kindle (if I'd bought a 'real' book I'd have remembered it), I checked my LibraryThing catalogue. Then I thought that as I was here I might as well check this group for what was said about him ... and having found that, I ended up reading the rest of the thread ... and that prompted me to another thread ... and I read that ... and so on ...

... and now it's ten-o-clock! I'd got up with the intention of having, by now, showered, shaved, walked over to town for some food shopping, and got back here for a late breakfast. Er ... and now it's ten past ten ...

I read the original short story (well, novellete) version of Mythago Wood on its first publication in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (I don't know if had always been the case or if it was a temporary post-Star Wars but 40-odd years ago the American science fiction magazines - the digest-sized successors to the pulps - used to appear on newsagents' shelves).

I've wanted to read the later stories and novels he wrote about Ryhope Wood - a survival of primeval forest in the heart of England where time and space become confused and "mythological archetpes" - mythagos - can be created from the minds of visitors to the wood. However I thought I was missing one long story. As it turns out, I wasn't. Annoyingly the information was all here on LibraryThing but I wasn't interpreting it properly. The story "The Bone Forest", as well as being the title story of the out-of-print The Bone Forest, is also included in Merlin's Wood.

Not realising tht I already had a copy of the story, I came close to buying a signed first edition hardback of The Bone Forest. It was a lot of money, but compared to the prices being asked for indifferent paperback editions it started to look like good value. Thankfully my search on AbeBooks also called up a copy of the magazine Interzone, which published the story. It must have been a cross-promotional thing as the magazine reproduced the book's cover as it's own cover. So I only spent around £5 rather than over £80. There's also an interview with Holdstock in the magazine.

The original Mythago Wood(s) (novelette and expanded-into-novel) take place in the '40s. Two brothers - scientist father long lost in the Mythago Wood - brothers falling in love with a Celtic warrior princess apparently created by the combination of their father's unconcious and this strange power of the wood. There's lots of Freud and Jung and (shades of The Owl Service) people falling into reenactments of ancient myth.

"The Bone Forest" is a prequel and the father is the main character, while the sons are still pre-teens. He's already investigating the wood and an incident creates a kind of ghost/doppelganger/Mr Hyde that he has to try to firstly understand and then protect his family from. There are elements of Gothic and Folk Horror. You could also class it as science fiction (in the accompanying interview, Robert Holdstock admits that Stanislaw Lem's Solaris must have been at the back of his mind when the ideas for Mythago Wood were first coming to him).

And now I've started reading The City of Unspeakable Fear (The Shadow of the Wind is not abandoned but put aside for the time being).

I ordered this from Amazon months ago and was beginning to wonder where it was, now the publication date had passed. Then I received an email telling me my order had been cancelled! Worried the publisher had gone under (thankfully, no). Then I remembered reading something - I think from Valancourt Press (I expect it was on Twitter, before Musk stopped non-users reading tweets anyway) saying that Amazon was pulling back from "supporting" (on deep discounts) small independent publishers.

Thankfully I didn't have to give up on the book, or pay crazy US postage. I was able to order it from Blackwells. But...like European DVDs it used to be easy to get, before Brexit really started to bite, it looks like books from the US may be harder or impossible to get in future.

Another book-related piece of bad news that means less access to books: Reading's Oxfam charity bookshop closed its doors at the end of last year, for renovations. There was a note in the window saying it would reopen in the spring.

Not only had it not reopened, there's no indication that the building work ever even started.

It's never going to reopen, is it?

>185 housefulofpaper:

There it is, or was...

Sorry to be replying late, I was just too tired to tangle with the topic.

>178 alaudacorax:

the more racist you are, the thicker you must be.

I think I know what you mean, and I think it's true that today being racist at a minimum speaks to ignorance of science (ironic, considering that historically science was mobilised to defend racism). But there's just something a little too convenient in assuming that people with awful opinions must be stupid. They may be, but intelligence is complex. Also, to me it seems Lovecraft's odium was truly visceral, probably something instilled in him very early. Not sure he was the type who could be reasoned out of that.

>181 housefulofpaper:

Noir (I was thinking of the films more than written fiction) conjures up a cold, hostile, paranoid vision of the modern city without grounding it in a racist worldview.

I suppose it depends on what you mean by "grounding", but in general I'd say that just because a movie (or any type of narrative) does not feature black characters or explicit racial conflict or racist slurs etc. it cannot be said to eschew projecting a racist worldview. For a Godwin-worthy comparison, there are many movies from Nazi Germany that don't feature or mention any Jews or Jewishness-related, and yet we can't avoid the context and understanding that, regardless of the lack of a "negative" representation, this type of would-be "neutral" absence actually speaks volumes as well. So, for example, in classic American noir there are basically nil black leads, but also no minor black characters in "upper class" professional roles. However, black maids, cooks, chauffeurs, shoeshines, railroad workers, liftboys etc. are plentiful. This wasn't a passive reflection of "reality" but in fact an artificially maintained image to shore up segregation as well as to spare white audiences the anxiety of seeing the growing black middle class--in short, it was due to racism.

I'm not that familiar with British noir but I would note Basil Dearden's Sapphire as a (late) example (in colour to boot!) dealing frontally with racism in the modern British city. It came considerably later than the heyday of American noir, but then one could argue that racism didn't become a mediatised concern in Britain until the fifties, with the mass arrival of Caribbean and other immigrants. And from the fifties on, it becomes ever more difficult to avoid having PoC on screen, is it not? Hence the trouble Midsomer Murders got into, and the frank recognition that its appeal to certain audiences was precisely a general lack of PoC. (I'm not being judgemental here, I liked the show and, being unfamiliar with Britain, didn't notice anything odd about those early seasons--now this would be white privilege at work.)

>186 housefulofpaper:

Oh no. Probably not a good sign, but who knows?

>182 alaudacorax:, >183 housefulofpaper:

I picked up a book because I thought I recognised a Gorey cover (it's not) and lo and behold, it combines multiple "Gothic" strands... most of all vampiric, but involving other supernatural creatures (reminding me of The Monster Club). Greta Helsing, related to that Helsing, is doctor to the undead and similar. Edward Ruthven is a friend and within the first few chapters she's been called upon to help another "sanguivore"--no other than Sir Francis Varney. He'd been the victim of a mystical attack by people dressed like monks...

Anyone read this? Did you like it? So far so good for me, but I'm barely in.

ETA: oops, forgot to name the book!-- Strange Practice by Vivian Shaw

>187 LolaWalser:
This is extracted from the Wikipedia entry for Film Noir: “Scholar Andrew Spicer argues that British film noir evidences a greater debt to French poetic realism than to the expressionistic American mode of noir.”

Before reading that, I wondered if it could even be said to be such a thing as British Film Noir. I would have tentatively suggested that anything that looked like a Noir was merely aping a popular American thriller style, and/or betraying the involvement of technicians who learned their trade in pre-Nazi Germany and had Expressionism in their blood. Perhaps Andrew Spicer has only added another influence.

“And from the fifties on, it becomes ever more difficult to avoid having PoC on screen, is it not?”
I’d have to disagree. As far as I’m aware it was due to pushing from within the industry by a relatively few enlightened writers and producers. Of course the result (plays and sitcom scripts from Johnny Speight say) can be very uncomfortable viewing half a century (and more) later on (in terms of language and at-the-time progressive ideas). PoC didn’t get behind the camera in any numbers until the 1980s, in large part due to Channel 4’s remit to cater for minorities and to commission programs from independent production companies).

As an aside, there was nothing odd - in the sense of the all-white cast being unrealistic - about Midsomer Murders. Take it from somebody who used to live in Burghfield Common and has family in Wallingford!

On the subject of British film and German Expressionism, have you ever seen the segment of the 1967 Casino Royale (famously, a dog’s breakfast of a film) where James Bond’s Daughter, Mata Bond and her sidekick Carlton Towers (Joanna Pettit and Bernard Cribbins go to West Germany and take on SMERSH agents in their headquarters, which is disguised as a Caligari-style Dancing academy?

>187 LolaWalser:

Re. Strange Practice:

That book and the series were both new to me.

To be honest, realising that if I manage to read 100 books a year, my current unread books collection will take me into my late 80s, it’s starting to dawn on me that I can’t hope to read everything that catches my eye. Not to mention the series that I’ve started but haven’t finished, or bought the first two or three books maybe 30 years ago but “haven’t quite got around to them yet”.

(Not there isn't a sense of freedom in ignoring the TBR pile(s) and launching into something completely new!).

>187 LolaWalser:
I enjoyed Strange Practice but not enough to follow up with the other books in the series. It was interesting light entertainment.

>189 housefulofpaper:

I know exactly how you feel! I keep re-calculating how many books I can reasonably expect to read in the future... it's a number far smaller than what I accumulated!

>190 pgmcc:

Just saw your review (thumbed). I must agree overall, it's no more than pleasant fluff. I saw another review (just skimmed them, this one's on top) that also criticised stylistic mannerisms, which I also agree with. I did put in a request for the sequel, though, as I love the "doctor to the monsters" premise and am hoping she may have improved. Shedding the fanfictiony aura would be so very welcome! (Less of the Smurfette with the adoring boy gang, more complex plots?)

>191 LolaWalser:
Thank you for the thumbing. I like the premise too; it is what prompted me to pick it up in the first place.

My reading took another sideways serve on Sunday. Late afternoon sun (not too hot, unlike how this following week has turned out!) and an inviting armchair seduced me into picking up an unread hardback from the shelves. Tartarus Press have been publishing ghost story collections by a retired academic named John Gaskin. The Long Retreating Day is from 2006 and I got it on the second-hand market (in my head this was just a couple of years ago but LibraryThing says 2013!).

You could say they are in the M. R. James tradition but there's more overt social comedy - or observation that sometimes crosses over into comedy. In that regard he sometimes reminds me of Reggie Oliver (absent the stories set in the theatrical world).

I get a distinct sense that Gaskin is a small-c (and probably Capital-C) convervative which doesn't bother me, apart from (so far, the sole incident) where some working class characters come over as badly-written Morlocks. Yes I suppose this is intended to point up the contrast with a "gentleman" from England at the break of WWI, but if I can't believe in them then that's an artistic failure.

I thought I'd whiz through the book in a couple of days but real life intruded, as usual.

>189 housefulofpaper:

I've remembered I have a couple of short novels by 19th Century novelist Paul Feval waiting to be read. I can't remember if he used other authors characters, or put real-life authors into his fiction, or both, but the "Monster Club" aspects of Strange Practice rang a bell.

I'm persevering with The Shadow of the Wind but keep sloping off and reading other things (I've started The Drowned World but in some crazed attempt at self discipline I'm keeping it in an upstairs room and only reading it in there).

Hello all,

I've read little over 100 pages of Caleb Williams, Oxford World's Classics, by William Godwin. But I confess, I don't see (so far) where it fits into Gothic Literature. Am I dense, or missing something?

It's a good book but so far it reads like a political treatise wrapped in beautiful writing and storytelling. Perhaps something changes in the rest of this 400+ page book?

But so far...I'm feeling a bit flummoxed.

>195 benbrainard8:

As was I.

Couldn't understand why Gothic studies academics regard it as so important.

Took a real dislike to Godwin himself—felt he couldn't write a good story and, worse, wasn't really trying and, rather, more concerned with his 'message'. I wasn't impressed by the quality of his writing and storytelling and, ironically, felt it only really sparked into life when he suddenly went off into a rant about the contemporary prison system—I felt he was really caring about that bit.

I'm still holding a grudge against the academics who inveigled me into reading it ...

I did read the second book in Vivian Shaw's trilogy, Dreadful company, and I did enjoy this one more than the first, so chances are I'll get to the third (and last) book as well. Greta Helsing and Lord Ruthven are in Paris when strange things begin to happen, seemingly centred on a coven of chavvy vampires.

A larger cast of characters that assembles together only gradually instead of all at once was a significant improvement on the first book. The main attraction, at least to me, remain the colourful monsters and their interactions with Greta, but there's also something to be said for Shaw's ample references to Gothic classics and pulp fiction, and even to odd television, such as the 1960s series The Prisoner.

In this installment we meet an erstwhile friend of Victor Frankenstein's, but most memorable (for better or for worse) will undoubtedly be Shaw's use of M. R. James' Whistle and I'll Come To You.

And here is where I run into a dilemma, and wonder why I'm even talking about this fluff in this group... on the one hand, I suppose there MAY be some interest in how contemporary pop culture processes older pop culture; on another, perhaps it's too trite to mention? Which brings me back to the examples of, say, The Monster Club, The Abominable Dr. Phibes and similar. If you like these, despite what they do to the Dracula saga etc., then you probably have what it takes to enjoy Shaw's borrowings, allusions and variations.

There are hints of Potterverse (I thought) in the names of Crepusculus Dammerung and Gervase Brightside (psychopomps, eternal beings who help to usher souls from one world to the next), and in the many cute varieties of monster.

Vampires from Sheffield with dubious taste and social climber aspirations brought to mind some themes from Buffy. And I thought of the TV series Penny Dreadful more than once too. All of this is entertaining.

But one best be clear that this is rather short on horror, and decidedly COSY. While the busier storyline did away with some aspects of the "fanfictiony" feel, Shaw still revels in the emotionalism of the friendship and love not one but half a dozen awesome monsters (to say nothing of the less-awesome) have for Greta. Some people look exactly for that, while others might be repelled. Personally I don't love it, but I guess I'm far from the target audience, so any amusement I get out of this is a gift.

>197 LolaWalser:
Catie Murphy once told me of her reaction to a review. The review stated that the novel in question did not have an underlying message. Catie's reaction was, "Well, it was only meant to be entertainment fodder."

It sounds like you have found some entertainment fodder. It is not shameful to gain some pleasure from entertainment fodder. :-)

>197 LolaWalser:, >198 pgmcc:

Well, Lola's sold me—they sound quite fun and I'm tempted to try them at some point. And, writing as someone who spent yesterday evening binge-watching
Disenchantment (brilliant!), who am I to sneer at 'entertainment fodder'?

Edited link—apparently there is no video to enter on LT ...

>198 pgmcc:

Ha, thanks for the encouragement! I suppose that since I read so little in this genre, I feel awkward as I wouldn't want to ruin anyone else's greater pleasure in these books by (mis)applying standards better suited to something else.

>199 alaudacorax:

If you do decide to try them, I warmly recommend looking up samples of the writing first. Also, hand on heart, I am happy to read them borrowed, but I wouldn't buy them. But that's just mean old me...

Hey, I found some free samples online:

Read a sample from STRANGE PRACTICE Chp. 1 by Vivian Shaw

Read a sample from DREADFUL COMPANY by Vivian Shaw CHAPTER 3

FWIW, I would even recommend going with the second book first. The adventures are self-contained and Greta's romance, the only change affecting her and another character, starts and develops very low-key.

>200 LolaWalser:

I have no idea why, but I never learned the names of colours when I was a kid. Anything beyond primary colours and I still have to look them up. Started to read the 'Strange Practice' sample and immediately derailed by 'ultramarine'. And then I came across this page - https://simplicable.com/colors/ultramarine. DOESN'T HELP!!! No wonder I still get confused.

>201 alaudacorax:

And I'm still struggling to remember if I've ever seen a pre-dawn sky 'fading to ultramarine'. That's going to niggle me all day, now.

>200 LolaWalser:
I read Strange Practice a couple of years ago. The premise of doctor to the supernatural was the hook that caught me. My response to reading the book appears to have been similar to yours; I found it quite enjoyable but felt it was a bit fan-fictiony and I had to ignore some obvious violations of accepted Gothic lore*. Having read the book I decided I would not get the next book and gave Strange Practice to someone who enjoyed it much more than I. Your post has now made me think that Dreadful Company might well be worth a read. Since my conversation with Catie I have no shame in reading entertainment fodder.

*I use the term "accepted Gothic lore" tongue-in-cheek as I see the application of the word Gothic to an ever expanding array of stories.

>202 alaudacorax:
It will probably niggle you right up to the next time you see a clear pre-dawn sky. After that you will be niggled with wondering if the colour you saw in that sky was indeed ultramarine or something totally darker.

>204 pgmcc:

Yup ...

>201 alaudacorax:

Lol! That is perplexing... to me "ultramarine" evokes a shade of middling bright blue.

>203 pgmcc:

Well, I hope the excerpts may help you decide. By the way, I just noticed that Chapters 1 and 2 from Dreadful company are available at the same link, I linked Chapter 3 because that's the one that came up on my Google search.

No sooner had I undertaken to finish reading The Shadow of the Wind and The Drowned World so that I could reread Frankenstein, than I picked up The Cambridge History of The Gothic Volume 1 after a gap of several months and read the next chapter.

This was, to be honest, quite a dry chapter entitled "The Aesthetics of Terror and Horror: A Genealogy". I think Mrs Radcliffe's distinction between terror and and horror is relatively well known - dread and anticipation as against revulsion. Boris Karloff was making the same distinction in interviews in the '30s or '40s - wishing that the genre he had become famous for was called "Terror films".

The essay by Eric Parisot sets out the time line for the development of these ideas, from theorists/essayists such as Joseph Addison early in the 18 Century, through Edmund Burke and up to Mrs Radcliffe's time. He rounds out the essay, taking Mrs Radcliffe's way of creating suspense and scares in her novels, by arguing that there is a shifting horror/terror nexus rather than a simplistic rule where one feeling is stimulated and the other rejected, and that aesthetics in primary: it's how we perchieve a "dreadful object" (e.g. a mountain, a foreboding old castle, a coffin) and not any intrinsic qualities of the object, that makes it dreadful.

I read the last in Vivian Shaw's trilogy, Grave importance, where there is much talk and action involving mummies and other things Egyptian. The final all-out war comes as a bit of surprise, and it would have been good, I think, if it had been foreshadowed from the first book on. Mainly, previous observations still obtain, lots of good ideas and compelling monsters, but perhaps too cosy for some.

Also, I didn't know that Shaw is married to the sf writer Arkady Martine! Funny that I should have managed three books by one, when I abandoned Martine's A memory called Empire a couple hundred pages in (I thought the writing was OK, but as often happens, I found myself wondering why read some ersatz of politics and sociology when there's so much fascinating stuff around that is also REAL.)

>208 LolaWalser:

I was getting really into the sample of Strange Practice you linked in >200 LolaWalser:, then I forgot about it. >208 LolaWalser: reminded me and I read it last night. Enjoyed it so much I read it almost in one sitting (pausing only to make some grub).

I understand your use of 'cosy'. It was a bit of an adventure yarn rather than creepy or scary, but good light entertainment.

To be honest, there wasn't much that original about it, but I'm struggling to know what to think of that. You can see where most of it came from, but then is she riffing on old themes, paying homage, parodying? Whichever, it was good fun.

>209 alaudacorax:

I had one little conundrum. Some of the dialogue Shaw gave to Greta struck me as rather American for a London born and bred doctor. But then I wondered if it wasn't actually quite accurate, a product of exposure to our predominantly American media. I have noticed young people around me using 'gotten' and 'off of' and so on.

>210 alaudacorax:
Aaaaarrrrggghhh!
Not the dreaded “off of”! My teeth hurt.

>209 alaudacorax:

I hope you took advantage of the free samples to the utmost. I noticed only belatedly that the first three chapters seem to be free for all three books. Generous!

On the American/British confusions, I'm afraid that after twenty years in Canada I mostly lost the ability to pick out finer nuances. But Americanization is probably to be expected. Shaw herself, according to her bio, is of English ethnicity and moved to the US as a child.

>212 LolaWalser:

Yeah, I'm increasingly noticing this free sample business. It's quite clever really; they've found the online equivalent of reading the first few pages in a bookshop.

>212 LolaWalser:

I'm still puzzling whether that was a parody or whatever. For example, those ghouls she pinched pretty much straight out of The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, but then has Greta and one of the vampires going all broody over a baby ghoul. And then trying to clean up their clothing after cuddling it. I remember wondering as I was reading that if she taking the mickey out of Lovecraft ... or of me? Had me puzzling and chuckling at the same time, despite being absorbed in the story.

>214 alaudacorax:

Couldn't tell you if the ghouls are Lovecraftian, but the general trend of befriending all the monsters surely isn't!

Recent reads have included:
Two more chapters in The Cambridge History of the Gothic. One focused on Mrs Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis, looking at them as the "terror" and "horror" poles of 1790s Gothic literature, and finding that they seem to have been more aware of one another, and were influenced by one another (at the very least, Mrs Radcliffe seems to have "toned things down" a bit, following the notoriety of The Monk. The following chapter looks at writers that have been looked down on as hacks cashing in on the success of "proper" literary authors (in prticular, of course, Mrs Radliffe), and again argues for a more complex to-and-fro, and innovations on the part of the supposed copycats, and earlier sources (e.g. mid-century "novels of sentiment", European works of fiction, that they all could have drawn on.

I also read The Witchfinder Omnibus Volume 2. This is a comic book set in the universe of Mike Mignola's Hellboy. Sir Edward Grey is Queen Victoria's witchfinder, a character originally mentioned in passing in a Hellboy story. There are a lot of comics set in the Hellboy universe, and a lot of them, it seems to me, have similar "Giant rat of Sumatra" origins.

The omnibus collects three stories originally serialised as comic books, all set in the Hellboy universe's version of Victorian England. It's got elements of steampunk and traditional Gothic horror, as well as weird super-science secret societies. One story borrows from the Ripper Conspiracy theories that also inspired Murder by Decree and From Hell.

Admittedly it's very derivative - so much of the Hellboy universe is a celebration of the Weird Fiction that Mignola discovered in his teens. And there's another potential issue, in that, because of genesis of the Sir Edward Grey character, we've already seen the payoffs of these stories main arcs in the main Hellboy stories 20+ years ago.

>217 housefulofpaper:

Sir Edward Grey? As in Viscount Grey of Fallodon, statesman, bird watcher and fly fisherman, at least two of whom's books I own? Wow. I live and learn ...

>218 alaudacorax:

Well, no. It's either a coincidence or Mike Mignola appropriated his name.

That said, it would be a curious echoing of how Ian Fleming chose the name of his secret agent character (James Bond, author of Birds of the West Indies, and then you remember the story that John Dee was reportedly a secret agent for Elizabeth I as well as her unofficial magician (officially, her court astronomer, I believe), and signed letters to her as "007"!

Is it off-topic if I say what I am not going to read?

I've been meaning for quite a long time—really can't remember why—to read Flowers in the Attic. I was having a go at the current LT Treasure Hunt yesterday and somehow found myself reading the synopsis for Flowers in the Attic. Child abuse and incest? I am not reading that!

Not even for curiosity about why people class it as a Gothic novel. It seems to me there's an artificiality about the Gothic (I never know whether I should capitalise the definite article) that can't be there if the story is too close to some news headlines.

>220 alaudacorax:

I was intrigued but not at all enlightened to note it has a significantly higher rating on Amazon than on LibraryThing.

I finished The Shadow of the Wind. Thoughts - I think the distinction I made a while back between “Gothic” and “Sensation” novels was pointless. The modern Gothic has swallowed up all the elements of the Sensation novel that didn’t evolve into the Detective novel. It’s a Gothic novel. I didn’t love it like a lot of people do (in fact I looked at the reviews of it here and found myself nodding along with the critical ones) but it did keep me engaged and plot-wise, it didn’t all fall apart at the end, which is always a danger with bid multi-story strand, multi-time frame stories. It was interesting to accidentally read it alongside The Drowned World, which definitely isn’t Gothic but does use a Gothic trope, that of the “buried” past coming back with a vengeance in the present. There’s also Ballard’s take on human nature, which (post Empire of the Sun) is taken to be informed by his childhood years in a Japanese internment camp. It was, of course, but at least in this early book there’s some obvious colonial attitudes and some what seems to me wacky psychological theorising too. I’ll try to work my thoughts up on this when I’m not away from my books at tapping away at my phone. But at least I’ve “put a pin in it” for now.

>222 housefulofpaper:

Ballard has become, no doubt quite illogically, an annoyance to me. First of all, I read some Ballard short stories. That was probably a lifetime ago—may even have been back in the '60s. I thought he wasn't very good and decided I wasn't going to read him anymore. Actually, that's an understatement; I remember ending up irritated and quite out of patience with his work. But ...

Ever since, I've been periodically coming across depictions of Ballard as a 'towering figure of 20thC literature' or the like and wondering if I made a mistake and should revisit.

Nowadays I have two competing examples nagging at me in these situations, like the little angel and the little demon on the shoulders in the cartoons. One is Dickens: I've disliked Dickens since childhood, but realised what I was missing out on after reading 'The Signalman' and Great Expectations over recent years and now I'm regretting not reading him and really am intending to read all his novels. On the other hand, there is The Blair Witch Project, which is absolute rubbish and which I've watched THREE times because I was doubting my own judgement because it has such a high reputation, and now I really, really resent the time wasted and how much worse would that be for whole novels (pause for breath)?

Truth be told, I'm not going to read Ballard, but he's taken to hovering in the background of my consciousness niggling at me. One knows one shouldn't worry about these things, but he's like a sort of literary version of a bluebottle occasionally buzzing around ... when you haven't got a rolled-up magazine handy.

And it doesn't help that I'm online browsing and writing these posts when I really should be sitting down and doing half-hour's reading ...

I've read above with great interest.

Perhaps all of us have authors, that perhaps we know are important for one reason or another, but that we ourselves just cannot take.

I tried reading J.G. Ballard, and I admit, he's bit much. But when I've read about what he went through, as a child (no less), in a Japanese internment camp, I then try to take a different view on his writing. I think we've always got "divisive" or difficult writers. Burroughs, Ginsberg, Irvine Welsh, Rushdie, and other comes to mind. I know that they're supposedly important, and perhaps they even become part of the literary lexicon. Doesn't always mean I'm going to read all their works, perhaps their writing is too difficult for me, or perhaps "they don't speak to me".

I'm now reading Rebecca, and have greatly enjoyed it, though comparing it to all the cinematic versions has been daunting. It's quite an interesting book. I didn't know the writer also wrote the story that would be Hitchcock film, The Birds (1963).

Oh, and speaking of something that was a hard one for me...

I watched John Carpenter's The Thing (1982). 1st view, my spouse was so grossed out by it that I couldn't really pay attention. Then one of my coworkers teased me, and said "hey, watch it alone without your spouse and don't turn away every time there's a gross scene." So, since I'd rented it for one-month period, I re-watched it after work. Turned up the volume and tried my best not to look away..... Wow. Well, um, it's certainly not a film for everyone. But I figured out why everyone says it's one of the best of its genre, and unfortunately it came out same year as E.T., so it utterly bombed! I now realize that it's perhaps John Carpenter's 'David Cronenberg/Alien' moment, has some solid acting, and is homage to many of the 1950s films about the us and them Alien genres (both in film and in literature).

Sorry, this must seem like a long rant, discourse. Don't mind me, it's Sunday a.m.

Nothing wrong with a good rant ...

>220 alaudacorax: - I've been meaning for quite a long time—really can't remember why—to read Flowers in the Attic.

I've figured out why. But ... why the hell should my subconscious have been confusing Flowers in the Attic with We Have Always Lived in the Castle? The crossed wires my brain gets are really weird sometimes. I've realised it's the latter I've really been wanting to read and have no idea how Flowers in the Attic sneaked in there.

Doesn't help that I feel my only reading of The Haunting of Hill House was 'unsatisfactory' and I really want to reread that first. I perhaps was never in the mood for it—I remember I took absolutely ages to read it, then never starred it here, never noted the reading dates and don't very clearly remember it.

>226 alaudacorax: - ... and don't very clearly remember it.

When I try to remember it, memories of The Haunting shoulder it out.

>226 alaudacorax:

I had the same kind of feeling when I read The Haunting of Hill House but I think I recognised why, and that it was really a "me" problem: when I read it I was glutting on a lot of Edwardian ghost and weird fiction - "Things giving chaps a nasty turn" - whereas Shirley Jackson's book was much more psychological. Paradoxically, that made it (superficially) much more like a modern mainstream novel, whereas the Edwardian stuff, emotionally limited though much of it was, had the freshness of novelty for me at that time.

I will reread the book - I bought the Folio edition, and passed my Penguin paperback on to one of my neices.

A bought I bought back in 2017, Scarred for Life Volume one: the 1970s (surtitle "growing up in the dark side of the decade"). This huge book - 740 pages of small print - consists of chapters examining all the weird, unsettling, or inappropriate popular culture those of use who grew up in the UK in the 1970s were exposed to. I had only made it 300 pages in by the start of this month, but I knuckled down and finished it yesterday.

Subjects that are relevant to this group include:
supernatural kids' tv shows such as The Owl Service, Ace of Wands, etc.
Nigel Keale's '70s televsion
Doctor Who
Public information Films (miniature horror movies to dissuade the under 10s to play on railway lines, or fly kites near power lines, etc)
Genre-themed board games, food and snacks
Films we were too young to see but knew about
Books and comics catering to the kids who couldn't get in to see horror films and violent action film
The paranormal - UFOs, psychic abilities, Nessie...and finishing off with the scariest thing I ever saw on television (the details of which I had forgotten until I got this book and Folklore Myths and Legends of Britain to reconstruct the story. It was the story of the "Hexham Heads":

In brief, two small stone heads dug up from an ordinary suburban back garden. Once unearthed by the children of the family in the house (so the story goes) they were brought into the house. Once out of the ground, theymoved in the night, and a werewolf/poltergiest was manifested when the children were alone in the house. This was a report on early evening (usually quite light) magazine programme Nationwide and ended the piece with a clip of a werewolf jumping out of the TV screen ... well it was probably a clip from an old film, but the impact was a mixture of Sadako from Ringu and the end of Ghostwatch (with the TV studio in uproar and Michael Parkinson possessed by "Pipes"). The immediate shock nearly made me lose control of my bladder, but the implication that something in our garden could be disturbed and manifest something in the house gve me many sleepless nights.

>229 housefulofpaper:
Do not forget page 26 of The Godfather. Pick up any copy in a bookshop at the time and it fell open at page 26.

>230 pgmcc:

I think that must be a couple of years too early for me. I do remember sex scenes in the Dallas novelisation, which seems very strange now but was, I suppose, par for the course back then; and my English teacher cheerfully selling Emmanuelle to my friend st a school jumble sale.

I've just recently found out that there's a Scarred for Life podcast. In one edition, guest Reece Shearsmith lists three things from his childhood that "scarred" him. This, actually was an honourable mention: one of The Two Ronnies musical numbers was a Sweeney Todd spoof (in the wake of the Stephen Sondheim musical) which he watched on first transmission but he remembers was removed from the repeat. He said he's never seen it since, it's not on YouTube etc.

Well of course I checked, and it's been recently uploaded:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCxjfZ2O63I

>231 housefulofpaper:
Excellent!
I feel a bit scarred now myself.

>231 housefulofpaper:, >232 pgmcc:

Oh my god! That was hilarious! I don't remember ever seeing that one—especially the bloodshed.

As I remember it, they were BBC. How did they get away with the HP sauce back in those days? That might be why it was removed from the repeat as much as the blood.

Has the opening singer got no hands? And am I missing some obvious significance to the 'PODBUR'?

Edited to add ... Bloody hilarious! Sorry, couldn't resist ...

>233 alaudacorax:

And now, a day later, I can't get the bloody opening song out of my head. Wandering round the supermarket droning, "I'll telly you the tale of Teeny Todd. Aha! Aha!" Strange looks ...

The "aha"s kill me. Great video.

I've got two separate paperbacks of The String of Pearls (the original Sweeney Todd penny dreadful). I've got so much to read! I thought I'd been restrained entering the new year, but I've averaged one new book every other day so far!

I did finish a fat collection of Algernon Blackwood short stories (Tales of Terror & Darkness - the Touchstone has a different name but goes to the correct book, it seems). This was a lucky find in a charity bookshop. It feels like it was a recent purchase but in reality it was about a decade ago. Despite the book's title, a lot of Blackwood's stories are really supernatural romances - there's a lot of reincarnation and soul mates, that kind of thing.

>236 housefulofpaper:

The Touchstone thing - Librarything has combined at least two separate (and posthumous) short story collections, and someone's charged in and set the "wrong" title as the canonical one.

>236 housefulofpaper:
I loved The String of Pearls. For me Sweeney Todd, as presented in the book, is a pure anti-hero. So many stories have an anti-hero that has some redeeming feature or background that prompts sympathy and understanding. I think Sweeney Todd is pure anti-hero without a single redeeming factor.

My copy is from the days before writing analysis had attributed authorship.

The last book I finished reading was a short novel by 19th Century French writer Paul Féval, Le Chevalier Ténèbere in an English translation entitled Knightshade. The translation is by Brian Stableford, who has translated an enormous amount of French Gothic and Decadent fiction in the last couple of decades.

As the introduction (by Stableford) notes, the story seems to owe something to The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, as both stories feature a pair of hanged criminals who are nevertheless not at rest, and the supernatural element recedes to focus on banditry (not entirely though, in the case of Le Chevalier Ténèbere.

The story opens at a society gathering in 19th Century France, at an evening soiree or Society gathering. One of two German guests (a tall baron and a short cleric) tell a tale about two Hungarian undead brothers "an oupire and a vampire". He then claims that they are real, and masters of disguise. Suspicion falls on any two guests matching the only trait the brothers can't disguise: one is tall and one is short...

There's a romance but the hero and heroine are pretty forgettable compared to the villains, and the more strongly-drawn supporting characters. And it's all done and dusted in under 100 pages.

I was going to go straight on to The String of Pearls, but noticing Clark Ashton Smith's birthday fell last week, I picked up a volume of his stories, that has had a bookmark parked about 50 pages in for too long a long time. It's not that I didn't want to finish the book, it's that I read the big Gollancz Fantasy Materworks colelction just before I found out about and got the "collected fantasies" volumes, of which is (only) volume two. A lot of the stories not selected for the Gollancz collection were early science fiction rather than fantasy or horror. It's not exactly what I intended to read and it's taking a bit of a mental change of gear.

>239 housefulofpaper:

Struck with a feeling uncomfortably close to gulit, or shame, after finishing The Clark Ashton Smith volume mentioned above (The Door to Saturn) I turned to more partly-read books:
- Uncertainties volume two - an anthology of new* weird fiction from Swan River Press (no Touchstone)
- The Collected Fiction of William Hope Hodgson volume two - this includes The House on the Borderland and Carnacki the Ghost-Finder, and is rounded out with two supernatural tales and a group of more-or-less maritime mysteries.

I also finished Books and Bookmen, which is a short book. Apart from the one essay on Japanese ghosts there is little that's relevant to this group, unless it's the simple fact of its Victorian antiquarianism - oh, and stray mentions of William Beckford (in the context of the spoils of the sale of his library).

I have, now, returned to The String of Pearls.

* published in 2016...doesn't time fly.

Still feeling guilty about the the number of partly-read books on my shelves, and duly finished volume one of The Cambridge History of the Gothic. The chapters left to be read consisted of essays on 'Oriental Gothic', 'The German "School" of horrors', 'Gothic and the history of Sexuality', Gothic Art and Gothic Culture in the Romantic Era, and 'Time in the Gothic'.

The essay on Oriential Gothic took the shape I would have anticipated (having already read a fair bit of the relevant literary history and criticism, so that's not an adverse criticism).

The German school looked at the translations from German originals, and pastiches, and discussed what seems to have been a moral panic around this material, couched in terms of (moral) poisons, echoing the (actual) poisons that feature in many a Gothic tale.

The essay on sexuality was possibly the most Academic and capital-T Theory-laden in the book. The theories of Michel Foucault, in particular, feature heavily.

The essay on art and culture in part, asks questions we've worried at here: what is and what is not "Gothic", and when does it form part of a "Gothic Culture"? Where to draw the line? (a personal observation - quite a few years ago on a visit to the Victoria and Albert Museum, the gallery of rooms - wood panelling, fixtures and fittings from various castles and stately homes - included a room from Walpole's Strawberry Hill. It's inarguably very important in the popularisation of Gothic architecture and Gothic style, but the actuality seemed far too dainty "in the flesh" and more obviously of the 18th Century and closer to Roccocco style than anything else). The painter Fuseli is the focus of this essay.

The essay on time is another tough one, arguing for a tension between pre-modern time (based on the seasons, cyclical and in a sense eternal) and modern time (measured out by the ticking of a clock, linear).