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Post by wordswortheditions on Feb 5, 2009 11:13:08 GMT
Over the last few months, we at Wordsworth Editions have received many suggestions for new authors and titles we can include in our Mystery & Supernatural series. We've now selected the 20 most popular authors and would like you to cast your votes for your favourite 5 authors in the poll. The poll will be running until the end of February and the top 5 authors will form the basis for our Mystery & Supernatural publishing schedule for 2010/11. As a token of our thanks, everyone who votes in our poll (or has previously contributed a suggestion through email) will be put into a lucky dip, and 2 of you will win £50 of Amazon vouchers to use as you wish (although if you want to spend them on Wordsworth books, that's fine with us! ) Thanks again for your continued interest and support. Please also take a look at our poll for authors still in copyright: vaultofevil.proboards75.com/index.cgi?board=presixties&action=display&thread=2574
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Feb 5, 2009 11:28:26 GMT
Thanks Guys. Another pint owed I think.
My one objection on the list might be Correlli - not, I stress, on artistic grounds. Although I haven't been back to Blighty for a few years Correlli was easily obtainable in second hand book shops. I'm thinking that the mad people here and other like minded souls might find her easier to find than the others.
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Post by dem bones on Feb 6, 2009 10:17:15 GMT
The really boring reasoning behind my voting. You'll read something else if you know what's good for you. Henry S. Whitehead - A Weird Tales regular, much revered by Robert A. W. Lowdnes who revived several of his eerie and horrible voodoo mini-masterpieces for Startling Mystery Stories and Magazine Of Horror. Hadn't Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard been in their pomp at the same time, Whitehead would certainly be more widely known. Who in their right or even wrong mind couldn't vote for him? Amyas Northcote - I'm not sure if all his stories are up there with Brickett Bottom but those i've read from In Ghostly Company - The Late Mrs. Fowke, The Downs, etc - have me curious to see more without the irritation of trying to enjoy reading them from a screen. Sabine Baring-Gould - I just had to lend some support to A Book Of Ghosts - for all the wrong reasons! Read A Dead Finger, never recovered, and I was hoping all of his stories would exhibit a similar strain of prejudice and snobbery of Wheatley esque proportion. They don't quite ever attain those heady heights again, but he certainly has plenty sniffish to say about frivolous modern women and, when he takes a break from sermonising, even reveals a flair for the traditional ghost story. 'Dick Donovan' - There's some controversy as to whether Dick Donovan plagiarised one of his stories wholesale from Gothic legend 'Anne of Swansea', but it might simply be a case of Peter Haining attributing a story to the wrong author - let's face it, he had previous. Hugh Lamb ran several Donovan's throughout his stint as a top anthologist and a combined Stories Weird & Wonderful/ Tales Of Terror would be very welcome. I can't bring myself to make a fifth choice because it means ditching one of Capes, Vernon Lee, Morrow, Fitz-James O'Brien, Swain or master of the Grand Guignol Gaston LeRoux! The only authors I didn't consider were E. F. Benson - purely on the grounds that it shouldn't be too difficult to get hold of his work - and S S Van Dine, Guy Dent and Sarah Orne Jewett (never read them so couldn't comment). I can't help but think that Dine in particular is at an unfair disadvantage given the horror-supernatural bias of our readership. Something I noticed looking over the candidates: my first - in some cases, only - experience of Pain, Capes, Donovan, the Herons, Chambers and Baring-Gould via the anthologies of Hugh Lamb, as was the case with R. Murray Gilchrist (already available in Wordsworth Editions), L. T. C. Rolt and several other names who've cropped up during the course of this. Someone should really try and coax him out of his retirement from the field!
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Post by lobolover on Feb 6, 2009 22:29:08 GMT
Id go for Whitehead, seeing he is quite hard to get a hand (or any member for that ) of, then for Morrow, seeing his work desires to be FAR more known, then of course for Barry Pain, who was a master of the strange stories, as evidenced in "Stories from the dark", however a reprint of his other , harder to obtain colections would be nice. The same matter with Bernard Capes, a very gifted writer, whose PD work is scarce and whose in print work is even scarcer. And then, of course, I voted for the "master" himself, the author of the King in yellow, Robert W. Chambers.
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Post by marksamuels on Feb 7, 2009 3:25:02 GMT
Wakefield and Burrage.
And while they're at it, Wordsworth should bring out my classic short novel "The Face of Twilight". It was shortlisted for a British Fantasy Award, you know. And I'm very cheap.
Mark S.
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Post by marksamuels on Feb 7, 2009 3:26:54 GMT
Ooops. Wrong thread. I should be over at the other one.
Mark S.
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Post by marksamuels on Feb 7, 2009 3:28:23 GMT
Here I'm going for O'Sullivan and O'Brien.
Mark O'Samuels
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Post by allthingshorror on Feb 12, 2009 13:20:08 GMT
Derek - I see no mention of The Horrid Mysteries!!!!
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Post by lobolover on Feb 12, 2009 23:09:15 GMT
I hope you dont mean THOSE "Horrid mysteries". Now look sunny, Ive read "The necromancer", another of the "horrid novels" from Northanger Abbey and THATS not particulary(? How do you spell this again?) good, in fact, I can do a review on it if you people would like. Now imagine how THIS would be (and I know HPL singeled it out and extremely poor in "Supernatural Horror in Literature" and a friend of mine, Mr. J.D.Worthington has said that he would rather do alot of other things then read it again and that it made his teeth grinch quite alot), so I hope that apart from learning that I seem to capitalise various bends and forms of THAT for some strange reason, it would not exactely be a too desirable a choice.
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Post by allthingshorror on Feb 13, 2009 8:16:51 GMT
Sorry Lobo, I mean The Horrid Mysteries by the Marquis of Grosse. Originally seven volumes, only two have ever been translated into English and published. Robert Holden and Co brought out the two in 1927. Incidentally, it is the first genre book that Herbert Van Thal ever worked on. Both volumes have the same cover.
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Post by lobolover on Feb 13, 2009 19:53:18 GMT
I very much think that IS it.
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Post by unholyturnip on Feb 18, 2009 16:21:02 GMT
I went with Capes, Braddon, Lee, Northcote, and Benson.
Capes because I think he's way under-rated, and there's not been a great collection of his stuff ever released really (the Ash-Tree volume misses out loads of his best tales in favour of many quite insignificant ones).
Braddon, simply because her sense of story is just wonderful. Her prose is really nice to read and she's quite good at chilling the spine too. Many women writers get hung up on sentimentalism and politics I find, but Braddon never suffers from this.
Vernon Lee, because even though there's loads of collections out there, a definitive one hasn't been made available in paperback. Not all of her stories are as good as her best material, but when she's on form she's up there with Henry James in my book.
Northcote, against a very under-rated writer. The last edition of his work came out in '96 and is now way-out-of-affordability on ebay. There's no depth to his stories, but he's great at just chilling you.
E.F. Benson, an obvious writer, but obvious for very good reason. The Dalby edited 'Collected' volume from a few years back misses out lots of his stories, so it'd be good to have a full collection. There are more obscure writers who probably deserve to be exposed than Benson on grounds of rarity, but Benson's tales are just SO good, and yet he's out of print. A lot of folks my age especially don't know about him, which sucks!
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Post by lobolover on Feb 18, 2009 21:55:30 GMT
Wordsworth-If you ARE doing Benson, please exclude the Dust Cloud, sure, it has a short description of a graveyard slowly crumbling into the sea, but, like Capes' "Dark Dignum" ,fails to be actualy good, story wise.It's just a lengthy rhapsody on the wonders of a car, and talks about the ghost of a car.You'd do us ALL a favour . Oh-wait you mean his BROTHER.
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Post by dem bones on Feb 19, 2009 19:21:51 GMT
I very much think that IS it. It is that Horrid Mysteries, and, to be honest, much as it would be nice to know the Northanger books were easily available if you wanted them, it would be a brave publisher who took a chance on them as they're very much specialist interest. At the close of the 'eighties Skoob books set about reissuing all seven (?) but only got as far as Teuthold's The Necromancer and Francis Lathom's The Midnight Bell, both of which are .... hard going. Also, I'm not so sure the Marquis Von Grosse actually wrote Horrid Mysteries - isn't he just the doomed hero of the novel? Whatever, the author seems to have taken their inspiration from Anne Radcliffe, so all the apparent 'supernatural' incidents are rationalised which always gets on my tits. If you're going to go for a Gothic revival, I reckon the best, most commercial place to start has to be the full-on, proper horrors of M. G. Lewis's The Monk, so delighted to learn there's a Wordsworth edition in the offing! To my way of thinking, and no matter that he never intended to, Lewis invented the sensationalist pulp horror novel with that book! Anyway, am pleasantly surprised to see respectable support for Amyas Northcote, and put me down for one of those The Complete Ghost Stories Of E. F. Benson - minus 'The Dust Cloud'. Sounds like a real winner, that.
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Post by allthingshorror on Feb 19, 2009 23:14:00 GMT
Yes Dem - P Will wrote it. Not the Marquis of Grosse. Major brain f*rt.
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