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Post by dem bones on Jul 5, 2010 10:56:59 GMT
You've a friend with £10 in their pocket and they'll pe passing Lovejoys on Charing Cross Road later today. This person has recently sampled a few ghost and horror stories for the first time and is keen to read more and wants to know which four from the Wordsworth Mystery & The Supernatural range should be their next purchase? Which do you suggest? as ever, will show you mine if you show me yours, etc. hopefully, this one could be even more impossible than choose your favourite Pan Book Of Horror Stories cover....
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Jul 5, 2010 14:22:56 GMT
A NIGHT ON THE MOOR AND OTHER TALES OF DREAD by R Murray Gilchrist. Not because the stories are necessarily any good, but because this is very obscure stuff that is otherwise difficult and expensive to obtain. (Of course, the book is a shameless ripoff of the Ash Tree Press volume of the same contents.)
COUCHING AT THE DOOR by D K Broster. Same thing with this one, also extremely obscure. Although I still have no idea who D K Broster was, I remember enjoying some of the stories, including one about cave paintings.
UNCLE SILAS by J Sheridan Le Fanu. Not a ghost story, but one of my favorite novels of any category. A riot from start to finish. If you only read one Victorian novel in your life-time, let it be the wonderfully subversive UNCLE SILAS.
Finally, THE BISHOP OF HELL AND OTHER STORIES by Marjorie Bowen, because Marjorie Bowen is great. This volume contains "Elsie's Lonely Afternoon," which while not a ghost story, as such, is a cruel and depressing masterpiece.
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Post by dem bones on Jul 5, 2010 15:27:40 GMT
Thanks Jojo. I went for M. G. Lewis's The Monk after which it all became very problematic! The David Blair edited Gothic Short Stories is a tidy anthology but would i recommend it over Mark Valentine's centuries-spanning The Werewolf Pack or James Doig's Australian Ghost Stories? I agree that both Marjorie Bowen and D. K. Broster are excellent (even if i've yet to finish either book) but perhaps our friend will get just as much from the bumper E. Nesbit selection? I can't decide between three of the four Le Fanu's (if I'd read House By The Churchyard it would likely be four of four). Probably Madam Crowl's Ghost over the others. Also, I think this friend who has put us to so much trouble deserves to encounter Dennis Wheatley's The Devil Rides Out. I'd turn them toward Robert E. Howard (the Solomon Kane collection) rather than M. R. James if only because they'll almost certainly find the latter - or he'll find them - before long.
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Post by Johnlprobert on Jul 5, 2010 21:01:47 GMT
David Blair - Gothic Short Stories: A great sampler of delights to be explored Sheridan LeFanu- In a Glass Darkly. Lesbian vampires and demon monkeys - what's not to love? May Sinclair - Uncanny Stories. Because I was genuinely surprised & delighted at how good they were. Dennis Wheatley - The Devil Rides Out. Because everyone needs a brush with a little 'real and concrete evil'. Admittedly I haven't read that many Wordsworths yet. My dislike of the Gilchrist has been well documented & I think he should only be allowed in antholgies where his work might be more palatable
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Jul 6, 2010 3:22:23 GMT
The Right Hand of Doom and The Haunter in the Ring & other Tales because too much R. E Howard is still not enough. Dennis Wheatley - The Devil Rides Out because then you can invite them round to watch the film and Sheridan Le Fanu; but which one would be the crunch question. All in all I think you'd have to supplement the tenner with another fifty at least to make the trip worthwhile.
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Post by carandini on Sept 11, 2010 8:24:02 GMT
I appreciate the suggestions. I have The Devil Rides Out and The Bishop of Hell on order already. Along with several others. Takes a bit longer for some of these to cross the Pond it seems (my copy of Varney the Vampyre is expected sometime in October), so I try to nab them from booksellers over here when I can.
If I have one gripe, it would be the numerous cover editions out there. Becomes a bit frustrating trying to get everything in the wonderful skull and bloodspot livery when some of these have regular Wordsworth Classics incarnations floating about.
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Post by lemming13 on Sept 12, 2010 20:51:27 GMT
Since you're in the US, Howard and Lovecraft will be pretty easily obtainable already; so I'd suggest LeFanu, Madam Crowl's Ghost; The Werewolf Pack; Harvey's The Beast With Five Fingers; and Conan Doyle's Tales of Unease. I would have said F Marion Crawford's The Witch Of Prague, but the title novella is just so damn bad and takes up so much of the book I would say it wouldn't be worth the shipping cost, not if you can find the other stories elsewhere.
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Post by monker on Sept 13, 2010 1:35:06 GMT
What about the bleedin' obvious in the collected M. R. James?
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Post by carandini on Sept 13, 2010 12:06:55 GMT
I already had a badly over-read collection of M. R. James (I mean, is anything more creepy than 'Count Magnus'?), which I was prompt to replace with a Wordsworth copy when I found one. The Werewolf Pack was actually my first purchase, a few years ago, but I found it to be a very mixed bag, especially finding he Sherlock Holmes story to be poor in quality and highly out of place. At any rate, I've been making up for lost time and buying quite a few of these wonderful collections, which led me to the Vault as I was trying to track down a complete list of what has been released (incidentally, the Wordsworth site no longer has The Haunting of Toby Jugg listed, perhaps meaning it has been dropped from their catalog). Thus far, and despite having some of these in an assortment of other collections, I've picked up Ambrose Bierce's Terror by Night, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Tales of Unease, Amelia B. Edwards's All Saints' Eve, Elizabeth Gaskell's Tales of Mystery & the Macabre, W. F. Harvey's The Beast with Five Fingers, M. R. James's Collected Ghost Stories, J. Sheridan Le Fanu's In a Glass Darkly, Gaston Leroux's The Mystery of the Yellow Room and The Phantom of the Opera, H. P. Lovecraft's The Whisperer in Darkness, J. H. Riddell's Night Shivers, The Castle of Otranto, Vathek & Nightmare Abbey, Gothic Short Stories, Australian Ghost Stories, Scottish Ghost Stories and the aforementioned The Werewolf Pack. A robust beginning to a collection I hope to expand over the next few months into a formidable catalog of Victorian horrors. The one good thing about being a writer is you can feel innocent squandering your ill-gotten gains on books by thinking of them as 'reference material' Currently, I have five others on order: Varney the Vampyre, The Bishop of Hell, The Devil Rides Out, Return of the Dead and Madam Crowl's Ghost - some of these influenced by the kind suggestions of this forum.
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Sept 13, 2010 19:48:35 GMT
Apropos of nothing, I just noticed from the ad at the bottom of the front page that the Wordsworth Jack the Ripper book has more bloodstains than just the regulation one on it. Classy!
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Sept 13, 2010 19:55:18 GMT
I could also recommend Richard Marsh's bizarre and entertaining THE BEETLE. It concerns Egyptian shape-shifters and a cult that needs to sacrifice specifically English young ladies. I have some reservations about the ending, though---the story does not end so much as come to a (literally) grinding halt through the intervention of a totally arbitrary deus ex machina. It is as if the author suddenly decided he had more urgent business to attend to.
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Post by carandini on Sept 14, 2010 6:51:20 GMT
Or was running against deadline Perhaps The Beetle suffered a similar fate as Bram Stoker's Jewel of the Seven Stars where the editors slapped a happy ending onto it and threw out the real ending. Honestly, a world of difference when you read that novel depending on which ending is in place.
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Post by dem bones on Sept 16, 2010 19:01:52 GMT
At any rate, I've been making up for lost time and buying quite a few of these wonderful collections, which led me to the Vault as I was trying to track down a complete list of what has been released (incidentally, the Wordsworth site no longer has The Haunting of Toby Jugg listed, perhaps meaning it has been dropped from their catalog). hi carandini Chorion acquired the rights to Dennis Wheatley's back catalogue in April 2008 so once the print runs of The Devil Rides Out, To The Devil - A Daughter and The Haunting Of Toby Jugg sell out, sadly there will be no more Wordsworth Wheatley's. masochist that i am, i was hoping they'd rerun all the Black Magic titles and his terrible flying saucer novel, Star Of Ill-Omen.
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Post by pulphack on Sept 16, 2010 22:54:57 GMT
This is true - unfortunately, Chorion are always preoccupied by their childrens catalogue and Agatha Christie - to the extent that their rather fine adult catalogue (Edmund Crispin and Raymond Chandler along with George Simenon and Margery Allingham to go alongside our Dennis) gets ignored. Part of this is because the chaps who organised the acquisition left the company soon after, one to join another IP company and the other to set up on his own.
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Sept 17, 2010 8:24:46 GMT
This is true - unfortunately, Chorion are always preoccupied by their childrens catalogue and Agatha Christie - to the extent that their rather fine adult catalogue (Edmund Crispin and Raymond Chandler along with George Simenon and Margery Allingham to go alongside our Dennis) gets ignored. To be fair, Crispin is practically completely back in print since some time back.
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