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Post by noose on Dec 5, 2011 23:02:05 GMT
It was the same with the Pan Horror reprint, some of the tales were slated by reviewers (because of their un-pcness) new to the stories - that charge was aimed mainly at Muriel Spark's The Portobello Road.
But take bits out of stories? Nope, should never happen, no matter how unflavoursome the story is. Just imagine in the future if someone wanted to reprint Love on the Farm, but took out all the gnarly bits? I shudder to think.
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Post by andydecker on Dec 5, 2011 23:35:50 GMT
yeah, a lot of the horror fiction from that era is problematic. Wordsworth surgically removed some of the more offensive moments from their Bulldog Drummond omnibus, and RAWL used to do that with Jules de Grandin stories now i think of it. it's a dilemma, but am still of a mind that it's better to reproduce the text as published or not at all, until somebody persuades me otherwise? O no! Always in their original form. If you go the PC way 90% of horror fiction and crime must be deleted. From Robert Howard to Mickey Spillane. The retro-sanitization has reached a level straight out of Orwell. Everything under the sun is offensive to someone and only villians smoke! Imho anybody who cannot put a 80 year old story into context should read a few more books!
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Post by pulphack on Dec 6, 2011 8:46:05 GMT
i agree with you completely, gentlemen. context is everything. old fiction and non-fiction writings reflect their times as much as the men and women who wrote them, and in turn those men and women were shaped by those times. to change that is to bowdlerise history, and god knows that's malleable enough as it is.
i can understand the commercial context in which some publishers do this - bad reviewing on pc issues can reflect on sales not just of the title but also the company. and frankly, no-one want to be name-called as a racist or anything else because some reviewer is either pc blind or out to make a name for themselves (the latter being the only possible reason for some stupidity of this nature). but in the longer view, they're making a mistake.
the point is simply this. no-one is or was perfect, and will say at least one thing in their lifetime that you disagree with. if you can't accept that (arguing about it is another thing), then you're going to have a very frustrating and narrow life. and this seems to be the problem with pc thinking. no-one wants to condone racism, homophobia, etc etc, but to ignore them as if they don't exist rather than look at people who either have those views or who chose to explore people with those views in their work is ultimately self-deafeating.
some people can just be blind, though, for whatever reason. years ago i had a huge argument with an editor as i had a murder with a supposedly racist motive in a book. a lot of phone calls took place before i tumbled that he had stopped reading there (you can't have that these days, are you a racist?, etc) and hadn't gone about a hundred pages on where it was revealed that a business motive had led to one man creating a supposedly racist situation to cause dissent amongst the different groups in a small village and so make it easier to control them piece by piece. the editor did have the grace to apologise, but the point remains.
do that to the past as well as the present and you wipe out any kind of perspective. and that, in the longer run, is surely far more dangerous?
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Post by dem bones on Dec 6, 2011 9:11:30 GMT
Thanks kindly for your thoughts on the subject, gents. will likely come back to this later, but have to say i'm fully in agreement with the sentiments expressed, though i'd be very interested in hearing from someone who holds the opposite viewpoint. on to today's razor blade in the sherry trifle; i was gonna run with another story from Creeps but couldn't get it finished in time so a personal favourite to be getting on with. i've uploaded this before, but here is a much-spruced up (trans: mischievously illustrated) version. there's no namby-pambying around with Touch And Go, it's a full on horror story pure and simple, and i hope you'll agree it slots in just so with what we've had to date. Attachments:
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Dec 6, 2011 10:13:33 GMT
You just can't fail with Sapper 'It was about the size of a football, and it was wrapped up in what looked like a towel.'
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Post by andydecker on Dec 6, 2011 10:28:40 GMT
Servants - the bane of our everyday lives, I´ll tell you! Wonderful story. You know, I never read anything by Sapper, only a lot about him, of course. As I saw the first few eps of American Horror Story - which puts the nail into the coffin of the Haunted House story - I was delighted to find here each and every cliche of this kind of story which havn´t changed in 100 years. But he really put a number on them. Now I know what all those EC writers read in their youth. Guess it will be a trip to Wordsworth later; I have to read more of Sapper.
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Post by scarabium on Dec 6, 2011 11:36:58 GMT
I wonder who actually does get upset about past attitudes so much that they want to actually rewrite history. I would hope that most people, regardless of colour or faith, are mature enough to realise that everything is contextual. Isn't it better to show a particular snapshot in time and the mindset that inhabited it even if some people find it offensive? Definitely. However, I can understand that some editors are reluctant to do this due to the fear of being labelled a racist. They do, after all, have bills to pay and families to feed and being unemployable (or even having a race-related criminal record or "image") for standing up for your values is a failure of today's political climate and not the person. Once you've felt the clammy hand of a political nutcase with a spiteful and insane agenda you've never experienced true horror!
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Dec 6, 2011 11:45:39 GMT
Rats - stonking story As soon as I saw 'Baby Hector' mentioned I shook my head sadly in resignation...
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Post by mattofthespurs on Dec 6, 2011 18:54:33 GMT
Just a quick note to say that I'm really enjoying this years Advent Calender. Thank you very much.
I'm also in the camp that agrees that any censorship of the written word is wrong, wrong, wrong.
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Post by dem bones on Dec 7, 2011 8:58:55 GMT
We're off to the seaside today. Hester Holland Gaskell (1897-?), who also wrote under her married name, Hester Gorst, was one of very few authors who contributed to both the Creeps and Not At Night series', three "grisly and extremely ingenious" horrors to each in her case, the best known of these being The Scream (adapted for TV series Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Presents in 1953), The Doll's House and the lovable 'when plants attack!' melodrama, Dorner Cordainthus. Attachments:
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Post by dem bones on Dec 8, 2011 10:22:13 GMT
Typical that so tragic a figure as Richard Middleton (1882-1911) should be perhaps best remembered for a comic supernatural romp, The Ghost Ship, when so much of his other work in the genre is black as pitch. Included his sad, sad story of The Conjurer on the 2010 calendar, this one is maybe grimmer still, but who among us could resist stopping for a drink at a marshland inn called The House Of Woe? Attachments:
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Dec 8, 2011 18:22:46 GMT
Typical that so tragic a figure as Richard Middleton (1882-1911) should be perhaps best remembered for a comic supernatural romp, The Ghost Ship, when so much of his other work in the genre is black as pitch. Included his sad, sad story of The Conjurer on the 2010 calendar, this one is maybe grimmer still, but who among us could resist stopping for a drink at a marshland inn called The House Of Woe? An easier way out than being hounded by CS but some good lines. Suddenly made me think of that other wrong turning story - Pan Horror - which had a memorable scene where the hero is escaping through the window of the bathroom and steps in the water cistern which is full of.... Can't remember the name though.
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Post by dem bones on Dec 9, 2011 9:14:49 GMT
Continuing a short run from the Thrills series and no big shock that i can tell you nothing about today's victim. John Gawsworth's 'Bibliographical Note' in Crimes, Creeps & Thrills isn't a great deal of help either. " A. L. Davis is a new author. His eerie atmospheric tale The Skull, a sketch on body-snatching, reminds the reader of the macabre fantasy of Robert Louis Stevenson." It also reads like the kind of thing Milton Subotsky might have adapted for an Amicus portmanteau, though he'd likely have tarted up the ending a touch. Attachments:
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Post by dem bones on Dec 10, 2011 7:21:48 GMT
Will pick up on the Thrills series again shortly, but to set everyone up for the weekend, a lust story from Vault legend Guy Preston. Resisted the temptation to go with The Inn - which really should be included here as an example of 'thirties Brit horror at its very best - instead opted for his slightly lesser known contribution to Birkin's Monsters. Attachments:
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Post by dem bones on Dec 11, 2011 8:49:15 GMT
Oswell Blakeston (1907-1985) is the only author to have stories included in the Not At Night, Creeps and Thrills series', delightfully weird ones at that. Blakeston was an artist, poet, film critic (he edited the magazine Close-Up for some years) and author of - among other titles - Priests, Peters & Pussens (Fortune, 1947), "a classic volume of creepy stories" according to Hugh Lamb who recycled three of the nastier ones over his anthologies. There would have been a fourth, as, at Hugh's instigation, Oswell was revising his Creeps classic The Hut at the time of his death. Oswell Blakeston, writing in collaboration with Roger Burford, was also the mysterious 'Simon'. Now, Oswell's work most certainly does not fall within the seventy years rule, so this brief (three page), nightmarish gem is offered as a tribute to a relatively neglected master of the macabre in the hope those who have not yet had the pleasure go seek out more of his work. Attachments:
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