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Post by dem bones on Nov 14, 2011 10:27:05 GMT
As mentioned on the Carry On Up The Jungle thread, some years back I inexplicably charity-shopped my copy of Tim Sullivan's Tropical Chills, so dead pleased when a replacement showed up at the market yesterday alongside another undeserving victim of the purge, the Rosemary Timperley edited Sixth Ghost Book; Part 1. Locus tag Mr Sullivan's antho with a "highly recommended" but being a person of zero literary taste, i remember it as a thing of fits and starts (loved Dead Meat and White Socks, was significantly less taken with It Was The Heat, etc). Blah blah. Here's the line-up. Tim Sullivan (ed.) - Tropical Chills (Avon, Nov. 1987) Tim Sullivan - Introduction Gene Wolfe - Houston, 1943 Susan Lilas Wiggs - Mama Doah’s Garden Steve Rasnic Tem - Grim Monkeys Brian W. Aldiss - The Flowers of the Forest Ian Watson - White Socks Edward Bryant - Chrysalis Robert Frazier & Bruce Boston - Night Fishing on the Caribbean Littoral of the Mutant Rain Forest Charles Sheffield - Dead Meat Avram Davidson - Where Do You Live, Queen Esther? George Alec Effinger - Talking Heads Jack M. Dann & Barry N. Malzberg - Getting Up Pat Cadigan - It Was the Heat Gregory Frost - A Part of Us Timothy Robert Sullivan - Zeke Dean R. Koontz - Graveyard HighwayBlurb THE HEAT IS IN
Are you ready to meet horror lurking in steamy jungles... ravening creatures roaming through hot summer nights ... the living dead basking under swollen tropical suns? Now, in ten new stories and four classics, you'll be gripped by torrid terror. See if you can take the heat in Dean R. Koontz's "Graveyard Highway," a one-way trip to the far side of the twilight zone... "Houston, 1943," where unspeakable evil enters a suburban home...."Chrysalis," set in a botanical garden with roots in a dark and mysterious past. You'll break out in a cold sweat as you enter these chilling landscapes of evil and fear created by such acclaimed writers as GENE WOLFE, STEVE RASNIC TEM, EDWARD BRYANT, CHARLES SHEFFIELD, PAT CADIGAN, AVRAM DAVIDSON, DEAN R. KOONTZ and seven other modern masters of horror.
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Post by dem bones on Jul 3, 2012 8:27:44 GMT
Charles Sheffield - Dead Meat: Prabang, in the sweltering swampland of Borneo. Jack Scanlon is contracted to build a rocket silo and the narrator, Tom Gavin, is his charge hand. From the first Gavin is involved with Scanlon's beautiful wife, Magrit. While Scanlon is away attempting to bribe Semerap, a troublesome Government official, to allow him to excavate Monstro, a thirty foot long crocodile from a pool he needs to drain, Gavin is caught in a feud with two Australian's he's sacked. When Scanlon returns, already furious at having hiis time wasted by Semerap, the Aussies present him with photographs of Gavin getting up close and personal with his wife. Scanlon, already decided on destroying Monstro, douses the croc in petrol and empties the rest of the can over Gavin. As the two men argue, Monstro crawls from the pond and snaps its jaws shut around the unfaithful Magrit, setting us up just so for a violent and bloody ending.
Ian Watson - White Socks: Tanzania in the early 'sixties. Accountant Harry Sharp and wife Helen Sharp are in Mikumi on Ministry of Finance business when they unwisely accept the hospitality of the overbearing Mr. Desai, big game photographer and despiser of the white race. The smug Brits offend their host by trying to wheedle out of a promise to accompany him on a leopard hunt, whereupon Desai abducts Mrs. Sharp, drives her out into the jungle and informs her that she will be returned to her husband unharmed once she's stripped nude and posed for some polaroids (he's amassed quite a collection). Desai is merrily snapping away when a leopard man comes crashing through the trees and slashes him to pieces, but Helen's relief turns to despair when her rescuer details what he has in store for her, both in this world and the next. Weird, funny and suspenseful, with Mr. Desai's incredibly distracting testicle stealing the show.
Robert Frazier & Bruce Boston - Night Fishing on the Caribbean Littoral of the Mutant Rain Forest: As you maybe gathered from the title, a three page poem, and I am even less qualified to comment on verse than I am on prose.
Pat Cadigan - It Was The Heat: A financial convention at a hotel in New Orleans' French Quarter. The narrator, a married, thirty-five year old businesswoman, is seduced by a Loa. Consequently, despite the sweltering summer heat, she is always freezing cold until she summons back the demon by sitting in the fire. Obviously, there is far more depth to this story, but, truth be told, am in no rush to read it a third time.
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Post by dem bones on Jul 4, 2012 22:30:13 GMT
Dean R. Koontz - Graveyard Highway: ".... When he opened the trailer he saw a hundred dead men, women. and children sitting within, on benches that ringed the walls. Their rotting bodies reeked of corruption, and their flesh crawled with maggots, and as one they turned their heads to look at him with chilling intensity.
He woke, thrashing with entangling sheets that at first seemed to be the cold, grasping hands of cadavers.
"When he turned on the light, the old framed poster of Che Guevara showed not the bearded face of the famous guerilla leader but a corpse in an advanced state of decomposition, its fierce eyes filled not with revolutionary fervour but with stark terror and with the dark knowledge of the grave..."Orange County. Mason Sondheim, 27, turns his back on a successful and financially lucrative career as an artist to embrace a career in liberal politics. His father is furious, insisting a politician, no matter how sincere, will never be of as much value to society as a painter. While driving to his workplace at the American Action Committee building, Mason spots a signpost denoting 'Death: 2 miles' and enters The Twilight Zone as the familiar landscape gives way to a sprawling graveyard, deserted but for a spectral figure in black. The graveyard becomes a jungle, the trees a forest of rotting human flesh, and Mason bears witness to unspeakable war-atrocities in El Salvador and Nicaragua, joins the jews aboard a cattle truck destined for Auschwitz, and experiences first hand the horror and misery of the Gulag .... But for a handful of short stories, charity shop ever-regular Dean R. Koontz is among my many horror blind spots. I'm forever seeing his novels around, rarely give them a second glance because they all seem huge and his output is so prodigious, where are you supposed to start? Had a great time with Down In The Darkness in Cramer & Pautz's Architecture Of Fear and, fifteen pages into Graveyard Highway, was seriously intent on bumping Whispers to the top of the 'to read' pile until ..... ..... a stupendously cringe-inducing, feel-good ending decided me otherwise. What on earth was he thinking?!
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Will E.
Crab On The Rampage
Posts: 24
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Post by Will E. on Mar 22, 2013 13:27:41 GMT
" ..... a stupendously cringe-inducing, feel-good ending decided me otherwise."
That's Koontz's usual M.O. I think he's the worst kind of bestseller hack writer. He had some enjoyable books several decades ago, but they all had those kinds of unwarranted happy endings (MIDNIGHT from '89 ends with a father smashing his estranged, moody teenage son's "black metal" records until the kid finally gives in and they embrace. Fade out). I avoid Koontz always. "Charity shop ever-regular"... heh.
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Post by dem bones on Mar 23, 2013 13:45:05 GMT
" ..... a stupendously cringe-inducing, feel-good ending decided me otherwise." That's Koontz's usual M.O. I think he's the worst kind of bestseller hack writer. He had some enjoyable books several decades ago, but they all had those kinds of unwarranted happy endings (MIDNIGHT from '89 ends with a father smashing his estranged, moody teenage son's "black metal" records until the kid finally gives in and they embrace. Fade out). I avoid Koontz always. "Charity shop ever-regular"... heh. Thanks Will, though I wish you'd not told us that about Midnight because if I see a copy on my creepy crawls, you know I'll not be able to resist. Picked up something called The Dean R. Koontz Companion not so long back, dip into it every once in a while, but am really none the wiser where to start on him. That's you and Andy D. have both cited his earliest novels as those to take a chance on, so maybe one day . He is perhaps the no.1 charity shop fixture. Seen loads of his hard-covers, BCA editions by the looks of 'em, and they always look in pristine condition, like somebody ordered them by mistake. No kidding, was getting on famously with Tropical Chills until the Cadigan-Koontz double-whammy.
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Post by Calenture on Jul 13, 2013 20:21:38 GMT
Houston, 1943 by Gene Wolfe: Gene Wolfe’s a writer whose stories and novels have earned my respect rather than my enthusiasm. Houston, 1943 opens with young Roddie dreaming that he’s at his desk in ‘Poe School’ (Edgar Allan Poe Elementary School in Houston, which Wolfe attended); then he realises that someone is calling him from the garden. Jim, a small boy with a cockney accent, is immediately recognizable as a ghost; and soon after we discover that the huge, apparently not unfriendly spider, that seeks closer acquaintance, is actually something even more unpleasant than at first it seems. In fairly close order we’re introduced to a naked young girl (Sheba) and a voodoo houngan (Doc). And if the nature of this adventure hasn’t become apparent by now then the introduction of Captain Hook and a ticking crocodile should ring loud alarm bells. Roddie is trapped in a dream world, unable to re-enter his own body, forced to watch it being sacrificed on a pagan altar. A few days after reading this one, I remember that I enjoyed reading it, but can’t for the life of me remember what the hell it was actually about. Usually the first story in an anthology is a strong one, preferably uncomplicated. This dreamlike narrative with characters speaking in near-unintelligible dialects, seems a very odd choice. Mama Doah’s Garden by Susan Lilas Wiggs: Wiggs’ first professional sale, this one continues the voudon theme with the crone Mama Doah watching the white visitors and salivating over ‘the delicious softness of their bad-tempered, well-fleshed little children!’ When the children leave Mama Doah to return to their parents, no-one notices the tiny bead of blood that spots each child’s ear. The nature of the spell Mama Doah is casting over them is not spelled out, but it has something to do with her garden and the seeds she is waiting to grow and flower. Wiggs has been an historian, an archaeologist, and is a compulsive sailor. Small details of arcane rites are lightly but very effectively sketched in, delicate touches of grue; we can be quite sure the garden’s final flowering won’t bode well for the children she’s so affectionately fondled. Grim Monkeys by Steve Rasnic Tem: ‘Grim Monkeys’ is the way he remembers his father referring to the native people of Venezuala; just as he’d spoken of kids back home as ‘Yard Apes’, as if ‘they weren’t quite human yet.’ When Marge gets custody of their daughter Ceelie, he snatches the child and heads for his recently deceased father’s home in Caracas. Then Ceelie vanishes, snatched by the Yanomami, the Fierce Ones. He heads deeper into the sweating jungle, led now by Perez. Perez who had always been his father’s faithful servant. Perez who remembers only too well how he had always been his father’s Monkey. The Flowers of the Forest by Brian W Aldiss: As Hopkins guides his canoe into deepest Sumatra and the territory of the witch Subyata, he’s determined to enlist the witch’s aid in his search for his wife Carol. Hopkins had always been too quick with a knife and that had been the case years before, when he found Carol with another man. The man had died and Hopkins had used his knife to make sure that Carol would not find it so easy to find a man again. Now, he remembers his wife with odd affection, more like disguised guilt, and only wants to see that she’s safe in whatever relationship she might have been able to make. Close by Subyata’s cave a path leads to a giant tree, a rafflesia, “whose roots, creeper-entangled, struggled out of the ground like an octopus kicking aside the bedclothes… the biggest, ugliest flower on the whole planet.”Subyata helps Hopkins' soul to leave his body in order to seek out his wife. But the witch is younger than he expected, and very beautiful – and she can read him like an open book. What happens is inevitable, given a man with such a treacherous temper as Hopkins. What is not expected is Subyata’s resurrection in the body of her pet snow leopard. And what of the leopard’s outcast soul? While Hopkins has left his own body unguarded, the leopard’s soul has found a new home, albeit an ill-fitting one. Helpless to intervene Hopkins can only watch as his own form is guided clumsily down a path with a horrible destination. Grotesque and original. rafflesia
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Post by mattofthespurs on Jul 14, 2013 7:09:47 GMT
" ..... a stupendously cringe-inducing, feel-good ending decided me otherwise." That's Koontz's usual M.O. I think he's the worst kind of bestseller hack writer. He had some enjoyable books several decades ago, but they all had those kinds of unwarranted happy endings (MIDNIGHT from '89 ends with a father smashing his estranged, moody teenage son's "black metal" records until the kid finally gives in and they embrace. Fade out). I avoid Koontz always. "Charity shop ever-regular"... heh. Whilst that is absolutely true his last decent book, "Odd Thomas", has a very down ending. Used to love Koontz's books and then somewhere around Mr Murder onwards he completely lost the plot (figuratively speaking). I used to buy all his books in HB as soon as they appeared but I have been burnt one time too many now. "The Darkest Evening Of The Year", "The Taking" and "77 Shadow Street" were the final nails in the coffin as far as I am concerned. Wretched books.
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Post by dem bones on Jul 14, 2013 7:55:43 GMT
i'm glad you brought that up Matt, because - Martin S. Greenberg, Ed Gorman & Bill Munster (eds.) - The Dean R. Koontz Companion (Headline, 1994) Lee Gibbons Ed Gorman - Interview with Dean Koontz David B. Silva - Keeping Pace with the Master Charles de Lint - The Heart of the Tick Tock Man Matt Costello - Films, Television and Dean Koontz
Dean Koontz - An Unusual Collection:
Koontzramble Oh, To Be in Cedar Rapids When the Hog Blood Flows The Man Who Knows All About Hippodurkees Rex Stout and Nero Wolfe Tater Baron The Coming Babylonian Age The Truth About Christmas Mr Bizarro My First Short Story Kittens (Readers And Writers, 1966) Koontz, Will You Just Shut Up Already! Ghost Stories A Genre in Crisis How To Keeping the Reader on the Edge of His Seat Why Novels of Fear Must Do More than Frighten You’ll Either Love It or Hate It - or Just Be Indifferent to It Weird World: The Introduction The Day It Rained Frogs The Man Who Does Not Always Mean What He Says Tweetie, the Parakeet from Hell No One Can Talk to a Horse, of Course The Miracle Tree of Burbank The Unluckiest Man in the World The 10 Questions Readers Most Often Ask Dean Koontz Annotated Bibliography Blurb: Here for the first time is -a comprehensive look at the life, career and work of one of the most popular and prolific writers of our time – with more than 70,000 words of material from Dean Koontz himself. An exclusive, in-depth interview, never before published... Rare articles by Koontz about the art of writing... His first published short story... A complete annotated guide to all his novels... Selections from Weird World, humorous pieces unpublished until now... Answers to questions fans most often ask... The films based on his work... And more.Doubtless a treat for the converted, this hefty Companion isn't quite so helpful to Koontz novices like self who maybe require something in risible Idiot Guide ... tradition. We've a few early Dean R. Koontz fans on Vault - have noticed that "early" is very significant - so, if i may pick your brains a second, which particular macabre titles would you say are indispensable, and where does it begin to go "wrong"? Pristine hardcovers of his books are something of a charity shop fixture, but, having no idea where to leap in on his unfeasibly huge back catalogue, have always passed up until now, though there's a Demon Seed been quietly rotting on the shelf for years. Anything good that comes in around or under the 300 page mark would be preferred, but really, would most like to know which DRK novels you would nominate as his very best work?
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Post by Calenture on Jul 14, 2013 10:05:32 GMT
We've a few early Dean R. Koontz fans on Vault - have noticed that "early" is very significant - so, if i may pick your brains a second, which particular macabre titles would you say are indispensable, and where does it begin to go "wrong"? Pristine hardcovers of his books are something of a charity shop fixture, but, having no idea where to leap in on his unfeasibly huge back catalogue, have always passed up until now, though there's a Demon Seed been quietly rotting on the shelf for years. Anything good that comes in around or under the 300 page mark would be preferred, but really, would most like to know which DRK novels you would nominate as his very best work? I don't think "early" is any guarantee of a decent read from Koontz. I mentioned somewhere that I liked his Watchers(1987) - the first of his that I read. I also liked Chase (1984) - written under his 'Leigh Nichols' pseudonym, republished under his own name, natch. But House of Thunder - another Leigh Nichols outing in 1982, had me chucking the book to the foot of the bed in exasperation. I thought it was a mess!
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Post by mattofthespurs on Jul 15, 2013 7:28:05 GMT
The companion is a good book. I enjoyed reading it.
For me, the best Koontz are;
"Watchers", "Strangers", "Chase", "Twilight Eyes", "Night Chills", "Strange Highways" (short story anthology), "Odd Thomas" (his best book in my opinion), "Shattered", "Mask", "Phantoms" (joint favourite) and "Icebound".
Some of the later ones like "The Husband", "Life Expectancy", "The Good Guy" and "The Face" are ok. Competently written thrillers.
Avoid, if you can find, pretty much all his Ace double science fiction stuff. Anything from the last five years is generally garbage. All in my opinion of course.
For a novice who has never read any Koontz I would suggest starting with "Phantoms" and then "Odd Thomas". The sequels to Odd are ok but he seems to be dragging it out now. Some of the earlier stuff like "Chase", "Shattered", "The Vision" and "Mask" are decent and are short and quick easy reads.
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Post by dem bones on Jul 15, 2013 11:21:13 GMT
Thanks for the crash course, gents. Have jotted 'em all down in readiness for a charity shop creepy crawl over Ruislip way on Wednesday, so will let you know should any Koontz titles (recommended or otherwise) turn up.
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Post by andydecker on Jul 15, 2013 19:56:57 GMT
No love for Whispers?
Or Servants of the Twillight?
He used to write really enjoyable thrillers, but he lost me in the mid-nineties.
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Post by mattofthespurs on Jul 16, 2013 7:07:10 GMT
I liked Whispers. Thought Servants of the Twilight was turgid.
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