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Post by the paperback fanatic on Apr 28, 2015 8:55:13 GMT
Building an article for The Paperback Fanatic on books and stories with a theme of hunting. Below is my list to date. Any suggestions/additions very welcome. At this stage it's definitely more SF based, so especially keen for horror titles.
There's one that can't remember the title of - a social climber is delighted to receive an invite to the hunt from the ruling elite and turns up in his finest attire, but gets a nasty surprise. The reader doesn't, but the class war theme and its nasty edge makes it memorable all the same. But not the title.
Sound of Thunder, Ray Bradbury
A Gun for Dinosaur, L Sprague De Camp
Name Your Tiger, Milton Lesser
The Hunted Ones, Mack Reynolds
Impractical Joke, Lyon Sprague de Camp
Day of the Hunters, Isaac Asimov
Arena, Fredric Brown
Hands of Zaroff,
The Sound of his Horn, Sarban
The Seventh Victim, Robert Sheckley
Gerry Carlyle series by Arthur K Barnes
Winthorp was Stubborn, William Tenn
Come, Hunt an Earthman, Philip E High
The Prize of Peril, Robert Sheckley
Killer, David Drake and Karl Edward Wagner
The Day The Monsters Broke Loose, Robert Silverberg
Home is the Hunter, Moore and Kuttner
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Apr 28, 2015 9:03:07 GMT
Richard Connell's "The Most Dangerous Game" surely belongs on this list.
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Post by franklinmarsh on Apr 28, 2015 9:33:04 GMT
I see Justin's list includes ...er...The Hands Of Zaroff (sic) which, if he means Hounds rather than Hands, is The Most Dangerous Game, certainly in film terms.
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Post by dem bones on Apr 28, 2015 9:33:42 GMT
There's one that can't remember the title of - a social climber is delighted to receive an invite to the hunt from the ruling elite and turns up in his finest attire, but gets a nasty surprise. The reader doesn't, but the class war theme and its nasty edge makes it memorable all the same. But not the title. That one is George Hitchcock's An Invitation To The Hunt, a favourite of Alfred Hitchcock anthologies if I remember. Are we talking hunting humans, hunting animals or doesn't it matter?
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Post by franklinmarsh on Apr 28, 2015 9:42:42 GMT
Would Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male count?
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Post by dem bones on Apr 28, 2015 9:58:04 GMT
Richard Connell's "The Most Dangerous Game" surely belongs on this list. I see Justin's list includes ...er...The Hands Of Zaroff (sic) which, if he means Hounds rather than Hands, is The Most Dangerous Game, certainly in film terms. Two bizarre and rather wonderful variations on The Most Dangerous GameJohn Wallace's Terror Is Cupid's Mate ( Mystery Tales, May 1939: reprinted in Tom Mason's Spicy Horror Tales, Malibu, 1990) Ron Goulart's Vampirella 2: On Alen Wings David Case's The Hunter should be on the list, likewise Richard Laymon for short, sick shocks, The Hunt (topless girl in obligatory red gym shorts is pursued by prolific serial killer), and The Fur Coat (a recently bereaved woman hunted through the streets by a pair of sadistic animal rights extremists. The various Bigfoot novels, especially M. E. Knerr's Sasquatch and Thomas Page's The Spirit, probably qualify, but then I guess you could say the same for Jaws and similar Moby Dick variations.
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Post by franklinmarsh on Apr 28, 2015 12:02:56 GMT
David Case's The Hunter should be on the list I second that emotion.
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Post by dem bones on Apr 28, 2015 12:08:37 GMT
How about James Dickey's Deliverance?
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Post by the paperback fanatic on Apr 28, 2015 12:30:40 GMT
Thanks so far - I really wasn't expecting such a quick and useful set of responses. (Make your mind up which one of the two I wasn't expecting!)
Anything is fair game (see what I did there?) as long as it's not a conventional hunting story. So all the most dangerous game derivatives should be, in my eyes anyway, included.
Please keep 'em coming.
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randy
Crab On The Rampage
Posts: 17
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Post by randy on Apr 28, 2015 17:54:16 GMT
James Blish: "There Shall be No Darkness" John Langan: "The Wide, Carnivorous Sky" David Drake: "The Hunting Ground" & "Something Had to Be Done" (I feel reasonably confident about the first, but less so about the latter; been awhile since I read these) Laird Barron: "Old Virginia" & "Bulldozer" (these might be stretching the definition of "hunting" somewhat)
Adam Nevill: The Ritual
I'm a bit unsure how literal you mean "hunting": The first Barron and the Blish, Drake and Langan stories feature hunters after ... something! Though the situation reverses somewhat in all of them. The Barron and Nevill works feature something hunting people.
Randy M.
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Post by dem bones on Apr 28, 2015 21:14:52 GMT
Richard Bachman - The Running Man. Blood sport shorts from around the board; T. H. White - The Point Of Thirty Miles: Upper class toff Frosty recalls the strangest and most terrifying experience in all his years with the hunt. Pursuing a fox along the Thames, the pack caught scent of an altogether more dangerous prey - a huge wolf. It took them thirty miles to catch up with the exhausted beast, whereupon the hounds dragged it down and tore out its entrails. But before the dying creature was ripped to pieces, Frosty witnessed a terrible transformation that sent him scurrying off to the nearest pub. (Peter Haining, [ed.] Werewolf). Ian Watson - Tales From Weston Willow: Three short stories narrated by Mrs. Prestige in The Wheatsheaf Inn. The first deals with cross-country runner, Charlie Fox, who sabotages the hunt and pays a heavy price for his sins. (Chris Morgan [ed.], Dark Fantasies). The same author's Lost Bodies, is an extraordinarily weird tale of a foxes head which continues to live despite its being torn off during the hunt. Two young couples are concerned that it is an alien spy - and the narrator wonders if his bashful wife, Karen, is one of the same kind ...( Salvage Rites) Great Big-Game Hunters Of Our Time; not sure if either of the following qualify, but they're both ace. Harry E Turner - Love Bites: Captain 'Mad Jack' McAlpine, playboy and fully paid up member of the Travellers Club, leaves his country estate Hestercombe Towers for the Amazon jungle on a mission to locate a lost tribe of superwomen, although he doesn't believe for one moment that any such community exists. Mad Jack only volunteered for the job to evade the clutches of Lady Fiona Selston-Bunter, but after being taken prisoner by the sex-crazed native beauties, he suddenly comes to view his intended in a far more favourable light. Can he escape back to Surrey or will he be staked out and ravished to death by the girls? (Herbert Van Thal [ed.], 22nd Pan Book Of Horror Stories) Cecil M. Willa - The Lost Village: Described in the introduction as "deliberately shocking," The Lost Village would not have been out of place in an early Pan Book Of Horror. Our narrator and Verriner, the ill-tempered big game hunter, are stranded in a Central European wilderness when they fall into the clutches of a thirty strong tribe of blind, bestial hags, the demented survivors of a war atrocity. These poor creatures live on a diet of wild cat and, when the chance arises, human flesh. The prospect of being eaten alive holds little appeal to Verriner who shins it up a chimney abandoning his friend to fend for himself. Which is when things turn really ugly. (Crime Writers Association [eds.], Butcher's DozenThere are, of course, several ghost & vampire hunting variations on the theme if applicable?
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Post by mcannon on Apr 28, 2015 22:01:08 GMT
I don't think this one has been mentioned yet - "His Coat So Gay" by Sterling E Lanier (originally published in "The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction", July 1070) . It's one of his "Brigadier Ffellowes" series of club stories, which I'd love to see to reprinted in a nice single collection.
Mark
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Post by jamesdoig on Apr 29, 2015 9:49:52 GMT
Lord of the Flies of course. That Richard Christian Matheson story where a family being hunted by people with spears turn out to be endangered whales. You'd think All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By has a hunting scene it it, but I can't remember it.
Do all those Wild Hunt stories count?
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Apr 29, 2015 11:42:43 GMT
Almost half the Dumarest series by Tubb deals with hunting but the Quillian Sector has a hunter as the central character with our hero as the prey of course. One of my favorites.
Also Sheckley's The 10th Victim which was novella as well as a novel and the basis for many's a film
(Ps just spotted your 'The seventh victim')
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Post by Dr Strange on Apr 29, 2015 12:02:27 GMT
The Wendigo by Algernon Blackwood.
The Damned Thing by Ambrose Bierce.
I'm sure there must be some by Lord Dunsany, given that he was a big game hunter himself.
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