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Post by jonathan122 on Nov 8, 2010 10:31:59 GMT
Last line? Sometimes, as with "You Got to Have Brains" (1956), all you need to know about the story is already in the title. I have a vague recollection of a Robert Bloch story about a cat which ripped out someone's tongue. I believe it was called "Cat Got Your Tongue?"...
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Post by jonathan122 on Nov 4, 2010 12:07:56 GMT
Oops.
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Post by jonathan122 on Nov 4, 2010 11:49:21 GMT
Can't wait now for Tartarus to release the rest of Aickmans collections; I wonder what the next one will be? (my money's on 'Tales of Love and Death') Judging by the dust-jacket of "Sub Rosa", it looks like it's going to be "Dark Entries".
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Post by jonathan122 on Oct 30, 2010 14:33:57 GMT
Much (if not most) of Kafka's work is basically horror.
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Post by jonathan122 on Oct 30, 2010 14:18:43 GMT
Can't think of any other gongs to horror writers. Hang on: wasn't MR James a Companion of Honour? Mark S. He was, but I'm pretty sure it was for his day job rather than his ghost stories! I can think of a few writers who received honours and also wrote horror (de la Mare, Henry James, Kipling), but they usually wrote other things as well. Charles Birkin was a baronet, but sadly that was hereditary...
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Post by jonathan122 on Oct 25, 2010 11:34:48 GMT
Whatever 'intellectual' means. If it means anything, I think I've always associated being "intellectual" with the idea of striving to attain knowledge. I see no reason why the knowledge in question can't be about giant flesh-eating praying mantises. Slightly more seriously, I personally read different stories for different reasons; I'm a big fan of Robert Aickman's work, and I do like to have a go at unwrapping the layers of symbolism and classical allusions (mostly unsuccessfully!), but I also really enjoy a lot of the less subtle pulp horror we discuss here as well. I actually think this board does a very good job at covering both types of story, and I've certainly never found it anything less than welcoming (though I don't think I was around when the aforementioned "big argument" occurred...). On that note, I'm off to try and find something about killer crabs, preferably written by Henry James. ;D
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Post by jonathan122 on Oct 24, 2010 22:42:08 GMT
Up next is John Metcalfe's collection THE SMOKING LEG. The title story is very,very strange... I posted a contents page to this one a while back, with the intention of writing an incisive story-by-story review, but I obviously got distracted... Anyway, feel free to make use of that thread if you want to save yourself 30 seconds or so! Perhaps the act of someone else posting a review will encourage me to think of something interesting to say, as the book certainly deserves a comment or two. vaultofevil.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=gruesome&thread=2657&page=1
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Post by jonathan122 on Aug 30, 2010 21:08:41 GMT
The character of frustrated / bored/ slowly going insane author Oleron is presumably meant to contain a lot of Onions himself (OLivER ONions). I'd never noticed that until you pointed it out, Lord P! (Actually, I didn't even notice it then, and at first I just assumed it was a problem with the caps lock on your computer. ) On another note, I've just been reading "The Honey in the Wall" (1924), and there's a moment where one of the characters tells a ghost story, and the story turns out to be exactly the same as William Sansom's "A Woman Seldom Found" (1956). Until now, I'd always assumed that the Sansom tale was original - but is it actually quite a well-known folk-tale which I've somehow never hear before?
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Post by jonathan122 on Aug 24, 2010 15:27:16 GMT
The Dead of Night - The Ghost Stories of Oliver Onions (Wordsworth Editions, 2010) Introduction by David Stuart Davies
Credo (Preface by Onions)
The Beckoning Fair One Phantas Rooum Benlian The Ascending Dream The Honey in the Wall The Rosewood Door The Accident Io The Painted Face The Out Sister "John Gladwin Says..." Hic Jacet The Rocker Dear Dryad The Real People The Cigarette Case The Rope in the Rafters Resurrection in Bronze The Woman in the Way The Smile of Karen Two Trifles: The Ether-Hogs & The Mortal The Master of the House Tragic Casements
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Post by jonathan122 on Aug 6, 2010 23:06:17 GMT
At Wordsworth's prices, I feel I should buy it for the cover alone, but maybe that's why I struggle to pay my rent bill every month. I've certainly enjoyed the few Northcote tales that I've read, but I suspect it's possible that they could work better in anthologies, rather than en masse. Still very excited about Wordsworth's Oliver Onions collection though.
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Post by jonathan122 on Aug 2, 2010 11:55:06 GMT
As far as I am aware, I have never read anything by Charles Birkin. But what I want to know now is: is he related to Jane Birkin? I was bored at work, so I looked this up. Apparently she's his first cousin once removed.
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Post by jonathan122 on Jul 23, 2010 21:05:00 GMT
I don't think I'm going to read any more Blackwood. Three of the stories in this volume are superb (The Willows, The Wendigo and The Listener). A couple are pretty good (The Glamour of the Snow, The Other Wing, Secret Worship) but quite a few really weren't worth the bother. I normally would let that pass but this is meant to be a 'Best of' collection so unless anyone knows of any other Blackwood tales worth reading it's time to move onto someone else. I'm going to stand by my recommendation of "The Insanity of Jones" - for a start, it's relatively short, and the ending is pleasingly violent and amoral. In general, though, I'm still looking for a Blackwood tale to grab me in the same way that "The Willows" and "The Wendigo" did. (I haven't read "The Listener" yet, I'll have to track that one down!)
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Post by jonathan122 on Jul 18, 2010 1:02:16 GMT
The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories 2 - ed. Richard Dalby (Robinson 1991) Preface - Christopher Lee Who or What Was It? - Kingsley Amis The Believers - Robert Arthur A Happy Release - Sabine Baring-Gould One, Two, Buckle My Shoe - Nugent Barker The Man Who Went Too Far - E. F. Benson The Secret of Macarger's Gulch - Ambrose Bierce The God with Four Arms - H. T. W. Bousfield The Shadowy Escort - A. M. Burrage The Widow's Clock - Bernard Capes A Pleasant Evening - Robert W. Chambers The Elemental - R. Chetwynd-Hayes Something to Reflect Upon - Clare Colvin The Second Passenger - Basil Copper No. 252 Rue M. Le Prince - Ralph A. Cram St. Bartholomew's Day - Edmund Crispin The Ghost in Master B.'s Room - Charles Dickens The Brown Hand - Arthur Conan Doyle Yak Mool San - H. B. Drake The Spirit of Christmas - Vivian Edwards Uncle Christian's Inheritance - Erckmann-Chatrian The Black Widow - John S. Glasby Across the Moors - William Fryer Harvey The Gray Champion - Nathaniel Hawthorne Governor Manco and the Soldier - Washinton Irving Rats - M. R. James Madelein - Roger Johnson And Turns No More His Head - A. F. Kidd By Word of Mouth - Rudyard Kipling The Curse of the Stillborn - Margery Lawrence Dance! Dance! The Shaking of the Sheets - Alan W. Lear The Fortunes of Sir Robert Ardagh - J. Sheridan Le Fanu Haunted Air - L. A. Lewis The Coxswain of the Lifeboat - R. H. Malden On the River - Guy de Maupassant Things - J. C. Moore The Ebony Frame - Edith Nesbit The Downs - Amyas Northcote The Pot of Tulips - Fitz-James O'Brien The Burned House - Vincent O'Sullivan The Unfinished Masterpiece - C. D. Pamely The Witches' Sabbath - James Platt Metzengerstein - Edgar Allan Poe The Story of Saddler's Croft - K. and H. Pritchard The Face - Lennox Robinson A Fisher of Men - David G. Rowlands A Mysterious Portrait - Mark Rutherford Ward 8 - Pamela Sewell The Coat - A. E. D. Smith A Voice in Feathers - Lewis Spence A Dream of Porcelain - Derek Stanford No. 11 Welham Square - Herbert Stephen The Bishop's Ghost and the Printer's Baby - Frank R. Stockton The Secret of the Growing Gold - Bram Stoker The Ash Track - Mark Valentine In a Nursing Home - E. H. Visiak The Stranger of the Night - Edgar Wallace The Triumph of the Night - Edith Wharton The Hall Bedroom - Mary E. Wilkins The Ghost at the "Blue Dragon" - William J. Wintle
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Post by jonathan122 on Jul 17, 2010 23:23:31 GMT
Miss Mary Pask - Our delicate young male protagonist has promised to look up the title character if he's ever in her home land of Brittany. It's only when he gets there when he remembers that she's dead. Which is odd because there she is to say hello to him. There's an entirely reasonable twist to this one but the protagonist's convenient lapses in memory, along with the convenient missing out of various important bits of information, make this one a bit hard to believe. I think a couple of Wharton's stories suffer from some pretty clunky plot mechanics - both this one and "Afterwards" have the same problem with characters inexplicably forgetting things, whilst in both "Mr. Jones" and "Pomegranate Seed", the "twist" endings are blatantly obvious from the start. Then there's "All Souls'", which ends with a "rationalisation" for the strange events of the story which is downright peculiar, making it feel a bit like a Robert Aickman story being solved by Sherlock Holmes. Most of the time Wharton is good enough to allow the reader to overlook these problems, but personally I feel that "Afterwards" is an example of a story which is sunk by its plot contrivances.
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Post by jonathan122 on Jul 17, 2010 22:56:15 GMT
As Mrs [Narrator] goes over the events of the day which lead up to her husbands disappearance she completely forgets about the mysterious stranger whom she directed to the study. It is not until later that she recalls this incident. This has in the past annoyed me as it seems so unlikely that she should overlook such a memorable incident leading up to her husband vanishing. However, it now occurs to me that this could be perhaps part of the whole "Afterwards" theme. According to the legend (such as it is) the ghost(s) of the house is only recognisable as such afterwards; but perhaps the actual _meeting_ with the ghost itself is also forgotten about and only remember afterwards? This recollection is subsequently followed by the realisation that the stranger was a ghost (?). Try replacing the word "later" in the 2nd sentence of this paragraph with "afterwards"; still unconvinced? Ok, maybe I'm not entirely convinced either, but there must be some reason why the narrator fails to recall this pivotal incident, otherwise there is a slight credibility gap in the plot. A lot of interesting points in your post Chris, but one in particular struck me on re-reading the story - the business with the wife forgetting the meeting with the ghost has always annoyed me. I think you're probably right that the meeting being forgotten about is intended to be a part of the haunting, but I don't think Wharton handles it at all well, as the rest of the story seems to work on the assumption that the reader knows as much about what's going on as the wife does - in fact, we know more, and thus the ending seems very flat, to me at least. I certainly think it's a very well-written tale, but the central plot point seems too contrived for the story to have much impact.
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