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Post by Steve on Jul 18, 2010 8:14:40 GMT
Me and Lord P are both in the forthcoming Robinson Mammoth Book of Zombie Apocalypse created by Stephen Jones. I don't doubt for a minute that this is indeed a cracking read but ' created by Stephen Jones'? What happened to good old fashioned editing?
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Post by Steve on Jul 18, 2010 6:33:57 GMT
Hiya Noah,
Are you still looking for a copy of Witches 7? If so, I might be able to help you out. Let me know, yeah.
Steve
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Post by Steve on Apr 16, 2010 12:56:23 GMT
Brilliant! Did Jones do the covers for all the Lancers? I believe Curt has scans of all of them at Groovy Age. They're more what I'd describe as fantasy-style covers than horror as such Just checked The Groovy Age (I could happily spend hours there) and it was the Berkley Medallion numbered Guardians books that I was thinking of with the Jones covers. Beautiful, and interesting to see that despite numerous references on the covers to 'Black Magic', 'Occult Evil', 'Devil Worship', 'Voodoo', 'Demonic Possession', 'Diabolical Cults' and the Undead, the Guardians titles were billed as 'fantasy adventure'. I suppose Fantasy as we think of it today with evil sorcerors, muscular heroes and scantily clad women was just coming into its own in the late 60s while horror was still in a bit of a lull between the golden age of the monster movie & the early Hammers and the Devil really having his day in the 70s with The Exorcist and what have you. Looking at those covers though I was wondering if we've got a gallery with all the different Saxon covers together (I couldn't see one just looking through the various threads here)?
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Post by Steve on Apr 16, 2010 7:52:07 GMT
Was hoping for something a bit more punnish, but I'll go with it if there's no inspiration between now and tomorrow. Er... 'The Joy of Saxon'? 'Everything you ever wanted to know about Saxon...'? 'P.S. I Love You'? OK, I've got nothing. Thanks for the info, Sev, and apologies to everyone connected with Magnum/Prestige. That tallies with the Magnum Rathlaw being a 70s reprint though - it's always nice to know I'm not talking complete shite!
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Post by Steve on Apr 14, 2010 19:32:53 GMT
Don Short - Engelbert Humperdinck: The Authorized Biography (New English Library, 1972) You know the story... You visit your favourite charity shop/ market stall/ car boot sale for the first time in weeks... suddenly everything looks like it's your all-time best find... you're ten yards from the stall, you can't resist another peak inside your carrier bag-load of treasure, and... ...then you write it up at Vault and it goes straight onto some sad bastard in the midlands's wants list 'cos, god help me, that's my kind of book! May have to wait a while though - did you know that copies of Engelbert Humperdinck: The Authorised Biography are going on Amazon for £25 in just 'acceptable' condition and £75 if you want a 'very good' one. Mind you, if you want quality...
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Post by Steve on Apr 14, 2010 18:23:54 GMT
just trying to think of a suitable thread title ala 'Glut of Glut' and 'Lorryload of Lory' A Shitload of Saxon? Me neither, especially not about Stephen Frances. Glad I didn't imagine it completely though! I have the 1968 Lancer THE CURSE OF RATHLOW which has a brilliant Jeff Jones cover! KC Did Jones do the covers for all the Lancers? I believe Curt has scans of all of them at Groovy Age. They're more what I'd describe as fantasy-style covers than horror as such but they are gorgeous either way. The Curse cover is certainly suitably occult-looking. As I recall the cover for the Howard Baker edition has the same figures - horny bloke and woman with discretely covered nipples - but drawn by a different artist. The Magnum edition has the same cover as the Lancer if I remember - assuming it's a straight reprint, I'm wondering how legit these Magnum books were (do I remember Justin mentioning that they were a similar outfit to Manor or am I unfairly maligning a perfectly respectable publishing house?). I see Magnum also reprinted a lot of Lancer's Gothic titles. i'll nab The Torturer and Vampire's Moon then, while they're still going. Think I'll swap The Killing Bone for Dark Ways To Death only because, just looking at the Peter Saxon thread here, Bone seems to have been pretty well covered already while Dark Ways hasn't had a look-in yet. It's probably too late to ask now but I'm wondering if Mr Glut knows whether the previous Dutch (or German, going from the Pulp 2.0 blog) edition of his Brother Blood was published under his own name or a pseudonym? Which, along with those lovely German cover scans posted above by Sev, brings me to the last thing I'm wondering about, i.e. other titles which might have been published under the 'Peter Saxon' name elsewhere but never appeared as Saxons in the UK. Hopefully Andy's list may shed some light on this.
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Post by Steve on Apr 13, 2010 0:09:31 GMT
Very nice, Sev. I've got a 1972 Five Star Dark Ways To Death with (fairly) tasteful 'down the back of the Vault' style cover that you might want to add to the list. Also have the Magnum/Prestige Curse of Rathlaw and although it has a 1968 Press Ed. copyright, the book itself isn't dated (i.e. no indication of when that particular edition was printed). I suspect it's later than the Lancer, possibly mid-70s? Have you started The Haunting of Alan Mais yet? I'm currently skipping between (straddling?) Rathlaw and The Killing Bone and will try and formulate some thoughts on one or both by the weekend. Corruption - Wilfred McNeilly For some reason I had it in my head that Stephen Frances wrote that one? And Black Honey?
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Post by Steve on Apr 3, 2010 14:24:00 GMT
Seeing as it's almost 4 years since our 'glut of Glut' in which four members read, and commented on, four of Glut's Frankenstein novels at the same time - anyone up for a similar go at Saxon. KC and Dem have both recently mentioned a desire to read a Saxon, and I've got The Haunting of Alan Mais up next on my reading list... Anyone? Put me down for either The Curse of Rathlaw or The Killing Bone - but please bear in mind that, on recent form, it could well take me another 4 years... that 'glut of Glut' thread is one of my happiest memories from Vault. Likewise, and our 'lorryload of Lory' effort was good fun too. Happy times. Thanks for the link to the Glut interview, Andy. I'm wondering what people make of this idea of putting out books with DVD-style 'bonus features'? "In the case of Pulp 2.0 Press, publisher Bill Cunningham is presenting them in some very creative formats. Bill is looking at these books as “productions” rather than “publications,” and as movie productions come out on DVD with all sorts of bonus features, so will these books."
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Post by Steve on Apr 3, 2010 9:03:51 GMT
You see, this is the curse of Vault - well, one of them anyway - you think you know a particular book, having read and enjoyed it umpteen years ago, then someone reviews it here and you realise that you can't remember half of what's in the thing so back on the 'to read' pile it goes. It's relentless, I tell you.
Of the ones I do remember, the Basil Copper story will probably stay with me only slightly less long than "Amber Print" (which, as I think I've mentioned before, will doubtless haunt me for the remainder of my days). The Wheatley and the Blackwood I've re-read fairly recently so can probably quite safely give them a miss next time round. The Poe and the Ainsworth (if it's the one I'm thinking of - ghostly black mass in an old abbey?) I remember as being pleasant enough but neither is particularly screaming for a rematch (I think Haining claims to have rescued the Poe story from relative obscurity, doesn't he? Not sure how true that is?). "Homecoming" I quite enjoyed at the time but recently had a go at From the Dust Returned, which collects all Bradbury's Elliott family stories, and couldn't really get on with it. All well and good but what's worrying me is that the likes of "Cerimarie", "The Devil Worshipper", "Prince Borgia’s Mass" and "The Witch" aren't ringing any bells yet all sound unforgetable.
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Post by Steve on Mar 27, 2010 13:04:17 GMT
The GSS was formed by Jeff Dempsey, Ro Pardoe, Mark Valentine and Roger Dobson and the first issue of the newsletter appeared in 1988. i don't know how long it lasted; i've got numbers 2-12 inclusive but i'm sure they were still going after that. Going from the current Ghost Story Society website, The GSS Newsletter ran for 13 issues under Jeff Dempsey and Rosemary Pardoe alongside the annual Mark Valentine-edited All Hallows until Barbara and Christopher Roden took over around 1994, the newsletter being absorbed into All Hallows shortly afterwards. I notice that the October 1994 issue of All Hallows included a piece entitled "In Pursuit of The Countess of Lowndes Square" by Jack Adrian, which might suggest that either relations had improved by that point or, conversely, that Mr Adrian still didn't consider the matter settled.
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Post by Steve on Mar 23, 2010 19:54:45 GMT
I was never really that fussed about A.C. Benson until I reread a couple of things by him recently. While not especially memorable or original, stories such as 'The Slype House' are well-written and manage to drum up a decent bit of atmosphere, while 'Out of the Sea' with its "goatlike thing" I found particularly enjoyable.
Still can't get excited about R.H. though.
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Post by Steve on Mar 23, 2010 19:24:58 GMT
I should say upfront that I know very little about the BFS, its membership and its workings and - based solely on our little run-in with certain of their number last year - am quite happy for things to remain that way. However, I can't help agreeing with this sentiment; it's still a pleasant thought to know at least one person liked something I wrote enough to nominate it. Quite so, and I think it's nice too that someone thought enough of Vault, in any of its myriad forms, to bother putting in a nomination. Especially so because there doesn't seem to be any sort of ulterior motive to it - no back-slapping, back-scratching, ego-massaging or any other sort of nonsense that sadly seems to be an inevitable part of these sort of things. Vault's well out of it but it was still a nice thought.
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Post by Steve on Mar 21, 2010 18:40:34 GMT
So we're agreed then? The Wordsworth Twilight Fantasy series is the way to go - same books, just different packaging. Just think how many more copies of The Beast With Five Fingers they could sell with a cover like this one;
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Post by Steve on Mar 21, 2010 16:43:16 GMT
I would have suggested another architect, TG Jackson I feel largely responsible for this thread going a bit off topic as it was me who first mentioned D*** F****** in relation to Waterstones stocking and displaying Wordsworth Mystery & the Supernatural titles. So, having dragged things even further off topic in my post above (or below depending on where you read this), I'd like to try to make amends by agreeing that T. G. Jackson's Six Ghost Stories would certainly be right up my proverbial and a very welcome addition to my personal Wordsworth M&S collection. I'm wondering also if there'd be enough stuff in the public domain to put together a decent collection of Jamesian writers along similar lines to the long out of print Ghosts and Scholars book mentioned on various other thread recently. I'm not sure of their precise status in terms of copyright but there have been recent print-on-demand editions of both E. G. Swain's Stoneground Ghost Tales and Arthur Gray's Tedious Brief Tales of Granta and Gramarye which might suggest that they'd be doable. I think we've established that the likes of Malden, Munby and Rolt are all out of bounds at the moment, Frederick Cowles too, I believe and M.P. Dare, which is a shame (especially in the case of Dare as I'm gagging for a reasonably priced reprint of Unholy Relics) but there still might be enough stuff with those listed above - you could chuck in J. Meade Falkner's The Lost Stradivarius, which I'm pretty sure is out of copyright, and maybe recycle a few of the more Jamesian pieces already published in the Andrew Caldecott and Benson brothers collections. Might be worth thinking about, what do we reckon? Or, I don't know, how would some contemporary authors such as our own Daniel They That Dwell In Dark Places McGachey or James Doig - who I believe has contributed stories to G&S in the past - feel about Wordsworth publishing some of their work alongside older members of the James gang?
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Post by Steve on Mar 21, 2010 16:06:13 GMT
...creating little niches is massively important in guiding the casual punter's eye to a new title, especially if you can find a way of racking it with something they may know and like. and so these sub-divisions become a valuable marketing tool. ...dark fantasy is, by its very choice of wording, elusive and allusive ...because it's allusive, that's why it's hung around, i reckon. it can be all things to all people. which is why it's confusing,and why it can be twisted from MR James to arty tossers to vampire romance... Quite so, Pulps, and I don't really have a problem with Dark Fantasy or anything else as a marketing tool. My problem, as a customer, was simply that nothing on that particular shelf in Waterstones - in fact it was two great big fuck-off floor to ceiling bookcases which just goes to show you how much of this stuff they must be shifting at the moment - looked like it would've been of any interest to me. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not averse to any sort of old toss. I don't, for example, look down on people who enjoy a bit of romantic fiction, supernatural or otherwise. Similarly, if teenagers are reading again that can only be a good thing as far as I'm concerned. However, all this stuff was taking up shelf space at the expense of books which I might have been interested in buying (had they not been significantly overpriced) but which have been all but squeezed off the shelves between Dark Fantasy on one side and Fantasy/SF on the other. I've always loved Westerns - bear with me - but people don't buy them any more. They used to buy lots of them but not any more. Other types of Historical fiction still sell well but not your Western. Do you know one of the main reasons why no one buys Westerns anymore? Because nowhere fucking sells them! You can get them from the library and lots of people still do. They're very popular in libraries, just like Mills & Boon. The big difference between Westerns and Mills & Boon though is you'll never see one in a supermarket. My point then, and I do have one, is that given the potentially all-encompassing nature of the term 'Dark Fantasy' - and given also that 'Dark Fantasy' (whatever it may be) seems to sell by the cartload while 'Horror' (whatever that may be) seemingly doesn't - why not, as Pulps almost hints at in his post, stock the likes of M. R. James alongside Twilight or Erotic Tales of the Supernatural or whatever it may be. Like vampires and ghosts and shit? Feeling a bit Gothic? Why not try Edgar Allan Poe or H. P. Lovecraft (you've heard of him, haven't you?) and Bram Stoker (he wrote Dracula you know) and this bloke's good, Sheridan Le Fanu - he does lesbians and everything. My only issue with Dark Fantasy is when it's used by people as a way of distancing themselves from something they look down on or view as somehow distasteful. It's the snobbery, the pomposity and the conceit that I can't be doing with. As a way of selling books it's fine by me. Call it what you like, just don't let horror books go the way of the western.
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