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Post by marksamuels on Dec 5, 2010 15:25:45 GMT
That download was a good 'un.
Lord & Lady P should stage it ...
Mark S.
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Post by marksamuels on Dec 4, 2010 15:42:14 GMT
This is brilliant. Thanks for digging it up Dem! "Pitbull"
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Post by marksamuels on Dec 2, 2010 0:18:15 GMT
This will be, I'm convinced, abso-blooming-lutely brilliant Mark S.
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Post by marksamuels on Nov 30, 2010 15:52:29 GMT
I don't know why, but the way that cat's been drawn cracks me up.
Mark S.
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Post by marksamuels on Nov 29, 2010 2:00:29 GMT
And Trott's just knocked off his century too... Mark S.
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Post by marksamuels on Nov 29, 2010 1:59:35 GMT
Ponting= Strauss= Too exciting to go to bed: looks like the dawn-patrol for me. Cook's got his double-century and KP's still to come. Amazing stuff. Mark S.
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Post by marksamuels on Nov 28, 2010 23:11:01 GMT
Sounds to me that you require a copy of this reference book KC, published by Nightshade Books in 2006. It's sent me on many a hunt after Lovecraftian celluloid horrors... Mark S.
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Post by marksamuels on Nov 28, 2010 13:47:54 GMT
Ramsey Campbell - Midnight Sun (MacDonald, 1990) inside cover blurb: Ben Sterling has a very strange inheritance ...
Though now a happy family man, and a successful writer of children's stories, as a child Ben was tragically orphaned by a mysterious car crash. Raised by a loving aunt who refused to discuss his father's eccentric family, he nevertheless develops a strange fascination with the lonely Yorkshire house they inherited.
On his aunt's death, Ben unexpectedly acquires this ancestral home, and the family decide to move into it .... ignorant of the strange stories concerning those who stray too close to the woods at night.
Ben himself is increasingly drawn to nearby Sterling Forest – extensive pinewoods planted by his family around the ancient oak grove where his great-grandfather was found dead so many years before. Edward Sterling had been exploring the icy wastes of the far north, where shamans were said to practise ancient rituals to keep the midnight sun shining over their desolate land. Found naked and snowblind in this distant wilderness, he had been returned to his wife .... but died soon afterwards in bizarre circumstances.
Now, three generations later, Ben unwittingly sets loose an awesome power, and soon the entire countryside falls into the grip of ice and blizzards. But what must be the sacrifice that can transform eternal winter back into spring?
A truly disturbing novel, MIDNIGHT SUN underlines Ramsey Campbell's talent for creating a modern supernatural tale that maintains the best spine-tingling standards of classic horror. When i eventually get around to another of his novels (anything too deep is out of the question right now), it will most likely be The Influence unless any of our Ramsey Campbell fans can convince me this is the pick of the two? There don't seem to have been many mentions of Midnight Sun so far beyond a few one-liners that suggest it doesn't show him at his best? Thanks to Dem for passing over a copy of this to me a while ago; it's a book I've been after for ages and I finally got around to reading it. This is RC's attempt to incorporate the old "cosmic sense of awe" into a full-length novel, paying tribute to the likes of Lovecraft, Machen and Blackwood. RC has shown he can do cosmic horror highly effectively, for example in the excellent "The Voice of the Beach". And indeed, in Midnight Sun there are moments of fantastic power, especially towards the end when the full-force of the mysterious icy power "out there, in them there woods" is unleashed and finally takes control of the protaganist Ben Sterling. But I wonder whether the limitations of the novel are really an indication of the limitations of attempting cosmic horror within the conventions of the novel form itself. (Ramsey seemed to have circumvented this problem in other novels by developing phenomena as psychological/behind the scenes, as it were, rather than out-in-the-foreground) The build-up was over-prolonged, to my mind, and seemed to cater to the requirements of achieving novel-length rather than an being an organic process of the writing in itself. So I wonder whether Midnight Sun would have worked even better as a novella, at around a third of its current length. Nevertheless, as it stands, it's a magnificent achievement and the high points towards the end more than make up for any minor criticisms I might make, and which are only a matter of personal preference. I wonder too, whether this novel was partially inspired by elements found in Stephen King's novels The Shining and Pet Sematary? Nevertheless, what's clear is that Ramsey handles the cosmic aspect with a sure touch that SK never matched. Mark S.
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Post by marksamuels on Nov 28, 2010 12:33:25 GMT
The Picture in the House - A slight story but nevertheless quite punchy. In all seriousness, i find this story far more frightening than any of his Cthulthu Mythos stories, which is not the same thing as saying that The Picture In The House is "better" than The Call Of Cthulhu or The Dunwich Horror, you understand. By dispensing with the cosmic dread & Co., HPL gives us a mundane, everyday, it-could-happen-to-you tale of terror, not dissimilar in feel to the likes of Alex White's Never Talk To Strangers! Colin Wilson pointed out that this was one of only two (?) occasions when HPL made any reference to sex in his fiction (perverted, of course: the old timer getting a "tickle" from ogling the woodcut depicting extreme cannibal excess), the other being The Loved Dead which may or may not have been mostly the work of C. M. Eddy. Yes, I think "The Terrible Old Man" and "In The Vault" are also of that short-sharp-shock kind of proto-EC comics terror HPL sometimes wrote. Mark S.
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Post by marksamuels on Nov 28, 2010 12:27:30 GMT
I'm all on edge to see what will happen when KP gets to the crease... He'll either blast his way quickly to a huge total or get out early doors I reckon. It'll be worth staying up for Mark S.
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Post by marksamuels on Nov 28, 2010 1:32:10 GMT
Wasn't Aklo the language invented by Mr Machen? If I'm right, I hope Mark Samuels is proud of me... Yay! Mark S.
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Post by marksamuels on Nov 27, 2010 0:31:34 GMT
James
Did you get Kevin Howells filling in just now from the BBC when the TMS line to Brisbane went down?
What a hero!
(Unless you did, this'll make no sense)
Mark S.
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Post by marksamuels on Nov 26, 2010 16:41:12 GMT
Blimey! Here's a fine way to spend time; looking for drivers for a scanner that's 10 years old and was designed for Windows 98 ... Nevertheless, the old tank is working again. Mark S.
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Post by marksamuels on Nov 25, 2010 23:42:40 GMT
I've got the Ballantine Sardonicus & Other Stories by Ray Russell. Well, I've got the cover, at least! Found it in an old box above the khazi whilst hunting for some old fanzines. No idea what's happened to the rest of the book... If I can get the scanner I've not used for a couple of years to work I'll try and post it tomorrow. Mark S.
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Post by marksamuels on Nov 25, 2010 23:05:08 GMT
The selectors got it right for a change. I wish the radio commentary was better, though. Send over Blowers. I still remember the first time I heard him commentating a test match - "And there's Ian Bothom at first slip, hands firmly clasping his buttocks." All in that fine Oxbridge drawl. "Oh my dear old thing, how frightfully kind of you to say so. And, oh I say, a rather lovely pigeon's fluttered down onto the boundary at long leg..." etc I'm not Blowers's health is up for a long-haul flight down under. Hasn't he got a dicky ticker? Mark S.
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