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Post by weirdmonger on Feb 4, 2023 12:39:15 GMT
“…and saw with unseeing, unhappy eyes the conservatories and hothouses of the sea, green fronds and purple and red, swaying below me in innocent beauty.” —- Stella Gibbons (ROARING TOWER) FLOWERS OF THE SEA
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Post by weirdmonger on Jan 27, 2023 11:09:51 GMT
Sarah Orne Jewett - The Green Bowl “The voice of poultry usually means not only a hen-coop but a barn and a house,…”, but here means a gradual, delightfully inconclusive narrative incubation of the open-ended mystery of… The Green Bowl by Sarah Orne Jewett (1901)“We were on our way home, as safe as dolls in a nursery when we had our little adventure and got the green bowl.” The ‘adventures’ of a lady and her young ‘companion’ lady with horse and carriage, this one she tells within the frame story to other ladies, an adventure, lost under ‘drowning rain’ and hearing that voice of poultry, but at last seeing a church steeple, that later she unaccountably calls a spire! And manifold horse sheds outside a church wherein which church they find basic shelter till found in the morning by a local woman who gives them the heavenly apotheosis of an idyllic breakfast and the story of her two green bowls, one she gives to our narrator as ‘companion’ reciprocalist of their fore-telling powers. A strong suspenseful tale that needs iconising. A narrator who at one point says, “The only trouble was that there was so little of me.” And you will never forget the description of the green bowl as looked at by the listening ladies within the frame story. But such a claim of never forgetting depends on my own fore-telling skills, or will only time tell? — “…and when we had been in the house an hour one felt as if it had been a week…” *** “The old pony plodded up yet another hill; we went clattering down its deep descent; and there, in the green bowl of a meadow sloping down from its woody fringes above, lay scattered the bellying booths, the gaudy wagons and cages of the circus. All but hidden in the trees above them, a crooked, tarnished weathercock glinted in the sunset afterglow.“ (my italics) — from MEMOIRS OF A MIDGET by Walter de La Mare (my review: dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/11/02/memoirs-of-a-midget-by-walter-de-la-mare/)The weathercock and the circus, and compare the ladies’ horse in ‘The Green Bowl’ “The horse was whinnying after us like a whole circus,…” And the storyteller’s own ‘midget’ statement: “The only trouble was that there was so little of me.” *** Full WOMEN’S WEIRD context of above review: dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/01/21/womens-weird-more-strange-stories-by-women-1891-1937/
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Post by weirdmonger on Jan 24, 2023 13:11:56 GMT
Interesting response (which I don't really follow or comprehend) to this story. I recall neither the tale nor the author's name now at this distance of five or six years so it was quite disconcerting to peruse my own somewhat over-egged notice of it. Hel. Your review, of D.K. Broster’s COUCHING AT THE DOOR (that I read after completing my own review of it) I found interesting and instructive. For example, I had not realised the Dorian Gray connection.
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Post by weirdmonger on Jan 24, 2023 10:51:29 GMT
D. K. Broster, "Couching at the Door" -- John Keir Cross states in the introduction that this tale was originally published in 1933. It is something of an homage to the culte for the Black Mass and Satanic reveries of the "Decadents" of the 1880s and 1890s. At times the story reads like a pastiche of Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray or Huysmans' La-bas (a chapter of which is the finale to this volume). The central character, a gentleman I personally found hard to take seriously, presents the spectacle of black magic as the exotic flower of a rather tiresomely fetishistic narcissism. The "spook" has a Jamesian flavor to it but I'm not sure that Rosemary Pardoe would regard the author as among the ranks of those worthy of consideration under the mantle of the Master. I did enjoy the story very much. And to revert again to the theme of the Seventies, it would have made a good episode of Rod Serling's Night Gallery series. H. Couching at the Door by D K Broster“…Art has nothing whatever to do with what is called ‘morality’; happily we know that at last!” This is an intensely creepy work, evolving from a piece of fluff or “nothing now but a drenched smear swirling round the nymphs of Thetis!” to, I infer, a feather boa worn by the two ladies in Prague and Paris whom the writer (Augustine Marchant now at the more innocently countrified Abbot’s Medding) once met now being reconfigured in his so-called poetic work that his neighbours know little about, and then to a gigantic cobra, all three visions of such frightful realities threaded through with various images of the Garden of Eden, and, from a different point of view, we gain a glimpse of the same story as seen by the young callow illustrator who is to do the book’s artwork for Augustine’s writing and who is somehow palmed off by Augustine with this frightful furry familiar! Leaving Augustine free of it? A work of hiding one’s art, guilt at one’s art, even absolving oneself of whatever dark creativity one does… and even writing such stuff myself and now reading, then openly reviewing this story being equivalent to my own guilty secret, but now no longer a secret as it is thus palmed off on you?! There are some wondrous passages describing the horrific ‘familiar’, but by by calling them ‘wondrous’, what is it do we do? The warmth of our snuggling up to the familiar in bed just being one thing here deployed. I discern, to help his own self-exorcism, the older man’s grooming of the illustrator was effectively set in motion by an elbow trigger: “In the shaded rosy candle-light, his elbows on the table among trails of flowers he, who was not even a neophyte, listened like a man learning for the first time of some spell of spring which will make him more than mortal.” And each reader of this work will wrestle with their own vision of how this prose is couched. And maybe there will rear false aunt sallies to hide the actual nature of the serpent embedded in its tale? “For his own art was of infinitely more importance than the subservient, the parasitic art of an illustrator.” Part of my review of the whole WOMEN’S WEIRD (Handheld Press) here’: dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/01/02/womens-weird-strange-stories-1890-1940/
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Post by weirdmonger on Jan 22, 2023 11:49:53 GMT
Margery H. Lawrence - The Haunted Saucepan: London, around St. James' Palace. Anybody who eats anything prepared in the saucepan suffers the most horrible pains consistent with the pangs suffered by those poisoned with arsenic. Connor, Trevanion and a borrowed dog conceal themselves in the kitchen overnight to catch who or what has been setting it on the boil. The denouement is predictable, but the story has some wonderfully atmospheric touches and Strutt, the butler, is a trip. The Haunted Saucepan by Margery Lawrence
“I drew a sigh of enjoyment as I stretched out my legs before the fire and sipped the excellent coffee at my elbow. Strutt had found me a woman of sorts to do the cooking – marvellous fellow Strutt! – and certainly she could cook, though the glimpse I had caught of her through the kitchen door as I went into the dining-room proved her a dour and in truth most ill-favoured looking old lady, with a chenille net, a thing I had thought as dead as the Dodo, holding up her back hair. I rang for some more coffee, and as usual, Strutt was at my elbow almost as my finger left the bell-push.” …a double-elbowed sense of calm and contentment in a house at the start, if also a telegraphing of the off-putting glimpse of Mrs Barker! – prior to what it says above about this story on its tin – a haunted saucepan! “….one of the few cases of genuine ‘queerness’. Something really uncanny, I mean.” The days of valets who rub down their masters, and static servants who embody a house, and if it were not for the trite denouement of the haunting over-explained in the last few pages and if one removes those last few pages, this is a genuinely scary work. Scary, despite the saucepan’s ludicrous rakish tip of its lid and and its recurrent bubbling, and poor Ben the collie dog used as potential spear-carrier to test out its poisons. What makes it scary is – “the grandfather clock seemed to hide a long lean thing that peered furtively at us with narrow horrible eyes … […] The exquisite caution of the sound made…” My italics. Pause on pause on pause as what I have often called the essential ‘gluey Zenoism’ of ghost stories. “…entered – paused – and walked towards the stove.” Ever halfway between the door and what the ghost intends to do, till the mighty fruition of frissons… each time the promise of a “new evil”…”Oh, it was beyond words vile and awful, that sound – and to know, as now we did know, that Something – Someone – did actually, sans human light, gas or anything of that sort, set a-boiling in that horrible little saucepan some devil’s brew of some sort,…” Who owns a slow pot today? Many of us, I guess. But what does it all mean? And the deadpan culmination of something ever, pause upon pause, approaching the point of happening, without it truly happening, especially if you ignore the last few pages! … “– began with ‘p’ but she couldn’t say the word…”
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Post by weirdmonger on Jan 22, 2023 11:42:53 GMT
92 • The Call of Llanelly • short story by D. F. Lewis hey! Forgot all about that one!
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Post by weirdmonger on Jan 21, 2023 11:42:23 GMT
Published October 26th 2021 by Handheld Classics ISBN 1912766426 (ISBN13: 9781912766420) Edition Language English Blurb: Elinor Mordaunt was the pen name of Evelyn May Clowes (1872-1942), a prolific and popular novelist and short story writer, working in Australia and Britain in the first thirty-five years of the twentieth century. Melissa Edmundson has curated this selection of the best of Mordaunt's supernatural short fiction, which blend the technologies and social attitudes of modernity with the classic supernatural tropes of the ghost, the haunted house, possession, conjuration from the dead and witchcraft. Each story is an original and compelling contribution to the genre, making this selection a marvellous new showcase for women's writing in classic supernatural fiction. Content introduction, by Melissa Edmundson Works Cited Publication Dates 1 Weakening Point 2 The Country-side 3 The Vortex 4 Hodge 5 The Fountain 6 'Luz' 7 The Landlady 8 Four Wallpapers 9 The Villa Notes on the stories, by Kate Macdonald (Had to type this in by hand) Hodge (1921) by Elinor Mordaunt“: in this case the boy’s name expressed him as little as the slow, luscious, sweet ‘Summerzetshire’ expressed Hemerton, its mud and marshes.” This boy’s name Hector Fane (remixed as ‘technofear’?), a boy stocky, round-shouldered, with Hector’s Rector as his and Rhoda’s father in a place called Hemerton, a place as strange as Hector was to normal humans, Hemerton strange otherwise to the rest of Somerset then. Marshy, grey… The young siblings — not so much an ‘imaginary friend’ as a missing link they uncover in a hidden part of such marshes, an ‘it’, then ‘he’, that they uncover from the marshes, a stone-throwing version of Hector…. I can’t help recalling that Hector sometimes shares Rhoda’s bed for comfort. Now this missing link wants to do so, too? Even after Hector comes back from boarding school, Hector hides his ‘belief’ in the missing link they call Hodge, and what transpires is a lesson for us all about humanity now. A 2001 Space Odyssey in the making? Now made. These moments below are what I shall take away from yet another remarkable discovery by this book for me, this one as the literary missing-link in my seeking gestalt… You babblers do listen, for once! “…‘Do you remember?’ in speaking of paths that they had never traversed.” “‘The mastodon! That’s nothing – nothing! But the sabre-toothed tiger – I tell you I saw it. What are you grinning at now? – in our Forest – ours, mind you! – I saw it!’” Their forest. “‘Nothing more than a fold out of the old world, squeezed up to the surface’;” “– we’ve lost it; I know we’ve lost it – after all these years! After thousands and thousands and thousands of years of remembering!’ […] Rhoda drew him into her bed, comforted him as best she could, very sleepy, and unperturbed – for, of course, they would find it.” “Silhouetted against the sea and sky, white in contrast to its darkness, it had the aloofness of incredible age; drawn apart, almost sanctified by its immeasurable remoteness, its detachment from all that meant life to the men and women of the twentieth century: the web of fancied necessities, trivial possessions, absorptions.” “Terrified of ridicule, incredulity, he hugged his secret, as that strange man-beast hugged his – the highest and lowest – the most primitive and the most cultured – forever uncommunicative; those in the midway the babblers.” “With a sense of appalling weariness he seemed to see the centuries which had passed sweep by him, wave upon wave, era upon era, each so superficially different, and yet so tragically, so stupidly alike: man driven like a dry leaf before the wind of destiny; man the soul-burdened brute.” “‘It’. Hector held to that: the pronoun was altogether reassuring now – something to hold to, hard as a bone in his brain.” Rector as Boner? A technofear now transcended and harnessed?
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Post by weirdmonger on Jan 20, 2023 15:46:32 GMT
This is something special, something most dirtying of the spirit, suspenseful and self-suspended. Yet with blame and shame accruing the more I did read into it, as the narrator, within a sort of reconciling frame story of detection and drugs, is meant to expunge such feelings but did little to assuage me. A shabby area, full of the “ill-to-do” and late night shops, and dark turnings and, eventually, a sort of museum with a membrane that is a sort of prophecy of an inter-net dirtying us all, I guess. It is really evil, and one wonders who are the most evil — those trying to help the narrator as me, or the one (some sort of Mad Scientist with photographic plates?) who showed me that the Gestalt I have been seeking now for several years is indeed the “Thing” still emerging from man’s natural hatred and evil. Or is this a catharsis for betterment, a tunnel one needs to travel in order to expunge it? Or simply, as the story puts it, an obsession with non-existent evil? Whatever the case, this work is quite a discovery. Just a few of the ingredients that still pepper my mind… after a reading that one must think hard about undertaking in the first place! — “..I wished that he might never speak again. I was desperately, contemptibly in dread of the thing he might say next.” “…a livid, ghastly chamber, filled with – overcrawled by – what?” “– man has made these! By his evil thoughts, by his selfish panics, by his lusts and his interminable, never-ending hate he has made them, and they are everywhere!” “Our gropings toward divinity were a sham, a writhing sunward of slime-covered beasts who claimed sunlight as their heritage, but in their hearts preferred the foul and easy depths.” “I could abolish my monster-creating self.” “…your colour photography and your pretty green golliwogs all nicely explained for you,..” “– doubt is sometimes better than certainty,…”
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Post by weirdmonger on Jan 17, 2023 14:41:19 GMT
"Let Loose" by Mary Cholmondeley, available in Dracula's Brood amongst others - Richard Dalby (ed.) - Dracula’s Brood: Rare Vampire Stories by Friends and Contemporaries of Bram Stoker (Crucible, 1987, Equation, 1989) Mary Cholmondeley - Let Loose: Wet-Waste-On-The-Wold, Yorkshire. When Sir Roger Despard, a man of many vices, lay on his deathbed, he did so denying God and his Angels, declaring that all were damned as he, and that Satan was strangling him to death. Taking a knife, he cut off his hand and swore an oath that, if he were to go down and burn in hell, his hand would roam the earth and throttle others as he was being throttled. Thirty years after his death, a young man persuades an old clergyman to open the crypt … I have just read LET LOOSE by Mary Cholmondeley in Women’s Weird: Strange Stories 1890 – 1940 published by Handheld Press (2019) This is a superbly scary pre-M.R. Jamesian story of Fresco hunting in the oppressively insular Wet Waste community of Yorkshire as cast upon by a morbid moon of astrological strengths. A man, for some reason, thinking it may be a fillip to his chances of marriage into a certain family, if he divulged to one of them this story of why he always wore high starched collars!… It would be remiss of me to help make such secrets more widespread here, nor why the Three Authentic Epistles of Ignatius are mentioned. But it is genuinely a story about intricately double-locked area of a church in the Wet Waste that has been unavailable down below for many years — and for good reason! Its piled-up skulls and shin-bones, too, and its toad-like sentinel. The saddest part of this story is what happens to our hero’s dog called Brian, and you will go far to read anything more devastating, so beware! I only mention this incident as I can’t help thinking Brian is an oblique metaphor for our human Brain and the skull that keeps it safe! Not forgetting W.F. Harvey’s hand! I also can’t help thinking this remarkable story’s ‘Evil One’ whispered these words for a character to say as if it were his own… “My son, marry not in youth, for love, which truly in that season is a mighty power, turns away the heart from study, and young children break the back of ambition. Neither marry in middle life, when a woman is seen to be but a woman and her talk a weariness, so you will not be burdened with a wife in your old age.” Which brings me full circle to this story’s need of satirical divulgement?
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Post by weirdmonger on Jan 17, 2023 12:13:16 GMT
that's the one. i still have the originals of the unpublished zine somewhere. Originally it was going to go in what was to be called Idobeliff. This then became Dangerous Specimen, whicjh lends itself to a multitude of lovely lovely anagrams btw. neither of which was actually published; Dangerous Specimen came ever so near though. The best zine i never made... I'll see if i can locate the artwork; there were a few scribbles specifically created for The Raw Brain... I’d love to see all that, Steve. Also, I am deeply into anagrams with my gestalt real-time reviewing of all the stuff we love reading!
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Post by weirdmonger on Jan 15, 2023 23:35:37 GMT
hi there Des (Weirdmonger). was just doing a "Fat Knite" search to see what still remained of the tattered paper remnants of my past and was pleased to see someone still remembers the zine at least. Always loved your stuff btw - ashamed i never got around to publishing The Raw Brain which you wrote so brilliantly to my abstract request/ based on an illustration; the zine was to be based around the rather niche subject of god-dogs walking around on stilts. 1st edition sort of ground to a halt at 90% completed - some day i will stick it on t'internet, along with Fat Knite archives. I hope you gave the story to someone else who actually used it; i just cradled it and showed my friend down the pub with accompanying illos - an audience of maybe 5, which doesnt seem fair... What a blast from the past! Great to hear from you, Steve. And thanks for your thoughts. I no longer have hard copies of all these small press mags. I divested myself of them around the time of setting up this Small Press Ark on the Vault 15 years ago. THE RAW BRAIN was eventually published, according to my records in ‘Arrows of Desire’ #6 in 1994. it is obscurely archived on-line at one of my blog sites here: etepsed.wordpress.com/141-2/
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Post by weirdmonger on Jan 12, 2023 17:11:14 GMT
Fay Weldon - Watching Me, Watching You: ( Women's Own, Jan. 1981). The ghost first entered 66 Aldermans Drive, Bristol, on the shoulder of a parlourmaid returned from a séance where she'd failed to make contact with her dead lover. It has stayed ever since to pry upon the tangled relationships, infidelities, divorces, and tragedies of those who've lived there right through to 1980, occasionally intervening on the side of women wronged. ….spanning 1965 to 1980 in a city’s suburbs and the lives that link a couple of those houses and also the ghost that journeys between them carrying their fates as burdens and as catalyst or cause-and-effect or effect-and-cause upon or by humans who live or grow there, or all of these things — their cursed endings one of which ignited the ghost, their later marital flings or permanent disloyalties, the consequent births of more humans as potential people with subsequent growth into such people, and the necessity of at least one of them to write something worthwhile that also pays money. To keep the ghost from the door. The author now, in our own real-time, is all of those things, even this story’s gestalt as ghost or ghost as gestalt? RIP Fay Weldon
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Post by weirdmonger on Jan 9, 2023 19:19:46 GMT
I encountered a candidate for this question today! THE POLICE by David Zane Mairowitz (1972) A conte cruel, and I felt as if the letter k in Kafka had been sharpened and enlarged, then inserted into me like a surgical umbrella… I have photocopied the whole of this brief story here, for any interested: dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/the-police-by-david-zane-mairowitz/
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Post by weirdmonger on Jan 9, 2023 8:51:01 GMT
YOUNG MAGIC, from this collection, is now definitely my favourite childhood ‘imaginary friend’ story ever! A young girl’s friend called Binns amid large houses and sewing rooms of yore. Outdoes even Walter de la Mare stories on this score!
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Post by weirdmonger on Jan 4, 2023 12:48:17 GMT
With a vivid imagination and a trait (gift) for drifting off from the everyday into psychotic hallucination/delusion, I think actual horror can well be experienced in reading literature. Or else, ... It also requires both imagination and intelligence to realize the full significance of what is read. And at that moment the body starts to shiver from intellectual horror. =O I think I agree! vaultofevil.proboards.com/thread/4011/vault-evil-anti-intellectual
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