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Post by weirdmonger on Dec 30, 2022 8:04:24 GMT
2011Colleen Anderson – IT’S ONLY WORDS 3414 Daniel Ausema – TREE RING ANTHOLOGY 2066 Dominy Clements – THE USELESS 3463 Rhys Hughes – TEARS OF THE MUTANT JESTERS 1852 Colin Insole – THE APOPLEXY OF BEELZEBUB 5456 Nick Jackson – PAPER CUTS 4097 Rachel Kendall – HORROR STORIES FOR BOYS 3215 AJ Kirby – COMMON MYTHS AND MISCONCEPTIONS REGARDING RITA KENDALL 10004 Joel Lane – MIDNIGHT FLIGHT 3223 E. Michael Lewis – THE FIFTH CORNER 3866 Tony Lovell – THE FOLLOWER 7330 David Mathew – RESIDUA 10723 Christopher Morris – THE AMERICAN CLUB 6828 Mike O’Driscoll – THE REDISCOVERY OF DEATH 9201 Reggie Oliver – FLOWERS OF THE SEA 6295 Rosanne Rabinowitz – THE PEARL AND THE BOIL 10023 Clayton Stealback – THE WRITER 8487 S.D. Tullis – HORROR PLANET 3703 Mark Valentine – YOU WALK THE PAGES 3138 D.P. Watt – ALL HIS WORLDLY GOODS 6842 Stories ABOUT Horror Anthologies
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Post by weirdmonger on Dec 26, 2022 17:00:24 GMT
Just watched Schalcken the Painter on BBC iPlayer. It seems even greater than I remember it from watching it in 1979.
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Post by weirdmonger on Dec 24, 2022 12:54:26 GMT
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Post by weirdmonger on Dec 18, 2022 11:57:27 GMT
SEASHORE MACABRE (A Moment’s Experience): Hugh Walpole
“…and Mrs. A – , the friendly, soft-hearted and deeply pessimistic farmer’s wife, making cakes, hot and spicy….”
This quite short story is indeed momentous. How have I not read it before? A real discovery. The above quote is from its disarming start — a boy (with his residual threepence of pocket money and wild imaginings generated by the popular literature of the day that he gladly tells us about) on an idyllic day at the seaside with his family (a seaside called Seascale evoked wondrously here) — staying at their usual farm lodgings, but why did I read over those two words ‘deeply pessimistic’ and then forget them? Well, I can only assume I was fazed by the most frightening ending in any story, featuring, at first, the boy’s involuntary following of a local old man back to his cottage…. If I told you more (and there is more), I would become complicit!
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Post by weirdmonger on Dec 17, 2022 5:24:24 GMT
"The Tower" was interesting to me because it did absolutely nothing for me. I think I know what she was doing in the story but all I thought at the end was "that's 15 minutes of my life I'll never get back." Several folks on this forum have proclaimed it to be one of the most terrifying stories they've ever read. De gustibus, etc. H. If I recall correctly, it did nothing for me either. So you're not alone! There is an added terror added by that very fact of such extreme polarity of reaction, I feel.
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Post by weirdmonger on Dec 16, 2022 18:56:07 GMT
Kafka's Metamorphosis, and not because of the metamorphosis. His sister’s violin playing?
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Post by weirdmonger on Dec 16, 2022 9:12:49 GMT
A couple of suggestions: A Foreign Dignitary by Bernard MacLaverty The Tower by Marghanita Laski The Tower is in a class of its own. Very unsettling without a drop of blood or a monster. Just managed to read THE TOWER. When I watched and listened to Marghanita Laski as a media panellist during the fifties, sixties, and seventies, I had no idea she had written or would write one of the greatest horror stories ever. This lonely tower of 470 steps near Florence, is worth climbing alongside Caroline — exercising her personal rights on a day when her husband Neville (Marghanita’s father was called Neville) had released her by dint of his business commitments elsewhere that day when they were both touring Italy — and as she climbs its internal precarious spirals in the dusk, we realise it is a self-enforced task on her part to prove herself if only towards severe psychological vertigo, with the terrifying prospect of anxious descent. With the tower’s backstory, no wonder! And the story’s ending holds an unaccountable threat…. The reader is within their own such tower, from birth up into life and then back down toward death, from brain toward bottom?
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Post by weirdmonger on Dec 14, 2022 7:38:02 GMT
Possible spoilers
THE LISTENER: ALGERNON BLACKWOOD
“The chance was a mere chance, and unworthy of record.”
This story of a striving writer who takes on a property cheap, without knowing why it is cheap in an erstwhile London. And finds it full of things like…
“The floor of my sitting-room has valleys and low hills on it, and the top of the door slants away from the ceiling with a glorious disregard of what is usual. They must have quarreled – fifty years ago – and have been going apart ever since.” and “…the same uncouth figure of a man crept back to my bedside, and bending over me with his immense head close to my ear whispered repeatedly in my dreams, “I want your body; I want its covering. I’m waiting for it, and listening always.”
Cats stalking him from outside, rats inside, winds full of tricks and larks, dreams of dreams and the Listener who terrifies him as the narrator eventually follows him to the room upstairs, and thoughts fighting thoughts within the narrator’s brain he can’t control (“unusual thoughts, thoughts I have never had before, about medicines and drugs and the treatment of strange illnesses”), and mention of de Quincey alongside suicides cursed with ‘reclothing’ themselves upon earth, the sense of a closeness of a loathsome disease, a bad egg, and a landlady with a tablecloth that makes his clothes feel crooked and she also has a “son who is ‘somethink on a homnibus.’” A repeated refrain throughout of this son on an omnibus. But what is that to do with the suspensively awaited Chapter to rescue the narrator? But rescue him from what… a ghost of a leper as a mere chance decoy from a terrifying truth, so worth recording, after all?
“I am looking forward very much to Chapter’s arrival. […] I wish Chapter would come. My facts are all ready marshalled,…” The narrator’s thoughts versus Chapter’s thoughts like two sets of bombs. And my italics here… “He talked and I listened. But, so full was I of the horrid thing I had to tell that I made a poor listener. I was forever watching my opportunity to leap in and explode it all under his nose.” Some think ‘hominibus’ (Latin), cf “somethink on a homnibus.”
Hic liber a duobus hominibus scriptus est
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Post by weirdmonger on Dec 12, 2022 11:48:06 GMT
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Post by weirdmonger on Dec 11, 2022 19:53:03 GMT
I love this; looks like Reveille is turning into a gold mine! My mother read REVEILLE regularly in the early 1950s. I used to take sneaky looks into them, I recall.
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Post by weirdmonger on Dec 9, 2022 15:10:33 GMT
A Foreign Dignitary by Bernard MacLaverty A FOREIGN DIGNITARY by Bernard MacLaverty “…and even though there is no hope of a reply I inquire after our daughter, Elgiva. She is a young woman who is ill with a skin complaint which makes her avoid the company of all but her closest female friends.” This is story of a colonial dignitary from the British Isles who thus writes home to his wife not expecting a reply because of postal logistics. And it is somehow a short work that truly creeps under our own skin, not only ELGIVA’s. It is genuinely oblique in an Aickman fashion, but even more horrific, with a similar brinkmanship of absurdity and disarming strangeness. Kafkaesque, too, when he is invited to a prison and he sees all the containers the prisoners are kept in, containers like claustrophobic cuboid bells, ‘bells’ that if they are naughty are thumped with a sledgehammer relentlessly, or so I recall, without somehow daring to re-check. One of them holds a girl prisoner. The night before, a pubescent girl performs a salacious dance for him at a ceremony to which he is invited and he is offered her for overnight pleasure which he politely declines. I think the word VAGILE actually covers the impression of both the above scenes as a singularity, by this word’s straightforward meaning of agile freedom as well as by its askew implication. Not a fable or parable, I sense, but simply a work that is what it is. A great horror story.
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Post by weirdmonger on Dec 9, 2022 12:47:40 GMT
A couple of suggestions: A Foreign Dignitary by Bernard MacLaverty The Tower by Marghanita Laski That’s amazing! I have very recently fallen in love with the work of Bernard MacLaverty! I must seek out that particular story without any delay! Thanks! !
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Post by weirdmonger on Dec 9, 2022 10:21:23 GMT
What is the most horrific story you have ever read? Depends how you define horrific? Scary? Gruesome? Troubling? A good question. I suggest a story most worthy, for you personally, of the epithet ‘Horror Story.’
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Post by weirdmonger on Dec 8, 2022 20:42:01 GMT
What is the most horrific story you have ever read?
I think I have just found it! That glimpse of truth. Outdoes anything in Pan Book of Horror Stories! A REAL DOLL by A.M. Homes
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Post by weirdmonger on Dec 8, 2022 8:42:54 GMT
MAN-SIZE IN MARBLE by Edith Nesbit “…stricken by lightening and the vengeance of Heaven.” The big house, thus stricken, once built upon which land the cottage now sits wherein the lovey-dovey, arty couple, Laura and and the narrator who called her Pussy, have found to live near an atmospheric but superstitious village and its lonely church. The playing out, in chilling inevitability, of a legend within marble that we all now know about from this famous story from an equally famous horror writer who also wrote, incidentally, children’s books. This couple never bore children thus lightened.
This story its own memorial to monumental catharsis. “…a horror indefinable and indescribable—an overwhelming certainty of supreme and accomplished calamity.” *** “lightening’ (sic) in this edition of the story and I have discovered in many other editions of it, too. lightening n. — a drop in the level of the uterus during the last weeks of pregnancy as the head of the fetus engages in the pelvis.
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