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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Oct 19, 2020 21:20:29 GMT
Mary Elizabeth Counselman - The Unwanted ( Weird Tales, Jan 1951). A US census taker has problems working out how many children (if any) an old one-armed mountain man and his wife have. Interesting concept, OK story. |
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Post by Dr Strange on Oct 19, 2020 21:32:54 GMT
Mary Elizabeth Counselman - The Unwanted ( Weird Tales, Jan 1951). A US census taker has problems working out how many children (if any) an old one-armed mountain man and his wife have. Interesting concept, OK story. Yes, that might explain how he lost the arm. |
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Post by ramseycampbell on Oct 21, 2020 12:01:19 GMT
Margaret St. Clair - Island of the Hands ( Weird Tales, Sept 1952). Definitely "weird", more like fantasy, probably Sci-Fi - I'm not entirely sure. Plane crashes on mysterious island (possibly on another planet) where there are these Giant Hands (an alien machine?) that can literally create whatever you imagine, exactly as you imagined it. There's an interesting idea in there (reminded me of PKD), but the story itself is a bit naff. A while back I went to some length to track down a print copy of "Island of the Hands." I'd seen it on J. F. Gonzalez's list of "top thirteen obscure shockers from the pulps and beyond" in The Book of Lists: Horror, edited by Amy Wallace, Del Howison, and Scott Bradley. I eventually found the story in an Ace Double, Message from the Eocene / Three Worlds of Futurity ( Message from the Eocone is a St. Clair short novel I recall as being terrible, while Three Worlds of Futurity is a St. Clair anthology). With all that buildup, I was somewhat disappointed in the story itself. St. Clair's fiction is often deeply strange. I love some of her stories, particularly "Brenda." Other works by her leave me perplexed--not so much at what's happening in them as what ideas she's trying to get across. She also wrote several novels, two of which influenced Gary Gygax's development of Dungeons & Dragons: Sign of the Labrys and The Shadow People. They're both bizarre and unpleasant in a fascinating sort of way; The Shadow People, in particular, has a queasy sort of appeal. The Bantam edition of Sign of the Labrys features an infamous back cover blurb: WOMEN ARE WRITING SCIENCE-FICTION!
ORIGINAL! BRILLIANT!! DAZZLING!!!
Women are closer to the primitive than men. They are conscious of the moon-pulls, the earth-tides. They possess a buried memory of humankind’s obscure and ancient past which can emerge to uniquely color and flavor a novel. Such a woman is Margaret St. Clair, author of this novel. Such a novel is this, SIGN OF THE LABRYS, the story of a doomed world of the future, saved by recourse to ageless, immemorial rites…
FRESH! IMAGINATIVE!! INVENTIVE!!! I've never seen any reports about what St. Clair thought of that. I was delighted to revive her work for Dover. |
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Post by cauldronbrewer on Nov 29, 2020 13:16:17 GMT
Queens of the Abyss arrived yesterday and I've read the first two stories (both new to me), but didn't think much of either - Mary E. Braddon - A Revelation ( The Misletoe Bough, Xmas 1888). A British army officer serving in India is haunted by ghostly visions of an old friend that he hasn't seen or heard from in years. He returns to Blighty, with trusty batman in tow, to get to the bottom of things. All very Victorian and genteel, with a resolution that depends on a ridiculous coincidence. Marie Corelli - The Sculptor's Angel ( Nash's Magazine, Dec 1913). This one is even worse. An artistic monk with a guilty secret is given the job of carving an angel by his Abbot. Over the top, flowery language, with almost every spoken sentence ending in an exclamation mark, dollops of Christian mysticism, God moves in mysterious ways, etc. I agree with Dr. Strange about the coincidence at the end of "A Revelation," but I still enjoyed the story. By contrast, I struggled all the way through the religious schlock of Corelli's tale. I didn't think her novel Ziska was that bad, but I found "The Sculptor's Angel" every bit as awful as her reputation would suggest. |
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Post by cauldronbrewer on Dec 1, 2020 0:10:39 GMT
Frances Hodgson Burnett - The Christmas in the Fog ( Good Housekeeping, Dec 1914). The "Romantick Lady" decides to spend some time in New York and sets sail on a liner from Liverpool two days before X-mas. Unfortunately the ship runs into thick fog in the Mersey and is forced to just sit around waiting for it to clear. There are emigrants from all over Europe travelling in steerage, including many children. The "Romantick Lady" decides to have a whip round among the wealthier passengers and crew to give these children some X-mas money to take into their new lives in America. People are surprisingly generous, and the money is distributed among the children on X-mas day. The fog then lifts and the ship continues on its journey. The "Romantick Lady" wonders if she did the right thing, or has she perhaps created a bunch of spongers who will now always have their hands out expecting others to provide for them? The End. I have no idea what this story is doing in this book - Mike Ashley maintains that "while not overtly supernatural" it is a "strange tale", but I don't see it. Actually, maybe there is something slightly chilling about this ostentatiously wealthy "Lady" very publicly doing "good works" for others to see and admire her for - while privately contemplating whether it would be preferable to just leave the poor people to sort themselves out, survival of the fittest and all that. It seems Burnett wrote a few of these stories featuring "The Romantick Lady" for Good Housekeeping and they are supposed to be "semi-autobiographical". I disliked "The Christmas in the Fog" on multiple levels, two of which Dr. Strange has already covered. First, there's nothing abyssal about it. Second, the "Romantick Lady" comes across as more smug and self-satisfied than "romantick." On top of that, I disagree with the premise Burnett tediously lays out in the prologue--that "Truth is as a rule more entertaining ... than fiction." Her example strikes me as contradicting her premise. Now, if the the fog had never lifted and the passengers in steerage had eaten the Romantick Lady out of hunger, bloodthirstiness, and/or class consciousness, I might've been more entertained. |
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Post by cauldronbrewer on Dec 1, 2020 23:58:16 GMT
G.G. Pendarves - The Laughing Thing ( Weird Tales, May 1929). Hard-headed/cold-hearted millionaire businessman Jason Drewe moves himself and Tony, his 8 year old son, into the house that he bought from the dying Eldred Werne. Werne had wanted more for the house and the extensive woodlands around it, but was desperate - and Drewe hadn't got to be in his position in life by being nice to people. Werne tells Drewe that after he dies he will "come back" to extract "a more satisfactory price" from him... I liked this one - it's not really anything special in terms of its plot or style, but it has a proper horror story ending. I'm happy that Mike Ashley resurrected "The Laughing Thing" for Queens of the Abyss--it delivers on the pulp horror and is the high point of the book so far for me. I'd rank it as a top three Pendarves story, just below "The Eighth Green Man" and "The Withered Heart." |
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Post by Dr Strange on Dec 2, 2020 10:26:12 GMT
I don't think I've ever read anything else by GG Pendarves. Based on this one story, I'd assumed (wrongly?) that she must have been American. There is a sort of non-biography for her here - it seems that next to nothing is really known about her, but it suggests she was born and died in England. Wikipedia identifies her with a " Gladys Gordon" who wrote screenplays for Hollywood in the 1920s, but this isn't mentioned anywhere in the "Tellers of Weird Tales" piece. I guess she must have lived in the US to work as a Hollywood screenwriter in the 1920s - assuming both of these are actually describing the same person. |
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Post by cauldronbrewer on Dec 3, 2020 15:10:14 GMT
Marie Belloc Lowndes - The Haunted Flat ( The Grand Magazine, Aug 1920). Benevolent ghost plays Cupid. Disappointing. Benevolent, maybe, but based on what we're told I question the ghost's taste in suitors. Jessie Douglas Kerruish - The Wonderful Tune ( At Dead of Night, ed. Christine Campbell Thomson, 1931). Among a group of travelers staying overnight at an inn in the Swiss Alps is a famous Norwegian violinist. He offers to entertain his fellow-guests with some old folk tunes from his homeland, traditionally supposed to be based on the music of the Huldra Folk or Elf-Kind. There is one particular tune that he once heard as a child, while out alone in the countryside searching for a strayed sheep on a dark and windy night. That tune had an irresistible effect on him at the time, inducing an ecstatic state in which he was compelled to dance. However, he has never been able to play the tune himself in its entirety, as it only seems to exist as disconnected fragments in his memory - perhaps the similarity of his current surroundings to those he was in when he first heard it will help him piece it together for the first time? I really liked this story - I've got a bit of a thing for Norse folklore anyway, but even without that it just works really well as straight-out supernatural horror (and with a little bit of dark humour thrown in as well). For me, definitely the high point of Queens of the Abyss so far. On rereading "The Wonderful Tune," I agree that it's the highlight of the book; the story has a great setting and plenty of eerie atmosphere. I also like Norse folklore, in part because my great-grandmother emigrated from Norway (she came from a town up the Atlantic coast, not far from where this story's violinist hails). Lady Eleanor Smith - Candlelight ( The Story-Teller, March 1931). Some toffs with "complicated" but dull love lives get together for dinner at a country house. They find a gypsy girl lurking in the garden shrubbery and insist that she tells them their fortunes, which she does with amazing accuracy. The set-up seems to promise a Dr Terror sort of scenario, but unfortunately the pay-off is more like DH Lawrence. Smith is maybe a bit too effective at making the partygoers unlikable, though the story does pick up when the fortuneteller arrives. Among the author's stories, I still prefer "No Ships Pass." Leonora Carrington - The Seventh Horse ( VVV #2-3, 1943). Surrealistic, probably symbolizing something or other, but I have no idea what. You and me both. At least it's short and definitely not dull. A final thought: the folks at the British Library have done a good job designing the books in the Tales of the Weird series. I particularly like the frontispiece for Queens of the Abyss. |
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Post by Dr Strange on Dec 4, 2020 2:53:55 GMT
A final thought: the folks at the British Library have done a good job designing the books in the Tales of the Weird series. I particularly like the frontispiece for Queens of the Abyss. Completely agree, I like everything about the design of these books. And there's a couple more recently announced, though no details of contents or covers yet - Minor Hauntings: Chilling Tales of Spectral Youth, ed. Jen Baker (due April 2021), and Crawling Horror: Creeping Tales of the Insect Weird, ed. Daisy Butcher & Janette Leaf (due June 2021). |
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Post by PeterC on Dec 4, 2020 11:07:54 GMT
Frances Hodgson Burnett - The Christmas in the Fog
'if the fog had never lifted and the passengers in steerage had eaten the Romantick Lady out of hunger, bloodthirstiness, and/or class consciousness, I might've been more entertained.'
Or better still, if the steerage passengers had been made to get into the lifeboats and tow the liner to America, subsisting in their labours on the odd crust tossed down by the Romantick Lady and her friends.
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Post by Swampirella on Dec 12, 2020 22:51:52 GMT
This will be out in May of next year; really not for me but posting it for those who might enjoy it.
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Post by helrunar on Dec 12, 2020 23:53:23 GMT
Thanks for posting, Miss Scarlett! There could be some cool stories in there, but I can't find any information on what the contents will be. One site has it available as of January 21, but another says not until next May.
The cover is quite kicky, in any event!
Hel.
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Post by Dr Strange on Dec 13, 2020 0:08:49 GMT
This will be out in May of next year; really not for me but posting it for those who might enjoy it. I'm looking forward to this one, and hoping that the more niche topic area will maybe mean more obscure picks for the contents than some of the other "Tales of the Weird" anthologies. I'm expecting some Lovecraft (probably Dreams in the Witch House), Blackwood's A Victim of Higher Space, maybe Frank Belknap Long's Hounds of Tindalos, but apart from that I can't think of anything obvious that would fit. |
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Post by helrunar on Dec 13, 2020 1:37:08 GMT
I think Clark Ashton Smith's City of the Singing Flame would be a good selection.
In Simon Raven's novel The Sabre Squadron, a brilliant mathematician has something like a psychotic break when his equations somehow lead him to the inevitable conclusion that the God who created this universe must be insane and delight in pain.
H.
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Dec 13, 2020 13:07:00 GMT
In Simon Raven's novel The Sabre Squadron, a brilliant mathematician has something like a psychotic break when his equations somehow lead him to the inevitable conclusion that the God who created this universe must be insane and delight in pain. That is so deep. |
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