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Post by Shrink Proof on Sept 17, 2021 6:46:00 GMT
Please suggest stories where mist/fog/smog plays an important part. London used to get terrible smog problems, apparently you would get a horrible taste in your mouth and it was yellowish in colour. Is there any with maybe a 1930s or 1940s setting? There was a very terrible smog in 1952 that may have killed 10,000 people. John Gaskin's "Addendum to a Confession" from his collection "The Master of the House" would fit. Here's a cut & paste of my summary of it from elsewhere in the Vault:- Have recently come across another tale to add to the railway archive, namely "Addendum to a Confession" by John Gaskin from his third collection of tales, "The Master of the House". Rather like "The Bay Platform" (in the original post), it's set at Oxford railway station in the 1950s, at night and in the depths of winter. The writer is a student, taking temporary work as a night goods porter prior to going to medical school. He fills the vacancy suddenly created by the departure of one Michael Elliston. Some while later, Elliston, known to be mentally unstable, confesses to the brutal murder of Geoffrey Harding, whose body was found by the first customers of the day in the station canteen. The writer is unsure of himself in the portering job but is befriended by old hand Charlie Hurdley, who tells him that Harding was an insomniac who hung about the staff canteen at night and was "a rum 'un...like āeād eat yer, if yer tasted better than yer looked." Hurdley recalls that his refusal to buy a newspaper for Harding was followed by him suffering badly in a freak bike crash when he ran into something he couldn't see on his way home from work. No-one saw the accident yet Harding seemed to know all about it, telling Hurdley that āNext time, āUrdley, you disobliges me youāll not get āomeā. Hurdley needed no further persuading to buy the paper for Harding, who then said he couldn't pay for it but āI always pays my debts, āUrdley. Mark my words, Iāll pay you, and youāll take it.ā But before he paid up he was murdered. Meanwhile the writer has problems of his own. Frequently left to his own devices on the deserted, snow-bound station, he repeatedly encounters a silhouette (or thinks he does) near the parked carriages where the murder weapon was found, eventually summoning up the courage to challenge the intruder, but finding nothing (not even footprints) except a purse containing threepence and a note saying The Keeper Keeps. Increasingly spooked, he becomes convinced that the figure is after him and flees that part of the station, cutting across the tracks and nearly being run down by a goods train which has been for some unknown reason diverted onto tracks normally unused. Later he offers Hurdley the 3d to compensate him for the price of the paper he bought Harding, but is turned down. Convinced he has to rid himself of the coins, he slips them into Hurdley's great coat in the staff room, which Hurdley puts on before biking home again.... The final twist comes years later. By now the writer is a doctor, working as a psychiatrist, and one of his first patients is Michael Elliston. He tells the doctor a bit more about what happened than he revealed in his original confession.... The gas-lit station at night with its snow, fog, smoke and steam is a great setting. A first-rate ghost story which leaves just enough loose ends. Actually, IMHO pretty much anything by John Gaskin is worth reading.
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Post by Shrink Proof on Sept 17, 2021 6:56:03 GMT
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Post by dem bones on Sept 17, 2021 7:02:24 GMT
Please suggest stories where mist/fog/smog plays an important part. A good place to start would be Elizabeth Dearnley [ed's] recent Into the London Fog (British Library, 2020). Includes stories by Violet Hunt. Lettice Gailbraith, Elizabeth Bowen, Arthur Machen, E. Nesbit, EF Benson, Marie Belloc Lowndes The Lodger, and a neat contemporary account of the activities of Spring Heeled Jack. Will try get back to you with some snowed-in suggestions. One that comes directly to mind is Loretta Burroughs The Snowman.
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Post by weirdmonger on Sept 17, 2021 7:13:55 GMT
Please suggest stories where mist/fog/smog plays an important part. MIST by Richmal Crompton āI sat in the parlour reading a three-weeks-old newspaper all morning and afternoon,ā¦ā Arrived at a grey inn on the grey moorland, with cheerless and churlish locals, bunked up, this woman, or man, as narrator, bored by the same newspaper, explores and finds a grey house close by where she witnesses through its window a sexual accosting and a later murderous scene that the narrator remembers as one that, by a reported court case, was different from the events accepted by the court. But the work is memorable really only for the genius loci and its prehensile mist that imbues the action.
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Post by dem bones on Sept 17, 2021 8:00:24 GMT
... and an anti-recommendation. Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Christmas in the Fog, featuring "the Romantick Lady," as recently revived in Mike Ashley's Queens of the Abyss.
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Post by Dr Strange on Sept 17, 2021 9:27:04 GMT
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Post by samdawson on Sept 17, 2021 9:52:28 GMT
Please suggest stories where mist/fog/smog plays an important part. The Tiger in the Smoke, by Margery Allingham. Highly effective detective novel. There was also a novel a couple of years ago about a copper in Ladbroke Grove in the 50s whose name escapes me, but was notably au fait with the area and its history.
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Post by humgoo on Sept 17, 2021 10:05:44 GMT
A.N.L. Munby - An Encounter in the Mist ( The Alabaster Hand & Other Ghost Stories, 1949). There's also a lot of mist in "The White Sack". Speaking of which, I hope someone can start a Mountaineering is Dangerous thread, if there's not already one.
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Post by šrincess šµuvstarr on Sept 17, 2021 13:30:30 GMT
I want to ask a question. Before the Internet how did people become involved in communities, such as pulp horror or fantasy? Did they do it through fanzines? But how would you go about finding out where to get the fanzines in the first place? It's easier in a big city, I suppose you could meet people in bookshops, but for someone in a small town or village it must have been very difficult.
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Post by Middoth on Sept 17, 2021 13:48:46 GMT
I want to ask a question. Before the Internet how did people become involved in communities, such as pulp horror or fantasy? Did they do it through fanzines? But how would you go about finding out where to get the fanzines in the first place? It's easier in a big city, I suppose you could meet people in bookshops, but for someone in a small town or village it must have been very difficult.
Many fanzines had a letter column. And of course the telephone initiative and good luck in personal communication.
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Post by dem bones on Sept 17, 2021 15:48:09 GMT
I want to ask a question. Before the Internet how did people become involved in communities, such as pulp horror or fantasy? Did they do it through fanzines? But how would you go about finding out where to get the fanzines in the first place? It's easier in a big city, I suppose you could meet people in bookshops, but for someone in a small town or village it must have been very difficult. Can only speak from personal experience, and it was certainly 'zines put me in contact with certain like-minded/ish enthusiasts, various trouble-makers and bookaholics. Circa 1990s, mainstream horror glossies like The Dark Side would include fanzine reviews, so that brought some publications to wider attention (which, in the case of John Guillidge's long-lived Samhain, wasn't always advantageous). Several 'zines reviewed other 'zines, or at the very least provided contact details, so get hold of one, and it gave you access to an entire subculture. On or near the Charing Cross Road, Forbidden Planet and Sister Ray stocked hundreds of stapled xeroxed pages encompassing multiple interests. 'Sportspages' specialised in football 'zines. Mick Mercer industriously listed and thumbnail-reviewed Goth/fetish/ vampire/ occult mags from across the globe in The Hex Files, (1996) and then there was Steven Jarvis and his extraordinary Bizarre Leisure Book ("From the Alan Whicker Appreciation Society to Zen Archery") from 1993.
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Post by dem bones on Sept 17, 2021 15:49:17 GMT
There's also a lot of mist in "The White Sack". Speaking of which, I hope someone can start a Mountaineering is Dangerous thread, if there's not already one. Go for it!
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Post by helrunar on Sept 17, 2021 15:57:57 GMT
Living in a "development" outside a small town an hour's drive north of Baltimore, Maryland, in the early Seventies, it was the same. I may have found out about what I recall as my initial zine contact, a sweet little thing called Gore Creatures (when the editor/publisher changed the name to the more market-friendly Midnight Marquee, it was the end of an era), from Castle of Frankenstein, a somewhat brainy prozine whose contributors included our own Michel "Mike" Parry (may his memory be a blessing). Pretty sure CoF also reviewed zines and included addresses. My first job was as a library page in the town book depot circa 1973 and at that point, I had my own money and could order more zines. These led to further contacts. It was a fun time.
The whole Dr Who black market thing may be a bogey or a will-o-the-wisp--who knows. There have been rumors for decades of some selfish fan hoarding old-tech video copies (supposedly done using a primitive 1960s video tech that only very wealthy individuals would have been able to access) of ALL of William Hartnell's episodes (1963-66)--most likely a myth, but who knows. Similar stories continue to circulate. Interesting to see that the Beeb is now doing cartoon versions of stories such as Evil of the Daleks which have had Maltese Falcon-level cult status for more years than you have probably been in existence in your current incarnation, my dear doubting Princess.
H.
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Post by jamesdoig on Sept 17, 2021 20:45:12 GMT
I want to ask a question. Before the Internet how did people become involved in communities, such as pulp horror or fantasy? Did they do it through fanzines? But how would you go about finding out where to get the fanzines in the first place? It's easier in a big city, I suppose you could meet people in bookshops, but for someone in a small town or village it must have been very difficult. There used to be Amateur Press Associations, which were clubs where members would produce fanzines and send them around. Lovecraft popularised these, and one dedicated to him called the Esoteric Order of Dagon used to exist, and probably still does for all I know. Here's a couple of examples from EOD, Outre from J. Vernon Shea and Fantipodean by Graeme Flanagan: Another popular one was Rehupa, dedicated to Robert E. Howard:
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Post by helrunar on Sept 18, 2021 3:54:55 GMT
That issue of OutrƩ is quite the rara avis, James! Excellent scans! J. Vernon Shea seems like quite the character. "H. P. Lovecraft and E. M. Forster: a comparison"--what on Earth was he on when he wrote that thing??
Some of the article titles literally do not make sense; perhaps that was intentional? Only the Gods of Unknown Kadath know the true unfathomable horror behind it all.
cheers,
H.
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