enoch
Devils Coach Horse
Posts: 117
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Post by enoch on Dec 27, 2021 13:54:51 GMT
Absolutely. There's an excellent short horror film called "The Ten Steps" which is somewhat reminiscent of it.
I confess to having been so unnerved by it when I was nine that I wrote a version into an eighties novel. I would think that this would be the highest sort of compliment one writer could pay to another. It unnerved me when I first read it, too -- and I was in my early fifties! I got that pleasant ice-water trickle down my spine as I finished it. You know you've just read a good one when that happens. |
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enoch
Devils Coach Horse
Posts: 117
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Post by enoch on Dec 27, 2021 14:22:23 GMT
Hi Enoch. In case you're not aware, Wakefield wrote a sequel to The Red House, Ghost Hunt, ( Weird Tales, March 1948). According to Peter Haining, setting was "a period house near Richmond Bridge where several suicides had occurred," though I'm not sure we ever found out the address. Was glad to see the very beautiful Halloween Girl included on your list. LaterI am familiar with Ghost Hunt and admire it very much, but had no idea it was a sequel! Thank you. I actually encounted it first as an episode of the old Suspense radio series (definitely worth seeking out, if you've never heard it). The story was also plagiarized (effectively) by EC Comics, though of course they changed the details a little bit. Always glad to meet a fellow admirer of Halloween Girl. It's one of a number of great stories I first read in the old Rod Serling's Twilight Zone Magazine, under the editorship of T.E.D. Klein. After Klein left, the magazine's quality dropped significantly and it went through a succession of editors, each one worse than the last. |
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Post by weirdmonger on Sept 27, 2022 13:57:24 GMT
“The Lottery" - Shirley Jackson. Served as my entry point into Jackson's work and left a permanent mark on my soul. This is the famous gratuitously cruel Tontine of a story involving a village of 300 souls, children and adults, with collected stones and bits of folded paper in a worn out black box that some say was partly built out of its predecessor box. The unfairness of choice and the eventual ‘prize’ plainly and gratuitously told with skilfully decorative evocations of place and people. The process of literature as one’s ongoing life itself and the duly allotted death of each reader while reading a book partly made from a predecessor book. That glimpse of truth. Words as stones or stories. |
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Post by jamesdoig on Sept 27, 2022 21:08:04 GMT
“The Lottery" - Shirley Jackson. Served as my entry point into Jackson's work and left a permanent mark on my soul. This is the famous gratuitously cruel Tontine of a story involving a village of 300 souls, children and adults, with collected stones and bits of folded paper in a worn out black box that some say was partly built out of its predecessor box. The unfairness of choice and the eventual ‘prize’ plainly and gratuitously told with skilfully decorative evocations of place and people. The process of literature as one’s ongoing life itself and the duly allotted death of each reader while reading a book partly made from a predecessor book. That glimpse of truth. Words as stones or stories. Shirley Jackson wrote a great essay about the Lottery - the story came to her on the way to the shops, she wrote it quickly and the New Yorker only wanted one change - the date of the event I think. After it was published she received hundreds of mostly angry letters from readers, some of whom thought the whole thing was true. Here's the Lion Books paperback with a great cover:  |
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Post by Knygathin on Sept 28, 2022 5:18:33 GMT
... "The Lurking Fear" - H. P. Lovecraft. As a kid, I was fascinated by Michael Whelan's pulpy cover for the Del Rey edition of The Lurking Fear and Other Stories; when I read the story itself years later, it lived up to the image. ...
If I may say so, I was too, ... standing there in the bookshop in the early 1980s, completely mesmerized. I bought it only for the cover art, even though I already had the stories in the traditional Arkham House editions.
But in hindsight I find the cover of the old Avon The Lurking Fear paperback much much better; it's as classic as it gets.
To me "The Lurking Fear" is Lovecraft's quintessential horror story. And has the most memorable title of all his stories. ... Perfect paranoia. Delicious.
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Post by darkbrabo on Oct 26, 2022 14:39:00 GMT
Currently, I am very busy writing a Jamesian story. It's about the ruins of an abbey in a fictional Walloon village, near the French border. I've always wanted to write something like this, and it's only when you start it that you realise how incredibly difficult writing a good horror story is! Besides, I have never understood why other Jamesian story authors have never used this region as a setting for a story.... In any case, all the ingredients are available: remote villages, vast forests, countless ancient monasteries, castles and abbeys etc.  |
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Post by Knygathin on Oct 26, 2022 15:17:29 GMT
Currently, I am very busy writing a Jamesian story. It's about the ruins of an abbey in a fictional Walloon village, near the French border. I've always wanted to write something like this, and it's only when you start it that you realise how incredibly difficult writing a good horror story is! ... For a writer who knows what he's doing, it should not be difficult at all, but only a pure pleasure. |
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Post by pbsplatter on Jan 10, 2023 18:49:28 GMT
If we're going with "most revisited" stories then, in no particular order. . .
1) Again - Ramsey Campbell: Never fails to creep me out, even though I've read it a million times. There's something about the sickly heat of a meadow in the afternoon that RC captures here.
2) The Road Virus Heads North - Stephen King: Not King's scariest, or his most original, but this one works for me every time. Good goofy bits (the horror writer being referred to as "VC Andrews with a prick" is pretty funny on several levels) and then the mounting horror.
3) Splatter: A Cautionary Tale - Douglas E. Winter: I don't think that this one necessarily 'works' that well--too many subplots and nothing ever really coheres, and I'm not sure if it's meant to be a Ballard pastiche (in which case it doesn't wholly satisfy) or not. But lots of clever bits in there.
4) Masque of the Red Death - Edgar Allan Poe: Dripping with style and atmosphere, no subtelty anywhere in sight, inimitable, doom-laden last lines. . .horror fiction wouldn't exist as we know it without stories like these.
5) The Godmothers - Charles Birkin: Easily my most re-read of all of his stories; this one has two or three lines at the end that are just kicks in the teeth. Really nasty.
6) Red - Richard Christian Matheson: If you ever want to put yourself in a really bad mood immediately, here's how. . .
7) The Haunted Dolls-House - MR James: Close between this and "Casting the Runes" but there's a good lashing of wry humor in here that helps with the re-readability.
8) Purity - Thomas Ligotti: One of those stories that makes no sense but also makes total sense, right down to the chilling one-liner conclusion.
9) The Coffin House - Robert Aickman: No, nowhere near the best of his work, but this one always makes me feel unsettled to the point of nausea.
10) Orange Is for Anguish, Blue For Insanity - David Morrell: A great, creepy idea that goes some completely off-the-wall, but worthwhile, places.
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Post by 𝘗rincess 𝘵uvstarr on Jan 11, 2023 14:52:56 GMT
The Horla, Viy, Rappaccini's Daughter, The Fall of the House of Usher, the House of Sounds. Certain parts of these linger in the mind.
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