Recent purchases

Was trying to come up with something clever but the muse escapes me at the moment so...Bought anything Weird and interesting lately? Last week I found Weird Tales: Seven Decades of Terror at a local book shop. Haven't had a chance to look at it yet, but its got great pulpy cover art. Also ordered a copy of the most recent issue of weird tales magazine. I haven't read it before, so looking forward to digging in!

My most recent acquisition in the vein of the Traditionally Weird is the REH collection El Borak and Other Desert Adventures, although in related non-fiction I was recently pleased to snag The Edge of the Unknown by Arthur Conan Doyle.

In the past week or two I have gotten in Washginton Irving - The Legend of Sleepy Hollow , E.T.A. Hoffmann - The Sand-Man and other Night Pieces , the corrected version of H. P. Lovecraft - The Complete Fiction , Maurice Level - Tales of the Grand Guignol , The Collected Fiction of William Hope Hodgson Vol.2 , Weird Fiction Review Vol. 1 , and I have some books on the way from Folio Society since I just joined up with them. Mostly fairy tale stuff and some Gothic lit.

I have a serious problem with buying books much, much faster than I can even hope to read them. :(

>1 DeusExLibrus:

I might have to look for that, since it must include the great WT 1980's period.

>2 paradoxosalpha:

I had an urge this past summer for some El Borak, but I got sidetracked (what else is new)...

Nominally "weird", but definitely of the fantastic, although it stands as a unique work in all of literature, I just received a new illustrated (by the author) hardcover version of Mervyn Peake's The Gormenghast Trilogy, with an introduction by Michael Moorcock. I strongly urge anyone who hasn't read these truly amazing books to seek them out!

>3 Thulean:

I love Washington Irving's tales, especially "The Adventure of the German Student", which would have been right at home at the Grand Guignol!

>5 semdetenebre:

I have never read him before. I loved the Headless Horseman animated short when I was a kid though. :D I think I am looking forward to that volume the most really.

The closest thing to weird fiction that I've purchased lately is Ursula K. Le Guin's The Language of the Night, which spends some time discussing Lord Dunsany and related authors. Oh yeah, and I downloaded A Princess of Mars and At the Earth's Core from Project Gutenberg onto my cell phone (a process that still seems strange to me; is there anyone else out there that feels like they're walking around in a future-shock-induced haze half the time these days?)

A couple of recent favourites are The Darker Sex and Ghost Stories, both collections of short stories by some of our greatest writers including Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Henry James, O Henry, Saki etc.

#4 The Gormenhast Trilogy is one of my favourite books and I second your call for people to seek them out. The illustrated edition is beautiful. I have treated myself. :-)

#9 What pgmcc said! Recently quite disappointed with Titus Awakes but I guess it has its place in the Gormenghast pantheon. Just doesn't stand up well against the three original books.

>9 pgmcc: & 10

I revisit the trilogy all the time. Some of the most wonderfully written prose I have ever experienced.

I was wondering whether or not to delve into Titus Awakes. Isn't that the one that was actually completed by Maeve Peake, based on her husband's notes?

I purchased The Yellow Sign and Other Stories yesterday, and was dismayed that S.T. Joshi spent most of the introduction describing what a lousy writer Robert Chambers was!* Yet Joshi has compiled a thick, 643 page anthology of this stuff. It put me in mind of the old joke about two old ladies on a cruise:

"The food on this cruise is lousy!"

"Yes...and such small portions!"

We can't accuse Joshi of dishing out small portions.



*The King in Yellow is a classic, but apparently Chambers wrote a lot of dreck.

> 12

It's been a while since I read that front matter, but I came away from it with the impression that Chambers was a very talented writer, who mostly wrote marketably pedestrian garbage that I wouldn't care to read. The Yellow Sign and Other Stories volume is exclusively his weird fiction, though.

Yes, his contemporaries, Lovecraft among them, expressed exasperation that Chambers did not rise to his obvious capabilities. He apparently wrote reams of material besides weird fiction, and most of it forgettable.

>12 Makifat:

One of the things I most admire about S.T. Joshi is that he's not really one for doing things in half-measures. A good example of this is the research he did before he wrote The Modern Weird Tale: before he wrote the chapter on Stephen King, he read ALL of King's fiction (as one who had at one point done this, I can assure you that that is no small task); before he wrote the chapter on Ramsey Campbell, he read all of Campbell's stuff, on down the line for every author covered in the book. The man is nothing if not thorough.

Yeah, I suspect that's what we see in the editorial tone of The Yellow Sign and Other Stories: Joshi has just read the entire Chambers ouevre, and he's like, "OMG most of this is utter crap!"

#11 That's the one. Just for curiosity value it's probably a bit of a 'must' for Gormenghast fans and it's an interesting insight into where the stories were meant to go but it couldn't be less like the originals. I wanted to like it but was really bored rigid. I'm sure anyone who loved the trilogy will eventually feel they have to read this one but I'm afraid they are in for a big disappointment. It has made me long to dig out the original books for a reread, though, and that can never be a bad thing.

Not picked up much weird since the summer, when I picked up Master of Villainy the biography of sax Rohmer. Which may just about qualify.

Picked up several weird titles and books of related interested at some local used bookstores in the last week or so:

Night Shift - Stephen King (including such stabs at Lovecraftian horror by El King as "Jerusalem's Lot" and "Gray Matter")
The Ceremonies and Dark Gods - T.E.D. Klein
The Purple Cloud - M.P. Shiel
Weaveworld - Clive Barker
Relic (aka THE RELIC) - Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child
The House Next Door - Anne Rivers Siddons

I am just now noticing that the mmpb copy of THE PURPLE CLOUD I purchased has a full-page ad for Kent cigarettes smack-dab in the middle of it. Those were the days, my friends. :D

Picked up a copy of The Mammoth Book of Short Horror Novels for a dollah today - in hardback, no less!

Ah, I forgot to mention last weekend that I stumbled across a copy of Lumley's The House of Doors for fifty cents.

>20 artturnerjr:

Nice find! I've never seen the "Mammoth" books in hardcover. Is it ex-library?

>20 artturnerjr:

The House of Doors was a nice step away from the Necroscope novels for Lumley. I think he's often underrated as a writer. His short stories are usually quite good, and he's one of the best of the neo-Lovecraftian stylists.

I've never seen the "Mammoth" books in hardcover. Is it ex-library?

Nope - it's from the library's used book store, but it doesn't have the Dewey decimal info or the little pocket in the front or anything, so I'm guessing it was a donation. Copyright page says it's from Carroll & Graph Publishers; ISBN is 0-88184-410-1.

ETA: This is kooky - when I do a WorldCat search on that ISBN, I get The Mammoth book of classic science fiction : short novels of the 1930s. Hey? :/

> 23

Cheapo publisher recycling ISBNs, prolly.

Not exactly a recent purchase (I pre-ordered the bloody thing about five years ago!), but Cemetery Dance just announced that The Horror Hall of Fame: The Stoker Winners edited by Joe R. Lansdale will actually start shipping next week! Yipeeee!

http://www.cemeterydance.com/page/CDP/PROD/lansdale05

I just snagged a secondhand copy of the Charles L. Grant-edited anthology Shadows this weekend. It looks great. Also just received an amazon order of The Simon Iff Stories and Other Works.

>26 paradoxosalpha:

I know I've read the Stephen King story collected in that one ("Nona"), but I'll be damned if I can remember anything about it. I'll have to try to give it a quick re-read in the next day or two (assuming I can track down my copy of Skeleton Crew, of course).

Speaking of Amazon, my copies of Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos and Essential Spider-Man, Volume 1 from them were delivered yesterday - woo-hoo! :)

>26 paradoxosalpha:

I love Charles L. Grant)'s work. I'm awaiting the new SCREAM QUIETLY collection from PS Publishing. The SHADOWS series was fantastic and groundbreaking. Lots of quality stuff to find there.

Scored a mmpb copy of L. Sprague De Camp's Lovecraft: A Biography for a quarter this afternoon.



Look out, Howard! There's a dragon on your shoulder!

***

The totally awesome back cover copy reads as follows:

LOVECRAFT THE MAN

LOVECRAFT THE WRITER

LOVECRAFT THE CULT FIGURE

His name conjures macabre visions of ghoulish beasts, creeping monsters, ghastly fantasies.

His stories have spawned a following that ranks him with Edgar Allan Poe and Lord Dunsany.

But Lovecraft was himself the most bizarre of all his characters!

Sweet. :)

ETA: This is apparently the book that sparked S.T. Joshi's interest in Lovecraft scholarship, so for that alone I'm guessing it's worth checking out.

I found a copy of Dennis Wheatley's To the Devil, a Daughter from the inexpensive Wordsworth Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural. Despite mixed reviews, I've wanted to try something by him since I saw Hammer's film version of The Devil Rides Out.

I've got some recently-acquired Wheatley on my TBR pile, too: The Satanist.

#30 & #31
When I was becoming aware of horror in the 1970s Wheatley was the man. My first Wheatley was "The Ka of Gifford Hilary". I really enjoyed this rather mild story. Not so much horror as an awkward predicament for a nearly dead person/spirit/ka.

>32 pgmcc:

I haven't read any Wheatley, but I'm intrigued by the movie adaptations I've seen and also by what I read of his work in The Fortean Times. An article there claimed Wheatley invented the whole tradition of the sauve, sophisticated Satanist: http://www.forteantimes.com/features/articles/2623/the_devil_rides_out.html

> 33

The Devil Rides Out is strongly derivative of Charles Williams' War in Heaven, including the portrayal of the "suave, sophisticated Satanist." That trope goes at least back to Gilles de Rais, by the way.

Recently ordered a copy of CAS's Poems in Prose.

>34 paradoxosalpha:

Just out of curiosity, are you familiar with Bataille's book about de Rais?

http://www.amokbooks.com/books/gdrtrial.html

> 36

Yup: The Trial of Gilles de Rais. Read it years ago and still have it on the shelf with my other Bataille (rather than the Satanism shelf or the Medieval shelves).

>37 paradoxosalpha:

Do you recommend it? I almost bought it when it came out years ago, and it's been hovering about ever since. It would have to go in my True Crime collection.

As I recall, it's mighty dry: straightforward positive history that accepts the conclusions of the ecclesiastical courts.

Just received the Cemetery Dance edition of The Doll: The Lost Short Stories by Daphne du Maurier.

This week I picked up Locke and Key: Head Games. I haven't even read through the first of the comics issues collected there, but the introduction by Warren Ellis sure made me laugh!

#40 KentonSem
I read The Doll: The Lost Short Stories last June. I enjoyed the stories and was blown away when I realised they had been written when du Maurier was only twenty to twenty-two years old.

A very interesting collection. Enjoy, if you have not already done so.

>35 AndreasJ:

Cool! You'll have to let us know how it is.

I finished reading Locke and Key: Head Games and reviewed it here.

>44 paradoxosalpha:

I just finished "Clockworks", the latest Locke & Key arc. There was also a fairly recent one-shot issue called "Guide to the Known Keys" that is really moving. If you are reading the series via the collected volumes, hopefully it will be included in one of those.

>42 pgmcc:

The Doll: The Lost Short Stories is on my short list. I'll be starting it very soon.

I picked up New Cthulhu today, just in time to read "A Colder War" in it for next week's Deep Ones. It looks like a real cream of 21st-century Lovecraftian short fiction. I've read the introduction, and editor Paula Guran is definitely pitching it to a general audience rather than connoisseurs.

>47 paradoxosalpha:

Will put up Stross discussion post later today. He has an enjoyable web site I'll add to the miscellany links..

The Atrocity Archives, Cthulhu's Reign and Hide Me Among the Graves - all arriving today, for my summer reading pleasure!

#49 KentonSem

Hide Me Among the Graves is not available here until September, 2012. Monster Island must have a head start.

I hope it's good and that you enjoy it. If it's not, let me know and you'll save me the expense of buying it in the Autumn. :-)

>50 pgmcc:

Will do! I read Last Call last year and enjoyed it immensely. When I recently chose The Anubis Gates as one of my top 25 horror novels of the twentieth century, it made me realize that I have some catching up to do with Mr. Powers. Hide Me Among the Graves sounded like a good place to start - I'll work my way backwards!

I also read Last Call last year and enjoyed it. I'm not sure when I'll get round to Earthquake Weather and Expiration Date.

The Anubis Gates was great. Declare was my first Tim Powers book. I think I'm hooked on his work now.

I've got Horrors from the Haunted Seas, a collection of short stories by William Hope Hodgson, in the mail. Nobody seems to've added a copy to LT yet, so I might become the first.

(The Deep Ones are, of course, at fault: having had the book on the wishlist since it came out earlier this year, I couldn't resist ordering it when "The Voice in the Night" ended up on the top of the summer reading list.)

I just picked up Hodgson's The House on the Borderland adapted to the graphic novel format by Richard Corben and Simon Revelstroke.

>54 paradoxosalpha: There was a recent review of this at Innsmouth Free Press which makes me interested in this. One of these days I'll get around to the original novel.

Just bought Horns by Joe Hill at Barnes & Noble. Remaindered HC for 7 bucks.

I was disappointed by The Atrocity Archives. Too much after-the-fact exposition instead of putting the reader right in the thick of things and too self-consciously clever by half. Some good bits, but not my cuppa. I am absolutely digging Hide Me Among the Graves, however! Pun intended there, of course.

Oh, hey gang, I binged a bit this weekend. In addition to the card game I've already mentioned on the games thread, I got:

The Shub-Niggurath Cycle
Anima by M. John Harrison
And half a dozen Dray Prescott titles

They were all very reasonably-priced used items, but I still feel shamefully extravagant, because I know it will be years before I exhaust these, in combination with a mass of other TBR material.

Besides the HPL "Books at Brown" journal mentioned in the Centipede Press thread, I snagged a signed limited copy Deathbird Stories from Subterranean Press. Half off from their eBay auction page!

I received Where the Summer Ends by Karl Edward Wagner and Peter Straub's two volume American Fantastic Tales for my birthday recently.

>58 semdetenebre:

I snagged a signed limited copy Deathbird Stories from Subterranean Press.

Sweet! "The Deathbird" (from that collection) is one of my all-time favorite short stories, regardless of genre. 8)

Speaking of Harlan Ellison titles, I recently picked up a hardcover copy of Again, Dangerous Visions for 25 cents. Gotta love the Friends of the Library store.

I paid all of seventy-nine cents for a lovely little copy of Poseidonis this afternoon.

>61 paradoxosalpha:

Excellent deal. The Ballantine Adult Fantasy series is still the gold standard of its kind, imho.

Just finished Horrors from Haunted Seas, excellent.

Also just got Penguin Book of Horror Stories.

Snagged a copy of the FBL bio of HPL Dreamer on the Nightside today.

>64 paradoxosalpha:

Sweet! Let us know how it is.

In addition to more high-minded tomes (e.g., the Penguin Classics editions of A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court and The Odyssey), I have been indulging my weakness for cheesy 1970s horror paperbacks with purchases of The Amityville Horror and Jaws. 8)

#65 I found the novel Jaws to be entertaining and to contain, as ever, more than the film.

While a fan of Mr. Clemens in many regards I found A Connecticut Yankee contained too much preaching, a disappointment as the Bing Crosby film is a favourite of mine. I particularly empathise with the words of the song, "I'm busy doing nothing, working the whole through, trying to find lots of things not to do."

>66 pgmcc:

If the novel Jaws is within shouting distance of the film aesthetic-merit-wise I'll probably really like it, as I consider the movie to be a genre masterpiece.

I am embarrassingly underread when it comes to Twain's work. I probably won't get to Connecticut Yankee any time soon (I'll probably read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn first (nope, haven't read that one either (like I said, embarrassing))), but it's nice to know it's there when I'm ready for it.

>65 artturnerjr:-67

Jaws the novel was HUUUUUUGE when it was first published. You'd see everyone reading it, even before the movie came out. I liked it, along with The Deep, also by Peter Benchley. Not amazing works, by any means, but very entertaining... errr... beach reads.The film actually removes some extraneous subplots that the novel puts you through, literally streamlining the beast of a tale into the highly efficient monster movie that it is. I've heard that the recent 100th anniversary blu-ray of Jaws is everything that a bluray disc was ever meant to be.

Mark Twain remains absolutely necessary. Besides the serious overarching subject matter, he's also as sarcastically funny as hell. Even better than Groucho Marx, Voltaire and Ambrose Bierce combined. Read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by all means, but also look for his short stories, letters collections, and my own favorite, Letters from the Earth, which proved to be of extreme importance to my personal outlook on religion in general and mankind in particular.

>68 semdetenebre:

Even better than Groucho Marx, Voltaire and Ambrose Bierce combined.

That's pretty good!

Two more horror paperbacks scored today: Peter Straub's Mr. X and Colin Wilson's The Space Vampires (I was supposed to resist a blurb like "A SCOURGE OF SEX AND DEATH FROM AN ALIEN SPACESHIP!"? Really?)

PIcked up Ramsey Campbell's Hungry Moon for 50 cents today. It's not going on top of the TBR pile, but I'll get to it someday.

>70 paradoxosalpha:

David Pringle had some nice things to say about that one in his Modern Fantasy: The Hundred Best Novels, which I just finished.

Picked up a copy of S.T. Joshi's H.P. Lovecraft: Nightmare Countries at my local Barnes & Noble last night and am already about halfway through it (not as impressive as it might sound - it's only about 160 pp. long and is lavishily illustrated). As the irrepressible Wilum Pugmire so ably demonstrates here, this sure is a purty book: http://youtu.be/dmbTvKDRpDI

>71 artturnerjr:

Thanks for posting Pugmire's report. I enjoy his video ramblings and reviews. I saw this volume in B&N again the other day. If it's still there next time, I'll pick it up.

>72 semdetenebre:

You'd dig it the most, Kenton. I'm thinking you'd particularly enjoy the final chapter, in which Joshi discusses HPL's posthumous influence on culture.

Anyone ever read Michael Cisco? I just received the new Cisco box set from Centipede and am beginning with the novel The Divinity Student. I must admit that at only 50 pages or so in, I'm pretty much stunned by this unique work of weird fiction. In fact, it put me into a near-trance state that I haven't experienced since the last time I read Machen's "The White People". There is a very strange vibe to the prose, as if you are somehow going into forbidden territory. At the beginning of the book, our eponymous protagonist gets hit by lightning, dies, is taken by strange beings to a room where his corpse is eviscerated, stuffed full of printed text from books and notebooks, sewn back up and reanimated. He is then directed to a nearby city where gets a job searching for lost words. And that's before it starts to get really strange.

> 74

Sounds great!

I remember liking part of Michael Cisco's "Machines of Concrete and Dark" in Lovecraft Unbound but being disappointed by the ending. I'll have to give him another look.

>74 semdetenebre:

There's a Cisco story ("Violence, Child of Trust") in the Black Wings: Tales of Lovecraftian Horror anthology, which is on my TBR list for this year. I'll have to remember to post my thoughts on it here when I get to that one.

Besides the Centipede set (the last volume of which is a short story collection), I have only two Cisco short stories in all of my collection - both are in Centipede's Weird Fiction Review journals. I believe Thomas Ligotti was instrumental in getting The Divinity Student published.

Here is Cisco's website and blog.

http://www.prostheticlibido.org/
http://michaelcisco.blogspot.com/

Judging by the blog, he does seem to have interests in common with Ligotti, especially with The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Cisco is no Ligotti-copycat though.

An anthology listed in his bibliography looks interesting: The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases.

I just picked up Ghouls of the Miskatonic, an Arkham Horror (game)-based novel. I don't play Arkham Horror, and I don't have any plans to do so, given the money/time/space overhead required. But I've been enjoying its smaller-scale spinoff game Elder Sign, and I thought I'd try out some fiction based in that "universe."

Deleted by author.

Recently picked up a couple of Lovecraftian paberbacks (The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions and The Watchers Out of Time) for a quarter apiece as well as a big beast of a hardback reference book called Twentieth Century Science Fiction Writers for a buck at my library's used bookstore. Man, I love that place. :)

>81 artturnerjr: I'm envious of the Twentieth Century Science Fiction Writers purchase.

>82 RandyStafford:

Yeah, it's a pretty neat book. I'm appreciative of the fact that it discusses a lot of authors that don't often get talked about in books like this (HPL, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, E.M. Forster, etc.).

Deleted by author.

Picked up a copy of The Keep (F. Paul Wilson) for a quarter today - woo-hoo!

>85 artturnerjr:

Finally got around to actually opening up said F. Paul Wilson book; the Acknowledgments section reads, in part:

The author also wishes to acknowledge an obvious debt to Howard Philips Lovecraft, Robert Ervin Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith.

I'm interested, I'm interested... 8)

I just picked up the Alan Moore League spinoff Nemo: Heart of Ice, which hit stores this week. I haven't read it yet, but my Other Reader tackled it as soon as I got it across the threshold, and she reports that it is a fairly satisfying synthesis of Jules Verne and HPL, though some parts seem underdeveloped.

I just picked up a copy of a book that I didn't know existed (until I saw it in the local independent bookshop). It is called Belmont Castle and was written and published by Theobald Wolfe Tone (Irish revolutionary), Richard Jebb and John Radcliffe in 1790. Apparently two copies of the book were found in Wolfe Tone's possession when he was arrested in 1798.

It is described as an amusing mock-Gothic novel...satirising the lives of several prominent figures of the Anglo-Irish establishment....

This promises to be wonderful from a number of angles: the mock-Gothic story itself; socio-political life in Ireland at a very turbulant time in Irish history; linkages to the local history of the village of Lucan where I live, and the glimpse of a side of Wolfe Tone's life that I never knew about before today. This will be read soon.

Oh, also: Last weekend I was delighted to find a cheap used copy of the recent Arkham Horror novel Lies of Solace with the Elder Sign promo card order page intact. I got Conan the Valiant in the same purchase, about $5 for both.

>88 paradoxosalpha:

LOL - welcome to the PA household, in which domestic squabbles are most often precipitated by a disagreement concerning who gets to read the new Alan Moore comic first. :D

I just picked up (for $4) a lovely early-1990s hardcover Book-of-the-Month Club edition of Blackwood's Tales of the Mysterious and Macabre, which to my delighted surprise, includes none of the half-dozen or so Blackwood stories I've already read.

>77 artturnerjr:

Read the Michael Cisco story that I was talking about back in January ("Violence, Child of Trust"). It's about ***spoilers ahead*** three brothers who are involved in some sort of human sacrifice of women ***end spoilers***. It's told from three different points of view and you're supposed to piece together what's going on from these accounts. Heavy on the ambiguity. I thought it was interesting although not necessarily 100% satisfying. I'd be up for reading something else by the author just because he's clearly not just another Derlethesque pastiche-monger and is interested in formal experimentation in a genre fiction format, which is something that I often find fascinating (and find examples of too infrequently).

>94 artturnerjr:

Centipede just released a 5-volume Cisco set, including his first novel The Divinity Student which is an extremely strange yet enjoyable excursion into surrealistic weird fiction. I think you can find older TPB editions online, but I'm not sure about pricing. I'll be reading Cisco's The Golem next.

more in the way of recent acquisitions: I just stumbled on a number of old L.W. Currey catalogs. The larger ones have 5000 to 9000 entries and are filled with excellent information regarding editions, etc. Great covers on most of them - Bok, Finlay, etc. There is an Arkham House list, a "SF, Utopian, Fantasy & Horror 1705-1938" catalog and one "reference guide" catalog along with a number of smaller catalogs. Weird Tradition members with interest can have them for the asking. Just let me know if you want more info or are interested in having some (if you want enough I might ask you to help with shipping) - first come, first served

cheers, scott

On the way: Tarzan and the Valley of Gold by none other than Fritz Leiber!

Scored a nice hardcover illustrated copy of Bulfinch's Mythology, in what I am assuming is an unabridged edition (it's 957 pp. long), for a buck yesterday. Not weird per se, although part of what made me want to get it was reading in H.P. Lovecraft: Nightmare Countries how it was HPL's gateway into ancient Greco-Roman culture as a child.

Just ordered Cthulhu's Reign and Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's graphic novel From Hell. They should arrive next week. 8)

Just scored a copy of the new Arcane Wisdom edition The Stuff Of Dreams: The Weird Stories of Edward Lucas White from the estimable Mr. Joshi. He might have a few copies left as of today.

http://www.stjoshi.org/news.html

I just got a copy of Meyrink's Walpurgisnacht in today's mail. I think my Other Reader is going to beat me to it, because I've got several others on deck.

>100 semdetenebre:

Did you ask him to sign it for you, Kenton?

>102 artturnerjr:

I think it was already flat-signed, but I did mention it!

I have not been as active in this group as I had hoped but I am skulking in the background and enjoying the discussions and debates. I am also in awe of the effort invested in establishing reading lists and have been using these lists to direct my "Weird" reading, albeit at a different pace from the main contributors.

I have taken the opportunity of my acquiring The Weird compendium of stories to post in this thread and let people know I have not gone away.

I'm a little sheepish about mentioning recent purchases because it takes me so long to get around to reading them, but I enjoyed the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society's latest pastiche '30's radio adaptation, 'Dark Adventure Radio Theatre presents H. P. Lovecraft's "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward"'.

>105 housefulofpaper: No need to be sheepish.

The time I get around to reading a title I've acquired bears little relationship to when I got it. Sometimes it's that week. Sometimes it's 30 years.

Alright then,

Maurice Level - Tales of the Grand Guignol (2nd edition from Centipede Press)
Rhys Hughes - Tallest Tales
D. P. Watt - An Emporium of Automata (both from Eibonvale Press - print-on-demand hardbacks, I notice)
Edgar Allan Poe - Poetry & Tales - the Library of America edition, which cost about £30 from Foyles bookshop in London.
Helen Grant - The Sea Change and other stories (from Dublin's Swan River Press)
Leigh Brackett- Black Amazon of Mars and other stories from the pulps (to be exact, two other stories)
Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill - Nemo: Heart of Ice
Ghost Stories of E. F. Benson

A borderline case: Katherine M. Briggs - Folk Tales of Britain in 6 volumes from the Folio Society (who have ramped up their 'weird fiction" in the last few years, including an edition of Gustav Meyrink's The Golem.

>104 pgmcc:

I am also in awe of the effort invested in establishing reading lists and have been using these lists to direct my "Weird" reading, albeit at a different pace from the main contributors.

I think it's something we all have a lot of fun doing or we wouldn't be doing it. Speaking for myself, it's also been a tremendous learning experience. 8)

>105 housefulofpaper:

There are three books that I mentioned in my first post on this thread (#7, made back in November of '11). Of the three, I have not read two of them; the other one I had read previously. In other words, don't feel bad. :)

Out of 26 (!) books that I've admitted to acquiring over the course of this thread, I've read only eight of them in their entirety, and I've read in three others. I've read neither of the two I mentioned in post #2.

Since one of my favorite local used book stores was open today (and I just got paid), I went on a minor SF/weird fic paperback buying spree and picked up the following titles:

Night of Light - Farmer
Alien (novelization) - Alan Dean Foster
Conjure Wife - Leiber
Man Plus - Pohl
Nightwings - Silverberg
The Hunger - Strieber

Which edition of Conjure Wife?

>111 semdetenebre:

It's an old (1968) mass market paperback - 60 cent cover price - from Award Books. I've added it manually and chosen the correct cover image so if you click on the link above you should see the correct image and info.

The link goes to my 1977 edition. Must be because I'm logged in. No matter - the 1968 one has the very traditional gothic cover, does it not? Jeff Jones? It's an odd choice, since Leiber's novel is thoroughly modern. I'd say it's his second best novel overall, right after OLoD.

Yeah - definitely going for the gothic romance vibe with this edition - cover blurb reads (in part) "AN AWARD NOVEL OF GOTHIC HORROR". No artist ID given but it does indeed resemble Jones' work.

Just ordered the new Laird Barron collection, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All.

Masters of the Weird Tale: Algernon Blackwood from Centipede Press. That's got to be my last extravagance for a good long while.

>113 semdetenebre:

Yeah, it's Jones:

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?281823

>116 housefulofpaper:

I've been so very, very tempted by that one, especially since Jared noted that it's on the verge of selling out, and I don't have a Blackwood volume in my collection.

> 118

I think the last time I looked, the website was showing this as sold out. It was Jared's email saying there were only 16 left that kicked me into ordering.

House of Stratus brought out some Blackwood volumes in paperback about 10 years ago, but I don't see them on their website now. They were digitally printed - they actually look like bound-up photocopies. To be fair the actual presswork - if the term can be allowed - was crisp and I don't remember any typos.

There is a selection currently in print from Penguin Classics, edited by S. T. Joshi.

The Arkham House edition of The Green Round by Arthur Machen.

The Complete John Thunstone by Manly Wade Wellman.

And a paperback I picked up second hand a few years ago turns out to consist of reprints from Weird Tales: Kurt Singer's Second Ghost Omnibus.

While I'm waiting for the new Laird Barron collection, I picked this one up. The very idea is so weird that it makes perfect sense: Doc Savage: Skull Island by Will Murray. Yep - that Skull Island.

>121 semdetenebre:

Just found out that Night Shade Books is possibly in the process of being sold, or some such. It has affected the scheduled 4/2/13 release date of Barron's book, which is now in limbo! I hope it's very temporary, but one never knows. For now, I'll let my Amazon preorder stand and keep my fingers crossed.

http://imago1.livejournal.com/

ETA

http://io9.com/night-shade-books-would-be-owners-on-their-controversi-470910101

>121 semdetenebre:

A Doc Savage/King Kong crossover? Sounds intriguingly Philip Jose Farmeresque. The author has also done a fair amount of weird fiction scholarship, iirc, so it should be interesting to see how those influences come together. 8)

>122 semdetenebre:

Hmmm. One of my Facebook friends works for Night Shade; I should swing over there and see if he has anything to say about this.

I picked up a copy of The Fifth Pan Book of Horror Stories from the Reading Oxfam Bookshop. It includes a Jules de Grandin story and "The Spider" by Basil Copper.

>123 artturnerjr: Murray has done a couple of decent additions to the Cthulhu Mythos. I keep meaning to return to Doc Savage and see how Murray does it. That might be the title to start with.

Skull Island is reviewed at http://www.sfsignal.com/?s=%22will+Murray%22.

I've heard that Murray's Doc Savage books aren't bad at all. Also, unlike the average short Lester Dent Doc pulp-novel, Doc Savage: Skull Island comes in at nearly 400 pages! I won't be able to get to this one right away, but it's near the top of the pile!

Today's acquisitions - hardcover copies of The Book of Skaith:



...and (speaking of Farmer) To Your Scattered Bodies Go:



Total cost: two dollars. 8)

Thanks to recommendations from Art and paradoxosalpha (and an Amazon gift card), I've just ordered Alan Moore's Neonomicon and Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy.

>129 semdetenebre:

Sweet! Let us know what you think.

Another visit to the Oxfam bookshop and I came away with two paperbacks:

Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles. Of course I already had a copy, only it's titled The Silver Locusts and the selection of stories making up the book is slightly different.

A novelisation of The Bride of Frankenstein by "Carl Dreadstone" (Ramsey Campbell).

I have the Silver Locusts, too - I believe it's a British edition and contains some leftovers from Dark Carnival. I think - I haven't cracked it open in a while.

>131 housefulofpaper:

I wouldn't mind having that Campbell adaptation in my collection - nice find!

I just ordered Who Goes There: The Novella that Formed the Basis of "The Thing", complete with a never-produced screenplay by William F. Nolan.

> 132

It shouldn't be as different as that.

Mike Ashley, in an article in the now-defunct Book and Magazine Collector (not to be confused with The Magazine Collector, which is still going) set out the differences between the first US and the first UK edition (published by Rupert Hart-Davis in September 1951):

"Following feedback from readers he {Bradbury} had decided that the story "Usher II" was out of place and disrupted the storyline. He cut the story, revised the bridging material and added "The Fire Balloons", a story he had always planned to include but had cut at the last moment."

Picked up a used copy of Daphne du Maurier's short story collection Don't Look Now (1971 Doubleday hardcover - not the NYRB collection with the same title) for a buck, thus enabling me to read our upcoming du Maurier Deep Ones selection without making an extra trip to the library (not that I mind going to the library - it's just, y'know, cooler to have my own copy. :) )

Some recent weirdish book scores (all picked up on the cheap, natch):

- What Dreams May Come - Richard Matheson

- A Reader's Guide to Fantasy - Baird Searles (handy little paperback mini-encyclopedia on fantasy authors and their works - includes many of our WT favorites (HPL, REH, CAS, Poe, Dunsany, Machen, etc., along with many less well known writers) - you guys let me know if you want me to look anyone up)

- An Evil Guest - Gene Wolfe (Amazon describes this one as "Lovecraft meets Blade Runner", so I guess it fits here. I also got a copy of Wolfe's The Shadow of the Torturer, but I don't know if it does (is the Dying Earth subgenre weird fiction?))

- Magic for Beginners - Kelly Link

> 136 is the Dying Earth subgenre weird fiction?

Well, according to the description posted for this group, it is, inasmuch as Clark Ashton Smith was a pioneer of the subgenre with his Zothique.

I loved Wolfe's New Sun, by the way, and aim to re-read it someday.

>137 paradoxosalpha:

Yeah, I've been dying (haha) to read that one ever since I read Alison Flood's review of it in The Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/nov/23/the-book-of-the-new-sun-sc...

Wolfe is very much a member of the CAS Fan Club, btw; he wrote a nicely laudatory intro to the recent collection The Return of the Sorcerer: The Best of Clark Ashton Smith.

One of the local book stores must have bought the collection of a weird fiction fan.

Got Thomas Ligotti's Noctuary. I 've never seen Ligotti ever in a used book store. I suppose the fact that it was a Carrol & Graf publication probably means it's less rare.

Also got my first Centipede Press book: C. L. Moore's and Henry Kuttner's Two-Handed Engine.

>136 artturnerjr: In the days before the Internet, I got a lot of use out of Baird Searles' guides to fantasy and science fiction. He wasn't a bad book reviewer for Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine either. I remember the review he did for Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination. "I'm not going to tell you what the book's about. Just buy it."

>140 RandyStafford:

I really enjoy the one I just got and its companion volume (A Reader's Guide to Science Fiction). Even though other authors contributed to both books, there seems to be a unifying sensibility to them that makes reading them more interesting than just surfing around Wikpedia looking up different speculative fiction authors.

>139 RandyStafford:

Congrats on your first Centipede. I missed out on that Kuttner/Moore volume. Still check out the latest asking rates now and then...

Just finished Alan Moore's Neonomicon. A foul, foul work that ultimately succeeds, despite propagating exaggerated semi-truths regarding HPL himself. It was just more complicated than that. The fanboys will surely get the wrong idea!

>142 semdetenebre:

Just finished Alan Moore's Neonomicon. A foul, foul work that ultimately succeeds, despite propagating exaggerated semi-truths regarding HPL himself. It was just more complicated than that. The fanboys will surely get the wrong idea!

Yeah, it is a pretty unremittingly nasty piece of work - about as much so as Moore could make it, which is saying something; Jacen Burrows' almost hyperrealistic art is a force multiplier here, I think, so that you get something that even dyed-in-the-wool horror fans like ourselves occasionally find hard to take. The underlying thought seems to be, "'Unutterable horror', eh? Yeah, we'll give you 'unutterable horror'..."

What did you feel like he got wrong about HPL, Kenton? The stuff about his sexuality?

Just came across a pretty good piece on Neonomicon that I hadn't seen previously. The author quotes Moore as saying the series "is very black, and I’m only using ‘black’ to describe it because there isn’t a darker color.” Indeed. He (the author) suggests that a film version of Neonomicon could have been one of the movies that Alex was forced to watch in A Clockwork Orange, which I thought was pretty good.

http://www.tor.com/blogs/2013/01/the-great-alan-moore-reread-neonomicon

>143 artturnerjr:

Not that Moore was wrong, but more that he amped-up the usual complaints against Lovecraft without really intimating why the writer remains important despite them. There are the usual unhealthily-asexual-racist-who-sublimated-his-own-neuroses-into-his-fiction tropes which admittedly are the "Red Hook" springboard for Moore's entire project, but also put forth are the false ideas that he was a "bad writer" (he was a different writer, surely, but not a bad one) whose fiction is fixated on Freudian "tentacles" and "bad fish smells". Not really. It's all about the affliction of a crushing cosmic fear upon the protagonists, which I'm sure Moore knows as well as we do. It's his tale, though, and it does succeed in being one nasty piece of horror fiction once it gets past my quibbles.

One thing I'm wondering - in the story, a character claims that Lovecraft could only have sex with his clothes on. I'll have to check I Am Providence later, since I don't remember this detail being in it. Could it come from some other biographical source? Sonia Greene's memoir, perhaps? Moore could also have exaggerated this issue, of course.

>145 semdetenebre:

the false ideas that he was a "bad writer" (he was a different writer, surely, but not a bad one)

Well, you've got to remember who the characters are that are calling him a bad writer. I think perhaps that that's Moore's commentary on the typical reaction of "mundanes" (to borrow a term from SF fandom (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mundane)) upon first encountering HPL's work, which is usually somewhere along the lines of "What the fuck is this shit?" (hell, a lot of SF/fantasy/horror fans don't seem to get him, either). Besides, Moore kind of gives the lie to the notion of HPL's lack of importance as a writer by so frequently incorporating HPL's artificial mythology into his own work (Yuggoth Cultures, The Courtyard, Neonomicon, etc.) - if he keeps at it, he's gonna be more closely associated with HPL than August Derleth!

One thing I'm wondering - in the story, one of the characters claims that Lovecraft could only have sex with his clothes on. I'll have to check I Am Providence later, since I don't remember this detail being in it. Could it come from some other biographical source? Sonia Greene's memoir, perhaps? Moore could also have exaggerated this issue, of course.

Yeah, I don't know where that came from, either. I don't recall it being in L. Sprague de Camp's Lovecraft bio. (Speaking of Joshi's stuff, did you happen to notice the copy of H.P. Lovecraft: A Life sitting on Brears' desk? I thought that was a nice touch.)

>146 artturnerjr:

While reading, I considered the idea that these are just characters who might be deliberately mouthing what would be a layman's take based on a superficial read, so I'll gladly concede that point, although Moore has mentioned the same notions in some of the limited number of interviews with him I've read.

Missed the Joshi book cameo the first time around! There was a lot of detail.

>147 semdetenebre:

Moore has mentioned the same notions in some of the limited number of interviews with him I've read.

I don't recall every reading an interview where Moore just flat-out called HPL a "bad writer"; then again, it seems like dude does an average of 1-2 lengthy interviews a week, so even though at one point I was pretty close to being completely caught up on all his interviews (back when I was I was still posting regularly on my AM obsession blog (http://decipheringhobshog.blogspot.com/)), I am way behind on them now and he may well have said that very thing and I missed it. The thing that Moore has indicated recently re: HPL that I found most troubling is that he seems to believe that he was a homophobe, which seems kind of absurd considering that two of his closest friends (Robert Barlow and Samuel Loveman) were both gay. HPL had more than his share of irrational prejudices, but homophobia wasn't one of them.

There was a lot of detail.

There's always a lot of detail in Moore's stuff. He's the only comics writer whose works I will pay full price for without hesitation, as I know that even if a piece is not his best work, it will still be (a) better than 90% of the stuff that's out there and (b) so crammed with little details that I know that I will be able to reread it with pleasure at least two or three times, catching tons of stuff that I missed on the previous go-'rounds.

>148 artturnerjr:

I didn't mean that Moore had called HPL a bad writer, just that he has pointed out the asexual, racist and, as you mention, homophobic aspects he sees in the writing.

You're right about "irrational prejudices". I'm not sure how tenaciously HPL actually held on to these after his bad experience in NYC, but besides having gay friends while there (although how clued in to that aspect Grandpa actually was is not known), he had also married a Jewish woman. Plus, let us not forget that he recanted a lot of this unsupportable junk a bit later in his life as he bent more towards accepting only the scientifically verifiable. Moore even mentions something to that effect in Neonomicon.

"Detail" - do you think that title was coming from Moore, or from the artist?

>149 semdetenebre:

"Detail" - do you think that title was coming from Moore, or from the artist?

Oh, Moore, definitely. A script of his for a twenty-page comic is apparently about the size of a small town phone book. If you're curious, pick up something like Absolute Watchmen and check out the supplemental material in the back - there are some facsimiles of Moore's original script pages that give you some idea of the staggering amount of detail he puts into them.

The Gothic Blackwell guide has just arrived in the post.

Any views on how good it is? My initial browse leaves me with a positive feeling about it. I also get the feeling that it will lead to the acquisition of many more books.

I've got hold of a copy of Weird Tales: 32 Unearthed Terrors (from a UK-based seller, so the postage wasn't too bad).

A so-so steampunk novel (the second in a series) called The Feaster from the Stars. The villain of the piece is Robert W Chambers' The King in Yellow.

H. P. Lovecraft, The Classic Horror Stories edited by Roger Luckhurst.

Some Father's Day gifts for myself: Crypt of Cthulhu #76 and Joshi's H.P. Lovecraft: Nightmare Countries.

>153 paradoxosalpha:

Some Father's Day gifts you have to get for yourself! :-)

Mine was Told by the Dead by Ramsey Campbell

Father's Day gifts for myself? What a good idea! :)

Happy Father's Day, guys. Hope you enjoy Nightmare Countries as much as I did, PA. 8)

Picked up S.T. Joshi's H.P. Lovecraft: Starmont Reader's Guide 13 at one of my library's used book sales; apparently (and rather surprisingly, considering the number of Lovecraftians on this sight) I have the only copy on LT!

156 > Actually, seems a number other users have it to, but its editions are mixed up with those of Joshi's H. P. Lovecraft: A Life. Some combiner love appears to be called for.

>157 AndreasJ:

Yeah, that's what the touchstone links to, too. Hey, combiners - where you at? :D

158 > I've made a stab at it. Feel free to tell me if anything seems still wrong or left hanging.

I snagged some more Crypt of Cthulhu issues today: #22, 23, and 28, completing my 1984 set.

>159 AndreasJ:

Nope - looks good. Thanks! :)

Just received Alice Walks by Michael Aronovitz. He's been making something of a name for himself lately. This non-Lovecraftian novel has an afterword by S.T. Joshi, so I assume it has some weird-tale aspects.

Not a purchase, but a working-in-a-library perk: I was just handed A New Companion to The Gothic ed. by David Punter. This one looks yummy!

I got this charming little copy of The House on the Borderland for $1 at a sidewalk sale today:

Fantastic. It is a wonderful looking copy.

I must confess to having purchased a copy and not yet having read it.

> 164

http://www.flickr.com/photos/penguinbooks/2892132266/in/set-72157607530254768/

This is the cover of my copy, from 2008. Striking, but very different.

Yesterday I snagged the trade paper collection of Haunt of Horror, Corben's comics adaptations of a bunch of Poe and Lovecraft: a new copy at 75% off cover price.

>167 paradoxosalpha:

I have the original comix of those - good stuff!

>164 paradoxosalpha:

That's a Richard M. Powers cover - nice find!

An amazon order arrived for me yesterday, including A Season in Carcosa.

ETA: Oh, and I managed to pick up a nice copy of Under the Green Star at a local shop. That one's been on my sword-and-planet wishlist for a while.

Hey! Here's another thread I haven't posted on in ages (damn, I'm glad I'm on vacation!)!

(Relatively) recent weird purchases include The Monster Book of Monsters, picked up for the low, low price of twenty-five cents primarily for its fetching Hannes Bok cover:



...and The Antarktos Cycle, purchased with the intent of reading Who Goes There? out of it for Deep Ones (nope, still haven't read it yet):



Here are the TOCs (courtesy the ISFDB):

The Monster Book of Monsters

•5 • Introduction: Here Be Monsters (The Monster Book of Monsters) • (1988) • essay by Michael O'Shaughnessy
•9 • Vault of the Beast • (1940) • novelette by A. E. van Vogt
•26 • We Never Mention Aunt Nora • (1958) • shortstory by Frederik Pohl
•33 • Last Rites • (1955) • shortstory by Charles Beaumont
•44 • And Lo! The Bird • (1950) • shortstory by Nelson S. Bond
•53 • The Black Retriever • (1958) • shortstory by Charles G. Finney
•60 • The Bird Woman • (1863) • shortstory by Henry Spicer
•62 • The Hoard of the Gibbelins • (1911) • shortstory by Lord Dunsany
•65 • Answer • (1954) • shortstory by Fredric Brown
•66 • The Painted Skin • (1895) • shortstory by P'u Sung-Ling
•69 • The Monster and the Maiden • (1964) • shortstory by Roger Zelazny
•71 • The Devil Is Not Mocked • (1943) • shortstory by Manly Wade Wellman
•77 • Puppet Show • (1962) • shortstory by Fredric Brown
•84 • At Last, the True Story of Frankenstein • (1965) • shortstory by Harry Harrison
•90 • Disturb Not My Slumbering Fair • (1978) • shortstory by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
•98 • Island of Fear • (1958) • shortstory by William Sambrot
•105 • Doctor Zombie and His Little Furry Friends • (1971) • shortstory by Robert Sheckley
•112 • The Mother of Monsters • (1974) • shortstory by Guy de Maupassant (trans. of La Mère aux monstres 1883)
•115 • The Man Who Liked Dickens • (1933) • shortstory by Evelyn Waugh
•126 • Monsters of the Pit • (1925) • shortstory by Paul S. Powers
•136 • Expendable • (1953) • shortstory by Philip K. Dick
•140 • The Demon Spell • (1894) • shortstory by Hume Nisbet
•145 • Born of Man and Woman • (1950) • shortstory by Richard Matheson
•148 • The Thing on Outer Shoal • (1947) • shortstory by P. Schuyler Miller
•156 • After King Kong Fell • {Wold Newton} • (1973) • shortstory by Philip José Farmer
•165 • The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth • (1965) • novelette by Roger Zelazny
•189 • Leprechaun • (1962) • shortstory by William Sambrot
•193 • Men of Iron • (1940) • shortstory by Guy Endore
•199 • The Lop-Eared Cat that Devoured Philadelphia • (1975) • poem by Louis Phillips
•200 • Flight Useless, Inexorable the Pursuit • (1968) • shortstory by Thomas M. Disch
•203 • Ghost V • {AAA Ace} • (1954) • shortstory by Robert Sheckley
•215 • Slime • (1953) • novelette by Joseph Payne Brennan
•231 • They Bite • (1943) • shortstory by Anthony Boucher
•239 • The Foghorn • (1951) • shortstory by Ray Bradbury (variant of The Fog Horn)
•246 • The Plant-Thing • (1925) • shortstory by R. G. Macready (variant of The Plant Thing)
•251 • The Conqueror Worm • (1843) • poem by Edgar Allan Poe
•253 • The Fools' Pope (excerpt from Notre Dame de Paris) • (1831) • shortfiction by Victor Hugo
•259 • Rex • (1934) • shortstory by Harl Vincent
•272 • Roman Remains • (1948) • shortstory by Algernon Blackwood
•278 • The Distortion Out of Space • (1934) • shortstory by Francis Flagg
•287 • Mr. Waterman • (1961) • shortstory by Peter Redgrove
•290 • The End of a Show • (1901) • shortstory by Barry Pain
•293 • Mujina • (1904) • shortstory by Lafcadio Hearn
•294 • She Only Goes Out at Night • (1956) • shortstory by William Tenn (variant of She Only Goes Out at Night . . .)
•298 • Mother of Serpents • (1936) • shortstory by Robert Bloch
•305 • Sweets to the Sweet • (1947) • shortstory by Robert Bloch
•311 • Wolves Don't Cry • (1954) • shortstory by Bruce Elliott
•319 • Looking for Something to Suck • (1969) • shortstory by R. Chetwynd-Hayes
•329 • The Professor's Teddy-Bear • (1948) • shortstory by Theodore Sturgeon
•337 • Creature of the Snows • (1960) • shortstory by William Sambrot
•344 • Lips of the Dead • (1925) • shortstory by W. J. Stamper

The Antarktos Cycle

•ix • Introduction: Lovecraft's Cosmic History • (1999) • essay by Robert M. Price
•2 • Antarktos • Fungi from Yuggoth • 15 • (1930) • poem by H. P. Lovecraft
•4 • The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket • {Pym • 1} • (1838) • novel by Edgar Allan Poe
•142 • The Greatest Adventure • (1929) • novel by John Taine
•283 • At the Mountains of Madness • {Cthulhu Mythos} • (1936) • novel by H. P. Lovecraft
•370 • The Tomb of the Old Ones • (1999) • novella by Colin Wilson
•466 • At the Mountains of Murkiness • (1940) • shortstory by Arthur C. Clarke
•475 • The Thing from Another World • (1938) • novella by John W. Campbell, Jr.
•524 • The Brooding City • (1990) • shortstory by John S. Glasby
•539 • The Dreaming City • (1987) • shortstory by Roger Johnson

I've always taken the week of Halloween off from work just to revel in Halloweeny things. I've started building up this year's goody package a little early. It includes:

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Macabre Tales
Gorgo (1961) on blu-ray.
The Uninvited (1944) on blu-ray (from Criterion, in Oct.)
Bob Powell's Terror

Bob Powell was an amazing horror artist in the 1950's. He's featured in the second volume of the Craig Yoe "Chilling Archives of Horror Comics" series for IDW. The first was Dick Briefer's Frankenstein. These full-color hardcovers are beautifully designed and inexpensive.

I picked up a used copy of The Woman Between the Worlds yesterday. It was on my wishlist, and I'm not sure how it got there. It does promise some weird, though.

As I mentioned over on the Sword & Planet thread, a Half Price Books store (http://www.hpb.com/) opened in my city recently and I (predictably) went nuts scooping up book bargains. Here are some of the titles (weird and otherwise) I picked up on my last couple of visits:

Just After Sunset - Stephen King
Full Dark, No Stars - King
Dhalgren - Samuel R. Delany
Pirates of Venus - ERB
Darker Than You Think - Jack Williamson
The Coming of the Horseclans - Robert Adams
The Lost Work of Stephen King - Stephen J. Spignesi
Three Prophetic Science Fiction Novels of H.G. Wells
Consider Phlebas - Iain M. Banks
The Book of Fritz Leiber
Hero of Dreams - Brian Lumley
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea - Jules Verne
Fast Food Nation - Eric Schlosser
The Mist of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley

The most expensive of any of these were the King books (both hardcovers), which were $3 each. As you can imagine, I was quite pleased with my purchases. :)

I recently took delivery of copies of a couple of books that had been on my wishlist for a while: Rehearsals for Oblivion and Free Companions.

Bought the massive Delphi Works Machen collection in ebook form for $2.99 from Amazon. It's huge, has almost everything except one story still in copyright and also is missing "an obscure short story collection". It seems well-laid out with Machen's autobiography and some non-fiction included as well as a piece of Vincent Starret criticisms. It's even got color photos and cover reproductions.

#173 arttrunerjr

"When the Sleeper Awakes" in you H.G. Wells volume is excellent from a prophecy viewpoint. It is probably one of the few books in which are more realistic and are based on real science. He does get some things very wrong (such as manpowered airplanes), and the telephone would have just been invented when he wrote the book, but he predicts video recorders (using wire instead of tape, which has been used for audio recording) and video conferencing. When I read it I made a list of about a dozen things that have come to pass since he wrote this novel.

On the political side, many of the points he made would be valid today and would be music to the ears of anti-globalization and "occupy" protesters. Also, his self-confessed racism comes out in several ways throughout the book.

Consider Plebas was the first Banks book I read and it got me hooked. My impression of it was that it was a ripping yarn; just a great story. Nothing philosophical or deep, unlike some of his later books. Just good fun.

I loved 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea when I read it decades ago. Verne always entertains me.

Enjoy getting through that pile of books.

> 173

The books that stand out for me in that list are Dhalgren (which I was bowled over by about 25 years ago and have bought for the purpose of re-reading) and Darker Than You Think (see my review).

Over the weekend, a pal gave me a copy of the Dover edition of J. Sheridan Le Fanu's Wylder's Hand. Sounds pretty gothic. Don't know much about this one.

>176 pgmcc:

"When the Sleeper Awakes"

I've read several of Wells' novels over the course of the last few years and have enjoyed all of them. Not only could the man tell a great yarn - I find that his worldview harmonizes quite nicely with my own as well.

Consider Plebas

In the wake of Mr. Banks' untimely death, that was the title of his that was most frequently recommended to me. I really want ot read his book The Wasp Factory as well.

It's nice to have the Verne, too. I've really been neglecting him.

>177 paradoxosalpha:

Dhalgren

Looking forward to that one, too, although it looks to be quite the project; it'll probably be sitting on the back-burner for a couple of years, I'm afraid.

Darker Than You Think

Fascinating review as always, PA. Actually, it just reminded me of an occult-oriented lyric that I recently came across that I will message to you presently. :)

Picked up trade paperbacks of Wordsworth Editions' The Loved Dead & Other Stories (HPL - ISBN: 978-1-84022-622-5) and Harlan Ellison's Strange Wine for 3 bucks each (Half Price Books again).

The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 24 contains many top-notch stories by such authors as Gemma Files, Evangeline Walton and Ramsey Campbell, but there are two that I have to single out. First is Simon Kurt Unsworth's "The Cotswold Olympicks", reminiscent certainly of The Wicker Man but more than able to stand on its own as an extremely dark piece of weird fiction. Also on hand is Reggie Oliver's M.R. James tribute, "Between Four Yews", which is a sort of prequel to "A School Story". This one contains some outright jolts.

Both authors are now on my watch-for list.

I'm going to try out the new issue of Dead Reckonings from Hippocampus Press with this table of contents, $7.50 with free shipping seems to be a pretty good bet.

http://www.hippocampuspress.com/journals/dead-reckonings/dead-reckonings-no.-13

DEAD RECKONINGS is great. High level of critical acumen there.

Picked up The Monk by Matthew Lewis (trade paperback from Wordsworth Editions - not the fancy-schmancy one that Kenton just got (j/k)) and The Best of H.P. Lovecraft (Christmas gift for big brother)(both at Half Price Books) and Anno Dracula (at library used book sale).

I just received a holiday sale order from Fantasy Flight Games, in which I picked up Dance of the Damned and Feeders from Within new for $3 each. Murky Cthulhumas to me.

Santa was very, very good to me.

I received copies of books by two writers of the weird about whom I've heard very, very good things. First we have North American Lake Monsters by Nathan Ballingrud. Next up is The Wide, Carnivorous Sky by John Langan.

Not so Weird but really, well, weird is Swallow: Foreign Bodies, Their Ingestion, and the Curious Doctor Who Extracted Them by Mary Cappello, which is based on a permanent exhibit at the Mutter Museum at the College of Physicians in Philadelphia (go there, if you are ever in town - trust me). People have swallowed the darndest things!

I also purchased for myself the Ballantine pb 1st of E.R. Eddison's fantasy novel The Worm Ouroborous. Witchland, Demonland, Goblins, ghouls... how could I have resisted this long? It's written in a really strange, archaic-yet-hypnotic, Icelandic Sagas style. I'm heartily enjoying it.

Managed to snag the 2-vol. Essential Solitude: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth from the estimable S.T. Joshi. In light of our recent Derlethian discussions here on the WT, it should make for some very interesting reading.

Follow http://www.stjoshi.org/news.html if you don't already!

After discovering that the original UK paperback edition of The Face That Must Die, that I picked up for a couple of pounds in a charity bookshop, is expurgated, I looked about for another edition.

The Book Depository (it used to be a competitor to Amazon, then Amazon bought it) had a copy of the Millipede Press paperback from 2006. I hadn't even known about Millipede Press (obviously I've worked out the connection to Centipede Press!)

Brian J. Showers has been banging the drum for J. Sheridan Le Fanu in this, his 200th anniversary year. I was prompted to buy the Ash Tree Press three-volume collection of his ghost stories (unfortunately I didn't realise they were still available from the publisher and got them from various sources via AbeBooks).

ETA - banging the drum on Facebook, I meant to say...

>187 semdetenebre:

Really enjoyed the first volume of Essential Solitude: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth. Derleth was very young when he began writing to HPL, so there is a definite student-mentor dynamic here. Derleth proves to be quite precocious, however, soon out-publishing and possibly out-reading Grandpa. Unlike some of HPL's correspondence, most of the letters here are rather short. It's almost like reading back-and-forth email correspondence! The majority of Derleth's missives have been lost, but you can still gauge their contents by HPL's replies. Highlights include HPL's descriptions of his travels up and down the east coast (incl. Canada), an in-depth argument on the existence (or not) of the supernatural, and titles of books loaned back and forth between a number of authors, including HPL, CAS, FBL and Derleth. Also enjoyable are humorous complaints about Farnsworth Wright and the weakness of various issues of Weird Tales!

Picked up Shadow Publishing's recent budget reissue of L.A. Lewis' Tales of the Grotesque - a legendary collectors item, both in the original thirties edition in the 'Creeps' series, and the Ghost Story Press reissue. Truly odd stuff, with a gleeful gruesomeness reminiscent of early HPL. The Bertie Woosterisms in the contemporary slang used by the narrators gives it additional spin. On balance, I'm glad I didn't shell out for a rare hardback, but it's a lot of fun.

Just ordered The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, a recreation of the early 1900's Endymion edition. Contains over 100 b&w plates by Heath Robinson.

Picked up a copy of an interesting-looking August Derleth omnibus simply entitled The Cthulhu Mythos; the dust jacket copy states that it "collects for the first time all of Derleth's noncollaborative stories set in Lovecraft's universe". While I'm not the biggest fan of what I've already read of Derleth's Mythos fiction (his take on the artificial mythological seeming to me to be crassly antithetical to HPL's), I admit that it's something I'm probably gonna want to research further at a later date, so for 3 bucks I couldn't pass this volume up.

Oh yeah! I like the cover, too:

> 192

I would expect that book to have all of The Trail of Cthulhu included, based on the description. What I liked about that book, Lumley does better.

>193 paradoxosalpha:

That's correct; it has the entire contents of The Mask of Cthulhu, The Trail of Cthulhu, and various other non-collaborative stories ("The Dweller in Darkness", "Beyond the Threshold", etc.).

Here's the ISFDB entry on it:

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?186509

>192 artturnerjr:

Art - that seems to be a Barnes and Noble edition. Did you pick it up at the store or elsewhere?

I just received my copy of The House of the Octopus, which looks like a fine little morsel. Jason Colavito has edited a collection of old anthropological papers about a martial octopus cult in the South Pacific. There's no evidence that HPL knew about this lore at all, but the parallels are eerie, to say the least. I expect to have read it (with review to follow) in the next week or two.

If I like this one, I may just go on to Colavito's latest work in this vein, the more substantial Cthulhu in World Mythology.

>195 semdetenebre:

No - got it at my local Half Price Books, actually:

http://www.hpb.com/222/

>196 paradoxosalpha:

That sounds like a really interesting book. I look forward to your review.

I purchased a copy of Horror! by Drake Douglas yesterday. Mostly concerned with monster films and legends, but with appendices on (appreciations of) Lovecraft and Machen, who were not as widely read at the time (mid-1960's). One online review suggests the book is riddled with errors, but I haven't read enough of it to know what they might be. It's a pretty entertaining book. Drake Douglas is apparently a "pseudonym of a gentleman who has been deeply involved in horror throughout his life..."

Picked up a copy of Greg Bear's novel City at the End of Time for 2 bucks at my beloved Half Price Books. Marketed as science fiction (as Bear's work generally is), it seems to me that there is a great deal here of interest to weird fiction fans. Note, for example, the following from Tony Keen's review of the book at the Strange Horizons website (http://www.strangehorizons.com/reviews/2009/02/city_at_the_end.shtml):

At a recent British Science Fiction Association meeting, John Clute commented that City at the End of Time is an example of a novel in dialogue with past works of SF. He has singled out The Night Land (1912) by William Hope Hodgson as one such work, and the parallels are obvious. Both novels involve dreaming of the future, and a city that is barely holding out against the forces of chaos that surround it. But there are many other resonances with past SF works in Bear's novel. The notion of dreamers swapping personalities through time can be found in H. P. Lovecraft's "The Shadow Out of Time" (1936, and itself influenced by The Night Land, which Lovecraft admired), and a similar idea features in Iain Banks's Walking on Glass (1985). Kalpa reminded me of the end of time as depicted by Neil Gaiman in The Books of Magic (1989), whilst echoes can be seen of the eschatology of Michael Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time (1981), or the works of Stephen Baxter or Olaf Stapledon, in whose Last and First Men (1930) people from the end of humanity mentally contact people of the time of writing. Some of the groups seen in the contemporary sections, including what is close to being a coven of witches, remind me of those forces maneuvering in the final season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

>196 paradoxosalpha:

I've read and reviewed The House of the Octopus, as promised.

> 196, 201

Thanks for the tip. I just snagged an ePub copy from lulu.com for $1.25.

I was wondering if these papers were dubious because they were written by the 'discoverer' of Mu, but that was James Churchward. William B. Churchward is the author of Blackbirding in the South Pacific and My Consulate in Samoa and appears to be legit.

>201 paradoxosalpha:

That is absolutely fascinating. Adherents to Jung's theory of the collective unconscious would have an field day with this, I'd imagine.

I've got to recommend John Langan's The Wide Carnivorous Sky to WT members. Langan is usually mentioned in conjunction with Laird Barron, Nathan Balingrud and a handful of others as the cream of the crop of new weird writers, and rightly so. This volume of nine short stories (most of them novellas, really) has only two misfires, in my opinion. The others are home-runs, especially "Technicolor", which magnificently avoids being a mere Poe "Masque of the Red Death" pastiche and works on its own metatextual terms. I think I might nominate that one for a Deep Ones read this summer. "Shallows" is an incredibly somber and affecting tale from the collection Cthulhu's Reign. "City of the Dog" takes on HPL's ghouls. Langan also examines the zombie and werewolf motifs to startling effect. His re-using Thornton Wilder's "Our Town" to portray a zombie apocalypse in "How the Day Runs Down" goes way beyond gimmickry and revivifies a burned-out sub-genre.

>204 semdetenebre: "Technicolor" would make a fine Deep One study.

The May/June 2014 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction contains a nice little Mythos tale by Jonathan Andrew Sheen called "The Shadow in the Corner".

Picked up a new paperback edition of Robert W. Chambers' The King in Yellow at Barnes & Noble yesterday; this is the edition released through B & N's Library of Essential Reading series with an introduction, appendix, endnotes, and suggestions for further reading prepared by S.T. Joshi, apparently as something of a "tie-in" edition to HBO's True Detective series (discussed here: http://www.librarything.com/topic/170082). This is a very handsome little paperback, and at $9.95 a pop, I couldn't resist picking up a copy. :)

>207 artturnerjr: That looks interesting art. Maybe I'll have to pick up a copy to replace my Project Gutenburg edition.

>208 RandyStafford:

Another thing that I factored in when considering my purchase is that I didn't own this as an actual print book. I had had the Wordsworth Tales of Mystery & the Supernatural edition (ISBN: 978-1840226447) on my Amazon wish list, but this looks to be a superior edition.

>207 artturnerjr:

Just picked up a copy. Looks like it's a bit more complete than my old Ace paperback, plus with the Joshi intro, it's a sure bet.

Michael Dirda essay on The King in Yellow:

http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Library-Without-Walls/Robert-W-Chambers-Se...

I've been using an influx of royalties to purchase Arkham House editions of Clark Ashton Smith. I have those five wonderful CAS volumes of his Collected Fantasies, but there is something sweet about holding those old AH editions and reading Smith as he was publish'd by Arkham House. This week I got TALES OF SCIENCE AND SORCERY and GENIUS LOCI AND OTHER TALES--beautiful mint editions for good prices on Amazon. Next I'm getting ABOMINATIONS OF YONDO.

I'll be going to S. T. Joshi's Memorial Day Cook-Out on Sunday, and I am going to borrow his galley of THE NEW ANNOTATED H. P. LOVECRAFT. Les Klinger sent me an email yesterday saying that he is writing to Norton to request I be sent my own copy, but I simply cannot wait. I wanna see it NOW, and then shew it in detail on YouTube. Some have express'd worry about the editor's approach to Notes & Annotations, and they will not be pleas'd:

"I do expect that my approach in likely to play the Sherlockian 'game' with Lovecraft's stories, which may not please everyone. The 'game' is to adopt the gentle fiction that Lovecraft was recording the truth in his stories, that these are historical documents, and therefore it is my job to verify or correct the historical details. For example, where is Arkham? Kingsport? What can we state factually about the Miskatonic River or Miskatonic University? What evidence is there of the case of Charles Dexter Ward? I hope that this approach will make the book original, enjoyable, but wholly accurate--I never make up any facts."

Hmmm, I do not see that this is the best approach for what I assumed would be a Critical Edition of Lovecraft's tales. But I know I'll enjoy it nonetheless.

>212 wilum:

I had mixed feelings about Klinger's 'Sherlockian game' approach to his annotated Dracula. On one hand it made me think about many small details that I'd simply glossed over or failed to notice on previous readings of Stoker's novel, but on the other it sort of undercut Stoker's original intentions and told a different story. There was a constant threat that the familiar tale would be reduced to a mere cover story for the "real" one.

On the matter of CAS editions, have you seen the Pegana Press Poseidonis Cycle I: The Age of Malygris. It's letterpress and, in fact, pretty much hand-made (there are photos on presses' website of copies being bound).

>212 wilum:

Arkham House editions of CAS? That's fantastic! I just tried to snag a signed copy of Searchers After Horror from S.T., but alas, he had none left. Drat. As if to make up for it, I've just received the brand-new Arcane Wisdom edition of Fritz Leiber's Adept's Gambit: The Original Version. It features an intro by S.T. Joshi (who also signed and numbered it), along with the complete text of a long letter by HPL, in which he comments extensively on the tale. The back cover states:

For decades, it was believed that this version - which contains small but significant references to Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos - was lost. But the manuscript has recently resurfaced and it is now being published for the first time. This version differs radically from the later version published in Night's Black Agents (1947), and represents a landmark in the development of Leiber's fantasy career. As the first Fafhrd and Gray Mouser narrative, it will be of consuming interest to all devotees of Leiber's work.

>212 wilum:

Regarding The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft: I am very much looking forward to reading Alan Moore's introduction to that one. Do you know if Klinger is using S.T.'s corrected texts for it?

From Klinger's blog: "This will be another lavish edition, with a brilliant introduction by Alan Moore (who has his own Lovecraft project coming soon, a graphic novel called PROVIDENCE, featuring H. P. Lovecraft as the protagonist) coming soon. ... Unlike the previous annotated editions of some of Lovecraft's stories, edited by the estimable S. T. Joshi, I've attempted to show the range of Lovecraftian scholarship and focus on explanatory material rather than biographical details. With his assistance, I've used Joshi's carefully edited texts, rather than other slipshod sources." I have the book on pre-order at Amazon, but just got an email from Les saying that he wrote to Norton to have a copy of the galley sent to me.

I've also just ordered THE DUNWICH HORROR volume of PS Publishing's LOVECRAFT ILLUSTRATED series, and that should reach me any day nigh. I will be getting free copies of all nine volumes in the series since I wrote four original essays for various volumes, but I wanted an extra of ye DUNWICH to give to Stan Sargent, who wrote the classic story, "The Black Brat of Dunwich." Stan just told me that he is now working on a sequel to "Brat."

>216 wilum:

That's fantastic. Many thanks for the info. :)

I'm so looking forward to Moore's Providence. Of course, I loved Neonomicon, though I can see how it put people off!

>214 semdetenebre:

The Arcane Wisdom edition of Fritz Leiber's Adept's Gambit; The Original Version is fantastic. It's a small volume with excellent notes by S.T. Joshi covering both the story and HPL's long letter to Leiber discussing it. Lovecraft is in rare form here, providing an astonishing amount of detail about the Greco-Roman world, suggesting correct Greek and Latin usages and spellings of historical names and places, and even providing a recommended reading list containing some really obscure historical volumes that the younger writer could find or possibly even borrow from Lovecraft himself in order to research future stories. Adept's Gambit itself is a really classic tale, the first to feature Fafhrd and Grey Mouser. It contains some surprisingly weird sexuality along with the scares (it is Leiber after all), and is carried brilliantly along by some well-placed, sophisticated humor.

https://tinyurl.com/mn4n69r

>219 semdetenebre:

Nice-looking book!

***

Weird-related: finally picked up a copy of Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary, which I've wanted forever. 8)

> 220

I have an old Dover edition of The Devil's Dictionary (and also Lucifer's Lexicon), but I was sorely tempted just this weekend by a copy of the Joshi-edited Devil's Dictionary Unabridged!

>221 paradoxosalpha:

Yeah, that's the one I got (the Dover edition):

Nah, mine's an old Dover edition, that predates the "Dover Thrifts":

>223 paradoxosalpha:

Groovy! Love the Mencken blurb (which is on my copy, too, but on the back). 8)

A fine Father's Day - I've received The Assaults of Chaos, S.T. Joshi's first novel, featuring HPL.

Also, since they seem to come up so often in DEEP ONES nominations, I've finally ordered The Weird a Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories and New Cthulhu: the Recent Weird.

>225 semdetenebre:

The Assaults of Chaos

You'll have to give us your thoughts on that one once you've had a chance to read it, Kenton.

***

I read a interview with Laird Barron a while back (at http://shirleyjacksonawards.blogspot.com/2008/05/charles-tan-interview-with-lair... where he was talking about his literary influences. I found the following passage intriguing:

I'm... particularly fond of Peter Hoeg's Smilla's Sense of Snow. I recall closing the book at the end and staring out the window, thinking, How did he get away with that? Here we have an elegant, yet thoroughly by the numbers mystery-thriller that suddenly turns on you and smacks you across the face with a finale straight out of Lovecraft's playbook. I decided right there this was the kind of thing I'd like to do.

I resolved to keep an eye out for the title after reading that. Went garage saling yesterday, and lo and behold! there's a paperback copy on sale at the last one I went to for a dollar. Looking forward to getting into it.

> 226 Thanks for that. I've had a copy of Smilla sitting around since it came out. This will give me a kick in the pants to read it as I should have.

Vintage bookseller L.W. Curry is having a $10 sale. If you do a search such as "horror" or "Lovecraft", you might find something of interest!

https://tinyurl.com/p87k4b7

well worth combing thru the whole list
: 0

> 228 There are some fine listings there, but I think I will pass on this one:

Lovecraft, Howard Phillips.
LETTERS FROM H. P. LOVECRAFT TO FRANK BELKNAP LONG, 1920-1931. 52 letters and three letter fragments, totaling 509 pages, of which approximately 80% is unpublished. Seven of the letters are entirely unpublished and one fragment is probably unpublished. Extracts, some very brief, from 47 of the letters are published in SELECTED LETTERS, volumes I, II and III.

(#108246)
More Details
Add to Cart
Price: $150,000.00

>230 bertilak:

Wow!

>230 bertilak:

Curry has some amazing rare books and related items, that's for sure! You might want to limit your search to the $10 sale. :-D

I picked up one Ramsey Campbell and two scholarly HPL volumes. I could swear that there are some there today that weren't there yesterday.

ETA

"80 % unpublished". Egads!

Just started The Jennifer Morgue, a "Laundry Files' novel by Charles Stross. More darkly humorous Lovecraftian techno-geekery, although this one might be a bit more Bondian in nature than the first novel.

>233 semdetenebre:

Yes, The Jennifer Morgue is all about the Bond (and it's the only Laundry Files book that is so). I just recently finished The Rhesus Chart, which is the 2014 installment.

>234 paradoxosalpha:

And I have you to thank for setting me on to this series. It took me a while, but I'm sure enjoying them now!

I visited a newly-opened independent bookstore near me today, and picked up two books.

Master of the Crossroads was used. I really liked the author's (Bell, not King) Doctor Sleep a lot, and this one is about the Haitian Revolution.

Cthulhu: Dark Fantasy, Horror & Supernatural Movies was remaindered. It looks like some interesting art, with text pitched well below my level of interest and prior information. I wouldn't have paid full price.

Picked up a copy of Fritz Leiber's The Dealings of Daniel Kesserich (with illustrations by Jason Van Hollander) for a quarter at my library's used book sale yesterday. 8)

>237 artturnerjr:

Nice find, Art! As you probably know from the back cover, that short novel of cosmic horror was written in the midst of Leiber's correspondence with HPL. It's a keeper, to say the least.

>238 semdetenebre:

Yeah, I'm looking forward to it.

From the L.W. Currey $10 sale, just picked up Harlan Ellison's Watching and a signed ARC of Blood Kiss by Dennis Etchison. They still have a few Lovecraft-related volumes left, as well as a nice copy of Fritz Leiber's Heroes and Horrors collection.

I have had a rather incredible string of luck finding classic weird/horror/speculative fiction titles at my local Half Price Books in the last month. Here's a few of the more interesting ones:

- The Stepford Wives
- The Book of the New Sun: Volume 1: Shadow and Claw (Gene Wolfe)
- Rosemary's Baby
- The Complete Pegāna
- The Big Time (Fritz Leiber) (I had this as an e-book, but not a print copy)
- The Dark Descent

The Stepford Wives and the Wolfe book were a buck each - everything else was $2 a pop (2 bucks for a copy of The Dark Descent? Shut the front door!).

Does anybody else have one of these places near them? I think they're the ginchiest. 8)

Last week, I finally succeeded in getting a copy of Karin Tidbeck's first short story collection, Vem är Arvid Pekon?. Somewhat tangential to the Weird Tradition, but definitely lowercase weird stories.

>241 artturnerjr:

Why so cheap? I expect trade paper genre fiction to run $3-$8 at the Half-Price locations I frequent. Nice finds!

>243 paradoxosalpha:

Well, it's an outlet store - that probably has a lot to do with it. There are lots of the sorts of items you'd expect to weed through (e.g., they seem to have approximately 17 million copies of The Da Vinci Code on hand at any given time), but the diligent shopper can uncover some real treasures there.

Here's the webpage for my local store:

http://hpb.com/222/

>241 artturnerjr:

Some nice finds, Art! Are any of those hard covers? Alas, the store locator seems to indicate no stores here on the east coast.

>245 semdetenebre:

No, all paperbacks. The Stepford Wives and the Wolfe book are mass market paperbacks; the former is the movie tie-in edition (I am inordinately fond of these, for reasons I find difficult to explain), the latter is published by Orion, as part of their Fantasy Masterworks series (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasy_Masterworks). The other four are trade paperbacks. (PS: I love Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu Fiction series, but their covers are hideous (and not in a good way)).

ETA: Yeah, they don't really seem to have expanded out east yet. There are a few stores in Pennsylvania but that seems to be about it.

>204 semdetenebre:

I thought John Langan's "Shallows" was the most formally interesting tale in Cthulhu's Reign. Definitely keeping an eye out for his stuff in the future.

Picked up a first edition hardcover of Thomas Ligotti's My Work is Not Yet Done a couple of days ago for a very reasonable price. Looking forward to getting to this one.

>247 artturnerjr: Oh, that's a good one.

>248 RandyStafford:

In a recent article (http://www.vulture.com/2014/08/thomas-ligotti-true-detective-guide.html), Jeff VanderMeer wrote of the title novella, "If “My Work Is Not Yet Done” were a movie, it’d be like Quentin Tarantino rewritten by David Lynch and then edited by Stanley Kubrick." Sounds like my jam.

After wanting a copy for several years, I finally got The Drums of Chaos this week. It's a Richard Tierney mythos-in-antiquity novel. Tierney's work in this vein (The Winds of Zarr, The Gardens of Lucullus, etc.) reminds me of a more sophisticated version of Lumley's Khai of Khem.

I'm looking forward to reading it, but as a large hardcover novel (i.e. commute reading), it will at least have to wait behind my current read All Souls' Rising and also Inherent Vice, which I've owned for years and need to read before I see the upcoming film.

Picked up a copy of the Stephen Jones- and Dave Carson-edited The World's Greatest Horror Stories (aka H. P. Lovecraft's Book of Horror), which should come in handy for future Deep Ones reads (as well as my oft-delayed plan to go back and read (and comment upon) DO tales that I've neglected in the past). Here's the TOC:

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?302250

>250 paradoxosalpha:

They're filming a Pynchon novel, eh? That's the first time anyone's tried that, isn't it?

>251 artturnerjr: That's the first time anyone's tried that, isn't it?

As far as I know, yeah.

Just finished The Cabalist by Amanda Prantera. A chance second hand find on a recent trip to London, picked up for the title, and bought on the strength of the blurb. I'm surprised I've never heard of it before, as it seems squarely in the M.R. James tradition of antiquarian horror, down to the droll academic style, albeit at novel length. Anyone read any of Ms. Prantera's other works?

>253 Soukesian:
Just one, The Side of the Moon in the early '90s. It's not Weird but rather a historical novel in the tradition of I, Claudius. The narrator is the physician Galen and the novel sort of up-ends the traditional view of father and son, and Roman Emperors, Marcus Aurelius and Commodus.

Thanks! The author's website gives her own assessments of her works. She doesn't actually rate The Cabalist particularly highly. I beg to differ. I hope to pick up her other supernatural works soon, starting with Sabine(vampires) or Wolfsong(werewolves). Conversations with Lord Byron on Perversion, 163 years after His Lordship's Death seems like a pretty essential title, too!

Over the last few days I snagged The Bloody Crown of Conan and Michael Moorcock's Elric Vol. 1: The Ruby Throne. The latter (an English translation of a bande dessinée) is (so far) surprisingly excellent. It has a glowing introduction by Moorcock himself, saying that the additions by writer Blondel are the sort of thing he'd put in if he were doing a rewrite today. It begins with Stormbringer narrating the birth of Elric.

Just interlibrary-loaned The Lost One: A Life of Peter Lorre. A Mountain Walked has arrived from Centipede and Year's Best Weird Fiction Volume 1 just shipped. Add to these comics volumes The Secret Files of Dr. Drew and Roy Thomas Presents: Frankenstein Volume 3 and I've got my Halloween season reading pretty much lined up!

The final volume of Joe Hill's Locke & Key is finally in trade paperback, and I picked it up today.

>212 wilum: et al.

There is a very generous free preview of The New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft available at Amazon, which can be viewed on the page for the Kindle edition (http://amzn.com/B00N33M25M) either by clicking on the "Look inside" button (on the left side of the page) or by clicking on the "Send sample now" button (on the right side) if you have the Kindle app. Looks nifty!

Not a purchase, but I got ahold of a copy of The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft from my local public library this week. It is a Cyclopean tome indeed - 800+ pages, 1,000+ footnotes, lavishly illustrated. I haven't really got into it in earnest yet and I've already learned lots about HPL's tales that I didn't know. Everybody here needs to at least have a look at this one.

A few weeks back I picked up The Dweller in the Deep, the third of Graham McNeill's "Dark Waters Trilogy" of Arkham Horror novels. I'm eager to read it (after I finish Magister Ludi), to see if my hypothesis holds up: that these books are a "re-theme" of The Lord of the Rings.

This weekend I snagged a trade paper copy of The Book of Cthulhu II at the local Half Price Books. They seemed to have a small stack of new copies; I guess it's been remaindered?

>260 artturnerjr:

Just got my copy. Fantastic! It is indeed a huge volume and a quick browse through some of the annotations finds them to be both informative and enjoyable.

I'm in the middle of reading Ramsey Campbell's The Hungry Moon, and enjoying it. So when I came across The Face That Must Die for $1 yesterday, I couldn't resist picking it up.

It's Ramsey Campbell time for me, evidently. I found a nice ppbk copy of Cold Print today for $2 and snapped it up.

>264 paradoxosalpha:

I'd like to know what you think of The Face That Must Die.

I need a Laundry fix, so I just ordered The Fuller Memorandum along with Stephen King's Revival, which seems to have some kind of Arthur Machen connection.

Here is the dedication in King's Revival.

"This book is for some of the people who built my house:

Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Donald Wandrei, Fritz Leiber, August Derleth, Shirley Jackson, Robert Bloch, Peter Straub.

And ARTHUR MACHEN, whose short novel The Great God Pan has haunted me all my life."

OK, now I'm really intrigued. That's quite a heady list!

I finished reading The Hungry Moon and posted my review.

Scored some good titles at my local public library's used book sale last week, including:

- Approaching Oblivion - Harlan Ellison
- The Best of Fritz Leiber
- The Ruins of Earth: An Anthology of Stories of the Immediate Future - Thomas M. Disch (ed.)
- A Treasury of Fantasy - Cary Wilkins (ed.)

TOC for The Ruins of Earth:

1 • On Saving the World • (1971) • essay by Thomas M. Disch
8 • Deer in the Works • (1955) • shortstory by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
21 • Three Million Square Miles • (1971) • shortstory by Gene Wolfe
26 • Closing with Nature • (1970) • shortstory by Norman Rush
51 • The Plot to Save the World • (1970) • shortstory by Michael Brownstein
57 • Autofac • (1955) • novelette by Philip K. Dick
81 • Roommates • (1971) • novelette by Harry Harrison
104 • Groaning Hinges of the World • (1971) • shortstory by R. A. Lafferty
113 • Gas Mask • (1964) • shortstory by James D. Houston
123 • Wednesday, November 15, 1967 • (1971) • shortstory by George Alec Effinger
137 • The Cage of Sand • (1962) • novelette by J. G. Ballard
160 • Accident Vertigo • (1971) • shortstory by Kenward Elmslie
165 • The Birds • (1952) • novelette by Daphne du Maurier
198 • Do It for Mama! • (1971) • novelette by Jerrold Mundis
221 • The Dreadful Has Already Happened • (1971) • shortstory by Norman Kagan
240 • The Shaker Revival • (1970) • novelette by Gerald Jonas
268 • America the Beautiful • (1970) • shortstory by Fritz Leiber

TOC for A Treasury of Fantasy:

vii • Foreword (A Treasury of Fantasy) • (1981) • essay by Cary Wilkins
1 • The Story of Sigurd • (unknown) • shortstory by uncredited
49 • The Quest of the Holy Graal • (unknown) • shortstory by Mrs. Andrew Lang
69 • The Enchantment of Lionarda • (1567) • shortstory by Francisco de Moraes
81 • The Elves • (1977) • shortstory by Ludwig Tieck (trans. of Die Elfen 1812)
97 • The King of the Golden River • (1841) • novelette by John Ruskin
121 • Phantasies • (1858) • novel by George MacDonald (variant of Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women)
259 • The Wood Beyond the World • (1894) • novel by William Morris
345 • The King of Elfland's Daughter • (1924) • novel by Lord Dunsany
467 • The Doom That Came to Sarnath • (1920) • shortstory by H. P. Lovecraft
475 • Swords of the Purple Kingdom • (1967) • novelette by Robert E. Howard
495 • The Rule of Names • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin

Total cost for all titles: one dollar. 8)

Just finished The Fuller Memorandum, another excellent entry in the Laundry Files series by Charles Stross. Hmmm... maybe the DEEP ONES should attempt a novel at some point...

>267 semdetenebre:

One additional note on King's Revival. Besides the dedication, HPL's famous "That is not dead which can eternal lie" opens the novel, which I've just begun reading.

>270 semdetenebre:

Let us know how Revival is, Kenton. I've been thinking about trying to get that one in before the end of the year.

A 1976 paperback edition of James Blish's novel about Roger Bacon, Doctor Mirabilis. It's ink-stamped inside with the name "D R Langford". I'm guessing this is David Langford - he lives in Reading and, in fact, for a time supplied the Oxfam bookshop where I found this volume with free copies of Ansible.

>271 artturnerjr:

Stephen King's Revival is indeed a novel of cosmic horror which I recommend to anyone here. It's not entirely successful in sustaining its momentum as the plot meanders a bit (although it's only a mid-sized book as far King goes) and Blackwood and Machen have nothing to worry about, but I appreciated the fact that SK does not back down on the nastier implications of Lovecraftian philosophy.

>273 semdetenebre:

Thanks for that. Onto the TBR list it goes!

It was a gift, rather than a purchase, but thanks to my Other Reader, I now have a copy of H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, which has been on my wishlist for a decade!

>275 paradoxosalpha:

That's a great gift. I'm glad you finally got a copy! Looking forward to a review...

Moved post.

I also received a copy of Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe!

I've been falling behind on new stuff, so I just ordered Laird Barron's X's for Eyes and Experimental Film by Gemma Files.

Further to >272 housefulofpaper:

Today I got another book that David Langford donated to Oxfam. It's one of the 1970's literary hoax versions of the Necronomicon (subtitled - but only on the dust jacket - "The book of dead names"). It's the first edition published in 1978 by Neville Spearman, the UK publisher - but based on Jersey - that put out UK hardback editions of books originally published by Arkham House.

The contents page lists George Hay as editor, a "researched by" credit for Robert Turner and David Langford, an introduction by Colin Wilson, and contributions from "Dr Stanislaus Hintertoisser" (apologies if he's a real person!), L. Sprague de Camp, Christopher Frayling and Angela Carter. There are illustrations by Robert Turner and Gavin Stamp. The book's signed by David Langford.

>279 semdetenebre:

X's for Eyes

I got that one, too. Let me know how it is - if it's as good as I think it's gonna be, I'll have to move it up on the TBR list.

>280 housefulofpaper:

Ah, the Hay/Turner Necromicon! It was later (1993) reprinted in softcover by Skoob, and I have a copy of that, but I've never seen the original hardcover in person.

>282 paradoxosalpha:

I still haven't figured out how to post a picture into a post, but here's the title page and dust jacket:

https://www.librarything.com/pic/5210078

Apologies for the picture quality - I still haven't got myself a phone. Just Photo Booth on my Mac.

>283 housefulofpaper: I still haven't got myself a phone.

Stay strong! I regret to say I resisted for longer than many, but finally capitulated. Not one of my prouder moments.

>283 housefulofpaper:

Cool!

No phone for me either, but I do have a camera.

>283 housefulofpaper:
>285 paradoxosalpha:

You guys don't have any kind of phone? Wow, that must really suck. ;)

The quality of my photographs nosedived when I got a smartphone, because I can now rarely be bothered to carry about a real camera.

>286 artturnerjr:

Well, of course I've got a landline. Otherwise, how could I take calls from India claiming to be "Windows technical support"? ;)

>286 artturnerjr:, >288 housefulofpaper:

Yes, I too have a land line, that is currently full of political opinion polling. It certainly doesn't take pictures.

>281 artturnerjr:

X's for Eyes is absolutely crazed. I just finished the first half, "We Smoke the Northern Lights". In a way, it's the Hardy Boys gone Weird, but it's crawling with that unique Barron touch that makes you want to hide under the couch.

>288 housefulofpaper:
>289 paradoxosalpha:

:)

I have a tiny little Samsung that I got from my ex-wife when we separated back in 2011. It is allegedly a "smart" phone (I refer to it as "semi-smart") that is apparently already hopelessly primitive by today's standards - I am told by co-workers that I "need an upgrade" approximately every ten minutes.

>290 semdetenebre:

I love that story - it was included in The Gods of H.P. Lovecraft, that Early Reviewers book we were talking about in another thread here. It was like Barron dropped acid, watched an episode of The Venture Brothers, and wrote a transcript of what he thought he saw. I thought the arch dialogue was particularly hilarious ("I'm not a Lovecraft man, as I prefer Clark Ashton Smith").

>291 artturnerjr:

I a big admirer of Barron's technique of bringing The Big Awful - a being whom you would never, ever want to encounter - vividly to life.

A copy of The Book of Wonder and the Last Book of Wonder arrived in the mail y'dy. An omnibus combinging The Book of Wonder and The Last Book of Wonder (v.t. Tales of Wonder), it's part of a series called "Tolkien's Bookshelf", collecting works that inspired J.R.R.T.

I bought it basically because it reproduces the original Sime illustrations.

>293 AndreasJ:

First, my thanks for pointing out that Tolkien's Bookshelf imprint. It looks familiar, so perhaps I'd seen it before now, but in any case I know it now.

Second, how is the quality of the reproduction, and the binding, etc? A shame it's a paperback, though of course that means it will be affordable.

The quality of the reproduction and binding appears adequate, but not outstanding. It's basically what you'd expect from a trade paperback I guess (tho most trade paperbacks don't have elaborate initials!).

picked up a copy of Mark Valentine's HAUNTED BY BOOKS (Tartarus) - fascinating little journeys thru little known (but worthy) writers. Then had to try a few starting with Claude Houghton, I. Myers and Julian Croskey. Very worthwhile

I always enjoy Valentine's stories; now I admire his taste

Fred Chappell: Masters of the Weird Tale is on sale for $119 through amazon so I picked one up this morning http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1613470665?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_...
Masters of the Weird Tale: David Case also on sale for those interested. http://www.amazon.com/Masters-Weird-Tale-David-Case/dp/1613470525/ref=pd_sim_sbs...

recently picked up a large lot of books, including reading copies or better of a hundred or so volumes that might be of interest here. Here's a list of anthologies I will cheerfully ship to folks who want one or more - google the titles for contents:

Laing: HAUNTED OMNIBUS
Calvino: FANTASTIC TALES
Moskowitz: HORRORS UNKNOWN
Datlow: A WHISPER OF BLOOD
Haining: MAMMOTH BOOK OF 20TH CENTURY GHOST STORIES
Lamb: VICTORIAN TALES OF TERROR

first come, first . . . feel free to ask if any questions; the price is right - free

cheers, scott

Yesterday I went to Half-Price Books to sell four bags of books. Of course I bought a couple also, but I did end up in the black. I found remaindered copies of Black Wings of Cthulhu 2 and Acolytes of Cthulhu.

I lucked into a used copy of this one today:

Eh, having just packed over 2500 books for a cross-country move, I know well that I shouldn't be buying any. But when I went to Half-Price Books today (to sell two bags of books), I couldn't resist this buy: Michael Cicsco's The Divinity Student has been on my wishlist for nearly a decade, and I found a trade paper copy of The San Veneficio Canon, which binds the former title together with The Golem.

>301 paradoxosalpha:

Michael Cisco is a master. Totally unique. I'd really like to hear what you think of The Divinity Student.

>301 paradoxosalpha:

Two books exchanged for 2 bags is still a net reduction. I was returning from a family trip to Wisconsin for the holiday weekend, and saw a billboard for Half-Price Books on I-94. I had a fleeting thought of going, but I knew none of us were in a good place for browsing books, after 3 days of woodsmoke and pool chlorine. So we went on home.

>303 elenchus:

Ah, it was just one volume (albeit including two novels), and I also walked away with an increase in liquidity. So, no, I don't feel bad about the transaction. I still have packing to do, though.

picked up a lovely and cheap copy of Centipede's Ambrose Bierce: Masters of the Weird Tale and received Dorothy Macardle's EARTH-BOUND from Swan River Press - beautifully written! All the titles from Swan River are worthwhile.

>305 bookstopshere: I hope to get my copy of EARTH-BOUND this week. The cover art is amazing.

The low-key humor of the recent French TV series A VERY SECRET SERVICE (stream it on Netflix!) put me pleasantly in mind of the Laundry Files series by Charles Stross, so I ordered The Apocalypse Codex. Can't wait to get back to Bob Howard & crew!

I'm eager for The Nightmare Stacks, and I'm on a waiting list for it at my local public library.

>308 paradoxosalpha:

Great! I'm going through the series slowly. The Nightmare Stacks makes three still on tap. The Stross Wikipedia page also lists The Delirium Brief and The Labyrinth Index for 2017 and 2019, respectively.

I visited a local ARC Thrift for the first time today, and scored The Monster of the Prophecy (a CAS Pocket Timescape edition I hadn't been aware of), and less weird, although on my wish list for some years now, Quest for the White Witch (the third and last of the Birthgrave books by Tanith Lee). One dollar each.

That's a Welcome To The Neighbourhood if ever there was one.

Finally got to get out to use the Half Price Books gift certificate my daughter got me for my birthday last month (I knew I liked that kid for a reason). Got a couple bagfuls of books and DVDs, including the following weird/horror titles:

- The Passage - Justin Cronin
- The Penguin Book of Vampire Stories - Alan Ryan (ed.) (http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?664465)
- The Empire of Fear - Brian Stableford
- The Dark World (written by Lovecraft Circle member Henry Kuttner (probably with some assistance from his wife, Lovecraft Circle member C.L. Moore), so I thought it should be included here)
- The Throne of Bones - Brian McNaughton

Brian Showers' anthology UNCERTAINTIES (volumes I and II) arrived today from Swan River Press with stories from Derek John, Lynda Rucker, Mark Valentine, Mark Samuels Reggie Oliver, Helen Grant, R.B. Russell, Peter Bell, John Howard and more. Midway thru volume 1, I like them all - recommended if you like Aickman and his like.

Swift to Chase, Laird Barron's new collection of Alaska-set tales is just out from Journalstone. He seems to be exploring a recurring cast of intriguing characters, including the extremely hard-to-kill Jessica Mace. Mixed-genre fun and highly recommended!

Picked up a used mass-market paperback edition of Dan Simmons' The Terror on the cheap at my local library's Friends store. Have no idea when I'll get to it (at just shy of 1,000 pp., I'm sure it'll take a bit of time to read), but it looks like it's up my alley. (I also seem to remember >314 semdetenebre: having kind words for it, somewhere around here.)

I just posted my review of Michael Cisco's San Veneficio Canon, which I mentioned acquiring upthread.

>315 artturnerjr:

The Terror is a keeper, that's for sure.

>316 paradoxosalpha:

Both of those novels are so uniquely Weird. I have them in the Centipede box set, which also contains my favorte Cisco work to date, The Tyrant, featuring a 15-year-old polio victim named Ella.

>317 semdetenebre: Both of those novels are so uniquely Weird.

I don't know; if you love 'em, you really need to check out The Physiognomy. Ford's trilogy has an amazingly similar flavor to the Canon, as far as I'm concerned. Ford's prose is a little more subdued, but his imagery is just as exotic, and the storytelling sensibility is nearly a perfect match.

>318 paradoxosalpha:

I'm on it!

The Curious Case of H.P. Lovecraft, a brief biography of the Old Gentleman of Providence. The Google Books incarnation was linked in the "The Crawling Chaos" discussion thread, and I found myself reading enough of it that a purchases was clearly called for.

Just ordered a new Valancourt Books HC edition of Robert Aickman's novel The Late Breakfasters. It also contains the short stories "My Poor Friend", "The Visiting Star", "Larger Than Oneself", "A Roman Question", "Mark Ingestre: The Customer's Tale", and "Rosamund's Bower".

>321 semdetenebre: I really enjoyed The Late Breakfasters.

>322 pgmcc:

That's good to hear! If I understand correctly, it might be a little more odd than Weird, but that suits me just fine.

>323 semdetenebre: You might say that. I look forward to hearing your thoughts on it.

>321 semdetenebre:

Love that cover art.

Snagged a hardback edition of Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, with the Raymond Bayless cover art. Already in possession of The Dunwich Horror and Others in the same edition, I now lack only The Mountains of Madness to complete my hardback collection of HPL. Not the complete tales, alas, but I've always liked this edition and pleased to be a step closer to owning the trilogy.

acquired, mostly by accident, quite a few books including the 5 Rosalie Parker STRANGE TALES anthologies from Tartarus - loving them.

included were a bunch of books on jazz & blues - if anyone interested in any of these (free) drop me a note:

Ascension: John Coltrane and his quest
Monk (de Wilde)
Good Morning Blues (Basie autobiography)
Dexter Gordon – a musical biography
Jazz from the Beginning (Bushell)
The Jazz Book – from ragtime to fusion & beyond
Jazz: America’s classical music
Discovering great jazz
Meaning of the blues (Oliver)
The Jazz Tradition
Duke Ellington Reader
Thelonius Monk Reader
History of jazz (Gioia)
From Satchmo to Miles
the Art of Ragtime (Schafer & Riedel)
Milestones – music & times of Miles Davis
Keeping Time – readings in jazz history
the Making of jazz – a comprehensive history (Collier)
Visions of Jazz (Giddins)
All Music Guide to the Blues
Early Downhome Blues (Titon)
Gramophone Jazz good CD guide
Living Country Blues (lyrics)
the Blues Line (lyrics)
Jazz from its origins to the present
Jazz – the ultimate guide
Chronicle of jazz (Cooke)
The Blues from Robt Johnson to Robt Cray
American Roots Music
Music Hound Jazz – Essential album guide
Music Hound blues – Essential album guide
All Music guide to jazz
Penguin guide to jazz on CD
History of Western Music (Grout)
the Enjoyment of Music (Machlis)

merry new year!

>324 pgmcc:

I loved The Late Breakfasters! Griselda de Reptonville is a pretty unusual heroine. That she is an overt lesbian seems kind of unexpected for a 1964 novel, at least in my experience. The narrative is compelling, the oddball characters are fascinating and Aickman's dry, dark humor is wonderful. Every so often I found myself stopping to go back and re-read a paragraph. It's definitely "strange" but not weird fiction by any means. What a treat.

I recently picked up Black Wings of Cthulhu 3, and I've just ordered the sword-and-sandal-and-sorcery novel Heir of Darkness, which I was alerted to after reading The Gardens of Lucullus.

On my lunch hour Monday I found a used book store near me I hadn't known about. I didn't have time to explore it fully, but I did buy Tanith Lee's Volkhavaar (which had been on my wishlist), the first couple of Cija volumes (starting with The Serpent) by Jane Gaskell, and a BAF volume new to me: Discoveries in Fantasy.

>330 paradoxosalpha: That is a super cover.

>330 paradoxosalpha:

What a find! The book and the bookshop equally, that is.

The BAF's dedication is listed in CK (perhaps you entered it), and implies the four authors listed on the back cover are the sole contributors. So, not a short story collection, but novellas / novellettes?

This book, which attempts to revive interest in four long-neglected fantasy writers, I dedicate to James Blish, who was for so very long done so much to revive interest in another neglected writer known by the name of Cabell.

>330 paradoxosalpha:

those are good finds! DISCOVERIES IN FANTASY (way back when) introduced me to Richard Garnett, Eden Phillpotts and Donald Corley - all became real favorites. The entire Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, with the Carter intros, are worthwhile. I'm a Jane Gaskell fan as well

congrats

>332 elenchus: The BAF's dedication is listed in CK (perhaps you entered it), and implies the four authors listed on the back cover are the sole contributors. So, not a short story collection, but novellas / novellettes?

Right.

>333 bookstopshere:

I hadn't read any Gaskell, but had formed an interest based on occasional surfacings in LT. I've started in on The Serpent already and I'm enjoying it.

Oh, I also picked up a new hardbound copy of King's Revival from the remainder tables at B&N last weekend, impelled by >270 semdetenebre: and other online discussion.

picked up a copy of the Swan River edn of Rosalie Parker's OLD KNOWLEDGE and the facsimile reprint of R. Murray Gilchrist's STONE DRAGON & OTHER TRAGIC ROMANCES (one of my favorite collections of decadence.)

I'd note Swan River has announced a new edn of George Russell's (writing as A.E.) SELECTED POEMS. These are superior mystical verses by a fine, though mostly forgotten, Irish poet - wonderful stuff!

Sorry. Posted to wrong group.

Deleting...

After American Gothic and English Gothic, now comes the really terrific Euro Gothic by Jonathan Rigby.



I found a really cheap HC from an Amazon merchant. I highly recommend all three.

ETA

Whoops - meant to put this in Off Topic -Lit. Ah well. There are still plenty of weird themes in the films covered!

Some stellar deals on weird fiction titles and related items for Kindle at Amazon right now.

$1.99 each:
Psycho - Robert Bloch
http://a.co/csHItZb
The Book of Cthulhu - Ross E. Lockhart (ed.)
http://a.co/gZRr2hu

$0.99 each:
Demons by Daylight - Ramsey Campbell
http://a.co/7Z4qStX
The Gods of H.P. Lovecraft - Aaron J. French (ed.)
http://a.co/bQfkwPX

I snatched up the Bloch and the Campbell (I already have the French, and my library has the Lockhart).

Short stories 1895-1926, the first volume of Walter de la Mare's collected tales edited and published by Giles de la Mare. I've only just started through it but, for those of you who like your books as physical objects too, it's a very nice quality hardcover for not too much money. None of that cheap yellowing-gray mass market paper you tend to get in this sort of literature.

(edit: I don't yet know how much of his work even counts as "Weird" but I'll soon see...)

I just got around to buying a copy of Cthulhusattva, which had been on my wishlist for a year or so.

>342 paradoxosalpha:

Almost worth purchasing just so I can have something from Martian Migraine Press on my shelves. That's a bombastically good name.

Well, I'm in the mood for some Laundry Files, so I just ordered The Rhesus Chart by Charles Stross.



Just arrived from Centipede: Anthony Shriek by Jessica Amanda Salmonson, The Circus of Dr. Lao by Charles Finney and The Dogs by Robert Calder. CP is also working on some pretty amazing-sounding editions of Fafhrd & Gray Mouser and Elric, too!

Since you reminded me, I've just requested The Delirium Brief from my public library.

>344 semdetenebre:

The Fafhrd & Gray Mouser and the Elric sound good to me. Good enough to purchase? Dunno. I just invested in hardcovers of the Leiber in the past couple of years, though I still have just paperback for some early issues. Maybe I start with the Elric, since I still have just the first 2 paperback compendia and never read beyond that.

But I'm packing up my library to be boxed in storage for the remainder of 2017, if not longer. Purchasing is not something I need to do now, there's no place to put anything. Hopefully the renovation is done by year's end, and I can think about a proper library space in the basement. I suspect it'll be a couple years before I reach that point, sadly.

>346 elenchus:

I'll buy any Leiber edition that comes from Centipede, but I know what you mean. I already have so many different versions of the Fafhrd & Mouser books.

I'm hoping to get my library out of storage soon. It's been over a year and a half! Having everything available in bookcases again will be quite a luxury.

>345 paradoxosalpha:

Brand new - yes!!!

I'll soon be putting my library in storage in preparation of a move, but I hope it shall all be up in the shelves again in early September.

I moved a year ago, and I've still only re-shelved about 25% of my library. :(

>350 paradoxosalpha:

Well, 25% of your library is more than 100% of mine. :)

>349 AndreasJ:

At least it's a relatively short window. Hope the storage place is comfy for the collection!

>350 paradoxosalpha:

Due to lack of space or lack of time?

>352 semdetenebre:

Basically lack of space. We sold off nearly all our old bookcases before the move, and haven't acquired many at the new place. There are boxes of books in closets, under beds, and stacked neatly against walls where they are covered with cloth. Those latter could be replaced with new bookcases--if we had the flex in our budget.

I'm reviving this long-dormant thread to observe that after Revival has spent seven years on my shelves, I've finally read it and posted my review. If ever there was a novel for the Weird Tradition, it is one. Other than some references to Bloch's imaginary tome De Vermis Mysteriis by Ludwig Prinn, there's little canonical yog-sothothery in the book, but it's an impressive synthesis of the tradition with King's personal fingerprints all over it.