|
every time i think "sicilian-polish-american from detroit" i lol irl for reasons i can't even begin to explain here. poor thomas
|
#
?
Feb 18, 2019 03:09
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 19, 2024 02:57 |
|
|
laird barron has a billion stories published and not one of them can hold my attention
|
|
#
?
Feb 18, 2019 03:14
|
|
|
Oxxidation posted:laird barron has a billion stories published and not one of them can hold my attention
|
|
#
?
Feb 18, 2019 03:21
|
|
|
robert aickman was also a genuinely weird dude. hated kids, hated women, hated feminism, loved - loving loved canals. devoted his entire life to conserving britain's lovely, pointless canals. wrote several books about those canals. was anglo-catholic, which means "anglican but also catholic", which doesnt make sense to me. died of treatable cancer because he retained a homeopath instead of going to the doctor.
|
|
#
?
Feb 18, 2019 03:24
|
|
|
pikachode posted:every time i think "sicilian-polish-american from detroit" i lol irl for reasons i can't even begin to explain here. poor thomas Nothing says Hamtramck like
|
|
#
?
Feb 18, 2019 03:25
|
|
|
i havent read scorch atlas, where does its prose fall on the spectrum from "lucid" to "drug diary"
|
|
#
?
Feb 18, 2019 03:27
|
|
|
chernobyl kinsman posted:i havent read scorch atlas, where does its prose fall on the spectrum from "lucid" to "drug diary" way on the "lucid" side, in fact it's the most comprehensible thing he's published which is why i only recommend it and the first half of Three Hundred Million out of all his books there's two or three stories in scorch atlas that are just freeform logorrhea in which inconceivable existential decay is repeatedly described using analogies for fermented milk, but the rest are solid this is the first story in the collection e: actually, reading it over, the version that appears in the collection is a little more tightly edited. still mostly similar though Oxxidation fucked around with this message at 04:02 on Feb 18, 2019 |
|
#
?
Feb 18, 2019 03:34
|
|
|
For some good depressioncore horror Cantos for the Crestfallen is a dope 31 page poem that I feel like Ligotti might have written under a pseudonym.
|
|
#
?
Feb 20, 2019 02:02
|
|
|
|
|
#
?
Feb 23, 2019 08:15
|
|
|
andrew michael hurley's devil's day is really good; better than the loney. it's still heavily focused on atmosphere, place, and character, and the horror elements are still very understated and subtle (albeit slightly less so than in loney), though - very little happens in the way of out-and-out horror. i don't say that as a criticism - i really like it - but if that's not your thing than this won't be either.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2019 23:43
|
|
|
Ornamented Death posted:A new Brian Hodge collection, Skidding Into Oblivion, is out this month. This is out now. Also of potential interest, Scott Nicolay and Wakefield Press are re-translating all of Jean Ray's weird and horror fiction, and the first volume, Whiskey Tales is out now. Ray is something of a forgotten master of weird tales; his stories have received a lot of critical acclaim through the years, but they're damned near impossible to actually find in English; The Weird included two, and that's very likely the only exposure the vast majority of readers have had*. Nicolay is doing his own translations of everything and they're being released in the original publication order. A bit of a content warning: there's antisemitism. Nicolay talks about it extensively in his introduction but leaves it up to the reader to decide if Ray was an antisemite or if he was just writing stories about people that were very often antisemites. I'm about 2/3 of the way through the collection now, and past the stories identified as the worst offenders, and yeah, it is pretty blatant. *Three collections and one novella have been previously released in English, but they're all exceedingly rare. Ghouls in My Grave is a PBO from the '60s, so not a lot of copies survive. My Own Private Spectres was released by Midnight House Press in an edition of 370, and copies very rarely come up for sale. Malpertuis, the novella, was done by a small independent publisher in the 90s; it was actually available on Amazon through at least 2010, as that's when i ordered a copy, but it's all but disappeared since. The Horrifying Presence and Other Tales is another very limited edition, released by Ex Occidente Press; I think the limitation was 300 copies, but who knows how many the publisher actually put out there. Of course, if you can read French, all of his work is readily available.
|
|
#
?
Feb 28, 2019 03:33
|
|
|
i taught a couple of robert aickman stories in class this week and one of my students said it was "the weirdest poo poo ive ever read in college and i didnt understand it at all" you're welcome, son, and neither do i
|
|
#
?
Mar 1, 2019 03:17
|
|
|
chernobyl kinsman posted:i taught a couple of robert aickman stories in class this week and one of my students said it was "the weirdest poo poo ive ever read in college and i didnt understand it at all" So the teaching of it is you standing before the class and gesturing vaguely ?
|
|
#
?
Mar 1, 2019 14:50
|
|
|
chernobyl kinsman posted:i taught a couple of robert aickman stories in class this week and one of my students said it was "the weirdest poo poo ive ever read in college and i didnt understand it at all" I'm glad I'm not the only one who had that reaction to Aickman. Dark Entries owned and I want to read more of his stuff, but so many of the stories in there ranged from "requires thought" to "totally opaque (but still effective)."
|
|
#
?
Mar 1, 2019 17:12
|
|
|
oh yeah i love him for that. his stories make me feel like they almost make sense, like there's some deeper meaning im missing or some missing piece that will explain everything, but im not smart enough to figure it out. it rulesBilirubin posted:So the teaching of it is you standing before the class and gesturing vaguely ? i just say "weird poo poo huh" and then make uncomfortable eye contact with them in total silence for 75 minutes chernobyl kinsman fucked around with this message at 17:42 on Mar 1, 2019 |
|
#
?
Mar 1, 2019 17:37
|
|
|
chernobyl kinsman posted:i just say "weird poo poo huh" and then make uncomfortable eye contact with them in total silence for 75 minutes Today's guest lecture my impression of the internal dialogue of Ligotti:
|
|
#
?
Mar 1, 2019 19:15
|
|
|
I taught "The Stains" in my horror class earlier this semester and a lot of the students didn't even think it was a horror story when they entered the session where we discussed it and they left really grossed out by lichens
|
|
#
?
Mar 1, 2019 19:39
|
|
|
Bilirubin posted:Today's guest lecture my impression of the internal dialogue of Ligotti:
|
|
#
?
Mar 1, 2019 22:09
|
|
|
Dr. Video Games 0081 posted:I taught "The Stains" in my horror class earlier this semester and a lot of the students didn't even think it was a horror story when they entered the session where we discussed it and they left really grossed out by lichens what was the discussion like? really curious.
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2019 07:10
|
|
|
Does anyone subscribe to the 'Year's Best Weird Fiction' anthologies? I tried the first one a couple of years back and didn't get on with it - it was co-edited by Laird Barron and I remember there being a lot of tired, antiquated Lovecraft homages - but I just picked up Vol 4 and it's giving me a bunch of interesting, unique new horror voices I want to seek out and hear more from.
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2019 08:42
|
|
|
I believe there won't be any more because they didn't sell well.
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2019 11:46
|
|
|
Undertow won't be doing it anymore, but another publisher is starting their own version.
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2019 12:18
|
|
|
chernobyl kinsman posted:i taught a couple of robert aickman stories in class this week and one of my students said it was "the weirdest poo poo ive ever read in college and i didnt understand it at all" The only Robert Aickman stuff I can find in my local library is the Wine-Dark Sea, is that a good place to start?
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2019 13:01
|
|
|
Started the new Brian Hodge collection. The first story is a forest creature manufacturing meth as retribution for man strip-mining the land. I'm a Hodgehog so I love it but YRMV.
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2019 16:53
|
|
|
StrixNebulosa posted:The only Robert Aickman stuff I can find in my local library is the Wine-Dark Sea, is that a good place to start? yeah that'll work
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2019 18:01
|
|
|
grobbo posted:Does anyone subscribe to the 'Year's Best Weird Fiction' anthologies?
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2019 23:11
|
|
|
I finished Hodge's new collection last night. Not unexpectedly, it's good.
|
|
#
?
Mar 4, 2019 14:41
|
|
|
Dr. Video Games 0081 posted:I taught "The Stains" in my horror class earlier this semester and a lot of the students didn't even think it was a horror story when they entered the session where we discussed it and they left really grossed out by lichens What work is this? Googling mostly just brings up bands called "The Stains". Edit: nevermind, guessed it was Ligotti first, googled, the discovered it was Aickman.
|
|
#
?
Mar 4, 2019 16:07
|
|
|
Can't recall whether these two have been mentioned before. New from Laird Barron: https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781614981923?fbclid=IwAR0V_pJswT6AQ-dguUCZccUh7L0eqgeg7LgZwkmhXN-r7-sLGsBjCIv2sbQ And from Nathan Ballingrud: https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-5344-4993-0?fbclid=IwAR0sgIKulgwsukweBocFqSWRGjBrUpj9GPhNx0v_uEaAsOplEGb_XmpvdmA
|
|
#
?
Mar 4, 2019 16:15
|
|
|
Bilirubin posted:Can't recall whether these two have been mentioned before. John Langan
|
|
#
?
Mar 4, 2019 16:31
|
|
|
Ornamented Death posted:John Langan poo poo right. Apologies. Was just looking at a review by Barron and that slipped in
|
|
#
?
Mar 4, 2019 16:36
|
|
|
chernobyl kinsman posted:what was the discussion like? really curious. The discussion was really one of my favorite of the semester so far, and I mean it when I say most of the students entered the class not knowing what made the story relevant to the horror genre and left pretty grossed and freaked out. We did really spend a lot of time just unpacking the implications of the imagery, the references to mythological figures like dryads, did some discussion of the role that sexual desire played in the story though really would have liked to do more there. The story kind of functioned for us as a bridge between Blackwood's "The Willows" and "The Call of Cthulhu." Now that I've been reading more Aickman I find his work really interesting, especially because he's actually good at building characters and grounding the narrative in the dilemmas that the characters face, which makes his work read a lot closer to traditional literary fiction than a lot of other horror stuff (and maybe why the students didn't recognize "The Stains" as horror/weird fiction.) He also seems unusually good at writing women and thinking about their experience for a horror guy. It's The Wine-Dark Sea I have that I've been reading through, and both the "The Trains" and "Into the Woods" have been really good for that. I'm surprised that you find him such an opaque writer, though perhaps I'm just not reading his stories that are the most obscure. Of course in terms of the question of like, "What is the mechanism that underlies the events described in the story?" that is left unclear, but he lays out the themes so clearly and repeatedly in his stories that I've found him to be an enormously clear writer. (Maybe not "Your Tiny Hand is Frozen.") The push-pull feeling with modernity is really interesting too--many of the stories are pretty ambiguous if something BAD or something WONDERFUL has happened, especially "Into the Woods."
|
|
#
?
Mar 14, 2019 20:35
|
|
|
I don't think I'd personally use the word "opaque" to describe his writing, in the sense that I never encountered something that required me setting the book down and puzzling through the text or whatever. I think for me he felt more ambiguous. I never felt like I had no idea what was going on in a given story as much as there were two or three possible things happening and they all felt more or less equally valid as an interpretation, and bafflingly sometimes they could all be true. But you're right, that even in the midst of that ambiguity you do get a pretty clear theme or what have you. I think that's what appeals to me about the most strange stories-- you walk away from them kind of unsure what just happened, but you still feel like the story was "successful" in what it set out to do. Some of them are much more direct than others though. I've only read Dark Entries, which had a handful that were pretty straightforward with some ambiguities, like you said, about the underlying mechanism of events, but it also had at least one or two stories that were just a string of "wtf" for me. In a good way. Also I've introduced him to a handful of people and the consensus seems to be that even his more abstruse stories are immensely readable and approachable, even if you're not certain what the heck is going on.
|
|
#
?
Mar 14, 2019 21:17
|
|
|
In a lot of ways he's just a very good, solid short story writer of any stripe. Blackwood or M.R. James are like that too--they just know how to tell a story. Lovecraft often doesn't which is why his work is so spotty, but the ways of telling a story he manages to come up with are often very enjoyable. Not that he's unprecedented or anything, he basically says in Supernatural Horror that he's drawing on Machen's techniques in narration. (Though of the four authors he singles out I like Machen the least, though have read the least of Dunsany.)
|
|
#
?
Mar 14, 2019 22:01
|
|
|
I should read more MR James. I think I've only ever read the two that show up in every collection (Casting the Runes and... Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad or something like that) and they were good, but didn't fire me up to read more of him. Any other standouts? I guess same question for Blackwood... I've read The Willows and Wendigo, and very slightly preferred the latter, but haven't read anything else by him. Heck while we're at it, what's good by Machen besides The Great God Pan? this question isn't directed solely at you, Dr. Video Games, your post just made me start thinking about those authors
|
|
#
?
Mar 14, 2019 22:09
|
|
|
I like James a lot, but if you didn't particularly dig what you read, I'm not sure I'd recommend you search more out. His stories are very consistent in tone, in my experience -- not repetitive, but similar enough to one another that if the big hits didn't click with you, the others won't either.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2019 11:24
|
|
|
MockingQuantum posted:Heck while we're at it, what's good by Machen besides The Great God Pan? I first bumped into him in a collection from the Famous Fantastic Mysteries pulp magazine with The Red Hand and The Novel of the White Powder, both of which are enjoyable, as is pretty much everything from his Three Imposters collection.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2019 14:38
|
|
|
MockingQuantum posted:I should read more MR James. I think I've only ever read the two that show up in every collection (Casting the Runes and... Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad or something like that) and they were good, but didn't fire me up to read more of him. Any other standouts? I'm going to assume that part of what's not clicking with you is the leisurely pace and detached/academic tone, so I'm going to try and think of what James has the least amount of bookish professors puttering around for an hour before they see a ghost. Since that describes even James' most vigorous works, that might be difficult, but: 'Lost Hearts' is one of his most straightforward and almost pulpy ones, I like it a lot but I seem to recall James himself thought it was one of his weaker stories. 'Wailing Well' is pretty cut-to-the-chase and I love anything that ends with a bratty kid getting exsanguinated by ghosts. 'The Mezzotint' does involve a lot of bookish puttering but has a fantastically creepy concept that's been ripped off many times by various film and tv anthologies, and is worth a read. 'Number 13' similarly has some puttering but also a wonderfully inventive concept. 'Count Magnus' is a slow build as most James is, but it's also what introduced me to James and the way that it develops is great. Now I keep thinking of other ones but I like them too much to really evaluate them; Jesus Christ, M. R. James is good, gently caress. I'll just say also 'An Episode of Cathedral History' and leave it at that. For what it's worth, 'Oh Whistle' is among my least favorite James but his best-regarded, so maybe my taste shouldn't be trusted.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2019 15:32
|
|
|
For Blackwood I highly recommend "The Man Whom the Trees Loved." "The Glamour of the Snow" is another nice variation on some of his major themes, though a bit staid compared to "The Willows" or "The Wendigo." His John Silence stories are a lot of fun. I especially like "The Psychical Invasion" and "The Camp of the Dog." The last one to be written, "A Victim of Higher Space" is funny and good, too, about a guy who manages to ascend into higher numbered dimensions and the troubles it gets him up to. As "psychic detective" stories the John Silence stories always seem to resolve happily with the resolution of the supernatural phenomenon, which I find pretty unusual. edit: One of the things about Blackwood that's also really lovely in Aickman, and that I find that students find frustrating in certain kinds of fiction (though of course the reading they are doing for a class is externally imposed upon them in a certain sense, and represents only a fifth or less of the tasks that they have set before them on any given day) is that they take time to tell a story. They're very well paced, but that pacing also involves a gently sloped "rising action." I think genre competence can really help with this, as when you're reading say Blackwood and you know what weird fiction typically does and how nature functions within weird fiction, you can say to yourself "Oh I know what that means," or "I can see where this is going." Otherwise if you don't have those competences hopefully you can reach the end of the story, have a sense of the shape of what you've just read, and then think back to the beginning and recognize why it was paced in the way it was. That, though, is a different, and in some ways more old-fashioned seeming pattern of storytelling than other authors; compare for instance George Saunders's great essay "The Perfect Gerbil" about Donald Barthelme's "The School." In both cases you're dealing with rising action, but the "gas stations" Saunders identifies in "The School" both accelerate the action wildly each time right from the beginning, and also raise the story's themes into thematically stranger territory each time. An Aickman or Blackwood story starts off with a much longer series of gentle pushes, and tends to track and balance its various thematic debts by the end of the story. Dr. Video Games 0081 fucked around with this message at 14:40 on Mar 16, 2019 |
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2019 17:16
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 19, 2024 02:57 |
|
|
By the way, isn't it a bummer that Ligotti's "The Nightmare Network" is such a vivid, accurate representation of our own time?
|
|
#
?
Mar 16, 2019 14:43
|
|