General Weird discusion thread

Thanks for the heads-up. My copy should already be on its way, so should be here in relatively short order. As I said in my PM, I've not heard anything about this being the case from anyone else, but it's certainly possible, as it does happen now and again....
 
A question: has anyone ever heard of an Ernest Dunlop Swinton ? I just read his "The sense of touch" which is actualy quite atmospheric, though tending to be a litle akin to B flicks about animals like "Fish" "Ants" "Snakes" and so on, though it is stil superior to a story that suffers even greately because of it, R. Ernest Vernéde's "The finless deeath" , which has an interesting title, but is over all slightly B flickish all throughout . . If you want to read some good genre tale from Vernéde, try his "The Maze" .
 
I did earlier today get from the library The Hill of Dreams by Arthur Machen.

The only book of Machen in the hole library so i didnt have much of a choice. I couldnt choose the stories that are more famous. I read little, i like his prose style the little i sampled.

Funny enough this author's name never meant anything to me except seeing in threads like this. His rep didnt reach me until i read REH's horror collection. REH had alot of affection for this writer apparently. So today i went to the library to try my literary hero's hero if that sounds right :)
 
I picked up 100 Wild Little Weird Tales off of amazon a while back. They're all only a few thousand words and can be read in ten minutes or less. I go back to it and read a few and then put it down. Most are alright, some are good, some are bad. They have a few by Poe, but I dunno why, as I find him quite boring.
 
Trying to bring this back :

I am currently reading Maurice Level's story colection, also having finished "The other Passanger" selection from Ballantine books, by John Keir Cross . Certainly atmospheric pieces .

A diferent type of colections is one by "Dermot O'Byrne" (Pseudonym of a more or less acclaimed mussicina, lord Bax) "Children of the Hills" , which has both a wonderfull conte cruel, two marvelously short evocative tales concerning past lives,and, besides two others, a story called "Ancient Dominions" and yes, what you just thought of i contained therein .

Now : about Michael Arlen . I know Lovecraft didn't like him at all, anyone have any more personal experiences with the bloke ?
 
Except for the Lovecraft reference I've never heard of any of these. Are they older stories, newer? (I figure the guy Lovecraft didn't like was older, natch.)
 
Older; though Lobo could give you much more information about them. Cross, for instance, was born in 1914 and died in the 1960s; "O'Byrne", or Bax, was born in 1883 and died in 1953; while Maurice Level wrote macabre tales of the conte cruel type and was one of the shining lights -- if that's the proper term -- of the Grand Guignol theater, and was born in 1875, dying in 1926.

I don't know if you are familiar with the term, but in case you aren't:

Grand Guignol - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

As for Michael Arlen -- yes, sadly, most of his supernatural fiction is not at all atmospheric, though it is occasionally clever. Then again, it has been years since I've read anything by him, save for "The Gentleman from America", which I reread fairly recently in going through the Frazer/Wise Tales of Terror and the Supernatural. That one is worth reading, though not for the "supernatural" element -- an extremely ridiculous story which one of the characters within the tale reads -- but rather for the truly nasty view of human beings the tale reveals. In this, it is similar to Shirley Jackson's "One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts". The basic story, though, bears strong similarities to Bierce's "The Suitable Surroundings" crossed with some elements of his "The Middle Toe of the Right Foot". Nonetheless, you may find it of some interest.

As for the rest of his work... I think I'd suggest John Kendrick Bangs instead; and, if you know anything about his work, that's a rather telling statement....:rolleyes:

By the way, Lobo... that edition of The Other Passenger, from what I understand, only reprints nine out of the eighteen tales that were in the original edition. Do you know anything about that....?
 
I know about the Other Passanger . Im thinking of geting the earlier edition .
 
J.D.:I did hear some praise about "The smell in/from the library" (I can't remember the title)
 
Lobolover said:
J.D.:I did hear some praise about "The smell in/from the library" (I can't remember the title)
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I must admit that one doesn't ring a bell; but, as I say, it has been quite a long time since I read any of Arlen's work aside from that one tale (I'm assuming you meant Arlen in the above comment, yes?).

dask said:
Thanks for the info. I read RUE MORGUE MAGAZINE for a few years so I am familiar with the term. My dictionary defines it as "dramatic entertainment featuring the gruesome or horrible." "At The Mountains Of Madness" certainly has its share of that!
Click to expand...

I think, though, that in connection with the Grand Guignol, the term is meant to signify more of the physically gruesome or horrible. While there is that element to certain passages in At the Mountains of Madness, the focus is more "spiritual" or (to be precise) epistemological. Though he did have elements of the physically gruesome in his tales, such was not Lovecraft's focus, and these almost always (with perhaps the sole exception of "In the Vault", which was written around an idea given him by one of his correspondents) were symbolic of the major focus -- the violation of (perceived) natural law, and what it implies.
 
j. d. worthington said:
in connection with the Grand Guignol, the term is meant to signify more of the physically gruesome or horrible.
Click to expand...

The way Grand Guignol was bandied about in RUE MORGUE I pretty much figured it was a fancy term for splat, and though "At The Mountains Of Madness" has its moments such as the slaughter at Lake's camp I agree it's probably not a textbook exemplification. That's not to say it's any less a story because it wouldn't win a Fulchi Award (if there was one). It has a particular power to wear the reader down with wave upon wave of dread and disbelief. I stand in awe of Lovecraft's ability to talk around something without watering it down. His wild imagination may have gone too far at one point depicting pre-life earth as a cosmic playground for myriad alien hooligans but the inclusion of something as repulsively realistic as six foot blind albino penguins reigned it back in. Gruesome but not gross, the story left me --- I don't know, feeling dirty, with clean up like showering in water heated with hell fire.
 
dask said:
Gruesome but not gross, the story left me --- I don't know, feeling dirty, with clean up like showering in water heated with hell fire.
Click to expand...

Now, that is a very interesting reaction -- one I don't think I've ever run into before. Is there any way you could explain....?

As for the Grand Guignol... somewhat like splatter, yes, but perhaps a bit more refined on some levels, as it also leaned heavily on the suspense and twisting of emotional screws....
 
Well, I certainly wasn't slamming Lovecraft. When I said feeling dirty I meant that in a, um, good way. A testament to his ability as a teller of macabre tales. While not necessary, it's nice (for me at least) when a good story told well sticks with you when you're done. "At The Mountains Of Madness" is a great if not ideal Halloween whopper, a powerful narrative yielding powerful imagery. It didn't just make me feel dirty, it made me feel creepy dirty, and that's okay. But you gotta wash. Soap and hot water still the standard but heated with hell fire? A fiendish formula indeed. And no! I won't tell you what the soap is made of.:eek:
 
Who's this General Weird, then? Is he one of Harry Harrison's lesser-known creations? And why haven't I seen him discussed in this thread yet? :eek:
 
Well I'm just starting on a litle known Russian writer from the '20s who wrote what the blurb is calling weird fiction along the lines of Borges. The collection is called Memories Of Future and the author Sigizmund Krzhizhanvsky. Too subversive to expsoe to a publisher when written in the 1920s and subsequently quashed by the Censors, his stories only began to see publication in the late 80's and only recently have they been translated into English w.r.t. this collection. Sigzimunsd is now being viewed as one of the great Russian writers of the 20th Century.

As a sample the stories include: A man loses his way in the vast black waste of his own small room; the Eiffel Tower runs amok; a kind soul dreams of selling "everything you need for suicide"; an absentminded passenger boards the wrong train, winding up in a place where night is day, nightmares are the reality, and the backs of all facts have been broken; a man out looking for work comes across a line for logic but doesn't join it as there's no guarantee the logic will last; a sociable corpse misses his own funeral; an inventor gets a glimpse of the far-from-radiant communist future.

These works are clearly quite satirical with a weird element to them so I don't know if they classify as weird fiction in the way we generally think of it at Chrons?

I'll let you know how I find therm.

Has anyone else ever heard of this author??

Cheers...
 
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