I love this thread. I've got a page full of authors to check out now. Don't know that I can name any one particular over another. Recently, I've really been enjoying Carl Jacobi a lot, both for the prose and the stories.
I read
Revelations in Black a few years ago and promptly kicked myself for not getting
Smoke of the Snake when it was right in my hands -- in fact, in my hands a number of times.
From
Revelations..., if I were ranking, I'd consider him 2nd tier behind Lovecraft, C.A. Smith and the better work of Bradbury, Bloch and Leiber, but a really entertaining old pulp writer who even outdid himself in the title story, "Carnaby's Fish," "Mive" and "The Face in the Wind."
I'll add another writer I haven't found mentioned -- I'm a bit annoyed I didn't add him before: Bob Leman. He published one book, a collection, a rare one at that,
The Feesters in the Lake and Other Stories. Leman began publishing late in life, mainly in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (though one of his stories was slated for Harlan Ellison's
The Last Dangerous Visions), from the 1960s through the 1980s, but only produced 15 stories. His style is very similar to the style of s.f. writers of the 1940s and 1950s, and the sensibility behind it seems similar to me as well. But I find his prose smoother and more literate than most any of the s.f. writers of that time, and that he could incorporate Lovecraftian stories (the title story and "Olida" for example) into this sensibility strikes me as quite an achievement. He's best known for "Window," which is good, though I think some of the other stories in the collection more than equal it.
Randy M.
