What are you reading?

[OSJ]

On 5/14/2017 at 1:57 PM, Marty Sugar said:

Finished the third book my daughters' got me for my birthday: DEAD RINGERS by Christopher Golden. It deals with doppelgangers, but not in an "Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers" way. A fast-paced little horror story, although the last five lines of the book...I dunno, maybe they weren't necessary. My daughters made some awesome book choices, though. Proud of them.

Any excuse to talk about Christopher Golden is a good one! Always nice to see someone on here discovering one of the newer and more intriguing voices in the genre. While Golden has improved steadily as a writer, what's equally cool is the sure hand for story selection he's developing as an anthologist. A recent volume (co-edited with Tim Lebbon and James A. Moore) is British Invasion. I do have some minor quibbles,mostly regarding the omission of Simon Clark, Stephen Laws, John Llewellyn Probert, Simon Kurt Unsworth, & David Hambling; any or all of whom would be welcome replacements for Philip Nutman. There are a couple of other inclusions that don't exactly blow me away, but these would be a matter of personal tastes (both individuals that I'm thinking of are fine writers, just not my particular cup of tea. Nutman, on the other hand is just actively bad.) Again, these complaints are very minor in nature and sticking to commenting on what's actually there as opposed to what I would've liked to have been there is far more productive. That said, if this collection of tales provides an introduction to any of the following authors, then it has achieved its aim in fine form: Joel Lane, Paul Finch, Nicholas Royale, Adam L.G. Nevill. I imagine that many of the others are already familiar, as they're pretty widely published by US publishers.

Featuring an Introduction by Stephen Volk and an Afterword by Kim Newman. All New Dark Fiction by Allen Ashley, Kealan Patrick Burke, Ramsey Campbell, Mark Chadbourn, Peter Crowther, Paul Finch, Gary Fry, Joel Lane, Steve Lockley & Paul Lewis, James Lovegrove, Paul Meloy, Mark Morris, Adam Nevill, Philip Nutman, Sarah Pinborough, Tony Richards, Gord Rollo, Nicholas Royle, John Travis, Conrad Williams, and "Anonymous." About the Book: They've invaded before, sending their best and brightest to transform popular music for all time. This time, they're leaving the music behind and focusing on words. The British Invasion has begun again, in a collection of twenty-one unforgettable stories of horror and the dark fantastic. From the birthplace of horror fiction, the land where writers first dreamed up the icons that shaped the field we know today Frankenstein's monster, Count Dracula, the vile Mr. Hyde and more. You think you know desperation? Discover a literary tradition born from centuries of violence, pain, and suffering, distilled through the veneer of civility, and twisted by the reign of tyrants and kings. You think you know fear? From creeping dread to hideous humor, from quiet terror to brutal horror, from mad speculation to unspeakable truth, the twenty-one tales here represent the best that the U.K. has to offer. The rising stars and the masters of British horror have joined together. The British Invasion has begun. Table of Contents: Introduction by Stephen Volk "Lost in a Field of Paper Flowers" by Gord Rollo "Respects" by Ramsey Campbell" "Farewell to the 21st Century Girl" by Mark Chadbourn "At One" by James Lovegrove "The Nowhere Man" by Sarah Pinborough "The Spaces in Our Lives" by Allen Ashley "The Crazy Helmets" by Paul Finch "Slitten Gorge" by Conrad Williams "Birchiam Pier" by Tony Richards "Beth's Law" by Joel Lane "Black Dogs" by Gary Fry "The Misadventure of Fat Man and Little Boy, Or, How I Made a Monster" by Philip Nutman "The Goldfinch" by Nicholas Royle "Never Go Back" by Steve Lockley & Paul Lewis "Mutiny" by Kealan Patrick Burke "British Horror Weekend" by Anonymous "King of the Maggots" by John Travis "Leaves" by Peter Crowther "Puppies For Sale" by Mark Morris "Yellow Teeth" by Adam Nevill "The Vague" by Paul Meloy Afterword by Kim Newman Reviews & Praise: "From Gord Rollo's transcendentally eerie tale of a comatose young boy's revenge ("Lost in a Field of Paper Flowers") to Mark Morris's cautionary tale about a pair of unorthodox vampires ("Puppies for Sale"), the 21 original stories in this anthology establish the strength of British horror writers. Contributors include Ramsey Campbell, Sarah Pinborough, Conrad Williams, Peter Crowther, and other veterans and new authors. A strong collection of contemporary horror from across the pond." Library Journal. "The British may not have invented the modern horror story, as the editors of this all-original anthology claim, but the 21 stories they've selected prove that contemporary U.K. writers are infiltrating American publishing markets with some of the most provocative horror fiction written today. Refreshingly devoid of genre clichés, these subtle tales offer ambiguously supernatural horrors from the dramas and traumas of everyday life. Nicholas Royle, in The Goldfinch, gives chronic illness an unsettling spin by objectifying a man's cancer as a relentless shadowy stalker. Mark Morris's Puppies for Sale presents a nuclear family's gradual implosion as a consequence of a malignant supernatural influence that may be a complete figment of the distraught father's mind. In Conrad Williams's Slitten Gorge, the disconnect between the unpolluted natural world and the protagonist's industrially despoiled environment achieves an aura of otherworldly horror. The book's title notwithstanding.

[The Unholy Dragon]

Is Golden really a newer voice? Dude has twenty years as a published author including being one of the go to writers for Buffy novels when that was a hot property as well as Mike Mignola collabs with Hellboy and Baltimore. He's definitely someone I think of as both seasoned and fairly well known but maybe that's to do with his overlap in my areas of interest (having read many of his Buffy books as a kid and being a fairly big Hellboy fan)

[OSJ]

5 hours ago, The Unholy Dragon said:

Is Golden really a newer voice? Dude has twenty years as a published author including being one of the go to writers for Buffy novels when that was a hot property as well as Mike Mignola collabs with Hellboy and Baltimore. He's definitely someone I think of as both seasoned and fairly well known but maybe that's to do with his overlap in my areas of interest (having read many of his Buffy books as a kid and being a fairly big Hellboy fan)

Well, the short form is that you are correct and I'm wrong... It's a matter of perspective, I suppose, see, I consider myself and Tim Lebbon to be "newer voices", when the reality is that as an editor/publisher I go back to 1986 and as an author, the early 1990s... See, in my universe, Stephen King, Peter Straub, Harlan Ellison, Kate Wilhelm, Brian W. Aldiss and Joe Lansdale are the "established authors". Funny thing is that the people I've just cited range from 65 at the youngest to just over ninety...

[The Unholy Dragon]

Yeah. I'm the relatively young age of 29 so you've been at this longer than I've been at life. Makes sense we'd have different ideas of what's recent.

[OSJ]

On 5/17/2017 at 7:04 PM, The Unholy Dragon said:

Yeah. I'm the relatively young age of 29 so you've been at this longer than I've been at life. Makes sense we'd have different ideas of what's recent.

Perspective is such an interesting and often ignored element of how we see things. I often describe myself as having grown up in a time-warp and it's mostly true... See, in junior high I met a kid my age who was sitting in the school library reading a 1930s issue of Weird Tales. I'd never seen one, but having just discovered H.P. Lovecraft, I knew what Weird Tales was, so I struck up a conversation based on "Is there a Lovecraft story in that issue?" One thing led to another and an eventual invite to his house to see the "rest of the books and pulps". Turns out his father was the owner of the first SF specialty bookstore on the West Coast and when the store closed in the early 1960s, he just brought all the stock home and added it to his already massive collection. End result is you have this kid who is an avid reader of contemporary SF, horror, & fantasy who is splitting time reading 1930s/1940s Astounding, Unknown & Weird Tales. Certainly gave me an interesting background not readily duplicated... 

Thinking about this stuff, when I was asked to put to together a tribute anthology dedicated to Clark Ashton Smith's world of Zothique I thought about my own experience with discovering Smith, which came at age 14 via the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. Smith, for those who haven't read him, is one of the finest prose stylists that the field has ever produced. Almost entirely self-educated (read both the Encyclopedia Britannica and Oxford Unabridged Dictionary cover to cover, something that seemed like such a great idea that I did the same thing from age 18-20); anyway, Smith's vocabulary is an awesome thing, with only Jack Vance, Michael Shea, and Gene Wolfe coming close... So my perspective is that I literally grew up reading Smith and that perspective is set in stone... What about some of my writer friends that have never read him? What would it be like discovering this amazing author as a thirty or forty year-old as opposed to a callow lad of 12?

Interested in how this might play out, I built the anthology out of two very distinct groups of people, the first, writers who I knew to be (like myself) "students of the game" who were deeply read in the pulp tradition from whence came our modern weird tale. The second group was even more interesting, (to me), friends and colleagues that I considered to be excellent writers who came from an entirely different place and considered "old school horror" to be The Exorcist, Carrie, and Rosemary's Baby. In no way am I slighting these folks, I'm intrigued because their experience with Smith will be so much different than my own. (In all fairness, I was probably too early and would have enjoyed his work even more with some additional life experience behind me.) Anyway, with one exception who found his prose to be "pretentious and over-written). the group discovering Smith as adults were just blown away and the stories that they created as a result were just so full of creative energy that it was just leaping off the page... Fun stuff.

Final note on the perspective thing... One of my friends (former next-door neighbor) is just 21, and "always meant to read more horror and sf, but just didn't know where to start"...) Dude is like a sponge, reminds me of me in that he reads like he's making up for lost time... His dad is a few years younger than I am, but also really good people; both father and son are fans of the Cramps, which is of course very commendable... Now they've been turned on to the other two members of the Holy Trinity, Link Wray and Hasil Adkins (of course, the late, great Lux Interior is the third member) . 

[bobholly138]

Started the below last night.

 

[OSJ]

Can't go too far wrong with any of the Nebula anthos. The three edited by George Zebrowski are particularly choice as George gives not two fucks what the publisher expects and puts in whatever he damn well feels like within the parameters of the Nebula Awards. So, in this one you not only get great fiction, but also some incisive essays and for good measure three poems. Worth the price of admission just for the Lucius Shephard and Octavia Butler pieces, there's also some great shorter works. Oh, silly me, I forgot the best of all, the John Varley novella... Yeah, this one's a keeper...

I should mention that if the short story herein is your intro to George Zebrowski, you have a ton of great reading ahead of you... I'm hoping to work out a deal to do a retrospective collection of his short fiction for my "Masters of SF" series at Centipede Press, there are a couple of great collections from Golden Gryphon, but there's still a lot to be mined in order to really have a definitive book.

[J.H.]

Marvel Comics: The Untold Story is wonderfully fun to read and makes me simultaneously respect and hate Jim Shooter. Its weird knowing he was responsible for getting editorial organized in to the Line Editor format which stayed in place when Defalco took over as EiC and was still palce when I worked there (and still pretty much remains in palce to this day I believe). I find the Gerber/McGregor/Englehart trifecta to be utterly fascinating.

 

James

[AxB]

I read Blood Red Turns Dollar Green by Paul O'Brien, and didn't really like it. It's a fictionalised version of how the New York territory in Wrestling went national, with the names and characters tweaked so it's not exactly a historical novel as an alternative history. It has very good reviews, but I didn't really like it. The writing style is a bit 'teenage fiction' and it partly suffered from the fact that I'd just read a series of books set in the 60s and 70s about gangsters  written by James Ellroy. So reading a book set in the 70s about gangsters written by someone who'd never written a book before, there's no way it's going to smell of roses after that.

Then I re-read American Gods to get ready for the telly version. Much better than I'd remembered... the first time I read it, when it was new, it felt like a slog to get through. But this time I raced through in less than a fortnight. I also read the short story sequel he did to it, from Silverbob's Legends 2. In the foreword to that, Gaiman says he now knows what the sequel to American Gods will be. But then he didn't write it . Yet.

[Marty Sugar]

I finished Gaiman's AMERICAN GODS, and was blown away. Amazing stuff.

[JLSigman]

World War Z by Max Brooks.

Mira Grant's Feed series got me into zombie books, and this has been in the book Pile of Shame(tm) for a while. I'm about 100 pages in and I'm liking it well enough. The only thing that sometimes pulls me out of it is the thought that this dude was literally going all over the world after the apocalypse, but I may just be misunderstanding how devastated the world and technology are.

[Ace]

You are. The dead rose. The world didn't end. Also the interviews are years after the resolution of the crisis.

 

[Marty Sugar]

The Fracking King by James Browning. It's supposed to be an anti-fracking book by a leader in the anti-fracking movement...but it's really just a weird take on the "fish out of water" gimmick when a geeky kid who hopes to be a pro Scrabble player ends up at a grimy Pennsylvania private school run by a fracking company. It's quirky and fun and an easy read.

[Robert S]

I tried to read the first of the Wild Cards books. I liked both the concept of the mosaic novel and the premise but I stopped reading after a couple of chapters as the thing was just too pulpy (is that a word?) for me. I suppose that is on purpose but that's just not really my cup of tea.

[OSJ]

16 hours ago, Robert s said:

I tried to read the first of the Wild Cards books. I liked both the concept of the mosaic novel and the premise but I stopped reading after a couple of chapters as the thing was just too pulpy (is that a word?) for me. I suppose that is on purpose but that's just not really my cup of tea.

The Wild Card books are basically written by old comic book geeks like GRRM for other old comic book geeks like me. They're a lot of fun (at least the first seven or eight, I sort of lost interest after that), but to expect much more than pulpy fun is a recipe for disappointment.

[Control]

A couple of chapters into The Expendable Man. It's terrific so far. Dorothy B. Hughes needs to be in any discussion of hardboiled fiction. In a Lonely Place is fantastic as well (and the excellent film adaptation diverges from it in a profound way).

[Marty Sugar]

Glorious (2014) by Jeff Guinn.

Guinn is more well-known for writing non-fiction about Charles Manson and the Old West; this time he tries a novel about a potential silver rush in the Arizona Territory that leads to murder and treachery. The book is kind of a whodunnit but they give away the who pretty early...the rest of the book is you waiting for the characters to catch up to what you already know. Finish of the book is rushed, as it was to set up an eventual sequel. The main character, Cash McClendon, is an interesting anti-hero character trying to become a better person...although probably not for the right reasons. The supporting cast are an interesting lot, to say the least.

[bobholly138]

Hellblazer vol 4 Family Man-Just read the 2 issue anti nuke story by Morrison and David Lloyd. So far the trade is good. 

[odessasteps]

Those guest creator issues around issues 25-30 Are great, esp the Gaiman issue "hold me."

[Kuetsar]

Read Dirk Hayhursts books and Jonah Keri's Expos book.  The Expos was fantastic(obviously), after reading it it was surprising the Expos lasted as long as they did. As for Hayhurst, the Bullpen Gospels is a classic, the second less so, but still interesting and the third was mixed(at best). About the third, the first half is painful to read. Yeah I get it its hard to be a Major Leaguer, but it got boring quick. After reading how fucking stupid he was in the locker room, its a wonder anyone talked to him at all, and the Triple H stuff was such bullshit and he seemed obvlious that anyone would be upset about that sort of thing. Frankly Trips should have kicked his ass. The second half of it was MUCH better as he was back to telling stories, rather than being a whiny bitch. Also read a book about pitching by Roger Kahn, which was really good as well.  Here's a link to by Goodreads account, assuming anyone gives a shit https://www.goodreads.com/challenges/5493-2017-reading-challenge

[bobholly138]

Started Richard Laymon's The Cellar last night. Read The Beast House a few years ago,so got an idea what is gonna happen in this the first novel in what a 3 book series.

Still it is a Laymon I haven't read. And so far it is great.

[OSJ]

On 7/21/2017 at 11:20 PM, bobholly138 said:

Started Richard Laymon's The Cellar last night. Read The Beast House a few years ago,so got an idea what is gonna happen in this the first novel in what a 3 book series.

Still it is a Laymon I haven't read. And so far it is great.

Wait... A Laymon fan that hasn't read The Cellar? WTF? That's like a wrestling fan never hearing of Misawa. ;-) The Cellar along with novels by Jack Ketchum and James Herbert saved us from being inundated by "quiet horror", yeah, I'm all for atmosphere and subtlety, but I do like variety. The Cellar was a huge hit and seemed like it would launch Dick as a major star. Then they followed it up with this and effectively killed his career in the USA for over a decade.

Tell me, does this look like a horror novel? Or for that matter, "a novel of terror"? No, no it does not. This has to be one of the worst covers a book has been cursed with. This is on a level with the skeletal cheerleader on Ketchum's The Girl Next Door. Just criminal stupidity. 

[The Unholy Dragon]

That cover actually really evokes VC Andrews to me. Which uh. I don't think that's quite the right tone.

[bobholly138]

5 hours ago, OSJ said:

Wait... A Laymon fan that hasn't read The Cellar? WTF? That's like a wrestling fan never hearing of Misawa. ;-) The Cellar along with novels by Jack Ketchum and James Herbert saved us from being inundated by "quiet horror", yeah, I'm all for atmosphere and subtlety, but I do like variety. The Cellar was a huge hit and seemed like it would launch Dick as a major star. Then they followed it up with this and effectively killed his career in the USA for over a decade.

Tell me, does this look like a horror novel? Or for that matter, "a novel of terror"? No, no it does not. This has to be one of the worst covers a book has been cursed with. This is on a level with the skeletal cheerleader on Ketchum's The Girl Next Door. Just criminal stupidity. 

I just never had a copy of The Cellar before lol.

[OSJ]

3 hours ago, The Unholy Dragon said:

That cover actually really evokes VC Andrews to me. Which uh. I don't think that's quite the right tone.

No, that shit killed Dick's career in the US, and I'm not kidding. He went from over a quarter of a million copies of The Cellar sold to something like 25,000-30,000 copies of this POS. In all fairness, it wasn't just the cover, the book was horribly edited in an effort to tone things down (in other words, remove everything that readers were digging about Laymon in the first place). The story has a happy ending, Dick was published as a major author in the UK with his books perpetually in print. When he started publishing in the US again, everything got the royal reception as a limited edition, then trade hardcover, then finally mass-market. No, he wasn't Stephen King or Dean Koontz, but he was the leader of the next tier of horror authors and probably the biggest name to be marketed specifically as a horror author. King and Koontz haven't been marketed as genre in a long, long time.