OSJ Brings You the Horror/Weird Fiction Author of the Week

[OSJ]

Okay, maybe not the week, more like whenever I damn well feel like it, but whatever... The last couple of outings I've talked about guys from the pulp era, so I thought I'd switch things up and talk about a guy who is doing his best stuff RIGHT NOW. Sadly, you're not going to find Scott Thomas at your local Barnes and Noble. Scott Thomas' work can be found mainly in the specialty press, save for regular appearances in Ellen Datlow's Year's Best Fantasy & Horror.

 

Since 1993 Thomas has written some 13 dozen stories, mostly ghost stories set in New England's past. If you're looking for Russell Gray-style splatter or the hip, slick work of his brother Jeffery Thomas, Scott Thomas isn't for you. His work is of a gentler, more subtle tone, but none the less terrifying for that. Like the great M. R. James, Scott Thomas is a master of the understated, that allows your imagination to paint a picture far more horrifying than anything that he could commit to print. Other than his tremendously expensive first collection, Cobwebs and Whispers all of his work has been made available in both limited hardcovers and economical trades or e-books. After nearly a decade specializing in the short form, Thomas wrote his first novel,  Fallengrey in 2012.

 

His collections are as follows:

 

Cobwebs & Whispers  2001 - (ridiculously expensive)

Shadows of Flesh 2004 - (pricey, but within reason $75-$100)

Westermead 2005 - (very reasonable $20 for the trade)

Over the Darkening Fields 2007 - (very reasonable, anywhere from ten bucks to over $100 if ya want one of the fancy ones. A real bargain with 26 stories!)

Midnight in New England 2007 (Another fine collection, also very reasonably priced)

Garden of Ghosts 2008 - (Great concept collection, each story actually relates to the vegetable kingdom in some way. The Ziesings have this for a mere ten bucks!)

Quill & Candle  2010 - (Yeah, you can get a cheap trade, but you really want to check Amazon and eBay for one of the signed hardcovers. It's a beautiful book and will no doubt shoot up in value over the years. I restrained myself from spending $100 on the slipcased version (1 of 13), as the 1 of 100 signed hardcover is plenty fancy for me.)

Urn & Willow 2012 - (Another chance to either buy a trade or a spiffy hardcover for $40, OSJ sez, "Get the hardcover!")

 

Here's the cool thing about Scott Thomas, his older brother Jeffrey is my age (almost to the day), which puts Scott in his late forties or early fifties, thus we can have a reasonable expectation of him cranking out a collection every other year for the next twenty years, and won't you be glad you got in on the (almost) ground floor!

 

 

 

 

 

 

[DEAN]

Here's a wee interview: 

http://www.thisishorror.co.uk/read-horror/meet-the-writer/scott-thomas

[cwoy2j]

Speaking of Jeffrey Thomas, I love the Punktown and Hades series.

[Control]

Hey John, what can you tell me (if anything) about Dorothy Quick and Mary Elizabeth Counselman? Either write anything worthwhile?

[OSJ]

Wow! There's a couple of names that you don't see everyday. Okay, for Ms. Quick... You know how the old pulp magazines like Weird Tales would usually have a cover illustration for the longest story in the magazine and then make mention of a couple of regular contributors such as:

 

In this issue, a new novel by Robert Bloch! New stories by Seabury Quinn and H.P. Lovecraft and many others... Dorothy Quick is the very epitome of "many others". She's not awful, just very unmemorable. She wrote quite a lot and I'm sure that I must have at least a couple of dozen of her stories either in Weird Tales or various anthologies, but I would be hard pressed to name a single story.

 

Now as for Mary Elizabeth Counselman... Half in Shadow is one of my favorite single-author collections, can't recommend it highly enough. Do make sure to get the US Arkham House edition and not the UK William Kimber edition. There are seven additional stories in the US edition. Her 1934 tale, "The Three Marked Pennies" gets a lot of mention as possibly being the single best story ever published by Weird Tales. I don't happen to agree with that, but it is awfully good. One of the hardest decisions that I had to make when assembling The Century's Best Horror was choosing between the Counselman story and "The Tower of Moab" by L.A. Lewis. I ended up going with Lewis, but on any given day I might opt for "The Three Marked Pennies". It was that close.

 

Sadly, I never got to meet Ms. Counselman, by all indications, she was a really cool lady, went to lots of SF conventions in the deep South and was always good for a new story whenever August Derleth was putting together an anthology. When the 1980s rolled around she became a regular contributor to Fantasy Book, a semi-pro zine. Looking at her bibliography, it appears that there's just enough material for another collection... I should really look into that... There is also a collection entitled African Yesterdays: A Collection of Native Folktales that looks to be very interesting...

 

Lastly, for those interested in the really good, yet forgotten Weird Tales authors, there's an anthology entitled Far Below, edited by Robert Weinberg. This is one of those anthologies that anyone interested in the genre should have. It features an excellent yarn by Counselman, the titular piece (which is the best H.P. Lovecraft story that H.P. Lovecraft didn't write), Also, great stories by three great writers that you likely have never heard of: Merle Prout, G.G. Pendarves, and Mindret Lord. Prout and Lord were simply not very prolific, and Pendarves had the bad timing to die just as she was developing a following in the US (she hailed from Cornwall).

 

So, as to "did either write anything worthwhile?" You could go through life never reading Dorothy Quick and you wouldn't have missed anything. As for Mary Elizabeth Counselman, I've never encountered a bad story by her and consider her Arkham House collection to be among the biggest bangs for the buck when it comes to supernatural horror. (You can score copies on abebooks.com for around $15.00 or even less  if you're not fussy about condition.

 

Control: Thanks so much for bringing this subject up... As you probably know, I'm editing a line of books under the Dancing Tuatara Press imprint that is comprised mainly of collections from the weird menace pulps and weird mystery novels. I was just looking at expanding the line to include some Weird Tales material, including a Frank Belknap Long collection, collections by Paul Ernst and Arthur J. Burks that derive equally from Weird Tales and the weird menace pulps and a real weird one, a four-author collection featuring four writers from the late 1940s - early 1950s who between them authored less than twenty stories. However, the quality level is off the charts, so it will be a damn good book, even if people haven't ever heard of the contributors, (David Eynon, C. Hall Thompson, Ewen Whyte, and W. Kirk Mashburn). But a second Counselman collection? Why the hell not? ;-)

 

See what sort of literary reign of terror I've unleashed at: www.ramblehouse.com (look under "Dancing Tuatara")