Horror Book Thread

[Curt McGirt]

Got in Alone with the Horrors by Ramsey Campbell and just ordered Strange Wine by Harlan Ellison from the very reliable Abe Books (thanks again to OSJ). I got about halfway through Strange Wine from the local library when I was much, much younger but never made it; "From A to Z, In the Chocolate Alphabet" was probably the last one. I don't know why but if Stephen King's description of some of that one in Danse Macabre is correct then there you go. 

[OSJ]

Good stuff, my friend! You've selected books by two of my dearest friends and mentors. AWTH is a great retrospective of Campbell, funny thing is, without much difficulty I could assemble another retrospective of his work that would be just as good and the same size. If he's going to mis-fire it's usually going to happen at novel length, though most of his novels are great. He's had a disturbing tendency in the last couple of years to go for funny, which is not his strong suit. I don't want to sound arrogant or besmirch one of my mentors, but funny is something that you either are or are not, and just like horror, less is more. Harlan Ellison is funny, Richard Laymon could be hysterical, Edward Lee is funny I've been told I'm pretty amusing when I put my mind to it. Ramsey Campbell, while in person a witty, funny guy overthinks the shit out of things when writing. 

SW a great Harlan collection, but really, is there any such thing as a less than great Harlan collection? The only thing he can't do is write novels and with the body of short stories, essays, screenplays and what-not that's a minor cavil. How good is Harlan? He could write an essay about the price of tea in the UK and I would read every word despite not drinking tea and not living in the UK. 

[Curt McGirt]

Just read "In the Bag" from AWTH and I have to stop. It legit stopped me in my tracks, and that doesn't happen often.

In other news I devoured (heh) Slob by Rex Miller in a couple days and now since it ended on a cliffhanger I'm gonna have to get the other Chaingang books. Vicious stuff. Speaking of which I bought a copy of Open Season by Jack Ketchum and Seeing Red by David Schow for a friend for Xmas; I'm sure he'll be entertained...

[OSJ]

On 12/6/2017 at 8:04 PM, Curt McGirt said:

Just read "In the Bag" from AWTH and I have to stop. It legit stopped me in my tracks, and that doesn't happen often.

In other news I devoured (heh) Slob by Rex Miller in a couple days and now since it ended on a cliffhanger I'm gonna have to get the other Chaingang books. Vicious stuff. Speaking of which I bought a copy of Open Season by Jack Ketchum and Seeing Red by David Schow for a friend for Xmas; I'm sure he'll be entertained...

Oh yeah, "In the Bag" heh-heh-heh.  I have good news and bad news regarding the Rex Miller books, they're about as uneven as a Sunday morning performance by Blue Panther. (If the phrase "in no condition to perform" comes to mind, that's just what we were going for there.)  There are bits of great stuff sprinkled throughout the series, but there's also an incredible amount of stupid stuff that a professional writer would have been able to avoid. Rex Miller, despite having six books published is by no stretch of the imagination  a "professional writer", what he is really is a major fanboy, mail-order pop-culture dealer and comic-book collector who had a couple of good ideas and a gift for instant composition. It's obvious in Slice that he thinks the real story is "How long can you fight the monsters without becoming one?" 

Of course, that's a theme that needs to be treated intelligently and with nuance as the character "grows" (or degenerates, eef you wheeeel). Unfortuantely, that sort of thing is far beyond Miller's abilities, so he drops the idea cold and never bothers to bring it up again. The books are filled with lazy-ass, incompetent shit like that, of course this is what happens when you sell to a house like Onyx or whoever the fuck the publisher is, and there's no editor on board to help a new writer like Miller. Lacking that expertise on his side, Miller's usual routine is when he feels he's come up against something beyond his abilities, why just drop it entirely and do another Chaingang murder/rape scene. 

Fortunately, you can read one these novels in about an hour, so if you have a bus or train ride to work, you're all set.

[Curt McGirt]

Yeah, I didn't get a feel of anything great out of Slob but thought the series might pick up after and like you said, it just runs at a good pace, ran through it in about three reads. I tried to get the second and third off of Abe but was rejected due to a credit card malfunction and ended up getting Slice from Amazon instead. Strange Wine, sadly, is STILL not in the mail from Abe/the seller even though today is the deadline and I'm pissed about that. 

[odessasteps]

I got an Amazon notice about the House of Secrets trade the other day, so there's another book for the horror comic list. 

[OSJ]

2 hours ago, Curt McGirt said:

Yeah, I didn't get a feel of anything great out of Slob but thought the series might pick up after and like you said, it just runs at a good pace, ran through it in about three reads. I tried to get the second and third off of Abe but was rejected due to a credit card malfunction and ended up getting Slice from Amazon instead. Strange Wine, sadly, is STILL not in the mail from Abe/the seller even though today is the deadline and I'm pissed about that. 

Keep in mind there are some sleazebags on abebooks.com, the most common thing is "phantom" sellers.  These assholes don't even have any books, they just cut and paste other people's listings and add a few bucks to the price. If the customer isn't careful to sort by lowest price, the search will default to most recently listed and here's where the scumbags score. Not only does the customer pay more than they needed to, the scumbag will call up the dealer who actually has the book and ask that it be dropped shipped, of course, it's customary in the trade to give a colleague 20% off, so that gets added to the revenue stream as well.  The customer hasn't a clue that they've been diddled and the bookseller who actually had the book doesn't know that they've been rooked out of a sale. 

Here's a rule of thumb, look at the seller's whole stock, see if he has depth within the genre, I'd rather buy from a specialist than a generalist, even if it costs me a few bucks more. Or, just ask me, I've been on abebooks since day two or three, and know who to shop from and who to avoid.

[Curt McGirt]

Thanks man, I'll do that. The dealer had a reasonable photo so maybe it's USPS being stupid, but I dunno, we'll see.

[OSJ]

On 12/6/2017 at 8:04 PM, Curt McGirt said:

Just read "In the Bag" from AWTH and I have to stop. It legit stopped me in my tracks, and that doesn't happen often.

I just took a break from this huge Walter Simonson Thor omnibus (after two days I'm only half way through it, damn thing's over 1100 pages and of course one must stop to savor the artwork... Anyway, re-read "In the Bag" and "Mackintosh Willy", damn, Ramsey can bring the nastiness when he wants to. Oh yeah, had to give "Cold Print"  a re-read too, hard to believe he was sixteen when he wrote that... Damn... Of course,  I've probably mentioned that Ramsey Campbell was the guy that made me want to be a writer way back in 1970 when I bought Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos for $7.50 of my paper route money. Fast forward to 2016 and who should write the introduction to my first short story collection... Why Ramsey Campbell, of course.

[Curt McGirt]

Strange Brew FINALLY showed up today because the seller just completely screwed up and forgot to ship it. Happy not to be working at USPS this season...

Slice (the second Rex Miller Chaingang book) also came in this week and is indeed pulp trash. Not like I'm surprised or anything, and I'm still gonna finish it. 

[Curt McGirt]

On 12/11/2017 at 8:55 PM, OSJ said:

I bought Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos for $7.50 of my paper route money

Oh, funny thing about this, I bought a copy of it for about $3 when I was in high school on paperback and never finished it. Fast forward 20 years, a friend of mine in Indiana gives me a nice, glossy repress with extra stories. I didn't realize it was the same book, then go out in the garage and surprise! The old paperback is starting right at me through a clear plastic carton. 

Needless to say I finished the book and reading "Cold Print" made me say to myself "let's go look for some Ramsey Campbell". 

[OSJ]

On 12/22/2017 at 12:05 PM, Curt McGirt said:

Oh, funny thing about this, I bought a copy of it for about $3 when I was in high school on paperback and never finished it. Fast forward 20 years, a friend of mine in Indiana gives me a nice, glossy repress with extra stories. I didn't realize it was the same book, then go out in the garage and surprise! The old paperback is starting right at me through a clear plastic carton. 

Needless to say I finished the book and reading "Cold Print" made me say to myself "let's go look for some Ramsey Campbell". 

Slice... Damn, what a chore that was, and I've been known to read over 150,000 words of Wayne Rogers' weird menace stories in a single day (neither activity is recommended, and I say that having inflicted two of Rogers collections on the world). I told the publisher we needed to do two of Rogers' books because he makes the other ten weird menace authors that we publish look absolutely brilliant in comparison.

Campbell wrote "Cold Print" when he was sixteen, yeah, fucking sixteen...

Let's see, Arkham did a New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos edited by Ramsey Campbell and leading off with "Crouch End" by Stephen King, which is absolutely excellent. Then they did a new edition of Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. Yes, it's a new edition not a second or third  printing or whatever they call it. Arkham House has never been able to grasp the difference between the terms "edition" and "printing"; for example, their flagship books, the basic set of the major works of H.P. Lovecraft, Dagon, At the Mountains of Madness, and The Dunwich Horror underwent a major change with the fifth or sixth printings, when the dustjacket art changed and the texts were changed to the versions edited by S.T. Joshi, who painstakingly reconstructed the texts as Lovecraft had originally submitted them to Weird Tales and Astounding Stories. Properly speaking these should have been listed as new editions, not new printings. The rule of thumb is pretty damn simple, which is why it irritates me that Arkham House can't seem to understand it. If substantial changes to the book are made, it's a new edition. If no changes are made, it's simply a new printing and should be listed as 2nd, 3rd or whatever. But hey, it gets even simpler than that! Be they paper or metal, the type for a book is set on what are called "plates", if you can use the same plates that you used last time, what you've got is a new printing. If you have to use new plates, (presumably because something has changed be it a new introduction, change in content, even a change in the font (which will change your line length and thus your page count, even if it's only one or two pages in difference;  basically anything that necessitates the use of new printing plates gives you a new edition. There, y'all now know more about publishing than Arkham House, a company which has been in business over seventy years!

Anyway, the later mis-characterized as "printing" of TOTCM removes  "The Deep Ones" by James Wade, which was pretty bad and replaces it with stories by Derleth (2), Joanna Russ, Philip Jose Farmer, Karl Edward Wagner, Stephen King, and drops two weak Brian Lumley stories, replacing them with a really good Lumley piece. So you lose three crappy stories and gain seven good ones. This is obviously a new "edition", not a new printing and this is a case where the difference should certainly be noted as traditionally later printings are worth less than a first printing, and calling this a second "printing" really does the book a disservice as this is clearly  a substantially superior volume.

[Curt McGirt]

Yeah, that's the one 

which has the really weird Richard A. Lupoff story "Discovery of the Ghooric Zone" at the end. My original is this one

Meanwhile... Jesus Fuck, is Slice a chore. I thought I could knock it out today. Then I looked and realized it was 300 pages and THEN I got bogged down in the sex shit which is a case where you might as well just skip a whole chapter. Talk about bloat, this one should have been called Slog instead

[OSJ]

MASTERS OF THE WEIRD TALE: ARTHUR J. BURKS

A stunning single volume edition of Arthur J. Burks’s best weird and horror fiction, across 900 pages, with over 20 full page illustrations, many in full color, with a stunning wraparound dustjacket by Piotr Jablonski. Also included is a new introduction by editor John Pelan. 
       The single volume is enclosed in a handsome slipcase with ribbon marker, patterned endsheets, and other extras. The complete contents are shown below. 
       The edition is limited to 200 signed and numbered copies, and the book is signed byJohn Pelan, Piotr Jablonski, and Gwabryel, with a special facsimile signature by Arthur J. Burks. $225.00 the copy, e-mail [email protected] and tell 'em OSJ sent ya, and you're sure to get a discount!

I know $225.00 sounds like a lot, but consider most of the individual issues of Horror Stories and Terror Tales that ran the stories originally cost $200-$400 an issue!!!! Anyway, this is by far the largest single-author collection of weird-menace stories ever assembled by anyone and I was going to try and be modest, but I just can't do it... I'm damn proud of this thing.  Consider that I started with a pool of almost twice as many stories and fought tooth and nail to keep as many as I could while staying within our budget (oh yeah, this is an oversize book, basically the height and width of a sheet of copy paper, so most of the stories that you see in the 20+ page range would actually be novelettes or novellas running 30-50 pages in the original pulp magazines

[Curt McGirt]

Since I burned through more Ellison (Deathbird Stories) I decided to finally tackle something I should have read years ago: Dracula

[Captain Kronos]

Just now, Curt McGirt said:

Since I burned through more Ellison (Deathbird Stories) I decided to finally tackle something I should have read years ago: Dracula

Dude, no need to burn books. You can just read them or not. 

Dracula's good stuff. It might take a minute to get used to the storytelling method, but it's worth it. I should re-read it one of these days. 

[Curt McGirt]

Got through the first chapter and into the second on work break, along with the (long) introduction. Such rich Victorian language, you can practically dine on it. I think the method is extremely unique too. Gonna dig this one.

Meanwhile, Slice is still sitting in the backseat of my Honda haha

[Captain Kronos]

25 minutes ago, Curt McGirt said:

Such rich Victorian language, you can practically dine on it.

When I first read TURN OF THE SCREW about 5 years ago, I was stumbling on Henry James's language. Then I would read a few sentences aloud, to get a feel for it. And the magic began to shine through. 

Those guys could write in those days. 

 

The second time I "read" was audible - Emma Thompson was kind of enough to read it to me. 

[Curt McGirt]

The side notes at the bottom explaining some of the now fairly arcane terms is a big help, too. 

Oh and speaking of actors, it's unfortunate that some of the lines I clearly hear Keanu Reeves' dumb ass reciting in my head haha

[Captain Kronos]

25 minutes ago, Curt McGirt said:

The side notes at the bottom explaining some of the now fairly arcane terms is a big help, too. 

Oh and speaking of actors, it's unfortunate that some of the lines I clearly hear Keanu Reeves' dumb ass reciting in my head haha

I am a big Keanu fan. 

I respect his attempt to break out of Bill & Ted with this film, but it didn't work like he planned. (see also: MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING, speaking of Emma Thompson)

[Curt McGirt]

Oh, I've really no problem with his part aside from the fact that he is... well... wooden. I loved Keanu in the Bill and Ted movies and River's Edge, but in Bram Stoker's Dracula I think he was maybe trying a bit hard to be the clueless victim. His pronunciation of "Carfax Abbey" is legend though. 

[OSJ]

Gents: 

Always happy to see someone reading one of the classics and Dracula was all of that. Really transcended the rest of Stoker's output which was pretty much okay, but nothing to get overly excited about. Now here's a funny fact, what if I were to tell you that from 1897 until 1927 Dracula was NOT the best-selling horror novel, nope, not on the Continent, not in "Colonial editions" (the USA, India, Canada, & Australia; yeah, over 100 years after we'd kicked their asses, those arrogant Brits were still calling books sent to the US "Colonial Edition", matter of Dracula wasn't even the best-selling horror novel in England during that thirty-year period. That honor fell to The Beetle by Richard Marsh. It wasn't until the stage version of Dracula went international that the book picked up steam and  eventually relegated The Beetle to a footnote. There are dozens of editions starting at around five bucks. Pictured below is my copy from the 1920's. Interestingly enough, my pals at Wildside Press copied the design for their new hardcover edition which runs around $25.00. Give it a read after Dracula and compare the two...

 

From a stylistic standpoint, I'd be really hard-pressed to vote against Dracula, but both books suffer from a surfeit of supposedly intelligent people doing some really stupid-ass shit.   Even so,  The Beetle is a real blast, lots of chase scenes and monster-fu if you know what I mean and I 'm sure that you do. There is a 1919 film of The Beetle, but I've never seen it nor do I know anyone that has ever mentioned it. Likely means it's either a lost film like London after Midnight or it really sucked. Considering the circumstances and the author, either one is a good possibility.  The novel is a case of Richard Marsh writing so far over his head that it's ridiculous. Marsh was a Victorian/Edwardian hack of the worst sort. After reading The Beetle, I picked the main collection of his supernatural fiction, The Haunted Chair, what a waste of forty bucks that turned out to be.

[Curt McGirt]

Instead of doing something smart like finding the above title I went back to reading freakin' Slice after a multiple month layoff. I refuse to be defeated by this one, no matter how long it takes me. It's like he wanted to do Slob again but make it some kind of multiple storyline epic and is failing miserably, and I'm only halfway through. Plus, you know, having Chaingang raping underage boys in the woods doesn't help either. 

[OSJ]

9 hours ago, Curt McGirt said:

Instead of doing something smart like finding the above title I went back to reading freakin' Slice after a multiple month layoff. I refuse to be defeated by this one, no matter how long it takes me. It's like he wanted to do Slob again but make it some kind of multiple storyline epic and is failing miserably, and I'm only halfway through. Plus, you know, having Chaingang raping underage boys in the woods doesn't help either. 

Your first mistake was picking up Slice after being warned not to. Your second mistake is giving it another try. I''m sorry, but I can't help you now, you deserve the full half-book of Miller nonsense that you're going to get. I, on the other hand will be reading Glen Hirshberg's new collection from Cemetery Dance. ;-)

[Curt McGirt]

Hey, the fucking thing has been sitting in the back of the Honda for like two, three months. Until I got Taboo 2 in the mail today I had nothing to read at work but the new Maximumrocknroll and I can burn through one of those in a sitting. Now that I've sat down with it again I want to see just how bad it gets

And yes, I do deserve this. THANK FUCK my card was rejected when I tried to get the other two, which I forgot even happened until I went back and read that post...