OSJ

Yes, really. Not a fan at all...

Thank God we didn't have to see Tito and Hampage stink up the joint after what was easily FOTY. Oh yeah, EDDIE! EDDIE! EDDIE! Too bad for Curran that MMA fights don't go ten rounds, he might have got warmed up by then...

A big F U to my recurring cellulitis in my legs that makes it impossible to walk from time to time. I hadn't spent a day in the hospital in 43 years and now I've been in for three-four days three times this year. (Note to docs: Figure out how to fix it or cut the sonofabitch off at the knee, I'm tired of this shit.) The only redeeming factor was the ketamine IV they gave me this last time... That is some seriously good shit...(and this from someone who has had every psychoactive drug known to man...)

Be not overly pissed! Your post suggests that you have some connection with VCU, whether it be as faculty or student matters not, you have vast powers at your disposal of which you had not even dreamed! It appears that your institution participates in the ILL network, this is the Inter-Library Loan program (which used to be a big selling point when recruiting students). Basically, anyone connected to a participating facility can obtain any book they want from anywhere in the network just by going into the library and requesting an ILL form, which will ask for the following info: Your library card # or Student/Faculty ID Card # Book Title: Yellow jacket. The Return of Chanda-Lung Publisher: Skeffington Date Published: 1936 Reason Needed: Research That's it... They can't say "no", although some institutions may stipulate that an item may not be removed from the facility (that's still not a problem as far as we're concerned.)

They fail to mention that she spends her evenings turning tricks.

True that. I sometimes forget that I live in those certain circles. ;-) I am surprised to hear that it didn't make back the budget... Someone should have called Todd MacFarlane about making action figures, that would have taken care of that...

What's obscure about "Nightbreed"?

M. Emmett Walsh was one of the all time great sleaze bags in Blood Simple but that movie got roundly ignored. *nods* Dennis Hopper not getting nominated for Blue Velvet is disappointing. *agreed* Malcolm MacDowell not getting anything for A Clockwork Orange is disappointing. He did get something, it's called "a career". What he should have won for was O Lucky Man.

Do you mean funny haha or funny peculiar?

I would be happy with an hour of Rhodes vs. Wyatt Family. But what's with the ineffectual masked tagteam, what is this, 1988? I'm sure that the Thunderfoots or Cruel Connection could use the work.

What exactly is supposed to be likable about Sandow's character? He's very polite, always says "You're welcome!"

Without question, "SONG OF THE DEAD". Damn near was my pick for best story of the year (1935) in CENTURY'S BEST HORROR. Got edged by Clark Ashton Smith, ain't no shame in that... Just my opinion, but I think if Blassingame had written for WEIRD TALES instead of the weird menace mags (which paid more), he'd be pretty much as well-known as Lovecraft today, well, maybe not Lovecraft, but at least the level of Smith...

J.T. : Anyway I could trouble you to Xerox Yellowjacket? I will of course pay for the copies and postage and immortalize you in the introduction. ;-)

Okay folks, let's go way, way back this week to the 1920s when booze was illegal and the west was terrified of all things Asian... The author of the week is Edmund Snell, at one time he was so prolific that you couldn't pick up a fiction magazine in the UK without finding a Snell story somewhere on the table of contents. When the story paper The Thriller came along, Snell was in hog heaven, the publisher wanted full-length novellas, Snell loved to write at that length and the end result was dozens of stories that qualified as book-length back in the day. Snell wrote of American gangsters (and was one of the few Brits that could do so without sounding like a complete twit), but his real forte was writing stories of Asian super-criminals, generally with a good deal of the action taking place in exotic locales like Singapore or Borneo (Snell lived in both places). As this was in those halcyon days before marketing categories dictated everything, his novels were all simply called "thrillers". You never knew what you were going to get, straight mystery, fantastic inventions, or outright supernatural content. Some of the best were The White Owl, The Yu-chi Stone, The Sound Machine, and The Yellow Seven. Several are available as reprints from Ramble House Publishers, others can be found cheaply on abebooks.com. Sadly, Snell's short stories didn't get the same treatment and there are well over 100 (by my count) that have never been reprinted, (please excuse the shameless self-promotion that follows), so far, I've assembled a half-dozen collections, mostly from The Thriller and Detective Fiction Weekly that will see publication from Ramble House. I'm also working on preparing a matching set of his trilogy that begins with The Yellow Seven, continues with Sign of the Scorpion and concludes with The Return of Chanda-Lung. Chanda-Lung is simply one of the most badass characters to feature in pulp fiction. Imagine a guy with the intellect of Fu Manchu and the general temperament of Bullseye and you're pretty close. Anyway, Edmund Snell's work holds up amazingly well for material written eighty years ago and if you excuse some of the fallacies in the science department, you'll find a lot to like about his stuff. It's just amazing that someone that was so prolific is so completely forgotten today, it would be like time travelling to 2050 and finding that no one had heard of Tom Clancy or Stephen King. Anyway, do check out Edmund Snell and post your thoughts here!

Check out House of Flesh under his real name (Bruno Fischer), another good one is The Lustful Ape.

Jest so ya know... Russell Gray was a pen-name for well-known mystery author Bruno Fischer. He was also the most hardcore of all the guys working for the weird menace pulps. In case you doubt me, check out http://fiction.libgen.net/view.php?id=878409 and consider that this was written seventy years ago... It would be difficult to get something this sick published now, how it got published then is a complete mystery... However, if anyone is seeking more Gray Grand Guignol goodness, I have put together two collections of his best stuff, and the first one Hostesses in Hell is available now...

Okay, for this week a guy that I'm almost positive no one here has ever heard of... (Hell, I didn't know much about him until a few years ago and it's my job to know this stuff!) The author of the week is Wyatt Blassingame (no relation to Bray Wyatt, although that opens an interesting line of thought...) Considering the prodigious quantity and remarkably high quality of his work during the 1930s one would expect Wyatt Blassingame to be mentioned in the same breath as contemporaries such as Lovecraft, Smith, and Howard. Certainly, he was as important to the success of Popular Publications’ “Big Three” weird menace pulps as the aforementioned gentlemen were to the success of Weird Tales. Between 1934 and 1940 Wyatt Blassingame authored over five dozen outstanding horror stories; almost all were for Popular Publications and the vast majority were of at least novelette length and frequently the had the place of honor as the cover story. Such a track record should have served to make the author a well-known figure within the genre. Sadly, this was not to be the case… The reasons for Blassingame’s obscurity are ironically enough a result of his success! First and foremost, with the exception of a handful of reprint anthologies edited and published by Robert Weinberg over twenty years ago and two fine anthologies edited by the late Sheldon Jaffrey, the weird menace pulps have been pretty much ignored by anthologists, with only a handful of tales by Hugh B. Cave appearing in the massive collections of his pulp fiction published by Fedogan & Bremer. Until recently, with the advent of “Terror Trios” at Altus Press and a six-volume set of Blassingame’s collected weird tales in process at Dancing Tuatara Press, only one volume (a slim paperback collection of detective stories which was published over fifty years ago) existed as evidence of Wyatt Blassingame’s career as a pulpster. The main reason for the weird menace pulps being ignored is a partially deserved reputation for formulaic tales of cardboard characters with the main emphasis being on wild excesses of violence and hints of all manner of depravity. While true to a certain extent, a sweeping generalization like this is no more accurate or useful than to state that Weird Tales published the worst science fiction of the 1930s. Again, a true statement, but one that ignores all of the fine work published there. The truisms are that editor Rogers Terrill was fond of the formula where a seemingly supernatural menace would be revealed to be of a mundane nature on the last page of the story. Equally true is that when the genre was bad, it was awful… However, the mainstays of the “Big Three” (Dime Mystery Magazine, Horror Stories, and Terror Tales) such as Blassingame, Knox, Ernst, Cave, Zagat, & Burks were talented enough to get the most out of the formula and more importantly, were popular enough that they could blithely ignore the editorial mandate and turn in out-and-out supernatural tales whenever they chose to do so. The results were a body of work that can stand comparison to the best stories in Weird Tales or Strange Tales. In the case of Wyatt Blassingame, he started at a high level in 1934 and remained in top form until the genre imploded in the late 1930s. To add a bit more background, I’d like to address the canard that has floated around collecting circles for many years; the idea that somehow the aforementioned authors weren’t good enough to crack Weird Tales… Obviously, Burks, Cave, and Ernst were so prolific that they were frequent contributors to “The Unique Magazine” as all three men were capable of filling a magazine’s complete content. In the cases of Blassingame and Knox there’s a very pragmatic reason that they ignored Weird Tales… They were earning two to three times as much appearing in the “Big Three”! One might also take note of the fact that during the height of the weird menace genre (1935-1937) both Arthurs (Burks and Zagat) are pretty much absent from Weird Tales, presumably with only overflow tales being submitted there. While Wyatt Blassingame did write a wide variety of fiction, it’s evident that with his knowledge of obscure mythologies and cultures that the genre of weird fiction was perfectly suited to his talents. Of the three novellas presented here, two are from his first year as a professional writer and serve to show just how polished his work was from the very beginning. Throughout the 1930s he remained one of, if not the best of the authors specializing in the genre. Equally comfortable with Terrill’s formula or with the full-blown supernatural tale, his stories provide a great mix and keep the reader guessing as to whether or not the horror is supernatural or not. As the decade wound to close and the weird menace genre perished due to its self-imposed limitations Blassingame switch to more straightforward detective and mystery tales and proved to be equally good at these. Called into service in WWII, Blassingame returned to find a vastly different market from what he had left… The weird menace genre was gone entirely with only an occasional story of that type showing up here and there. The pulps themselves were dying, where once over two dozen mystery and horror pulps dominated the newsstands now there were only a handful of digest-sized magazines in their stead. Wyatt Blassingame saw the handwriting on the wall and immediately made the switch to authoring childrens’ books on a variety of subjects (most often, U.S. History). Later he would augment his income by teaching creative writing. Apparently, these new careers left little time to contemplate marketing collections of his pulp fiction and thus, some of the finest weird fiction of the 1930s has remained unavailable… Until now… So far there are three volumes of his short fiction available from Dancing Tuatara Press and I have two more complete. The sixth volume will pretty much finish things off with every significant piece of his horror fiction reprinted. You can buy the books off eBay (seller ID = chrismorris927) or if you're not sure about picking up the whole set, e-mail me at [email protected] What the hell, I'll send anyone interested a free Blassingame story to peruse. This really is an author deserving of a wider audience.

I have returned, my brother!

Brilliant writer, editor, agent... He will be missed.

Douglas Hulick? I will check that out stat! Also, I don't know whether or not to call it "epic", but author Scott Nicolay turned me on to two of the best fantasy novels I've ever encountered, The High House and The False House. Simply not to be missed. I've got to figure out where to get the $400 to buy the signed limited editiond that were originally published by a micro press a decade ago. The paperbacks are much less expensive. ;-)

Okay, figure I should do something constructive like suggesting authors that you may have missed. So what I'll try and do is come up with one author per week and suggestions on where to get their stuff (cheaply if possible). So, the first author to be so honored will be a cranky old guy who blew me off completely when I queried him about publishing a collection of his work (not that I''m going to give up that easy). Ladles and Gentrymen, I give you: Albert Cowdrey A very odd career, Mr. Cowdrey published his first story in 1968 and then vanished for several decades. He does both SF and horror fiction, much of the latter centered around his native New Orleans. As you'll see on his bibliography (lifted from the internet speculative fiction database), he's almost exclusive to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (which y'all should be getting anyway...) Anyway, there's one e-book thus far and as Mr. Cowdrey just celebrated his 80th birthday, I should probably ping him again about a collection. Enjoy! Novels Crux (2004) Chapterbooks The Tribes of Bela (2006) (This here is available as an e-book) Short Fiction Series Azalea Place, New Orleans The Familiar (1997) White Magic (1998) The Great Ancestor (1998) Colonel Kohn The Tribes of Bela (2004) Murder in the Flying Vatican (2007) Paranormal Services "Jimmie & Morrie" Hartmut's World (2012) The Ladies in Waiting (2012) Shortfiction The Lucky People (1968) [only as byChet Arthur] Revenge (1999) Crux (2000) The Stalker (2000) Mosh (2000) The King of New Orleans (2001) Nature 2000 (2001) Tomorrow (2001) Queen For a Day (2001) Ransom (2002) The Posthumous Man (2002) The Boy's Got Talent (2002) Grey Star (2003) The Dog Movie (2003) Danny's Inferno (2003) Rapper (2004) Silent Echoes (2004) A Balance of Terrors (2004) The Name of the Sphinx (2004) The Amulet (2005) Twilight States (2005) The Housewarming (2005) The Revivalist (2006) Imitation of Life (2006) Animal Magnetism (2006) Immortal Forms (2006) Revelation (2006) Envoy Extraordinary (2007) The Recreation Room (2007) The Overseer (2008) Thrilling Wonder Stories (2008) Poison Victory (2008) Inside Story (2008) A Skeptical Spirit (2008) Seafarer's Blood (2009) Paradiso Lost (2009) The Private Eye (2009) Bandits of the Trace (2009) Fort Clay, Louisiana: A Tragical History (2010) Mister Sweetpants and the Living Dead (2010) Death Must Die (2010) The Bogle (2011) Scatter My Ashes (2011) The Black Mountain (2011) Where Have All the Young Men Gone? (2011) How Peter Met Pan (2011) Mindbender (2012) Greed (2012) Asylum (2012) The Goddess (2012) The Sheriff (2012) [only as byChet Arthur] A Haunting in Love City (2013) The Assassin (2013) The Trouble With Heaven (2013) [only as byChet Arthur] The Woman in the Moon (2013)

Well, Blackwood was far more varied in his output than Lovecraft and unfortunately, neiither of the inexpensive collections purporting to be his "best" supernatural fiction are even within shouting distance of being the "best". You really want to seek out "The Wendigo" and "The Willows" (the latter may be the closest thing to a perfect horror story ever written), the John Silence stuff is great if you go for the psychic detective theme. Seriously, the closest thing to a "Best of" that I've found was a 1940s collection called "Shocks". If you can find a cheap copy, that's probably the best Blackwood bang for the buck that you can get. On the other hand, if it's quantity and quality that you're after, Centipede Press did a massive, over-size volume of Blackwood that sells for around $250-$300. It's nearly 1000 pages and includes all of Blackwood's best material. In fact, for the well-heeled, the Centipede Press "Masters of the Weird Tale" is really a good way to go... I won't pretend that they aren't expensive and I probably wouldn't own more than a couple if it weren't for the fact that I've edited several volumes in the series, but the series contains everyone that you would expect (Blackwood, Lovecraft, Mchen, Hodgson and then several that you might not expect... Frank Belknap Long*, Henry Kuttner, Carl Jacobi*, Karl Edward Wagner, Arthur J. Burks*, Hugh B. Cave, and Jean Ray*. Several of these are still forthcoming, those with an * were put together by myself and in the case of Jacobi, I had the very welcome assistance of my pal S.T. Joshi.