#i think it's from one of those e a poe horror tales

[girlcatullus]

posting my sadness and woe on this site for the girlies' entertainment. being a jester is a vocational job choice

#“come hither fool” #“the fool jingled miserably across the floor”. #i think it's from one of those e a poe horror tales #and it has never left my mind since the day i laid eyes upon it

[lordjohngreyreadingnook]

Happy Halloween Rec List!

What a fun event this has been! A huge thanks to everyone who wrote and read and commented and liked and kudos’d and reblogged and otherwise supported all the spooky new stories! Your support and participation has made our first annual Trick-or-Twink Fanfic Spooktacular a huge success!

In case you’re a nerd like MistressPandora, here’s some stats for you...

Didn’t quite get yours finished in time? That’s okay! We’ll keep reblogging if you tag @lordjohngreyreadingnook​ and leave the AO3 collection open for new submissions until we announce the next event.

Your Trick-or-Twink rec list is below the cut, in the order they were posted. Go get your spooky read on!

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Title: I Was a Child Author: @mistresspandorawritesthings​ Pairing: Hector/John Rating: M Summary:  Some people you grieve forever. And sometimes, it's because they refuse to leave. A ghost story.

Title: Lord John, the Succubus Author: @narastories​ Pairing: John/Tom Byrd Rating: E Summary: Tom frowned down at his drink, toying with the glass. He shouldn’t pry but… He bit his lip. “You’re not getting visits from the succubus, right?” he blurted out. (...) Lord John looked at him. “No, Tom, I’m not. Not quite, that is." My first contribution to the Trick-or-Twink event. Happy Spooky Season! This is referencing "Lord John and the Succubus" by Diana Gabaldon, but I think you can enjoy it without having read that part of the series.

Title: A Gentleman Caller in the Night Author: @angstosaur​ Pairing: Claire/Jamie/John Rating: M Summary:  A knock at the door late at night startles Jamie and Claire. But not as much as the gentleman calling so very late - or his story. There's always room in the hearts of those who love freely to let one more in... especially someone so very deserving of that love.

Title: Into the Dark Author: @iihappydaysii​ Pairing: Claire/Jamie/John Rating: E Summary: When Jamie finally ends things with Laoghaire, he decides to pursue, the woman of his dreams, Claire Beauchamp, but there is one thing he must do first.

Title: Erebus and Apollo Author: @mistresspandorawritesthings​ Pairing: John/Percy Rating: M Summary: A stranger makes a spectacular entrance, and Lord John Grey finds himself drawn into another scandal. A horror story.

Title: Beetlejuice and Witchcraft Author: @rubadubdub3nunsinatub​ Pairing: Brian/John (gender swapped Brianna) Rating: T Summary: John Grey just wanted to take a nice walk but somehow ended up running into Beetlejuice and going witch-hunting on Halloween night.

Title: May He Rest in Pieces Author: @geekinthefuschiahair​ Pairing: Jamie/John Rating: E Summary: Claire shared the story of Charles Stuart after Culloden with Jamie. But what if he knew long before? What if he told the story to Lord John Grey after returning to Madame Jeanne's to find his friend waiting for him? What if history tells a tale that couldn't possibly be true? Inspired by The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe.

Title: One April Night Author: @londonthunderr​ Pairing: Hector/John Rating: M Summary: On one April night, the burden of solitude and grief was alleviated. On one April night their bond eluded the impenetrable barrier between life and death, reassuring the love for each other. On one April night they were together again.

Title: Lord John Grey and the Hounds of Brownsville Author: @angstosaur​ Pairing: Gen Rating: T Summary: Brianna wants to surprise her parents on Halloween. In return she terrifies Lord John Grey who accompanies her, scares her mother and causes her father to be more protective than usual.

Title: Love Potion No. 9 Author: @iihappydaysii​ and @mistresspandorawritesthings​ Pairing: Jamie/John Rating: E Summary: When young queer boys begin to go missing under spooky circumstances, skeptical Detective John Grey is forced to team up with Jamie Fraser, a detective known for his use of unusual and paranormal methods to solve cases.

Title: And They Shall Rise Author: @mistresspandorawritesthings​ Pairing: Gen Rating: M Summary:  Nine people in Wilmington have already died mysterious, gruesome deaths. Desperate to stop the violence, Lord John agrees to help Brianna figure out who--or what--the killer is, even though her strategy is a bit... arcane.

Title: What Kind of Monster Author: @geekinthefuschiahair​ Pairing: Claire/Jamie/John Rating: T Summary: When William sees something unexpected at Fraser's Ridge, he finds himself drunk and confused at a nearby Inn. Feverish and weak, he contemplates what's real and what's not and who is at his side when he needs them the most.

Title: the books of darkest magic Author: @iihappydaysii​ Pairing: Brian/John (gender swapped Brianna) Rating: M Summary: John and Brian are spending Halloween night doing inventory in John's bookstore when they come across a creepy old book and strange things begin to happen

Title: Lord John and the Ghost of the Scottish Prisoner Author: @angstosaur​ Pairing: Brian/John (gender swapped Brianna) Rating: M Summary: After taking over as Headmaster of Ardsmuir Academy from the disgraced Harry Quarry, Lord John Grey is working late. A knock at the door leads him into a frightening evening of terror and lust, as a gorgeous young man enters his study. The resident ghost is not impressed at all.

#trick-or-twink event #Lord John Grey #Lord John #Rec List

[buzzdixonwriter]

My Five Most Influential

Someone asked:   Who are the most influential writers in your life?

Good question.

The broad answer is that one gets influenced many different ways by many different sources.  I enjoy poetry and song lyrics because they find ways of conveying the strongest emotional content in the most concise manner, music brings a sense of dramatic rhythm and fulfillment, the visual arts suggest ways of subtly adding many insights to a single strong idea, etc., etc., and of course, etc. (and that is also an example of a creative influence in my work).

But…to boil it down to those whom I most consciously made an effort to emulate, we find ourselves facing five creators that primed the pump.

This is not to say others whom I began following after them didn’t wield a lot of influence (thanx, Ernie, Bert, Jack, Bob, and Hank!) but these are the foundation of everything I’ve done in my career.

(And to those who notice a lack of diversity, I know, I know…but to be honest I have to acknowledge the truth, and the truth is for whatever reason, by chance or by choice, by fate or by fortune, these five dominated my sensibilities.  I trust that I’ve grown and expanded my horizons since then, but they’re the hand I got dealt.)

. . . 

Carl Barks

I loved ducks as a kid and my grandmother and aunt would always bring me a passel of duck-related comics when they came to visit.

There were some Daffy Duck comics mixed in there but while I know I looked at and enjoyed them, none of them stick in my mind like the Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge stories of Carl Barks.

Typically my grandmother would read these comics to me and I’d imprint the dialog and captions in my brain, replaying them as I looked at the pictures over and over again.

Barks never wrote down to his audience, and his stories covered a vast array of genres, everything from straight domestic comedy to oddball adventures to screwy crime stories.

Donald and his nephews encountered dinosaurs more than once (another big favorite of mine), and Uncle Scrooge setting out to explore the asteroid belt in order to find a new home for his fabulous money bin was another tale I loved literally to pieces, but A Christmas For Shacktown remains my all time favorite graphic novel.

I’ll concede there are better graphic novels, but none of them warm my heart the way that Christmas story does.

Barks showed it’s possible to combine heart (not to be confused with sentimentality or =yuch!= schmaltz), vivid characters, and strong, intricate narrative.  His plots where typically filled with unexpected twists and turns but his characters were always deeply involved in them, not just along for the ride.

He’s one of the greatest storytellers in the 20th century, and his work remains timeless enough to last for several centuries to come.

. . . 

Ray Bradbury

The first Ray Bradbury story I remember encountering was “Switch On The Night” in its 1955 edition, read to my kindergarten class towards the end of the school year.

This would place the event sometime in the spring of 1959.

“Switch On The Night” captivated me because it was the first story I’d ever heard that showed what could be seen in the dark that couldn’t be seen in the day.

Even as a child, it made me realize the night wasn’t scary, but contained wonders and insights we miss in the harsh glare of day.

I don’t recall if the kindergarten teacher told us the name of the author, and if she did it didn’t stick, but boy howdy, the story sure did!  Did it open the doors of the night for me, or was I already inclined to be a night person and it simply confirmed that as a valid identity?

I dunno, but I’m typing this right now at 12:24am.

And the thoughts Bradbury planted in little Buzzy boy’s brain stayed and grew and flowered, as you can read in my poem, “The Magic Hours Of The Night”.

The next time I encountered Ray Bradbury’s writing was in grammar school, certainly no later than junior high.  I was already interested in science fiction by that point, and had read “The Pedestrian” in one of my school English books (we weren’t taught the story in class; the teacher skipped over it for whatever reason but I read it anyway then re-read it and read it again and again).

Anthony Boucher’s ubiquitous 2-volume A Treasury Of Great Science Fiction was in my grammar school library and in it was Bradbury’s “Pillar Of Fire” (which I would later learn was one of his alternate Martian Chronicles and a crossover with Fahrenheit 451) and in that story he offered up a veritable laundry list of outré and outlandish fiction to be tracked down and read, authors to dig up and devour.

Oh, man, I was hooked.

So of course I began looking for all the stories and writers Bradbury listed in his short story but I also began looking for Bradbury’s own work and before you could say, “Mom, can I get a subscription to the Science Fiction Book Club?” I’d read The Golden Apples Of The Sun and A Medicine For Melancholy and R is For Rocket never once dreaming that at some point in the future the roadmap Ray plopped down in my lap would eventually lead to us being co-workers (separate projects, but the same studio at the same time) and friends.

There is a beautiful yet deceptive simplicity to Ray’s work, and even though he wrote his own book on writing (The Zen Of Writing) that has lots of good insights and professional tricks & tips, he himself wasn’t able to explain how he did it.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a good Ray Bradbury parody.

I’ve seen parodies that clearly are intended to evoke Ray Bradbury, but only in the same way a clumsy older relative might evoke Michael Jackson with a spasmodic movement one vaguely recognizes as a failed attempt at a moonwalk.

But, lordie, don’t think we didn’t try to emulate him, and while none of us fanboys ever came close, I think a lot of us did learn that less is more, that the right word carries more impact than a dozen paragraphs, and that there’s magic in even the most ordinary of things.

And of course I discovered the film and TV adaptations of his work, and in discovering them I also discovered that there are some things that just can’t be translated from one media to another, and that the light, effortless appeal of Ray’s work on the page (paper or pixel) can at best be recaptured with a good audio book reader but even the best dramatic adaptions -- even those by Ray himself -- are cold dead iron butterflies compared to the light and lively creatures flying about.

So eventually I stopped trying to write like him, and instead picked up the valuable lessons of mood and emotion making an impact on a story even if the plot didn’t make much logical sense.

Decades later I would become a fan of opera, and would learn the philosophy of all opera lovers:  Opera doesn’t have to make logical sense, it just has to make emotional sense.

Ray Bradbury, opera meister.

. . . 

H.P. Lovecraft

As noted above, Bradbury’s “Pillar Of Fire” tipped me to numerous other writers, first and foremost of which turned out to be Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

Okay, before we get any further into this, let’s acknowledge the woolly mammoth in the room:  H.P. Lovecraft was a colossal asshat racist.

He was a lot of other terrible things, too, but racist is far and ahead of the rest of the pack.

It’s a disillusioning thing to find people one admired as a youngster or a teen later prove to have not just quirks and eccentricities and personal flaws, but genuinely destructive, harmful, and offensive characters.

I’ve posted on that before, too.

How I wish it were possible to retroactively scale back that hurtfulness, to make them more empathetic, less egregiously offensive (in the military sense of the word), but that ain’t so.

We have to acknowledge evil when we see it, and we have to call it out, and we have to shun it.

Which is hard when one of its practitioners provides a major influence in our creative lives.

Here’s what I liked about Lovecraft as a kid:  He was the complete opposite of Ray Bradbury.

Bradbury’s instinctive genius was in finding the right word, the simple word that conveyed great impact on the story, drawing the reader into the most fantastic situations by making them seem more familiar on a visceral level.

Lovecraft achieved the exact opposite effect by finding the most arcane, bedizened, baroque, florid, grandiloquent, overwrought, rococo verbiage possible and slapping the reader repeatedly in the face with it.

If Bradbury made the unreal real, Lovecraft made the weird even more weirder.

And let’s give this devil his due:  The Strange Case Of Charles Dexter Ward and The Dunwich Horror are two masterpieces of horror and serve as the bridge between Edgar Allen Poe and Stephen King, not to mention his creation of Cthulhu and other ancient entities existing beyond the ken of human knowledge…

…oh, wait, that’s where the story simultaneously gets messy yet provides a convenient escape hatch for fans.

While Lovecraft created Cthulhu, he did not create the Cthulhu Mythos.

That was primarily the invention August Derleth, a writer / editor / agent and H.P. Lovecraft’s #1 fanboy.

Lovecraft had some loosely related ideas in his stories and several themes he revisited repeatedly (in addition to racism).

He also had a circle of fellow writers -- including such heavy hitters as Robert “Psycho” Bloch and Robert E. “Conan” Howard -- who picked up on his ideas and, as way of a tribute, incorporated them in some of their stories.

Derleth took all this and Lovecraft’s unfinished manuscripts and short ideas he jotted down and turned it into a whole post-mortem industry, linking all of Lovecraft and other writers’ tales.

And he did a damn fine job of it, too.

So much so that the Cthulhu Mythos has taken on a life of its own, and pretty much anybody can play in that cosmic sandbox now (including Big Steve King and a ton of Japanese anime) and so Lovecraft’s works have an enormous influence on pop culture…

,,,but Howard hizzowndamsef can be -- and is -- cancelled.

Derleth and various biographers downplayed Lovecraft’s virulent racism for decades, and I don’t think Ray Bradbury was ever aware of the scope and tenor of Lovecraft’s bigotry when he name checked him in “Pillar Of Fire” and other stories.

In a similar vein Bradbury didn’t know -- because thanks again to overly protective literary executors, nobody knew -- just how big a racist asshat Walt Whitman was, either.  It is one thing to call shenanigans on a Bill Cosby or a Harvey Weinstein or a Donald Trump because their egregious behaviors were noted long before they were held accountable, but quite another to do so on a creator who died while hiding their most awful behavior from thousands if not millions of fans who felt inspired and uplifted by their work.

It’s one thing to call out a contemporary bigot and not support them by not buying their work, it’s quite another when their bigotry has been shielded from view and fair minded, decent people have used their work to draw inspiration into their own creativity.

Of course, I had no way of knowing all this when I was in junior high and seriously began tracking down Lovecraft’s work.  

He possessed a flair of the horrific and unearthly that to this day is hard to match (but easier to parody).  He was a tremendous influence on my early writing (truth be told, I zigzagged between Bradbury’s stark simplicity and Lovecraft’s overarching verbosity, giving my early oeuvre a rather schizophrenic style) and the ideas he sparked still reverberate to this day.

If only he hadn’t been such a giant %#@&ing asshat racist …

. . . 

Harlan Ellison

In a way, I’m glad neither Harlan nor his widow Susan are alive to read this.

I cherished Harlan as a friend and greatly admired his qualities as a writer.

But damn, by his own admission he should have been thrown in prison for aggravated assault on numerous occasions (he was courts martialed three times while in the Army).

We’re not talking about arguments that spiraled out of control until a few wild punches were thrown, we’re talking about Harlan by his own admission stalking and ambushing people, knocking them unconscious or causing grievous bodily harm.

We’re talking about sexual abuse and humiliation.

We’re talking about incidents he admitted to which if true put people in life threatening situations.

And yet ironically, in a certain sense Harlan (a bona fide Army Ranger, BTW) was like the U.S. Marine Corps:  You’d never have a greater friend or a worse enemy.

I became dimly aware of Harlan in the late 1960s as I started diving deeper into literary sci-fi, transitioning from monster kid fandom to digests and paperbacks.  Harlan first caught my attention with his macho prose (years later a similar style also drew me to Charles Bukowski) in stories like “Along the Scenic Route” (a.k.a. “Dogfight on 101”) in which Los Angelinos engaged in Mad Max motor mayhem but soon it became apparent the macho posturing was just a patina, that the heart and soul of much of the work reflected great sensitivity and often profound melancholy (ditto Bukowski).

Harlan was a fighter, and again by his own admission, he acknowledged in his later years that he was not a fighter because his cause was just, but rather sought out just causes because he knew he would be fighting regardless of his position, yet possessed a strong enough moral compass to point himself in the direction of a worthy enemy…

…most of the time.

He hurt and offended a large number of innocent and some not-so-innocent-but-certainly-not-evil people.

He also helped and encouraged a large number of others, people who had no idea who he was, people who had no way of adequately reciprocating his kindness and generosity.

He defended a lot of defenseless people.

He also mistakenly defended a lot of terrible people.

If someone tells me Harlan was a monster, I’ll agree:  Monstre sacré.

What made his writing sacred was that no matter how outlandish the situation, Harlan dredged up from the depths emotions so strong as to be frightening in their depiction.

Skilled enough not to lose sight of humanity, outlandish enough to conjure up ideas and emotions most people would shy away from, Harlan hit adolescent Buzzy boy like an incendiary grenade.

Unlike my first three literary influences, Harlan was and remained active in the fannish circles where I was circulating at the time.  He regularly wrote letters and columns for various fanzines, including a few I subscribed to.

In a literary sense he stood, naked and unashamed, in full view of the world, and that willingness to go beyond mundane sensibilities is what made his work so compelling.

He certainly fired me up as an adolescent writer, and proved an amalgam of Bradbury and Lovecraft that got my creative juices flowing in a coherent direction.

I don’t think I ever consciously tried to imitate him in my writing, but I sure learned from him, both in how to charge a story with emotion and how to fight for what’s right regardless of the blow back.

I loved him as a friend.

But, damn, Harlan…you could act so ugly...

. . .

H. Allen Smith

Who?

Most of you have never heard of H. Allen Smith, and that’s a damn shame.

I’d never heard of him either until I stumbled across a coverless remaindered copy of Poor H. Allen Smith’s Almanac in a Dollar General Store bin in Tennessee in the late 1960s (it was a memorable shopping expedition:  I also purchased Thomas Heggen’s Mister Roberts and Let’s Kill Uncle by Rohan O'Grady [pen name of June Margaret O'Grady Skinner]).

Reading Smith’s editorial comments (in addition to his own essays and fiction he edited numerous humor anthologies) I realized I’d found a kindred soul.

Smith had a very conversational tone as a writer; his prose seemed off the cuff and unstructured, but he slyly used that style to hide the very peculiar (and often perverse) path he led readers down.

He sounded / read like a garrulous guy at the bar, one with a huge number of charming, witty (and delightfully inebriated) friends in addition to his own bottomless well of tall tales, pointed observations, and rude jokes.

Of all the writers mentioned above, that style is the one I most consciously tried to emulate, and one I seem to have been able to find my own voice in (several people have told me I write the same way I talk, a rarity among writers).

Smith was hilarious whether wearing an editor’s visor or a freelancer’s fool’s cap.  If you know who H. L. Mencken was, think of Smith as a benign, better tempered version of that infamous curmudgeon (and if you don’t know, hie thee hence to Google and find out).

Compared to my other four influences, Smith didn’t need to add the fantastic to his fiction:  The real world was weird and wacky and whimsical enough.

A newspaper man turned best selling author, Smith became among the most popular humorists of the 1940s-50s-60s…

…and then he died and everybody forgot him.

Part of the reason they forgot is that he wrote about things that no longer seem relevant (TV cowboys of the early television era, f’r instance, in Mr. Zip) or are today looked upon askance (and with justifiable reason; the ethnic humor in many of his anthologies may not have been intended as mean spirited, but it sure doesn’t read as a celebration of other cultures, viz his succinct account of an argument following a traffic accident between two native Honolulu cabbies rendered in pidgin:  “Wassamatta you?”  “’Wassmatta me’?!?!?  Wassamatta you ‘Wassamatta me’?  You wassamatta!”).

I’m sure I picked up a great many faults from Smith, but Smith also had the virtue of being willing and able to learn and to make an effort to be a better person today than he was yesterday, and better still tomorrow.

I’ve certainly tried applying that to my life.

Smith’s style was also invoked -- consciously or not -- by other writers and editors, notably Richard E. Geis, the editor of the legendary sci-fi semi-prozone, Science Fiction Review (among other titles).  Smith died before I could meet him, but while I never met Dick Geis face to face we were pen pals for over 40 years.

Geis certainly sharpened specific aspects of my writing style, but the real underlying structure came from H. Allen Smith.

Smith’s work is hard to find today (in no small part because whenever I encounter one in the wild I snap it up) but I urge you to give him a try.

Just brace yourself for things we might consider incorrect today.

. . . 

So there’s my top five. 

With the exception of Carl Barks and Ray Bradbury, none of them are without serious flaw or blemish (though Smith seems like a decent enough sort despite his fondness for X-rated and ethnic humor).

In my defense as an impressionable child / teen, I was not aware of these flaws and blemishes when I first encountered their writing (primarily because in many cases efforts were made to hide or downplay those aspects).

The positive things I gleaned from them are not negated by the negative personal information that came out later.

I can, for the most part re the more problematic of them, appreciate their work while not endorsing their behavior.

Ellison can only be described in extremes, but his fire and passion -- when directed in a positive direction -- served as a torch to light new paths (his two original anthologies, Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions, pretty much blew the doors off old school sci-fi and belatedly dragged the genre kicking and screaming into the 20th century).

Lovecraft I can effectively ignore while finding entertainment value in the Cthulhu Mythos.

But I must acknowledge this isn’t the same for everyone.

For example, as innocuous as I find H. Allen Smith, if a woman or a member of a minority group said, “I found this in particular to be offensive” I’d probably have to say, yeah, you’re right.

But I can still admire the way he did it, even if I can no longer fully support what he did.

. . . 

By the time I reached high school, I’d acquired enough savvy to regard to literary finds a bit more dispassionately, appreciating what they did without trying to literally absorb it into my own writing.

I discovered for myself the Beat generation of writers and poets, the underground cartoonists of the late 60s and 70s, Ken Kesey, Joseph Heller, Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. LeGuin, and a host of others, some already alluded to.

Some, such as the Beats and Bukowski, I could enjoy for their warts and all honest self-reflection.

Yes, they were terrible people, but they knew they were terrible people, and they also knew there had to be something better, and while they may never have found the nirvana they sought, they at least sent back accurate reports of where they were in their journeys of exploration.

By my late teens, I’d become aware enough of human foibles and weaknesses -- every human’s foibles and weaknesses, including my own -- to be very, very cautious in regarding an individual as admirable.

While I will never accept creativity as an excuse for bad behavior, if a creator is honest enough and self-introspective enough to recognize and acknowledge their own failings, it goes a long way towards my being willing to enjoy their work without feeling I’m endorsing them as individuals.

It’s not my place to pass judgment or exoneration on others bad behavior.

It is my place to see that I don’t emulate others’ bad behavior.

Every creator is connected to their art, even if it’s by-the-numbers for-hire hack work.

Every creator puts something of themselves into the final product.

And every member of the audience must decide for themselves if that renders the final product too toxic to be enjoyed. 

    © Buzz Dixon

#how this writer's mind works #writing #Carl Barks #Ray Bradbury #HP Lovecraft #Harlan Ellison #H Allen Smith #influences

[citialiin]

ooc ; thank u for tagging me in fun memes and stuff! ヽ(　･∀･)ﾉ so i dont flood ppls dashes i just wait until i have a few & put them under readmores.

HORROR ARCHETYPE AESTHETICS tagged by: @ betelguide

GOTHIC HORROR.

gaslights.   corsets.   ballrooms.   candlelight.   mist.   starless nights.   full moons.  cobbled streets.   horse-drawn carriages.   mysterious strangers.   bogs.   moors.  forests.   mountains.   castles.   velvet.   silver.   brass.   gold.   jewels.   domino masks.   the opera.  dangerous romances.   tragic romances.   violins.   roses.   lilies.   empty graves.   crosses.   cemeteries.   snow.   ice.   the gallows.   crows.   milk-white skin.  ambiguous illness.  fangs.   pointed nails.   something howling in the night.   capes.   gloves.   top hats.   straight razors.   lightning.   pipe organs.   underground caverns.   bats.   mice.   rats.   ravens.   cats.   pearls.   attics.   talismans.   axes.   wood.  isolation in a room full of people.   vampires.   werewolves.   ghosts.   coffins.   western europe.   eastern europe.   bones.   churches.   catacombs.   mausoleums.   spiders.   books.

CLASSIC HORROR.

black   &   white.   powder puffs.   red lipstick.   winged eyeliner.   white kitten heels.  black lace lingerie.   icy blue eyes.   rain.   abandoned cars.   skeletons.   acid.  poison.   voyeurism.   switchblades.   strangling.   overcoats.   looking over your shoulder.   trans-atlantic accents.   private detectives.   dinner parties.   haunted mansions.   alcohol in glass decanters.   cobwebs.   perfect blonde curls.   kitchen knives.   shock.   cellars.  dust.  dark alleys.   empty streets.   driving at night.   horn-rimmed glasses.   radiation.  zombies.   serial murder.   paranoia.   the city.   witches.  the devil.   cannibalism.  conspiracies.   amulets.   abject terror.   the american south.   the american northeast.    england.   analog cameras.

SLASHERS.

bloodbaths.   massacres.   wanton nudity.   newspapers.   leather jackets.   letterman jackets.   converse sneakers.   obscured faces.   social unrest.   bonfires.   lakes.  babysitters.   suburbia.   high school.   lockers.   dead leaves in the fall.   jack-o’-lanterns.   outdated television sets.   nightmares.   psychiatrists.   hospitals.  unstoppable forces.   gunfire.   police.   landline telephones.   household objects turned into improvised weapons.   halloween.   secrets.   revelations.   character masks.  scrunchies.   queerness.   wild curls.   morbid humor.   jeering children.  parties.   fire.   swearing.  revulsion.   california.   the american midwest.   ambulances.

PARANORMAL HORROR.

malevolent spirits.   seances.   spells.   missing bodies.   hidden graves.   white noise.   static.   flickering lights.   rings of salt.   demons.   poltergeists.   dark histories.   old buildings.  cold air.   mausoleums.   wells.   urban exploration.   a dog barking at something you can’t see.   black ooze.   old photographs.   faces you can swear you’ve seen before  but can’t for the life of you figure out where.   dark bodies of water.   crucifixes.   priests.   possession.   exorcisms.   dolls.   jump scares.

CRYPTID   &   URBAN LEGEND HORROR.

ALIENS.  blinding light.   dark woods.   driving at night.   claw-marks.   bite-marks.   men in black.   memory loss.  dismembered bodies.   sewers.   flashlights.   cell phones.   video cameras.   cars with tinted windows.   abandoned houses.   unlabeled cassette tapes.  bugs.   big cities.   urban crimes.  clowns.   something rustling outside your window. glowing light.   unsolved mysteries.   suburbia.   mirrors.   the american pacific northwest.   the american midwest.   the american east coast.   hiking   /   backpacking.

THRILLERS.

daylight.   fluorescent lighting.   morgues.   asylums.   unwavering eye contact.  tension.   lit rooms with no one inside them.   a dog digging in the newly-planted flower bed.  steely gazes.   paperwork.   anagrams.   codes.   convicted killers.  missing persons.  law enforcement.   federal agents.  small towns.   suspicion.   paranoia.   subdued terror. dimly-lit parking lots.

CLASSIC NOVELIST AESTHETICS tagged by: @ finestprize

JOHN KEATS. the lavender in sunsets, flowers in the rain, sunlight slipping through clouds,  lazy summer afternoons, the heavy scent of musk, flickering candlelight reflecting off the gold titles of books,  fireflies on a cool summer night, being wrapped in fresh bed sheets, the ache of wanting what you can never have, dripping sunlight like gold,  loving someone so exquisite,  soft lips and soft whispers, fingers through hair, names of lovers carved in trees, broken glass,  the insistence of being perpetually dreamy.

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD.   crisp winter skies with cold bright stars,  mahogany wood, the solitude of an early autumn morning wrapped in fog,  empty bottles on stacks and stacks of books haphazardly placed in a messy room,  bruised arms reaching out into the darkness,  cigarette smoke just barely hiding the scent of alcohol,  a wall of books all poetry and old and weathered, the way tragedy strikes in your heart but ends up stopping your breathing for a moment,  your favorite sweater, parties spilling into four a.m. with the stars above spinning and dancing, the contrast of blood against snow,  a purple split lip oozing blood,  black eyes fading to blue to pale skin,  the butterflies of falling in love for the first time, the statues falling apart over time in cemeteries,  the romanticization of self-destruction.

FRANZ KAFKA.  the weight of dread that sits heavily in your stomach when thinking about the future,  decrepit houses cloaked in mystery from children telling stories of people who died there,  the way not even light can escape a black hole, the rich smell of old books, delicate veins in the wrist, ghosts filling lungs,  shattered bones,  raindrops on the tongue,  rusting metal, nostalgia that aches,  the way hope feels like a plastic bag over your head.

H.P. LOVECRAFT.   the anxiety felt when staring into an unknown cave,  pouring rain and mud, a child’s fear of the dark,  thinking so many questions about your existence as you stare at the vast expanse of never-ending ocean,  the silence of three a.m.,  ouija boards and urban legends. (WHO WROTE THIS???? HAVE YOU EVER OBSESSIVELY POURED OVER HP LOVECRAFT LIKE I HAVE??? THIS SUCKS!!! THESE ARE NOT HP LOVECRAFT AT ALL WHERE IS THE SECTION ABOUT CLIMBING UP MOUNTAINS TO SUMMON ELDER GODS AND HOWLING AT THE MOON LIKE A MADMAN AND HAVING A WIZARD BEAT YOU TO DEATH IN YOUR OWN HOUSE)

JACK KEROUAC.   the brisk pine air of being on a mountain,  travels without a destination,  those nights where you’re missing three hours of memory,  screaming to a lifeless desert about how you’re so alive,  coffee shops late at night, car rides at night spent speeding and laughing in the dark, naps spent in the sun,  novels highlighted and underlined with notes and epiphanies in the margins, the way uncertainty sits on the shoulders, ignoring flaws and loving life,  wind through hair,  depression as fog in the brain, impossible ideals, a quiet sunrise,  walks alone, when you think about trying to discover all the secrets to the universe, dazzling people, open lands stretching out into infinity, falling in love with being alive.

EDGAR ALLAN POE.   the ocean’s horizon inseparable from fog,  hollow bones,  a preserved heart held in hands,  twinkling stars above an old graveyard,  the way everything turns to dust,  silent black birds with eyes full of wisdom, self-inflicted flames,  perfection depicted as a rotting corpse,  death as bricks in the heart,  lips barely brushing against each other, glassy glazed eyes,  biting into a lemon,  heart-shaped bruises,  rotting flowers on a grave,  dried blood and spilled liquor,  the hush of dusk when it begins raining,  the intimacy of a secret.

LITERARY ARCHETYPE MEME tagged by: @ manenimittliv

HOMERIC EPITHET:  You are THE GREAT TELLER OF TALES

The Greek hero Odysseus had many epithets ascribed to him (others included “much-enduring,” “cunning,” and “man of twists and turns”), and this was one of them, so you’re in good company.

FATAL FLAW: YOU’RE IN LOVE WITH THE IDEA OF A PERSON.

And then I deleted the rest of this because it didn’t really apply to him. Oh well

LITERARY SETTING: GATSBY'S MANSION

You got Gatsby’s mansion! This larger-than-life crib is the perfect place for a party animal like yourself. It’s located on the Long Island Sound (ideal for swimming, lounging, obsessively staring across the water with a LaCroix in your hand and unattainable fantasies on your mind, etc.), but it’s also just a train ride away from New York City (city of dreams and $1 pizza). But let’s not forget the best part: it’s got a library that’ll make you wanna grab a fluffy blanket and a chai latte and literally never see the light of day again.

this is a lot of useless information. steal them if youd like

#ooc #memes #I didnt get shit done today sorry

[werdegasts]

Okay, hit me with a dream cast for a classic horror movie! Any horror movie, pre-existing or not, hit me with those casting choices!

skfnshndb ok, mandatory disclaimer though that i’m a fool in a man’s shoes. nevertheless! here are some things sorta resembling dreamcasts

doctor x: but with glenda farrell in lee tracy’s role. IDEALLY ideally still with the romance subplot but i’d so take a version where they power-of-friendship thru it all too. also, if i was recasting the xavier institute doctors, john carradine and oskar homolka in there somewhere

dracula: you know what. we need a round table discussion on who should’ve played lucy’s suitors if they’d stayed in

frankenstein: george e. stone as “'victor moritz”’ (that name choice remains baffling). justification: i really like his scenes with mae clarke in ‘the front page’ (as earl and molly; >> their hgf actors imo!) in ‘the front page’, also he’s great (and almost unrecognisable) in ‘the vampire bat’. maybe, instead of an ersatz-clerval & spare love interest for elizabeth, 'victor’ could be an ernest/william(/justine) composite younger relative chara, probably meeting the latters’ fates.

kathleen burke in a 40s noir-horror. she could & should have played fab leads; 'murders in the zoo’ is more than proof of that!! as for actual dreamcasting, maybe as thea in ‘isle of the dead’ (my favourite of the less-praised rko-lewton movies, at least atm). i think if the ensemble cast were a little better balanced, the horror of thea’s situation should have been a centerpiece. her experience and pherides’ compliment and comment on one another. she’s threatened by the weight of others’ suspicions of her, a hostile micro-society; his standing & standards for himself create a trap of his own making, literalised when he imposes the quarantine in which they’re then forced together. you can see the same thread elsewhere, fulfilled to varying extents. stone and merriam in ‘the ghost ship’, and sims and nell bowen in ‘bedlam’ are prob the strongest examples, but i find thea most interesting because like irina (in cat people, not curse)/jacqueline/clo-clo, she too is classified as threat, mired in death, source or contaminant of ancestral supernatural destruction. and she…survives? (wow, tangent. i should’ve made a diff post for this)

son of frankenstein: of all the almost-happened castings to choose from, i really wonder about peter lorre’s version of wolf von frankenstein. & then if they’d had basil rathbone for gof, instead of inventing ludwig. vaguely related: basil rathbone should’ve played a lead in one of the corman/poe movies - he’s great in the 'the facts in the case of m valdemar’ section of 'tales of terror’

dracula’s daughter: feat. a flashback prologue & bela! probably made a few years earlier. as for dreamcasting; lil dagover, in a world where she stayed in hollywood after 'the woman from monte carlo’ in '32, as marya’s mother/mentor/ ❔ ❔

non-preexisting

here’s my galaxy brain take: universal DOCTOR FAUSTUS adaptation, as a bela lugosi and boris karloff collab (lbr, secretly this dwells in the hearts of all ‘the black cat’ (and ‘the raven’) stans). leaning towards boris as faustus and bela as mephistopheles but the reverse would also SLAP. since time and audience expectations are a flat circle the play already has the exact kind of irrelevant comic relief characters you would expect - so like. wallace ford as wagner. zita johann (hedy lamarr??) is there as helen of troy for all of 5 seconds and she glares at everyone then leaves. ideal

hashtag premake: VAL LEWTON’S CORALINE

i have one whole suggestion for a Modern Remake, naturally feat 0 casting ideas: 'the black room’, but gregor and anton are women. possibly gregor has a whole elizabeth bathory thing going on - if so, both of them eventually die by drowning instead of stabbing. lots about Doubles Fear + performance and violence of beauty + mirror images (true/false/same/different/self/voyeur) + treatment of disability etc

#MESS #reel talk #OH ALSO egr should've done Horror Movies horror movies. #the hole in the wall and night has a thousand eyes are VERY good adjacent content but nevertheless

[rubykgrant]

Updated! Big List of Spooky Movies and Books!

Get ready for Halloween~

I’m a notorious list-maker; I love collecting stories, and I also love sharing them with people who are either looking for ref or just want to find something interesting. “Spooky” is a pretty broad term, so I listed different categories below that will hopefully make more sense. Some movies/books fit into more than one category, so I picked one and stuck it there. Some stories have a film and book version that are both worth taking a look at, so I put a *by those titles (and they appear in the movie and book list). These range from being for kids to more mature, so if that is a concern for you be sure to check out the rating/content yourself

I’ve updated this since I’ve added a few more titles to my collection, and added more categories (but I think I’ll call this done for now, I can’t update it every couple of months)

I wanted to limit myself, at least a little (otherwise the list would have gon on forever). So each category has at least 3 titles listed, but no more than 7. A few of these are more funny than scary, and some might not really be “spooky” at all, but they still fit the theme. Something to keep in mind, I only listed stories that I own. This is not a complete list or a “best of”. I went with the ones from my personal collection because I know them best and I enjoy them. Hopefully I listed a few that will help somebody with research, or at least entertain them for a bit!

Enjoy~

Halloween

Movies- Hocus Pocus (1993), *the Halloween Tree (1993), the Nightmare before Christmas (1993), Trick r Treat (2007), Monster House (2006), Halloweentown (1998), the Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1949)

Books- How to Drive Your Family Crazy on Halloween by Dean Marney,*the Halloween Tree by Ray Bradbury, the Haunted Mask (Goosebumps) by RL Stine, Dark Harvest by Norman Partridge

Ghosts

Movies- Poltergeist (1982), the Haunting (1999), Casper (1995), Ghostbusters (1984), the Haunted Mansion (2003), Thirteen Ghosts (2001), *the Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)

Books- Stonewords a Ghost Story by Pam Conrad, Deep and Dark and Dangerous by Mary Downing Hahn, Ghost Beach (Goosebumps) by RL Stine, the Crossroads by Chris Grabenstein, Wait Till Helen Comes by Mary Downing Hahn, *a Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

 Witch

Movies- *Practical Magic (1998), *the Wizard of Oz (1939), *the Witches (1990), Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989), Scooby-Doo and the Witch’s Ghost (1999) *Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001), the Craft (1996)

Books- *Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman, *the Witches by Roald Dahl, Charmed Life by Diana Wynne Jones, the Unwilling Witch by David Lubar, *Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by JK Rowling, *the Wizard of Oz by L Frank Baum

 Vampire

Movies- Blade (1998), the Little Vampire (2000), Hellboy Blood and Iron (2007), Hotel Transylvania (2012), Fright Night (2011)

Books- Bunnicula by James and Deborah Howe, Dracula by Bram Stoker, ‘Salem’s Lot by Stephen King

 Werewolf

Movies- Alvin and the Chipmunks meet The Wolfman (2000), Ginger Snaps (2000), Van Helsing (2004) Wolf Children (2012), the Wolfman (1941)

Books- Wolfen by Whitley Strieber, Red Rider’s Hood by Neal Shusterman, the Werewolf of Fever Swamp (Goosebumps) by RL Stine

 Zombies

Movies- Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island (1998), ParaNorman (2012), Night of the Living Dead (1968), *Pet Cemetery (1989), Zombieland (2009), Resident Evil (2002), Dawn of the Dead (2004)

Books- *Pet Cemetery by Stephen King, the Haunting of Derek Stone by Tony Abott, Welcome to Dead House (Goosebumps) by RL Stine

 Demons/Devil/Possession

Movies- the Omen (1976), Insidious (2010), the Exorcist (1973), *Christine (1983), Fallen (1998), *Rosemary’s Baby (1968), Bedazzled (2000)  

Books- *Christine by Stephen King, Needful Things by Stephen King, On the Devil’s Court by Carl Deuker, HECK where the bad kids go by Dale E Bayse,* Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin

 Curse/Transformation

Movies- *Beauty and the Beast (1991), the Princess and the Frog (2009), Penelope (2006), Kubo and the two strings (2016), the Swan Princess (1994), the Thing (1982), the Mummy (1999)

Books- *Beauty and the Beast translated by Richard Howard and illustrated by Hilary Knight, the Witch’s Boy by Michael Gruber, Owl in Love by Patrice Kindl, the Invasion (Animorphs) by KA Applegate

Monsters

Movies- Monsters Inc (2001), Eight Legged Freaks (2002), Godzilla (1998), *a Monster Calls (2016), Pokemon the First Movie (1998), *Jurassic Park (1993), King Kong (1933)

Books- *a Monster Calls by Patrick Ness, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, *Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton

Cryptids and Mythology

Movies- Harry and the Hendersons (1987), Darkness Falls (2003), Atlantis the lost empire (2001), Song of the Sea (2014), *the Last Unicorn (1982), Urban Legend (1998), Tall Tale (1995)

Books- Sasquatch by Roland Smith, *the Last Unicorn by Peter S Beagle, the Moor Child by Eloise Jarvis McGraw, the Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson and the Olympians) by Rick Riordan

 Giants/Tiny Folk

Movies- Honey I Blew Up the kid (1992), the Borrowers (1997), Mickey and the Beanstalk (1947), *Thumbelina (1994), the Princess Bride (1987), Gulliver’s Travels (1939), *Horton Hears a Who (2008)

Books- *Horton Hears a Who by Dr Seuss, Fairy Haven and the Quest for the Wand by Gail Carson Levine, Trouble with Trolls by Jan Brett, *Thumbelina (Hallmark pop-up book)

 ESP/Psychic/Mental Powers

Movies- *Carrie (1976), *Firstarter (1984), *Matilda (1996), the Last Mimzy (2007)

Books- *Carrie by Stephen King, *Firestarter by Stephen King, *Matilda by Roald Dahl, Scorpion Shards (Star Shards Chronicles) by Neal Shusterman

 Dolls and Toys

Movies- *Coraline (2009), the Adventures of Pinocchio (1996), Child’s Play (1988), Toy Story (1995), 9 (2009)

Books- Frozen Charlotte by Alex Bell, *Coraline by Neil Gaiman, No Flying in the House by Betty Brock

 Circus/Carnival/Fair

Movies- We’re Back a dinosaur’s story (1993), the Care Bears Movie (1985), Little Nemo adventures in Slumberland (1989), *Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983), *Charlotte’s Web (1973), Dumbo (1941)

Books- Joyland by Stephen King, *Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury, *Charlotte’s Web by EB White

 Gothic

Movies- the Others (2001), the Addams Family (1991), Rebecca (1940), Edward Scissorhands (1990), Mama (2013)

Books- the Raven by Edgar Allen Poe, the Shining by Stephen King, Remember Me by Mary Higgins Clark

 Dark Fantasy

Movies- Legend (1985), the Dark Crystal (1982), *the Princess and the Goblin (1991), Labyrinth (1986), *the Neverending Story (1984), *the Secret of NIMH (1982), Anastasia (1997)

Books- Well Witched (Verdigris Deep) by Frances Hardinge, Poison by Chris Wooding, *the Neverending Story by Michael Ende, *Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C O'Brien, Zel by Donna Jo Napoli, *the Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald, a Tale Dark and Grimm by Adam Gidwitz

 Dragons

Movies- *How to Train Your Dragon (2010), the Pagemaster (1994), Mulan (1998), the Flight of Dragons (1982), Shrek (2001), *the Hobbit (1977), Quest for Camelot (1998)

Books- *How to Train Your Dragon by Cressida Cowell, Jeremy Thatcher Dragon Hatcher by Bruce Coville, *the Hobbit by JRR Tolkien

 Other Worlds

Movies- Spirited Away (2001), *Alice in Wonderland (1951), Space Jam (1996), the Book of Life (2014), *Hook (1991), Pleasantville (1998), *the Phantom Tollbooth (1970)

Books- *Peter Pan by JM Barrie, Malice by Chris Wooding, * the Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, *Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

 Mystery/Thriller

Movies- Clue (1985), *Holes (2003), Get Out (2017), Hot Fuzz (2007), Minority Report (2002), Kidnap (2017), Saw (2004)

Books- *Holes by Louis Sachar, the Lost (the Outer Limits) by John Peel, We’ll Meet Again by Mary Higgins Clark

 Psychological

Movies- Cube (1997), *Secret Window (2004), Silent Hill (2006), the Sixth Sense (1999), the Good Son (1993), Psycho (1960), Donnie Darko (2001)

Books- *Secret Window Secret Garden (Four Past Midnight) by Stephen King, House of Stairs by William Sleator, Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King, Tangerine by Edward Bloor, Lord of the Flies by William Golding

 Action/Adventure

Movies- Anaconda (1997), Dire Hard (1988), National Treasure (2004), the Goonies (1985), *Treasure Planet (2002), the Mask of Zorro (1998), *James and the Giant Peach (1996)

Books- *Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, Hatchet by Gary Paulsen, *James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl,

 Space Aliens

Movies- MIB (1997), Mission to Mars (2000), Galaxy Quest (1999), Alien (1979), ET the extra terrestrial (1982), Independence Day (1996), Spaced Invaders (1990)

Books- a Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle, Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, the Dark Side of Nowhere by Neal Shusterman

 Robot/Technology

Movies- I Robot (2004), the Iron Giant (1999), the Terminator (1984), AI artificial intelligence (2001), the Stepford Wives (2004), Wall-E (2008), *Screamers (1995)

Books- the Terminal Man by Michael Crichton, Feed by Matthew Tobin Anderson, *Second Variety (Screamers) by Phillip K Dick, *I Robot by Isaac Asimov, Cell by Stephen King

 Nature/Animals

Movies- Lake Placid (1999), *Animal Farm (1954), Jaws (1975), *Cujo (1983), Ferngully the last rainforest (1992), Wild America (1997), the Lion King (1994)

Books- *Cujo by Stephen King, Cat in the Crypt (Animal Ark Hauntings) by Ben M Baglio, Congo by Michael Crichton, *Animal Farm by George Orwell, Watership Down by Richard Adams, Weslandia by Paul Fleischman

 Illness/Medical

Movies- Outbreak (1995), Balto (1995), Osmosis Jones (2001), Repo the genetic opera (2008)

Books- Breath by Donna Jo Napoli, Because of Anya by Margaret Peterson Haddix, a Bad Case of Stripes by David Shannon

 Comedy Horror

Movies- Little Shop of Horrors (1986), Beetlejuice (1988), Army of Darkness (1992), Gremlins (1984), Arachnophobia (1990), Jawbreaker (1999), Tremors (1990)

Books- Aliens Don’t Wear Braces (the Baily School Kids) by Debbie Dadey and Marcia Jones, the Cuckoo Clock of Doom (Goosebumps) by RL Stine, a Dirty Job by Christopher Moore jr, Skulduggery Pleasant by Derek Landy

 Slasher/Gore

Movies- Scream (1996), a Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), *IT (2017), *I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), Kill Bill (2003), Happy Death Day (2017), the Hills Have Eyes (2006)

Books- *I know What You Did Last Summer by Lois Duncan, the Dark Half by Stephen King, *IT by Stephen King

 Dystopia/Disaster

Movies- Waterworld (1995), the Matrix (1999), Escape from New York (1981), Demolition Man (1993), the Day After Tomorrow (2004), Volcano (1997), the Fifth Element (1997)

Books- Among the Hidden by Margaret Peterson Haddix, Uglies by Scott Westerfeld, the Road by Cormac McCarthy, the House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer

 Time Travel

Movies- Frequency (2000), Meet the Robinsons (2007), Back to the Future (1985), *the Time Machine (1960), Planet of the Apes (1968), Lost in Space (1998)

Books- *the Time Machine by HG Wells, Found (the Missing) by Margaret Peterson Haddix, the Jaunt (the Skeleton Crew) by Stephen King

 Anime and J-Horror

Movies- Akira (1988), Perfect Blue (1997), Ring (1998), Dark Water (2002), Ghost in the Shell (1995), Digimon the Movie (2000)

Manga- Claymore by Norihiro Yagi, Death Note by Tsugumi Ohba and illustrated by Takeshi Obata, Yu Yu Hakusho by Yoshihiro Togashi, Fullmetal Alchemist by Hiromu Arakawa

 Super Hero

Movies- Hellboy (2004), Ghost Rider (2007), the Incredibles (2004), the Mask (1994), Batman Beyond return of the Joker (2000), TMNT (2007)

Comics- Animal Man (New 52, 2011) DC Comics, Swamp Thing (New 52, 2011) DC Comics, BPRD Dark Waters (2012) Dark Horse Comics, Nextwave (Agents of HATE, 2006) Marvel Comics

 TV Shows and Cartoons

Invader ZIM, the Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy, Courage the Cowardly Dog, Beetlejuice (animated series), Gravity Falls, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Grimm, the Twilight Zone, So Weird, Are You Afraid of the Dark, Danny Phantom, the Munsters, the Addams Family (animated series), Tales from the Crypt, Scooby-Doo Where Are You/What’s New Scooby-Doo, Sabrina the Teenage Witch (animated series), Gargoyles, Strange Days at Blake Holsey High, Aaahh Real Monsters, Tutenstein, Goosebumps, the New Spooktacular Adventures of Casper, Futurama, the Venture Bros, Rick and Morty, Metalocalypse, Over the Garden Wall, Star VS the Forces of Evil, People of Earth

#long post #ref #books #movies #tv shows #spooky #horror #halloween #ghosts #witch #monsters #vampire #werewolf #gothic horror #sci fi #dragons #movie list #book list #zombies #manga #anime

[swipestream]

Science Fiction: An Illustrative Conversation

Author JD Cowan examines Science Fiction: An Illustrated History, by Sam J. Lundwall in the first of many parts. Written in 1975, during the tumultuous years just after John Campbell’s death, Lundwall’s account offers an examination of science fiction history unclouded by the revisionism that accompanied the latest editorial handover in the mid-2000s. Lundwall, a Swedish member of SFWA and other SF organizations, set out to “prove that science fiction is a worldwide phenomenon that hadn’t blossomed in English speaking countries until post-World War I.”

While a European perspective is welcome, as it counteracts American science fiction’s continued provincial myopia concerning World science fiction, Lundwall does a disservice to Poe, Wells, and Burroughs in his claim. Furthermore, English language science fiction was thrust in the limelight after World War I because France, Germany, and other nations involved in both science fiction and World War I lost the spark of hope for the future needed to write science fiction and abandoned the field. American and English science fictions were the loudest voices in a much-diminished choir.

Lundwall and Cowan’s conversation on science fiction sparks many points of discussion, such as the earliest works in the form, how science fiction’s secularization killed its spirit of wonder, and more. Lundwall offers science fiction as the mythology of progress, while Cowan is quick to point out where the mythology diminishes itself:

Mr. Lundwell continues to pry a genre definition from half-formed ideas and made-up terms in order to put to paper what science fiction is. The fact is that it doesn’t have one, and that might be because it is not much in the way of a standalone genre. 

Unlike, say, mystery which is about mystery, or romance which is about romance, or adventure which is about adventure, if your genre requires mental gymnastics to explain to a child then you should go back to the drawing board. One sentence should be enough. Genres aren’t aesthetics or themes. Genres are defined by what emotion and sense they are meant to invoke in the reader. This is why the average reader picks up a book. They choose one based on the experience it will give them. 

What they are fumbling around to define in the above definitions is Wonder. Wonder is a trait from adventure fiction and its subgenres fantasy and horror. It is the adventure of exploring new lands, peoples, and possibilities. Pair that with the origins of those listed in the paragraph above and you will see where I am going with this, and why the battle for an original definition has been fruitless for well over a century. It’s never going to have one, and that is a point that should be discussed more than it is.

That science fiction might be closer to chinoiserie than mystery or horror is a point to ponder. But it is the following exchange which highlight Lundwall’s claim of science fiction as a global phenomenon–and gores a sacred cow of science fiction in the 2010s:

And to quash another canard, the author continues:

“When some critics argue that the English author Mary Shelley invented modern science fiction with the novel Frankenstein (1818), they forget that she was drawing upon more than fifty years of Marchen literature, most of it infinitely better and more modern than Frankenstein was.”

No, that wasn’t written by Jeffro Johnson. In fact you will soon see that the author is no friend of the pulps or the old stories at all. There is a larger point here. This is a man who stood at fandom’s heart, and here he is admitting what no one currently in that position will. If you accept Mary Shelley as science fiction (and horror, when it’s convenient to the argument) you have to accept many other works that came before hers. You do not get to pick and choose. 

You have to accept fantasy and horror as a whole connect to science fiction, and she did not create either of those. She merely continued on in a tradition that started long before she was born and continued long after she was dead. Despite fandom’s best efforts to rewrite the past, she did not create the genre. She was a participant in a unending conversation called art and had her piece. This should be enough. 

Those using Shelley as a bludgeon for political reasons are doing her work and those who came before a disservice and are actively whitewashing history–a history, I might add that was crystal clear from all the way back in 1977. Even fandom understood this.

Let’s turn again to Lundwall for an explanation of Marchen literature:

“Modern science fiction in a sense appeared with the German romanticists of the late eighteenth century–Clemens Brentano, Achim von Armin, Adalbert von Chamisso, E. T. A. Hoffman and others. These romantic Marchen writers wrote what in effect were fairy tales for adults, including all the various paraphernalia common in modern sf, such as robots, monsters, strange machines etc, set against a curious background. They demanded an almost boundless credulity from their readers, for they described life, not as a reality, but as a dream of sorts–not what it is, but as it might be.”

We see once again the influence of Romantic literature, with this branch in fairy tales, joining English Gothic tales and Poe’s mysteries as the venerable roots of science fiction. Cowan and Lundwall will disagree yet again over the merits of the Gothic tale, this time, over the appeal of materialism:

But here is where we get the writer’s real opinion of adventure fiction. What follows is his description of The Castle of Otranto, the single most important and popular Gothic novel.

“It had form and no substance, it horrors all lay on the surface as it were . . . the seminal The Castle of Otranto succeeded only in building up baroque facades without much content. In many ways this was the forerunner to the Penny Dreadfuls and the pulp magazines–lots of form, no content.”

I will translate this from arrogant fandomese for the paupers in the audience. “Form and no substance” means the horrors are spiritual, implied, and obvious to those reading, and not explicit.

Cowan describes further the importance of the Gothic:

The Gothic is the beating bloody heart in any good traditional romance story and is what gives it the universal core so needed in fiction. White against black. Dark against Light. Hero against Villain. Eternal Life against Endless Death. Temptation against Virtue. It goes beyond the surface into weighty themes of the Ultimate, God, and True Justice. The knowledge of a battle between forces beyond both parties at play that haunt the scenery and the overall world behind the story. It underpins every action and decision, and the thought that salvation or damnation is a stone throw away is the most nail-biting experience of them all. Now those are stakes, and they were an integral part of all fiction until the second half of the 20th century where the worst thing that can happen to you is that a monster might kill you in the dark where you can’t see it.

Really makes you think.

Indeed, it does, with this discussion of the first chapters leaving readers much to ponder over. I look forward to the rest of this series, and the continued conversation between 1970s’ science fiction orthodoxy and 2010s’ independent rebels.

Science Fiction: An Illustrative Conversation published first on https://medium.com/@ReloadedPCGames

[tanmath3-blog]

Kenneth W. Cain first got the itch for storytelling during his formative years in the suburbs of Chicago, where he got to listen to his grandfather spin tales by the glow of a barrel fire. But it was a reading of Baba Yaga that grew his desire for dark fiction. Shows like The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and One Step Beyond furthered that sense of wonder for the unknown, and he’s been writing ever since.

Cain is the author of The Saga of I trilogy, United States of the Dead, the short story collections These Old Tales and Fresh Cut Tales, and his latest Embers: A Collection of Dark Fiction. Writing, reading, fine art, graphic design, and Cardinals baseball are but a few of his passions. Cain now resides in Chester County, Pennsylvania with his wife and two children.

  1. How old were you when you wrote your first story?

Five or six, I believe. It was an awful rendition of the whole Baba Yaga thing.

  2. How many books have you written?

Written or published? Written, I would say, so far: 6 novels, 5 novellas, 4 collections of short stories, and maybe a hundred stories that aren’t in those books that will likely end up in other collections. As well as a bunch of poetry, a lot of which is in a themed collection, most of which is still unpublished. The most recent releases will be a novella titled A Season in Hell (due out September 7th) and my next collection, Darker Days (due out December 7th).

  3. Anything you won’t write about?

No, I don’t believe in taboos. There are stories in every taboo. They say not to kill the dog, but there’s a story there as well. It’s been done, too. I have to tell the story I have to tell. If it’s in me, it’s going to get out, like it or not.

  4. Tell me about you. Age (if you don’t mind answering), married, kids, do you have another job etc…

I’m 48, married to a wonderful woman with two kids. I write pretty much full-time, other than keeping up chores around the house and coaching my son’s baseball teams.

  5. What’s your favorite book you have written?

It has to be A Season in Hell. This short book tackles many modern issues, things that matter to me. It’s hard-hitting, and a love story for the game of baseball.

  6. Who or what inspired you to write?

If I had to put he onus on just one person, it would have to be my mom. She loved horror, and growing up, I saw several movies (The Omen, Psycho, etc). They fueled my passion, but so did discovering the stories in the various Writer’s Digest books my parents kept on their shelves. It’s there I discovered Poe. Or perhaps it was hearing that Baby Yaga story for the first time.

  7. What do you like to do for fun?

Read. That’s fun for me. I also like to check out an original series now and then. Nothing that’s been rehashed or rebooted but something really original. Like Dark on Netflix. I also like gardening, fishing, coaching baseball, trying to play my guitars, drawing and painting, hanging with my family, and enjoying the beauty of this world.

  8. Any traditions you do when you finish a book?​

Wine! A bottle of Merlot, something like Smoking Loon.

  9. Where do you write? Quiet or music?

I have an office…now, with a desk and all, though it’s more like a dungeon to me. As for music, it varies. Sometimes it’s music, which can be anything from Pink Floyd to Metallica to Sinatra. Other times, I listen to baseball games or baseball chat. Then there are the podcasts I listen to, sometimes chat about the craft and other times stories. My brain is usually able to separate the two, so I can write a story and still hear what I’m listening and process it. Kind of weird. But there’s also times I need silence.

  10. Anything you would change about your writing?

Well, I would have started much earlier for one. I don’t know why I started so late, but it often feels like it’s too late. And I’d be far more patient, not taking the first offer, honing my craft before I rushed out there. I likely wouldn’t have hurried to get so much out there.

  11. What is your dream? Famous writer?

I’m living my dream. At least I think I am. I get to write a lot, read a lot, do all the things I enjoy. I married an awesome woman who is SO supportive of all my endeavors and two really bright children who are blossoming into great adults. And sometimes, once in a very great while, someone will leave a kind review or contact me or make a post about something I wrote, and it will touch my heart deeply. Who could ask for more?

  12. Where do you live?

Chester County, Pennsylvania.

  13. Pets?

I recently got rid of all my reef tanks, but I’ve had several over the years, as well as many, many birds. Right now, though, I have two dogs, a Catahoula leopard mix named Iggy and a Labradoodle named Kady. They’re both sweet, loving dogs.

  14. What’s your favorite thing about writing?

Getting it all out of my head. It’s cathartic; helps me sort my thoughts and feelings in a way I can deal with them. I’m putting myself out there for my readers, getting naked with my feelings. Hopefully they get something from my stories that elicits a similar feeling.

  15. What is coming next for you?

A young adult novella entitled Shadows in the Storm where Nita faces off with Shade, leader of the Shadow People. Though I still have to work on finding a publisher for the book.

  16. Where do you get your ideas?

My inspiration typically starts with a seed from something I know quite well. For instance, with A Season in Hell (due out September 7th from Crystal Lake Publishing) I drew from my long career playing baseball, as well as coaching. The story is about a woman playing baseball in the minor leagues back in the nineties and what she must endure just to play the game she loves. For that story I took from my own personal experience, even down to the smallest details like taping up a torn muscle with duct tape just so I could play the next game.

  There’s another element to the process, what I call the “what if” moment. You’ll see a lot of that in my shorter work. For instance, there’s this story in my collection Fresh Cut Tales entitled “Split Ends.” I was sitting at a pool while on vacation watching a mother furiously brush the knots out of her daughter’s hair and thinking about the “what if.” In this case, what came to mind was a disease, one the mother and daughter thought was very real, and it was but only mentally in this case. So that story is about the struggle of a mother not to succumb to that mental disease.

  Additional info:

  I have three books coming out this year (all three through Crystal Lake Publishing). Details for all three books follow

  The first is a novella entitled A Season in Hell. Due out September 7th.


  “Kenneth W. Cain takes timely social topics and explores them against the backdrop of America’s pastime. What begins as a baseball story quickly delves into something rich, deep, and dark.” – Mercedes M. Yardley, author of Pretty Little Dead Girls

  Synopsis:

When Dillon Peterson is honored for his baseball career, he must face a ghost that has long haunted him. He is transported back through his memories to a single season in the nineties that broke his heart. That was the season he met Keisha Green, the first and only woman to play baseball in the minor leagues. He sees what she goes through, what she must endure just to play the game both of them love, and this struggle leads to their friendship. As matters escalate, Dillon finds himself regretting his role in it all, as well as his career in baseball.

  “A Season in Hell is a gut-wrenching, heartbreaking story. You won’t soon forget Dillon or Keisha. Her struggle is as timely today as ever. A Season in Hell is also a love letter to baseball and how, despite everything, the game can still heal and bring people together who seemed impossibly far apart, and can do so through intimidating odds. A timeless story of true humanity.” —John Palisano, Vice President of the Horror Writers Association and Bram Stoker Award-Winning Author of Night of 1,000 Beasts

  The second is Tales From The Lake Volume 5. Due out November 2nd.

  Poetry:

“From the Mouths of Plague-Mongers” – Stephanie M. Wytovich

“Malign and Chronic Recreation” – Bruce Boston

“Final Passage” – Bruce Boston

  Short stories:


TBD – Gemma Files


“In the Family” – Lucy A. Snyder


“Voices Like Barbed Wire” – Tim Waggoner


“The Flutter of Silent Wings” – Gene O’Neill


“Guardian” – Paul Michael Anderson


“Farewell Valencia” – Craig Wallwork


“A Dream Most Ancient and Alone” – Allison Pang


“The Monster Told Me To” – Stephanie M. Wytovich


“Dead Bodies Don’t Scream” – Michelle Ann King


“The Boy” – Cory Cone


“Starve a Fever” – Jonah Buck


“Umbilicus” – Lucy Taylor


“Nonpareil” – Laura Blackwell


“The Midland Hotel” – Marge Simon


“The Weeds and the Wildness Yet” – Robert Stahl


“The Color of Loss and Money” – Jason Sizemore


“The Loudest Silence” – Meghan Arcuri


“The Followers” – Peter Mark May


“A Bathtub at the End of the World” – Lane Waldman


“Twelve by Noon” – Joanna Parypinski


“Hollow Skulls” – Samuel Marzioli


“Maggie” – Andi Rawson

  The third is my fourth collection, Darker Days. Due out December 7th.


  “Darker Days, the latest collection of short stories by Kenneth W. Cain, delivers on its title’s promise. From the very first story readers are dragged into seemingly ordinary situations that serve as cover for dark secrets. Ranging from subtle horror to downright terror, from science fiction to weird fantasy, Cain demonstrates a breadth of styles that keeps you off-balance as you move from one story to the next. There is something for everyone in this collection–as long as you don’t want to sleep at night!” – JG Faherty, author of The Cure, Carnival of Fear, and The Burning Time.

  Now that you’ve warmed by the embers, submerge in darker days.

  The author of the short story collections These Old Tales, Fresh Cut Tales, and Embers presents Darker Days: A Collection of Dark Fiction. In his youth Cain developed a sense of wonderment owed in part to TV shows like The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, One Step Beyond andAlfred Hitchcock Presents. Now Cain seeks the same dark overtones in his writing.

  There’s a little something for every reader within this collection. These 26 short speculative stories arise from a void, escaping shadows that ebb and weave through minds like worms, planting the larvae that live just under the skin, thriving upon fear. These are Cain’s darker days.

  In this collection, Cain features stories from the Old West, of past lives and future days, the living and the dead, new and unique monsters as well as fresh takes on those of lore. Once more he tackles themes of loss and grief, and the afterlife, always exploring the greater unknown. In “The Sanguine Wars,” Cain takes us to a future where soldiers are made to endure the horrors of war. He explores the complexities of global warming and what lengths men and women alike sink to in “The Reassignment Project.” And, as often is the case, he ends on a lighter note, with “Lenny’s New Eyes” and “A Very Different Sort of Apocalypse.”

  When the darkness comes, embrace it. Let it wrap you up in cold. Don’t worry, it’s not your time…yet.

  INCLUDES THE FOLLOWING STORIES:

​▪​“A Ring For His Own”

​▪​“Heirloom”

​▪​“Rust Colored Rain”

​▪​“Prey”

​▪​“Passing Time”

​▪​“What Mama Needs”

​▪​“My Brother Bit Your Honor Roll Student”

​▪​“Outcasts: The Sick and Dying 1 – Henry Wentworth”

​▪​“The Sanguine Wars”

​▪​“The Hunted”

​▪​“Her Living Corals”

​▪​“Puppet Strings”

​▪​“The Trying of Master William”

​▪​“By The Crescent Moon”

​▪​“Mantid”

​▪​“The Underside of Time and Space”

​▪​“Outcasts: The Sick and Dying 2 – Gemma Nyle”

​▪​“The Griffon”

​▪​“Adaptable”

​▪​“When They Come”

​▪​“The Reassignment Project”

​▪​“Presage”

​▪​“One Hopeless Night by a Clan Fire”

​▪​“Lenny’s New Eyes”

​▪​“Outcasts: The Sick and Dying 3 – Anna Kilpatrick”

​▪​“A Very Different Sort of Apocalypse”

    You can connect with Kenneth W. Cain here:

  Website: https://kennethwcain.com

  Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/AuthorKennethWCain/

  Twitter: https://twitter.com/KennethWCain

  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kennethwcain/

  Amazon author page: https://www.amazon.com/Kenneth-W.-Cain/e/B004HHALF6/ref=dp_byline_cont_ebooks_1

    Some of Kenneth W. Cain’s books:

      Getting personal with Kenneth W. Cain Kenneth W. Cain first got the itch for storytelling during his formative years in the suburbs of Chicago, where he got to listen to his grandfather spin tales by the glow of a barrel fire.

[hermanwatts]

Sensor Sweep: Crusher Joe, Diana Rigg, Black Ops Cold War, Ambrose Bierce

Forthcoming (Cirsova): We’ve just received Schuyler Hernstrom’s foreword for Endless Summer, and we thought it was too good not to share:   Discussing stories is a complicated business.  Buried somewhere underneath layers of criticism, commerce, and identity you might find some deep understanding of Misha’s work. But I worry that careless digging will disturb the landscape. I challenge myself to think about his work with the care and sensitivity that he puts into it.

Memorial (The Silver Key): Word spread on Facebook last night that Charles Saunders, author of Imaro, has passed away. It is being reported he died in May. Odd that an obituary search turns up empty.  Let’s hope it may be a rumor, but it does not appear that way. Author Milton Davis, who continued in Saunders’ “Sword-and-Soul” tradition, broke the news, and many authors, friends, and peers have chimed in since.

Cinema (Wert Zone): Born in Doncaster, South Yorkshire in 1938, Rigg was raised by her parents in Bikaner, India. Returning to the UK, she trained as an actress and made her stage debut in 1957 and her TV debut two years later. In 1965 she was cast in the first of her three major screen roles on the fourth season of British spy series The Avengers, playing Emma Peel. Peel was an action heroine with a line in witticisms, engaged in a constant battle of comebacks and ambiguous tension with her co-star Patrick Macnee (playing John Steed).

Cinema (Wasteland & Sky): The 1970s are still looked on by movie snobs as the peak of cinema, destroyed by the aforementioned filthy space movie that opened the theaters of the 1980s to juvenile pap. This is of course ignoring that the 1970s were dead, spiritually, and morally, which makes many of those 1970s “classics” more worthless than the juvenile goofy space movie. It actually has a moral point, regardless of what you think of it. 1970s cinema, as a whole, did not.

Games (Bleeding Fool):  The new game Black Ops Cold War takes place during Reagan’s presidency during the height of the cold war with communist Russia. The initial trailer features KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov speaking about the communist’s plan to bring down America from within. If you pay attention, you may recognize some of the moves being used by the left today. The trailer urges you to “know your history or be doomed to repeat it” as it flashes images from the cold war across the screen.

History (DMR Books): This past Friday marked the four hundred and fifty-fifth anniversary of the definitive end to the Great Siege of Malta. On September 11, 1565, the tattered and battered fleet of Suleiman the Magnificent sailed away from the tiny island of Malta, utterly humiliated. The Ottoman Turks had disembarked amid imperial splendor nearly four months earlier. Their soldiers were reckoned in the tens of thousands, outnumbering by a factor of four to one–at minimum–the Knights Hospitaller and the Maltese who fought alongside them.

Fiction (Galactic Journey): The book is titled The Wizard of Lemuria but we don’t meet the wizard until Chapter 4. There are 12 chapters. The first quarter of the novella-length book is spent introducing our hero, Thongor of Valkarth. He is, although a lowly barbarian mercenary, both mighty and honorable. The book opens on the aftermath of a wager on a zamph race. Jeled Malkh—an officer and swordmaster—lost the wager, and attacked Thongor rather than pay up. Thongor quickly overcame him, shrugged off the bet, and offered to drink away their differences.

War Gaming (Jon Mollison): Miniature wargames in general, and historical wargaming in particular, are headed down the same road as every other hobby out there. You’d think those with an interest in history would be better prepared to learn from the history of other hobbies, but it doesn’t look that way. A lot of ink is being spilled and chit is being chattered about how to save the hobby from… well, from something that can’t really be shown or identified.

Comic Books (Screen Rant): Heads are gonna roll – as well as fly, disintegrate, and cave in upon themselves, along with pretty much any other violent act that can be inflicted upon a head – in the latest adaptation of Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian. Originally published in Weird Tales and later adapted by Dark Horse Comics, the story of the legendary Destroyer is now published by Ablaze, a publication that has given Conan a sword more caked with blood than ever before thanks in part to their decision to create a truly uncensored version of his exploits.

D&D (Grognardia): I’ve never been much of a fan of Deities & Demigods, though I owned it, of course. Why wouldn’t I? I have always had decidedly completionist tendencies and being an unabashed TSR fanboy, there was no chance I wouldn’t purchase this book as soon as I was able to do so. It’s true I didn’t get much use out of it, but I still proudly displayed it on my bookshelf, right next to the Monster Manual.

Guns (Frontier Partisans): As will most when forced to fight for their way of life, the Apaches of The War Chief utilized any weapon to which they might lay hand. Some of these they fabricated, with especially skilled artisans becoming highly revered by the tribe. The Apaches ranged a broad swathe of the American West and portions of Mexico, and so various materials fell into their hands — materials they converted into bows, arrows, and war clubs, including the famous jawbone club. These weapons and tools, for centuries, they fabricated themselves from indigenous materials.

Edgar Rice Burroughs (Pulpfest): The 2020 Edgar Rice Burroughs Chain of Friendship (ECOF) Gathering will be held Sunday, October 11 through Tuesday, October 13 in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin. Guest of Honor is acclaimed comic book artist and Hollywood illustrator Daniel Parsons. COVID-19 restrictions dictate this will be a small gathering in two large meeting rooms at the Country Inn & Suites located at 1650 Doris Drive. Fort Atkinson is located just 35 miles from Madison or 65 miles from Milwaukee. It’s 100 miles from Chicago O’Hare International Airport.

Fiction (Old Style Tales): “Some Haunted Houses” is easily one of Bierce’s most entertaining series of tales. I recommend it as the ideal Hallowe’en reading choice – a collection of pithy short stories that exude the gloomy atmosphere and chilling mood that make stories like Jacobs’ “The Monkey’s Paw” or Poe’s “House of Usher” horror classics. Reading one after another, a strange feeling of uneasiness creeps into your imagination as Bierce’s reporterly prose calmly details what sound like the verifiable details of veridical hauntings.

Cinema (Swords & Stitchery): There is a space opera out there that came out back in the day that most of you had never heard of… A bit of background, on the weekends back in the 90s I would get into my car & go down to Wallingford,Ct for a weekend of Anime at a local comic shop. I would spend the weekend with friends & one of the things we saw was this. Crusher Joe was made into an animated film in 1983, and a pair of for-video animated episodes in 1989. The film version won the Animage Anime Grand Prix prize in 1983.

Gaming (Future War Stories): There are time when we must ask ourselves when we witness what could have been: how can this not exist? That is how I and many other gamers felt during the recent leak of a Xbox development kit for the Blizzard cancelled StarCraft: GHOST 3rd person action/stealth game for the 6th generation. For many of us, GHOST was going to be first day buy for our OG Xbox consoles…and then there were delay after delay until GHOST was placed on DNR status in 2006 by Blizzard after nearly six years of development that span two studios.

Tolkien (Notion Club Papers): John Garth. The Worlds of JRR Tolkien: the places that inspired Middle-Earth. Frances Lincoln, London: UK, 2020. pp 208. John Garth is one of the best and most important writers on JRR Tolkien. This is his first full-length book since the landmark volume Tolkien and the Great War of 2003; so I knew I would enjoy it. From the title, and the fact that it is a large format, really beautifully-produced, hardback volume; I supposed The Worlds of JRR Tolkien might be dominated by the pictures, maybe even be something like a superior ‘coffee table’ book?

Fiction (Library Blog): This week marks the bicentenary of Sir Walter Scott’s twelfth novel The Abbot, published in Edinburgh on 2 September 1820 and in London two days later. Alone among the Waverley Novels, it was presented not as a stand-alone narrative but as the sequel to an earlier volume, The Monastery, which had appeared just six months earlier. Set in the early years of the Scottish Reformation, The Monastery had sold well but had disappointed many readers and reviewers. Criticism was directed, in particular, at the pivotal role played by the ghostly White Lady,

Cinema (Hollywoodintoto): Reporters have spent days detailing why “Terminator: Dark Fate” became the year’s most embarrassing flop. The movie made just $29 million stateside, and its foreign box office totals are equally weak ($94 million and counting). That’s no way for a franchise reboot to perform. Most observers are writing the saga’s obituary. Those reporters nailed some of the core reasons for its box office woes, from franchise fatigue to recycled story beats. Most missed another crucial factor. The sad decline of Arnold Schwarzenegger, A-list movie star.

Fiction (Adventures Fantastic): So yesterday’s post on Edgar Rice Burroughs and Harold Lamb and the recent post on the canon, coupled with today is the anniversary of the passing of J. R. R. Tolkien and the seventh anniversary of the death of Frederik Pohl, got me to thinking. I referred to Burroughs and Lamb as giants. In the canon post I quoted Newton talking about his achievements being due to his standing on the shoulders of giants. So who exactly are the giants in the field?

Fiction (Tentaculii): There’s a new bibliographic website for prolific British writer Michael Moorcock. The Works Of Michael Moorcock is obviously still a work-in-progress, but the pages for books and shorter fiction appear fairly complete. Moorcock tried his hand with at least one Sherlock Holmes pastiche, but has no overtly Lovecraftian pastiches that I’m aware of. His leftist attacks on many other writers, often described in words such as ‘brusque’ or ‘pungent’, turned out no differently in Lovecraft’s case and with the usual knocks being offered (“astonishingly awful prose” etc).

Fiction (George Kelley): I’ve been a big fan of Hank Davis’s Science Fiction anthologies over the years. Just in time for the Holiday Season, BAEN Books released Space Pioneers, an anthology with just about something for every readers’ taste. In typical Hank Davis fashion, the mix of stories blends Oldies with some newer stories like David Drake’s “Superweapon” (2018). I especially enjoyed Ross Rocklynne’s “Quietus” and Manly Wade Wellman’s “Men Against the Stars.” If you’re in the mood for an entertaining theme anthology, I recommend Space Pioneers. GRADE: A

Fiction (Paperback Warrior): In 2019, Stark House Press generated a commercial and critical hit with the release of The Best of Manhunt, an anthology of stories from the legendary 1950s crime fiction digest. Knowing a good thing when they see it, the reprint publisher has compiled a second volume of blood-on-the-knuckles tales from the popular magazine’s heyday for an August 2020 release.

Writing (Rawle Nyanzi): Recently, I came across an article (archive here) about the evolution of the horror genre in film. While the article is from 2000, and I’m not a horror fan myself, one point stuck with me: how scientific materialism, rather than an understanding of good and evil, became dominant in horror filmmaking, starting with George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. In the materialist worldview, the universe came into being by random chance, and so did the Earth and humanity.

Writing (Kairos): World building is the one element that sets speculative fiction apart from every other category of writing. When designing a secondary world, it’s crucial to establish a foundation of internally consistent principles to help readers suspend their disbelief. Religion in general has been a constant of human existence. Writing a secondary world where there are no and never have been any religions will automatically cause tension between the setting and known history, straining credibility (though it could make for an interesting story hook if handled properly).

Tolkien (Jon Mollison): Listening to the Silmarillion on audiobook, and something occurred to me. The three themes of the Ainur presage the three ages of Middle-Earth.  From the Tolkien Gateway: The Ainur’s flawless Music satisfied even Ilúvatar during this early stage. The Second Theme was “like and yet unlike” the First; it gathered new power and beauty. Soon, however, Melkor’s discord rose up against it, and there was a “war of sound more violent than before”. This time, Melkor’s Theme triumphed over that of the others; many of the Ainur stopped singing entirely out of dismay.

Sensor Sweep: Crusher Joe, Diana Rigg, Black Ops Cold War, Ambrose Bierce published first on https://sixchexus.weebly.com/

[hermanwatts]

Sensor Sweep: Space 1889, Barry Windsor Smith, Tokien, Prydain

Popular Culture (DVS Press): If you needed more proof that the obsession with fictional corporate franchises has a religious overtone to it, here is a major filmmaker advertising just that. When my viewers were upset about the corporate destruction of Star Wars, calling the franchise a cultural institution, I thought it a bit hyperbolic – after all, these are just stories, and you can’t uncreate what George Lucas did. I see things better now. Star Wars is part of the religious reverence for popular franchises.

RPG (Matthew J. Constantine): Way back in the 80s when I was a wee lad and just getting into tabletop RPGs, I used to see Space 1889 on the shelf at a local game store and I thought it looked pretty cool. Somewhere around there, my father picked up a copy, and I used to thumb through it a bunch.  There was something in the setting that really hit a lot of my buttons. I was an Edgar Rice Burroughs, H.G. Wells, and Jules Verne fan, so that was probably enough. But the setting had something that drew me in.

Comic Books (ICV2): Marvel Comics announced Conan the Barbarian: Coming of Conan, the first volume of collected Conan books restored for The Original Marvel Years Epic Collection, for release into trade in June 2020. Conan’s adventures would become legend, but before he became king, he was Conan the Barbarian. In this new trade paperback, Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith bring Robert E. Howard’s barbarian to four-color life, and have restored the art to match the epic majesty of their original editions.

Cinema (Amatopia): So this Birds of Prey movie didn’t do so hot. The usual suspects are blaming misogyny among the movie-going public. The other usual suspects are blaming a marketing campaign that specifically told men that this movie was not for them. Now, both are apocryphal, as I have not found men telling other men not to see this movie because it features women, and I have also not found people involved with the making of the movie telling men “This movie is not for you.”

Tolkien (Sacnoth’s Scriptorium): we now know that Tolkien was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature at least three times: in 1961, when he was nominated by C. S. Lewis. in 1967, when his name appeared on the (alphabetical) long list as #58 of 70 nominees. In 1969, when he was #90 on the long list of 103 names. So far as I know he did not make the short list any of these times.

Weird Fiction & Appendix N (Goodman Games): Without August Derleth (1909-1971), you probably wouldn’t have that Cthulhu bumper sticker on your car, that Cthulhu for President poster, and certainly not that Plushie Cthulhu you have staring down at you from your geek-memorabilia shelf.  Not that Cthulhu would not exist, but he (it?) would be just one more forgotten character in a series of stories by an author unknown except to the most ardent of horror literati. Howard Philip Lovecraft’s greatest creation and most if not all of his fiction would have passed into obscurity if not for August Derleth’s founding of Arkham House publishing.

Fiction (DMR Books): These are stories of Jean Ray, who was known as “The Belgian Poe.” Other writers he was similar to are H. P. Lovecraft, William Hope Hodgson, and Guy de Maussapant. I first read Ray’s fiction in the doorstopper anthology The Weird by Jeff and Anne VanderMeer which reprinted his stories “The Mainz Psalter” and “The Shadowy Street.” Reading these stories, I felt like I did when I first read Lovecraft. They were tales of cosmic horror of immense power and imagination. I decided I would seek out more of his fiction.

RPG (Black Gate): For twenty years, the folks at Privateer Press have been creating games, primarily set in their Iron Kingdoms steampunk fantasy setting. They began with a series of RPG volumes, including an award-winning trilogy of adventures from 2001. These adventures, later collected into The Witchfire Trilogy, was built on the D20 System from Dungeons and Dragons 3E. Then Privateer Press really came into their own with the introduction of the Warmachine miniature wargame, focusing on armies that control massive metallic warjacks, one of the iconic creatures from their Iron Kingdoms setting.

T.V. (Dark Worlds Quarterly): When I was in graduate school, one of my

favorite television shows was Highlander.  I’d seen the first and second movies, and while I’d enjoyed them, it was the TV show that really captured my imagination and made me think about immortals and immortality. A movie is limited to approximately two hours. By contrast, a weekly show has a lot more time to develop characters, backstory, plots and subplots, and story-arcs that can last for months or even years.

Fiction (Epoch Times): In 1907, the man who composed these verses won the Noble Prize for Literature at the remarkably young age of 41. He also wrote hundreds of short stories and several novels. Many of these were made into films in the 20th century, among which were “The Jungle Book,” “Kim,” “Gunga Din,” “Wee Willie Winkie,” “Captains Courageous,” “Soldiers Three,” and “The Man Who Would Be King.” (Reader, if you haven’t seen this last film, starring Sean Connery, Michael Caine, and Christopher Plummer, treat yourself to a great movie this winter.)

Fiction (Wasteland & Sky): A couple of years ago, Superversive Press announced a series of 12 volumes each containing short stories based on the classic planetary system. 9 were based on the planets, and two were based on the sides of the moon. Each volume would contain stories science fiction, fantasy, horror, and weird fiction, with everything in between. No genre style was off limits. All that mattered was matching tone and theme. As a themed series of short story anthologies, it was quite ambitious.

Retro-Science Fiction (25 Years Later): There are two closely-knit, though not necessarily always interchangeable, subgenres of the Golden Age of Science Fiction. Raypunk, or in architectural design circles referred to as Raygun Gothic, is the retrofuture with an eye for a bright future. Atompunk generates dystopian vibes and warns of a dreaded future in which the atomic bomb desecrated all humankind. Atompunk is bleak and afraid. Raypunk is quite excited for what tomorrow has in store.

Cinema (Jon Mollison): Bollywood often gets bandied about as an alternative to Hollywood fare by those cut back on consumption of it’s anti-American resentment.  Taken in by the flashy colors, the obvious national pride of the productions, and for some strange reason the song and dance numbers that break out on the regular, they seek solace in alien spectacle.  Personally, I find the sheer foreign-ness of Bollywood off-putting in much the same way I find anime incomprehensible. . . Enter Furious, the Russian made story of 17 brave warriors who stood up to a full Mongol horde.

Art (Down the Tubes): The Windsor-Smith Studio announced the completion of Monsters, the long awaited graphic novel by Barry, last December, and that the project is on track for a mid-2020 release, but a publisher was not revealed. Assuming it will be launched through traditional distribution routes and not solely through the Windsor-Smith Studio official web site, you’d expect a solicitation through Diamond Previews might soon be in the offing.

Fantasy Fiction (Superversive SF): To both spend time with my children and give them literary food to build their minds, I recently read to them THE CHRONICLES OF PRYDAIN. For them, it was the second reading, but they were too young to remember the first. This time, they were begging for me to read more each night. The stories of Taran and the companions, Fflewddur Fflam, Gurgi, and Eilonwy not only filled their imaginations with adventure but taught them how dragons can be slain (paraphrasing of G.K. Chesterton).

Tolkien (Tentaculii): In August 1955 L. Sprague de Camp reviewed new Conan books and The Fellowship of the Ring, in Science Fiction Quarterly, August 1955. Worth reading right across the spread, as it’s ‘all of a piece’. For those who have somehow not yet enjoyed The Lord of the Rings, note that his review has plot spoilers for the first volume. At that time the second volume was not yet published. Camp must surely have here been the first to draw the comparison between the modus operandi of the ring in the Conan novelette “The Phoenix on the Sword” (1932) and The Lord of the Rings.

Sensor Sweep: Space 1889, Barry Windsor Smith, Tokien, Prydain published first on https://sixchexus.weebly.com/

[hermanwatts]

Sensor Sweep: Irish Horror Writers, Robert Jordan, E. C. Comics

Indie Fiction (Jon Mollison): Given that indy comics are shouting into the gale-force winds of multi-billion dollar marketing campaigns.  It’s hard to get noticed, and every little of help that I can offer my fellow creatives is time well spent.  These reviews aren’t just the writings of a fan, they are recommendations to help you choose the best works to fill your time.

    Fiction (Matthew Hoskin): I was reminded of this poster recently, reading my Oxford World’s Classics edition of Ludovico Ariosto’s Italian Renaissance epic, Orlando Furioso. The cover depicts Ruggiero rescuing Angelica, mounted on a winged steed (bird? hippogriff? I don’t know yet), lancing a dragon from atop his mount. Angelica is nude.  This led me to start thinking about Howard and Ariosto. Now, I’m not saying that Robert E. Howard ever read Ariosto (or Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato).

  Gaming (Kraken Originals): Four more Mythical Mystics are ready to be released into the wild. Mermaid, SaberWolf, Unicorn, and Yeti will be available for sale at 6pm PDT on 10-24-19. The different ink options give each set a very unique and different look from their counterparts, and with our Naked sets the outcomes are endless! Don’t miss out on completing your collection with these 12 or 14 piece sets.

Currently there are no Naked Fairy sets available, but the other four sets are available in all ink options. 12pc Set is $19.95 and the 14pc set is $24.95, a $3 savings from buying the 30mm and 15mm alone.

  Fiction (Goodman Games): So even when Joe Goodman suggested doing some Appendix N Archaeology articles, I had not thought of the Bard of Baltimore until he suggested revisiting Poe. And in retrospect, decades from those dreaded reading assignments, I can think back, remember stories like The Pit and the Pendulum, The Masque of the Red Death, and The Telltale Heart and realize that he was, more than Hawthorne or Stoker, the father of modern horror fiction. Before Poe, there were horror stories and novels like Varney the Vampire or Geoffrey Lewis’ The Monk, but the majority were more morality stories than anything else or ended, Scooby-Doo-style, with the villains unmasked as mere charlatans.

  Gaming (Nerd Stash): Destiny plays a major role in Call of Cthulhu as well. Your choices have a lasting impact on the world and Pierce and will make all the difference in the final moments of the game. Choose to betray a character’s trust and they may not assist you in a key point of the game. While helping them with something will earn you a reward later on that may get you to a different area or give you a new piece of lore. I’m a huge fan of pen and paper roleplaying games and Call of Cthulhu plays out exactly like one. That’s excellent seeing as it is based on the same mechanics as the RPG of the same name.

D&D (Skulls in the Stars): UK4: When a Star Falls (1984), by Graeme Morris.  We start today with another of the UK-produced modules, which tend to have a very different flavor and welcome quirkiness when compared to their US counterparts. The fact that this module is written by Graeme Morris is a good sign: Morris was an author or co-author of many excellent modules from the TSR UK office, including Beyond the Crystal Cave, which I’ve written about before!

  FIction (Cleveland.com): But it wasn’t “Star Wars” or Atari that made the biggest impression on the Cleveland author growing up. Thanks to his father, Bruening grew up reading the pulp fiction of the pre-World War II era, the noirs and adventure tales and Westerns and aviation tales that kept earlier generations rapt. “My father was born in 1929, six months before the stock market crash, his childhood was defined by the Great Depression and then war,” says Bruening. “He read all of the adventure classics, Kipling, Dumas, Edgar Rice Burroughs, cowboy stories. He was really enamored of that whole type of entertainment.

  H. P. Lovecraft (DMR Books): Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett—better known as Lord Dunsany—passed beyond the Fields We Know on this date in 1957. H.P. Lovecraft, was, without a doubt, one of the foremost Dunsany fans to ever walk the earth. Below is the poem he wrote in tribute to that titan of fantasy literature. As far as I can ascertain, HPL’s ode to Dunsany was written in 1919. Lovecraft would precede his idol to the grave by two decades.

“To Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Eighteenth Baron Dunsany”

  Fiction (From Dundee’s Desk): Back in the 1992 – 94 time period, under the pen name Adam Rutledge, James Reasoner wrote a six-volume series of books for Bantam entitled THE PATRIOTS. As the over-arcing title suggests, these stories are set during the Revolutionary War years when young America rose up and won independence from England.

  Fiction (Don Herron): Far be it for me to sit on my beanbag when you guys are having all the fun with the Siege of Malta. This inscription is from The Knights of St. John (1932), a novel by Paul L. Anderson which — while I haven’t read it — undoubtedly deals with the siege. Just check out the Dedication. Anderson of course is well-known for his stories of prehistoric man which appeared in issues of Argosy during the early 1920s. These stories were obviously enjoyed by Robert E. Howard, and influenced him when he wrote tales such as “Spear and Fang.”

  Culture Wars (Brian Niemeier): Merely mentioning a Disney/Marvel property, even to negatively contrast it with a superior indie work, just gives the Devil Mouse brand social proof as the one to beat.

Refusing to feed the beast doesn’t suffice by itself, though. We also need positive messaging that promotes superior alternatives. Freeing Gen Y fanboys from the nostalgia trap has also proven more of a challenge than even I anticipated. Studying methods professionals use to combat addiction and deprogram cultists may be in order.

  Horror (Ireland XO): The people of Ireland have a reputation for their skill as storytellers with the nation producing some of the most lauded novelists, playwrights, and poets that the world has ever known. The genre of horror is no different, as three of the great early authors in the field had either immediate or very close connections with Ireland.

Horror (Digital Bibliophilia): There is a point while I was reading The Spirit by Thomas Page that I had flashbacks to the fairy tale Goldilocks and the Three Bears. I won’t spoil anything, but if you read the novel, or have already read the novel, it might happen to you too. I read the re-print version by Valancourt Books, which has come about via the enormous success of their coffee table reference book Paperbacks From Hell by Grady Hendrix with contributions from Will Errickson.

  Comic Books (Goodman Games): In fact, it’s also fairly easy to see how Gary Gygax, the main co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons (and an entire gaming industry) would fess up to being influenced by the art and storytelling found within the comic books of his formative years. But they are not just any old comic books that he mentions; Gary took the time to single out the creative output of one particular company among the veritable sea of comic books being printed at the time. Yes dear readers, the creeping tendrils of Tales from the Crypt, Weird Science, and Vault of Horror have been christened part of the root system beneath the mighty sequoia that is Dungeons and Dragons.

Westerns (Brandywine Books): The scene above, (involving lost luggage) near the beginning of Owen Wister’s novel, The Virginian, seems to me to foreshadow a major theme of the novel. This is a panorama painted on a canvas a thousand miles wide. The landscape itself is a character in it. It’s a slow book, episodic and discursive, but that’s because everyplace is a long way from everyplace else, and travel takes time.

Robert Jordan (Every Day Should be Tuesday): Decades ago James Oliver Rigney Jr. wrote a book.  That book allowed him to break into the publishing industry.  He sold it several times.  It established his working relationship with Harriet McDougal, who would become his wife.  It led to his first published book, The Fallon’s Blood (as Reagan O’Neal).  It led to a gig writing (eventually seven) Conan pastiches for Tor, this time as Robert Jordan, the pseudonym he would make famous.  It also heavily foreshadows themes and elements from The Wheel of Time, his landmark work of epic fantasy.  It was not, however, published before his death.

Pulp Magazines (Mystery File): Have you ever received a book in the mail and immediately stopped what you were reading, stopped whatever you were doing and sat down and read the book? This is what happened when I received Queen of the Pulps. I had seen Laurie Powers work and do research on it for several years and finally here it is! She must of gotten sick and tired of me nagging her about the book and asking for progress reports.

Writing Philosophy (Rawle Nyanzi): The post — and the novel it reviews — asserts that good and evil are real, and that with great struggle, good can overcome evil. The novel in particular asserts that the Christian God is the source of this good, and that through Him, all things are possible. On the other hand, the tweet decries those who find the Joker film to be too nihilistic. Its writer asserts that the movie did well because heroism is dead. According to him, no one wants heroes anymore because society is corrupt and collapsing, with nothing to look forward to.

Sensor Sweep: Irish Horror Writers, Robert Jordan, E. C. Comics published first on https://sixchexus.weebly.com/