FOMO

[None]

Do you know this situation?

Somewhere in the depths of the internet, on a long abandoned weird fiction blog, you find a review for a short story by one of your favorite authors. It isn't really a review, more like two sentences.

The story was published only once, in an obscure webzine, years ago.
The webzine doesn't exist anymore, you can barely find any information about it.
If you're lucky, there's an update on the zines twitter from 5 years ago;

"Good news, issue #3 will be shipping in october!"

As far as you can tell, there never was an issue #3...

The story, which by the way, has a VERY intriguing title, was never collected anywhere, it's not listed on isfdb and a google search only leads you back to the blog...

The story has essentially become "weird fiction lost media"
(Is that even a thing? Someone should get in on that.)


This has happened to me on several occasions, and everytime i get this fear of missing out on a great piece of nightmare.

[Nemonymous]

Reminds me of Nemonymous Six!

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

I keep meaning to join isfdb because there's lots of odds and ends not included yet but I've heard the moderators can be strict, so I'm a bit scared.

[cannibal cop]

"Midnight Flight" (originally published in Nemonymous's "Horror Anthology of Horror Anthologies")—one of Joel Lane's later tales and by my reckoning one of his best, dealt with a similar situation. It also painted a none-too-flattering picture of a subliterate internet-era culture where old or obscure printed works were no longer meaningfully valued for their unique artistic and literary merits, and where the very institutions dedicated to preserving their legacy had abandoned their duties under pressure to conform and maintain "relevance" in the digital age.

[Nemonymous]

Quote Originally Posted by cannibal cop

"Midnight Flight" (originally published in Nemonymous's "Horror Anthology of Horror Anthologies")—one of Joel Lane's later tales and by my reckoning one of his best, dealt with a similar situation. It also painted a none-too-flattering picture of a subliterate internet-era culture where old or obscure printed works were no longer meaningfully valued for their unique artistic and literary merits, and where the very institutions dedicated to preserving their legacy had abandoned their duties under pressure to conform and maintain "relevance" in the digital age.

Thanks, CC, I found that fascinating.

I would like to factor in Joel Lane’s story THE DROWNED MARKET that appeared in ‘Nemonymous Ten’ in 2010 (aka ‘Null Immortalis’). A quotation from it below….



My ‘review’ of it in 2010:

“In the 1990s, crime publishers often used ‘distressed text’ on book covers to give the impression of a damaged page.”
And it is also perhaps no coincidence that drown resembles dream and drug and this author’s story in Nemonymous One 2002 also had ‘The Drowned’ as its title!
This new story is a fascinating blend of a possibly self-referential plot about indie publishing and of transfigured names as well as printed text almost behaving as if it’s electronic, plus the thorny didactic question of using didacticism in fiction… 
An enjoyably provocative story alongside of all that. It is interesting, too, that this fiction has absorbed the blank philosophy as a positive foil to its obverse: commitment. There was a blank story in that 2002 Nemonymous.  By so doing, this fiction becomes more than fiction: it becomes a version of rescued truth. The witnesses have returned?  

***

And as an aside, below is my Facebook post in 2015 that elicited over 70 comments…

I can't help wondering, if anyone put a masterpiece on Facebook today (poem, comment, painting, photo, or whatever), whether anyone would recognise that as a masterpiece or even notice it at all.
If that masterpiece had been made similarly public between, say, 1950 and 1980, it would likely have lasted forever and been celebrated.
How many masterpieces have we lost?

[cannibal cop]

And Lane's novella "The Witnesses Are Gone" also concerns the search for a "lost" film, I believe. I've had a copy of the PS edition for years that I still haven't gotten around to, and given my strange talent for causing prized books to disappear from my midst without a trace, I'm now going to have to make sure that hasn't turned into yet another example of lost media as well.

Similarly, many of my favorite horror stories are short pieces I read as a child in illustrated volumes of horror and folk tales intended for younger readers, which the shelves of my local library's 'Children's Section' boasted an impressively varied collection of back in the late '70s. The combination of odd, semi-expressionistic drawings and spare but effectively sinister storytelling (back then they had no qualms about troubling younger readers with dark and unsettling endings) is probably what initially inspired my lasting fascination with the genre.

Unfortunately, none of those books to my knowledge can still be found in any library today. The closest things I can think of are the books in the later, somewhat underwhelming Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series, which seems to have been revived on the basis of the lasting appeal of its illustrations and little else.

[Nemonymous]

Quote Originally Posted by cannibal cop

And Lane's novella "The Witnesses Are Gone" also concerns the search for a "lost" film, I believe.

Indeed. Joel was inspired by THE VANISHING LIFE AND FILMS OF EMANUEL ESCOBADA by Anonymous, as first published in ‘Nemonymous’ in 2002 and reviewed by Steven Silver in 2003 here: https://web.archive.org/web/20030706...hp3?review=774
The inspiration mentioned below is a reference to me publishing this anonymous story, NOT for having written it. The story remains anonymous at the request of its author.

[Nemonymous]

PS:

Acknowledgements from ‘The Witnesses Are Gone’ novella and a poem by Joel in the ‘Rain Dog’ poetry anthology, respectively, below:

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

Quote Originally Posted by cannibal cop

The closest things I can think of are the books in the later, somewhat underwhelming Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series, which seems to have been revived on the basis of the lasting appeal of its illustrations and little else.

Odd thing about that is how they changed the illustrator, changing the thing people remembered best

[cannibal cop]

Quote Originally Posted by Robert Adam Gilmour

Odd thing about that is how they changed the illustrator, changing the thing people remembered best

HAHAHA! I totally forgot about that.

Reading up on the history of the series now, I am a little surprised to see these unexceptional books were repeatedly targeted through the 1990s and 2000s by strangely humorless, censorious community groups, and consequently removed from some elementary school libraries (which, in a reasonably sane world, would be their ideal home) and even pulled from a few public library branches. Clearly the era of the "WHO WILL THINK OF THE CHILDREN???" scolds and busybodies had reached its apotheosis over that period.

But no. If all that wasn't silly enough, I now present a link to the very worst thing to be found or read online, a blog post entitled "I’M GLAD THEY CHANGED THE ART IN SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK" (https://bookriot.com/im-glad-changed...ies-tell-dark/). And here we see the tragic end result of too many years of people thinking of the children too much.

Let this whole sorry episode be a lesson to overprotective parents everywhere. After all, if your children can't handle the existence of art they find mildly upsetting, how are they ever going to deal with the reality you introduced them to?