Sorcery and Sanctity: A Homage to Arthur Machen

[njhorror]

I'm not the best judge, but based on my observations on this board and elsewhere, I don't believe that Mark Samuels is delusional, at all. As for all this other stuff - I have no idea what's going on. Maybe intolerance, hurt feelings, misunderstandings...but in the long run it's the work that counts. I wish you all the greatest success in your vocation of writing.

[Druidic]

If you feel strongly about something in a book, Amazon reviews are worth writing. This is my review of Barron's latest, hastily written but making every attempt to be fair while taking him to task for his unseemly 'humor'. --

"Blackwood's Baby" and "The Men From Porlock" are probably reason enough to buy this collection: two stories of hunts, set in the period after World War I, where the hunters find themselves the prey of Lovecraftian horrors. Barron's prose is clean, incredibly detailed and richly atmospheric; and these two stories are examples of the writer at his very best. (Not that Barron is without failings, but I really don't intend to write an essay here.) Suffice to say the best of these stories are about as good as contemporary horror has to offer. "The Redfield Girls" and "Hand of Glory" are strong stories that show different sides of this writer, the former a subtle atmospheric tale of a lake that may be haunted by an evil genius loci; the other a no-holds barred horror story set in the 20's with gangsters, "hillbilly Satanists", evil crones and black magicians. "The Carrion Gods in their Heaven" is a creepy werewolf tale that features the missing woman from "Parallax", the latter story in Barron's first collection, The Imago Sequence. Didn't care for "Jaws of Saturn" which felt rather trashy or, even worse, "More Dark" which was, I believe, a tasteless and meaningless exercise in gratuitously mocking a fine writer like Mark Samuels who has never even met Barron. I deducted a star accordingly for this bit of nastiness. My respect for Barron has taken a bit of a hit.

[Joel]

I haven't got the time or energy for this nonsense – but for the record, I did not take any part in, let alone orchestrate, any smear campaign against the Machen anthology or any other book that Mark S. has edited or authored. That simply did not happen. I'm saddened to note that people are already posting on this thread to say that the book's excellence will see off the politically-motivated Lane smear campaign. For their benefit, I will repeat: there was no whispering campaign against this book, politically motivated or otherwise. I'm sure it's an excellent book, but I'm not eager to hear more opinions about how wrong it was of me to try and wreck it. Mea non culpa.