Recent Reading

[In A Dark Light]

Just finished Ray Bradbury's 'From the Dust Returned', whilst also enjoying Damian Murphy's 'The Star of Gnosia' at a deliberately leisurely pace.

[Frater_Tsalal]

My thoughts on Ramsey Campbell's The Way of the Worm, reposted from Goodreads (with very mild spoilers):

The Way of the Worm is the 3rd and final book in Ramsey Campbell's "The Three Births of Daoloth" trilogy (following 2016's The Searching Dead and 2017's Born to the Dark). Just as the second book was set around 30 years after the first book, so this new book also represents a similar jump in time, presumably to around the years 2016 or 2017 (unlike the previous books where Campbell explicitly states the date, here he just says "Recently"). The book is once again set in Liverpool, and Dominic Sheldrake, the narrator of the first two volumes, returns as the main character. Now retired from a job as a lecturer of film (and recently widowed), Dominic finds a new purpose in life: rescuing his son Toby, his son's wife, and their daughter from the clutches of the sinister cult they've been indoctrinated into, the Church of the Eternal Three. Upon infiltrating the cult, Dominic quickly finds out (to the surprise of no one) that it's being run by his old enemies, the Noble family. Once again called upon to come into conflict with his lifelong foes, he's forced to recruit the aid of his two childhood friends, Jim Bailey (a retired cop) and Bobby Parkin (a lesbian writer). This isn't the first time they've taken on the Noble family; only now, the stakes are much higher...

One of the most interesting aspects of this series was its format, as I can't think of all that many horror trilogies: generally most horror books tend to be standalone novels. Certainly Campbell gets a lot of mileage from the number three in general here: the three main characters (Dominic, Bobby and Jim, who in the 1950's referred to themselves as "The Tremendous Three") are mirrored by the three principal antagonists (Christopher, Tina and Toph Noble), and to a lesser extent with Dominic's family (his son Toby, Toby's wife Claudine, and their daughter Macy). There's also much focus on the number three in regards to its application to religion (be it Christianity or the cult run by the Noble family), and on the concept of time itself (past, present, and future). One thing that makes the trilogy very readable is that each book is set in a different time period and thus has its own feel: 1952-1954 in the first book, 1985 in the second, and modern day in the third. Therefore, it's very interesting to see how both Liverpool (and society as a whole) changes during the course of each book, to say nothing of watching the main character and his friends grow up: Dominic starts the series as a teenager, is 43 in the middle volume, and is in his 70's in the final book (another trilogy there: childhood, adulthood, old age). In some ways this final volume was the darkest and most depressing of the three: it was very melancholy seeing the Tremendous Three nearing the end of their lives, and reading about Dominic's frustrations and disappointments at some aspects of modern life just reminded me of how I also detest so many aspects of human civilization as it stands today... I found myself yearning to read the first book again, when the characters were still young and in the prime of life, with their whole future ahead of them, and there was no hated social media... though (in my case) I suppose it's easy to be nostalgic for a period of time in which one never personally lived...

In any event, The Way of the Worm was a fine ending to the trilogy, full of unexpected plot twists, and while in terms of horror there wasn't anything in the book that quite matched the chills generated by Dominic and Jim's exploration of the (seemingly) abandoned Safe to Sleep building (that culminated the end of the second volume), certainly there are still plenty of uneasy moments here, and at the end of the book Campbell finally gets around to depicting the eldritch apocalypse only hinted at in the previous two books (which ties into the symbol of the Ouroboros, an icon venerated by the Noble's cult). Indeed, I imagine that it would be very intriguing to reread these books at some point in the future, now that I know how it ends. And of course, Campbell's writing is as reliable as ever, and he manages to make even the most prosaic things sound interesting: you have autumn "...transforming new leaves into paralysed flames," a flock of seagulls in flight gets morphed into "...shards of bone fly up from the bay." You also have "...a sky so colorlessly nondescript it resembled a denial of its own existence," a subway described as a "...subterranean platform that was trapped between two mouths of the dark"... even a blank computer screen becomes a sinister "...emblem of eternal darkness."

[marioneta]

I finished the Aickman book, Compulsory Games, an excellent read, although not a best of collection. Now, as we say in Spanish, 'cerrar con brocha de oro', I'm reading Ramsey Campbell's story collection, Scared Stiff: tales of sex and death. I'm halfway through and it's amazing. Ramsey can tackle a topic most horror writers shy away from, Lovecraft for instance, and still be scary.

[ToALonelyPeace]

Infinite Resignation by Eugene Thacker.
It's a great book if you're looking for references on other pessimistic writers. Unfortunately, it doesn't have an index so you'll have to keep track of the names on your own.

The first half is a hodgepodge of fragments, definitions, personal observations, shoe-gazing, wanderings and dreams. It has some good bits, but I find this portion contrived more often than I would like. The second half introduces the "Patron Saints of Pessimism" and here Thacker excels at presenting the forgotten bits of each "saint" 's daily life--the dashes which complete a persona or the shading of an amorphous blank. It suffers less from the logophilia and wordiness syndrome endemic to creative writing/alt lit magazine articles, but there are still unnecessary words to cut. To sum it up, plenty of words but no fire.

[Acutely decayed]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Nigh...nesome_October


kinda a cheat, read decades ago, but daily can't decide if I am an opener or closer ...


also read, sadly, "a people s history of the V uprising" all of it, so you don't have to, unless he was trolling molly biologists in which case ...clever (by which I mean, worse than very bad)


and



so far very good, despite some startling claims ...

[Gnosticangel]

Re. "kinda a cheat, read decades ago, but daily can't decide if I am an opener or closer ..."

Good question - I wondered that myself for years, now finally I know myself a Closer.

Got to meet Zelazny once, we took a long walk together around a campus where he was teaching in the late 1980s; a wonderful and kind person!

[miguel1984]

I started reading Lone Wolf and Cub by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima. I will let you guys know when and if I finish it, in about two or three decades.

[Caliban]

I’m half way through It by Stephen King

I’m also slowly meandering my way through the most recent Years Best Weird Fiction edited by Michael Kelley and Robert Shearman.

Also. I’m backi haven’t been here in a while. I’m the same useless no hoper I was before.

[Zaharoff]

Ghosts & Scholars Book Of Folk Horror by Rosemary Pardoe (editor)

I imagine interested parties have already purchased their copy.
Just to be considerate of procrastinators, however, I checked with Robert.
He still has a few copies of this recent Sarob Press title in stock. Which means prices in the secondary market are reasonable - for now.

The word "folk" gave me pause, as I had a mental image of rustic, hayseed types.
I was wrong. The settings may be rural, but the characters are anything but.
Many are city travelers who have wandered afield, or have taken the dreaded short-cut.
Celebrants burn effigies in a fire, before eyeing the outcasts.
A bleak landscape of stone walls that seem less than stable.
Half glimpsed faces in gnarled trees. An odd gathering of birds.
The decades old folder, purchased at auction, contains disquieting letters.

The collection is half old material, half new.
Indeed, some of the oldest stories here hark back to "Ghosts & Scholars" 2 and 3.
The quality is uniformly high. I must confess, I enjoyed damn near every piece in this collection, and rationed myself, reading only one per day, or every couple of days.
Good company for the gloomy days ahead.

[Patrick G.P]

James Champagne's Grimoire - A Compendium of Neo-Goth Narratives:
“His nightmares began to stink with decay, as if his subconscious itself was starting to slowly rot."

James Champagne’s stories delve deep into a mysticism that’s wholly his own, a feverish nightmare world where the search for knowledge and truth ends in madness or worse. His prose is fresh and concise, painting characters that often live on the edge of reality itself, desperately searching for a meaning or a purpose in their lives. Bizarre occult tomes and cryptic religious lore loom in the background offering a glimpse of a truth that will send them screaming into the abyss.

Throughout the collection an interconnectivity slowly reveals itself to the reader, the same obscure occult books pop up into new hands, previous characters’ fates are hinted at, the machinations of strange corporations seems to follow a pattern, and through all this, there starts to form a bigger picture, of some hideous, crooked dimension forcing its way into our reality. A maniacal intensity lies over his portrayal of the horrors and alien vistas that befalls some of his protagonists, flooding the pages with outlandish pictures of monstrous gods and some truly grotesque descriptions of mutilations and death. These images work together to create hallucinatory dreams of some unknown hell, twisted religious visions caught on paper to show a reality infested with some cryptic sickness. Though amidst all this carnage and weirdness, Champagne often writes with tongue planted firmly in cheek and manages to find humor in the total strangeness he describes to great effect.

The nightmare stories of James Champagne is something one has to experience for themselves, the merging of references, soundtracks, paintings, and movies melds together with the dark void of Lovecraftian horrors, bizarre corporations, Catholic imagery, and outlandish occultism. Though there are similarities to both Thomas Ligotti and Mark Samuels in his prose, Champagnes works read a lot more personal, as many of the references can be seen as a reflection of his own personality and tastes. The use of music in his tales strikes me as very personal and unique, as several of the stories has specific songs mentioned playing or a suggested as soundtrack to the reading experience. The English neo-folk band Current 93 is the most prominent, and his prose are littered with references and tributes to the wonderful lyrics and melancholy tunes of David Tibet. There is a longing in the prose to discover something hidden, some mystical truth that will reveal a cryptic revelation, yet every time this gnosis presents itself it leads into the yawning chasm of insanity. In the very best moments there is a sadness accompanying these moments, of something wonderful within reach, and then lost forever.