Recent Reading

[Mr. Veech]

Quote Originally Posted by Prince James Zaleski

If you are exclusively interested in his dark fiction then The Hill of Dreams, The White People, Novel of the Black Seal and Novel of the White Powder are essential. He has other works in this area that are decent, such as The Shining Pyramid, The Inmost Light and Change, but overall his horror/dark works are very few in number and his reputation as a horror writer isn't representative at all of his body of work. The Hill of Dreams isn't generally counted as a horror book, but it's so haunting and full of dark imagery that I don't discount it. It is one of the finest novels I have encountered and his masterpiece. If you enjoy these and want to check out his other works which emphasise wonder and mute or exclude the terror element then I strongly recommend A Fragment of Life, The Secret Glory and the prose poems that comprise Ornaments in Jade. Pretty much everything he wrote in the 1890s is gold. After that his work suffered a steep decline in quality, although little of it is outright bad and instead just seems rambling and unfocused. The Secret Glory is his final work of genius.

As always, thank you.

I could do with some recommendations myself. As a natural extension of my odyssey into the stark unbridled horrors of Ewers and Andreyev I'm looking for some great splatterpunk fiction. I'm aware many on here dislike this sort of horror, but it's worth a shot asking. I am already a big Clive Barker fan, but I am otherwise hardly familiar with the subgenre. I want to find the most intense stuff possible, which doesn't shy away from the explicit consequences of horror and trauma/nightmare on the human tabernacle of flesh.

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

A lot of people rate David J Schow but the one story I read by him was quite plain, I hope it wasn't representative. Joe Lansdale is supposed to be very good too but all I've seen is the film Bubba Ho-Tep.

Not being very experienced with splatterpunk, I gather the impression it's generally more focused on fun but Jack Ketchum has a reputation for not shying away from real life darkness (I even read an essay by him about "not looking away") and Girl Next Door has become a classic which sounds too depressing for me (based on real events too), some reviewers have said it made them vomit.

That last one sounds like something I should check out. I'm on the lookout for the extreme. Everything is so cosy.

[Ibrahim]

Prince James: if you prefer your horrors confrontational, check out Roberto Bolaño's 2666, the middle section of which features such clinical discriptions of mind-numbingly ceaseless flow of homicides in fictional Santa Teresa ( based on the very real murders in Ciudad Juarez), that it's a miracle ( and a testament to Bolaño's craft) that the book is not a quagmire of nihilism. It's sobering, and tempers a lot of the (already quite black) humour, but it's not a one-note excercise ( which is the problem with a lot of extended horror fiction i guess- its narrowness of focus).
Read 2666, unless you have already and disagree with me, of course...

Has anybody here, by the way? ( read that book i mean)

I'll check it out, ibrahim. I'm not sure I'd say I now prefer my horrors this way. It's more that I have exhausted the supply of recognised classic ghostly and cosmic fiction, and I feel the need to go somewhere different with the more intense and graphic portrayals of human suffering.

My defence of Robert E. Howard earlier has put me in the mood for some sword and sorcery. May do a best of Howard/Moorcock/Wagner reread. Sod the critics.

James, I'm reading Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword at the moment and I think you would dig it. I think Moorcock's boner for the novel rages too much but it's still a pretty good piece of fantasy fiction.

[Ibrahim]

I keep giving Moorcock a try, mainly because the original paperback edition covers are so enticing, but the prose is just so flat and forgettable...it's all 'this happens & then this happens & then that.'
KEW is great, though, as far as guilty pleasures go. The Kane tales have a nicely contrived melancholy atmosphere. Also Leiber's Gray Mouser tales are fun. Currently reading Clifford Simak's Enchanted Pilgrimage which, also, is fun. Spirit of the times, perhaps? Written with zest and schwung and optimism tempered by common sense. Like a less overbearing and more concise Dark Tower.

The only Moorcock I've read so far is The Eternal Champion, which was a great deconstruction of ditzy heroic fantasy novels. Behold the Man sounds incredibly interesting, and that will most likely be my next Moorcock pit-stop.

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

Behold The Man is the only fiction I've read by him and it's good, some people think it's just made to shock Christians but I thought it was a sympathetic portrayal of a Christian guy.

But Gloriana, Dancers At The End Of Time, the Pyat series and Cornelius series is where most of the real acclaim comes from.