Happy Halloween; Recommended Reading

"Yet more disturbing than our view of the asylum was the idiotic gaze that it seemed to cast back at us. Throughout the years, some persons actually claimed to have seen mad-eyed and immobile figures staring out from the asylum’s windows on nights when the moon shone with unusual brightness and the sky appeared to contain more than its usual share of stars." 

"And next to that room would be another room that was unfurnished and seemed never to have been occupied. But leaning against one wall of this other room, directly below the sliding panel, would be some long wooden sticks; and mounted at the ends of these sticks would be horrible little puppets."

"To make things worse, the setting sun would each day slip out of sight behind the asylum, thus committing our town to a premature darkness in the long shadow of that massive edifice."

from Dr. Locrian's Asylum

by Ligotti, Thomas

"In the Forest of the Night" by Alter Reiss

  Last night I woke around 4:00 and headed over to the Great Lovecraft Reread at Tor to see what Ruthanna Emrys and Anne M. Pillsworth were reading. It turned out to be, a story I had not read before, one that was available online, and one that I really liked. Alter Reiss’s "In the Forest of the Night" it was first published in the March 2015 issue of the Lovecraft E-zine.

The link to the story is here;

https://lovecraftzine.com/magazine/issues/2015-2/issue-34-march-2015/in-the-forest-of-the-night-by-alter-reiss/

The link to the Reread review is here;

https://www.tor.com/2018/10/24/kentucky-bourbon-and-elder-signs-alter-reisss-in-the-forest-of-the-night/

The story is quite short so I will a provide a few quotes and make some comments but try to avoid spoilers. Why not read it first and come back? 

The first paragraph propels us directly into the heart of the story as well as into the wonderfully atmospheric setting of the tale.

"“And who is this,” said the long-necked paneron, from the bole of one of the great, phosphorescent night oaks, “come to our solitary?”

Jack kept walking, not looking up at the paneron, or at the shimmer spiders, who pulled in their threads at his approach, hissing angrily.

“Abraham Jackson,” continued the paneron. “But he is not the only one to come out of the great mirrored hall in this hour.” It dipped its head lower, claws biting the night oak’s bark. “Two others are in the Dawning Wood, Abraham Jackson…,"

Not that the warning is really needed because Abraham Jackson, normally referred to as Jack or One-eyed Jack has entered the wood under compulsion. And what an eerie wood it was;

"So still that the spiders forgot him, and lowered their strands down, down past the roots of the night trees, into the dreaming world.

Jack watched the sparks rising and falling in those strands. Those were the souls of dreamers; each of the spinners had found a dreamer, and was bringing it upward. The spark would rise as the dreams drew closer to reality, and fall as they fell farther away and the dreamers woke. "

"In the Forest of the night is a nicely realized tale of betrayal and revenge. But the most impressive thing for me was Reisse's world building especially in such a relatively short story. The atmosphere is dark and grotesque with a real sense of place. It has an odd mixture of Southern Gothic and Baroque imagery that is totally appropriate for Reisse's plot. After talking with my wife and a number of friends I realized that a lot of readers visualize the setting or characters as they read. This is something I rarely do, but in the case of the paneron I envisioned something like an armoured pangolin but with the grace and agility of a gecko, and scary of course. What I do instead, while reading is compare the plot, character, tropes within the story to other things I have read. I do not claim that the authors has read or emulated these stories, rather this allows me (and hopefully others) to identify the type of things I like. In  "In the Forest of the Night" the setting reminded me of Clark Ashton Smith's two Maal Dweb stories, "The Flower-Women and "The Maze of Maal Dweb" and Jack Vance's Dying Earth stories both of which are concerned with the adventures of wizards and magic users in a world of deadly perils and strange magical beasts. 

But Jack himself with his bourdon, clasp knife, and silver dimes comes from another tradition. 

Pillsworth in her review says "and this fellow has definitely dropped into the Forest of the Night from some high ridge of our own Appalachian mountains.'" and I would not be surprised. He seems a more violent and morally ambiguous version of Manly Wade Wellman's character Silver John or John the Balladeer. Silver John is a character who battles evil through out the Appalachian mountains, with little more than his silver stringed guitar and the occasional silver dime, in a number of Wellman's short stores and novels. 

The image of Jack moving through a grotesque and twisted landscape of treachery, betrayal and revenge also reminded me of a number of Zelazny's heros or anti-heroes, including Francis Sandow in Isle of the Dead or especially Jack of Shadows (Shadowjack) in the novel of the same name. As I said earlier, I do not claim to know anything about about the author's, in this case Reiss’s inspiration for this work. I do know that it offered an interesting take on a Lovecraft themed story with shimmer spiders fishing for dreamers lost in a strange dreamland, and Great Old Ones yet again awaiting their sacrificial offerings. I loved this story and hope to read more stories about Jack by Alter Reiss.

For another very different take of betrayal and revenge in a Lovecraftian world I recommend "NEMO ME IMPUNE LACESSIT" by Michael Shea, and while it is quite different, there the rose garden scene.

New Eldritch Tomes, H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Rice Burroughs James Blaylock

  A few posts back, I spoke of the death of Peter Nicholls the editor of the 1979, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. As I was preparing for that post, I took out my tattered edition and leafed through looking at the pictures. Which meant looking for my favourite, a 1937 edition of Argosy with an enchanting Burroughs cover by Emmett Watson. I then decided to see if there was a decent/affordable copy on ABE. I found one and since one of the main drawbacks of ABE is the initial shipping costs, I looked to see if the vendor has other items I could add. I knew from previous purchases that this vendor, Leonard Shoup, tends to carry Weird Tales related material so I did a quick search on Lovecraft. And there they were. I could not resist adding The Lurking Fear and Other Stories and The Shuttered Room and Other Tales of Horror to the Argosy and now all I had to do was wait until the frantic barking of the dogs signaled the arrival of our letter carrier

When I first began collecting, rather than simply buying books randomly, I focused initially on two areas. Lovecraft with the obvious (to me) addition of Arkham House and other Weird Tales authors, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. I chose Lovecraft because I was introduced to his work by a school chum at 15 and enjoyed it.

These two Lovecraft titles would be considered minor collections at best. The stories in the The Shuttered Room are pastiches or stories based on Lovecraft's notes by August Derleth. The Lurking Fear contains what I think I can safely describe as lesser tales, although I have a certain fondness for the wildly illogical The Lurking Fear, with it's warning against the dangers of inbreeding, cannibalism and a subterranean existence. I purchased them for the John Holmes covers, these were among the first editions (now lost) that I owned.

(Both author's works can be considered problematic in their treatment of women and minorities, I posted my thoughts on Lovecraft here

http://dunwichhorrors.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-real-shadow-over-innsmouth-odd.html )

I chose Burroughs because his books filled the used bookstores of my youth and I loved the covers. James Blaylock in his wonderful Burroughs themed novel The Digging Leviathan expressed this beautifully. 

" Edward St. Ives was a collector of books, especially of fantasy and science fiction, the older and tawdrier the better. Plots and cover illustrations that smacked of authenticity didn't interest him. It was sea monsters; cigar-shaped, crenelated rockets; and unmistakable flying saucers that attracted him. There was something in the appearance of such things that appealed to the part of him that appreciated the old Hudson Wasp …,.  Once a month or so, after a particularly satisfactory trip to Acres of Books, he'd drag out the lot of his paperback Burroughs novels, lining up the Tarzan books here and the Martian books there and the Pellucidar books somewhere else. The Roy Krenkel covers were the most amazing, with their startling slashes and dabs of impressionist color and their distant spired cities half in ruin and shadow beneath a purple sky." (17)

Cover by Timothy McNamara (as by Ferret)

Roy Krenkel below

I have to admit this purchase was rooted very much in nostalgia or perhaps immaturity if you like. I have lately found the rise of irrationalism worldwide troubling and some days the world seems unrecognizable. As I get older my reading and collecting helps keep me mentally active, engaged and grounded. The process of aging has been beautifully described by Wendell Berry in his novel (a favourite of mine) Jayber Crow.

 "Back there at the beginning, as I see it now, my life was all time and almost no memory. Though I knew early of death, it still seemed to be something that happened only to other people, and I stood in an unending river of time that would go on making the same changes and the same returns forever.
     And now, nearing the end, I see that my life is almost entirely memory and very little time." (24)

I try very hard to avoid wallowing in memories of the past, and make sure that I read new and diverse works and authors, but I, like Edward St. Ives, cannot resist the occasional winged T-Rex. 

New Eldritch Tomes

The nightgaunt(s) have appeared at our strange high house bearing even more eldritch tomes for this humble branch of the Miskatonic University library system. I can only assume Nodens, "Lord of the Great Abyss" has subcontracted them to Amazon. 

Cover by Jason Van Hollander

I was happy to see Volume Six of the Black Wings series, although I preferred the covers of the previous volumes with their monstrous menacing creatures, vast against the background of star charts. Some good authors here, I am looking forward as always to Caitlin R. Kiernan, as well as the stories by Darrell Schweitzer, Don Webb. I am sorry to see there is nothing new by John Langan or Brian Hodge. Still I expect great things.

Cover by Ken W. Kelly

I have read some excellent mythos stories by Michael Shea, "Coping Squid", "NEMO ME IMPUNE LACESSIT" and "The Presentation"  in DEMIURGE: The Complete Cthulhu Mythos Tales of Michael Shea. So I decided to give this a try

Cover Art by Randy Broecker, Design Michael Smith

I have the Arkham House edition of Inhabitants but this edition from PS Publishing has lots of great extras, including first drafts and August Derleth's editorial responses to the stories.

Cover Art by Randy Broecker, Design Michael Smith

I now have all four volumes of the PS Publishing series of Caitlin R. Kiernen's collected stores.

Cover Art by Richard A. Kirk, Design by Michael Smith

Cover photo Paul Moore

I encountered this novel in a review by Michael Dirda, wow a sequel to  The Night Land, I had to buy this. 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/stories-that-are-strange-fantastical--and-utterly-engrossing/2018/04/25/8baf4250-4706-11e8-8b5a-3b1697adcc2a_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.80472055a800

"While one of Iain Sinclair’s own urban fantasies involves the search for a reputed lost sequel to “The House on the Borderland,” Avalon Brantley, who died in 2017, actually produced her own in The House of Silence (Zagava Books). In it she drew additional inspiration from Hodgson’s brooding science fictional quest-romance “The Night Land,” the last published of his four novels. Alas, I haven’t yet had a chance to do more than look at Brantley’s book, but it has already been widely acclaimed a sui generis masterpiece. Earn bragging rights by being the first on your block to read it."

It came with a copy of The Little One about which I know nothing, except the house seems eerily familiar.

Cover photo Dare Wright