I wanted to put a post together and was waiting to gather some things I wanted to share. First off I have not been buying as many old paperbacks lately. I basically have accumulated lots and decided to hold off for a while. However will searching the basement for Blaylock's The Elfin Ship for another project, I found two books that really belonged upstairs with my main collection. Initially I assumed that The Phoenix Tree was part of Lin Carter's Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, it must have been the unicorns and dragons that fooled me. However the authors on the cover had a distinctly weird tales or horror vibe. I have been collected a number of slim horror collections from the 1970's and this Stoker collection for 1974 by Quartet Books fit right in.
I also wanted to mention a couple items that I thought would be of interest to readers of this blog. The first is a documentary I just watched on Vimeo, Clark Ashton Smith: The Emperor of Dreams directed by Darin Coelho Spring. Smith is a favourite author and I thought this was a great overview of his life and career. It featured a number of tours by Smith scholar, Donald Sidney-Fryer. There were interviews with S.T. Joshi, W.H. Pugmire, and an extensive interview with Harlan Ellison on Smith's influence on his work. Ellison also mentions how he first encountered Smith's "City of the Singing Flame" in Derleth anthology The Other Side of the Moon. I found the interview with Smith's stepson Prof. William Dorman particularly interesting. The documentary also featured some of Smith's painting and sculptures and I have to admit I has really impressed. The b&w reproductions in my copy of The Fantastic Art of Clark Ashton Smith did not do them justice and led me to undervalue them.
Author John Langan reviewed the documentary for Locus here,
https://locusmag.com/2019/01/john-langan-reviews-clark-ashton-smith-the-emperor-of-dreams/
And you can see the trailer here, (I really recommend it)
Lastly I want to recommend Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country by Edward Parnell and I am only on chapter eight. (Finished, a powerful but poignant (okay sad) memoir)
Parnell has written a beautiful and engaging memoir combining his personal history with an overview of the supernatural fiction and film that informed his childhood. Parnel's discussions of the works of authors like Machen, Blackwood. M.R. James, Alan Garner and William Hope Hodgson and films like The Wicker Man or The Blood on Satan's Claw are enhanced by visits to significant locations in their creators' lives and works.
Readers of W.G. Sebald (who I love) may recognize some similarities. There are b&w photographs of the author and his family or the locations he visits. The work consists of descriptions of trips interspersed with personal anecdotes, capsule histories, observation of the local birds and the landscape.
But I think Parnell is more deeply immersed in his subject than Sebald sometimes was. This process seems vitally important to Parnell. His visits to the locations where these authors lived and worked become meditations on his own life and a trigger for his own memories. I have mentioned before that Helen is a big fan of The Fortean Times. One phenomenon which she made me aware of was the concept of The Haunted Generation, as mentioned in the link below;
" The phrase ‘Haunted Generation’ comes from an article of that title by British broadcaster and writer Bob Fischer for the June 2017 issue of Fortean Times magazine, the purview of which is ‘the world of strange phenomena’. Fischer, who was born in 1973, discusses his childhood exposure to a popular culture thematically preoccupied with mysticism and the supernatural;"
From
‘A LOST, HAZY DISQUIET’: SCARFOLK, HOOKLAND, AND THE ‘HAUNTED GENERATION’ by David Sweeny
A link to the actual Fortean Times article is here.
https://hauntedgeneration.co.uk/2019/04/22/thehauntedgeneration/
I think Parnell's work provides an interesting example of the phenomenon. I have found it riveting not just for his discussions of supernatural fiction in Britain but also as an exercise in memoir.
There is a excellent discussion of Parnell's book with an interview with the author here. Parnell states,
"I went back to Norfolk and thought hard about whether I would like to write such a book – a book concerned with ghost stories and films and the places around Britain that fed into them. And I decided that I did. Because I’d grown up obsessed from a young age with the supernatural and horror. Like a lot of children born in the 1970s, my early years had been surrounded by morbid public information films and terrifying, offbeat TV programmes aimed at, but quite probably unsuitable for, our age group; without knowing it, I was part of what the Fortean Times has come to term the ‘haunted generation’."
https://folkhorrorrevival.com/2019/12/27/ghostland-review-and-interview-with-edward-parnell/
Cover credits;
The Bram Stoker Companion unattributed
The Phoenix Tree unattributed
Genius Loci Frank Wakefield
A Rendezvous in Averoigne Jeffrey K. Potter
The Other Side of the Moon Virgil Finlay?
Emperor of Dreams Ned Dameron
