Bran the Blessed

I've never read either. However I will say I preffer adaptations of King's work with as little fantastic things as possible. Even if The Green Mile has some, it's just enough for it to work as a greta movie and make it different enough from The Shawshank Redemption.

I just felt like mentioning them again since they be my two most favourite film apart from.......something I'm not sure you'd not laugh at me for : P

53 minutes ago, JasonT said:

+1 to all that. Maybe I was wrong-footed by the show's new style (which I've seen described more than once as "cop show"), but I found the new Doctor underwhelming, and I have to confess I thought Jodi Whittaker did a pretty mediocre acting job. Then I went online and saw reviewer after reviewer praising her performance. I dunno. There's a lot to unpack, as they say.

I'm in total agreement with the general consensus on the forgettable-ness of the story and the bad guy.

Early days yet.

I've yet to watch it myself but every single trailer they've released so far was utterly devoid of anything interesting going on so I don't exactly have high hopes. And one should probably not contrast these trailers with the trailer to Capaldi's final season as the sheer, overwhelming flow of content there leaves these so called trailers feel wholy destitute in comparison.

I did notice a lot of online praise for it, but I do wonder if this be another case where maybe people are trying to force themselves to find it amazing because they feel they'd get slapped with the M word if they dared dislike it ? Either way I'm going to give it a look, even though I've not finished with the finale of the last season.

That is a loss indeed. Sadly I don't think many people on the other side of the pond will notice and that's even sadder, in a way.

1 hour ago, dogpoet said:

Apparently in the 'States a "circus peanut" is a type of marshmallow confectionary, rather than something they dig out of the turds the elephant leaves in the ring after its performance in the big top.

They are bright orange, apparently:

Huh. I always thought they were just peanuts you buy at the circus for an extra premium. You know, like with most places which sell overly expensive food.

16 hours ago, Christian said:

Not really, no. His fiction would certainly work very well for reading over the radio, or whatever type of newfangled technology humans are using today.

Was the story "Naturally" included in the collection you read? It was about the college student who decides to make a pact with a demon to help him pass geometry. I love that story, it was so funny. Try to hunt down a copy of that story, if you haven't read it yet.

Doesn't seem familiar no.

And here then

https://archive.org/details/Mindwebs_230

55 minutes ago, Christian said:

Frederic Brown is awesome. I love his stuff. Yeah, he was the master of the flash fiction format.

Most writers have no idea how to work in the form. Usually, I see a story in an anthology by an author I enjoy and see it is four pages, and think, "Well, that was a waste of money. That story will be really disappointing.", because the writers need space to write the type of fiction by them which has gravitas. When they make it so compact, they lose all the attention to details which make their fiction work so well.

However, with Brown, he manages to always deliver a very good story in just a few pages , that doesn't leave you feeling cheated. They almost always end up reading as clever conceits.

There are some other writers who have managed to master the flash fiction format, but it is very difficult, and Brown is one of the better.

I actually remember hearing one of the stories read on an episode of Mindwebs. Are you at all familiar with it ?

Finished Nightmares and Geezenstacks by Fredric Brown. It was an interesting mix, and most of the stories did have a clear point beyond two or so. It was a bit exhaustive to read this many short things so quickly though XD

16 hours ago, Christian said:

Gluttony is one of the "seven deadly sins", now isn't it?

There's also the association with Satanism and decadence, with the idea of "decadence" being fat, lazy, and promiscuous.

Anyway....That sounds like my kind of book!

It's rather obvious where it's going 80 pages in or so and it  gets a bit depressing in that way.

So I just got done with Henry Kressing's The Cook. Basically a new cook manipulates his employers into becoming his servants and he kills the son's fianceé and marries the sister, whom he makes fantastically fat.

I'm just going to assume Henry Kressing was into fat women from all the attention they get in the book. Not that there's anything wrong with that, it's just not something I expected in a book of which the reviewers said that it contained "satanic revels" XD

Tis a bit depressing seeing the manipulation starts being obvious very early on and it just sort of goes on and on. Especially since none of the people most affected deserved it.

Finished Ghouls in My Grave by Jean Ray. There were only four stories here that weren't in My Own Private Spectres so it didn't take long, but even this was fairly enjoyable. Makes you wonder just why more of Ray's stories never appeared here in book form. I still have that one collection I found online with a few unique items at least.

Sardonics by Harris Merton Lyon. A good enough collection without any outright genre pieces except for the final story, but good enough showcase of misery peppered with a few brighter moments.

Origin by James Albert Knowlton. An imagined origin story for Native Americans during the time following Noah's flood, the first section slavishly apes the Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel story with differently named characters, as if Knowlton literally could not conceive of any other possible opening narrative. The second section involving the schemings of the evil Mymo, the scalped murderer and progenitor of "red skinned" and savage offspring, despite these hiccups is better, but time is spent to establish the characters of secretly adoptive siblings/couple Winn and Tolti, only for them to get shoved right out of the book without having contributed anything significant, right before the book just sort of ends.

Sleep no More by L. T. C. Rolt. I enjoyed the writting here but in about half of these stories Rolt's shorthand solution of not explaining whatever just happened and simply ending got on my nerves. Sometimes he simply ends the story like that, and we never get any hint as to why what was happening happned. This is the case with "The New Corne"r and "The Garside Fell Disaster" for example. What is the point behind the man who keeps waving people away from the new corner on the race track and what exactly IS behind the fence ? "Something". Why is the inside of the Garside Fell railway tunnel super hot and what exactly is it there that "shouldn't be disturbed" ? "Something". What is the tree-beard like thing the narrator in "The Shouting" comes across and runs off from ? No idea, no one has any idea who the kids are who yelled at it and there is no superstition or legend to account for it either.

Then you have those instances where Rolt starts explaining before he stops. "Cwm Garon" begins to tell us that the reason for the oppressive atmosphere and secrecy is some sort of local dark cult, but the narrator insists the actual influence is something separate from that, and then runs off and apparently gets killed by what are implied to be fay. The most tragic victim of Rolt's terseness is Music Hath Charms. There we suddenly start seeing how the narrator's friend is apparently being possessed by the spirit of his vile ancestor, gets himself a mysterious, very disqueting and creepy mistress whom he calls the same name as said ancestor's mistress, and then we see, amid hints of intentional shipwreck and plunder, hint of some strange, inhuman creature and possibly familiar to the dead, nefarious count being glimpsed by the narrator obeying the summons of his friend and the damn story just ends then and there. What could have been the brilliant beginning of a horrid, gruesome little tale, something between Poe and John Metcalfe, is brutally cut off and left tragically, criminally unfinished. I would assume this is why Bleiler was not very happy with this collection.

Don't get me wrong, Rolt does have some genuine gems here like "The Mine" or "Hawley Bank Foundry", but his terseness is what makes many of the very promising stories here be somewhat disappointing. It's different from what M. R. James does, as he usually sketches enough of an outline to at least get an idea what happened, even if you don't always get exactly why. But the what is very often missing from Rolt's stories as well.

12 hours ago, Christian said:

It sounds like a poor rip-off of H.G. Wells' When the Sleeper Awakes. (My favourite Wells story, by the way; not that anyone asked.)

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I'm reading through The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror: 2017, edited by Paula Guran.

It's the only place where you can find a copy of "The Ballad of Black Tom" by Victor LaValle.

That's not my sole reason for wanting to read through the anthology.

Rousseau actually goes on about Wells quite a bit, making him revered as a "Prophet" in this futuristic scienco-religious-atheistic society. Also came out 18 years later than the Wells.

Just finished Victor Rousseau's The Messiah of the Cylinder. It's by the same guy who wrote The Sea Demons, which I've heard good things about but never could get my hands on thus far.

This book is at heart a well written story of a cold scientific/socialist future dystopia and it's toppling, but the author sometimes seems to be gripped in a fit where he is possessed by the ghost of a 17th century despot, joyosly espousing the virtues of permanently abolishing representative goverment, appointing Judges for life, abolishing all possibility of divorce while rallying against the inherent "evil" of democracy.

Also his blathering about how the world didn't have morals before Christianity and how Christians are the most bestest and only truly compassionate, moral people ever is rather irksome sometimes. Rousseau appears to be operating from the base premise that a goverment and judiciary who cannot be held accountable by the population they govern will never succumb to the corrupting influences of unlimited and unimpeachable power as long as they are "his" people, as in Christians. It shows a frankly bewildering level of naiveté.

7 hours ago, Christian said:

Hey, I don't know how bad it could be...Colin Wilson gave it a good review on the cover of the paperback edition shown on the ISFDB web-site. The author could've always been proud of that. 

Or, Wilson got paid a lot of money by the publisher, and was never proud of that glowing review.

Which book are you talking about again ?

6 minutes ago, dogpoet said:

Sadly, he tries to play it straight, which just plain doesn't work for material like that.

I mean that sounds like it has the making of a great, hilarious thing, like say if Maurice Richardson tried to write a horror collection.

5 hours ago, dogpoet said:

To be fair to Langford there was some breathtakingly ill judged crap in the book once it got going, but those were the most entertaining bits. A man is tortured by being hung from his mustache and a woman has her foot blown off by an exploding shoe that she's sent by a thwarted rapist, for example. I think that's a bit beyond pulpy...

That sounds like a very farcical conte cruel to be honest.

Also on the subject, I just finished Charles Birkin's Devil's Spawn. Lots of good conte cruel stuff but...I feel like Birkin goes a bit too far. Like the time where he has children abducted and mutilated for freak shows or the rather still nice girl caught by her dead lover's wife to be raped continously by a giant idiot and forced to bear him children, forever. That's just....too much.

Also on a similar note, read The Web of Easter Island by Donald Wandrei. A good, pseudo mythos novel of global menace, that manages to largely stand on it's own and never even quite openly rely on the recitations of any famous names or quoting from the famously infamous fictional manuscripts employed by Howard and his followers.

On 9/9/2018 at 1:41 PM, dogpoet said:

It's all about the spam...

Cheeky but true.

Finished The House of the Worm by Gary Myers. I enjoyed the Lovecraft Dreamland setting and Myers definitely used refferences and colorful language to set up atmosphere. Only after the connection between the first two stories I had hoped there would be more of a thread running through there, perhaps explaining what was behind that damn door.

An issue one sort of runs into is that Myers sometimes has his characters go to a place which he spends several pages setting up and then he cuts away to after everything happened and maybe gives us a description of what horrible fate befell that person. It seems that sometimes Myers is simply skipping the most interesting bits. The Four Jars especially is guilty of this. The main character goes into a shop, buys a mask and then two pages and not five minutes later he's dead or worse, the end.

I have to give props for the introduction where Myers basically posthumously tells Derleth to stuff his catholicism and that he's gonna follow what Lovecraft himself wrote.

...Why is the opening in vietnamese and about football ?

Did I have a stroke ? Is this what colours taste like ?

Finished My Own Private Spectres by Jean Ray. Definitely a lot of weird, fantastic stuff that Ray does here and refreshingly doesn't feel like he needs to build up to labouriously. "The Uhu" for example, things just happen, no need to make a novel out of it.

I am rather looking forward to a final complete translation of his Whisky Tales coming this year, because while the longer form stories that make up the majority of this book were good or even great, the first two short pieces from Contes du Whisky are short macabre little pieces and briefly won Ray acclaim as the Belgian Poe before he landed in jail, and I definitely enjoyed them. Reading these early ones one is maybe reminded of Marcel Shwob, only where Schwob sometimes has things just sort of stop or fizzle out Ray delivers in short form in both instances.

Oddly enough the bulk of these stories with their rich assortment of sailors, sailing incidents and various sea fearing rogues of the more unsavoury description in fact reminded me of my recent reading of John Metcalfe. Ray is a little more even than Metcalfe who has the occasional confused tale where the "punch line" is a trifle convoluted or perhaps not very well emphasized, but overall Ray is more than able to equal the best of Metcalfe's, and there's even a sort of "family resemblance" one can draw between Ray's rogues and Metcalfe's. Not that I know that either ever read or even heard of the other, in fact I don't know if Metcalfe even knew French to be able to understand Ray before any of his work was translated into English. But their troubled lives and experiences evidently brought them intot he company of the same type of unsavoury types, be they speaking Shakespeare or Flemish.

An odd too is that they both died within the span of less than a year.

Also I've basically stumbled upon a 10 volume collection of A.M.Burrage's fiction so I think I basically have everything beside his two novels.

22 hours ago, dogpoet said:

I'm good thanks: I'm spending enough time propped up in front of a computer at the moment that I don't want to be reading fiction on one as well.

You could try using your phone like me

13 hours ago, dogpoet said:

I'd imagine he liked it? You do see a few anthologies where the editor has presumably stuck in something curiously ill fitting because they like it and they know that nobody's going to complain about their content until the anthology sees print and it'll be too late to remove anything.

Thanks for the tip.

I can send it your way if you want, I borrowed it online and copied all the pages.

Also I finished Twixt Dog and Daylight by C. F. Keary. Reminded me of the Seignolle I just read but the stories were a bit more denser and longer, except for the first one. Not but maybe not having quite the quality of the Seignolle. Elizabeth is certainly good due to how it doesn't end the way you expect. It was actually recommended by John Buchan and Richard La Gallienne I believe.

55 minutes ago, dogpoet said:

 

Cannibal nudists. They're sadly lacking in fiction.

Well it's just kinda understatedly weird if that makes any sense.