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handful_ofdustJesus, Wednesday already!
I've had what I've been hopefully calling a “pseudo-cold” all weekend, though frankly, it no longer feels all that pseudo: Streaming, snuffly nose, sinus pressure, general tiredness, eyes intermittently burning, gum-purging and feeling raw, harsh insomnia. It and Canadian Thanksgiving kept me from making any progress on “A Feast for Dust”, though I quickly remedied that yesterday, and am now in the home-stretch. However, I was still able to research a ridiculous October horror culture commentary project, which I will outline here.
On Friday, just after dinner and before we drifted home to watch the first couple of episodes of Fringe Season Five and half of Tourneur's Curse of the Demon, we went (as is our wont) into the World's Biggest Bookstore, which is where I found a book titled (I shit you not) The Thirteen Best Horror Stories of All Time. I stood there staring at it until Steve walked up, showed it to him, and said: “Wow. Such a hard claim to prove, or refute.” (On Amazon, a reviewer noted that a far more accurate version of this title would be Thirteen of the Best Horror Stories Written Between 1843 and 1948, while my personal amendment—based on reading the TOC—would be The Thirteen Best Horror Stories in the Public Domain that We Didn't Have to Pay to Reprint.)
At any rate: For myself, if I was assembling such a collection, I know I sure as hell wouldn't be able to restrict myself to thirteen. When any writer looks at other writers' work, too, the extent to which the story in question sticks around in your head is always about not only the thing itself, as it is, but also about the thing you wish it was—the seed it forms and the shadow it creates, irritating your brain enough to prompt you to muse on what you might've done with the same idea. The book I'd put together would therefore inevitably fall somewhere between [However Many] Horror Stories Chosen by a Horror Author and [However Many] Horror Stories I Wish I'd Written. Not to mention how there'd be sub-genres, like The Real Stuff (Acknowledged Canon/Formative Favourites/New Hotness), Evil Fairytales, Ghosts, Shapeshifters and the Undead, Black Magic and Dark Science Fiction—when I was listing off the first stories that came into my head, for example, an amazing amount of them came from Science Fiction Hall of Fame (1970), a Silverberg-assembled collection my Dad left behind when he took off for Australia after the divorce. Etc.
So my own version of the list, thus far, would go like this—a six-book series, I guess, and probably hellishly expensive to compile:
“White Chapel” by Douglas Clegg
“The Road of Pins” by Caitlin R. Kiernan
“In the Hills, the Cities” by Clive Barker
“Mysterium Tremendum” by Laird Barron
“Nethescurial” by Thomas Ligotti
“The Great God Pan” by M. John Harrison
“The Beast With Five Fingers” by William Fryer Harvey
“The Depths” by Ramsey Campbell
“Masque of the Red Death” by Edgar Allen Poe
“Intertropical Convergence Zone” by Nadia Bulkin
“The Horla” by Guy de Maupassant
“Take Your Daughters to Work” by Livia Llewellyn
“Sun City” by Lisa Tuttle
“Year of the Rabbit” by An Owomoyela
“Blue Rose” by Peter Straub
“The Juniper Tree” by Peter Straub
“Bunny is Good Bread” by Peter Straub
“The New Mother” by Lucy Clifford
“The New Daughter” by John Connolly
“Catskin” by Kelly Link
“The White People” by Arthur Machen
“Children of the Kingdom” by T.E.D. Klein
“The Third Bear” by Jeff Vandermeer
“Sagadahoc” by Scott Thomas
“Sredni Vashtar” by Saki
“Red as Blood” by Tanith Lee
“Silent Snow, Secret Snow” by Conrad Aiken
“Children of the Corn” by Stephen King
“Ashputtel” by Peter Straub
“Oke of Okehurst” by Vernon Lee
“Lost Hearts” by M.R. James
“On No Account My Love” by Elizabeth Jenkins
“The Portobello Road” by Muriel Spark
“Forget-Me-Not” by Bernard Taylor
“The Happy Autumn Fields” by Elizabeth Bowen
“With and Without Buttons” by Mary Butts
“The Wide, Wide Sea” by Barbara Roden
“The Little Voice” by Ramsey Campbell
“1408” by Stephen King
“Night-Side” by Joyce Carol Oates
“Wolves Don't Cry” by Bruce Elliott
“The Kill” by Peter Fleming
“As Red as Red” by Caitlin R. Kiernan
“Close Behind Him” by John Wyndham
“The Horror Undying” by Manley Wade Wellman
“Trial of the Blood” by K.M. O'Donnell
“Blood Son” by Richard Matheson
“When It Was Moonlight” by Manley Wade Wellman
“Over the River” by P. Schuyler Miller
“The Room in the Tower” by E.F. Benson
“Pages from a Young Girl's Diary” by Robert Aickman
“Dark Angel” by Edward Bryant
“San Diego Lightfoot Sue” by Tom Reamy
“Shattered Like a Green Glass Goblin” by Harlan Ellison
“The Hound” by H.P. Lovecraft
“His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood” by Poppy Z. Brite
“The Ash-Tree” by M.R. James
“Where Did She Wander?” by Manley Wade Wellman
“Les Fleurs Empoisonnées” by Caitlin R. Kiernan
“The Trick” by Ramsey Campbell
“The Book” by Margaret Irwin
“Sometimes They Come Back” by Stephen King
“The Country of the Kind” by Damon Knight
“Nightfall” by Isaac Asimov
“The Cold Equations” by Tom Goodwin
“Salvage” by Halli Villegas
“Mimsy Were the Borogroves” by Lewis Padgett
“A Season of Broken Dolls” by Caitlin R. Kiernan
“Sandkings” by George R.R. Martin
“Bloodchild” by Octavia Butler
“The Small Assassin” by Ray Bradbury
“The Reach” by Stephen King
“The River Styx Runs Upstream” by Dan Simmons
“Something Passed By” by Robert R. McCammon
“A Street Was Chosen” by Ramsey Campbell
So...my project is to write about these stories, at a rate of a few per day or couple of days, until Hallowe'en. To explain why I find them as resonant as I do, where I found them (several come from a particular 1977 anthology called Nighttouch, edited by Gerry Goldberg, Stephen Storoschuk and Fred Corbett, that I can't help but think may have had some influence on the CBC radio series Nightfall), and why a few authors' names appear again and again. That's the plan, anyhow.
From that same anthology, meanwhile, have a Max Ernst quote I've always found useful:
Being a man of “'ordinary' constitution,” I have done my best to make my soul monstrous. A blind swimmer, I have made myself clairvoyant. I have seen, I have become the amazed lover of what I have seen, wanting to identify myself with it. (”Inspiration to Order”, 1924)
I've had what I've been hopefully calling a “pseudo-cold” all weekend, though frankly, it no longer feels all that pseudo: Streaming, snuffly nose, sinus pressure, general tiredness, eyes intermittently burning, gum-purging and feeling raw, harsh insomnia. It and Canadian Thanksgiving kept me from making any progress on “A Feast for Dust”, though I quickly remedied that yesterday, and am now in the home-stretch. However, I was still able to research a ridiculous October horror culture commentary project, which I will outline here.
On Friday, just after dinner and before we drifted home to watch the first couple of episodes of Fringe Season Five and half of Tourneur's Curse of the Demon, we went (as is our wont) into the World's Biggest Bookstore, which is where I found a book titled (I shit you not) The Thirteen Best Horror Stories of All Time. I stood there staring at it until Steve walked up, showed it to him, and said: “Wow. Such a hard claim to prove, or refute.” (On Amazon, a reviewer noted that a far more accurate version of this title would be Thirteen of the Best Horror Stories Written Between 1843 and 1948, while my personal amendment—based on reading the TOC—would be The Thirteen Best Horror Stories in the Public Domain that We Didn't Have to Pay to Reprint.)
At any rate: For myself, if I was assembling such a collection, I know I sure as hell wouldn't be able to restrict myself to thirteen. When any writer looks at other writers' work, too, the extent to which the story in question sticks around in your head is always about not only the thing itself, as it is, but also about the thing you wish it was—the seed it forms and the shadow it creates, irritating your brain enough to prompt you to muse on what you might've done with the same idea. The book I'd put together would therefore inevitably fall somewhere between [However Many] Horror Stories Chosen by a Horror Author and [However Many] Horror Stories I Wish I'd Written. Not to mention how there'd be sub-genres, like The Real Stuff (Acknowledged Canon/Formative Favourites/New Hotness), Evil Fairytales, Ghosts, Shapeshifters and the Undead, Black Magic and Dark Science Fiction—when I was listing off the first stories that came into my head, for example, an amazing amount of them came from Science Fiction Hall of Fame (1970), a Silverberg-assembled collection my Dad left behind when he took off for Australia after the divorce. Etc.
So my own version of the list, thus far, would go like this—a six-book series, I guess, and probably hellishly expensive to compile:
“White Chapel” by Douglas Clegg
“The Road of Pins” by Caitlin R. Kiernan
“In the Hills, the Cities” by Clive Barker
“Mysterium Tremendum” by Laird Barron
“Nethescurial” by Thomas Ligotti
“The Great God Pan” by M. John Harrison
“The Beast With Five Fingers” by William Fryer Harvey
“The Depths” by Ramsey Campbell
“Masque of the Red Death” by Edgar Allen Poe
“Intertropical Convergence Zone” by Nadia Bulkin
“The Horla” by Guy de Maupassant
“Take Your Daughters to Work” by Livia Llewellyn
“Sun City” by Lisa Tuttle
“Year of the Rabbit” by An Owomoyela
“Blue Rose” by Peter Straub
“The Juniper Tree” by Peter Straub
“Bunny is Good Bread” by Peter Straub
“The New Mother” by Lucy Clifford
“The New Daughter” by John Connolly
“Catskin” by Kelly Link
“The White People” by Arthur Machen
“Children of the Kingdom” by T.E.D. Klein
“The Third Bear” by Jeff Vandermeer
“Sagadahoc” by Scott Thomas
“Sredni Vashtar” by Saki
“Red as Blood” by Tanith Lee
“Silent Snow, Secret Snow” by Conrad Aiken
“Children of the Corn” by Stephen King
“Ashputtel” by Peter Straub
“Oke of Okehurst” by Vernon Lee
“Lost Hearts” by M.R. James
“On No Account My Love” by Elizabeth Jenkins
“The Portobello Road” by Muriel Spark
“Forget-Me-Not” by Bernard Taylor
“The Happy Autumn Fields” by Elizabeth Bowen
“With and Without Buttons” by Mary Butts
“The Wide, Wide Sea” by Barbara Roden
“The Little Voice” by Ramsey Campbell
“1408” by Stephen King
“Night-Side” by Joyce Carol Oates
“Wolves Don't Cry” by Bruce Elliott
“The Kill” by Peter Fleming
“As Red as Red” by Caitlin R. Kiernan
“Close Behind Him” by John Wyndham
“The Horror Undying” by Manley Wade Wellman
“Trial of the Blood” by K.M. O'Donnell
“Blood Son” by Richard Matheson
“When It Was Moonlight” by Manley Wade Wellman
“Over the River” by P. Schuyler Miller
“The Room in the Tower” by E.F. Benson
“Pages from a Young Girl's Diary” by Robert Aickman
“Dark Angel” by Edward Bryant
“San Diego Lightfoot Sue” by Tom Reamy
“Shattered Like a Green Glass Goblin” by Harlan Ellison
“The Hound” by H.P. Lovecraft
“His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood” by Poppy Z. Brite
“The Ash-Tree” by M.R. James
“Where Did She Wander?” by Manley Wade Wellman
“Les Fleurs Empoisonnées” by Caitlin R. Kiernan
“The Trick” by Ramsey Campbell
“The Book” by Margaret Irwin
“Sometimes They Come Back” by Stephen King
“The Country of the Kind” by Damon Knight
“Nightfall” by Isaac Asimov
“The Cold Equations” by Tom Goodwin
“Salvage” by Halli Villegas
“Mimsy Were the Borogroves” by Lewis Padgett
“A Season of Broken Dolls” by Caitlin R. Kiernan
“Sandkings” by George R.R. Martin
“Bloodchild” by Octavia Butler
“The Small Assassin” by Ray Bradbury
“The Reach” by Stephen King
“The River Styx Runs Upstream” by Dan Simmons
“Something Passed By” by Robert R. McCammon
“A Street Was Chosen” by Ramsey Campbell
So...my project is to write about these stories, at a rate of a few per day or couple of days, until Hallowe'en. To explain why I find them as resonant as I do, where I found them (several come from a particular 1977 anthology called Nighttouch, edited by Gerry Goldberg, Stephen Storoschuk and Fred Corbett, that I can't help but think may have had some influence on the CBC radio series Nightfall), and why a few authors' names appear again and again. That's the plan, anyhow.
From that same anthology, meanwhile, have a Max Ernst quote I've always found useful:
Being a man of “'ordinary' constitution,” I have done my best to make my soul monstrous. A blind swimmer, I have made myself clairvoyant. I have seen, I have become the amazed lover of what I have seen, wanting to identify myself with it. (”Inspiration to Order”, 1924)
