ThReads Must Roll: the new, improved rolling fantasy, science fiction, speculative fiction &c. thread

Also Richard Matheson, who wrote a lot of the best Twilight Zones, Speilberg's Duel, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, which Chris Carter credited with inspiring him to create The X-Files, also novels like The Shrinking Man and I Am Legend, which could be an ancestor of Breaking Bad, with the one Normal terrorizing a world of vampires, although in his mind, of course, he's Making Good. Also lots of short stories---Ward Fowler scared the crap out of me by posting this 'un on the old Rolling sf etc. thread:

http://magicmonkeyboy.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/drink-my-red-blood-by-richard-matheson.html

^my fave matheson short story, which deeply affected horror-obsessed-young-me when i read it as a boy. the whole treatment of vampirism seems very similar to the vibe that george a romero was going for w/ his movie martin, and i know romero admitted that matheson was the primary inspiration behind NOTLD. you can see why stephen king is such a big matheson fan, too - that 'naturalistic'/everyday treatment of the supernatural. again, this story reminds me v much of parts of the tobe hooper tv movie of salem's lot - vampirism as teenage yearning/disaffection

― Ward Fowler, Sunday, September 9, 2012 4:17 PM (3 years ago)

I'd second Ligotti, and add Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle, but perhaps that's more unsettling than horrific; among recent books, I particularly like Caitlin Kiernan's lesbian gothic novels The Red Tree and The Drowning Girl; you might also read some of Brian Evenson's short fiction.

You might also try Ramsey Campbell, and several I still need to try (got 'em), like Thomas Tryon's The Other, the screen version of which is awesome: a perfect example of what Stephen King (in my fave of his books, the nonfiction, much-cooler-taste-in-other-people's-writing-than-his-own Danse Macabre) calls "sunlit horror": looks like it's gonna be The Waltons or Little House On The Prairie, but so sick, and no need for lots of gore, just the right wrong glimpse, uggghhh. Directed by Robert Mulligan of To Kill A Mockingbird fame, and still so good with children, plus, this one's in color...
Also, I need to read Ira Levin, who wrote Rosemary's Baby and others later filmed.
Def second to xpost Lucy Clifford's "The New Mother," and anything else you can find by her, most probably.

The fantasy novels I just mentioned upthread, Mckillip's Winter Rose and especially Novik's Uprooted, certainly have horrific elements.

A major part of the plot in Uprooted.

Also maybe RIP Lois I Know What You Did Last Summer Duncan---haven't read her, but it says here she "Defined Teen Terror For A Generation":
https://newrepublic.com/article/134402/lois-duncans-teenage-screams?utm_content=buffer638ed&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

not a huge horror fan but everyone should read some Lovecraft

> "sunlit horror"

one of Ramsey's books is actually called Demons By Daylight... he also has a book of cthulu mythos stories, Cold Print.

(Danse Macabre is also the Stephen King i've gone back to most. it's a good little read, lots of info. i'd like for him to do an update because it's 30 years old now (unless that's what On Writing did))

all of ira levin is worth a read, imo. he does this great thing of putting the big surprise in the middle so you get to see all the repercussions.

ray bradbury has a lot of very readable horror shorts.

good recommendations so far ... here are a few more horror novels not yet mentioned:

Ramsey Campbell, The Doll Who Ate His Mother; The Face that Must Die; Ancient Images
Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
Stephen King, Salem's Lot; The Shining; The Stand; It
Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
Fritz Leiber, Our Lady of Darkness
Michael McDowell, The Elementals

Dan Simmons' Carrion Comfort was pretty good, but there's a huge plot surprise at about the 2/3 point that might make you throw the book away.

Some people say the short story version is much better. It must be very different because it's a small fraction of the novel's length.

Watched Howl's Moving Castle and it was very easy to watch, once I got used to mix of drawn (?) and photo-based imagery, and suspenseful enough (also liked how she was in diff *degrees* of the spell, visually), but not as involving as the ones in a TCM Miyazaki festival (long ago, so comparisons of visuals and overall effect might be off). Did get most of the themes, but a couple of important plot points had to be clarified by online exposition, hopefully accurate.
Anybody read the book, the trilogy? Thinking about trying these or others by Diana Wynne Jones, discussed on that list of good female fantasy writers Robert posted here.

Also the first issue of Wormwoodia, thee journal I've occasionally linked here, is back in print:

Wormwood 1
Writings about fantasy, supernatural and decadent literature
Edited by Mark Valentine

Now back in print

Issue 1, Autumn 2003

Gustav Meyrink: The Monster-Magician in Kafka’s Shadow by Adam Daly
The Heroic Hereafter: Explaining Eddison by Jonathan Preece
Ernest Bramah: A Challenge to the Biographer by William Charlton
A Very Real Presence: Dame Muriel Spark, Briefly Interviewed
The Ninefold Kingdom and Others: Four Fictional Visions of the Political Future by John Howard
Everything Ends in a Greater Blackness: Some Remarks on the Fiction of Thomas Ligotti by Mark Samuels
The Decadent World-View by Brian Stableford
Revisiting Ramsey Campbell by William P. Simmons
Camera Obscura
Late Reviews by Douglas A. Anderson Anderson edited the splendid Tales Before Tolkien---but what's Muriel Spark doing here? Was she into fantasy, supernatural, decadent lit? Maybe not, and that's why it's brief.
more info:
http://tartaruspress.com/wormwood-1.html

Spark wrote a really good book about Shelley and Frankenstein, plus the supernatural creeps into a number of her stories

https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uR3rUk_LnYw/V2o7FEZXUKI/AAAAAAAAA8A/RhI_k5hJ5C0-aAI7MaHeH20Sj1eOweCwQCLcB/s1600/img133.jpg

If images are gone,
they're covers of a 60s supernatural kinkoid thriller published in Britain as Ask Agamemnon, filmed as Goodbye Gemimi and republished with that title---anybody read/seen it??

details:
http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2016/06/ask-agamemnon-jenni-hall.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Wormwoodiana+%28Wormwoodiana%29

Oh and I finally finished xpost Naomi Novik's Uprooted. Title theme goes deep, makes me think of my own life. Also really like how the narrator lives the story moment to moment, almost nonstop, with no fatigue of reading interest. Magic is just a part of her, tapping into her and generated by her, also the aforementioned "political" element, ditto "horrific" elements meet with the urge to merge via magic--can't blame it all on the boogieman or woman---all-too-human and parahuman and other emotions and motivations get tangled and electric. I like the not-too-mutable personification a lot better than just having another 1- or 2-D Mordor-wannabee murking about. Or Something with a brief bitter alibi just before the smoke takes it out and the sun comes up etc.

The fact that they can't get her name straight is a weird thing

NYRB Classics Club is offering DG Compton's The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe as bonus-bait for signing up. The name and seemed vaguely familiar---turns out SF Encyclopedia likes his far-sighted social commentary x canny literary chops pretty well. Synthajoy looks like it might have Ballard and especially Cronenberg appeal, for inst.
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/compton_d_g

re-reading Pohl's "Jem", underrated late-period near-masterpiece. Dunno what inspired this particular book but it exemplifies the best aspects of his style, characters are sharply drawn, plot is both wildly imaginative and plausible. I never hear people talk about this one though, it seems like an obscurity in his bibliography for some reason, even though it's much better than the heechee books.

I've seen that occasionally, will check a nearby thrift store good for SF/
xpost NYRBC edition of The Continuous KM, w intro by Jeff VanderMeer, is out July 5, but looks like the SF Masterworks is still around.

re-reading Pohl's "Jem", underrated late-period near-masterpiece. Dunno what inspired this particular book but it exemplifies the best aspects of his style, characters are sharply drawn, plot is both wildly imaginative and plausible. I never hear people talk about this one though, it seems like an obscurity in his bibliography for some reason, even though it's much better than the heechee books.

Oh wait, that was you, never mind.

lol

The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe is good and yes, quite Ballardish, as is his The Silent Multitude, about some very 1970s people dashing round an otherwise deserted English city falling apart thanks to weird concrete-devouring nanotech.

hey youse guys what novels scream FANTASY IN THE 80S WAS LIKE THIS to you, pre-dragonlance

wait was dragon lance early 90s. what even is left to believe in

Zimmer Bradley, maybe? Before she died and turned out to be a paedophile.
Tedious old Stephen Donaldson?
The endless Shannara bollocks?

Mythadventures

Piers Anthony

david eddings

Oof yeah

Oh man those Piers Anthony books were so goofy, but I ate them up (as a kid)!

I feel like a lot of the 80s vibe was one of "humorous deconstruction" - fantasy tropes were well established by that time and people were either goofing on them or making them "darker"/"edgier"

Or else they were endless Anne McCaffrey special precious snowflake Pern novels

https://sfmistressworks.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/moreta.jpg

Ha yes.

Tedious old Stephen Donaldson?
The endless Shannara bollocks?
Hated this stuff too.

I sometimes wonder what it would be like to read Piers as an adult. Probably horrible

What about Andre Norton?

I somehow sidestepped both of those.

I once lent a girlfriend a Banks Culture novel, and she lent me an Anthony Xanth book, and then dumped me before we could swap back. The Xanth was worse than the dumping.

i have a friend who estimates he's read at least 80 piers anthony books

Anthony Xanth is a great name. We should adopt that as a convention like the Smash Hits tradition of referring to, like, Matty 1979

I just reread 'Pawn of Prophecy'. I also looked at the Thomas Covenant books but I just couldn't bring myself to go there again. I also picked up a Terry Shannara, who even as a teen I couldn't bear.

Thanks for the idea re MZB--I'd never learnt about her at all, it mink? so that might be interesting.

*i think

oo'tis:

"I feel like a lot of the 80s vibe was one of "humorous deconstruction" - fantasy tropes were well established by that time and people were either goofing on them or making them "darker"/"edgier" "

like its interesting to think of yer robert asprins and yer Michael swanwicks existing in the same continuum but I feel like both these tendencies lay outside the terrible slick mainstream of the 80s fantasy machine (which was trying I think to replicate eddings-style 70s successes perhaps? I realise my ideas of sales figures for this stuff are basically entirely spurious)

does SF have a matching uptick in space opera do we think. I guess cyberpunk was busy happening

When did the boring "military" SF book still carried on by Baen and their horrible covers kick in? The 80s might be too early, though I guess the (much better) book they sort of spawn from, The Forever War, is 1970s.

boring "military" SF BOOM I mean

The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe also made into the p good film Deathwatch by Bertrand Tavernier, w/ Harvey Kietel and Romy Schneider - parts of it filmed in Glasgow, so of local interest to me, but is now seen as being prophetic in some ways of 'reality TV' (tho Jim McBride's David Holzman's Diary got there first)

This is the book that screams FANTASY IN THE EIGHTIES to me (and this edition in partic)

http://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/photo.goodreads.com/books/1432756104i/12164830._UY200_.jpg

From what I hear, the first two Pern books are good and Piers Anthony did some good stuff (this coming from people who generally don't like their work)

unrelated to my recent enquiries, tho also a fantasy novel of the 80s, i suppose, i've been reading diana wynne jones' 'witch week', which was advertised as a knockabout fantasy but turns out to be equal parts a satire on british schoolmasters and a masterful essay in pre-adolescent psychology

I love Diane Wynne Jones, and will always be a little bummed that she didn't get more props from Jo Rowling.

the first two Pern books are good

my wife is a huge Anne McCaffrey fan and was a completist at one point but even she can't bear the later cash-in/endless series of telepathicats and space unicorn girls or whatever. McCaffrey did have some good novels scattered across her different series' but she was not shy about banging crap out for quick $$$

(granted she's hardly unusual in that respect)