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

Wendy also turns up in the Red Sonja costume right at the end of this interview with Phil Seuling, the guy who pretty much established the direct sales market for comics:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9wRii6aiUk

Haha, for some reason I figured the Wendy & Frank show was something every modern comics fan knew about.

From that list, didn't much enjoy the one Diana Wynne Jones fantasy I read, but her 'The Tough Guide to Fantasyland', a thorough encyclopedic demolition of fantasy cliches, is a lot of fun: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tough_Guide_To_Fantasyland

Recent horror collections, but I want to start with an older one mentioned, the Peter Straub-edited Poe’s Children: The New Horror, w Kelly Link, M. John Harrison etc. (which reminds me, I still need to the VanderMeers’ monster anth, The New Weird).

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/05/books/review/horror-joyce-carol-oatess-the-doll-master-and-other-tales-of-terror-and-more.html?em_pos=large&emc=edit_bk_20160603&nl=bookreview&nlid=65074007&_r=0

Good tour, lots of descriptions and links
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/sympathetic-sci-fi

And (check link in here to Mieville’s essay also: utopia and rage need each other; hope he's taking it to the fiction)
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/salvaging-the-future/

Speaking of the xpost Vandermeers, didn't know they had this *other* monster anth. With several more books relevant to this thread, among others: http://io9.gizmodo.com/all-the-books-you-desperately-need-to-add-to-your-to-re-1780575415
Just started Naomi Novik's Uprooted: seems like no-nonsense fantasy, w plenty relevant funky detail x momentum, so far

Still digging xpost Uprooted. Maybe less enclosed than Winter Rose, but though they do go beyond the village and nearby, do spend a lot of time in the tower, and while it seems more "political," re dealing w encroachment of those in and from the Royal City, also using some people and phenomena as bait/distractions/otherness, still, lots of shifting moves and "identities" in WR too, just keeping it all in and too near thee family. So yeah, McKillip fans should check this out. Lots of sensual-to-sensuous imagery in both as well (though maybe layered in WR, riding dragon ov plot.

"though they": principal/most characters of Uprooted (so far).

Left out modifier and right paren, should be "in both as well (though maybe *more* layered in WR), riding dragon ov plot," cos both imagery of both tales riding it!

Left out right paren again, gotta give up and go back to virtual keyboard.

There's no way to re-set/sensitize a key once it goes consistently less and less responsive, right?

It's the whole key, the right paren and zero as well. Can use virtual for the former, but it's more distracting than number lock for the latter, and now that one's 0 is feeling squishy too.

Have you tried, um, turning the keyboard upside down and shaking it, to perhaps dislodge a crumb that may be causing the key to stick?

thx, but canned air might be safer? Would hate to dislodge anything that should be lodged

Perhaps some curved air and canned heat might do the trick.

Anyone read any REALLY GOOD horror fiction? Other than a few Victorian classics and some Stephen King, I've never really thought to read a horror novel. I get the impression a lot of it is pedestrian or a bit cheesy (like horror movies), but there must be some mitigating stuff too?

Thomas Ligotti - any of his short stories basically
Straub when he is on (Ghost Story, Koko, short stories)

Here's my favourites so far, I've got hundreds of horror books but I'm so far behind.

The first two are novels

William Hope Hodgson - House On The Borderland
William Hope Hodgson - The Night Land (Warning! This is an incredibly flawed book)
Edgar Allan Poe - The Black Cat
HP Lovecraft - Rats In The Walls
HP Lovecraft - Dreams In The Witch House
Ralph Adams Cram - The Dead Valley
MR James - Oh Whistle And I'll Come To You My Lad
MR James - Count Magnus
Arthur Machen - The White People
Arthur Machen - Great God Pan
Robert W Chambers - The Yellow Sign
Nathaniel Hawthorne - Rappaccini's Daughter
Algernon Blackwood - The Willows
Clive Barker - In The Hills, The Cities
Hugh B Cave - Murgunstrumm
Hugh B Cave - Stragella
R Chetwynd-Hayes - The Jumpity Jim
Ramsey Campbell - The Brood
J Sheridan Le Fanu - Schalken The Painter
Lucy Clifford - The New Mother

i read a lovecraft collection for the first time pretty young and the rats in the walls was the one that stayed with me, by which i mean totally scarred me. genuinely chilling.

cheers guys

Seconding Straub's Ghost Story
Clive Barker - The Books of Blood
Dracula

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