What is your opinion of these 3 Authors;John Wyndham, Mervyn Peake,Lord Dunsany?

[Dave Vicks]

I am thinking about trying these three obscure Authors. Please Recommend some of there novels.

 

[nixie]

Peake's I've read The Gormenghast trilogy, loved the first two but not keen on Titus Alone.

Dunsany, I've read The King of Elflands Daughter, it's a beautiful read.

May have read Wyndham's Day of Triffids when at school but don't remember if I enjoyed it.

 

[hitmouse]

Peake is brilliant and one of my favourites but I completely understand why he does not float everyone’s boat. See if you can get through the first chapter of Titus Groan: if so then you are probably onto a winner.

Wyndham: terrific 50s, 60s British SF. Some seminal novels.

Dunsany never quite did it for me.

I would not call these obscure, especially the first two.

 

[Randy M.]

Wyndham's not obscure. The Day of the Triffids gets resurrected as movie/tv fodder every so often. That and The Midwich Cuckoos are good, slow burn (the latter probably more than the former) reads, seminal even.

Titus Groan is brilliant and I should reread and go on from there. But it's very descriptive and deliberate, Peake's prose the perfect manifestation of what his illustrator's eye saw turned into language. Not an action/adventure fantasy.

Lord Dunsany in short form is both gorgeously written and utterly forgettable, with a couple of exceptions (the forgettable, not the gorgeous; his prose is consistently gorgeous). It makes rereading him a continuing pleasure. (If you remember reading him the first time, of course.)

 

[Dave Vicks]

ORWELL was a fan of Mervyn Peake.

 

[Randy M.]

Anthony Burgess listed Titus Groan, and by extention, Gormanghast, in his book on the 99 greatest novels he'd reviewed (roughly spanning 1939, when he started reviewing, to 1983).

For anyone curious about the other titles, 99 Novels. Quite a few genre inclusions.

 

[The Big Peat]

Only read Dunsany's Gods of Pegana, which is quite entrancing even if I don't remember much of it.

 

[AE35Unit]

The only one of those I've read is Wyndham, and his work is rather uneven. Sometimes he's good, other times he's quite dull

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

Some thoughts on what I have read of these authors.

John Wyndham is best known for what is sometimes called the "cozy catastrophe" novel. Realistic depictions of apocalyptic events, narrated in a calmer style than you'd expect. Very readable.

Mervyn Peake is one-of-a-kind. Subtle, poetic, eccentric, and, frankly, somewhat difficult to get into. I might compare his work, in some ways, to that of Gene Wolfe, but that may be misleading.

Lord Dunsany has a dreamy, exotic, ironic, rather distant style, not to all tastes.

You could have hardly picked three more different writers!

 

[Toby Frost]

Wyndham is very good, and his books have aged fairly well. I think The Day of the Triffids and The Midwich Cuckoos are the best two, although there's a lot of quality stuff there. Triffids is almost the first zombie novel (giant plants instead of walking corpses) and clearly influenced 28 Days Later and probably The Walking Dead.

Titus Groan and Gormenghast are great novels, but definitely not fast-moving and not to everyone's tastes. Peake was a poet as well as a writer and artist, and it shows. I love them but the prose is probably heavier than The Lord of the Rings and very much not the elves-and-magic type of fantasy. Peake's mental health was failing when he wrote Titus Alone and it's much weaker.

I've never read Lord Dunsany.

 

[Astro Pen]

I think I count Wyndham as an influence. Primarily a human touch. Try Chocky It is both short and gentle.
(Unfortunately TV dramatists got their hands on it and made the kind of kids programming mess that TV nearly always does. It might be about a child but it isn't a children's story)

Wyndham is very much of his time but his track record is undeniable The Day of The Triffids The Kraken Wakes, The Chrysalids and The Midwich Cuckoos. all burned bright and broadened the readership of sci-fi

 

[BAYLOR]

By Wyndham ive read The Day of the Triffids and The Chrysalids both excellent books Triffid spawned a movie and two miniseries adaptations and I think Simon Clark did a sequel to Triffids . I would love see a film or tv series adaptation of The Chrysalids . Ive never read The Midwich Cuckoos . As a writer , he terrific.

Lord Dunsany ive read The King of Elflands Daughter , The Charwomans Shadow and The Gods of Pagana , all of which I liked . A very good writer.

Mervin Peake , ive been slow reading Gomenghast a few pages at a time . about 150 pages in . so far impressive . What do I think of the place Gomenghast and the people ? Very scary place and very scary people.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

I'm not sure I'd say Titus Alone is weaker or much weaker than the two novels that went before it, it's just different. Titus is out on his own, away from his home. The sense of surreality is there, and there are many fantastic set pieces, not to mention amazing characters. Peake's experiences at Belsen come through also.
Neither Peake nor Wyndham could be described as obscure, unless you are young. Two British genre masters.

 

[hitmouse]

I'm not sure I'd say Titus Alone is weaker or much weaker than the two novels that went before it, it's just different. Titus is out on his own, away from his home. The sense of surreality is there, and there are many fantastic set pieces, not to mention amazing characters. Peake's experiences at Belsen come through also.
Neither Peake nor Wyndham could be described as obscure, unless you are young. Two British genre masters.

Agree about Titus Alone. Different from the first two, but excellent nonetheless. The more recent Titus Awakes by Maeve Gilmore, Peake's widow, is in a similar vein, beautiful and deeply moving.

 

[Fiberglass Cyborg]

I like all three, though I've not read much Dunsany. Wyndham is flat out one of the best SF writers of the early 20th century. Good ideas man, elegant, restrained prose and a very modern world-view. Peake is gloriously extravagant- he can blend slapstick comedy with Gothic horror and get it to work perfectly. A rambling, shambling creative mind who I'm sure broke every piece of creative writing advice ever. He was also a poet and a very talented illustrator.

 

[Bick]

My immediate thought regarding these three authors is that they are so different, I cannot fathom why anyone would ask a question about the three as if they have anything in common. These days Dunsany is the more obscure of the three - Wyndham and Peake and not remotely obscure. The latter two are very good, incidentally. They write is completely different styles, so don't assume you'll like both if you like one.

 

[Extollager]

Dunsany -- He was one of my favorite authors when I was an adolescent, but I haven't cared for much of what I have read when I've taken him up again in the past 20 years or so. If I were to try him again now, I would take up The Charwoman's Shadow, of which I was very fond almost 50 years ago. His mythological embroidery has no interest now.

Wyndham has seemed to provide fast-read fare in Triffids, etc. -- the novel to start with, without question.

Peake -- I've just read Titus Groan for the third time and am about 80 pages into Gormenghast. At his best, he provokes admiration with the vividness and freshness of his imagination, which is strongly visual: in this he reminds me of G. K. Chesterton's The Man Who was Thursday, etc. However, he can be unusually self-indulgent too. He deserves a try, but you will have to meet him on his terms. His work will be intolerable if you try to read it while requiring an eventful Fantasy Novel.

I'm inclined to guess that Dunsany's importance was overestimated half a century ago when the Ballantine fantasy series was being edited by Lin Carter with blurbs from his collaborator L. Sprague de Camp. In a book I reviewed a few weeks ago, for example, Peter Grybauskas -- without documentation although his book was from a respected academic publisher -- asserted that Tolkien admired Dunsany's short stories. We do not know that Tolkien did. We can be pretty sure he read three of them ("The Hoard of the Gibbelins," "The Distressing Tale of Thangobrind<" and "Chu-Bu and Sheemish" -- none of which is Tolkienian, btw). The only one of the three, so far as I remember, that Tolkien specifically avaluted was "Thangobrind," which Tolkien disliked. I would guess he read more Dunsany stories than these. If Dunsany influenced Tolkien very early one, Tolkien outgrew that influence early.

My 2c as of today.

 

[Randy M.]

I'm inclined to guess that Dunsany's importance was overestimated half a century ago when the Ballantine fantasy series was being edited by Lin Carter with blurbs from his collaborator L. Sprague de Camp.

I think you're wrong about overestimation. I think it's more likely Dunsany greatly influenced Carter and de Camp's generations, early generations of s.f./fantasy writers also greatly influenced by Kipling. The next generation of s.f./fantasy writers would be much more influenced by Tolkien.

 

[Dave Vicks]

Did Dunsany influence Robert E.Howard?

 

[Extollager]

I think you're wrong about overestimation. I think it's more likely Dunsany greatly influenced Carter and de Camp's generations, early generations of s.f./fantasy writers also greatly influenced by Kipling. The next generation of s.f./fantasy writers would be much more influenced by Tolkien.

I have little doubt that he influenced Carter and de Camp, and, earlier, Lovecraft, Smith, and Howard.