October - Horror Month (2013)

Fried Egg

Well-Known Member
Joined
Nov 20, 2006
Messages
3,541
For the forth year running, I'm going to devote the month of October to horror. Anyone else planning on doing something similar?

This time, I plan to read:

"Some of Your Blood" by Theodore Sturgeon
"The Perils & Dangers of This Night" by Stephen Gregory
"The Golem" by Gustav Meyrink

595394.jpg
99794.jpg
5997470.jpg
 
Hi, Fried Egg.

You could say I'm into my pre-October reading. I recently read Joe Lansdale's Deadman's Road and Lucius Shepard's Softspoken, and just finished King's Joyland. Now I'm on to a reread: Tales of Horror and the Supernatural by Arthur Machen.

Not sure what I'll read in October, though. I was thinking about Audrey's House by Sarah Langan, The Good House by Tananarive Due, or House of Fear ed. by Jonathan Oliver. (Apparently I'm on the verge of a haunted house binge.)

I'll be interested to hear what you think of your reading, particularly the Sturgeon and the Gregory. I read the former long enough ago the details are hazy; good book, especially if you keep in mind the time in which it was written. The latter I read for October 2-3 years ago; it's a psychological thriller I didn't care for as much as Gregory's The Cormorant, but still found absorbing.

Randy M.
 
Couple of Saki short stories suggested by J.D., then I thought I'd try these:



Unless, of course, my resistance falters and I go for this:

 
That's a great idea. Can't say I've ever devoted a month to one genre before, but I can see the attraction. Might have to give that some thought :).
 
I can't say for sure that I'll get to them in October but these are at least floating relatively near the top of the pile and fit the bill, I think.

THBSBLCH651977.jpg
KGrHqMOKpQE5U-snNn7BObSoR0ntg_12.jpg


Oh yeah, I've also got these but only because they're Shirley and I have more Shirley ahead of them so almost certainly won't get to them then.

51H1DV2F7KL.jpg
0843948442.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg
 
This is a cool idea. I have yet to read Shirley Jackson's "The Haunting of Hill House", so that would be a logical choice for me.

BYW @J-Sun "Fevre Dream" is the only G.R.R. Martin I have read and I enjoyed it a lot!
 
Just been looking around in my Kindle for some other yet-to-read horror books:

Generation Loss by Elizabeth Hand
The Thread that Binds the Bones by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
Audrey's Door by Sarah Langan
The Unseen by Alexandra Sokoloff

102880.jpg
 
Last edited:
J-Sun: I've read the Bloch and the Martin, and would recommend both strongly.


Randy M.
 
antiloquax and Randy M.: good to hear. I've read a couple of Bloch stories in anthologies and I read a few pages of the Martin and had to forcibly resist reading the whole thing because I was reading something else and just meant to sample it. Good to hear that both books hold up over all. :)

Forgot to say in my first post: Fried Egg: I read the Sturgeon long ago but I don't remember it being all that much of a "horror" book in the usual sense of the word and in terms of the surface reading - more a psychological (emphasis on "psycho", I guess) character study - but I remember thinking it was very good. And I found a note I'd jotted on it and it sounds even more enthusiastically positive at the time than what's left in the memory banks.
 
antiloquax and Randy M.: good to hear. I've read a couple of Bloch stories in anthologies and I read a few pages of the Martin and had to forcibly resist reading the whole thing because I was reading something else and just meant to sample it. Good to hear that both books hold up over all. :)

Bloch has been a favorite of mine since I was a teen. That Best of... volume was probably the third or fourth collection of his that I read.

Forgot to say in my first post: Fried Egg: I read the Sturgeon long ago but I don't remember it being all that much of a "horror" book in the usual sense of the word and in terms of the surface reading - more a psychological (emphasis on "psycho", I guess) character study - but I remember thinking it was very good. And I found a note I'd jotted on it and it sounds even more enthusiastically positive at the time than what's left in the memory banks.

You could say the Sturgeon is horror the same way Psycho is horror. Like Bloch, Sturgeon wrote horror stories, but these novels were more in the mystery/crime category. And both novels influenced a later generation of crime/horror writers, as did Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me.


Randy M.
 
Well, I'm a big Sturgeon fan anyway so if it isn't strictly horror, I won't be too disappointed...
 
I usually watch Horror Movies throughout all of October but now I'm looking into the sequel to " The Shining " titled " Dr. Sleep " - its coming out this month and Im rather excited!
 
My first story for this year's month of horror solves one of my life's major mysteries. Over the months I've been tempted to ask Chroners for help recalling a story I was exposed to back in grade school which for me would've been the early to mid sixties. The story concerned a group of outdoorsmen returning home from a hunting trip. Their appearance as viewed through a large window was causing quite a stir. The exact details are a blur. Was just one person affected or was everyone in the household in an uproar? I couldn't even remember if the story was one I read or was read to the whole class or was a movie or television episode from some long forgotten series. But thanks to J.D. and his spot on recommendation the mystery is mystery no more. The story is "The Open Window" and the author is the extremely adept storyteller simply known as Saki whose knack for the devious is apparently legendary.

The cause of all the trouble, the sweet little niece who is explaining her aunt's psychosis to her gentleman caller, is no Starbucks barista to whom everything is "perfect" but is as close to being a witch as one can get without fear of being burned at the stake. Gifted storyteller or pathological liar? We may never know, but one thing is for sure. This kind of highly polished nastiness makes me wish I could go into a bookstore and pull down from the top shelf of new arrivals a glossy black dust jacket with a simple but powerful warning: PSYCHO by Saki. Wouldn't that put a new slant on a plunging blade?
 
On my to read list:

The New Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko. (have read the previous novels in the series and really enjoyed them)

Picked up a batch of used Graham Masterton books in paperback:
Prey, Black Angel, The Walkers, Burial, Tengu, The Manitou

Should keep me quiet for a little bit!
 
Glad you liked "The Open Window". My first exposure to that one was a recorded dramatic version adapted for younger listeners, Alfred Hitchcock Presents Ghost Stories for Young People (which began with a terrifically truncated and altered, but nonetheless quite chilling, adaptation of Bulwer's "The Haunted and the Haunters"); I never forgot it, and when I came across Saki's name in a Whitman children's book, More Tales to Tremble By (the story was "Sredni Vashtar"), I knew I was in for something good.....

If you've enjoyed the Saki, and you've not read him before, you might want to give John Collier a try. Look for one of the many editions of his Fancies and Goodnights, a nice selection of his rather unique tales.

As for myself... my reading time has for some long while been whittled down to practically nothing, but I have begun a re-reading -- for the first time in almost three decades -- of the entire collection, The King in Yellow, by Robert W. Chambers. I've read two or three of the stories from it various times over the years, but this is the first time I've read the collection as a whole in a very, very long time. I must say that, if anything, this is one which continues to improve with age. The seemingly simple, yet elusive, dreamlike air of this volume (even the Latin Quarter stories, at least the first of them, which is as far as I've come so far) makes for a haunting, eerily disturbing feeling of our accepted reality being little more than an illusion we use to putty over a reality which is thoroughly appalling in an almost unidentifiable way. The strangely meaningful (in an obscure, never defined fashion which resembles those impressions of inherited memory we sometimes experience) references to the play The King in Yellow gradually weave a tapestry of a world where this (the play) is the reality, and the quiet terror is all the more effective for remaining just out of reach.
 
I've read two more Saki stories: "Sredni Vashtar" and "The Music On The Hill", two truly bizarre tales about the appallingly diabolical things children do to grown ups. I've noticed Saki appears in young adult anthologies fairly often and I wonder, is this a safe thing to do? Should children in their formative years be exposed to such, er, ideas? If I were a parent I wouldn't let my kids read Saki till they were old enough to drink it.

I too am currently reading THE KING IN YELLOW. There's an undercurrent of genuine evil that I'm afraid to even attempt to put my finger on for fear of pulling it back deformed or missing. The only story so far that didn't do anything for me was "The Prophet's Paradise." I just flat out didn't understand it. The current story I'm reading, "The Street Of The First Shell", a WWI love story of sorts hasn't yet reached any "notable heights of cosmic fear" as Lovecraft put it but just might be my favorite story of the bunch thus far.
 
No, that one isn't one of the weird tales in the collection -- of which only about half actually are, though those are quite notable enough to earn the book a permanent place in any aficionado's store.... However, it does have that same sort of hallucinatory feel to it that "The Prophet's Paradise" has; which, to me, is one of the connecting links in a rather loosely connected set of stories. And I can't help but wonder if Chambers included this piece because it in fact depicts a world in which something like The King in Yellow would have naturally emerged.....

Incidentally, it isn't a WWI story, but rather a story of the Franco-Prussian war, set in 1870-71....
 

Here's my copy of John Collier's book. Don't know if it's one of the more desirable editions but you can't beat the cover. Sadly, I haven't read it yet but have come across the occasional Collier story over the years and am confident it will be good.

Thanks for the war correction. Too bad all wars couldn't be so easily corrected. Not sure why I assumed it was WWI. I'll look the story over and try to find where I got confused.
 
Thanks for the war correction. Too bad all wars couldn't be so easily corrected. Not sure why I assumed it was WWI. I'll look the story over and try to find where I got confused.

Assumption here, but... most likely it is because the setting is Paris and the bombardment is from the Prussians/Germans... which would, given the mention of the book by such people as HPL in the 1920s, likely call WWI to most readers' minds. However, The King in Yellow was published in 1895, thus predating WWI by quite a bit....

I've only one story to go in the collection; the next to the last ("The Street of Our Lady of the Fields") has nothing, really, to do with the tales which have gone before except that it, too, is set in the artists community of the Latin Quarter and deals with artists and their models, as so many of the others do... and the fact that there are some repeated names here as well. A nicely done piece, but not particularly memorable....
 
Thread starter Similar threads Forum Replies Date
R Horror 10
Fried Egg Horror 35
Fried Egg Horror 27
Fried Egg Horror 30
Fried Egg Horror 83

Similar threads


Back
Top