William Meikle's Blog: Latest, page 60

I’ve got a little list – of 20 Ghost Story novels

Yesterday’s list of horror novels caused a deal of discussion. so here’s another- probably my favorite sub-genre, and one I keep trying to do justice to in my own work.

I’ve stretched the definition of novel to allow some that are little more than novellas, but I thought they needed to be in here. I’ve also seen lists of haunted house books that include HOUSE ON THE BORDERLAND, but I don’t think that place is haunted at all, so I haven’t included it in mine, although it is a personal favorite book.

THE HOUSE ON NAZARETH HILL – Ramsey Campbell
NAOMI’S ROOM – Jonathan Aycliffe
THE ELEMENTALS – Michael McDowell
THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES – Nathaniel Hawthorne
THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE – Shirley Jackson
SWEETHEART, SWEETHEART – Bernard Taylor
A STIR OF ECHOES – Richard Matheson
CAST A COLD EYE – Alan Ryan
BURNT OFFERINGS – Robert Marasco
BAG OF BONES – Stephen King
THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR – Anne Rivers Siddons
THE WOMAN IN BLACK – Susan Hill
GHOST STORY – Peter Straub
THE TURN OF THE SCREW – Henry James
THE GHOST PIRATES – William Hope Hodgson
PORTRAIT OF JENNIE – Robert Nathan
A SOUL IN A BOTTLE – Tim Powers
FOG HEART – Thomas Tessier
THE TAKEN – Sarah Pinborough
THE UNINVITED – John Farris

 

I’ve got a little list – of 20 Horror novels

Apart from the usual suspects of Stoker, Shelley and Stevenson which are givens, here’s a list of 20 of my favorite books in the genre. I’ve excluded ghost stories from this one as I intend to do a list of them separately. As ever, only one per author, otherwise the likes of King, Campbell and Barker would be filling it up.

Apart from the Nevill, these are at least 20 years old now – that’s either because most of my horror reading these days is in the short story form, or that the longer ones I’ve read by authors other than the ones listed haven’t had time to percolate into personal favorites yet.

Shadowland – Peter Straub
The Hour of the Oxrun Dead – Charles L Grant
Something Wicked This Way Comes – Ray Bradbury
Falling Angel – William Hjortsberg
Our Lady of Darkness – Fritz Leiber
The Damnation Game – Clive Barker
The Dead Zone – Stephen King
Parasite – Ramsey Campbell
The Matrix – Jonathan Aycliffe
The Ritual – Adam Nevill
The Trickster – Muriel Gray
Prey – Graham Masterton
Toady – Mark Morris
Bury Him Darkly – John Blackburn
Spectre – Stephen Laws
Exquisite Corpse – Poppy Z Brite
The Scream – John Skipp and Craig Spector
The Fog – James Herbert
Legion – William Peter Blatty
All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By – John Farris

 

I’ve got a little list – of 20 big influences

Some things in life stick with you, and shape the person you become, or in my case, the writer I’ve become. I can see influences from all of these things – and many others – coming through in my writing. Not all at the same time, although that would be interesting, but more than one at a time certainly, melding into weird combinations, some of which work better than others. Here they are, in roughly chronological order of which I discovered them, starting back in the early 60’s with Supercar, Fireball XL5 and Stingray.

I’m still striving for the perfect formula.

Gerry Anderson
The Hotspur
Tarzan
Robert Louis Stevenson
Zulu
Ray Harryhausen
Quatermass and the Pit
The Apollo moon missions
Adam Adamant
Bogart movies
Alistair MacLean
Pan Books of Horror
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
William Hope Hodgson
John Wyndham
Guitar playing
H P Lovecraft
The Isle of Skye
X-Files
Newfoundland

I’ve got a little list – of 20 SF novels

When I started writing in the early Nineties horror and fantasy took over my reading preferences, but I once read an awful lot of SF. Here’s twenty novels I remember fondly.

Nova – Samuel Delaney
Lord of Light – Roger Zelazny
The Chrysalids – John Wyndham
Stand on Zanzibar – John Brunner
More than Human – Theodore Sturgeon
Up the Walls of the World – James Tiptree, Jr (Alice Sheldon)
The Forever War – Joe Haldeman
The Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula Le Guin
Rendezvous With Rama – Arthur C Clarke
Neuromancer – William Gibson
Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang – Kate Wilhelm
A Canticle for Leibowitz – Walter M Miller Jr.
The Drowned World – J G Ballard
Tau Zero – Poul Anderson
The Man in the High Castle – Philip K. Dick
Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut
Rite of Passage – Alexei Panshin
Downbelow Station – C.J. Cherryh
Rogue Moon – Algis Budrys
The Island of Dr. Moreau – H G Wells.

 

 

BERSERKER now in audiobook

My Vikings versus Yeti Sword and Sorcery yarn is now available in audiobook in a wonderful reading by Jonathan Waters from Gryphonwood Press. Five hours of bloody mayhem, death and honor, and big effing howling things. I love it.

GET IT HERE

For Tor and Skald this is their first Viking raid, and their minds are filled with thoughts of honor and glory. What awaits them are beasts – huge, hairy, and fanged, the Alma, who will not suffer intruders in their domain.

When the Vikings slaughter a female Alma, they soon find themselves in the middle of a battle with vicious creatures bent on bloody revenge. Now they must stand and be counted, for destiny awaits in the mountains, where the hairy ones dance.

I’ve got a little list…of 20 albums I never tire of

Music has always been one of my big joys in life, and over the years since I started buying albums in 1970, there are some that have stuck, and get played over and over. Here’s twenty that I never tire of.

Bob Dylan – Blood on the Tracks
Gomez – Bring it On
Jimi Hendrix – Axis: Bold as Love
Elvis Costello – King of America
Rolling Stones – Let it Bleed
Otis Taylor – Truth is Not Fiction
Richard and Linda Thompson – Shoot out the Lights
John Martyn – Solid Air
Television – Marquee Moon
Nick Cave – Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus
T. Rex – Electric Warrior
Edwyn Collins – Gorgeous George
Robert Plant – Band of Joy
Bruce Springsteen – Nebraska
Blind Willie Johnson – Best of…
Black Rebel Motor Cycle Club – Beat the Devil’s Tattoo
Jesus and Mary Chain – Darklands
Van Morrison – Moondance
Elvis Presley – The Sun Sessions
Nirvana – Nevermind

I’ve got a little list… of 20 favorite movies made from great books

 

Some of my most favorite movies have been made from books. Admittedly, there’s also quite a few have been made from rather bad books (but that’s a list for another day, as is the list of bad movies made from great books.)

Here’s 20 films I can watch over and over again, from books I could read over and over again. As with previous lists, I’m limiting myself to one per author, otherwise we’d have more Raymond Chandler, Alistair MacLean, James Cain, Graham Greene and Philip K Dick among others.

The Maltese Falcon
The Big Sleep
The Postman Always Rings Twice
The Exorcist
Angel Heart (Falling Angel)
L.A. Confidential
The Village of the Damned (The Midwich Cuckoos)
The Dead Zone
Where Eagles Dare
The Thirty Nine Steps
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
The Ipcress File
Blade Runner (Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?)
Harper ( The Moving Target )
Brighton Rock
Three Days of the Condor (Six Days of the Condor)
The Manchurian Candidate
Psycho
Rosemary’s Baby
Lord of the Rings

I’ve got a little list…of 20 Fantasy books

Here’s a random 20 fantasy books that I have enjoyed over the years (limiting myself to one per author)

The Ship of Ishtar – A E Merritt
The Wizard of Earthsea – Ursula Le Guin
The Well at the World’s End – William Morris
John Carter of Mars – Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Worm Ouroboros – E R Eddison
The Hollow Hills – Mary Stewart
Swords and Deviltry – Fritz Leiber
Mythago Wood – Robert Holdstock
Stormbringer – Michael Moorcock
Dreamsnake – Vonda McIntyre
Wolf in Shadow – David Gemmell
Conan the Conqueror – Robert E Howard
Elidor – Alan Garner
Moonheart – Charles De Lint
The Magic Goes Away – Larry Niven
The Land of Laughs – Jonathan Carroll
The Broken Sword – Poul Anderson
On Stranger Tides – Tim Powers
The Birthgrave – Tanith Lee
The Once and Future King – T H White

Ask me tomorrow, you might get a different twenty, and I’ll probably post a different list in a couple of months time but these are the first twenty out of my head today.

 

The House on the Moor – now in ebook

 

My Gothic novella, THE HOUSE ON THE MOOR is now also available in ebook at Amazon from Dark Regions Press.

I’d wanted to do an old style Gothic novella for a while, so when I was asked to write a traditional haunted house story I jumped at the chance. Scotland, a misty moor, an old crumbling manor house, an owner with a scandalous secret, and something skittering in the rafters of the library – you’ll find them all here, along with more than a hint of a Hammer horror or two.

David Blacklaw and Hugh Fraser were celebrities in the days before it became a dirty word. They had done it all, in grand style — until the mysterious scandal that brought their fame crashing to an end. Now Fraser’s grandson, John, has come to the crumbling Blacklaw ancestral home on the Scottish moors, looking for answers, in search of a story that will make his career.

But what he finds is much more than a cover-up of a scandalous secret. A brooding terror lurks in the shadows of Blacklaw House, something that skitters in the eaves and rustles in the pages of the books in the old library — a dark entity that whispers in John’s ear, seducing and promising. Meanwhile, outside in the mist, something walks the fog-bound moors, getting ever closer to the house even as John closes in on the secret.

The race is on for John to find the answer and reap the prize, before the horror takes root in his soul.

A Question of Fungi

Something a lot of people don’t know about me: I used to be a botanist. And no, it doesn’t mean I know about gardening. For my honors thesis I studied how much archaeological information could be gleaned from analyzing pollen grains in the strata of peat bogs in Central Scotland, I spent a year after graduating cataloging the plant fossil collection in the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow, and I had an abortive attempt at doing a PhD in the causes of rot in apples as they ripen.

I also learned quite a lot about fungi. The pollen analysis stuff hasn’t made it into a story of mine yet, but the fungi have – there’s something insidious about the creeping of mycelium, something obscene in the flesh of the caps, something scary in the fact that they spend so much time in the dark, just sitting there… growing.

I started to get a germ (or should that be spore ) of an idea a few years back of a fungal takeover of the planet, and I tried it out in a piece of flash fiction that I sold to NATURE FUTURES ( you can read that one–> here. ) It was the one image I had in mind, of a dark sky and vast, endless fields of high fruiting bodies. The image wouldn’t leave me, and it came back in another story, THE KEW GROWTHS, in my Challenger collection where the Prof has to tackle a giant fungal menace threatening London.

That story was fun – but the image I had in my head was still for something a lot darker – something insidious, obscene and scary.

Then last year, another, accompanying, image came – a man in a HAZMAT suit, with nothing inside that was remotely human, just creeping filaments and bursting spores.

The story came out, fast and furious, and begins with spore-filled rain over Newfoundland. I’ve trashed my new homeland in this book. Sorry.

And now it’s ready to see the light. FUNGOID is coming soon from DarkFuse, and you lucky people can order the limited edition hardcover now, and it’s going to be in stock tomorrow. There’s only a few left, so if you want one, get it now or be prepared for eternal disappointment.

In the dark.

With the growing things.