Canavan’s
Comments
(group member since May 15, 2018)
Canavan’s
comments
from the Spells, Space & Screams: Collections & Anthologies in Fantasy, Science Fiction, & Horror group.
Showing 701-720 of 1,078
“The Complete Gentleman”, Amos Tutuola (1952) DNR“It’s a Good Life”, Jerome Bixby (1953) ✭✭✭✭✭
“Mister Taylor”, Augusto Monterroso (1952) ✭✭✭
“Axolotl”, Julio Cortázar (1956) ✭✭✭½
“A Woman Seldom Found”, William Sansom (1956) ✭✭✭½
“The Howling Man”, Charles Beaumont (1959) ✭✭✭
“Same Time, Same Place”, Mervyn Peake (1963) ✭✭✭½
“The Colomber”, Dino Buzzati (1966) ✭✭✭✭
“The Other Side of the Mountain”, Michel Bernanos (1967) ✭✭✭½
Lena said:Really, I feel like people obsess over her. Over at HA every single month there are people who want to read The Shining and in equal or greater number people who want to read Shirley Jackson’s ...
It drives me nuts.
I’ve noticed that trend as well, Lena. I’m not sure if it’s due to any adulation HA members have for Jackson or whether it just represents the likelihood that members may be more familiar with her name and hence more prone to vote for her works as opposed to the works of lesser-known authors. I think this hypothesis also accounts for the strong showing of other bestselling/famous works by well-known writers such as Stephen King, Robert R. McCammon, Peter Straub, etc. (How many times has Ghost Story been nominated over the years?)
I see that within the last month, the HA mods have taken steps to try and curb this distressing tendency and to promote the discussion of lesser known works. I wonder how successful they’ll be.
In any case, I know better than to try and and convince you that you ought to appreciate Jackson. :) But I will say that that there are folks out there who genuinely admire and enjoy her work.
Lena said:If not for the authors name I would have already forgotten the story. That was my fourth Shirley Jackson, two novels and two short stories, and I’ve always been dissatisfied. I think she’s shockingly overrated.
Well, that general reaction certainly goes a long way towards explaining our difference of opinion on this particular story, Lena. :)
My personal view is that Jackson is one of the most important 20th century writers in the Gothic/horror tradition. If anything, her work continues to be underappreciated, especially by those in the so-called mainstream, literary establishment.
Lena wrote:That’s it? Seriously? That was not even half a story. It was a tension filled beginning of something... that never-
It’s precisely this murky, ill-defined ending that makes the story (in my estimation) so deeply unsettling. I found the following discussion of the story on-line and it does a good job of capturing my own feelings about Shirley Jackson’s story:
Very little actually happens here. There is no hideous revelation. Everything that seems sinister has a mundane explanation....
When I first finished the story, I found this lack of resolution unsatisfying. But in the days afterward, I found I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I supposed I was worried for the Allisons, but that wasn’t it. The Allisons are fictional, after all. Then it dawned on me that I was worried for myself....I realized that the nebulous unease that haunted Jackson had been implanted in me, too. Or maybe it’s always been there.
(The review by Nick Melton can be read in its entirety here.)
Ronald said (in part):I saw the movie Mimic and liked it, though if memory serves the movie had major differences from the short story.
It wasn’t much like the story at all, although, to be fair, I’m not sure the Wollheim story is well suited for the screen. Unlike you and Lena I didn’t much care for the movie, although I heard del Toro wasn’t all that happy with the end result either. There is a director’s cut of the movie floating around somewhere, but I haven’t seen it.
“Smoke Ghost”, Fritz Leiber (1941) ✭✭✭✭½“White Rabbits”, Leonora Carrington (1941) ✭✭✭
“Mimic”, Donald A. Wollheim (1942) ✭✭✭✭
“The Crowd”, Ray Bradbury (1943) ✭✭✭✭
“The Long Sheet”, William Sansom (1944) ✭✭✭
“The Aleph”, Jorge Luis Borges (1945) ✭✭✭½
“A Child in the Bush of Ghosts”, Olympe Bhêly-Quénum (1949) ✭✭½
“The Summer People”, Shirley Jackson (1950) ✭✭✭✭½
“The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles”, Margaret St. Clair (1951) ✭✭✭✭
“The Hungry House”, Robert Bloch (1951) ✭✭✭½
Lena said (in part):That was just weird for the sake of being weird.
I’ll push back here — at least a bit. I don’t think Schulz is just being weird for the sake of being weird, or least that’s my rough, inexpert sense when reading this story (as well as some of his other pieces). I was reading an essay on Schulz by Larry Nolen in which he refers to Schulz’ fixation on the pre-war Austro-Hungarian empire as representing a period relative calm and stability, as contrasted with the ensuing interwar period. “As the story progresses, time slips out of the hands of the narrator and events grow more monstrous and terrifying, with soldiers marching in and dog-men appearing in the streets. The weird here has manifested as something anti-order, anti-peace. In it, the dissolution of states at the end of World War I can be discerned in symbolic form, as the old order has collapsed and something new and chaotic has emerged to take its place.” I’ve read similar takes on Schulz by other reviewers, but I’ll leave it to you as to whether or not you buy any of it. Personally, I will admit that, symbolism aside, I simply enjoy the Schulz’ surrealism for its own sake.
Lena wrote (in part):A monsters-among-us story inspired by Lovecraft’s Pickman’s Model.
You probably already picked up on this, Lena, but the more specific germ for “Far Below” is that passage in “Pickman’s Model” where the narrator describes a “study called ‘Subway Accident’, in which a flock of the vile things were clambering up from some unknown catacomb through a crack in the floor of the Boylston Street subway and attacking a crowd of people on the platform.”
I meant to post something about this earlier, but kept forgetting to do so. One of my favorite cartoonists, Gahan Wilson, died last month at the age of 89. I was exposed to his work primarily through his contributions to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and The New Yorker. His obit in The New York Times can be read here.
“The Night Wire”, H.F. Arnold (1926) ✭✭✭✭½A few of us discussed this story last year when we read the anthology Lost Signals . Here’s some of what I wrote back then:
Almost nothing is known about Arnold; he wrote a total of three stories for the pulps including this 1926 story. When I first read it as a teen I had a kind of “meh” response, but it did stick with me and I’ve found that subsequent readings have deepened my appreciation of its virtues, while simultaneously allowing me to forgive its flaws. There are points where Arnold’s prose is a little overwrought when it might have been wiser to show a bit more restraint; but then again, maybe that goofy, pulpy quality is part of the story’s charm. What I most appreciated about “The Night Wire” was the open-ended nature of its conclusion during an era in the American pulps when such ambiguity was not really the norm.
“The Dunwich Horror”, H. P. Lovecraft (1929) ✭✭✭✭½
“The Book”, Margaret Irwin (1930) ✭✭✭½
“The Mainz Psalter”, Jean Ray (1930) ✭✭✭✭
“The Shadowy Street”, Jean Ray (1931) ✭✭✭
“Genius Loci”, Clark Ashton Smith (1933) ✭✭✭✭
“The Town of Cats”, Hagiwara Sakutarō (1935) ✭✭✭
“The Tarn”, Hugh Walpole (1936) ✭✭✭
“Sanitorium under the Sign off the Hourglass”, Bruno Schulz (1937) ✭✭✭✭½
“Far Below”, Robert Barbour Johnson (1939) ✭✭✭✭½
I’ve been following with interest the conversations about the stories in this anthology. As I mentioned before, I started reading this book quite a few years back (stalling out in the later part of the 20th century) and so I feel quite ill-equipped to make any substantive comments about the stories I’ve read, but I thought that I might keep my hand in by posting my ratings for the first crop of tales, those published between 1908 and 1921 inclusive.The Other Side (excerpt), Alfred Kubin (1908)
I actually have not read this. More often than not, when reading story anthologies, I skip entries that are excerpts from longer works. To me they embody a sort of lose-lose proposition for the reader: If I dislike the excerpt, I find myself wondering if other parts of the greater work could have ameliorated my negative perception of the lesser portion. On the other hand, if I like excerpt, I almost reflexively think to myself that I need to read the whole work. In the case of The Other Side, I may get around to reading the Mike Mitchell translation that the Vandermeers refer to in their introduction.
“The Screaming Skull”, F. Marion Crawford (1908) ✭✭✭✭½
Not quite as good as Crawford’s 1903 “Man Overboard!”, but still a lot of fun.
“The Willows”, Algernon Blackwood (1907) ✭✭✭✭½
I’ll plagiarize myself and dust off a snippet that I wrote elsewhere about 15 years ago: This rather longish tale is acknowledged by many of the horror cognoscenti as Algernon Blackwood’s masterpiece. If recollection serves, I first read this story way back as a kid (12 or 13?) and was thoroughly bored. It took a reread about 10 years later for me to really appreciate its virtues and since that time I usually reread it every 5-10 years. Like a number of Blackwood tales, this one is a bit of a slow starter, but the language in the opening section describing the Danube and its environs is quite evocative. This may be the most Machenesque of Blackwood’s stories and, for that reason if for no other, it’s easy see why Lovecraft so admired it. It is the classic example of not showing the reader too much: from the appearance of the “otters” that frame our heroes’ experiences within the willow-populated region, to the description of the extra-dimensional beings upon whose boundaries they unfortunately trespass, Blackwood’s prose is very understated.
“Sredni Vashtar”, Saki (1910) ✭✭✭✭½
“Casting the Runes”, M. R. James (1911) ✭✭✭✭✭
(view spoiler)
“How Nuth Would Have Practiced His Art Upon the Gnoles”, Lord Dunsany (1912) ✭✭✭✭½
“The Man in the Bottle”, Gustav Meyrink (1912) ✭✭✭½
“The Dissection”, Georg Heym (1912) ✭✭✭½
“The Spider”, Hanns Heinz Ewers (1912) ✭✭✭✭
“The Hungry Stones”, Rabindranath Tagore (1916) ✭✭
“The Vegetable Man”, Luigi Ugolini (1917) ✭✭✭½
“The People of the Pit”, A. Merritt (1917) ✭✭✭
“The Hell Screen”, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (1918) ✭✭✭✭
“Unseen — Unfeared”, Francis Stevens (1919) ✭✭✭½
“In the Penal Colony”, Franz Kafka (1919) ✭✭✭✭½
“The White Wyrak”, Stefan Grabiński (1921) ✭✭✭
Randy said:The movie Curse of the Demon is based on this M. R. James story and is well worth seeking out if you haven't seen it. It stars Dana Andrews and was directed by Jacques Tourneur, who had worked with Val Lewton and that influence shows in this movie. (Sometimes known as Night of the Demon.)
“Casting the Runes” may just be my favorite story from the James canon and Tourneur’s adaptation remains one my favorite horror films.
I watched It Chapter Two earlier in the week. I might have felt more positively disposed towards this effort if only I hadn’t liked the first installment so much. Especially when contrasted with the 2017 film, there a
lot
of problems with this one; still, there are enough good moments buried in here to make me give it a grudging thumbs up.It Chapter Two, Andy Muschetti (2019) ✭✭✭
Some other recent viewings:
She Demons, Richard E. Cunha (1958) ½
Gunn, Blake Edwards (1967) ✭½
Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Herbert Ross (1969) ✭✭✭½
Win Win, Tom McCarthy (2011) ✭✭✭✭½
3 Days to Kill, McG (2014), ✭½
The Girl in the Spider’s Web, Fede Alvarez (2018) ✭✭
Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw, David Leitch (2019) ✭✭✭
Tyler J [They/He] said (in part):I'm sure i'll have a hard time with the size but I refuse to pay $20 for an Ebook especially when one doesn't technically own an Ebook and Amazon can take it away at a moment's notice.
The fact that one does not actually own an e-book is certainly a legitimate concern, but for me it’s not one of paramount importance. Balanced against the slim (but admittedly real) possibility that Amazon might make my e-book disappear, there are a few tangible upsides. There is the aforementioned ease of handling and reading. Two, I find it easier to annotate e-copies as opposed to physical ones. And finally, there is the issue of space: I’m at a point in my life where I’m looking to whittle down the number of my possessions. One of my goals is to reduce the number of physical books I own to that which will fill no more than about eight bookcases.
Lena said:Canavan, Ronald, D, do you guys all have physical copies?
No, I just own a digital copy. When physical books reach a certain size and/or the size of the type is less than 10 pt, then I find it easier to handle and read an electronic copy. Of course, that’s merely a personal preference.
Lena said: Armageddon, The Purge, 13 Hours, Jack Ryan... he’s had tasty offerings even if not all the Transformer movies are watchable.
I’m not sure, Lena, but I don’t think Bay actually directed any of the episodes from the two series you mentioned, The Purge and Jack Ryan, but since he was the executive producer their content and style no doubt reflected his artistic vision (which may have been your point). I sort of liked parts of the first Transformer movie, but his other films have left me largely unimpressed — mostly action, with little in the way of plot or character. And I typically don’t appreciate the way he films action sequences. Of course, Bay is one of those polarizing figures. People tend to love him or hate him; all a matter of taste.
Lena said (in part):Some action movie genius decided to combine The Fast and the Furious with American Assassin, and the cherry on top? Ryan Reynolds!!!
Hmmm. Directed by Michael Bay. Not a particularly good sign as far as I’m concerned. Supposedly, Netflix is hoping that 6 Underground will mark the inauguration of a successful franchise.
Corinne said (in part):Thanks
No problem. :-)
Corinne wrote (in part):Lena do you remember where you read this? I grabbed a screenshot back in March and am just looking for it now.
It can be found on the Dreamforge website. Here’s a link to the story, but you may need to establish an account to access it.
I may pipe in on occasion. I’ve read about three-quarters or more of this one. I recall stalling out somewhere in the 1990s. (The last story is dated 2010.)
