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message 51:
by
Steve
(new)
Oct 05, 2010 01:44PM
Some folks in the group appear to have enjoyed the booka good deal, but to each their own. When I first saw that Simmons was doing it I went back and re-read the Dickens novel to get in the mood. It never hurts to go back to a classic.
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I read Armadale by Wilkie Collins and really enjoyed it. It's as good as Woman in White I think.
Mike (the Paladin) wrote: "Louisa, have you read Drood by Dan Simmons? Fictitious but interesting."No I haven't read Drood and I know Matthew Pearl has written something surrounding Edwin Drood as well and I loved The Dante Club.
I would comment on Simmons book, but to say much about it would tip the hand a bit the way it's written... Haven't read anything by Pearl. I don't need any more "to be reads" (LOL) but I may run it down....in a few months. :)
Simon wrote: "How about The Devil Rides Out by Dennis Wheatley?"Ha! Dennis Wheatley has gone out of fashion because he was unashamedly non-PC. His heroes don't do such a vulgar thing as work for a living. They all have immense inherited fortunes, drive around in Bentleys and Rolls Royces, eat caviar by the bucketload and swig the very best champagnes. They live in rambling country piles and jet-set all over the world to exclusive parties. Their hobbies are foiling nasty Nazis and devil worshippers, and they have upper lips so stiff you could balance a wardrobe on them. They're proud of the British Empire and loyal subjects to HRH. They have butlers and footmen who know their place. The men are gallant and the women beautiful former debtantes who use cigarette holders. They're generally a bit suspicious of Johnny foreigner. They spout solid blocks of history at you in the middle of a light conversation.
Isn't he great?!
Dennis Wheatley: 'Gunmen, Gallants and Ghosts'. What a rollicking title!
Mod
'The Satanist' was the best I think. 'To the Devil - a Daughter' wasn't bad. Made into a terrible film with C. Lee. I greatly enjoyed 'The Haunting of Toby Jugg' and 'They Used Dark Forces'. The last one is set in WW2, and apparently it's true that the Nazi elite set up a coven of witches to try and weaken the resolve of the British High Command in 1942 when they were planning to invade. The British had a team of occultists to oppose them, supposedly using astral projections. Good obviously triumphed over evil as Hitler unaccountably changed his mind at the last minute. 'The Ka of Gifford Hillary' is a good one too; it starts with the hero dead and disembodied. A bit like that movie 'Ghost', but better.
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They were all recently reissued in the Wordsworth series of Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural' -http://simonmarshalljones.wordpress.c...
I don't know if you get them over there.
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I did a cursory look yesterday (It was far from comprehensive, so there are probably some I missed.). I found a few used on line, but they're pretty pricey. Keep looking I guess...spread the word if you find anything (LOL). :)
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David wrote: "Simon wrote: "How about The Devil Rides Out by Dennis Wheatley?"Ha! Dennis Wheatley has gone out of fashion because he was unashamedly non-PC. His heroes don't do s..."
UN PC or not he sounds fun. Is he really supernatural,horror writer ?
Yes he's great fun, he didn't care. He just wrote really great yarns, and was most famous for the supernatural ones. I'd highly recommend him!
David wrote: "Yes he's great fun, he didn't care. He just wrote really great yarns, and was most famous for the supernatural ones. I'd highly recommend him!"Well you sold me to him with your earlier post hehe :)
The wordsworth book/collection is a good place to start ? I saw the link to The Devil Rides Out.
Wheatley is a hoot. I've only read The Haunting of Toby Jug, and it's tremendously entertaining. Toby is the twittiest of upper-class twits -- he must be the most obtuse person on earth when he can't figure out which of the other characters are Satanists; Communism, Satanism, and voting anything but Tory are all explicitly linked as being on the same level of evil (I believe it is strongly suggested that Communism was started by Satanists); and at one point Toby stops the "action" for a three-page disquisition about the evils of a progressive income tax.
I suspect I'd enjoy it less if Wheatley an American -- it's a very British mid-century type of far-right-wingness, that doesn't ping my buttons in the same way that Toby being a John Birch type would.
Believe me Cathy, there are plenty of these Tory twats still around, for example our present Prime Minister.
Kipling wrote some good ghost stories, like 'The Phantom Rickshaw'.
Dennis Wheatley wrote in several genres fiction and nonfiction, history, historical fiction, espionage, super natural. He fought in WWI and was released after being gassed (chlorine). He served in WWII as staff. His writing has been pretty much continually in print ever since...except apparently until now. At least in the U.S. LOL
Well here too. He was ginormous in the seventies, the most popular writer around. But since all the PC business he’s faded. Maybe he could be edited of the more overt bits, but that would spoil him I think. You have to have a bit of tongue in the cheek, but the sheer narrative drive of his stories just keeps you wondering what will happen next. His villains like Mocata in The Devil Rides Out are deliciously evil. I liked the movie. My favourite bit was when Mocata leaves the house after unsuccessfully trying to hypnotise a woman into divulging secrets. He (Charles Gray) says suavely: ‘I won’t be coming back. But something will. Tonight - something will come here tonight’.
Bite your tongue...or typing finger. If we edited all the wonderful writers from the past who are not PC we'd lose most of our classic literature...and who would decide what gets edited out? Big Brother? Oh, wait, 1984 is probably among the non-PC books we need to edit. Mark Twain, P.G.Wodeouse, Dostoyevsky, even Dickens, they'd all fall under the Political Pen...no. If a person is too offended to understand other points of view and past ideas, maybe they are just too close minded to read at all. After all the facts could confuse as well as un-PC ideas...you can't be too careful. "THEY'D" never manage to catch every book that might "offend", maybe we need a UN office of book censorship, just to sure no "dangerous ideas" get into print, even in fiction....You think?
We'll probably all end up with a Soma pill anyway. Most of us already have.
Yes...it's a Brave New World.... :)
It can be very enlightening to read the unexpurgated past. I find bowdlerizing and rewriting pretty horrifying. I even hate it when they rewrite children's books to make them more "contemporary" -- they went back to Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great, took out all the stuff about the ditto machine, and put in a Xerox machine instead! And added computers and so forth. Would it REALLY kill children to learn that their parents used ditto machines and typewriters? Would it make it so very very difficult to relate to Sheila's story?
Totally agree. It's just another version of condescension if you think about it...or possibly dumbing down. Maybe we should do The Iliad with automatic weapons and tanks....? Just a thought.
Or The Pilgrim's Progress with submachine guns and limpet mines. He'd never make it.
Well....he probably have better armor.
They did Richard III with tanks and machine guns, and that was ... well, OK, that was actually pretty awesome.
Oh, it really is worth checking out! It stars Ian McKellen, and it's set in this sort of '30s fascist state. When he says "My kingdom for a horse," it's because his tank has broken down.
In case you didn't see it I rolled my eyes. :) Maybe I'll try to track down the DVD.
Mike (the Paladin) wrote: "Bite your tongue...or typing finger. If we edited all the wonderful writers from the past who are not PC we'd lose most of our classic literature...and who would decide what gets edited out? Big Br..."I have read many classics and un PC doesnt matter me at all. You have to understand the historical times. People was doing sick things 60 years ago i wont be too harsh on 100-200 year old books.
Not even when its personally offending thing like racism. The really classic literature has qualities that makes appealing to everyone who reads them no matter how dated,UN PC they are.
i'll admit that i still get annoyed when reading racism in classic books. and to a lesser extent, misogyny and anti-gay comments. i don't like to think of myself as overly pc, but understanding of others & humanism are timeless concepts so it doesn't matter what time period the novel was written in, when i see it, i can't help but be irritated and a little sad at the author's close-mindedness. it won't make me hate the author and i still can usually keep reading, but to me it will always be a real negative when i think of the novel or the author.but i am pretty open as far what i truly think is "racism", etc. for example, i don't think that mark twain was really racist. and certainly not To Kill a Mockingbird either. i do think that the word "racism" gets thrown around too frequently and is often used incorrectly. in my opinion, "racism" is not prejudice, it is something different: the genuine opinion that one race is better than the other.
Mod
I totally agree. It's irritating, but I don't hate the authors for it. Usually it's the mindset of their audience at the time, or that's how I see it.
Twain wasn't racist even for his time. Many of the "racist" lines in his works were actually meant to show the idiocy of racism, but today as then they are/were often misunderstood and only the "surface meanings" come through. Also there are words (race related and others) that everyone today realizes are offensive but were in common use in say the early years of the twentieth century. It doesn't make it right nor does it make reading them any easier for members of the group involved. But it does give a picture of the time line and keeps the work in tact. It's odd to realize that often the attitudes exemplified in these works don't reflect hate so much as a lack of understanding and empathy or understanding.
It is I believe appropriate for anyone who is hurt or offended not to have to read these works, but by the same token reading them doesn't mark the reader as a racist, sexist or whatever.
Okay, nuff said on this subject from me. I just hate the idea of censorship... Like I said, who gets to decided what's censored? Just because the one blue lining part of a book, play, song, or whatever today agrees with your views it doesn't mean the one doing it tomorrow will have the same "altruistic" motives. Today we/he/she/they may edit out racially sensitive material, next week or next year it might be politically objectionable material or religiously objectionable material or whatever. A writer's work needs to remain intact. I may totally disagree with what the writer is saying, but the work must remain in tact or we'll no longer be free to agree or disagree. F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, Margaret Mitchell, Harper Lee, (Mein Kampf by) Hitler, Marx, Ayn Rand, Mao, the Marquis de Sade, Machiavelli....even Barak Obama and George W. Bush...all need to have their words say what they said, not what some third party thinks they should have said, or what they meant, or what it's safe for all of "us" to know about that they said.
I have trouble more when the writers personal history have real racist,other un PC backround. Not the actual writing. Reading about HP Lovecraft views on other people was sick. The reason i dont read him though is because his prose put me off alot. Heh recently talked to a classmate in my literary class how both of us stopped reading because of that. How his importance maybe was in influence on other writers and not his actual writing ability.
I love HP Lovecraft, myself, but I also hate his racism. It's something you really have to try and ignore while reading his work. Which can be difficult. He was, you have to understand in order to get past it, a product of both his time and upbringing. S. T. Joshi, perhaps the biggest authoritative scholar on Lovecraft's works today, is a man of color himself (I believe he's East Indian, but I could be wrong). If he can get over it, so can I.
If HP Lovecraft, or any other author, were writing with that kind of attitude today, however, I would not read them! There's no excuse for that kind of ignorant hatred in today's world, imo.
Like opinions on most writers it's a matter of taste. I like Lovecraft's stories. I'm not necessarily a "horror" fan but I do like some horror books/stories. Some years ago I found H.P.Lovecraft and ran down as many of his works as I could find. On the other hand, I run hot and cold on (for example) S.King probably the best know modern horror writer, others love anything he turns out. That's one of the great things about fiction, we all may like different things and there are writers out there that appeal to each of us.I mostly didn't know much about HPL's personal feelings or beliefs when I first came across him. Later, while as I said I may disagree, I like his "stories".
I love Lovecraft, too. Mostly for his incredibly dark imagination. His prose can be fun to try and figure out, as well.
I have never encountered anything more than what I would call a passive racism in any of Lovecraft's fiction, and I have read most of it. What I mean by that is that his racism tends to be operating more on the subconscious level, sometimes affecting the way he portrays people of other races, and the occaisional use of politically incorrect words. I haven't seen any evidence of outright spite or hatred towards other races (in his fiction at least). I think I would find it impossible to read an author who exhibited this kind of aggressive racisim.
I don't know that I would call HPL a racist, although he was not without his prejudices. I believe part of the problem was Lovecraft's rather reclusive lifestyle. Living most of his life in Providence, with short trips outside to New York, etc. he didn't really have the contact with a lot of people outside his immediate social circle that might have changed his opinion of other races & religions.Despite all this the man has influenced quite a number of writers, fascinated millions of readers and continues to do so.
HPL was profoundly racist -- he really did believe that dirty, mongrel dark-skinned races (not just black, but asian and even Southern European) were going to overrun the world and ruin good, pure Anglo-Saxon culture. His letters are full of this stuff. I can still read and enjoy his work, though.
Unfortunately yeah he was a racist :( I think sometimes its a matter of choosing to read and appreciate someone for their work or judging them for their life. You often really do have to take the good with the bad. I've seen arguments over whether Dean Koontz and Stephen King's political views make them unreadable before and they're honestly not pounding a lectern over those politics in their work as they might be in their personal and public lives. The same is also true of Orson Scott Card who has made public statements indicating homosexuals should be annihilated but whose books really haven't said as much before he spoke out like that.
I guess I feel differently about the foibles of people who have been dead a long time versus those writing now -- poor Lovecraft (and I think his racial views may have been exacerbated by mental illness, though of course there's no way for me to know for sure) isn't going to take me buying his book as a personal endorsement for his beliefs, you know?I don't care whether I agree with a writer politically unless it really affects his books, but advocating mass murder falls a bit beyond the pale of "differing politics" for me.
Oh I agree Cathy and as a result I don't read Card's books. In his case his personal choices were enough to sway me away from him whereas with most authors I'd overlook smaller stuff like political views in favor of what I thought of the writing. I consider Lovecraft's racism to also be a symptom of the era as much as his mental state.
Classic Horror Lovers
Books mentioned in this topic
Rebecca (other topics)Ringstones (other topics)
To Walk the Night (other topics)
Raising Demons (other topics)
Life Among the Savages (other topics)
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Authors mentioned in this topic
Daphne du Maurier (other topics)Dennis Wheatley (other topics)
Dennis Wheatley (other topics)
Dennis Wheatley (other topics)
