Euan > Recent Status Updates

The Aleph by Borges (1945)- Loved this. I thought I'd read most Borges, but I don't remember this one. A very interesting take on infinity, as is common with Borges, and a fun and wryly self-deprecating metafictional nature too.

The Crowd by Ray Bradbury (1943)- An imagining of crowds as true, eerie animals.

The Long Sheet by William Sansom (1944)- A very allegorical tale of labour told through the wringing out of a sheet.

Something I'd never heard mentioned- as well as being very well written so far, it's also quite funny

Smoke Ghost by Fritz Leiber (1941)- An excellent story about a man haunted by a modern industrial ghost.

White Rabbits by Leona Carrington (1941)- A fun story about some quirky neighbours who rear rabbits (/s)

Mimic by Donald A. Wollheim (1942)- A shorter story about what mimics humans may have.

Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass by Bruno Schulz (1937)- I've been wanting to read this (well, the collection) for a while, and I did love it. The kafkaesque tale of a man visiting his dying (dead?) father in a sanitorium where time is jumbled up (perhaps...)

Far Below by Robert Barbour Johnson (1939)- A tale of the defense against ghouls that attack the NYC subway system. This was... fine.

The Town of Cats by Hagiwara Sakutaro (1935)- A tale about a lost wanderer in the Japanese mountains who wanders into a town of people he wonders if are possessed by the spirits of cats. Wasn't a fan on this one (not even sure it was speculative)

The Tarn by Hugh Walpole (1936)- A short tale of a jealous man driven to take his more successful friend to a mountain Tarn which whispers temptation to him

The Shadowy Street by Jean Ray (1931)- a very good story about a liminal street, which only exists for one man, and perhaps exacts revenge for crimes against itself.

Genius Loci by Clark Ashton Smith (1933)- an excellent story about a meadow inhabited by a malevolent presence. My first non-Zothique Smith, but I loved this too.

I find amusing that one blurb says "Jean Ray was a Flemish writer..." and the other "Jean Ray was a Belgian writer..."

Flanders is in Belgium ofc, but I wonder if one was written by Ann and one by Jeff?

The Book by Margaret Irwin (1930)- a very creepy story about a possessed book

The Mainz Psalter by Jean Ray (1930)- an excellent creepy nautical story, about sailing into parts no man should be

The Night Wire by H. F. Arnold (1926)- Excellent framing, but ultimately just "meh" on the wired story.

The Dunwich Horror by Lovecraft (1929)- This was excellent. Far superior to The Call of Cthulhu (the only other Lovecraft I've read yet, and I thought really wasn't very good).

It took til about page 160 or so for the story the blurb promises to really begin. And while what came before wasn't bad per se, I've found it much more enjoyable now it has.

I wonder if that's endemic of a self-publishing struggle without an editor/with an editor who you're hiring yourselves: to be able to Kill Your Darlings.

The White Wyrak by Stefan Grabinski (1921)- a simple story about the discovery of and fight against a soot monster

Unseen - Unfeared by Francis Stevens (1919)- A neat story of a horrible discovery about the world made by a photographer experimenting with new ways of development, wit an ambiguous ending.

In the Penal Colony by Kafka (1919)- an excellent short story in laborious detail about an intricately complicated and gruesome execution machine.

The People of the Pit by A. Merritt (1918)- an excellent, really well written story of a terrifying mountain containing a demonic city and its inhabitants

The Hell Screen by Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1918) excellent Japanese mosaic short story (didn't know you could do that) about a callous painter his disturbing work

The Vegetable Man by Luigi Ugolini (1917)- a story of a terrible encounter and transformation with a plant-animal of the Amazon. Short but sweet

The Dissection by Georg Heym (1913)- a very short, but very good, vivid, phantasmagorical autopsy.

The Spider by Hanna Heinz Ewers (1915)- a good, tragic story of a young man in Paris who thinks HE will be the one to resist the deadly phenomenon of this room...

The Hungry Stones by Rabindranath Tagore (1916)- a very well written gothic story of a haunted palace in India, but with a dissatisfyingly abrupt ending

Even accounting for upbringing and outside influence and others' mistakes... Lysaer is still just an idiot.

How Nuth Would Have Practised His Art Upon the Gnoles by Lord Dunsany (1912)- just two pages, yet excellent. It felt like the stories I've loved from Clark Ashton Smith or Jack Vance (despite maybe[?] being set on Earth).

The Man in the Bottle by Gustav Meyrink (1912)- a really good story about a fête turned weird and macabre.

Srendi Vashtar by Saki (1910)- not too sure why this was here, tbh. It was good, but didn't seem too weird or supernatural. A very short story of a boy in what I think was British India.

Casting the Runes by M. R. James (1911)- this was excellent. A fearful story of unexplained malice, that stays unexplained and doesn't go the way these things usually do.

The Screaming Skull by Francis Crawford (1908)- A good ghost story, less about the actual supernatural and more about the terror and madness of the haunted man.

The Willows by Algernon Blackwood (1907)- I've read this one before. An excellent horror novella, with a great use of the numinous and the idea that knowing less is sometimes more scary.

I've read a few of these stories before; Kubin, Krohn, Blackwood, Dunsany. But I'm thinking of a tale or two a night, and I think I will be edified.

The "Foreweird" is by Michael Moorcock- which accelerates Elric as "the big one" I haven't got to yet. Not only is he just incredibly knowledgeable about the genre, he's been around from Peake and Leiber to nowadays.

While there's definitely rough edges (i.e. what seem to be a few editing issues), the blending of Buddhism and metaphysics and posthumanism is novel for me to read.