u/Unfair_Umpire_3635

Sphere Books 1979

1980 Mcmillan UK edition

1963 Ace Books edition

"In the aftermath of an atomic war, a new international movement of pacifism has arisen. Multitudes of young men have chosen to curb their aggressive instincts through voluntary amputation—disarmament in its most literal sense.

Those who have undergone this procedure are highly esteemed in the new society. But they have a problem—their prosthetics require a rare metal to function, and international tensions are rising over which countries get the right to mine it . . ."

Second printing, Laurel-Leaf Library / Dell

In a year dedicated heavily so far to novels, I've been going back and forth on the next single author anthologies to tackle. A couple of these (the Justin Burnett and Charles Wilkinson in particular) I've been seeing more and more about and a couple (Rosalie Parker and Simon Kurt Unsworth) are rarely, if ever, discussed. Hopefully I'll be able to finish a title every couple of weeks, alongside whatever else I'm reading and be able to update, review, and recommend here from time to time.

1. The Twilight Zone Complete Stories by Rod Serling. Introduction by T.E.D. Klein

I'm expecting this to be a top tier read. Maybe that's nostalgia based wishful thinking but with Klein's involvement, an all time favorite writer (as well as the original editor of the Twilight Zone Magazine) and Serling himself being a genre pioneer, I can't imagine a universe this falls flat for me.

Skipping the intro, first paragraph from the first story, The Mighty Casey:

"There is a large, extremely decrepit stadium overgrown by weeds and high grass that is called, whenever it is referred to (which is seldom nowadays), Tebbet's Field and it lies in a borough of New York known as Brooklyn. Many years ago it was a baseball stadium housing a ball club known as the Brooklyn Dodgers, a major league baseball team then a part of the National League. Tebbet's Field today, as we've already mentioned, houses nothing but memories, a few ghosts and tier after tier of decaying wooden seats and cracked concrete floors. In its vast, gaunt emptiness nothing stirs except the high grass of what once was an infield and an outfield, in addition to a wind that whistles through the screen behind home plate and howls up to the rafters of the overhang of the grandstand."

2. Through the Storm by Rosalie Parker

(Parker runs Tartarus Press alongside R.B. Russell)

"Ghosts, shamans, aliens, angels and the weirdness of life all make their appearance in this new collection of Rosalie Parker’s strange tales. Her stories depict subtly shifting realities, and celebrate the fluidity of the barrier between the uncanny and the everyday. These twenty-five stories vary from contes to longer pieces, and explore the traditions of the weird tale in fresh and original ways."

First paragraph from the first story, The Moor:

"As soon as Simone set foot on the path through the heather her spirits began to rise. The red grouse were nesting, but the cries of curlew and lapwing, and the piping of meadow pipits and the trilling of skylarks punctuated the perfect stillness. High overhead, a buzzard soared on the summer thermals. Simone had walked over the moor many times: it was on a human level, utterly desolate and remote, and it suited her that she seldom met another soul. In the distance the fells slumbered in the heat."

3. The Puppet King and Other Atonements by Justin A. Burnett w/ an introduction by S.L. Edwards. This one's been getting a lot of love here lately,possibly more than upon its initial release. A couple of us are reading this soon if anyone else wants to join in.

"The Puppet King...conjures a horrific universe of puppets, labyrinths, and liminal spaces. Over the span of fourteen Borgesian terrors, Justin A. Burnett inhabits the strange borderlands between intimacy and isolation, fiction and philosophy, reality and nightmare. Sprouting from the blackened landscape of weird writers such as Thomas Ligotti, Jon Padgett, and Brian Evenson, this collection is a bleak, unflinching gaze into the vertiginous depths of the nonhuman."

Skipping the introduction, the first paragraph of the first story, The Toy Shop:

"ON THE MORNING I discovered the doll, I wondered what Braxon's rain had been like. The one I walked through was a listless drizzle conjuring a cold mist from the sidewalk, the kind one might abstractly describe as romantic but find oppressive in reality. Was Braxon's uncomfortable? I hope

it wasn't. It had rained on the day in question- -whether it was light or heavy, sagged in curtains or whipped to an angle, no one could say. There was rain, however. He wouldn't have seen the sun. It's impossible not to

think about that."

4. The Harmony of The Stares by Charles Wilkinson. Another author I've seen lately in discussion here, the book itself is as gorgeous as anything Egaeus Press has put out and I'm tremendously excited to start this one.

"Ten diversely strange tales, steeped in menace, linked in the most unexpected ways by an auricular theme... These are tales in which music often plays a role: music as ritual, music as language, impossible music, lethal music. But here also are the silences, the stop-gaps between notes, the attempted retreats from the audible world."

First paragraph from the first story, The True Accompanist:

"Even before Philippa glanced at the pianist between songs, she knew, by the playing - a lighter touch, the sensitivity to the phrasing in the Schubert- that he was not her regular

accompanist, who must somehow have absented himself at an earlier stage in the evening. The newcomer was bent over the keyboard, a curtain of red-brown hair across his forehead; his high shoulders could have been the result of a deformity or down to the odd way he was sitting. Before she could examine him further, he played the first chords of the next piece. She turned back to the auditorium. Only the upturned faces in the first two rows were plainly visible, the tiers rising above being star-blurred by yellow light."

Also including this epigraph from Nietzsche:

"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."

5. Mysteries of the Worm by Robert Bloch, edited by Robert Price. This is one of the Chaosium Inc editions, collecting twenty early Bloch tales of the Cthulhu Mythos.

Skipping the preface by Price, the first paragraph from the first story, The Secret in the Tomb:

"The wind howled strangely over a midnight tomb. The moon hung like a golden bat over ancient graves, glaring through the wan mist with its baleful, nyctalopic eye. Terrors not of the flesh might lurk among cedar-shrouded sepulchers or creep unseen amid shadowed cenotaphs, for this was unhallowed ground. But tombs hold strange secrets, and there are mysteries blacker than the night, and more leprous than the moon."

6. The Ammonite Violin & Others by Caitlin R. Kiernan, introduction by Jeff Vandermeer.

"Within these pages, you’ll discover a dazzling suite of stories situated on the borderlands between the unspeakbale and the erotic, the grotesque and the sublime. Here are stories of dream and metamorphosis, strange lands and beings existing beyond the veil of death and beyond this earth. Here is a selkie who’s lost her sealskin, a woman with a blackhole in her heart, a fairie girl fallen to the Queen of Decay, the descent of a modern-day Orpheus, and a killer who has fashioned the most exquisite musical instrument from the remains of one of his victims. Here are dreams, nightmares, and worse things yet...comprised of stories first published in the subscription only Sirenia Digest, run by Caitlin for her most devoted readers. This publication marks the stories' first availability to the general public."

Continuing my exploration of the wildly talented Kiernan, this will probably move up in the stack quite a bit. Skipping the introduction, the first paragraph of the first story, Madonna Littoralis:

"Like the hooves of Neptune's horses or only the waves breaking themselves upon the shore, my thoughts have broken apart again, shattered white foam spray on sharp

granite boulders, and I'm staring at the tub or I'm staring at you stretched out naked upon my bed or I'm staring into that other darkness huddled beneath the rocks. That darkness filled up with the semen reek of seaweed and stranded things, with the sound of dripping water and lapping water and someone

whispering half to herself, and I do not know if I'm meant to listen or to turn away. I always turn away, in time, when push comes to shove, but for now I listen, and the bathroom light off the old tub glints too brightly incandescent from cast iron enameled white and rusted claw feet on ceramic tiles the

color of a broken promise. I listen, and you pause, smile that smile that will never stop frightening me, and then continue again."

7. Strange Gateways by Simon Kurt Unsworth

"In this, the third collection of horror fiction from Simon Kurt Unsworth, you will find tales of words that can corrupt a world, of hotels that are not what they seem, of sculptures made at night from cans and bottles that have a meaning we cannot hope to grasp and of a journey to work that becomes a nightmare. These are monsters here and roads down which impossible vehicles travel, and mines and shadows and children made of twine and stitch. These are the places beyond the Strange Gateways."

I think I've seen Unsworth mentioned two or three times in the comments, it should probably more based on the admittedly small amount I've managed to read in various anthologies and collections over the years. Excited to dive in.

First dialog and paragraphs of the first story, Morris Expedition Days Nine and TEN:

"HERE?"

"Here."

"He's sure?"

"Yes"

Morris nodded and turned, blocking Tunney, the translator, out. He checked his camera again, wiping condensation from the lens with his sleeve. Looking through its distancing eye, the trees and foliage were a lush green, sharply delineated.

"You remember the deal?" asked the guide through Tunney.

"Of course," said Morris. "You bring us here. You get paid. You leave before nightfall."

"Before late afternoon" said Tunney. "He says it does not always wait for night, that it comes before nightfall or in the night as it wants to, and he wants to be gone before then. Before it discovers that you are here, if it does not know already. Before it hunts."

Also included, as the epigraph, 'Prickle-Eye Bush', trad.

"True love, have you brought me gold?

Or silver to set me free?

For to save my body from the cold, cold ground

And my neck from the gallows tree?"

Any thoughts, opinions, experiences with these particular authors or collections?

Bantam edition 1985

1st edition. Published for the 1997 World fantasy convention and Fantasycon XXI

I see Kiernan's work here from time time recommended in the comment sections but no real posts or specific books posted in a year and that seems like a fairly long time for one of the best working writers in the genre. I've been reading Caitlin's stories for years in collections and anthologies, I've purchased several based on their inclusion alone and I've very rarely been disappointed or underwhelmed so I finally took the plunge earlier this year and purchased the sets available from PS Publications/Drugstore Indian Press.

The first of the collections I dove into was To Charles Fort, With Love. I know there's more widely praised collections but I'm a sucker for anything Charles Fort related, Fortean themed, etc. It screams weird and unexplainable and you know from the jump there's not going to be easy resolutions, stories neatly tied up with a bow and spoon fed information. In short, it's exactly what I'm looking for in my reading.

It's extremely rare for me to read a collection front to back, cover to cover, preface, stories, afterword and remain throughout in such a heightened state of not only wonder and awe in the pages I'd finished but complete fascination and anticipation of what was still to come. This collection is just that good, that fabulous and the writing is breathtaking, wildly inventive and mesmerizing.

There is no sudden reveal here in these stories close to the edge, a nice tidy turn of phrase somewhere towards the end. There is no safety net laid out nice and neat to catch the casual reader wandering in on some cozy afternoon. The reveal here is in the lush world building, the lyricism of the prose, the knife to the gut jabs of unique word choices and bleak imagery and no sight of a wasted word or extra syllable to be seen. These are ominous little worlds, cracks in the sidewalk where black things fall through and reach back out, sometimes just to observe and sometimes to drag anything and everything down screaming.

'Onion' and the three stories that make up The Dandridge Cycle ('A Redress for Andromeda', 'Nor The Demons Down Under The Sea', and 'Andromeda Among The Stones') were absolutely, exquisitely rendered worlds of literary Lovecraftian horror.

A funny aside from their notes on the writing of 'Onion', which won the 2001 International Horror Guild Award for Best Short Fiction btw:

"I was once again in Manhattan examining the mosasurs in the collection of the American Museum of Natural History. We spent a couple of nights at Peter Straub's house and had our van towed by the crew of Mr. Deeds..."

An absolute perfectly placed moment of levity and humor after such an otherworldly, devastatingly human story.

Back to the point, these stories simply don't exist without the influence of Harlan Ellison or Ray Bradbury or Clive Barker or (obviously) H.P. Lovecraft. They don't exist without Charles Fort or Shirley Jackson or Lewis Carroll and (in my opinion) it's almost as big a shame that they aren't more widely read as it would be if they never existed in the first place.

Highest level of recommendation possible.

From the Best of Soviet Science Fiction series selected by Theodore Sturgeon

1980 Macmillan

New English Library 1984

First Printing: February 1976, Ballantine Books

Berkley Books 1978