r/WeirdLit

5/5 - listened to the audiobook and then immediately went out and bought the paperback to reread.

This is a novella, only 140 pages, and like the best books of any length it left me wanting more.

I love folk horror, feelings of cracks in reality, and weird lit in general. This book hit all of those feelings for me in the same way as Adam Leslie’s Lost In the Garden.

This story is told by a seemingly omniscient first person child narrator, who is at a family vacation home with some of her cousins, their parents, and their grandfather. None of the characters are named, instead having titles based on their character traits. The Liar, The Crybaby, The One With The Beautiful Voice, etc.

Growing up with lots of cousins myself, this book took me back to that liminal space in childhood where we spent semi-feral summers in the woods, forming little tribes while our parents faded into the background. The only adult the children really interact with is the Young Aunt.

Strange things start to happen in the woods. A tree fungus that looks like The Baby, gnarled trees that seem to be other children, stars that look wrong. Children come back from the woods and lake a little changed, unsure of how exactly.

Not everyone will be satisfied by the ending, but I absolutely loved it and when I reread it I picked up on so many “Ohhhhhh…..” moments.

If you enjoy folk horror, creepy fairytale vibes, and Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer, I’d give this a go.

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?

Finally got around to reading this collection of four short stories that all connect or have some mention of the King in Yellow entity or Lovecraftian world. And I thought it was an overall solid read but, at the end, felt like there needed to be at least a few more stories in the collection to flesh out the King in Yellow mythos a bit more. However, in some ways, I do respect not revealing a whole lot about the book or the other world to keep that unknown element to it to make the King a more menacing entity. I just wanted a little bit more from it as the horror bits felt like they were just repeating the few sentences over and over again without adding all that much new lore to the overall mythos being built up. And right when it felt like something big was going to be revealed, it just ends and not much is left to seek out for the reader in my opinion.

The first story in the collection "The Repairer of Reputations" was my favorite as it had all the weird elements that I seek in the genre and its structure was entirely centered on the King in Yellow and the madness/horror that follows. Other three stories were solid, but they were definitely a bit different, as they felt tonally different and not as fleshed out as the first story was. Had some good atmosphere and creepy moments, but nothing too crazy and some of the love story elements seemed a little out of place and almost like two different stories mashed into one. But I still thought they were decent for what they were.

Solid collection overall, just wanted a bit more as the little bit said about the King in Yellow was really interesting and almost reaches the levels of Lovecraft mythos, but falters a bit at the end.

Unexpectedly got the editor proof when I ordered this book. I haven't read it comparatively with the regular first edition, but I wonder what changes were made? Anyone read this version? I loved both of these stories but it seems to be somewhat obscure.

Curious to see if anyone else here is in to this guy. I just discovered him by reading one of his stories in a collection. He’s another author with an utterly distinct voice lending his talents and quirks to this very loose genre. I’d expect to see him become a bit better known.