As I mentioned yesterday, I’m going to get back into the swing of the book memes that I have been neglecting since I’m-feeling-too-lazy-to-look-up. Part of that is the A-Z Wednesday meme. Last year I decided that I wanted to showcase the strange, obscure, and offbeat books that I have on my shelves. This time around I’ve decided that what I want to continue with a theme since it helps organize not only what books I post, but also helps to organize my thoughts about the books.Again, as I mentioned yesterday one of the things that I really enjoy in my reading is what is called Weird Fiction and its descendents. That old school horror and science fiction of the 30s and 40s are some of my absolute favorites (I’ll discuss more about this in my review of the audio edition of Stephen King’s Danse Macabre that I currently listening to) and so I’ve decided to showcase some of what I feel are the best and essential works of the Weird Fiction, Horror Fiction and Science Fiction that are on my shelves. Now, I have 26 books set aside, but since today’s letter is G, I’ve got some backfilling to do.
A-Z Wednesday is hosted by Reading at the Beach.
Here are the rules: Go to your stack of books and find one whose title starts with the Letter of the Week and post the following:
- A photo of the book
- Title and synopsis
- A link (Amazon, B&N, etc.)
- Come back here and leave your link in the comments
If you’ve already reviewed this book, post a link to the review as well. Be sure to visit other participants to see what books they have posted and leave them a comment (we all love comments, don’t we?) Who know? You may find your next “favorite” book.
So, without any further ado, here are my A-F books:
A: The Alienist
by Caleb Carr
(New York: Bantam Books, 1998)
Paperback, 600 Pages, Fiction
ISBN: 9780553572995, US$7.50
From the Cover: New York, 1896: Lower Manhattan’s underworld is ruled by a new generation of cold-blooded criminals. Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt battles widespread corruption within the department’s ranks … and a shockingly brutal murder sets off an investigation that could change crime-fighting forever. In the middle of a wintry March night, New York Times reporter John Moore is summoned to the East River by his friend Dr. Lazlo Kreizler, a brilliant pioneer in the new and much-maligned discipline of psychology, the emerging study of society’s “alienated” mentally ill. There they view the horribly mutilated body of a young boy, a prostitute of Manhattan’s infamous brothels. Supervised by Commissioner Roosevelt, the newsman and his “alienist” mentor embark on a revolutionary attempt to identify the killer by assembling his psychological profile—a dangerous quest that takes them into … the mind of a serial killer.
My Thoughts: This book is the one exception to my “Weird Fiction” rule, although it is certainly a descendent of some of those authors like Richard Matheson and Robert Bloch. I chose this book over the more obvious choice (Jay Anson’s The Amityville Horror: A True Story, if you’re keeping score) because this is the book that started it all. Back when I first read it—August 2000—I was so taken by the book that I had to share it with everyone. Thus was born Bryan’s Book Review which was sent out monthly by email. The story of how those email reviews turned into this blog can be found HERE and I won’t rehash it here, but suffice it to say that this is the book that started it all.
B: The Body Snatchers
by Jack Finney
(New York: Dell Books, 1978)
Paperback, 219 Pages, Fiction
ISBN: 9780440143178, US$1.95
From the Cover: From Deep Space … The Seed Is Planted … The Terror Grows … For Dr. Miles Bennell his town was like a child’s puzzle with a deadly design. Everything looked the same. Throckmorton Street. Lovelock’s Pharmacy. The dime store. And everyone seemed the same. Aunt Aleda. Sheriff Grivett. Down to the last line on the face, the subtlest tone of voice. Yet something was wrong. … The town Miles knew was dying slowly, changing secretly. … And it wanted him to … for some unearthly purpose of terror. A purpose begun in Mill Valley … to encompass the whole living world. Prepare yourself…
My Thoughts: But wait, I hear you saying, the book is Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Well, yes and no. That is certainly what the cover of my copy says (as the image clearly shows) but that is not the original title of the book. Finney originally titled it The Body Snatchers and it wasn’t until the first movie (Don Siegel’s 1956 classic) was released and the title changed that the book had its title changed. I guess I’m just weird enough to continue thinking of it in the original title. Anyway, we wander from the point. Whatever you choose to title the book, Jack Finney’s novel is one of the most paranoid and atmospheric I have ever read. The sense he creates that something is wrong but you just can’t put your finger on it is absolutely wonderful. Body Snatchers is—whether you buy it as Red Scare metaphor or not (Finney himself rejects that reading)—one of the best works of science fiction ever put down in print. If you haven’t yet read it, you need to get your hands on a copy today.
C: The Collector
by John Fowles
(New York: Laurel Books, 1963)
Paperback, 255 Pages, Fiction
ISBN: 9780440313359, US$4.50
From the Cover: The setting is a lonely cottage in the English countryside. The characters are a brutal, tormented man and the beautiful, aristocratic young woman he has taken captive. The story is the struggle of two wills, two ways of being, two paths of desire—a story that mounts to the most shattering climax in modern fiction.
My Thoughts: It’s been a number of years since I’ve read Fowles’ book, but I remember being profoundly struck by the sheer power of the story. It is also, I will freely admit, a deeply disturbing novel not only because of its subject matter, but also because of the ambiguous light in which both Frederick Clegg and Miranda Grey are shown. Clegg is not fully evil, and yet Grey is not fully sympathetic either and so the Reader is left to decide where their loyalties lie, and yet that decision is further complicated by the ending which is quite disturbing in its own right. The Collector has inspired a number of contemporary authors not least of which are Stephen King (in Misery) and Neil Gaiman (in his comic The Doll House).
D: The Day of the Triffids
by John Wyndham
a.k.a. Revolt of the Triffids
(New York: Fawcett Crest, 1951)
Paperback, 191 Pages, Fiction
ISBN: 9780449237212, US$1.75
From the Cover: What were they—these hideous triffids roaming the ruins of the earth? Until a few short hours ago—before the sky exploded into a shower of flaming green hell—triffids had been regarded as merely a curious and profitable form of plant life. Now these shadowy vegetable creatures became a crawling, killing nightmare of pain and horror. Madness hung in the air, fear lurked in every side street, death hovered in every doorway. Stripped of civilized veneer by terror and desperation, the handful of surviving humans began to turn on each other. And all the while the triffids watched and waited …
My Thoughts: I reviewed Triffids back in December 2007 and looking that review over, I don’t know that I would add anything else to that review other than to say that in terms of killing off the world, this book is one of the Holy Trinity of Apocalyptic Fiction, the other two being Stephen King’s The Stand (of course, and I may make an argument for the original abridge edition over the unabridged … but that’s a discussion for another day) and George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides. (Though Nevil Shute’s On the Beach comes in at a very close fourth.)
E: The Edge of Running Water
by William Sloane
(New York: Del Rey Books, 1966)
Paperback, 247 Pages, Fiction
ISBN: 9780345286024, US$2.25
From the Cover: Beyond the barrier. In the shunned house on Setauket Point, Julian Blair—one a brilliant physicist, now an obsessed recluse—labored to pierce the barrier between life and death, to establish communication with those who had crossed that barrier. His ex-student, Richard Sayles, pitied his mentor’s delusions, seeing in them the wreck of a great mind. But from the locked strongroom where Julian Blair toiled at his bizarre apparatus there came sounds like nothing ever heard on earth—almost like distant voices…
My Thoughts: This is another one, like The Collector, that I have not read in a while but I remember being terrified by the ending. Sloane’s book achieves something that not many horror novels can: a sense that with the right materials and right set of circumstances this could really happen, and blurring that barrier is something that the best horror stories do often.
F: Falling Angel
by William Hjortsberg
(New York: Warner Books, 1978)
Paperback, 242 Pages, Fiction
ISBN: 9780446314329, US$3.95
From the Cover: Johnny Favorite was America’s biggest star, a velvet-toned crooner with a sensational talent—and a reputation for pure evil. Now crack private eye Harry Angel roves New York’s neon streets and smoke-fogged jazz joints trying to find him—and is himself drawn into a nightmarish shadowland of grisly voodoo rituals and foul black magic, where witnesses end up as corpses and every clue dissolves in blood. From the elegant Upper West Side haunt of a witchy heiress, to a desolate Coney Island carnival of sinister freaks, down to the subterranean rites of a murderous coven, Angel will gamble everything to outwit a demonic adversary—and risk paying a horrifying price…
My Thoughts: Other than Weird Fiction and Horror, one of my literary guilty pleasures is hard-boiled detective fiction … especially the Mike Hammer novels by Mickey Spillane (who I discovered in the sixth grade … I was a precocious reader with parents who were very permissive). I even wrote my own detective story in the eighth grade. It was a piece of crap and even though it was set in 1940s San Francisco, it was full of anachronisms. Then, in high school I discovered William Hjortsberg’s Falling Angel and it was as if two halves had finally been made one. I fell in love with the novel (especially the killer twist) and read it over and over. Then, I forgot about it. Simple as that. I forgot all about a novel that had been so transformative. I lost my copy of it sometime before my first year of college and it was a case of out of sight out of mind. Then, about five or six years ago, I came across a copy of Falling Angel while perusing the shelves at my local used bookstore and it was like a veil had been lifted and memories came flooding back. Of course, I snatched it right up. I would recommend this novel to any fan of Weird Fiction, the Horror Genre or Hard-Boiled Detective stories and is reminiscent of H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Horror at Red Hook.” Really, if you’ve got the stomach … you need to experience this book. It is Raymond Chandler-meets-H.P. Lovecraft, Mickey Spillane-meets-Stephen King.
This brings us, finally, to this week:
My “G” Book is:
The Great God Pan and The Hill of Dreams
by Arthur Machen
(Mineola: Dover Publications, 2006)
Trade Paperback, 236 Pages, Fiction
ISBN: 9780486443454, U$9.95
From the Cover: In The Great God Pan, Arthur Machen delivers a tense atmospheric story about a string of mysterious suicides. With its suggestive visions of decadent sexuality, the work scandalized Victorian London. Lyrical and introspective, The Hill of Dreams established Machen as one of the great prose masters of the language. As a penetrating portrayal of the accursed artist, redolent with soulful longing and genteel decay, it ranks as a landmark work in English literature.
My Thoughts: I will get this out of the way up front. Of the 26 books I have chosen for my Essentials of Weird, Horror and Science Fictions” I have not read two of them. This is one of those two. (We’ll get to the other at a later date.) However, it is worthy of note here, and it came to my attention, because no less than three of the greats of the genres have claimed Machen’s novella as inspiration: H.P. Lovecraft said of Machen “Of creators of cosmic fear raised to its most artistic pitch, few can hope to equal Arthur Machen” (praise from Caesar indeed) and Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror” not only mentions Machen’s story by name but is also very directly inspired by Great God, to the point of being less an homage to more of a pastiche.
Peter Straub has claimed Great God as inspiration for his chilling Ghost Story and Stephen King has cited Machen’s novella on numerous occasions, most recently in relation to his novella N. (anthologized in Just After Sunset) where he says of Great God—after saying that N. was “strongly influenced” by Machen’s piece—that it “surmounts its rather clumsy prose and works its way relentlessly into the reader's terror-zone. How many sleepless nights has it caused? God knows, but a few of them were mine. I think Pan is as close as the horror genre comes to a great white whale” (JAS 534). He stated in a self-interview on his website that N. is “Not Lovecraft; it’s a riff on Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan, which is one of the best horror stories ever written. Maybe the best in the English language. Mine isn’t anywhere near that good, but I loved the chance to put neurotic behavior—obsessive/compulsive disorder—together with the idea of a monster-filled macroverse. That was a good combination. As for Machen vs. Lovecraft: sure, Lovecraft was ultimately better, because he did more with those concepts, but The Great God Pan is more reader-friendly. And Machen was there first. He wrote Pan in 1895, when HPL was five years old.”
I have yet to pick up Great God—my own schedule has been swamped with reading student papers as well as readings for my own classes, but I’m hoping to get some time over the summer to pick this one up.
So, without any further ado, here are my A-F books:
A: The Alienistby Caleb Carr
(New York: Bantam Books, 1998)
Paperback, 600 Pages, Fiction
ISBN: 9780553572995, US$7.50
From the Cover: New York, 1896: Lower Manhattan’s underworld is ruled by a new generation of cold-blooded criminals. Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt battles widespread corruption within the department’s ranks … and a shockingly brutal murder sets off an investigation that could change crime-fighting forever. In the middle of a wintry March night, New York Times reporter John Moore is summoned to the East River by his friend Dr. Lazlo Kreizler, a brilliant pioneer in the new and much-maligned discipline of psychology, the emerging study of society’s “alienated” mentally ill. There they view the horribly mutilated body of a young boy, a prostitute of Manhattan’s infamous brothels. Supervised by Commissioner Roosevelt, the newsman and his “alienist” mentor embark on a revolutionary attempt to identify the killer by assembling his psychological profile—a dangerous quest that takes them into … the mind of a serial killer.
My Thoughts: This book is the one exception to my “Weird Fiction” rule, although it is certainly a descendent of some of those authors like Richard Matheson and Robert Bloch. I chose this book over the more obvious choice (Jay Anson’s The Amityville Horror: A True Story, if you’re keeping score) because this is the book that started it all. Back when I first read it—August 2000—I was so taken by the book that I had to share it with everyone. Thus was born Bryan’s Book Review which was sent out monthly by email. The story of how those email reviews turned into this blog can be found HERE and I won’t rehash it here, but suffice it to say that this is the book that started it all.
B: The Body Snatchersby Jack Finney
(New York: Dell Books, 1978)
Paperback, 219 Pages, Fiction
ISBN: 9780440143178, US$1.95
From the Cover: From Deep Space … The Seed Is Planted … The Terror Grows … For Dr. Miles Bennell his town was like a child’s puzzle with a deadly design. Everything looked the same. Throckmorton Street. Lovelock’s Pharmacy. The dime store. And everyone seemed the same. Aunt Aleda. Sheriff Grivett. Down to the last line on the face, the subtlest tone of voice. Yet something was wrong. … The town Miles knew was dying slowly, changing secretly. … And it wanted him to … for some unearthly purpose of terror. A purpose begun in Mill Valley … to encompass the whole living world. Prepare yourself…
My Thoughts: But wait, I hear you saying, the book is Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Well, yes and no. That is certainly what the cover of my copy says (as the image clearly shows) but that is not the original title of the book. Finney originally titled it The Body Snatchers and it wasn’t until the first movie (Don Siegel’s 1956 classic) was released and the title changed that the book had its title changed. I guess I’m just weird enough to continue thinking of it in the original title. Anyway, we wander from the point. Whatever you choose to title the book, Jack Finney’s novel is one of the most paranoid and atmospheric I have ever read. The sense he creates that something is wrong but you just can’t put your finger on it is absolutely wonderful. Body Snatchers is—whether you buy it as Red Scare metaphor or not (Finney himself rejects that reading)—one of the best works of science fiction ever put down in print. If you haven’t yet read it, you need to get your hands on a copy today.
C: The Collectorby John Fowles
(New York: Laurel Books, 1963)
Paperback, 255 Pages, Fiction
ISBN: 9780440313359, US$4.50
From the Cover: The setting is a lonely cottage in the English countryside. The characters are a brutal, tormented man and the beautiful, aristocratic young woman he has taken captive. The story is the struggle of two wills, two ways of being, two paths of desire—a story that mounts to the most shattering climax in modern fiction.
My Thoughts: It’s been a number of years since I’ve read Fowles’ book, but I remember being profoundly struck by the sheer power of the story. It is also, I will freely admit, a deeply disturbing novel not only because of its subject matter, but also because of the ambiguous light in which both Frederick Clegg and Miranda Grey are shown. Clegg is not fully evil, and yet Grey is not fully sympathetic either and so the Reader is left to decide where their loyalties lie, and yet that decision is further complicated by the ending which is quite disturbing in its own right. The Collector has inspired a number of contemporary authors not least of which are Stephen King (in Misery) and Neil Gaiman (in his comic The Doll House).
D: The Day of the Triffidsby John Wyndham
a.k.a. Revolt of the Triffids
(New York: Fawcett Crest, 1951)
Paperback, 191 Pages, Fiction
ISBN: 9780449237212, US$1.75
From the Cover: What were they—these hideous triffids roaming the ruins of the earth? Until a few short hours ago—before the sky exploded into a shower of flaming green hell—triffids had been regarded as merely a curious and profitable form of plant life. Now these shadowy vegetable creatures became a crawling, killing nightmare of pain and horror. Madness hung in the air, fear lurked in every side street, death hovered in every doorway. Stripped of civilized veneer by terror and desperation, the handful of surviving humans began to turn on each other. And all the while the triffids watched and waited …
My Thoughts: I reviewed Triffids back in December 2007 and looking that review over, I don’t know that I would add anything else to that review other than to say that in terms of killing off the world, this book is one of the Holy Trinity of Apocalyptic Fiction, the other two being Stephen King’s The Stand (of course, and I may make an argument for the original abridge edition over the unabridged … but that’s a discussion for another day) and George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides. (Though Nevil Shute’s On the Beach comes in at a very close fourth.)
E: The Edge of Running Waterby William Sloane
(New York: Del Rey Books, 1966)
Paperback, 247 Pages, Fiction
ISBN: 9780345286024, US$2.25
From the Cover: Beyond the barrier. In the shunned house on Setauket Point, Julian Blair—one a brilliant physicist, now an obsessed recluse—labored to pierce the barrier between life and death, to establish communication with those who had crossed that barrier. His ex-student, Richard Sayles, pitied his mentor’s delusions, seeing in them the wreck of a great mind. But from the locked strongroom where Julian Blair toiled at his bizarre apparatus there came sounds like nothing ever heard on earth—almost like distant voices…
My Thoughts: This is another one, like The Collector, that I have not read in a while but I remember being terrified by the ending. Sloane’s book achieves something that not many horror novels can: a sense that with the right materials and right set of circumstances this could really happen, and blurring that barrier is something that the best horror stories do often.
F: Falling Angelby William Hjortsberg
(New York: Warner Books, 1978)
Paperback, 242 Pages, Fiction
ISBN: 9780446314329, US$3.95
From the Cover: Johnny Favorite was America’s biggest star, a velvet-toned crooner with a sensational talent—and a reputation for pure evil. Now crack private eye Harry Angel roves New York’s neon streets and smoke-fogged jazz joints trying to find him—and is himself drawn into a nightmarish shadowland of grisly voodoo rituals and foul black magic, where witnesses end up as corpses and every clue dissolves in blood. From the elegant Upper West Side haunt of a witchy heiress, to a desolate Coney Island carnival of sinister freaks, down to the subterranean rites of a murderous coven, Angel will gamble everything to outwit a demonic adversary—and risk paying a horrifying price…
My Thoughts: Other than Weird Fiction and Horror, one of my literary guilty pleasures is hard-boiled detective fiction … especially the Mike Hammer novels by Mickey Spillane (who I discovered in the sixth grade … I was a precocious reader with parents who were very permissive). I even wrote my own detective story in the eighth grade. It was a piece of crap and even though it was set in 1940s San Francisco, it was full of anachronisms. Then, in high school I discovered William Hjortsberg’s Falling Angel and it was as if two halves had finally been made one. I fell in love with the novel (especially the killer twist) and read it over and over. Then, I forgot about it. Simple as that. I forgot all about a novel that had been so transformative. I lost my copy of it sometime before my first year of college and it was a case of out of sight out of mind. Then, about five or six years ago, I came across a copy of Falling Angel while perusing the shelves at my local used bookstore and it was like a veil had been lifted and memories came flooding back. Of course, I snatched it right up. I would recommend this novel to any fan of Weird Fiction, the Horror Genre or Hard-Boiled Detective stories and is reminiscent of H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Horror at Red Hook.” Really, if you’ve got the stomach … you need to experience this book. It is Raymond Chandler-meets-H.P. Lovecraft, Mickey Spillane-meets-Stephen King.
This brings us, finally, to this week:
My “G” Book is:
The Great God Pan and The Hill of Dreamsby Arthur Machen
(Mineola: Dover Publications, 2006)
Trade Paperback, 236 Pages, Fiction
ISBN: 9780486443454, U$9.95
From the Cover: In The Great God Pan, Arthur Machen delivers a tense atmospheric story about a string of mysterious suicides. With its suggestive visions of decadent sexuality, the work scandalized Victorian London. Lyrical and introspective, The Hill of Dreams established Machen as one of the great prose masters of the language. As a penetrating portrayal of the accursed artist, redolent with soulful longing and genteel decay, it ranks as a landmark work in English literature.
My Thoughts: I will get this out of the way up front. Of the 26 books I have chosen for my Essentials of Weird, Horror and Science Fictions” I have not read two of them. This is one of those two. (We’ll get to the other at a later date.) However, it is worthy of note here, and it came to my attention, because no less than three of the greats of the genres have claimed Machen’s novella as inspiration: H.P. Lovecraft said of Machen “Of creators of cosmic fear raised to its most artistic pitch, few can hope to equal Arthur Machen” (praise from Caesar indeed) and Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror” not only mentions Machen’s story by name but is also very directly inspired by Great God, to the point of being less an homage to more of a pastiche.
Peter Straub has claimed Great God as inspiration for his chilling Ghost Story and Stephen King has cited Machen’s novella on numerous occasions, most recently in relation to his novella N. (anthologized in Just After Sunset) where he says of Great God—after saying that N. was “strongly influenced” by Machen’s piece—that it “surmounts its rather clumsy prose and works its way relentlessly into the reader's terror-zone. How many sleepless nights has it caused? God knows, but a few of them were mine. I think Pan is as close as the horror genre comes to a great white whale” (JAS 534). He stated in a self-interview on his website that N. is “Not Lovecraft; it’s a riff on Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan, which is one of the best horror stories ever written. Maybe the best in the English language. Mine isn’t anywhere near that good, but I loved the chance to put neurotic behavior—obsessive/compulsive disorder—together with the idea of a monster-filled macroverse. That was a good combination. As for Machen vs. Lovecraft: sure, Lovecraft was ultimately better, because he did more with those concepts, but The Great God Pan is more reader-friendly. And Machen was there first. He wrote Pan in 1895, when HPL was five years old.”
I have yet to pick up Great God—my own schedule has been swamped with reading student papers as well as readings for my own classes, but I’m hoping to get some time over the summer to pick this one up.
1 comments:
Such an interesting collection of books!!
Thanks for catching up!!
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