An excellent video by a channel called Memovision crossed my feed the other day, and he did a great examination of the John Carter movie, made by Disney in 2012, and part of the reason why you aren't seeing these great pulp, public-domain stories made into movies.
Ostensibly Memovision's video is about the flop of the movie, but he did some digging and found out some stuff that must have been hard to find.
Let's be honest: lazily-written ghost stories are pretty common. That's not what I'm talking about today.
"The Ghost Guard" by Bryan Irvine (Archive version or Wikisource version) is a surprisingly good ghost story. One that, in the veil of a fairly trite genre, managed to say, or at least hint, interesting things about valuable ideas like justice, duty, mercy, and revenge.
It's not unpredictable, and it's not complex, but it does a good job of building up atmosphere and a peculiar sense of ambivalence about the main character.
Recently, a video popped up on my YouTube feed: it's a video called "H.P. Lovecraft's Favorite Horror Story," by a channel called Liminal Spaces. He was reading Lovecraft's old essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature," and it got him to read the story "The Willows," by Algernon Blackwood.
Go check out that video, because Liminal Spaces does a great job introducing it, giving a concise plot synopsis, and also showing off some really cool old horror paraphernalia!
This was quite an eye-opener. As I had been reading some of E.E. "Doc" Smith's books, someone mentioned to me that several of his concepts for aliens were very inspired by Edgar Rice Burroughs's Mars series (or, as I've learned, the "Barsoom" series), and never having read any Burroughs, I thought it might be fun to give the first book a read!
If you've been reading this blog regularly, you certainly know that I forgot to update it while I started making semi-regular YouTube videos, and I got way behind over here.
I've been trying to put enough time into posts here, and I'm close to catching up now. So, the plan is to create blog posts synchronized with YouTube releases, and finally to get back to some exclusive text-based posts here as well.
I thought you might like an update on that situation.
As always, thanks for reading!
I am a big fan of the anime series Trigun. It was one of the first box sets I bought back while I was still in high school, and I still have it.
I had heard about the Stampede reboot, and heard a mix of promising and worrying things, but I did not watch the series, not even an episode, until quite recently. Let's just say that my reaction to the first episode was not laudatory, and included expletives.
I found this little gem in the first issue of Weird Tales, and it's a great "buried alive" horror story. It tells the tale of a German soldier left behind in a collapsed underground bunker as his army was pushed back, and his eventual discovery, weeks later, by Allied troops.
Desperation, starvation, madness. It's good stuff.
If you'd rather read it, go here:
https://archive.org/details/WeirdTalesV01n01192303/page/n47/mode/2up
Reading The King in Yellow and learning a bit about Robert W. Chambers encouraged me to go even a little further back in creepy fiction history, to Ambrose Bierce. I'm pretty sure I read his "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" in high school, but not much else.
Thanks to a video by the channel American Strangeness, called "This story FREAKED. ME. THE. F. OUT.," I went and checked out this short story in the first issue of Amazing Stories, and while I think the video title by American Strangeness is a bit of an exaggeration, it's a good story nonetheless. It's called "The Thing from 'Outside'" and it was written by George Allen England. It's perhaps worth noting that this was not its first publication. Based on my research, it was first published in another of Gernsbach's magazines, Science and Invention, in April of 1923.
When I was a little kid, my dad had a stack of little comic books with the name Tintin on them. Every once in a while, I would find that stack and read one or two of them. They are fun, colorful adventure stories, each generally taking place in some unfamiliar country.
Later on, I bought a big collection of them, which included twenty-two completed comics and one that Herge wasn't able to finish before he passed away.
Back then, I had no notion of order, so I just read whatever book caught my fancy. Strongest in my memory are "The Shooting Star," "Tintin and the Picaros," and "The Castafiore Emerald."
A little while back I read Edgar Allan Poe's classic "The Cask of Amontillado..." Well, Walter Scott Story wrote a little alternative ending to the story that also got into the first issue of Weird Tales (1923).
It's simply titled "The Sequel," and it tells the story of a possible, and maybe even plausible, escape. Having played around with bricks and mortar before, I find this story believable.
Anyway, see the video above for my reading, or read it yourself here:
https://archive.org/details/WeirdTalesV01n01192303/page/n119/mode/2up
After reading "The Dead Man's Tale" in the first issue of Weird Tales, I checked out the next story, which was a bit longer, so I thought I'd do a short review, rather than a full reading.
The story in question is called OOZE, and it was written by Anthony M. Rud. I think it first appeared here in Weird Tales in 1923, but it's possible that it's a reprint that I'm not aware of.
Looking through the old pulps, I found this neat little novella in the first issue of Astounding Stories of Super-Science, from all the way back in January 1930. It's called "Phantoms of Reality" and it was written by Ray Cummings.
Astounding Stories is generally a bit campier than Amazing Stories, and this novelette is a good example. It's a straightforward action-adventure story, in which the main characters visit a world of another dimension around our own. The prose is engaging, and more descriptive of people than of places.
If you read Lovecraft you've probably heard of The King in Yellow. Lovecraft found the book interesting and wove references to some of its elements into many of his stories. Yet at the same time, Lovecraft said it had "uneven interest and a somewhat trivial and affected cultivation of the Gallic studio atmosphere" in his essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature."
Still, I was not fully aware of the uneven interest when I sat down to read the book.
Have you ever watched a sitcom that made you feel like it was twisting a knife in your heart and guts while you laughed? It's a weird feeling, and it's one I got from Yes, Minister, a very popular British show from the 1980s. It ran for three seasons, and then the follow-up series Yes, Prime Minister ran for two more.
Welcome to the final book in the Riftwar Saga! A Darkness at Sethanon brings to a close this sub-series by Raymond E. Feist, and it's a doozy of a book. I'm inclined to say this is my favorite book by Feist, for its tone, pacing, character arcs, and focus. Plus, it's some well-earned epicness, that has been thoroughly justified by the previous books.
This book has two main plot lines, and one of those splits late in the book to make a third minor plot line. There is a bit of desperation throughout the story, and it's well-justified. I'm not a big fan of the "ticking clock" trope, but the timing of events in this book is handled well, neither being too precise nor too vague.
We get to experience a massive siege on a city called Armengar, and Feist handles this type of warfare expertly. The action is realistic and full of surprises, and even an occasional laugh. Feist's descriptions of routed armies and the danger of being in their paths is fascinating and uncommon in fiction; most authors assume that retreating forces just run.
My least favorite part of Feist is typically "big magic," and there's quite a bit of it in this book, but it's handled pretty well, compared to other books, and feels earned after the three previous books. Feist manages to avoid the temptation to make big light shows, which always feel kind of silly in prose, and instead he actually comes up with some fun things for the big magic to accomplish.
And, as usual, we get some heart-wrenching moments and some great character development.
If you haven't read the previous books in this Saga, you may want to stop here, as I won't be able to avoid spoiling some parts of the end of Silverthorn in describing the beginning of this book.
I recommend that you read my Silverthorn review here, and maybe even Magician: Apprentice and Magician: Master, and check those books out first.
