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.
