Some stories I would love to hear reviewed on The Elder Sign podcast:
1) Anything by T.E.D. Klein, whose output has been low but whose stories have been consistently excellent. Especially the meta-HPL novella "Black Man With a Horn" or the very frightening "Children of the Kingdom" or really, anything he has written,
2) Ambrose Bierce's "The Damned Thing". "Bitter Bierce" combined sardonic wit with what could almost be considered proto-splatterpunk in this story that is among his best.
3) Ray Bradbury, especially early in his career, wrote some really creepy stories - in addition to "The Veldt", "The Lake" or "The Small Assassin" or "The Skeleton", maybe. Or two of the creepier stories he wrote, in my opinion - "At Midnight in the Month of June" - a story about the serial killer that stalks unseen through the events in the collection "Dandelion Wine", whom we finally meet in this story that never appeared in that collection but who sits quietly in a room, bright-eyed and thinking, in this independent story that was included in the collection "The Toynbee Convector". Or "Heavy-Set", never collected in any of his collections but which I found in that surprisingly definitive anthology of the 1950s/1960s SoCal school of horror, "The Playboy Book of Horror and the Supernatural".
4) Fritz Leiber - Fritz was great at finding horror in big cities, especially his novel "Our Lady of Darkness" which uses the history of San Francisco admirably to create an antique occult science to threaten the hero, who was based not-so-thinly on Leiber himself; his short story "The Black Gondolier" does the same thing with 1960s Venice, California.
Just some suggestions, I'm sure others have more. Loving the podcasts!
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Lovecraftian Fiction
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The "Suggestions For Podcasts" thread
The "Suggestions For Podcasts" thread
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Other recommendations, on the funny side of horror:
Edgar Cantero's The Supernatural Enhancements. Classic gothic set up: dude inherits out-of-the-way old house from relative he's never heard of, hijinks ensue.
Anything by A. Lee Martinez, such as Gil's All-Fright Diner and Monster.
Christopher Moore - prolific and funny. Not all of his stuff is horror-oriented but he's got at least one book about vampires.
I have just discovered the podcasts. especially loved Ammonite Violin. am I too late? I see that the page hasn't been updated......is it all over?
When I listened to the Ammonite Violin, My first though was the song Dreadful Wind and the Rain. Nowhere near a perfect parallel, but even so. That song goes back a good bit. Wondering if there are roots they share. Beyond just murder ballad.
CaitlÃn R. Kiernan is still on my list of I-never-read-but-want-to-read authors; she is a transgender lesbian from Providence (so at least no standard male author) and often mentioned in discussions about weird tales. Anyone read something by her? As Wikipedia says it:
'In her blog she stated:
"I'm getting tired of telling people that I'm not a 'horror' writer. I'm getting tired of them not listening, or not believing. Most of them seem suspicious of my motives. I've never tried to fool anyone. I've said I don't write genre 'horror.' A million, billion times have I said that. It's not that there are not strong elements of horror present in a lot of my writing. It's that horror never predominates those works. You may as well call it psychological fiction or awe fiction. I don't think of horror as a genre. I think of it – to paraphrase Doug Winter – as an emotion, and no one emotion will ever characterize my fiction." Kiernan has also stated, regarding the role of plot in creative writing: "anyone can come up with the artifice/conceit of a 'good story.' Story bores me. Which is why critics complain it's the weakest aspect of my work. Because that's essentially purposeful. I have no real interest in plot. Atmosphere, mood, language, character, theme, etc., that's the stuff that fascinates me. Ulysses should have freed writers from plot."
In his review of her novel 2009 The Red Tree, H. P. Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi writes: "Kiernan already ranks with the most distinctive stylists in our field – Edgar Allan Poe, Lord Dunsany, Thomas Ligotti. With Ligotti's regrettable retreat into fictional silence, hers is now the voice of weird fiction." In their introduction to The Weird, Ann and Jeff VanderMeer write that Kiernan has "become perhaps the best weird writer of her generation." '
Nice idea for a thread!
Personally I'd like to see more coverage of female authors, although in my male ignorance I don't have any specific suggestions. I've dipped into these short story collections, though, which both seem like they'd be good places to start:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25118836-she-walks-in-shadows
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26145911-cassilda-s-song
And if anyone has any suggestions for female authors of weird fiction I'd love to hear them!
Mick, thanks for these suggestions (and sorry for the much-tardy response). I'm always happy to have a list like this. I'm especially eager to read some Klein, who I've heard of but (shamefully) have never read.