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Many of you may be unaware, but Scott Connors passed away on 28 Oct 2024. He has been for many decades the leading scholar into the life and fiction of Clark Ashton Smith, but he has also contributed work on Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft.

In memory of the deceased, Hippocampus Press has discounted his works The Freedom of Fantastic Things: Selected Criticism on Clark Ashton Smith and Clark Ashton Smith: A Comprehensive Bibliography 50% off.

I only ask because this bad boy is thicker than the bible. I don’t want to spend time reading the whole thing only to realize that it’s not my cup of tea lol

Any fans of Steve Erickson here? I know he's mostly thought of as a "writer's writer" but that term has never made sense to me.

Rubicon Beach is in my top ten novels ever. I love the tripartite structure, I love the mishmash of detective fiction and Jules Verne-esque adventure. And the final third, where that mathematician finds a secret number, is just incredible, particularly the train ride he takes "west" right near the end.

Erickson's novels have never sold well, so I was happy for him when he won a Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award. Much of the family's financial troubles in 2012's These Dreams of You are autobiographical, so I was happy to see the guy finally get some much-needed financial relief. For a while there, he was an instructor for a creative writing class, the editor of a literary magazine (Black Clock), a parent to a young adopted child, a novelist, and a journalist (he regularly reviewed films for various L.A. magazines). That's a lot of responsibilities to juggle, especially when you're fighting to save your house from foreclosure.

Erickson's first four novels are basically one big long postmodern masterpiece. Characters and events and themes are returned to in unexpected ways throughout Days Between Stations, Rubicon Beach, Tours of the Black Clock, and Arc d'x.

By the time he wrote 1995's Amnesiascope, he was ready to try a different approach. He was also nearing the end of his rope. There's only so long you can be a "promising young writer" before you turn into a "writer's writer." Meaning your books are critically well-received but don't sell for shit.

I loathe academia but I was offered a bit of money to do a Master's in English Lit at a small Canadian University back in 2013. When they told me I could write my thesis on Steve Erickson's oeuvre, I said yes. The thesis isn't worth a damn, but I got to close read Steve Erickson's books for a whole year, so I'm not complaining. I corresponded with him a few times and found him to be incredibly gracious and humble (though he doesn't sell himself short either...he knows damn well how talented he is.)

Erickson's non-fiction works are terrific too because he weaves a lot of his fictional stuff into those works. 1989's Leap Year and 1996's American Nomad are great even if the elections they cover ended up being far less consequential than Erickson thought they would be. He has since joked that he "only covers boring elections."

His most recent non-fiction project, which he has dubbed "an Hallucinyx," American Stutter, is a non-daily journal covering Erickson's life from July 2019 to January 2021. It covers the collapse of his marriage, his near-cancellation after posting a rather innocuous opinion of Facebook, and his inability to write fiction anymore because he feels anything his imagination might concoct can't possibly be an insane or fucked up as the reality of American life between 2019-2021.

American Stutter can be read online @ the excellently-titled Journal of the Plague Year (and yes, I know it's a Daniel Defoe reference*)*: https://www.journaloftheplagueyears.ink/long-player-special-edition
You can also order a physical copy from that evil bald middleman, Jeff Bezos, but it's way cooler to support your local bookstore if you can afford to. If not, get your local library to order some of Erickson's stuff for you.

The novelist Brian Evenson wrote a great article back in 2003 about Erickson. You can read it here: https://www.thebeliever.net/the-romantic-fabulist-predicts-a-dreamy-apocalypse/

The best part of the Evenson article is this passage:

Erickson seems as baffled by his own almost-success as anyone. In Amnesiascope, a narrator who resembles Erickson in all literary particulars but who lives in a devastated, possibly futuristic version of Los Angeles, suggests that “because that small breakthrough had been so elusive, such a monstrous mountain to scale, I had this idea that once having scaled it, everything else about the Dream would finally lie at my fingertips. Having caught the tip of the Dream, I assumed the rest of it was simply to be taken. I don’t know why, five novels later, it didn’t happen. Any conjecture would only sound graceless, bitter, and self-justifying.… Looking back, I’m not sure I ever believed the Dream was possible.”

The narrator of Amnesiascope raises the most alarming possibility: “I’ve seriously considered the most obvious answer, that I was never as good as I hoped or wanted to believe. That the Dream was fantastic relative to what my talent really was.”

Bookslut, which I think stopped publishing articles, did a great interview with Erickson around the time Zeroville was published. You can read it here: https://www.europaeditions.com/news/345/bookslut-s-excellent-in-depth-interview-with-steve-erickson

The novelist David Leo Rice has also been a constant advocate for Erickson's work. Here's his review of Shadowbahn: https://www.thebeliever.net/logger/american-afterlife/ He has other Erickson-related stuff floating around the internet too. His novel A Room In Dodge City is very indebted to Erickson's visionary post-apocalyptic fiction, especially the earlier books.

And if you're REALLY bored, you can read my 110+ page Master's Thesis, which is not so much an example of rigorous scholarship than unabashed hagiography, here: https://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/items/58983a81-293a-4130-b690-1fc39a1301d1

If I was trying to introduce someone to Erickson, I'd recommend that they read his first four novels in order, followed by These Dreams of You (the last paragraph of that novel is the best writing Erickson has ever put to page. As far as I'm concerned, it's as good as that brilliant last paragraph in On the Road or the last page of The Great Gatsby.) If they balk at the notion of reading four novels, I'd sat start with Rubicon Beach, my fav, or Tours of the Black Clock (the critics fav).

Erickson's weakest efforts, in my opinion, are Our Ecstatic Days and Zeroville but they are both still miles better than most novelists novels. Having read American Stutter, Erickson seems so damn fed up with the state of his country and career that I'm not sure he has another novel left in him. If this turns out to be the case, it will be a great loss for American literature, but Shadowbahn is a hell of a way to go out. And Erickson will have left behind one of the most unique bodies of work ever.

The Penguin Weird Fiction series look incredible, and I haven’t read any of them previously. More of this please!

Clark-Ash-Tober continues at Thrilling Suspense Fantasy with a reading of the decadent fantasy “The Witchcraft of Ulua" by CAS—another Zothique story. Eroticism and morality on the last continent, beneath its dimming sun.Big channel news coming, so please leave a comment about where you would like to see the channel develop.We’ll have two more CAS tales before the month is through, so I’d like to invite you become a Thrilling Suspense Fanatic!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sznJopKXnSw

I'm searching for fiction books that explore reinterpretations of anthropology, biology, social structures, and cybernetics in a way similar to Deleuze and Guattari's Thousand Plateaus.

I've tried reading the collections Tales of Pain and Wonder (which felt very dated), Bradbury Weather, and The Very Best, and I gave up about 200 pages into each. The main issue I had with the last two was that they were anthologies that jumped around a lot from theme to theme. Would it be better to start with Kiernan's novels, or are there specific short story collections that are more unified?

I‘ve always enjoyed reading the works of authors who treat writing as a kind of game, who experiment with form and structure and meta elements, and was wondering if anyone might have some recommendation for authors like that. Bonus points for horror or horror-adjacent authors.

Authors I deem playful whose works I love would be Borges, Cortázar, Kafka, Ligotti, Bernardo Esquinca, Juan Rulfo, Ted Chiang.

I‘ve not read House of Leaves but plan to do so in the future. The same goes for Italo Calvino‘s Cosmocomics and If On a Winter‘s Night a Traveler.

Thanks!

Currently reading Lovecraft, and then I will try to read these. I've heard good things. Thoughts?

Hey so I’m not sure if this is the subreddit for this but idk who to ask. I came across this book called black diamonds by master Toddlee. I can’t find any reference to it online. It was published in 1989 by “The way of the light inc.” It appears to be some kind of religious text for a cult. The address it gives for the publication is in Dallas. I was just curious cause I couldn’t find out anything about it and would like to learn about its history.

What are you reading this week?

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hi y'all, just finished house of leaves a couple days ago and i'm ravenous for more weird stuff, preferably more intensely weird and complex but i'm concerned that the pool might be very small for those. i kinda want it to be a puzzle disguised as a book, if that makes any sense. what i valued most about house of leaves was that it stuck true to a medium while also completely breaking it and remaking it to fit its own rules. story will likely matter slightly less to me than the experience. i honestly don't read all that much so i feel like this might be a tall ask but any recommendations that aren't on the top couple google result lists would be super awesome. hope everyone's having a good evening :)

I read A Touch of Jen twice, basically back to back, earlier this year because I couldn’t get it out of my head. It’s been like eight months and I still haven’t been able to forget that book. I love the way the narrative flows, the shocks around every corner, and how, at the end, all the weird disparate pieces come together in this mind blowing reveal (also loving the drastic shift from mundane to sci-fi/supernatural).

Does anyone have any similar recommendations, given all of that?

I've had a life-long love of anthologies and while I liked pulpy weird lit as a kid, I kinda fell off in my teen years. I'm looking to dive back in and I'm wondering if anyone here can recommend some good pulp/weird anthologies, preferably ones featuring older stories.

Thanks!

Has anyone read this anthology (edited by Joshi)? Is it any good?

https://www.lovecraftrpg.com/2024/09/21/review-the-theory-of-the-weird-tale/

https://preview.redd.it/dvbt0xr5p4xd1.jpg?width=2930&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=13646db10787e16d89bc78ecc60461f92d036695

These books edited by Robert M. Price are not published by Chaosium, but I've added them to my collection of Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu Mythos library of books. The Yog-Sothoth Cycle is the culmination of the infamous “Cycle” series pioneered by Chaosium, Inc., and finished by Ramble House. The Yig Cycle, published by Ramble House, is an anthology of stories inspired by H. P. Lovecraft’s tale "The Curse of Yig." The Exham Cycle, published by Exham Priory, is a collection of short stories inspired by and focused on HPL’s classic tale “The Rats in the Walls.”

I am looking for books w weird language -the metaphors, imagery etcc, it doesn’t have to be that weird as well, something that would make me feel like how can a person think so, or use such langauge etc i love books by bhanu kapil, jenny boully, even maggie nelson

I made a collage of sorts to kind of illustrate the vibe I’m looking for. Something where the narrative is haunted by a dead or ghost type character in a liminal way i.e. Laura Palmer from Twin Peaks, Alice from the movie Lake Mungo or Lily from the movie I Am the Pretty Thing that Lives in the House.

Also looking for something with the vibes of season 1 of True Detective and the movie Skinamarink - so very liminal, backrooms, with a sort of haunting aspect. Hard to put into words so that’s why I kind of mashed all of this imagery together.

Wish me luck, I hope it's good