Re: Hallowe'en Reading and Viewing 2012: 'Ween Harder
I just ordered the complete series set of the original
Dark Shadows, so I'll probably be watching that this Halloween season...
and next Halloween season, if not the one after that. I also bought the Blu-ray set of the
Alien movies, so I'm watching those when I can find the time. I'd like to rewatch the original
Halloween and the
Scream movies, but I don't know if I'll get around to it.
I haven't been doing much horror reading lately, but I did enjoy
The Night Class by Tom Piccirilli. For a while there it was rough going-- Piccirilli's stylistic reach exceeds his grasp, making the book feel more lurid than chilling-- but by the end I was surprised how compelling it was in its way. I'll certainly read more of his work when I can. Piccirilli recently had surgery to remove a brain tumor, and while he's doing well his insurance doesn't exactly make such surgery cheap, so the publishers of the e-book editions of his work are currently waiving their portion of the royalty and sending the proceeds directly to him. There's a list of the titles, which are pretty cheap as e-books go,
here.
I also read
Five Degrees of Latitude, a debut collection of five novellas that I think would really appeal to fans of late nineteenth and early twentieth century supernatural fiction. There are echoes of Machen, Blackwood, M. R. James, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, but the stories never feel derivative. The print edition is an expensive
hardcover from Tartarus Press, but there's also an inexpensive e-book, available either from the publisher (in MOBI or EPUB) or from Amazon (in Kindle format, obviously). I wrote a review of
Five Degrees of Latitude here.
Last night on a whim I pulled a couple books off the shelf and reread two stories by Reggie Oliver, one of my two favorite contemporary writers of ghost stories. (The other is Glen Hirshberg.) They were both still chilling. One, "Bloody Bill," is unavailable except for expensive out-of-print limited editions, but the other, "The Children of Monte Rosa," is in one of the three Oliver collections recently made available as an e-book. You can get
Masques of Satan from Amazon's Kindle Store or in MOBI or EPUB direct from the publisher,
Ash-Tree Press, which over the past year has made a lot of new and classic ghost story collections available again in e-book form. The other two Oliver collections in e-book,
The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and
Mrs Midnight, are from Tartarus Press, and can also be ordered direct from the publisher in slightly pricey but handsome trade paperback editions.
This collections looks really nice, though. Interesting that Phantom of the Opera is included. I guess he didn't get a Legacy collection because he never had a sequel or appeared in a sequel, poor guy.
