Couldn't Stand Another Hour of Daylight

With His Serpent Eye of Obsidian

It's a Jungle Down There

Horror Fiction Help XVII

Anybody recognize any of these half-remembered short stories and novels?

1. The short story I'm looking for was from a compilation of about 10-12 stories.  I remember the cover was mostly black (big surprise there! ha!) with a small amount of line art in either red or white.  I think red, but I often remember colors wrong. Either way, the art was simple and not painting like. Scrawny teenager who grows into a well-built man over the course of a summer while working at a decrepit factory.  The story spoke about the bad vibes from the factory driving the young man's growth and how his newly strong body was somehow built of evil.  It wasn't really very horrific, but I remember liking some of the analogies and how they were worded.

2. I read this paperback in jr or sr high school sometime between 1976 and 1981.  I think the title was The Dark.  I also think the monster was named Harmon Quaid. The dark was darker than usual, and young ladies were disappearing/being murdered. Found! It's the novelization The Dark.

3. This book was paperback and had a beautifully designed cover the way many of these books had from the 1950's to the 1970's. I do not the date,publisher or author. This book was given to me as a birthday present some fifteen years ago in England when I resided there by a friend who is now deceased. I lost it with four thousand other books,half of our library because of the flood waters of Perfect Storm Sandy. Now,I believe the word Pan may have been a part of the title but I'm not sure. The one significant evidence I can offer of the book cover design is that at the top,not necessarily very top,of the design was what appears to be a naked baby but is actually an infant size man,bald with brown hair or black on the sides and back of his head,but the hair was most relevant on the sides. He had two little devil like horns and if I remember correctly he was smiling.

4.  Story unfolds from a father's perspective as he travels to visit his newly married daughter who was always pretty sharp and had some interesting ambitions, I believe they included some radical ideas involving psychology or something and she was pursuing research, had had some interview tapes or something. He finds her to be a completely different person, instead of his inquisitive, challenging daughter in pursuit of truth (she might have had a controversial thesis she was working on), she has become docile and dull, spending time engaged in domestic pursuits and watching daytime soap operas with her husband and inlaws who are equally boring. Turns out there's a mind-control program/ xperiment going on in this small town. They even have a factory that puts certain chemicals in canned foods, etc. and repackages them. Records are kept in the hospital with color codes and I think the police chief and others are in on it. The father discovers this, not sure how it turns out, I think they start trying to chase him down. Found! It's The Homing by Jeffrey Campbell.

5. I remember it being about this girl who is kidnapped. She's in this old abandoned house with this man that isn't a man...he tells her that Santa rearranged is Satan....at one point she is tied to a bed and he sticks spikes under her toe nails? I seem to remember that she escaped...I think....I also remember that in the book she reads a book that ends up being about what happens (happened) to her.

6. When I was a kid, there was a paperback that sat with some other books in a hall closet. It had cover art that scared me so much that I dreaded anytime I had to open the door. I don't know the name of the book, but it was probably 1960s and certainly not newer than 1972ish. The cover art had a pair of women's (I think) shoes and the shoes had scary, moaning faces.

Stephen King: The Futura UK Paperbacks

In the mid-1980s and early 1990s about half of Stephen King's books were published in England under the Futura imprint (the others were published by New English Library (home of the redoubtable Guy N. Smith's Crabs series!). The covers, most differing wildly from the American counterparts, ain't too shabby—except that one for The Dead Zone; that's the lamest ever. Oh, and I don't remember any bats in the moonlight in Different Seasons.

Sweet Halloween Swag!

And straight from the publisher! An editor from Penguin Books contacted me a couple weeks ago saying how much he enjoyed this blog and would I be interested in their new horror offerings for the Halloween season? Would I?! These three trade paperbacks—The Case Against Satan by Ray Russell, Perchance to Dream by Charles Beaumont, and Songs of a Dead Dreamer & Grimscribe by Thomas Ligotti— have each been given beautiful new covers that I believe accurately reflect the fictions therein. Thoughtful intros/afterwords are provided by folks like Ray Bradbury, Laird Barron, Jeff Vandermeer, and even William Shatner. These are welcome and affordable editions (the original Ligotti paperbacks from the 1990s are ridiculously expensive today) that will look terrific on your bookshelves. Get ready for some midnight reading...

Throwback Thursday Yog-Sothothery

(An Amazon review I wrote back at the turn of the century...)

Finally, Howard Phillips Lovecraft seems to be getting some due from the mainstream literary world. First it was that long Joyce Carol Oates essay from 1996 in the New York Review of Books, than it was the "Annotated Lovecraft" updates from Ballantine/Del Rey a couple years later, and now Penguin Classics has seen fit to bestow the American reading public with The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories. Wow, I can't imagine what readers of Virginia Woolf, John Steinbeck, and T.S. Eliot will do when confronted with the likes of Yog Sothoth, the Goat with a Thousand Young, The Great Old Ones and that nasty ol' Cthulhu....

Seriously: this stuff is incomparable. Lovecraft's creation of the Cthulhu Mythos (or "Yog-Sothothory" as he referred to it in a charming light-hearted moment) heralded a new age in supernatural fiction. So vivid, so cosmic, so vast and imaginative, it is the equal of Middle Earth, of Oz or Wonderland. HPL's view of humanity and the cosmos is deeply, dark, nihilistic, and he used symbolic structures of his neuroses—political, sexual, racial, dietary—to portray that view.

As for the stories themselves, the cornerstones are "The Call of Cthulhu" (1926) and "The Colour Out of Space" (1927); they will still be read a hundred years hence for their controlled atmosphere of cosmic dread and awe. His skill at evoking a slowly dawning sense of terror is unparalleled in these tales. "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" (1931)—not too shabbily adapted in a 2002 film as Dagon—and "The Whisperer in Darkness" (1934) are later stories that are a bit wordy but still powerful, unsettling, and unforgettable. Man's place in the cosmos is revealed as paltry and inconsequential; his physical being rendered as mutated and degraded. Space and time become meaningless. The climactic chills will remain with you for ages.

Others in this collection include "Rats in the Walls," "The Outsider" and "The Hound." The latter two reveal his penchant for evoking Poe all too derivatively (although the erstwhile Poppy Z. Brite wrote a reverent Goth-punk update of "The Hound," "And His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood"); "Rats" is one of his major early works, the artist coming into his own.

Lovecraft forced horror and supernatural fiction out of its old world infancy of vampires, ghosts, and devils and into the adult, modern world of a cold, uncaring, nearly malicious universe that we can scarcely comprehend. While Lovecraft's prose at times leaves much to be desired, the power of his imaginings is unique and convincing. This collection belongs on the bookshelf of serious readers everywhere. S.T. Joshi is a marvelous editor and biographer of Lovecraft, and his efforts should not go unheeded. Kudos to Penguin for finally adding H.P. Lovecraft to their catalog of Twentieth Century Classics.

From the Angry Seas

You Know I'll Always Be Your Slave Till I'm Buried in My Grave

Clive Barker: The Art of Horror

The one and only Clive Barker was born October 5, 1952 in Liverpool. Here's a fantastic video biography from about 1990 or so, judging by his spiky mullet—probably my favorite Barker era, between The Great and Secret Show and Imajica. And remember these comics?! Those were the days!