Quite a haul.
The books were cheap.
This is gonna be Weird Fiction marathon 4.
Maplecroft (2014)
Chapelwood (2015)
Lizzie Borden as a good-guy vs Lovecraft monsters.
They had me at Lizzie Borden!
Lizzie Borden captured my imagination from the moment I saw a very weird elementary school play about her. I was a little Pugsley Addams, I guess. 😏
Goth chicks have made her a weird feminist icon, and these books are the result.
And now they're mine.
Winter Tide (2017)
Deep Roots (2018)
Sequels to "The Shadow Over Innsmouth".
The second most racist Lovecraft story after "The Horror at Red Hook".
Victor Lavalle took care of "Red Hook" with "Black Tom".
Ruthanna Emrys takes a whole duology to patch up "Innsmouth".
I thought it was a trilogy, but part one is just a short story you can only read for free online.
I'll read and review that too. Natch.
Hammers on Bone (2016)
A Song for Quiet (2017)
About a sentient Shoggoth who becomes a P.I.
Shoggoths originate in "At The Mountains Of Madness" and are kinda wink-wink code for black people. So, if original recipe Shoggoths are a race allegory, a humanoid one must be an allegory for mixed people who pass.
I'm guessing. We'll see.
The City We Became (2021)
The World We Make (2023)
Sounds like Avengers meets Planeteers, vs Lovecraft-verse.
Also, sounds like the most wik-wak-wikkety-woke of all the rebuttal-quels.
Multiple Amazon reviews are like "waaahh!! Racist to white people!! 😭".
That's always some Klan shit.
Normal-ass whites are minding their business, not looking for offense.
If it's pissing off Klans, I have to have 'em.
That was an easy buy.
The House on the Borderland (1908)
It's got time travel, dimension travel, cosmic acid-trippy-ness like "2001: A Space Odyssey" and it came out in 1908.
190-fucking-8!!!
It conjured images on my head of shit from "Heavy Metal" and holy shit, Richard Corben who drew "Den" that got adapted in "Heavy Metal" did the graphic novel of this.
I may or may not get that, but I wanted to start with the regular novel first.
Weirdly, the novel is graphic novel sized.
I've never seen that before.
Goddamned odd.
But, for such a weird timewarp of a book, it fits.
Be funny if the graphic novel were paperback sized. 😆
Lilith's Brood (2000)
The cover makes it look like a sexy romance, but I assure you, it's a sci-fi saga.
I wanted more stuff like the Hainish books, and Octavia Butler's name came up.
Doing the research dive, she was inspired by being horrified by Ronald Reagan's nuclear dick waving.
She had me at anti-Reagan.
These actually came out in 1987, 1988, 1989.
The trilogy was collected in 2000.
Lagoon (2015)
I watched a panel podcast with Matt Ruff (Lovecraft Country), Victor Lavalle (The Ballad of Black Tom), and Nnedi Okorafor.
Ruff and Lavalle were there for their obvious connections to Lovecraft.
Nnedi Okorafor was there, because her Lovecraft connection was, she got the World Fantasy Awards to change their trophy from a statue of Lovecraft to something more abstract.
I did not know it was that.
WTF were they thinking?
Best case scenario, it was blind naïve white privilege.
Anyhoo! She actually didn't want to raise a stink about it, but just her little bit of "hey..wait a minute.." got her death threats, and internet toxic waste.
So, the Lovecraft fandom does have an asshole problem, so there was a problem.
It needed changing, and the CHUDs can die angry.
So, I needed something from her.
This and the next one are her space ones.
And this particular one is recommended by Ursula Le Guin, so there you go.
Binti: The Complete Trilogy (2020)
As far as I can tell, looks like Star Trek meets Black Panther.
I'm sure it's more than that, and I'll look like a goober when I've read it, and am reviewing it.
My copy is all beaten to shit.
I may re-buy it sometime.
The Devil in Silver (2013)
By Victor Lavalle who did "Black Tom".
Saw a YT interview with Lavalle where they talked about it.
About a guy with a violent temper who gets sent to an asylum, and the monster the crazy people are seeing is real.
Underneath the supernatural story, is how the mental hospital system is a crooked racket.
Lavalle has mentally ill relatives, and has first hand experience.
But, you can change it to VA hospitals, nursing homes, or hospice care, and it's the same shit.
I just went down the nursing home roller-coaster ride with Ma, so I'm thinking I'm going to relate to this a lot.
Sadly, my copy of this came even more beat to shit than "Binti".
I might re-buy this too.
Funny how the black author books came beat to shit.....😒🔍
Mercy (2014)
"Gramma" the movie.
Stay tuned.
In The Mouth Of Madness (1995)
John Carpenter gets meta with the Lovecraft-verse!
Stay tuned!
All of that, and a terabyte flash drive for dirt cheap!
I've dreamt about a terabyte since the 90's.
I finally got it!
😍😊
And, that's all that!
8 comments:
Did you make that Puggsley Addams in reference to Lizzie being played by Christina Ricci awhile back? I read a really long Reddit thread about Borden recently and forgot what all I was supposed to take from it.
Octavia E. Butler - I had to read "Dawn" for that very same science fiction class (the one that assigned "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas") 23 years ago. I remember it as being pretty good but I preferred the short story Butler wrote about a pregnant man, "N'Tlic" or something like that. I've forgotten the name of it!!! Some interesting race issues pop up in "Dawn" (seem to recall a German guy named Kurt ends up being the villain) I know that at least.
"The Handmaid's Tale" was inspired by Reagan dick-waving too.
Mentioning a terabyte reminded me of this weird lost Internet mystery...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ci3l7pnfdk
Re: Christina Ricci as Lizzie Borden. It must cave been crawling in my subconscious.
I'm kinda fascinated to see her version now.
I grew up with the one with the chick from "Bewitched" as Lizzie rerunning like crazy on basic cable.
I caught it every chance I could. TCM still plays it once in a blue moon.
I wish there was a book rabbit hole for "Lizzie Borden vs____" but nope, this seems like it.
Re: Octavia Butler. I forgot to mention. In my same research dive, they tried to make a show out of "Dawn" and Nnedi Okorafor wrote the scripts.
So, everything connects!
I do want to get "Handmaid's Tale" in there someday.
Hmm...why wait? I have some some spare cash now...
There! "Handmaid's Tale" and "The Testaments" on the list.
Re: Mortis.
I echo one of the commenters.
"Some poor dentist just wanted to pirate movies for his family, and the whole internet climbed up his ass about it". 😆
If you're gonna read Margaret Atwood's "MaddAddam" trilogy (2003-2013) which is about genetic engineering fucking up the world, be advised that the first book, "Oryx & Crake," is the best, starting off with the same kind of evocative writing that started off "The Handmaid's Tale," where Atwood quietly establishes a post-disaster future and then gives flashbacks as to how everything went to hell. It's diminishing returns through the two sequels though. I also read Atwood's "The Blind Assassin," a metafictional book that made the TIME magazine 100 best novels list, which was really well written, but I remember the point of the whole thing falling apart towards the end.
Where the fuck IS Barely Sociable? Did he just get tired of the whole thing? His Youtube videos were better put together and more interesting than most documentaries, if you ask me!
Oh!! Forgot to mention. Turns out, "The House on the Borderland" turned out to be Createspace. I'm getting my books from Thriftbooks in protest of Amazon's Trump-sucking, but old books have Createspace variants, and Amazon owns Createspace, so you have to be on your toes. HOTB tricked me. Usually, Createspace books have generic stock photo covers. HOTB has a beautiful real-book-looking cover. It slipped right under my Spidey-sense. One out of the thirteen slipping through isn't too bad. I'll have to be more mindful in the future.
Also-also, On that panel show with Matt Ruff, Victor Lavalle, and Nnedi Okorafor, Lavalle said in his research, he actually found himself feeling sorry for Lovecraft. That writing used to be a better gig, but by Lovecraft's time, it was in a slump like it is today, and Lovecraft felt like he'd missed the boat, but then sadly he took it out on minorities. Then Okorafor was like "nah, don't care, fuck him".
I just always got the impression from reading about ol' Lovey-dovey that he was sort of a 1920s proto incel, a guy who stuffed up in his room and kinda hated the world. I didn't know about his stuff being written in a time of slumps for writers--I always thought 1919-1960 had been considered a glory era for American writers, but I guess that wasn't pulp writers so much as it was all the tougher grittier stronger stuff that showed up after "Winesburg, Ohio" in 1919, like Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, Hammett, Chandler, etc...
I only really was into about six or seven of the guy's stories, so I'm not really attached to him. I do like that a few old pulp stories from the 1920s can last as long as they have though.
Yeah, Nnedi Okorafor would probably agree with "he was just an incel". I didn't set out to go down this rabbit hole as a way of understanding Stephen King better (he's read every scrap of Lovecraft, Machen, plus some others) I stumbled backwards into it through Poe, but here I am.
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