Thursday, October 2, 2025

Saturday Music Club (On Thursday): 2 October 2025

 Diane Monroe: "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child"

Brian Arnold: Carole King: "Will You Still Love Me, Tomorrow?" (Live on BBC TV, 1971)

Jim Cameron: David "Fathead" Newman: "Davey Blue"

Jeff Gemmil: Alexandra King: Across the Pond; Tasmin Archer: Vibration

Michael A. Gonzalez: "I Want You Back: On First Love and Michael Jackson"

Jerry House: Hymn Time: Elizabeth Cotten and Guy Penrod (separately) "In the Sweet By and By"; Hank Williams, Sr.: "The Old Country Church"; Alison Krauss and Yo-Yo Ma: "Simple Gifts"

George Kelley: Better Broken by Sarah McLachlan; 
and Remembering Now by Van Morrison        
from Better Broken by Sarah McLachlan:
 

April Landrum: Indirect Satisfaction (Strange Mono, an all profits for charity label), a four-way split album between bands Assisted Living, Bruise Bath, Droopies and Tlooth (2 songs each). (One of these bands, Bruise Bath, features a cousin, one gen removed, of Diane Monroe, above. Music can run in families.)






Vintage Obscura Radio: a web radio station devoted to a wide variety of obscure music and with a busy BlueSky presence/archive. Their 2020 Hallowe'en playlist.

Wednesday, October 1, 2025

SSW: June 1943: UNKNOWN WORLDS;; July 1943: WEIRD TALES, FANTASTIC ADVENTURES, SCIENCE FICTION (previously FUTURE FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION); September 1943: FAMOUS FANTASTIC MYSTERIES--stories from 1943 US fantasy fiction magazines:

A snapshot/slice of a time long past...notable that the most famous story in this issue of Weird Tales would be the most famous and among the most influential stories to be published in any of the issues cited here, one which posits that "Jack the Ripper" has found a means of achieving literal immortality through his crimes. Got a top-line banner, though not the cover illustration (albeit, to be fair, the story is not so very much Newsstand Illustration-friendly for the times). 





The most famous story here, I'd say, is the Wellman. I've certainly seen it collected and anthologized the most. Though the Sturgeon is probably a not too distant second...

This issue can be read here.  ISFDB index here. (Bloch's light-hearted, pun-laden "Lefty Feep"-series story might well be the best-remembered story in this issue.)


This issue can be read here. ISFDB index here. The Catherine L. Moore story would be the best remembered of the new fiction in this issue...even if by default. Chambers has had a spike in interest in part from television taking elements from his fiction and/or name-checking it in such series as True Detective, From, and Good Omens, the last in its turn based on the novel by Terry Pratchett and Alan Moore which also pays homage to Chambers, and apparently also Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, which I have yet to see.


This issue can be read here. ISFDB index here. The Bloch story is (just barely) the most widely-reprinted here.

Tuesday, September 30, 2025

Friday's "Forgotten" Books: links to the reviews, et al. 26 September 2025

Patricia Abbott: Morningstar: Growing Up with Books by Ann Hood

Brad Bigelow: Bad Girl by Viña Delmar

Brian Busby: recent vintage Canadian lit reviews

Colman/Olman: A Chill Rain in January by L.R. WrightBarking Dogs by Terence M. Green



Tony Davis: Dorothy McIllwraith, editor of Short Stories and Weird Tales magazines

Martin Edwards: Words for Murder, Perhaps by "Edward Candy" (Barbara Neville); Dead Men at the Folly by John Rhode; Murder Squad

Eric: Missing in Action by William J. Linn; the short fiction of Charles Boeckman


Will Errickson: Such Nice People by Sandra Scoppetone; The Happy Man by Eric C. Higgs; The Farm by Richard Haigh: the final volumes of the Paperbacks from Hell reissue series

Curtis Evans: The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes by John Dickson Carr and Adrian Conan Doyle

Paul Fraser: Future Fantasy and Science Fiction, February 1943, edited by Robert W. Lowndes

Ted Gioia on David Foster Wallace and his more accessible work

Michael Gonzales: the prose and film-scripting of Eleanor Perry; The 1980s NYC Bookstore: Supper at Scribner's

Brea Grant and Mallory O’Meara: The Most Underrated Books of the Year

Aubrey Nye Hamilton: Pattern for Murder by Ione Sandberg Shriner (nee Elaine Mathilda Sandberg)

Bev Hankins: The Nine Waxed Faces by "Francis Beeding" (John Leslie Palmer & Hilary St. George Saunders)

 

Lisa Hill: Short Story September 2025

Lesa Holstine: "The Hunter" by Tim Sullivan (a DS Cross short story); Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist by Daniel Pollack-Pelzner 

Rich Horton: Changelog: Collected Fiction by Rich Larson; Bones of the Earth by Michael Swanwick

Jerry House: Black Creek Crossing by John Saul

Kate Jackson: Death in Ambush by "Susan Gilruth" (Susannah Margaret Hornsby-Wright); The Whisper in the Gloom by Nicholas Blake; The Immaterial Murder Case by Julian Symons; Death at Deepwood Grange by Michael Underwood 

George Kelley: Yalum by Matthew Hughes

Stephen King on Daphne du Maurier

Karen Langley: No Such Thing as a Free Lunch by Rosalind Brackenbury; Look at Me by Anita Brookner; Looking After Your Books by Francesca Galligan

Joe Kenney: Raga 6 by Frank Lauria

B. V. Lawson: Murderous Schemes edited by J. Madison Davis and Donald E. Westlake

Steve Lewis: Orbit 3 edited by Damon Knight ("Joachim Boaz", as well.)

Todd Mason: 2021 best horror fiction of the year annuals anthologies

Neeru: A Hundred Years Hence Reading Challenge

James Nicoll: Random Acts of Senseless Violence by Jack Womack; Bound Feet by Kelsea Yu

J. F. Norris: Now Seek My Bones by S, H, Courtier

Jim Noy: Cat and Mouse by Christianna Brand

James Reasoner: Climb a Broken Ladder by Robert NovakShield for Murder by William P. McGivern; Montana Fury by "Al Cody" (Archie Joscelyn), Lariat Story Magazine, May 1927; Detective Action Stories, October 1936; The Sandhills Shootings by "Chap O'Keefe" (Keith Chapman); Jebediah Smith by Alfred Wallon

Gerard Saylor: I Never Promised You A Rose Garden by Mannie Murphy

Steven H. Silver: The Graveyard Heart by Roger Zelazny and Elegy for Angels and Dogs by Walter Jon Williams (Tor Double #24) 

Gay Talese and Edward Sorel, with Mark Rozzo: "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold", Esquire, April 1966, edited by Harold Hayes

Kevin Tipple: Within Plain Sight by Bruce Robert Coffin

Bill Wallace: Weird Tales, October 1939, edited by Farnsworth Wright

...

Clarissa BrincatNovels with a certain structure are more likely to be classics

Monday, September 29, 2025

2021: Best of the Year horror fiction annual volumes in English: as edited by Ellen Datlow, Stephen Jones, Paula Guran, and Randy Chandler and Cheryl Mullenax: "Forgotten" Books

In 2021, we had four "best of the year" horror-fiction annuals (that I'm aware of) published in English, as a few others had, sadly, ceased in just previous years. And this quartet included two that were also to be the last volumes published in their respective series, the Stephen Jones, and Hardcore Horror...Ellen Datlow offers the 13th volume of her second (first solo) series, while Jones's was his 31st volume (the first few in collaboration with Ramsey Campbell, as Datlow's first annual series was in tandem with Terri Windling, then with Kelly Link and Gavin Grant). I enjoy the mirroring in the numbers there; Guran's is her second with Pyr, after her former annual's publisher hit hard times, and this would be the sixth and last from Mullenax and Chandler. UK- and Australian/New Zealander-specific horror annuals, and the notably "line-crossing" Weird Fiction annual, had folded in the previous several years.

The Best Horror of the Year: Volume Thirteen, ed. Ellen Datlow (Night Shade Books, November 16, 2021, 978-1-949102-60-4, $15.99, xlvi+383pp, trade pb, annual, cover by Reiko Murakami)





Stury reviews forthcoming...it's been a busy weekend.