Great British Tales of Terror

[joysilence]

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY dfordoom)

I’m reading Great British Tales of Terror: Gothic Stories of Horror and Romance 1765-1840., edited by Peter Haining. It’s a collection of gothic tales from 1765 to 1840. The stories in this collection are extremely variable in quality, but it only cost me a couple of dollars in a used bookstore so I shouldn’t complain. So far I’ve liked:

Horace Walpole’s Maddalena – apparently based on an Italian legend, a tale of love and violence.

William Child Green’s Secrets of Cabalism, or Ravenstone and Alice of Huntingdon – a story of occultism in the reign of Mary I, involving cabalism, and hermeticism (and I’m a sucker for anything involving those kinds of occult sciences) liked this one a lot.

Leigh Hunt’s A Tale for a Chimney Corner – a subtle but rather interesting ghost story.

Mary Shelley’s The Dream – a young woman spends the night on St Catherine’s Bed, a high rock ledge over the Loire. Spending the night there will bring either death, or a dream that will answer her question.

And I’ve disliked:

Francis Lathom’s The Water Spectre – the best thing about it is the Scottish atmosphere and the Weird Sisters, straight out of Macbeth.

W. Harrison Ainsworth’s The Spectre Bride – a rather gruesome, but not very interesting, story about damnation.

On editing a horror anthology

[joysilence]

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY marlowe1)

Last year solely because I wanted to be published I edited an anthology entitled Teddy Bear Cannibal Massacre - somewhere in the editing process I decided not to include my story in the thing because I wanted it to be as professional as possible, and that meant making sure that every story was as good as it could be (I blame nihilistic_kid and nick_kaufmann for their HWA related posts and mocking of those that just put out garbage) which meant that I was hard on the writers that I accepted for publication and lost two friends in the process. They wrote good stories but with very clumsy prose.

However, I spent most of the time wading through crap horror stories that I couldn't even begin to publish or work with - including the then publisher's girlfriend's vampire story (I hate vampires) - stories with people sticking things into their eye sockets, cute stories, stories with explicit alien sex that were just crude.

And I also begged jourdannex for her lj entries whcih are not horror at all - but very funny.

What came out is that I have an anthology with 11 stories that have nothing to do with each other with 2 writers from Australia, two from Britain - one that's from New Jersey but trying to sound British.

And of the two reviews - Vas Littlecrow and Paul McAvoy there are maybe two taht they agree on - and the ones they disagree on are stark disagreements. (I personally like Vas's because even when she hates a story she makes people curious - while Paul's sounds like a quarterly evaluation)

So yeah - that's my introduction. This looks like a cool group.