predecessors, Mary Shelley, HG Wells, Mark Twain, L. Sprague de Camp and Robert Heinlein;
colleague and worthy successor, SM Stirling.
We discussed Anderson in relation to horror fiction here.
I own a copy of The King In Yellow by Robert W. Chambers although I have never read it. Stirling acknowledges this work as a source for his The Sea Peoples. One story in The King... is entitled "The Demoiselle D'Ys" so I will have to ascertain whether this Demoiselle is in any way related to Poul and Karen Anderson's King of Ys.
Since The King... is copyright 1895 but its action starts in 1920, it reminds me of ERB's few works that are set later in the twentieth century than they were written.
A perennial source of illumination is books not yet read.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Altho I have read some horror and even like some stories of that kind, horror is not one of my favorite literary genres. I am averse to tales of torture, pain, agony, sadism, etc. My preference is that horror story should have something more in them besides the qualities I listed. Such as a search for truth or characters coping with or even triumphing over adversity.
Sean
Sean:
I recommend some of the works of William Hope Hodgson for horror that might be more to your taste. The Boats of the Glen Carrig, for instance, is about survivors of a shipwreck encountering terrifying monsters in and around what's evidently the Sargasso Sea. The preface makes clear that the narrator survived and prospered, so THERE is a character "triumphing over adversity." The ingenuity and determination shown by the heroes, including the narrator, could make for a thrilling movie, although with the globe so well explored, the horrors the sailors found are no longer especially credible.
H.P. Lovecraft reviewed The Boats of the Glen Carrig with the words, "Few can equal Hodgson in adumbrating the nearness of nameless forces and monstrous besieging entities through casual hints and details ... in Glen Carrig there is vast power in the suggestion of lurking worlds and beings behind the ordinary surface of life."
Lovecraft also praised Hodgson's The House on the Borderland in high terms. The Ghost Pirates is masterfully spooky. I can't personally speak about Hodgson's tales of occult detective Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder yet, but I hear good things about them. Of note: sometimes in the Carnacki stories the supernatural is real; sometimes it's a hoax ... and then there's the story in which a terrified hoaxer screams at the end that the latest ghostly manifestation is NOT his doing.
Kaor, DAVID!
I agree, Hodgson's THE BOATS OF THE GLEN CARRIG would indeed be the kind of horror story more to my taste. And the other Hodgson works you listed also seem interesting and worth reading. Many thanks!
Sean
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