Weird Fiction discussion

We read this book as our March 2022 group read because fellow member Thom Brannan nominated it and no one else nominated another book. It therefore won the poll by a 100% landslide.

Thom, would you like to lead this month's group discussion about our book? Except for your mentions of it, I have never heard of it. I think all of us would gain from having someone as well versed on the charms of this book as you leading the discussion. There's really nothing to leading a book discussion. You just make some introductory comments about the book, what makes it Weird Fiction, what makes it worth reading, why you recommended it, etc. As people comment on the book, you can add to their comment with one of your own, or not, as you see fit. That's it.

I found this interesting short article about our author: https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/au...

We're starting this book on Tuesday March 1. I'm getting an early start changing our group pages and getting topics up and running this month because I will be travelling from the southeast to the southwest part of the U.S.A. on March 1 and will be too busy to start reading until about March 8.

This book is not expensive! On Kindle it's available for just $2.99. I'm buying a used paperback for less than $8 (including shipping and tax). I really like the cool, psychedelic cover, shown on this month's masthead.

LANDSLIDE~!!!11

Zod Wallop is hands-down my favorite book by William Browning Spencer. It's weird fiction in the new vein, a mix of horror and science fantasy, and it's told in a variety of flavors as is required for the story, from humorous whimsy to down-your-throat terror, and it's all done in William Browning Spencer's most authentic of voices. (He'll make you feel it.)

I always recommend this to fans of HPL's work and themes, specifically where they intersect with the "forbidden tome" trope, because the book in this work is a children's book, and the story behind it is heart-wrenching.

(Here's something to tell you what kind of fellow WBS is, too. I met with him once over coffee and hot chocolate in North Austin, and he gave me some very good pointers on how he writes, and then he gave me permission to use The Despicable Quest, which is a fictional book in one of this other novels, as a Forbidden Tome in my own UF series.)

In any case, I'm looking forward to seeing what you think of the book, as I'm a big fan. I loved it when I initially read it, and now that I'm a father, I've re-read it and love it even harder.

I am really looking forward to this. I think there might be a few short stories this author has available I can locate and read for free while I am waiting for the book to arrive. To see if I like his style. Sure enough. Wohoo! Found one, "The Halfway House at the Heart of Darkness" here: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/spen.... Sounds like it might be a riff on the Joseph Conrad short story, which luckily for me I've already read once or thrice. Literature teachers love to assign this Conrad story, far from his best, but hey.

I have been trying to read Zod Wallop these past ten days or so and managed to get up to page 73. I have been reluctant to comment on this book because as moderator I am sort of supposed to encourage the month's group read, but I just have not been able to get into this story. I can't even really say why. It's not badly written; it has characters, two story lines that merge cleverly early on. But I still don't really understand what the problem is or why we as the reader should care about what is being written. A lot of characters seem to have two names. Either that, or there are a lot of characters. I think I'm going to have to put this one down for now. I can't even review it since I don't feel I really understand it.

Okay. Rereading Thom's comment above about the book containing "terror" got me to wondering if we could possibly be reading the same book. So I sat down and gave it another try; I read those 72 pages in one sitting this time. It's a much better story when read that way. In fact, I don't think it can be read piecemeal. There are too many details to track that are needed in mind as the story progresses for the story to make sense if key ones are forgotten.

I still think introducing 28 characters in the first 72 pages, some of them with two different names, asks an awful lot of the reader. But now I am making sense of the plot. The protagonist is Harry Gainesborough, author of the fictional version of Zod Wallop. A fictional fantasy world is trying to intrude itself on the real world, perhaps, or several characters are in collective insanity. Harry has recovered and emerged from the insane asylum some of his friends still live in, but feels himself being drawn under again by these friends as they re-enter his life. Harry is being drawn back into the horror fantasy world, or is it more real than Harry realizes?

It's much more enjoyable this time now that I am reading this book in large chunks in one sitting.

Most of the terror comes later, after escalation.

Did you already twig as to why the characters have two names?

I suspect they have a name in the real world and a different but corresponding name in the fantasy world that is beginning to intrude.

Finished. My review, such as it is: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...