Weird Fiction discussion

November's group read is The Prisoner Of Carcosa & More Tales Of The Bizarre by Mark McLaughlin. So, how did I arrive at this decision when there was a three-way tie in the polls, you ask? Oh the dilemnas you folks foist upon your already hard-working moderator.

The answer is easy. I decided the matter by tie break! I made GoodReads itself the final arbiter, to be precise, their rating system. This Body's Not Big Enough for Both of Us has a 3.82 rating, very respectable; the book my vote went to--How the West Was Weird--has a 3.86 rating. Looking good! Finally, this month's winner has a 4.00. Admittedly, that's on the basis of only two ratings. Is there some way I can lower that rating so that my book wins? Well, if one of those ratings was a five by the author, out it would go, only to be recalculated manually by yours truly. But neither of the two ratings are author ratings. The author commented on his work, sure, however he was modest enough (to his credit) not to assign a star rating to himself. The two reviews look legit to me. So the 4.0 rating stands and we have a winner. Ding, ding, ding.

Besides, I sort of like that this book has heretofore only two ratings. Our group will no doubt more than triple that total by the end of next month if only the four who voted for the book rate it. Besides, I am going to read this book too. It really looks interesting, judging mostly by the cover. Besides I know absolutely nothing about Mark McLaughlin. What a way to discover a new author!

Oh, one more thing to mention. Before allowing this book to become our group read, I went to the Amazon "Look Inside" feature and read what the author made available there to make sure this book was up to our lofty literary standard. In the past, some lemons have been chosen in some groups when there are next to no ratings like this. I was pleased by what I read. The book appears well written indeed. So I think we are in for a treat rather than a trick right after October 31.

Speaking of overly simplistic material.... I read the first story in this collection last night. It was okay, but read a lot like fan fiction. The tone was very Lovecraft admiring, but the writing was fourth grade textbook in terms of complexity or originality. The book is well-edited and has no English mistakes, but there's no bells and whistles to be seen, no wow factor, neither in the writing style or the plot. Hope we have more than Lovecraft fan boy writing in their other stories.

You know, *somehow* the author's name rings a bell, like we read a story by him some time last year or something. Of course my memory is generally awful and I get confused a lot...
Just went and checked - there was a McNaughton in our June (?) read The Book of Cthulhu - maybe that's where I got confused.

Brian McNaughton He had a story in another of our group reads The Red Brain: Great Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos which did not impress me that much. Too light (see my review of that book). I have not got to his story in The Book of Cthulhu yet, but I will.

The first story of the book, "“Horrors Of The Trash Island”, is listed as having been written by both Mark McLaughlin and Michael Sheehan Jr. It was interesting, but not impressive. Two men take a sailboat out to the coordinates Lovecraft gave for R'lyeh (in the south Pacific) to find Cthulhu. What they found was rather absurd. I was concerned about writing abilities upon reading it. Three stars.

The second story, "You Shall Have This Delicacy”, listed as being by Mark McLaughlin alone, was so much better written I can't believe it was the same person. My concerns about writer ability vanish. While the ending didn't satisfy, this was a strong 4-star story nevertheless, leaving me wanting to read more of this protagonist for sure. Now I'm looking forward to the next story. This story is a perfect read for Halloween, by the way. It has one of the creepiest witches I've ever read!

I took a break to read an old Libertarian science fiction novel I had lying around. Time to pick these stories back up.

The third story, "Yuletide Mementoes: A Tale of Lovecraftian Horror" by both authors. This is the best story so far. A grand-uncle geologist makes a trip to Antarctica, discovers something, and brings back two chests never opened. He passes and years later his descendant decides to finally open the trunks in the attic. I love how shoggoths and Lovecraft's Elder Things made their way into this story and how they were accounted for. This was a really scary, imaginative tale with a strong ending.

The fourth story, "Tell Your Secrets to the Slime," was weird science fiction, and not for me. It was too much first person random narration. I did this, went there, and saw this. Then I went there and saw this. And so on and so on. It's loosely structured on the protagonist's mommy issues, but I didn't find it at all compelling. Three stars, if I round up. It was SF and truly contained elements of weird fiction, after all, meaning not all is explained. I imagine others in our group might like this story more.

The first four stories make the first 60% of the collection. There's three more to go. These stories are really interesting and varied. I have no idea what to expect of these last three: "Diabolical Entities and How to Deal with Them," "Venus," and "The Prisoner of Carcosa."

I finished my reading of this month's group read and was sure glad for the experience. My review may be found here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show....

There is one strange overlap between these stories and "The Dunwich Horror" that we are reading in the Lovecraft group this month. In my favorite story of this collection, "Yuletide Mementoes: A Tale of Lovecraftian Horror," Lovecraft's Elder Things features prominently. They are in the process of recreating themselves in McLaughlin's story in hopeful preparation of an upcoming invasion of our realm.

They were up to the same nasty stuff back in this 1929 Lovecraft novelette too, as this excerpt from "The Dunwich Horror" shows:

"Dr. Armitage slept, but was partly delirious the next day. He made no explanations to Hartwell, but in his calmer moments spoke of the imperative need of a long conference with Rice and Morgan. His wilder wanderings were very startling indeed, including frantic appeals that something in a boarded-up farmhouse be destroyed, and fantastic references to some plan for the extirpation of the entire human race and all animal and vegetable life from the earth by some terrible elder race of beings from another dimension. He would shout that the world was in danger, since the Elder Things wished to strip it and drag it away from the solar system and cosmos of matter into some other plane or phase of entity from which it had once fallen, vigintillions of aeons ago. At other times he would call for the dreaded Necronomicon and the Daemonolatreia of Remigius, in which he seemed hopeful of finding some formula to check the peril he conjured up.
“Stop them, stop them!” he would shout. “Those Whateleys meant to let them in, and the worst of all is left!

Man, I am soooo behind! Barely started yet and November's almost over.