Ten Steps to Thin Mountain

[The Silent One]

Anyone have CoC #68? Anyone have a spare? A spoiler-free-but-not-too-short annotation?

[The New Nonsense]

I own a copy. Ten Step to Thin Mountain is one of my favorites of Ligotti's short works. (It's very short. I believe it fits on one page if memory serves).
Without giving anything away, it's basically the narrator's gradual obsession with a place called "Thin Mountain". (It's really hard to tell more without ruining it) Whether it's a real place or a state of mind is for the reader to decide.
About a year ago I read "Ten Steps to Thin Mountain" at a poetry/short story reading. I doubt those in attendance were ever the same again. One of the other readers read "Guts" by Chuck Palahniuk. It's a story that's become legendary for making people ill. In fact one guy actually did run to the bathroom in the middle of the reading because he felt like he was going to throw up.

[yellowish haze]

Quote

While on his 2003 tour to promote his novel Diary, Palahniuk read to his audiences a short story titled Guts, a tale of accidents involving masturbation which appears in his book Haunted. It was reported that over 35 people fainted while listening to the readings (although it is possible that many of these incidents were staged by Palahniuk's fans for humorous effect).[7] Playboy magazine would later publish the story in their March 2004 issue; Palahniuk offered to let them publish another story along with it, but the publishers found the second work too disturbing. On his tour to promote in the summer of 2004, he read the story to audiences again, bringing the total amount of fainters up to 53, and later up to 60, while on tour to promote the softcover edition of Diary. The last fainting occurred on 25 September 2004, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Palahniuk is apparently not bothered by these incidents, which have not stopped fans from reading "Guts" or his other works.

Wow, I was waiting for this Haunted short story collection by Pallahniuk for a long while. I would like to check out Guts myself. Is it really that disturbing?

Ten Step to Thin Mountain sounds like a fine story to me. I wonder why it isn't included in the upcoming durtro collection!

P.S. Guts is available online: http://www.noops.org/guts.html

[waffles]

Quote Originally Posted by "s_wielh";p="2360
Wow, I was waiting for this Haunted short story collection by Pallahniuk for a long while. I would like to check out Guts myself. Is it really that disturbing?

P.S. Guts is available online: [url=http://www.noops.org/guts.html

http://www.noops.org/guts.html[/url]

Guts is absolutely absurd and hilarious. It's a gross-out on the level of John Waters. I didn't find it disturbing, but I can understand why people would walk out during readings.

I enjoyed the shorts stories in Haunted, but found the overall whole to be less than the sum of its parts.

Cheers1

Waff's

[ramonoski]

This is one of Ligotti's shortest pieces, but it's surprisingly good. Almost like a proto-Red Tower/Unholy City/Degenerate Little Town. I suppose that, in a way, most—if not all—of Ligotti's fiction ends up back in this place, its many manifestations, its many ways of it seeping back into what one could regard as "reality."

On a side note, re: "Guts", I would imagine the fainting spells happened because the story begins by asking the reader/listener to hold their breath and keep it there as long as the story lasts...

[MandyBrigwell]

Strange that 'Guts' and 'Thin Mountain' should end up together in a post. I always get to that line, "On Thin Mountain no one talks about Thin Mountain." and have to check dates to reassure myself Tom got there first...

Rule one about Thin Mountain: You do not talk about Thin Mountain.

It's rule two, too.