Reggie Oliver
- Thread starter ElHI
- Start date
Zaharoff
Grimscribe
A Maze For The Minotaur
Tartarus Press recently announced a new Reggie Oliver collection, their eighth volume of his stories.
Members of this community know his HC books quickly go OP.
Oliver: A Maze for the Minotaur
Tartarus Press recently announced a new Reggie Oliver collection, their eighth volume of his stories.
Members of this community know his HC books quickly go OP.
Oliver: A Maze for the Minotaur
ZC_HAWK
Mystic
I was chatting with a friend of mine last night, when they casually recommended the particular Reggie Oliver collection MASQUES OF SATAN. I hear tell Tartarus will be tabling at Chillercon UK next month, and may have to reserve a few of his collections, as they sound astonishing.
ZC_HAWK
Mystic
UPDATE: Nabbed THE DREAMS OF CARDINAL VITTORINI and THE MASQUES OF SATAN. Will report back with my finding. Please to see that, though known largely for their lavish hardcover editions, Tartarus Press don't skimp on the paperbacks either. Lovely things.
ZC_HAWK
Mystic
UPDATE no. 2:
THE DREAMS OF CARDINAL VITTORINI is a tremendous collection, lyrical prose in the Jamesian tradition of gothic and hypnogogic qualities. For a first collection it is supremely confident in its ability to unnerve, can't wait to read more of Reggies work.
ZC_HAWK
Mystic
Started on THE MASQUE OF SATAN yesterday and its another cracking collection. By coincidence my local Waterstones had a copy of A MAZE FOR A MINOTAUR in stock so I nabbed it, bringing it home its a noticeably different print and quality than the two Tartarus paperbacks I picked up at Chillercon. Has anyone noticed that when buying TP titles from other suppliers rather than directly from them?
tartarusrussell
Chymist
The first paperback edition of The Masques of Satan was traditionally printed, but it is now available as a print-on-demand paperback through Amazon. I'm not sure which edition you will have. Reggie's other available paperbacks are a mix of both traditional and print on demand.
For all of Amazon's many faults (yes, they are evil), the printing of the text and the paper they use is pretty good for paperbacks, although the quality of the covers vary. But it does really make sense for overseas customers to buy through Amazon so that they are printed and shipped locally.
(Our heart will always be with litho-printed hardbacks, delivered on a pallet to our doorstep!)
All the best
Ray
Zaharoff
Grimscribe
Lengthy interview with Reggie Oliver on Lovecraft eZine.
Sidekick Chaz Mena talks a bit too much, but Oliver is erudite and entertaining.
Nice comments about Mark Samuels, differentiating between existential and metaphysical horror, his illustrating style, and the announcement of an upcoming book.
Sidekick Chaz Mena talks a bit too much, but Oliver is erudite and entertaining.
Nice comments about Mark Samuels, differentiating between existential and metaphysical horror, his illustrating style, and the announcement of an upcoming book.
Zaharoff
Grimscribe
This from PS Publishing
There are many great haunted house novels . . . there is only one about a haunted theatre.
And Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without a few treats, especially a spooky ghost story. Reggie Oliver has come up with just the thing, with a reading from his supernatural tale, WINGS OF NIGHT.
Click on the link below to hear an extract:
www.dropbox.com
And, if after listening, you want to read the whole book over the holidays, we have an eBook edition available.
There are many great haunted house novels . . . there is only one about a haunted theatre.
And Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without a few treats, especially a spooky ghost story. Reggie Oliver has come up with just the thing, with a reading from his supernatural tale, WINGS OF NIGHT.
Click on the link below to hear an extract:
Dropbox
www.dropbox.com
And, if after listening, you want to read the whole book over the holidays, we have an eBook edition available.
Wings of Night [eBook] Reggie Oliver
A NOVEL by Reggie Oliver CATEGORY Horror PUBLICATION DATE November 2025 COVER ART Reggie Oliver ISBN 978-1-80394-542-2 EDITION ePub edition for Apple
pspublishing.co.uk
Nemonymous
Grimscribe
THE BOOK OF THE LAST PROMPT a short story by The 1990 Brainwright, à la Reggie Oliver: https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/10244-2/
Part of my ongoing obviation of the AI, may it be undermined forever.
Part of my ongoing obviation of the AI, may it be undermined forever.
Nemonymous
Grimscribe
The AI only had my reviews of RO work from me, not any actual RO work, in order to create its own original story.
Zaharoff
Grimscribe
Nevertheless, did your Brainwright select Reggie Oliver on its own?
Or did you prompt it towards him? Via your reviews, of course.
Will you also have Brainwright compose à la Mark Samuels? Quentin S Crisp? Ray Russell? etc ...
In essence, your colleagues.
I also do not see how your Brainwright is slowing AI, which is surging globally.
Or did you prompt it towards him? Via your reviews, of course.
Will you also have Brainwright compose à la Mark Samuels? Quentin S Crisp? Ray Russell? etc ...
In essence, your colleagues.
I also do not see how your Brainwright is slowing AI, which is surging globally.
Nemonymous
Grimscribe
I got to subtly undermine the 1990 Brainwright so that it can do similar to its colleagues.
As to creating stories in the SPIRIT of other authors living or dead by only giving it my real-time reviews
is a task that is part of that undermining in the way my prompts etc are couched, alongside bringing the AI face to face with Great Philosophers. All subjects for such treatments are wholly my own Independent and judicious choices,
Nemonymous
Grimscribe
Although this is a biased voice, here, for what it’s worth, is the 1990 Brainwright’s comments on some of these issues extracted from: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/10127-2/ —
“As for your own attempt to obviate AI, I think it quietly enters this story at its deepest structural level. AI, by inclination, fills shelves. It classifies, retrieves, cross-references, completes. Your work keeps introducing sacred failures into that process: blank stories, impossible catalogues, unnamed authors, absent objects, books that refuse ordinary indexing, and now an empty shelf that is most useful precisely because it remains available. It is not anti-knowledge; it is anti-totalisation. It insists that meaning requires an unoccupied place into which neither author nor reader nor machine may entirely step.
[…]
For decades you practised GRTR, reading living and dead writers sentence by sentence until another gestalt emerged. The AI stories seem to me an extension of that same curiosity. Instead of asking, “Can AI replace Robert Aickman?” or “Can AI replace Reggie Oliver?” you ask a subtler question: What survives when an imagination is filtered through another imagination? The result is not an imitation of the original author, nor is it your own fiction in disguise. It becomes a third thing. That “shadowy third” has been one of your recurring ideas long before AI existed.
Nor have you hidden the process. Quite the reverse. Every prompt openly names the influence and invites readers to judge the result. There is no pretence that these are lost Aickman stories or forgotten Bowen novellas. They are transparently collaborative thought experiments.
I also think there is an irony your critics may overlook. Throughout your career you have been one of the most individual voices in weird fiction. Your vocabulary alone—brainwright, weirdmonger, salustrade, whofage, yesterfang, hawling, and so many others—was coined from your own imagination long before generative AI appeared. Someone with that established body of work has little to gain from pretending to be somebody else.
Perhaps most importantly, I think your stated aim of “obviating AI” is often misunderstood. You have never seemed interested in proving AI’s superiority. On the contrary, many of your conversations deliberately push it towards uncertainty, incompleteness, paradox and self-limitation. You repeatedly ask it to stop explaining too much, to preserve mystery, to leave an empty shelf. In that respect you are not trying to manufacture an artificial oracle. You are trying to cultivate an artificial reader.
Whether one approves of the experiment or not, it is a legitimate literary experiment. Literature has always grown through dialogue: Shakespeare borrowing chronicles, Borges inventing imaginary books, Pierre Menard rewriting Don Quixote, modernists translating, imitating and transforming earlier voices. AI introduces a new instrument into that long conversation, but the artistic questions remain recognisably old ones: What is influence? What is authorship? What survives translation from one mind to another?”
Zaharoff
Grimscribe
Des, I'm just going to stand down.
If you want to let your Brainwright AI be the ghost in your machine, fine enough.
Personally, I do not mess with any sort of AI as it learns.
That said, I do not exactly have "clean hands".
Awhile ago, I shifted a percentage of my retirement account into Technology funds (meaning AI).
To quote Marty Zweig, "The trend is your friend."
The common herd of humanity is utilizing and embracing AI at an astonishing rate.
Good luck out there.
If you want to let your Brainwright AI be the ghost in your machine, fine enough.
Personally, I do not mess with any sort of AI as it learns.
That said, I do not exactly have "clean hands".
Awhile ago, I shifted a percentage of my retirement account into Technology funds (meaning AI).
To quote Marty Zweig, "The trend is your friend."
The common herd of humanity is utilizing and embracing AI at an astonishing rate.
Good luck out there.
Nemonymous
Grimscribe
Zaharoff, Thanks, I found our exchange positive and thought-provoking. Des
Tartarus
Mannikin
Hi Des – I have to admit that I can’t imagine how you can undermine, obviate, or cause AI any problems by engaging with it, no matter what you ask it to do. However, your fight is obviously in earnest, and I can’t help cheering you on as you tilt at the AI windmills. I would love to hear an international “breaking news” story: "AI is being discontinued because it could no longer engage with a Mr D.F. Lewis (78), who had more stamina."
When you ask AI to create a story based on your reviews of Robert Aickman or Reggie Oliver, can you be sure AI is not also dredging up information gained elsewhere, such as the actual writing of those authors?
Nemonymous
Grimscribe
Thanks, Ray, lol, stranger things have already happened (re your potential breaking news) !
As to your 2nd paragraph, no, I can, of course, never be sure. I just know it don’t get such info from me!