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The Scarlet Gospels by Clive Barker. Possibly the most disappointing book I have ever read cover to cover. Jarring genre shift from Hellbound Heart—going from straight up horror to goofy dark fantasy—and it really, truly, feels phoned in.

Barker's capable of so much more. Hope he's doing alright. Most reviews I've seen have been positive, so maybe I'm just not the audience for this novel.

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I finished it a couple of weeks ago. I bought it even though I was afraid it would be rather cheesy and it turned out to be much worse. I don't know what I disliked more, the characters for whom "flat" is by far not the appropriate term, the dialogue which reads as if a 16-year-old lacking any imagination attempted to write hardboilded fiction or the total absence of artistic (and linguistic) vision when the trip through hell is described (which feels as if you are playing a shooter in God mode). Seriously, I'm wondering what happened to Clive Barker. :o

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Just finished Scarlet Gospels. I agree with the previous posters ...

Wow! What a dud! I had high expectations, but even with low expectations, those would have still been too high. What a disappointment. This wouldn't even have made a good episode of Law & Order. Boo!

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Finishing GBH by Ted Lewis. Read this on a recommendation from a friend. I didn't have high hopes but boy was I wrong! Great dark and gloomy British crime novel.

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I need to get this novel, as I watched the film on YouTube recently. (Don't bother looking for it. It's been removed.)

At present I'm reading Across the Nightingale Floor by Liam Hearn. It has the magical readability of a child's fairy story, while being anything but that. I did wonder if Liam Hearn was descended from Lafcadio Hearn - but it's actually the pseudonym of Gillian Rubinstein. Reading an interview on the Liam Hearn site I found a reference to Kaneto Shindo's The Black Cats from the Grove which I must track down, as I love Asian cinema and that director's work... regrettably I can't say I know enough of it or the culture to write knowledgeably about either. But it does fascinate.

Apologies for wandering far off topic and not realizing how long this thread was. Unfortunately I doubt if any of the books I've finished recently would be of much interest here, as they've been mostly by Leslie Charteris and Edgar Wallace... even if I did find myself re-evaluating those authors.

These two books are also curiously intriguing, for some reason.

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Star Maker by William Olaf Stapledon. My gawd! what a book! It must be the most tremendous book ever written and rivals Lovecraft, Hodgson, and Smith in its cosmic imagination, scope, and vision (albeit without the soul-destroying terrors). Its closest analogue, in fusing persistent philosophy with interplanetary adventure, would be A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay, but on a much more grander scale. I have not read Stapledon's Laft and First Men, which is roughly similar to Lovecraft's The Shadow Out of Time.

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I read Star Maker a couple of years ago, recall enjoying it very much. That's a cooler-looking cover than the edition that I read.

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I have that version too but haven't read it yet.

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Eyes Of The Overworld (2/4 in Dying Earth sequence) by Jack Vance.

This is a huge improvement over the previous book, a better adventure and so much more happens.
It's not a continuation although one character from Dying Earth is mentioned a few times. Eyes Of The Overworld has humour as a major component whereas Dying Earth only had several funny moments. Dying Earth was partially linked short stories about different characters but this is just one long story following one man.

Cugel The Clever seems to me a clear replacement for Liane The Wayfarer (easily the most fun character in the previous book); initially I thought Cugel was an anti-hero but he's every bit the horrible villain Liane was; I was genuinely shocked at how nasty Cugel could be, especially when he murders someone for a harmless prank, and shows he's probably not above sexual harassment.
The main pleasure of the book for me was the showy conversations (it's hard not to want to talk like this and start referring to food as "viands") and Cugel's hilariously pompous indignation and claims to innocence when he is accused of crimes he has actually committed. He wrongs so many people in a spectacular fashion.

A couple of problems though:
(1) The scene in which Voynod assumes Cugel killed one of the pilgrims made no sense, and then immediately after Cugel unconvincingly succeeds in lying to Voynod that the salve he is trading is magic. It's a weak setup for later scenes to happen.
(2) Vance is well known for his impressive visual descriptions (particularly good at countryside and skies) but just like in the previous book, I found a lot of the descriptions confusing, awkward or ill fitting.
When the disembodied legs that support Derwe Coreme's boat are first mentioned, there is no mention of their arms, but when the arms grab at people they are jarringly introduced as if we already knew about them.
Cugel's rope climb down from the huge pillar was seemingly impossible to visualise correctly from the text.
Many of the clothes, furnishings, creatures and various other things are described in a frustratingly plain or unsatisfying manner when compared to the often lovely settings, sights and generally extravagant manner of the story. This is my biggest complaint.

But I generally had a good time with this book and the strengths outweigh my disappointments.

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The Room Beyond by Ramsey Campbell. I purchased Holes for Faces and that story is the first and only one I've read so far. Just from that short story alone, I think Campbell's stature is unquestionably justified.

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?

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I completed reading Stapledon's Last and First Men, certainly a tremendous feat in cosmic imagination. Unlike Lovecraft, Hodgson, Sterling, and Smith, Stapledon is not a poet transcribing the faery and ethereal wonders and demoniac horrors of an unknowable cosmos; he is not concerned with ''the terrors that underlie many things''; rather, he is an historian of sorts charting down the rises and falls of eighteen different species of men in the far future, and eventually all life in this universe. For unity of philosophy and imaginative vision, Stapledon is now another idol of mine.
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I reread a lot of Hellboy: Seed of Destruction, Darkness Calls, The Wild Hunt, The Storm, The Fury, Hellboy in Hell and The Midnight Circus, some short stories, like The Mole and An Unmarked Grave, plus Baltimore, Frankenstein Underground and The Amazing Screw-On Head, also by Mike Mignola. Hellboy is slowly becoming my favorite comic book.

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I enjoy Mignola's work a lot. I am also a fan of Richard Corben. They teamed up for some Hellboy stories some years back. I tracked more than a few of them down. A couple of favorites are "The Crooked Man" mini series and the one shot "Hellboy in Mexico".

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"KL A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps."

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Yester-day I finally finished reading William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land. It was a very tough book to read, with the unsuccessful attempt at archaic language, the parasitic, clinging sentimentality and romance, and the general repetition and tedium (quite literally every paragraph begins with ''and''); but in spite of this, it remains one of the most powerful and daring books ever written: the imagery of a black, sunless Earth with the majority of mankind ensconced in a mighty pyramid whilst outside, in the vast, rock-accursed dead world, monstrous and evil entities and forces -- from bestial Horrors perhaps developed from terrestrial life and Silent Ones and stupendous Watchers, living mountains of pure evil, of wholly alien dimensions -- prowl the starless, primeval landscape, awaiting to invade the pyramid, remains unrivalled in all art.
Hodgson, of course, is no prose stylist or poet in the league of Machen, Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Dunsany, Bruno Schulz, or Poe; but, rather like Algernon Blackwood, Olaf Stapledon, and David Lindsay, his strength rests on his imagination, ideas, and vision as opposed to his writing style. Though he did not discover him until 1934, I feel that Hodgson was Lovecraft's true predecessor. Machen and Blackwood's weird work was often diluted by their mysticism, and Poe often concentrated on horrors of a terrestrial nature; Hodgson, on the other hand, had a remarkably similar vision to Lovecraft: both were fascinated by the latent supernatural evil in things, often from the stars or from the sea; both supposed that anything ab-human or supernatural must essentially be antagonistic towards man; both conceived of a quasi-mythology that fused the trappings of occultism with science; and both were atheists (so I have read elsewhere). Other than The Great God Pan and The Willows, there is nothing more proto-Lovecraftian than The House on the Borderland, with its haunted, desolate region as a focal point for ultramundane horrors, its indifferent, ancient gods ''that underlie many things'', and its cosmic, epic visions of time, space, and the universe collapsing into infinite nothingness. I also feel that Hodgson's entities -- from monstrous fungi to sea monsters to vast terrors from the stars and beyond -- are the most menacing and chilling in weird literature, for Hodgson manages to preserve their awful mystery and cold nature whilst still having them engage in human conflict. Of course, these are mere opinions. And as I have said before, though his prose leaves a lot to be desired, one can see that through his fascinating, striking, and original ideas, Hodgson was a poet indeed.

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I actually really like the romance (although some of the attitudes about relationships can get annoying) but the repetition is indeed punishing.

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I recently dug this book out of storage and ended up reading it. The Silence of the Body by Guido Ceronetti.

I don't remember Ligotti mentioning him, but I read somewhere that Cioran liked him and cited him in his book Anathemas and Admirations. There have also been a few mentions of him here at TLO.

The book contains darker musings on the body. It is aphoristic like Cioran's work. It also contains thoughts from others that resonated with the author, not unlike some of CATHR. Some of TL's work touches upon the intersection of physical pain and illness with thought. I found this book worthwhile.

Here are a few passages:

"Do faces belong to the body? Sometimes I have my doubts. They seem to lead independent lives, meeting each other unburdened by the rest of the body. Faces come from the demonic and from the angelic, from the depths and from the heights; there rest is merely terrestrial."

"We throw into these vessels-all of the soul's excretions, all the minds diseases, all of the blackness of life-and we call it love. And if this poison of ours does not turn into a being that resembles us, we feel imperfect, mortal, helpless."

"To keep us from seeing in the active forces of destruction the God whom we seek and love, a fiction like Satan is extremely convenient, for it screens the unbearable truth."

"We are hovels and ratholes, inhabited by an occult face that bears no resemblance to us."

From a description of Parkinson's disease: "The face is often fixed and rigid, and when the patient hints at a smile, he or she does in a persistent manner." Nothing should last longer than the second required by its need to exist: a smile that persists instantly becomes a lugubrious grimace. All pointless perdurance, even without rigidity or trembling, is Parkinson's."

Searching around the net for more work by Cernotti I found this interesting photo.

Guido Ceronetti

Biographical shard: Ceronetti (1927- ) is co-founder of the Teatro dei sensibili, a traveling marionette theater. Here he is with his actors.


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Le Horla et autres contes d'angoisse by Maupassant, first volume of his horror short stories. Maupassant's tales are brutal, hallucinatory and profoundly pessimist. I find his works comparable to Bierce or Aickman and just as good.

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