The Age of Decayed Futurity

The Age of Decayed Futurity
Author: Mark Samuels
Publisher:
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2020-08
Genre:
ISBN: 9781614983033

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For the past two decades, British author Mark Samuels has written some of the most vibrant and challenging weird fiction of any contemporary writer. But his work--collected in such volumes as The White Hands and Other Weird Tales (2003), The Man Who Collected Machen (2010), and Written in Darkness (2014)--has by and large appeared in limited editions not widely distributed in the United States. This volume features seventeen of Samuels's best weird stories. Several display his fascination with technology, advertising, and urban horror, as in "Apartment 205" and the title story. Other tales speak of the writing of weird fiction itself as a potentially hazardous and supernatural enterprise, as in "The White Hands" and "Vrolyck." In several of his lengthier narratives--notably "The Gentleman from Mexico" and "The Crimson Fog"--Samuels draws upon H. P. Lovecraft's pseudomythology to venture into realms of cosmic horror. "The Black Mould" and "My World Has No Memories" are distinctively existential tales of undeniable potency. Mark Samuels is one of the pioneering weird writers of today, and this selection makes plain why he has few rivals in the portrayal of the horrors that are unique to our troubled age.

The Man who Collected Machen

The Man who Collected Machen
Author: Mark Samuels
Publisher: Chomu Press
Total Pages: 164
Release: 2011
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781907681059

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"Cryptic and potent languages, bizarre cults, mysteries that span the gulf between life and death, occult influences that reverberate through history like a dying echo, irresistible cosmic decay, forces of nightmare that distort reality itself, gateways to worlds where esoteric knowledge rots the future. Here is a collection of tales that forms a veritable Rosetta Stone for scholars of cosmic wonder and terror"--Page 4 of cover.

Horror Quarterly

Horror Quarterly
Author: Mike Philbin
Publisher: Lulu.com
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2005-10
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1411654099

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Body Horror; Fuck Horror; Blood Horror - these were the extreme + bizarro subjects of the first three issues of online zine HORROR QUARTERLY. In this paperback edition, there'll be a best article, best interview, best 'metal', five of the best stories and the classic three-part article from Quentin S Crisp exploring Japanese Horror to end each issue.

Sin and Ashes

Sin and Ashes
Author: Joseph S. Pulver
Publisher:
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2010-01-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780984480241

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"Some writers one admires and others make one want to do as they do, or try. For me, Joe Pulver is of the latter type. His imagination is so vile so much of the time that it makes me giggle with amazement. And the prose so deadly visionary. I'm grateful that the pieces in this collection are those of a fellow horror writer who has raised the ante on what it means to be such a creature." -- Thomas Ligotti on _Blood Will Have Its Season_ by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. The world of Joe Pulver's dreams and nightmares is a world of grim violence and death but also of strange beauty and wonder. In stories that read like poems and poems that read like incantations, Pulver weaves a sorcerer's spell of language-tough, gritty, cheerless, but always evocative, hypnotizing, intoxicating-that lays bare the fragility of human beings on the edge of the abyss, looking down at the depths and looking up at the boundless cosmos. H. P. Lovecraft, Robert W. Chambers, and other writers of terror and the supernatural are Pulver's touchstones, but his riffs on their tales are the work of a master craftsman who recognizes the emotive value of every sentence, phrase, and word. A poet in every sense of the word, Pulver sees the world and the cosmos as a cauldron of death and carnage but also a platform for triumph and redemption. In these stories, sketches, prose-poems, and vignettes, Pulver evokes the wild beauty of terror in a manner that few can match. Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. is the acclaimed author of the Lovecraftian novel _Nightmare's Disciple_, and he has written many short stories that have appeared in magazines and anthologies. His first short story collection, _Blood Will Have Its Season_ (2009), was published to wide acclaim.

Edgar Allan Poe The Dover Reader

Edgar Allan Poe The Dover Reader
Author: Poe, Edgar Allan
Publisher: Courier Corporation
Total Pages: 548
Release: 2014-12-17
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 048679119X

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The father of the detective novel and an innovator in American Gothic fiction, Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) made his living as America's first great literary critic. Today he is best remembered for his short stories and poems, haunting works of horror and mystery that remain popular around the world. This anthology presents Poe's finest works in a rich selection of poetry and prose that features his only complete novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Short stories include "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Purloined Letter," "The Tell-Tale Heart," and more than a dozen others. In addition to a few selections of Poe's nonfiction writing, the compilation offers "The Conqueror Worm," "Annabel Lee," "The Raven," and many other memorable poems.

The Time Machine illustrated

The Time Machine illustrated
Author: H. G. Wells
Publisher: BoD - Books on Demand
Total Pages: 114
Release: 2022-06-22
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 2384370014

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The Time Machine by H. G. Wells is a science fiction classic, which lends itself well to visualization. This version, illustrated by Yoann Laurent-Rouault, an illustrator master who graduated from the Beaux-Arts, and published in the international literary collection Memoria Books, is a reference on the time travel theme. Wells transports us in the year 802 701, in a society made up of the “Elois”, who live peacefully in a kind of big Garden of Eden, eating fruits and sleeping high up, while underground lives another species, also descending from men, the “Morlocks”, who do not stand the light anymore, living in the dark for too long now. At night, they return to the surface, going back up by the wells, in order to kidnap some Elois that they eat ; these last became livestock unknowingly. In The Time Machine, made into a movie several times, the last of them in 2002 by Simon Wells, the great-grandson of H. G. Wells, time is both a pretext to move the class struggle and warn... and also, in a way, a full character, who fascinates, arbitrates, transcends... The illustrations come to reinforce the time travel and provide a new experience to the reader.

Witch-Cult Abbey

Witch-Cult Abbey
Author: Mark Samuels
Publisher:
Total Pages: 162
Release: 2021-10-31
Genre:
ISBN: 9781614983521

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When, in 1940, Saul Prior receives a letter from Lady Caroline Degabaston to catalogue the library of Thool Abbey in Hertfordshire, he jumps at the chance. But he soon finds himself in a realm that seems cut off from the real world. In the cryptic fastnesses of the abbey, Prior is beset by bizarre dreams and seems incapable of leaving the place. Lady Caroline proves to be a baleful and mysterious presence, and Prior is mired in a landscape that mingles Gothic terror and surrealism. The actual books that Prior is tasked with cataloguing are themselves a farrago of occultism, psychological aberration, and cosmic horror. And when other presences manifest themselves in and around the castle, Prior knows that he has stumbled into an adventure that is unlikely to end short of death or madness. Mark Samuels has knitted together many of the themes that appear in his previous work into a grand synthesis of dread and awe. Impeccably written, with careful attention to historical detail and the portrayal of the strange characters he puts on stage, Witch-Cult Abbey is a triumph of supernatural terror.

The Great Romance

The Great Romance
Author: Inhabitant
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2008-01-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0803259964

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The Great Romance, a two-volume novella published under the pseudonym “The Inhabitant,” was one of the outstanding late nineteenth-century works of utopian science fiction. Volume 1 was a possible model for Edward Bellamy’s phenomenally successful Looking Backward, while volume 2 was assumed lost for over a century until uncovered in the Hocken Library in Dunedin, New Zealand. Together these volumes represent a remarkable piece of science fiction writing as they proffer one of the first serious considerations of the colonization of other planets and the impact of human beings on an alien culture. Here, for the first time, readers encounter descriptions of spacesuits and airlocks, space shuttles and planetary rovers, interplanetary colonization and cross-species miscegenation. Behind these genre-defining elements is the story of John Hope, who, by means of a sleeping elixir, awakes to a utopian community in a distant future—a “kingdom of thought” where the struggle for existence has been eliminated and humanity operates under an unwritten law of civility and harmony, aided by telekinesis that inerrantly reveals all wrong-doers. Since only two of the probably three volumes are extant, the tale ends with a chilling cliffhanger. In his introduction Dominic Alessio discusses the cutting-edge aspects of this work and its significance in both the realm of science fiction and the history and culture of its day.

Rootedness

Rootedness
Author: Christy Wampole
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2016-04-06
Genre: Education
ISBN: 022631765X

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Roots are good to think with indeed most of us use them as a metaphor every day. A root can signify the hiddenness of our beginnings, or, in its bifurcating structure, the various possibilities in the life of an individual or a collective. This book looks at rootedness as a metaphor for the genealogical origins of people and their attachment to place and how this metaphor transformed so rapidly in twentieth-century Europe. Christy Wampole s case study is France, with its contradictory legacies of Enlightenment universalism, anti-Semitism, and colonialism. At one time, French nationalist rhetoric portrayed the Jews as unrooted and thus unrighteous people. After the two world wars, the root metaphor figured in the new French philosophy (notably Deleuze and Guattari). And recently, Caribbean thinkers in Haiti, Guadeloupe, and Martinique have debated whether their roots were in Africa, France, the Caribbean, or in some pan-national network that could not be identified on a map. Walpole argues that while the metaphor was perhaps once useful in the establishment of communities and identities, that usefulness has expired. The longer we remain attached to the figure of rootedness, the more discord it sows. Giving up on the metaphor of rootedness, Wampole urges, allows us to see at last that we are in fact unbound by the land we inhabit."