| Author | Message | ||
     Matt_cowan (Matt_cowan) Username: Matt_cowan Registered: 04-2008 Posted From: 68.249.107.193 |
Someone posted this in another Message Board and I found it very interesting. It's a letter to someone from M.R. James where he mentions his thoughts on other horror writers of the time. I'm a huge fan of James and thought others here might enjoy it. I plan on writing my next article for Vintage Horror on him (it will be my second one on James). Anyway here is the link: http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~pardos/ArchiveMRJLetter.html | ||
| Mark_lynch (Mark_lynch) Username: Mark_lynch Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 89.168.131.22 |
Ha. That's brilliant. Very nice one, Matt. | ||
| Huw (Huw) Username: Huw Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 218.168.186.2 |
I remember that article - it appeared in Ash-Tree's James collection A Pleasing Terror. I particularly liked the following quote from MRJ: '... by one H.P. Lovecraft, whose style is of the most offensive. He uses the word 'cosmic' about 24 times.' Poor old Lovecraft. Blackwood didn't return the praise HPL heaped upon his work either. I don't know whether Machen ever read anything by him, but I'd expect he would have seen more of worth in Lovecraft. He did write a shining review of some of Clark Ashton Smith's work, after all. | ||
| Stephen Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 82.4.20.22 |
Where can I get my hands on some Clark Ashton Smith material? I keep hearing his name, have a huge horror library and only two short stories of his among it: 'The Return Of The Sorcerer' and 'Ubbo-Sathla'. I find M.R. James a bit snobbish in his opinion of other genre writers but then I suppose he could afford to be... | ||
| Huw (Huw) Username: Huw Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 218.168.186.2 |
Stephen, there's a big paperback omnibus in the UK called The Emperor of Dreams - it's part of Gollancz's 'Fantasy Masterworks' series. I don't know if it is still in print. There are also the original Arkham House collections, of course, but they are scarce and mostly very expensive. There were various paperbacks editions reissued by Ballantine and Panther in the 1970s, and more recently the Collected Fantasies series published by Night Shade. | ||
| Mick Curtis (Mick) Username: Mick Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.177.119.86 |
I had all the Panther collections (bought new!) but I think they are either in the garage or in that huge library in the sky. | ||
| Huw (Huw) Username: Huw Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 218.168.186.24 |
Necronomicon Press brought out a lot of good CAS stuff, too. | ||
| Tom_alaerts (Tom_alaerts) Username: Tom_alaerts Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 80.201.100.29 |
You can also read a number of his stories online. And that's not a bad idea for trying CAS as his prose is not for everyone. Here, for example are two that I have fond memories of: "The seed in the sepulchre": http://tinyurl.com/o69or6 "The dweller in the gulf": http://tinyurl.com/q88r6l | ||
| Huw (Huw) Username: Huw Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 218.168.188.26 |
I find his work more enjoyable and effective when read in small doses - a few stories or poems, say, at a time. There's something intoxicating about his writing, and I wouldn't want to overdose on it (at least, not too often). | ||
| Matt_cowan (Matt_cowan) Username: Matt_cowan Registered: 04-2008 Posted From: 68.249.107.193 |
I must admit to having difficulty reading Clark Ashton Smith, which is odd because I think I should enjoy him. It is something about his prose style that I find tough to stick with. A friend bought me a hardback collection of his and I still haven't been able to get through any of the stories I've tried so far. | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 91.110.212.63 |
Smith isn't quite the master of prose his strongest enthusiasts claim. His openings (especially in the later stories) are often terrible, and his prose can be turgid and self-consciously archaic. He really needed a good editor – someone who would fine him every time he used the word 'haply', for a start. His story endings, however, are something else again. When he gets into his stride there's an 'all bets are off' Gothic intensity and bleakness to his work that is breathtaking. Some powerful eroticism as well. My Smith faves include 'The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis', 'A Night in Malneant', 'The Weaver in the Vault', 'The Death of Ilalotha', 'The Last Hieroglyph' and 'The Planet of the Dead'. | ||
| Hubert (Hubert) Username: Hubert Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 78.22.231.93 |
I first read him in translation and discovering the real Smith when I bought the Arkham omnibus was an unsettling experience. But I've found that reading big doses of CAS actually helps to assimilate those lengthty slabs of 'florid' prose better. His language in "Yo-Vombis", "Vulthoom" and quite a few other tales is pretty straightforward. | ||
| Ramsey Campbell (Ramsey) Username: Ramsey Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 195.93.21.74 |
To return to the M. R. James letter - it has only just occurred to me to wonder if he was hostile to the essay because HPL pretty well dismissed James's favourite ghost story writer. | ||
| Huw (Huw) Username: Huw Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 218.168.178.142 |
It's been a while since I read Supernatural Horror in Literature, but I recall being surprised that Lovecraft had nothing much to say about Le Fanu. Hoffmann was dismissed in a sentence, too - if I remember correctly, his fiction was not sufficiently 'cosmic' for HPL. | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 217.37.199.45 |
As an assessment of the field by a leading writer, James' letter is painfully dull and bureaucratic. It reminds me of Larkin on the subject of poetry: you'd never imagine it was something he was any good at himself. Lovecraft was an avid fan as well as a writer, which James clearly finds incomprehensible. | ||
| Hubert (Hubert) Username: Hubert Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 78.22.231.93 |
In his biography Joshi mentions Le Fanu only once ("Lovecraft never read much of it and did not like what he did read") while E.T.A. Hoffmann remains conspicuously absent. | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 91.110.139.161 |
Also, Wells is hardly mentioned where you would expect at least a chapter on him as the real source of most of the ideas Lovecraft is known for. I was quite upset when I read THE WAR OF THE WORLDS and realised that every critic who had credited Lovecraft with inventing cosmic horror in the 1920s had got the wrong author, the wrong decade and the wrong country. | ||
| Stephen Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 145.229.156.40 |
Interesting point... I'm a huge admirer of H.G. Wells and consider him underrated as a writer of short horror stories. 'Pollock And The Porroh Man' is a particular favourite that inspired many an EC tale. As far as inventing cosmic horror goes his aliens were more physically tangible (to the point of succumbing to the common cold) compared with the demonic trans-dimensional alien beings of Lovecraft. So between them I suppose they covered all the bases of 'aliens' as something malign that was coming to get us. |