| Author | Message | ||
     Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.129.20.239 |
I'm just reading this short again for the first time since the early eighties. Is it me or is it some of the creepiest writing King has ever done? He feels reigned in, touched by a sort of cool Englishness. And he does unease, and awe, both things he can sometimes (for me) find tricky. What a story - and what an antho this Dark Descent volume is proving. | ||
| Mick Curtis (Mick) Username: Mick Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.163.48.60 |
It's a great little story, and a favourite, although I've not read it for some time. I first came across it in an Arkham House collection - New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. | ||
| John_l_probert (John_l_probert) Username: John_l_probert Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 90.199.0.117 |
Me too! I read it with Carpenter's Prince of Darkness soundtrack playing in the background, which is well worth a try if you haven't | ||
| Griff (Griff) Username: Griff Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 195.93.21.100 |
Is that the collection with the thing from The Monolith on the cover? | ||
| Griff (Griff) Username: Griff Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 195.93.21.100 |
Crouch End was an excellent story. I can remember it vividly. I felt at the time King wrote it to prove he could write like Ramsey. Completely wrong but that was what I felt at the time. | ||
| John_l_probert (John_l_probert) Username: John_l_probert Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 90.199.0.117 |
I think the monolith cover is 'Tales from...', illustrating the Robert E Howard story. My copy of 'New Tales...' has a lady in suspenders screaming at a nasty thingy from a Brian Lumley story | ||
| Hubert (Hubert) Username: Hubert Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 78.22.224.127 |
I vaguely remember it was about a pit with something undescribable in it which was sloshing. This reminded me of the scene in Quatermass and the Pit where the haunted drill operator falls to the ground, which is opening up under him. Wasn't peter Straub living in Crouch End at the time? | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.129.20.239 |
I heard that. Apparently King and 'Tabby' got lost there once when they went to see him. Yes, the story is very Ramsey. Pity he never tried it again. | ||
| Mick Curtis (Mick) Username: Mick Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.163.48.60 |
Ok, it's covers time (with a lot of help from my trusty scanner):- Original "Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos" from 1969 -  Revamped version from 1990 -  New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (the one with Crouch End) from 1980 -  | ||
| Mick Curtis (Mick) Username: Mick Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.163.48.60 |
I think the first and third covers are best... | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.129.20.239 |
Is that Divers Hands or Oivers Hanos on that second one? | ||
| Mick Curtis (Mick) Username: Mick Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.163.48.60 |
Oi vay Hanos? That famous Jewish author? | ||
| Matt_cowan (Matt_cowan) Username: Matt_cowan Registered: 04-2008 Posted From: 68.249.106.58 |
I actually enjoyed the movie version of Crouch End they did for the recent Nightmares and Dreamscapes miniseries. I know a lot of people didn't but I'd never read the story before so maybe that helped my appreciation of it. | ||
| Mick Curtis (Mick) Username: Mick Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.163.48.60 |
I didn't like the way they tried to pretend America was London. They could've invented a suburb of a US city, and it would've worked better, I think. | ||
| Huw (Huw) Username: Huw Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 218.168.197.170 |
I have that first Arkham House edition (the one at the top) with the Lee Brown Coye cover. I've always liked 'Crouch End'. King conjures up a real sense of pervading creepiness and doom through things as mundane as the way a tabloid heading reads (describing victims as "lost in underground horror"), the suggestion of a sinister history (the mention of pagan sacrifices), and the hints of 'thin spots' where entities from other dimensions can enter our world. If I have one complaint it's the way some of the English characters speak (the policeman in particular), which sounded a bit off to me. I didn't like the television adaptation at all. The Dark Descent is a splendid collection, but it's very odd that the editor omits anything by two of the finest and most influential writers of the macabre who ever lived: E.T.A. Hoffmann and Arthur Machen. | ||
| Huw (Huw) Username: Huw Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 218.168.178.175 |
Tony, I see from your recent posts that you're working your way through The Dark Descent story by story - you have some great ones coming up! Let us know what you think of them. I've just started reading Dark Forces again, which is out in a beautiful 25th anniversary edition with new artwork (some of which is stunning) and an interview with Kirby McCauley (conducted by Kealan Patrick Burke, who does a good job). What a great collection. | ||
| Hubert (Hubert) Username: Hubert Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 78.22.224.127 |
I have the second and third one. Never even seen the first one--it must be worth quite a bit nowadays. One of the more intriguing stories in NEW TALES is Basil Copper's "Shaft number 247". Very odd tale, I've always wondered why it was considered a Cthulhu Mythos story in the first place. DARK FORCES--can it be 25 years already? Gawd, I'm getting old  | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.156.110.243 |
Divers' hands are presumably webbed. 'Divers hands' lacks the apostrophe, because Arkham House had used up so much ink with those Oxford commas they had to economise when it came to the cover. | ||
| Mick Curtis (Mick) Username: Mick Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.163.48.60 |
Never even seen the first one--it must be worth quite a bit nowadays. It's not a huge amount, although understandably a bit much for most pockets - it seems to go from about £125 to £150 at the moment. I bought my copy for about £40 around ten years ago. | ||
| Huw (Huw) Username: Huw Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 61.216.36.220 |
Me too, Mick. Mine set me back around $50-$65, as I recall. | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.129.20.239 |
'I have the second and third one.' You mean Dark Descents or Dark Forces, Hube? I've just bought vol II from Red Cross for a fiver off amazon. | ||
| Griff (Griff) Username: Griff Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 195.93.21.100 |
Where IS Ramsey? | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.156.110.243 |
In Merseyside. | ||
| Griff (Griff) Username: Griff Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 195.93.21.100 |
Badoom-tish. | ||
| Hubert (Hubert) Username: Hubert Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 78.22.224.127 |
Dark Forces. Not a fancy edition, mind, but the fat paperback job. The story that probably impressed me most was Klein's "Children of the Kingdom". Sadly I havent' kept up with recent stuff. Tried lots of new names in the nineties, but hardely ever finished one of their books. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.24.122.40 |
Not a big fan of Crouch End - I found its evocation of the beasts too cartoonish and explicit. Same with the end of Children of the Corn - why does King have to ruin the atmos by showing us the things directly? It doesn't work for me, that...well, rarely. Clive Barker has done it well: I reckon direct sight of something potentially awe-inspiring needs either oblique suggestiveness (eg, HPL's The Dunwich Horror) or great gaudy descriptive paragraphs, as In The Hills, The Cities. By contrast, King's description of the 'thing' as having eyes like 'footballs' or whatever singular turn of phrase he employs doesn't have sufficient impact. For me, anyway. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.24.122.40 |
Am I alone in finding King's short fiction decidely average? I love his novels, and consider Misery, The Shining and a few others, towering masterpieces of the genres. But I don't consider any of his short stories classics. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.24.122.40 |
>>>an interview with Kirby McCauley Huw, what's KM up to these days? | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.129.20.239 |
I don't like much of it either, Gary. Pancake flat, like his heart was never in it (apart from 'Crouch'). | ||
| Huw (Huw) Username: Huw Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 218.168.195.167 |
I think some of the stories in Night Shift, Skeleton Crew, and his other collections are very good indeed. Gary, Kirby McCauley is still active in the editing world. Recently he's been editing mystery collections for Crippen & Landru (the 'Arkham House of mystery', as he referred to them). He mentioned that a follow-up to Dark Forces is possible, but unlikely. | ||
| Huw (Huw) Username: Huw Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 61.216.37.237 |
Y'know, I think some of King's best work has been in the novella-length range. 'The Mist', and some of the stories in Different Seasons and Four Past Midnight, for example. | ||
| Griff (Griff) Username: Griff Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 195.93.21.100 |
The short stories are my favourite. Some, but not all, of his novels drag on and atmosphere slips away. | ||
| Hubert (Hubert) Username: Hubert Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 78.22.226.245 |
Yeah, at one point in THE STAND one character is so bored he starts building a model airplane. Or was it a car? | ||
| John (John) Username: John Registered: 05-2008 Posted From: 82.24.4.67 |
It's a long time since I read Crouch End, but I remember it being one of my favourite stories in that collection of his is appeared in. Some nice touches - 'Lost in Underground Horror', as mentioned above, the references to the old 'towen'. If the ending was a let down it's hardly surprising. The end of The Stand is one of the most insulting things I've ever read. That it came after several hundred pages probably made it worse. |