Book picks similar to
Back There in the Grass: The Horror Tales of Irvin S. Cobb and Gouverneur Morris by Irvin S. Cobb
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The Knight of the Swords
Michael Moorcock - 1971
It was their whim to wipe clean the slate of history, to destroy the old races, the Vadhagh, the Nhadragh, the remnants of still more ancient peoples. Mankind, the contemptible Mabden, was ther instrument, washcloth of the Gods. But the Gods themselves fell out, and Chaos gained the advantage over Law.The stage was set for heroes.One such was the Vadhagh Prince Corum. Driven mad for revenge by the callous slaughter of his family and race, and by his own grotesque multilation at the hands of the Mabden, he agreed to accept from the treacherous sorcerer Shool the Eye of Rhynn and the Hand of Kwll in exchange for a lien on his soul.Thus armed he set out upon a personal crusade against the Sword Rulers, Lords of Chaos, puppetmasters to Man. And first of these was the loathsome Arioch, Knight of the Swords, master of five of the fifteen planes of reality. From Arioch, Prince Corum required his heart.
The Modern Weird Tale
S.T. Joshi - 2001
The primary purpose is to establish a canon of weird literature, and to distinguish the genuinely meritorious writers of the past fifty years from those who have obtained merely transient popular renown. Accordingly, the author regards the complex, subtle work of Shirley Jackson, Ramsey Campbell, Robert Aickman, T.E.D. Klein, and Thomas Ligotti as considerably superior to the best-sellers of Stephen King, Clive Barker, Peter Straub, and Anne Rice. Other writers such as William Peter Blatty, Thomas Tryon, Robert Bloch, and Thomas Harris are also discussed. Taken as a whole, the volume represents a pioneering attempt to chart the development of weird fiction over the past half-century.
The Best Bizarro Fiction of the Decade
Cameron PierceAndrea Kneeland - 2012
It’s a nightmare reflection of the society you inhabit, a surreal explosion of pop, punk, and the post-apocalypse. Over the last decade, Bizarro Fiction has changed the definition of avant garde, it’s abolished the traditional prose of yesterday and established a new precedent for awesome. Collected in this anthology is some of the best weird fiction from the past decade. Award-winning writers, cult prodigies and burgeoning talents all collected together in one place. This is what you’ve done with the last ten years of your life.With stories by:D. Harlan Wilson, Alissa Nutting, Joe R. Lansdale, Carlton Mellick III, Kevin L. Donihe, , Ryan Boudinot, Vincent Sakowski, Cody Goodfellow, Amelia Gray, Robert Devereaux, Mykle Hansen, Athena Villaverde, Matthew Revert, Garrett Cook, Roy Kesey, Jeremy Robert Johnson, Aimee Bender, Ian Watson & Roberto Quaglia, Jeremy C. Shipp, Andersen Prunty, Jedediah Berry, Andrea Kneeland, Kurt Dinan, David Agranoff, Ben Loory, Kris Saknussemm, Stephen Graham Jones, Bentley Little, David W. Barbee, and Tom Piccirilli.
The Translated Man and Other Stories
Chris Braak - 2009
Only a drug-addicted detective and a young man with a gift for mathematics have the means to solve an enigmatic murder--a murder that may be the key to saving Trowth from certain destruction.A new edition of this book is available! Sure, it's a dollar more, but it also includes three short stories--check out The Translated Man and Other Stories.
Perchance to Dream: Selected Stories
Charles Beaumont - 2015
Perchance to Dream contains a selection of Beaumont’s finest stories, including five that he later adapted for Twilight Zone episodes.Beaumont dreamed up fantasies so vast and varied they burst through the walls of whatever box might contain them. Supernatural, horror, noir, science fiction, fantasy, pulp, and more: all were equally at home in his wondrous mind. These are stories where lions stalk the plains, classic cars rove the streets, and spacecraft hover just overhead. Here roam musicians, magicians, vampires, monsters, toreros, extraterrestrials, androids, and perhaps even the Devil himself. With dizzying feats of master storytelling and joyously eccentric humor, Beaumont transformed his nightmares and reveries into impeccably crafted stories that leave themselves indelibly stamped upon the walls of the mind. In Beaumont’s hands, nothing is impossible: it all seems plausible, even likely.
Nightlife
Brian Hodge - 1991
Justin Gray, a former small-time drug dealer in St. Louis, has arrived in Tampa, FL, to start a new life. But on his first night in town his buddy Erik takes him to a disco, where he tries a mild dose of skullflush. Another of Erik's friends takes a larger dose and is tranformed into a ravenous beast who practically devours four people on the dance floor and then commits suicide. Local dealer Tony Mendoza begins a search for Justin, the only witness who knows what really happened in the disco that night. Mendoza himself is sought by the Yanomamo warrior Kerebawa, who travels to America to retrieve skullflush and avenge its theft before it is sniffed by too much of Tampa's "nightlife."
Apeshit
Carlton Mellick III - 2008
Apeshit is Mellicks love letter to the great and terrible B-horror movie genre. Six trendy teenagers (three cheerleaders and three football players) go to an isolated cabin in the mountains for a weekend of drinking, partying, and crazy sex, only to find themselves in the middle of a life and death struggle against a horribly mutated psychotic freak that just wont stay dead. Mellick parodies this horror clich and twists it into something deeper and stranger. It is the literary equivalent of a grindhouse film. It is a splatterpunks wet dream. It is perhaps one of the most fucked up books ever written. If you are a fan of Takashi Miike, Evil Dead, or Eurotrash horror then you must read this book.
The Claw
Ramsey Campbell - 1983
Beautiful, hypnotic, ancient, it was the sacred -- and deadly -- talisman of the fabled Leopard Men of Africa.Unsuspected, it would crawl its way into his mind, bringing horrifying destruction into his home. And unresisted, it would demand an unbelievable sacrifice. And then -- perhaps -- it would move on...
Motorman
David Ohle - 1972
It is curious that a reprint could be heroic. It is more curious that a book this good could go out of print so quickly. And it is most curious that an introduction would even be required for a novel that, if you examine it carefully in the right kind oflight, might actually be seen to be steaming. MOTORMAN is a central work, pulsing with mythology, created by a craftsman of language who was seemingly channeling the history of narrative when he wrote it. It is a book about the future that comes from the past, and we are caught in its amazing middle. To read MOTORMAN now is to encouter proof that a book can be both emotional and eccentric, smeared with humanity and artistically ambitious, messy with grief and dazzling with spectacle--Ben Marcus, from his introduction.
The Horror on the Links
Seabury Quinn - 2017
P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, August Derleth, and Clark Ashton Smith, all regular contributors to the pulp magazine Weird Tales during the first half of the twentieth century, are recognizable even to casual readers of the bizarre and fantastic. And yet despite being more popular than them all during the golden era of genre pulp fiction, there is another author whose name and work have fallen into obscurity: Seabury Quinn.Quinn’s short stories were featured in well more than half of Weird Tales’s original publication run. His most famous character, the supernatural French detective Dr. Jules de Grandin, investigated cases involving monsters, devil worshippers, serial killers, and spirits from beyond the grave, often set in the small town of Harrisonville, New Jersey. In de Grandin there are familiar shades of both Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, and alongside his assistant, Dr. Samuel Trowbridge, de Grandin’s knack for solving mysteries—and his outbursts of peculiar French-isms (grand Dieu!)—captivated readers for nearly three decades.Collected for the first time in trade editions, The Complete Tales of Jules de Grandin, edited by George Vanderburgh, presents all ninety-three published works featuring the supernatural detective. Presented in chronological order over five volumes, and including all thirty-two original Weird Tales covers illustrated for de Grandin stories, this is the definitive collection of an iconic pulp hero.The first volume, The Horror on the Links, includes all of the Jules de Grandin stories from “The Horror on the Links” (1925) to “The Chapel of Mystic Horror” (1928), as well as an introduction by Robert Weinberg.
Furnace
Livia Llewellyn - 2016
Call them what you like: Sex and Death, Love and Destruction, Temptation and Terror. While many may strive to reach the extremes, few authors manage to find the beauty that rests in the liminal space between these polar forces, the shuddering ecstasy encased within the shock. And then there’s Livia Llewellyn, an author praised for her dark, stirring, evocative prose and disturbing personal narratives.Lush, layered, multifaceted, and elegant, the thirteen tales comprising Furnace showcase why Livia Llewellyn has been lauded by scholars and fans of weird fiction alike, and why she has been nominated multiple times for the Shirley Jackson Award and included in year’s best anthologies. These are exquisite stories, of beauty and cruelty, of pleasure and pain, of hunger, and of sharp teeth sinking into tender flesh.
The Manse
Lisa W. Cantrell - 1987
Vampires, werewolves, ghouls and ghosts - not to mention Frankenstein's monster - stalk the premises. Bats and spiders drop upon the unwary. At every turn a new fright awaits - all in fun, of course.Happy HalloweenBut the Manse's history of horror is ancient and terrible - more awful than the innocent Trick-or-Treaters can imagine. For twelve years it has been biding its time, feeding on the fear its unsuspecting visitors so willingly offered...Happy HalloweenUntil tonight. Tomight is the Thirteenth Annual House of Horrors.It will be the last.Tonight, at the Witching Hour, all Hell will break loose.Happy Halloween
Liminal States
Zack Parsons - 2012
It is coming.It is 1874 and Gideon Long is dying. Wandering the savage desert of the New Mexico Territory, he craves a last drink before he bleeds out. On the brink of madness, he discovers a place best left forgotten and makes an insidious bargain: escape his fate and incur a debt too great for one man. His country will pay the price over the twisting course of more than a century and Gideon will learn there are worse things to bargain with than the devil.(Source: back cover)Liminal States is the debut novel from SomethingAwful editor Zack Parsons, and it's extraordinary. It begins as a grim, relentless western novel that describes a doomed love triangle between a simple lawman, the twisted scion of an land-baron, and a woman who has married one but thinks she might belong with the other. After a botched train robbery and an epic battle, Gideon (the rich man's son) finds himself gutshot in the desert, led by a mysterious spirit animal to a mystical pool that dissolves him and then reincarnates him, young and whole and vital and immortal. Gideon goes back for the woman he loves, only to discover that she has died in childbirth, and, enraged, he kidnaps the lawman who was her husband and throws him into the pool, too. And now they are both immortal. Every time they die, they are reborn in the pool, over and over, locked in orbit around each other like twin suns being drawn into a destructive nova. This first third of the novel is dark and bloody and remorseless, a story of revenge and tragedy that doesn't let up, until...
Small World
Tabitha King - 1981
For one, she's in the White House bedroom and there is a peculiar object thrusting itself upon her.