Download or read book Mr Cannyharme A Novel of Lovecraftian Terror written by Michael Shea and published by . This book was released on 2021-08-20 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early in his career, Michael Shea wrote the Lovecraftian novel The Color out of Time (1984). He subsequently wrote some of the most scintillating and gripping tales of the Cthulhu Mythos in contemporary weird fiction, including "Fat Face" and "Copping Squid." These tales mingled Lovecraftian themes with the gritty realism of urban horror, and they often featured drug addicts, prostitutes, and others whom conventional society treats with scorn and marginalization. Shea wrote the novel Mr. Cannyharme in the late 1970s, and it constitutes a remarkable adaptation of Lovecraft's early story "The Hound" (1922), about the depredations of an ancient Dutch vampire. In Shea's novel, Mr. Cannyharme stalks the seedy Mission District of San Francisco in the aftermath of the hippie movement of the 1960s. Holed up in a rundown hotel, the seemingly harmless Cannyharme-aged, feeble, bent almost double with a crippling disease-is the focus of the supernatural terror in the novel. Jack Hale, who manages the hotel, is one of the few who sense the danger to society and the world that Cannyharme represents. With a motley band of young whores and drug dealers, he takes on the challenge to counteract the horrors that Mr. Cannyharme seeks to release upon an unsuspecting world. Mr. Cannyharme, written in a vibrant prose that brings to life the multitude of characters that populate the book, is a triumph of Lovecraftian terror, but also speaks of the way in which those who are regarded as the refuse of society can assert their dignity and self-worth in a grim environment. In this sense, it proves to be a novel affirming the triumph of the human spirit over the horrors facing it.
Download or read book The Assaults of Chaos written by S. T. Joshi and published by . This book was released on 2013-08-06 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the summer of 1914, H. P. Lovecraft, a few months before his twenty-fourth birthday, receives a strange letter from his father, Winfield Scott Lovecraft—a father he thought had died sixteen years before—speaking cryptically of an urgent task that must be performed to save the world from a nameless fate. Meeting his father in Quinsnicket Park, Lovecraft is engulfed in an adventure that takes him across the water to his beloved England, where he encounters some of the titans of weird fiction. With this unusual but stalwart band of comrades, Lovecraft does indeed find himself facing a cosmic menace too horrible to contemplate . . .In this supernatural novel by leading Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi, the young Lovecraft is brought vividly to life. The shy, retiring, inward-looking recluse is brought out of his shell and brought into contact with such of his literary idols as Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, and Algernon Blackwood. Together, they must deal with a horror from beyond the stars with the only weapons at their disposal—their minds and imaginations.
Download or read book Copping Squid and Other Mythos Tales written by Michael Shea and published by Perilous Press. This book was released on 2009-10 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Demiurge written by Michael Shea and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2018-10-19 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than thirty years, Michael Shea has been making his own distinctive contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos devised by H. P. Lovecraft-an entire universe of gods and monsters that hundreds of writers have imitated. But Shea has done a lot more than merely mimic Lovecraft's prose or add a new god or "forbidden book" to the Mythos. In his Mythos tales, Shea has infused his own unique vision and perspective. The much-reprinted "Fat Face" takes us into the seedy underworld of prostitutes and drug dealers in San Francisco, while other tales such as "Dagoniad," "Copping Squid," and "Tsathoggua" vividly meld Lovecraftian cosmic horror with the contemporary world of California, with its swimming pools and beachcombers. Shea was also fascinated with Lovecraft's novel of Antarctic horror, At the Mountains of Madness, and his stories "Under the Shelf" and "Beneath the Beardmore" take us to that frozen land of death and terror. The title story, "Demiurge," is a previously unpublished novella that draws upon Lovecraft's tales of psychic possession in its chilling portrayal of a nameless monster who may be the harbinger of the overthrow of the entire human race. Michael Shea (1946-2014) was the award-winning author of The Color out of Time, the Nifft the Lean series of fantasy novels, and the classic tales "Polyphemus" and "The Autopsy." This volume of his complete Cthulhu Mythos tales has been assembled by S. T. Joshi, a leading authority on Lovecraft and the Mythos. This volume features wraparound cover artwork and five interior illustrations by renowned artist Aeron Alfrey (MADHOUSE)
Download or read book The Extra written by Michael Shea and published by Tor Books. This book was released on 2010-02-02 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Books and films have skewered Hollywood's excesses, but none has ever portrayed one man's crazy vision of the future of big action/adventure films as Michael Shea's The Extra does. As over-the-top as Mel Brooks's Blazing Saddles, as savagely dark as Robert Altman's The Player, and more violent than Rollerball, this is the story of the ultimate, so-insane-it-could-only-happen-in-Hollywood formula for success, a brave new way to bring the ultimate in excitement to the silver screen. Producer Val Margolian has found the motherlode of box-office gold with his new "live-death" films whose villains are extremely sophisticated, electronically controlled mechanical monsters. To give these live-action disaster films greater realism, he employs huge casts of extras, in addition to the stars. The large number of extras is important, because very few of them will survive the shoot. It's all perfectly legal, with training for the extras and long, detailed contracts indemnifying the film company against liability for the extras' injury or death. But why would anyone be crazy enough to risk his or her life to be an extra in such a potentially deadly situation? The extras do it because if they survive they'll be paid handsomely, and they can make even more if they destroy any of the animatronic monsters trying to stomp, chew, fry, or otherwise kill them. If they earn enough, they can move out of the Zoo--the vast slum that most of L.A. has become. They're fighting for a chance at a reasonable life. But first, they have to survive . . . At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book Nifft the Lean written by Michael Shea and published by . This book was released on 1985-01-01 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book To Rouse Leviathan written by Matt Cardin and published by . This book was released on 2019-08-20 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the early years of the twenty-first century, Matt Cardin has distinguished himself by writing weird fiction with a distinctively cosmic and spiritual focus, publishing two short story collections that have now become rare collector's items. In this substantial volume, Cardin gathers the totality of his short fiction, including the complete fiction contents of Divinations of the Deep (2002) and Dark Awakenings (2010). Several of the tales have been substantially revised from their original appearances. Inspired by H. P. Lovecraft, Thomas Ligotti, and other masters of cosmic horror, Cardin's fiction explores the convergence of religion, horror, and art in a cosmos that may be actively hostile to our species. In tales long and short (including a new novella co-written with Mark McLaughlin), Cardin rings a succession of changes on those fateful words from the Book of Job: "Let those sorcerers who place a curse on days curse that day, those who are skilled to rouse Leviathan." Aside from his short story collections, Matt Cardin is the editor of Born to Fear: Interviews with Thomas Ligotti (2014) and Horror Literature through History (2017). He is also co-editor of the journal Vastarien.
Download or read book The Color Out of Time written by Michael Shea and published by New York : Daw Books ; [Scarborough, Ont.] : New American Library of Canada. This book was released on 1984 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A gathering evil, as revealed by an indescribable color, haunts a lake in present-day New England
Download or read book The Imago Sequence written by Laird Barron and published by Start Publishing LLC. This book was released on 2007-07-01 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The title story of this collection — a devilishly ironic riff on H. P. Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s model” — was nominated for a World Fantasy Award, while “Probiscus” was nominated for an International Horror Guild award and reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 19. In addition to his previously published work, this collection contains an original story.
Download or read book What Is Anything written by S. T. Joshi and published by . This book was released on 2018-06 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Autobiography of a literary critic, whose main focus has been the study of 20th century horror author H. P. Lovecraft. Includes details of his publications." --
Download or read book Ghouljaw and Other Stories written by Clint Smith and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "These smart, unsettling stories give us, with vivid detail, both the squalidly ordinary and the terrifyingly extraordinary-and make clear how closely the two are linked."-Ben H. Winters, Edgar-Award-Winning author of "The Last Policeman" "Clint Smith's "Ghouljaw" stories use vivid imagery to build intense close-ups that connect reader with character, then adds psychologies corrupted by sex, loss, betrayal, guilt, cowardice, denial, and that fatal flaw pomposity. With sprightly literate language he twists old motifs into new shapes of the rural gothic, often embodied in some of the spookiest "monsters from the id" yet imagined-creatures gory, squishy, bloody, witchy, wild. Not to forget a demonic "dog" that scared the bejesus out of me! The monsters of humanity, too, find new life here, as blood cults, avenging mystics, violent poachers, PTSD, and repressed memories incarnate. Clint Smith's "Ghouljaw" releases into the reader's world a darkness that teaches, shakes, and warns. Read and after a night of tossing sleep you'll awaken changed. For the better? Well, as it is with Smith's characters, that matter's up to you."-Jim Powell, MFA, Senior Lecturer, IUPUI Over the past several years, Clint Smith has established himself as a powerfully imaginative writer of weird fiction. In this first collection of short stories, Smith demonstrates the multifaceted talents that will establish him as one of the notable weird writers of his generation. What distinguishes Smith's work is both the originality of its weird conceptions and its careful delineation of human character. One of his earliest tales, "Benthos," features both these qualities, telling a grim tale of alienated youth and drug-taking that veers into the grotesquely supernatural. In "The Tell-Tale Offal," Smith cleverly updates Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" in a grisly story of physical horror. In "What Happens in Hell Stays in Hell," Smith uses the war in Afghanistan as a chilling backdrop to unthinkable horrors unleashed in the parched sands of the Middle East. "I have no doubt that Clint Smith will be heard from in the future as a leading practitioner of the modern weird tale. The stories in this collection testify not only to his literary potential but to his already significant accomplishments."-From S. T. Joshi's foreword
Download or read book The Mother Wound written by Jess Landry and published by Independent Legions Publishing. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sometimes the deepest wounds are from those we hold the closest.In her debut collection, Bram Stoker Award-winner Jess Landry blurs the line between genres, magnifying the darkness in the spaces in between, and confronting those relationships that are nearest and dearest to us in the most horrific ways.A mother and her daughter escape Nazi Germany, boarding the Hindenburg under the promise of a new life. An abused musical protégé discovers that her rage fuels much more than her cello-playing abilities. A hardened police officer finds something unexpected in the rising flood waters of her evacuated hometown. A woman ventures out onto the sea, in hopes of finding a mysterious mist where the dead roam freely. A strange tar infests the home of a young girl, swallowing everything in its wake, including her mother. Two broken women form a tragic bond while searching for a missing person in the dead of winter.Mothers. Daughters. Sisters. Friends. No one is safe within the pages of The Mother Wound.Cover Art by Luke Spooner.
Download or read book Houses Under the Sea written by Caitlín R. Kiernan and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since H.P. Lovecraft first invited colleagues such as Frank Belknap Long and Robert Bloch (among others) to join in his creation of what has come to be known as ¿The Cthulhu Mythos¿ (over Lovecraft's less invocative name of ¿Yog-Sothery¿), dozens of authors have tried their hand at adding to this vast tapestry with varying degrees of success. Some, like the then teen-aged Ramsey Campbell, used the Mythos as a starting point to his own career while still finding his own authorial voice (The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants, Arkham House 1964); others, like Stephen King and Neil Gaiman, did so at the height of their careers, paying homage to an author who had been such a tremendous inspiration to them. But no one, absolutely no one, has contributed such a body of brilliant and profoundly original work to the Mythos as has Caitlín R. Kiernan. In this remarkable collection the author has selected over two dozen of her best Lovecraftian tales ranging from 2000s ¿Valentia¿ to her more recent classic ¿A Mountain Walked¿ as well as including the complete Dandridge Cycle, as well as a new story, ¿M Is for Mars.¿ In short, this is a cornerstone volume for Kiernan fans and Mythos devotees alike.
Download or read book Skidding Into Oblivion written by Brian Hodge and published by . This book was released on 2019-03 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We each inhabit many worlds, often at the same time. From worlds on the inside, to the world on a cosmic scale. Worlds imposed on us, and worlds of our own making. In time, though, all worlds will end. Bear witness: After the death of their grandmother, two cousins return to their family's rural homestead to find a community rotting from the soul outward, and a secret nobody dreamed their matriarch had been keeping. The survivors of the 1929 raid on H.P. Lovecraft's town of Innsmouth hold the key to an anomalous new event in the ocean, if only someone could communicate with them. The ultimate snow day turns into the ultimate nightmare when it just doesn't stop. An extreme metal musician compels his harshest critic to live up to the hyperbole of his trolling. With the last of a generation of grotesquely selfish city fathers on his deathbed, the residents of the town they doomed exercise their right to self-determination one last time. As history repeats itself and the world shivers through a volcanic winter, a group gathers around the shore of a mountain lake to once again invoke the magic that created the world's most famous monster. With Skidding Into Oblivion, his fifth collection, award-winning author Brian Hodge brings together his most concentrated assortment yet of year's best picks and awards finalists, with one thing in common: It's the end of the world as we know it . . . and we don't feel fine at all.
Download or read book Wounds written by Nathan Ballingrud and published by Gallery / Saga Press. This book was released on 2019-04-09 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[Ballingrud's] evocative and strangely beautiful.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Nathan Ballingrud is one of my favorite contemporary authors and any time he’s got a new book out I run to the front of the line. His work is elegant and troublingly, wonderfully disturbing.”—Victor LaValle, award–winning author of The Changeling “Nathan Ballingrud's brilliant fiction brims with imagination, integrity (I do not use that term lightly), and an authentic world-weary dread that bores directly into your heart. With Wounds you'll gladly follow Nathan to Hell and (maybe) back.”—Paul Tremblay, award-winning author of The Cabin at the End of the World and A Head Full of Ghosts “Nathan Ballingrud is one of my favorite short fiction writers.” —Jeff VanderMeer, New York Times bestselling author of Annihilation and Borne “Stretch[es] the boundaries of the genre by employing these grand, horrific worlds. “The Butcher’s Table” reminds me of the first time I read Clive Barker’s “In the Hills, the Cities.” It’s horrifying, but there’s beauty.” —The New York Times “In only two slender collections, Nathan Ballingrud has emerged as one of the field’s most accomplished short story writers.” —The Washington Post “Ballingrud’s work isn’t like any other.”—Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing “One of the most disquieting and memorable short story collections to come out this year.”—The New York Review of Books “Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell is without a doubt one of the best, most accomplished horror collections in recent memory.”—Hellnotes “Wounds will no doubt be remembered as one of the most disquieting and memorable short story collections to come out this year.”—New York Journal of Books “There’s enough nightmare fuel here to inspire weeks of insomnia — all told with an even hand with a penchant for precise storytelling. How else do you chart the furthest reaches of the uncanny?”—Tobias Carroll, Vol. 1 Brooklyn A gripping collection of six stories of terror—including the novella “The Visible Filth,” the basis for the upcoming major motion picture—by Shirley Jackson Award–winning author Nathan Ballingrud, hailed as a major new voice by Jeff VanderMeer, Paul Tremblay, and Carmen Maria Machado—“one of the most heavyweight horror authors out there” (The Verge). In his first collection, North American Lake Monsters, Nathan Ballingrud carved out a distinctly singular place in American fiction with his “piercing and merciless” (Toronto Globe and Mail) portrayals of the monsters that haunt our lives—both real and imagined: “What Nathan Ballingrud does in North American Lake Monsters is to reinvigorate the horror tradition” (Los Angeles Review of Books). Now, in Wounds, Ballingrud follows up with an even more confounding, strange, and utterly entrancing collection of six stories, including one new novella. From the eerie dread descending upon a New Orleans dive bartender after a cell phone is left behind in a rollicking bar fight in “The Visible Filth” to the search for the map of hell in “The Butcher’s Table,” Ballingrud’s beautifully crafted stories are riveting in their quietly terrifying depictions of the murky line between the known and the unknown.
Download or read book The Harbor Master written by Robert W. Chambers and published by . This book was released on 2021-06-29 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents the best weird fiction of the American writer Robert W. Chambers (1865-1933). Chambers attained celebrity for the enigmatic volume The King in Yellow (1895), and this book reprints several of the most notable tales from that collection, as well as such later volumes as The Maker of Moons (1896), The Mystery of Choice (1897), and In Search of the Unknown (1904), among others. These stories display the power and strangeness of Chambers's weird conceptions, making it understandable why his work has exercised so profound an influence on such later writers as H. P. Lovecraft, Karl Edward Wagner, Joseph S. Pulver, Sr., and many other leading figures in the field. The Classics of Gothic Horror series seeks to reprint novels and stories from the leading writers of weird fiction over the past two centuries or more. Ever since the Gothic novels of the late 18th century, weird fiction has been a slender but provocative contribution to weird fiction. Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, the Victorian ghost story writers, the "titans" of the early twentieth century (Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany, M. R. James, H. P. Lovecraft), the Weird Tales writers, and many others contributed to the development and enrichment of weird fiction as a literary genre, and their work deserves to be enshrined in comprehensive, textually accurate editions.
Download or read book Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos written by H. P. Lovecraft and published by Del Rey. This book was released on 2011-10-12 with total page 728 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." --H. P. LOVECRAFT, "Supernatural Horror in Literature" Howard Phillips Lovecraft forever changed the face of horror, fantasy, and science fiction with a remarkable series of stories as influential as the works of Poe, Tolkien, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. His chilling mythology established a gateway between the known universe and an ancient dimension of otherworldly terror, whose unspeakable denizens and monstrous landscapes--dread Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, the Plateau of Leng, the Mountains of Madness--have earned him a permanent place in the history of the macabre. In Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, a pantheon of horror and fantasy's finest authors pay tribute to the master of the macabre with a collection of original stories set in the fearsome Lovecraft tradition: ¸ The Call of Cthulhu by H. P. Lovecraft: The slumbering monster-gods return to the world of mortals. ¸ Notebook Found in a Deserted House by Robert Bloch: A lone farmboy chronicles his last stand against a hungering backwoods evil. ¸ Cold Print by Ramsey Campbell: An avid reader of forbidden books finds a treasure trove of deadly volumes--available for a bloodcurdling price. ¸ The Freshman by Philip José Farmer: A student of the black arts receives an education in horror at notorious Miskatonic University. PLUS EIGHTEEN MORE SPINE-TINGLING TALES!
