2010 Reading List

I kept track of the books I read in 2010. I hadn’t done this before,  I’m not sure why I started, but I suspect I will continue. It’s not everything I bought or intended to read by a long shot, but here it is. The traditional books are listed separately from the ebooks. I didn’t have a Kindle until mid-September, so that is reflected in the balance.

I’m wishing I’d worked on this post as I went and included a couple lines about each book. Perhaps next year. I wouldn’t recommend all of these, but many I would and several of them quite emphatically. It was a good year for reading.

2010 Books Read

Print Books
1. Song of Kali by Dan Simmons (Tor Books)
2. Benjamin’s Parasite by Jeff Strand (Delirium)
3. The Everlasting by Tim Lebbon (Necessary Evil Press)
4. Children Of Chaos by Greg F. Gifune (Delirium)
5. Primitive by J.G. Gonzales (Delirium)
6. Sesta & Other Strange Stories by Edward Lucas White (Midnight House)
A post on White’s excellent “The Tooth” here. Some other great pieces in this collection as well.
7. The Garden Of Hermetic Dreams Edited by Gary Lachman (Dedalus)
8. Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters by John Langan (Prime)
9. American Gods by Neil Gaiman (Harper Perennial)
10. Over The Darkening Fields by Scott Thomas (Dark Regions Press)
Posted on the Dark Regions Message Board after reading this one. “There are numerous stories in this collection that have stuck in my craw. Thomas understands people. Through the darkness and oddity, that understanding is perhaps his strongest attribute… Many of the stories are quite short, but his efficiency, clarity and imagination carve the words deep.”
11. The Darkly Splendid Realm by Richard Gavin (Dark Regions Press)
Here’s an old post on Gavin’s I wrote after reading his book Omens. The Darkly Splendid Realm was a treat.
12. Dark Harvest by Norman Partridge (Tor Books)
13. Can Such Things Be? Tales Of Horror & The Supernatural by Ambrose Bierce (Citadel Press)
14. Cold To The Touch by Simon Strantzas (Tartarus Press)
One of the highlights of the year for me. Strantzas is as evocative in his gloom and strangeness, as his authenticity. The character development is excellent, his voice unique and subtle. “A Seed On Barren Ground” is a story that I ruminate on regularly and would place very high on a list of my all time favorites.  The Tartarus Press production value only added to this wholly satisfying collection.
15. The Man On The Ceiling by Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem (Wizards Of The Coast Discoveries)
posted on this here
16. The Ginger Man by J.P. Donleavy (Grove Press)
A loaner from a co-worker prompted by my love of A Confederacy Of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. I hated this and abandoned it after about 100 pages. I can’t remember the last time I did that.
17. Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman (Harper Perennial)
18. The Book Of Days By Steve Rasnic Tem (Subterranean)
posted on this here
19. My Work Is Not Yet Done by Thomas Ligotti (Virgin)
20. The White Hands & Other Weird Tales By Mark Samuels (Tartarus Press)
21. Alone With The Horrors By Ramsey Campbell (Tor Books)
22. Dark Awakenings By Matt Cardin (Mythos)
posted on this here
23. Occultation by Laird Barron (Nightshade)
24. In The Hand Of Dante by Nick Tosches (Black Bay Books)
25. The October Country by Ray Bradbury (Del Ray)
26. Songs Of A Dead Dreamer by Thomas Ligotti (Subterranean)
27. Beneath The Surface by Simon Strantzas (Dark Regions)
28. Charnel Wine by Richard Gavin (Dark Regions)
(reading now)

Kindle Books
29. Wicked Delights by John Lewellyn Probert (Atomic Fez)
I started a post on this I have yet to finish…
30. The World More Full Of Weeping by Robert J. Wiersema  (Chizine)
posted about this one here
31. Excavation by Steve Rasnic Tem (Crossroads/Macabre Ink)
posted on this here
32. A Host Of Shadows by Harry Shannon (Dark Regions)

Writing Vs. Music: Atmosphere

October is my favorite month. The fires of autumn still hang from crooked branches. The sky is flooded with a crisp blue, unique to fall. It’s a reflective time plump with the magic fumes of decaying leaves. The world and I are more agreeable in October. Fear, mood and setting are recognizable more than any other time of the year. It’s the month of the imagination.

So, what scares you? Is “horror” really even scary? What’s worse, being scared or creeped out? Is there a difference? An orchestral stab, a “boo” moment, are they really scary? What is fear? Not what startles or grosses you out, but authentic guttural dread…

Adjectives associated with fear and darkness appear in a majority of the Gruntsplatter reviews I’ve seen, however, I never once set out to make a “scary” record. I don’t see dark ambient in those terms. The Suspiria soundtrack by Goblin. La-la-La-La… triggered more unease in me than any dark ambient record ever has. Whether anyone noticed or not, my records are social diatribes before they are horror shows. With Gruntsplatter I see the themes and fixation on the creeping dystopia as horrific, rather than horror.

Life when things aren’t right, unsettles me. A guy shouldn’t be singing witch lullabies over prog rock, it’s creepy. It’s not right. The movie Tideland is not a horror movie, but it got under my skin. Creepy, awkward, evocative and soulful. A window into something tragic and not right. Right and wrong are subjective obviously, but it’s those things more than monsters or killers and so many of the tropes of horror that creep me out.

The writings of Thomas Ligotti, Simon Strantzas, Steve Rasnic Tem, Mark Samuels, Richard Gavin and so many others that explore the wrongness in a wrong world, those are the contemporary voices of dread. I don’t worry about demons or serial killers. I worry about that guy on the bus that doesn’t feel right. I turn that thing sitting where it shouldn’t be into something diabolical. The dreams that scare me are the dreams of footsteps behind me from someone not concerned I know they are there. They are the voices in a house I thought was mine right up until I heard the voices. The stranger who says “see you later” and sounds like they mean it. The innocuous things that breach the facade of life.

I think about these things more, the more I write. “Weird tales” more than commercial horror speak in the tongue that resonates with me.  It is the subtleties in life that can go unnoticed, the curious juxtapositions, and the quiet shifts in wind and shadow where the genuine unease lurks. Mystery before bombast.

It’s what I have always tried to do with my music, subtlety and detail. It’s what I hope to infuse in my writing. I think that aesthetic is as much me as anything.

Richard Gavin

I recently finished Omens (published by  Mythos Books )  by Richard Gavin, and wanted to sound the horn for him.  The 12 stories here showcase a diverse and peculiar dread. Gavin has some great ideas  and his command of language and tone made this a quite enjoyable.

His work has been compared to such shambling giants of the macabre as H.P. Lovecraft,  and Edgar Allan Poe and Thomas Ligotti and Omens deserves such comparisons. It’s not as nihilistic as Ligotti, or as cosmic as Lovecraft. Of the three, I’d place it closest to Poe. The pervasive creep factor that each of those writers possess is present in Richard Gavin.  His imagination is impressive and unique, and he does a really nice job of overlaying that strange darkness into a modern setting.

I’m always looking for more writers that capture this side of horror. The current crop of writers that are making waves seem more straight forward. That is not to say they are unskilled or not to be enjoyed.  I have just always favored more obscure tales of secrets, nightmares, and oddities and Gavin impressed me.

He has a brand new collection entitled The Darkly Splendid Realm (published by Dark Regions) that I’m anxious to get my hands on. The introduction was written by Laird Barron (who I swear I will do a post on one of these days). It was Barron’s involvement that brought Richard Gavin’s name to my attention and I’m grateful for it.

http://www.richardgavin.net/

Thomas Ligotti

I was going to wait to post something on Thomas Ligotti until I had read more of his work, but what the hell. I’d heard his name  for a few years and had always been sort of curious, but it wasn’t until recently that I decided to give it a chance.  I picked up a copy of the short story collection  Teatro Grottesco and devoured it. The other day  I found a copy of the out of print The Shadow At The Bottom Of The World  that I will probably dig into over the long weekend.

Ligotti  most often gets compared to Poe and Lovecraft, but from the stories I have read thus far it is a tonal comparison more than a stylistic one. Within his body of work he has  visited the Lovecraft Mythos a bit from what I understand, but it is by no means is a focal point. His prose is tight and descriptive with out being overwhelming and superfluous. Ligotti’s stories evoke a vivid environment of apocalyptic dread, anxiety and madness that is truly potent.

His work is one of the very few that I have read that produced a “where have you been all my life” epiphany. The stories in Teatro, particularly “The Red Tower” and “In A Foreign Town, In A Foreign Land,”  capture so much of what I have tried to do in Gruntsplatter that seeing it on the page was striking. It was encouraging as well to see that those kind of stories have an audience.

Ligotti has also contributed to Current 93, on the albums “In A Foreign Town, In A Foreign Land”, “I Have a Special Plan For This World” and “This Degenerate Little Town.” I haven’t heard any of those releases. I’m not the biggest of Current 93 fans (David Tibet’s voice is annoying, sue me) but I am interested in seeing how his words play against their style of music.

I’m sure this won’t be the last time you see Ligotti’s name mentioned here, particularly since I have an unopened book of his work waiting for me.  Here is an interview from 2004 with Ligotti that is definitely worth reading. If you like dark fiction, short stories or any of the music I have done, I can’t recommend him enough. A lot of the stuff is out of print now sadly, but Virgin Books issued Teatro Grottesco and a collection of three novellas called My Work Is Not Yet Done that which I still need to get, and those shouldn’t be too hard to find. Fox Atomic comics has also issued two graphic novels called The Nightmare Factory based on Ligotti’s stories.