Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

Please nominate up to two weird fiction works you think other members and you would enjoy reading this June. Get your nomination(s) in early so you don't forget. We will run the poll for June's group read in mid-May.

I wish to nominate Arkham Nights: Tales of Mythos Noir by Glynn Owen Barrass.

For my second nomination: Swords Against Cthulhu edited by Gavin Chappell.

Would an essay be eligible? Have you ever done one? Or would you be willing to try it? I recently bought The Weird and the Eerie by Mark Fisher and thought it would be a perfect read for us if so.

In any case, I'd like to nominate Tales of Horror and the Supernatural by Arthur Machen.

Both nominations are accepted. Thank you! Funny that your first nominated work should mention Christopher Nolan. I just yesterday finally got around to viewing his film Inception. I found it too confusing and ambiguous, but understand why many enjoy it.

For this group and our group reads I place a limitation on genre only, namely that it must be or at least primarily involve work that can arguably be said to be weird fiction. I think I'm pretty liberal about what can be called weird fiction. I do want to be careful to avoid mainstream fiction (like The Yellow Wallpaper), and purely comedy (farce or satire) writing (Kurt Vonnegut Jr., for example), which people who don't know what weird fiction is sometimes confuse it to be. However, for group purposes I place NO LIMITATION ON FORM, meaning the work can be a novel, short story, chapbook, poetry, graphic novel, anthology, periodical, eBook, novella, a painting or collection of artwork, or even non-fiction, such as an essay or a non-fiction book. Pretty much any format could be of interest, and relate to or contain something pertaining to weird fiction. For example, I've been considering nominating Weird Fiction: A Genre Study by Michael Cisco.

I didn't notice earlier that one of the nominations was an Arthur Machen work. We read his The White People and Other Stories back in September 2021, a collection that supposedly had his better weird stories. There is some but not overly much overlap with that collection and the current nomination. Maybe the current nomination is more in the classic horror genre than the earlier more weird fiction one.

Here are our discussions of that earlier group read:
/topic/show/...
/topic/show/...

I read Machen's The Hill of Dreams a few years ago and found it to be awful. It got my rare one-star rating, which I give mainly when a work is so bad it offends me. See my review for why I thought this, if you want.

I had forgotten that I really appreciated Machen's "The Inmost Light" though, despite its problematic writing and challenging story structure. It's a quirky novelette. Okay, I'm revising my initial bad feelings towards this nomination to a more neutral outlook. I have a complete collection of Machen's stories, so I may pick and choose a few stories to read from this particular collection rather than read them all, assuming it wins.

Ah, wow, interesting. Fair enough!