THE DEEP ONES: Summer 2020 Planning Thread

This thread is for nominations and voting on stories for inclusion in the July-September reads in this group. Please feel free to draw on the ongoing brainstorming thread for nominations, but don't limit yourself to items discussed there.

As in past rounds, any story that gets more "No" than "Yes" votes won't make the cut; otherwise they'll be prioritized according to net-yes-minus-no, and the final list will be in OPD sequence. Ties will be broken in favor of author and period variety.

To propose a story for voting, place the title and author between HTML-style angle-bracket tags. The open tag says vote (in brackets); the close tag says /vote (ditto). Multiple polls seem to need multiple posts. If you put the name of the author in double square brackets, it will make it a linked "touchstone" for the LT database, and first publication dates of nominated stories are appreciated. Also welcome are remarks about the story, the author, and your nomination motives, and/or a link to an online version.

You can see a sortable list of all previous discussions here. A persistent brainstorming thread is here. Nominations repeating old discussions will be disqualified, but revival of dormant discussion threads is always welcome. "That is not dead which can eternal lie," etc.

VOTING is scheduled to END on the Summer Solstice: Saturday, June 20.

Held over from the cutoff tie in last quarter's voting.
Widely anthologized. More explicitly engaged with yog-sothothery than the usual run of Ligotti's work, this story has accordingly been much reprinted under the Cthulhvian aegis.

One of HPL's Dreamlands tales, whose setting was worked into "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath". Available e.g. at Wikisource.

The second tale by Ford to be found in The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories.

A masterful and deeply autobiographical weird tale from late in the author's career.

Lovecraftian tale found in the Cthulhu's Reign anthology.

Cosmic horror by Barron. Found in Cthulhu's Reign and The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All

Found in The Three Imposters.

Published in Black Wings of Cthulhu, where editor S.T. Joshi characterizes it as a "tale of psychological terror" (9).

Characterized by Robert M. Price as an "antiquarian ghost story" in the Jamesian mode.
Variously anthologized and available online.

>8 KentonSem:

The entirety of The Three Impostors is online at Wikisource.

Available online at Diabolique magazine or in various editions of the collection The Motion Demon.

Available online here and in his collection The Silence Room.

Sean O'Brien is professor of creative writing at Newcastle University. Among his publications are a book of short stories, The Silence Room, a novel, Afterlife, and seven collections of poetry, including The Drowned Book, which won both the Forward and TS Eliot Prizes.

An unsettling tale of gothic menace found in several Aickman collections and in The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories

In my judgement, this is a weirder tale than "The Truth About Pickman" which we just read. The downside is that it was only published in The Legacy of Erich Zann and Other Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos.

For those who are interested in polar exploration, Captain Oates is a major character.

Withdrawn.

>16 KentonSem:

I could have sworn we'd done "The Horla", but apparently not.

Seems like a long time since we did anything by Dunsany, so let's nominate something:A story of the lure of the sea. Put me in mind of the sea-yearning apt to befall Tolkien's elves when I first read it years ago. Online e.g. here.

And for something a little more out of the usual run of things:The title means "The foot of the mummy". A story that might be considered horror in form but not content. Definitely strange, though. English translation by Lefcadio Hearn here.

I've been trying to find a weird western that's widely available. This may fit the bill since it's been widely anthologized.

There's is an online version at http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks13/1304501h.html

>17 AndreasJ:

I really thought we had read "The Horla" as well, perhaps it was alluded to in one of our discussions of another story.

Wait, here's our dormant thread:
http://www.librarything.com/topic/189401

There appear to be three variants of this story, one called "Letter from a Madman".

>17 AndreasJ:, >20 elenchus:

Huh. Good memories/detective work! Doesn't show up on the discussions list, which is what I checked before nominating. Adding it now. Nomination withdrawn!

Well-anthologized and available online:

https://americanliterature.com/author/guy-de-maupassant/short-story/the-hand

Dr Hesselius, the occult detective mentioned in the frame to "Carmilla" which we read back in '17, investigates a clergyman who is being tormented by a pithecine demon. Widely anthologized and online e.g. here.

A regular in British small-press publications for some years now, D. P. Watt had this story reprinted in (at?) Weird Fiction Review in 2014.

https://weirdfictionreview.com/2014/09/erbachs-emporium-of-automata/

>24 housefulofpaper:

I'm vaguely recalling a mention of this name in the group, perhaps associated with a Dr Who story?

In any case, I scrolled through the LT author page and decided I like the titles of works listed there. Pieces for Puppets and Other Cadavers, Almost Insentient, Almost Divine, and so on.

>25 elenchus:

It's not ringing any bells...apart from Dr Watt (Kenneth Williams) claiming to be a relative in Carry on Screaming :)

Another British author, this story is anthologised in The Weird.

Time for last-minute voting! I'll tally tomorrow morning.

Sorry I'm late! I've got the votes and I'll post results momentarily in a schedule thread.