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S'està carregant… In a Lonely Placede Karl Edward Wagner
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One of the most important horror collections of modern times, back in print at last! Karl Edward Wagner (1945-1994) has earned a reputation as one of the finest horror writers of the modern era, but his work has been out of print and nearly unobtainable for many years. His seminal volume In a Lonely Place collects eight of his best tales, including "In the Pines," a classic ghost story evocatively set in the Tennessee woods, "Beyond Any Measure," an original take on the vampire story, "River of Night's Dreaming," a surreal and nightmarish masterpiece inspired by The King in Yellow, and the author's most famous tale, "Sticks," a disturbing story thought by many to have been the basis for The Blair Witch Project. This new edition includes all the stories from the original 1983 edition, plus an additional rare tale and the author's afterword from the Scream/Press limited edition, and features a new introduction by Ramsey Campbell. "Wagner is always a fascinating writer ... his tales of ancient evils working on the present are brilliantly modern." -- Washington Post "He knows exactly what he's doing; he's scary, entertaining, and knowledgeable."- - Peter Straub "Wagner is a contemporary master."- - Philadelphia Inquirer No s'han trobat descripcions de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — S'està carregant… GèneresClassificació Decimal de Dewey (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LCC (Clas. Bibl. Congrés EUA)ValoracióMitjana:
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"In the Pines" is in many respects--and by internal admission--an updating of the 1911 Oliver Onions story "The Beckoning Fair One." It has all of the evil inexorability of Onions' tale with none of its quaint moral circumspection.
"Where the Summer Ends" similarly shows roots in earlier weird fiction, riffing on the Little People of Arthur Machen's stories such as "The Shining Pyramid," but using an American setting familiar to Wagner, and enriched with believable late-20th-century characters.
The epistolary elements of "Sticks" and the character of its conspiracy is very reminiscent of one of my favorite Lovecraft stories, "The Whisperer in Darkness." Its factual basis makes it very eerie indeed!
"The Fourth Seal" is about scientific research and inspired by Wagner's time in medical school, but it is really an incisive and dismaying political parable.
The well-twisted revenge tale "More Sinned Against" is told with understated and economical prose. Like some of the other stories in this collection, though perhaps to a greater degree, it gives unflinching accounts of drug abuse and sexual exploitation.
".220 Swift" returns to the Machenesque in more of a pulp action mode, tying in Robert E. Howard's ideas about Bran Mak Morn and an assortment of other lore. This piece is a very full novella with multiple arcs and resolutions.
"The River of Night's Dreaming" is in the jauniste mode, drawing on the mythemes founded in Robert W. Chambers' The Yellow Sign. It's evidently the only story in which Wagner mined this particular vein, but for my money, the puzzle-box narrative it offers is one of the best examples of the form. It offers a very unreliable viewpoint character whose homicidal madness is perhaps of a piece with a desire to turn back time, even while her memories are inaccessible or impaired, and time itself might be the very river of night's dreaming, which permits only a little swim upstream before the swimmer is exhausted.
The final story "Beyond Any Measure" shares the source for its title with "The River of Night's Dreaming" in the libretto of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. This one concerns reincarnation and combines it in an unexpected way with a supremely traditional sort of gothic horror in a 1980s London setting.
Wagner's own afterword discusses his authorial process and some surprising details about his intent in stories that can be very murky about the "actual" conditions that they are describing and the messages he sought to convey.