Free/Bargain Horror

[pstjmack]

Originally Posted by NightBird

Free from Endeavor Press: Prospero's Mirror by A.N. Donaldson.

As a Cambridge man, I'm just peeved that the venue had to be switched from MR James's alma mater to The Other Place. But I'm still definitely going to be dipping into this one

[NightBird]

Originally Posted by Dr. Drib

Hear! Hear!
+1
Yes
Agreed
Why, of course





Don

LOL

Originally Posted by Critteranne

Not a free title, but a free podcast. The hosts of A Podcast to the Curious interview A. N. Donaldson, author of Prospero's Mirror, this week. You can subacribe on iTunes and so forth, or get it from their blog at http://www.mrjamespodcast.com/2013/0...-a-n-donaldson

Be sure to check out their earlier episodes. They are devotng an episode to all the M. R. James stories, in order.

Good one, Critteranne. Thanks for posting.

Originally Posted by pstjmack

As a Cambridge man, I'm just peeved that the venue had to be switched from MR James's alma mater to The Other Place. But I'm still definitely going to be dipping into this one

LOL

My favorite M.R. James story is "The Mezzotint." Really creepy. I also liked the fantasy, The Five Jars, something a little different. I know a lot of people don't like a first-person narrator, but I do sometimes as I think it can create a lot of suspense just going along with the narrator and seeing where it all leads.

Two freebies from Crossroad Press today. I've had these on my wishlist for a while so I really did a doubletake when I saw these were free.

Deathgrip by Brian Hodge. (Great writer, BTW.)

His touch can heal or harm. His fate is solitary. His agony belongs to us all…

He was born on a day of pain: November 22, 1963. He came of age in agony: that moment of tragedy when fun-loving rock-and-roll deejay Paul Handler discovered the inexplicable power in his own hands.

It is the power to make the wounded whole again. The power to make the lame walk and to heal the sick. It is a power that will sap his soul and plunge him into the world of a famous faith healer. It is a power that can turn to rage, even murder. It is a gift that makes Paul Handler a living, breathing human sacrifice.

For thousands of years, a secret cabal has guarded the lineage to which Paul is heir — scapegoats who have been forced to bear humanity's anguish upon themselves. Now, while the cabal searches for him, and one man seeks to destroy him, Paul makes a lonely, frightening journey to the core of his identity and to his destiny … to all the pain his soul can bear, to all the redemption he can give, to the freedom that is death.

Thunder Rise is the first book in a trilogy by G. Wayne Miller.

Something is happening to the children of Morgantown...

One by one, they are claimed by a strange illness that cannot be identified.

Night after night, they are haunted by terrifying creatures that invade their dreams.

Moment to moment, they dread the final hours of daylight. When the towering mountain called Thunder Rise casts its shadow over the town. When childhood innocence surrenders to primal fear. When evil reaches out—and into—their minds.

Crossroad Press has really been churning out a lot of backlist titles, usually priced from $2.99 to $4.99, and most are also available at Kobo with coupons. Downside is they do seem to have quite a few scanning errors/typos.

I'm reading one of theirs now and it is one of the best horror books I've ever read: Son of the Endless Night by John Farris (best known for being the author of The Fury). $3.99 at Amazon and Kobo. Check out the contest going on now at Kobo for coupons or check the Kobobooks coupon thread here.

Basically, the title is the name of the demon possessing one of the characters. Complex story with lots of characters, unusual situations, progressing to a legal thriller with the defense in a murder trial of not guilty due to possession by a demon. All the witnesses to the murder are being killed of in unusual and grotesque ways. lol Great writing and descriptions. This would make a great movie. Anyone who likes the best work of Stephen King or Dean Koontz will like this.

In a peaceful Vermont courtroom, humanity will be called to trial by endless evil. Ancient and implacable -- armed with sensuality, delusion and horrible death -- it will join itself to human weakness in an unholy alliance. Against it stand only imperfect human beings, caught in a world-spanning struggle in which they have everything to lose -- for all of us -- and only human strength to help them. Not since The Exorcist has there been such a powerful novel of demonic possession as Son of the Endless Night; perhaps never has there been a novel that so weds supernatural horror with human weakness as to make the two inextricably one.

[Dr. Drib]

Picked up the Hodge and G. Wayne Miller books.

Thank you!




Don

[NightBird]

YW.

Well, this one doesn't sound like horror, but they claim it is. Anyway, free short story from Corvus Investment in Fantasy: a Horror Story by Arthur Pendryll.

Gene is prepared to invest in Dwight Calver’s strip club, and more than that he and his wife are looking for a girl to join them in the hotel room. All in all, he has the life most men dream of, so why is he having such difficulty choosing a woman for his wife. There are strippers everywhere, and more than one has made it clear that they do more than dance. Still, he finds himself wanting the one girl in the club who seems to have a good head on her shoulders, and that’s not the kind of girl he and his wife like to play with.

[caleb72]

Originally Posted by Dr. Drib

Picked up the Hodge and G. Wayne Miller books.

Thank you!




Don

Me too.

[Dr. Drib]

Brian Hodge was a contributor to the Dell Abyss line of horror novels, about 20 years ago. This was and underrated and classy line, mainly comprised of psychological horror, if my memory is correct.

Hodge, himself, is an underrated writer.

Here's some interesting information on Dell Abyss:

http://toomuchhorrorfiction.blogspot...ck-covers.html

http://trashotron.com/agony/columns/2003/05-15-03.htm



Don

[Prestidigitweeze]

Originally Posted by Dr. Drib

Brian Hodge was a contributor to the Dell Abyss line of horror novels, about 20 years ago. This was and underrated and classy line, mainly comprised of psychological horror, if my memory is correct.

Hodge, himself, is an underrated writer.

I met Brian Hodge in the '90s at a horror/lit convention in Denver (where we were both guests) and he was as welcoming to other writers as he was talented. One example that struck me: He liked my habit of playing complex piano parts while reading my stories aloud -- so much so that he later mentioned that fact in an interview which could have focused entirely on himself. His classiness, as you say, was as obvious as his kindness.

So, yes, I picked up that story by Brian as well. Very glad he was mentioned.

Don:

Is there a particular e-book edition of M.R. James' ghost stories which you consider to be especially well done?

[Dr. Drib]

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

I met Brian Hodge in the '90s at a horror/lit convention in Denver (where we were both guests) and he was as welcoming to other writers as he was talented. One example that struck me: He liked my habit of playing complex piano parts while reading my stories aloud -- so much so that he later mentioned that fact in an interview which could have focused entirely on himself. His classiness, as you say, was as obvious as his kindness.

So, yes, I picked up that story by Brian as well. Very glad he was mentioned.



I met Brian Hodge in the '90s at a horror/lit convention in Denver (where we were both guests) and he was as welcoming to other writers as he was talented. One example that struck me: He liked my habit of playing complex piano parts while reading my stories aloud -- so much so that he later mentioned that fact in an interview which could have focused entirely on himself. His classiness, as you say, was as obvious as his kindness.

So, yes, I picked up that story by Brian as well. Very glad he was mentioned.

Don:

Is there a particular e-book edition of M.R. James' ghost stories which you consider to be especially well done?

You double-posted in the same post. This may be a first for MobileRead!

I'm glad you were able to meet him. It seems like he disappeared for awhile (or was undercover in one sense), but he now seems to be back, which is great news for his fans.

Let me look over what I have on James and I'll post a reply here.






Don

[Brendan Moody]

Not to butt in, but on M. R. James:

For those who don't mind paying $10 for an e-book, Ash-Tree Press' e-book edition of A Pleasing Terror: The Complete Supernatural Writings is the one to get. All four collections of ghost stories, the uncollected ghost stories, The Five Jars, the incomplete drafts of ghost stories he never finished, and his essays and articles on supernatural fiction, all annotated by the great James scholar Michael Cox and other experts. Plus some other odds and ends by and about James. The only drawback is that the e-book doesn't include the illustrations from the print edition. But since the print edition is long out of print and costs hundreds of dollars secondhand, the e-book is really a bargain even at $10. A Pleasing Terror is available for Kindle, or direct from the publisher in EPUB and PRC.

If you're a bargain-hunter, $3.49 for the Wordsworth Editions release of James' Collected Ghost Stories on Kindle is a good deal, and it looks like a decent version, though I note one of the Amazon reviews complains of no table of contents. It's missing a couple minor stories by James, the fragments, and The Five Jars, but unless you're a completist they're no great loss.

Curious Warnings: The Great Ghost Stories of M. R. James has all the fiction including The Five Jars, but at $11.29 on Kindle it's even more pricey than A Pleasing Terror, without notes, and (this is a deal-breaker for me) the editor has broken up James' ridiculously long paragraphs into ridiculously short ones, under the debatable impression that this will make the stories more accessible to modern readers.

[Dr. Drib]

For those without deep pockets, there is this Megapack series (which I've been very pleased with as a series). However, I do not yet own this edition.

It's only $0.99 and is available for the kindle here:

http://www.amazon.com/The-M-R-James-...8818691&sr=1-4




Don

[Brendan Moody]

That looks like a great pick as well. It's missing the stories from his fourth collection, because those are still under copyright in the US, but only one of those stories, "A Warning to the Curious," is particularly good, and anyone who picks up the A. N. Donaldson freebie will find "A Warning to the Curious" included at the end anyway.

[Prestidigitweeze]

Brendan:

Thanks for the detailed recs! Have you yourself gotten to look at the formatting for A Pleasing Terror, esp. in epub? I have no problem paying $9.99 even for a writer who's now out of copyright, but for $9.99, the editing had better be good even with footnotes and extra content (are the footonotes out of copyright as well?).

Originally Posted by Dr. Drib

You double-posted in the same post. This may be a first for MobileRead!

I've been so traumatized by browser crashes and forum password refreshes wiping my carefully wrought edits that I now cut and paste my posts habitually while writing them. It looks as though I hit control-V twice this time.

Let me look over what I have on James and I'll post a reply here. . . . For those without deep pockets, there is this Megapack series (which I've been very pleased with as a series). However, I do not yet own this edition.

Have you found the editing and proofing in the series to be good so far? I ask because the source for the collection is probably the Gutenberg Project, and those texts are always in need of radical surgery. I've also managed to find an epub version of your favored edition on Kobo.

[koland]

Free Horror (that is especially relevant to readers of this forum):

Ebooks Will Eat Your Children's Flesh! (And Other Harbingers Of The Apocalypse) by Elvis Shackleton

“Experts predict that within ten years of the rise of ebooks, publishing will implode, all decent writers will retire and start working at Tesco, 99% of books will be written in a sweat shop in Dagenham, the moral fibre of planet earth will vanish, moral outrage will spread like the plague, and as a result the plague will spread like the plague and flesh will fall off the faces of children as young as five...”

For over ten years Elvis Shackleton has been one of Britain’s most eclectic commentators, producing a curate’s egg of ideas, observations, commentary, outrage and occasional pieces of entirely fabricated investigative journalism. Now, for the first time, highlights from this random collection of words have been assembled into one volume. EBOOKS WILL EAT YOUR CHILDREN’S FLESH! contains such Shackleton gems as:

Someone Like You vs You Oughta Know: Which Is The Bigger Psycho Song?
Bloody Scotland, Independent
The Distilled Essence of Pussy Galore
10 Christmas Songs That Are Crimes Against Humanity
The Slartibartfast Paradigm
There's A Windfarm Outside My Window
The Wacko Boffin’s Guide To Climate Change
and many more.

http://www.amazon.com/Ebooks-Childre...dp/B00CMDP5MQ/

It's more or less self-pub (Long Midnight Publishing only publishes Douglas Lindsey, from what I can see, otherwise, and has no website).

[Brendan Moody]

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

Brendan:

Thanks for the detailed recs! Have you yourself gotten to look at the formatting for A Pleasing Terror, esp. in epub? I have no problem paying $9.99 even for a writer who's now out of copyright, but for $9.99, the editing had better be good even with footnotes and extra content (are the footonotes out of copyright as well?).

I'm afraid I haven't seen the epub. I own the Kindle edition, and the formatting generally seems solid. One annoyance is that, while there is a table of contents included, the Kindle doesn't recognize it as a table of contents, so that option is greyed out in the Kindle's navigation menu, and you have to select "go to beginning" and page back to the table of contents. A possibly-related issue is that when you select a story from the table of contents and navigate to it via the link, the story title shows up formatted incorrectly (on the left and not italicized), and you have to page back once and then forward again to get it to display properly (centered and italicized). This is a common problem with Ash-Tree's Kindle/PRC titles; I don't know whether the same would be true of the EPUB.

The footnotes are in-copyright; they're explanatory stuff from modern scholars, about sources and obscure references and what-not. Some of them also appeared in Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories, Michael Cox's selection from James' ghost stories. They're neat if you're a James enthusiast, but not necessarily worth the added cost otherwise. I should amend my earlier statement: "For those who don't mind paying $10 for an e-book and who are very into M. R. James, Ash-Tree Press' e-book edition of A Pleasing Terror: The Complete Supernatural Writings is the one to get." For those not familiar with his stories, something like the Megapack would be a better initial selection. As I mentioned, all his major stories (barring "A Warning to the Curious") are there, and if the formatting is good it's a great deal for the price. There are, of course, public domain versions of all the stories in the Megapack, but many will have dire formatting. I've had good luck with the University of Adelaide's public-domain e-books in the past, but I haven't looked at their versions of James.

[curtw]

Originally Posted by Dr. Drib

For those without deep pockets, there is this Megapack series (which I've been very pleased with as a series). However, I do not yet own this edition.

It's only $0.99 and is available for the kindle here:

http://www.amazon.com/The-M-R-James-...8818691&sr=1-4

For those with even shallower pockets: seeing the word "Megapack" in an ebook title is a virtual guarantee that you'll be able to borrow it from the local Overdrive library! (in the US, at least)