Oculus Presents: More bookses!

 

Greetings, everyone!

 

As I said in my last book-collecting post, I had a couple more books relevant to this blog on the way, and they arrived a few weeks ago, I was just a bit busy (read: lazy) to properly introduce these beauties.

Not that the one on the left needs an introduction, I think: it's an original edition of the first book in legendary Scary Stories series, which has been scaring the living bejezus out of American kids for generations now. Like many people, I'm not a super great fan of the more recent editions with the new drawings; I perfectly understand wanting to make these books more kid-friendly than the gnarly nightmares concocted by Stephen Gammell were, but the horrifying black-and-white watercolors were at least half of the charm of these books for me when I first encountered excerpts from them on the internet. Especially the drawing for the story called The Dream - yeah, I mean her. Hats off for spicing up my nightmares, Mr. Gammell. I've had my eyes on this book for a while now; and when it arrived, it was to my great delight that I saw: yes, it does contain the drawings. I won't review this book on the blog, because it's not rare or obscure at all, quite the contrary - but I can definitely appreciate it on my own.

The book on the right with the gorgeous cover, meanwhile, is a short story collection by the esteemed former horror author (I say former because as far as I've heard, she's mostly moved on to other genres lately) Kathe Koja. If you know anything about American horror literature history you know her: she is the author of the groundbreaking, legendary horror novel The Cipher, kickstarting the famed Dell/Abyss line of boundary-pushing horror books. For a while The Cipher had fallen out of print and became a collector's item, going for tens if not hundreds of dollars on the book market; but just last year Meerkat Press fulfilled every broke horror fan's dream and released a brand-new paperback edition of it, which I'm so buying next year. Until then, Extremities will be my first book of hers I'm actually going to dive into - the reviews on the back cover liken it to Poe and Calvino, two authors I love, so I think we're in good hands here.

Apologies for the quiet on the blog lately, I'm especially sour about not doing a Halloween-themed post like I said I would, but I do have something very cool planned to finish this year with a bang, so keep your eyes peeled in the next few weeks for new posts. Cheers!

Oculus Presents: Merry Book Haul, and a friend

Welcome, folks, to the biggest book haul this blog has ever seen.

I don't normally go on book-shopping sprees, but every now and then I feel like I'm allowed to splurge a little - and sometimes books I ordered separately all arrive at the same time and bury me with a very welcome avalanche. This time, I got five books within a week of each other! I've been very excited to get to these babies for different reasons, and they look quite nice on the Shelf, too. Four out of five I've ordered from Better World Books, which I very much recommend for you folks to check out - they have an excellent horror and genre fiction selection, offer free shipping on many titles, and they do a lot of good work with nonprofits and donated books with the money they get from book purchases, so you're doing something good while scoring great finds for your own shelf. Win-win scenario!

The fifth book is from my trusty Thriftbooks - a pricier venture shipping-wise, but one whose selection has never disappointed me. And as to what those books are? Well...

First of all, the greats - King and Matheson. I really dig the cover of Thinner, although the premise of the book is a little... uh... we'll burn that bridge when we get to it. I Am Legend, on the other hand, is a book I've been looking forward to for a while. I find both the shouting Will Smith sticker and the praise from Dean Koontz, hackmaster extraordinaire, a little comical; but the rest of the cover is very atmospheric, and I've heard nothing but good about the book itself. We shall see whether it holds up to that praise, but I've read from Matheson before and I trust his writing a whole lot.

Next is this great little find: a YA horror from the 80's, and one with the true rarity of having gay characters, even in the main cast if my memory doesn't fail me. I have mixed feelings about the YA phenomenon, but I've read a lot of great YA books - some even in the horror and thriller genre, and they were delightful -, and between the premise of YA horror, the gay characters and this awesome cover, The Lake is a book I'm very eager to check out.

Poppy Z. Brite is one of those slightly lesser-known (to non-horror lit fans anyway) authors who were the powerhouses of horror publishing in the 1990's, known for being fresh, daring and original; and he in particular was known for featuring queer people and outcasts in a genre heavily dominated by straight white men as protagonists. That alone would win my undying respect, but then he also came out as trans - nowadays he goes by Billy Martin, although he still uses Poppy Z. Brite, his pre-transition pen name, professionally. (Correct me if I'm wrong.) And since I'm always up for reading more from minority authors, especially in horror, I've been glad to find this much-praised short story collection, from the famed Dell/Abyss line, at a pretty good price. I've only ever read one short story by Brite before, but unlike Clive Barker's writing (Hellbound Heart, the novella Hellraiser is based on, is an awkward book to say the least), I really liked what I'd seen of him so far.

And finally, this well-loved, but still wonderful copy of Borderlands, a boundary-pushing horror anthology from genre greats like Harlan Ellison and Joe R. Lansdale, with one hell of a cover. Fantastic work by Dave McKean (the title is on the black part, but it's done in transparent reflective foil, so it's only visible in a certain lighting). As for whether the stories inside are just as great... well, other horror blogs tell me a very resounding YES.

Thus concludes the book haul - I have two more on the way, and then the book-shopping shall stop for a while; both because I have enough stuff to read for a year, and because the Shelf is getting rather full. (But worry not, gentle reader! I have a bigger bookshelf on my other wall.) As for the friend I mentioned...

Yorick?

 

I've been organizing my bookshelf for the umpteenth time, and I relocated my Tolkien collection (why yes, I am a giant nerd, why do you ask?) to a more visible spot; and then I couldn't resist adding an extra touch of fantasy with this wizard figurine I bought from an antiques fair. Someone get me a Boromir figurine or a dragon to go with it, and my bliss shall be complete.

Oculus Presents: Latest finds for the Shelf

Heya, folks, this is Oculus Presents.

Been a bit busy these past few weeks with work, writing and suchlike, but that doesn't mean I stopped buying books or reading (these days I'm mostly doing literary fiction, that's why the blog has been a little quiet on the review front). As usual, I scour the used bookshops for anything neat I can find, and I've ordered a few... interesting things online as well, so the Shelf is quite teeming with life. I've managed to score an excellent vintage copy of To Kill a Mockingbird and a biography of Franz Liszt among others, but let me show you the ones relevant to my genre collection...

My earliest find, from last month, is this copy of Savage by Richard Laymon - a western novel about a young boy pursuing Jack the Ripper into the American Wild West. The premise sounds neat enough, and Laymon fans are eating up the book, but I haven't heard super mega great things about his writing skills from people whose tastes I trust, and the first chapter had a teenage boy in Victorian London calling people "tough hombres", which, er, yeah. I have a feeling that this is going to be an experience.

Something I'm already quite fond of, though, is this story collection by the awesome C. L. Moore. Catherine L. Moore was one of the pioneers of female speculative fiction writing in the pulp era of the 30's and 40's (although she didn't retire from writing until the early 60's). There had been other female specfic writers at the time, of course, but she had been probably the most iconic. This is a collection of her short stories with the rugged space adventurer, Northwest Smith, as the hero - including the first Northwest Smith story ever, Shambleau, which is one of my favorite short stories. She also wrote Jirel of Joiry, one of the earliest female sword-and-sorcery heroines, and let me just say, I'm dying to get my hands on a copy of that collection. I'm going to do a Moore-stravaganza on this blog where I review this collection and discuss Shambleau in more detail, but until then - let us admire this fantastic cover.

And finally, one of my favorite used book finds: this reprint of an iconic, much-respected collection of short vampire fiction, edited by the late Alan Ryan (who I'm quite fond of, if you recall from my review of Cast a Cold Eye). Dunno who the hell okayed this lackluster cover and the weird font choice (the original cover art, done by Edward Gorey, fit the book's themes so much more); but the collection has stories from Bram Stoker, August Derleth, Stephen King, Richard Matheson, C. L. Moore again and other genre greats, and I've heard that Alan Ryan was an editor of great taste in short fiction, so I'm very much looking forward to diving in. Not this year, alas (I have 25 books to read until the end of the year for various reading challenges I signed up for, pray for me - I swear it's fun though, or I wouldn't be doing it), but chipping away at this book, one short story at a time, sounds like the perfect entertainment for the upcoming chilly winter months.

Well, folks, that's it for today - I'll be returning soon with a few reviews, gods willing (two of the books I'm planning to read until December are Hawk & Fisher and Vampire Beat from the Shelf, and I'll try to fit in The Lure as well); and hopefully I can do something interesting to celebrate Halloween with, I'll figure out what. Until then, have a very spooky October, everyone.

Oculus Presents: Another find for the Shelf O' Stuff

Welcome to Oculus Presents, folks.

I confess that for a long-ass time, I'd only known Patricia Highsmith as the author of the novel The Price of Salt (nowadays also published as Carol, after the movie adaptation), a groundbreaking piece of 1952 lesbian fiction. And then I found out she was actually a very acclaimed crime and thriller author of such classics as The Talented Mr. Ripley and Strangers on a Train. I know it usually happens the other way around when people get into her books, but either way, she's been on my to-read list for a while.

And then I found a copy of this book in a used bookshop.

Those Who Walk Away apparently is one of Ms. Highsmith's lesser-known thrillers, but it is still relatively widely read (bestselling crime author here) and has been published many times, in various languages. However, this particular edition with the wonderfully unsettling cover was released by Pan Books in 1970 as part of the very obscure Best of American Crime Fiction series (not to be confused with the other series titled The Best of American Crime Fiction, which came earlier and had a very different cover art style). And it is pretty much impossible to find on the internet. Nothing on Goodreads and Abebooks, nothing on eBay; only a few question marks from Pan paperback collectors, and copies for sale of various other books from this same series. Eventually I managed to dig up a blog entry on the Pan Books collectors' website, TiKiT, which includes at least a photo of this edition of Those Who Walk Away in the TiKiT catalog, proving that this is in fact a thing that people know about. I haven't the foggiest how valuable this edition is, nor do I particularly care, but it's definitely one of the hardest-to-find books I've tried to track down, especially from such a famous author. Whether the contents will hold up to that creepy cover remains for me to see, but I'm very glad to place it on the Shelf.

Update: I forgot to credit the designer behind this magnificently scary cover art - the back cover of the book tells me it's the work of one Tom Simmonds. Hats off, Mr. Simmonds.

Oculus Presents: A really... interesting new purchase

Hey, everyone, this is Oculus Presents.

Welp... I guess I own this now.

For those of you who don't speak German: this is a German-language edition of the infamous Stephen King novel Rage, published in 1977 under the pseudonym Richard Bachman (my German copy is dated 1995, and is a reprint of an earlier translation). Rage has achieved some uncomfortable notoriety in horror circles as being, to this date, the only Stephen King novel he personally had pulled from print (don't get me wrong, copies can be found, but it's a novel of his you won't see getting a new edition any time soon). And when Stephen "I wrote a story about self-cannibalism" King feels he's crossing a line, you know you're in for some harrowing stuff.

Let's not beat around the bush: Rage is a novel about a school shooting, and the reason why King let it fall out of print is because it has become associated with real-life tragedies similar to its plot. I've never read it, nor did I particularly feel like it until lately - I like boundary-pushing fiction as much as the next guy, but fictionalized tragedies make me feel uncomfortable as hell. I don't feel like horror has a moral responsibility towards its fans because that would be a real after-school special kind of view of the genre, but there are some topics I simply do not feel like reading about when I'm trying to have fun (well, a given definition of "fun", seeing how horror usually aims to stir some darker emotions). Especially because those topics are usually chosen and handled by hack authors only aiming to shock and disgust, with all the tact and delicacy of a rabid elephant.

But this copy of the book has been beckoning at me from a used bookshop for months now, man. As a sort of horror and genre fiction collector, the idea of owning a copy of this notorious King novel, even in a foreign-language edition, had a sort of odd appeal to me. And I ended up giving in to that. I don't actually speak German despite studying it in middle school, and like I said, this novel wasn't very high on my TBR list anyway; but I do aim to learn the language, if only for the sake of reading Amok someday. Am I gonna enjoy it if I do? Probably not. But now I've gotta, I guess.

Did somebody say vintage genre fiction shelf?

I've been organizing my library, and realized that I have a few real interesting pre-1990 genre paperbacks (except for The Lure, which is a hardcover, but it's a 70's thriller, so I say it counts) and decided to collect them in one place, just to see what they'd look like together. And they rock. Compared to some genuine literary collections out there this is a pretty meager offering; but for someone who lives in a non-English-speaking country, where I can only get these books from overseas or very occasionally from used bookshops if I get lucky, I'd say it's not too shabby.

Books from left to right:

• Gaywyck by Vincent Virga - the first ever explicitly gay Gothic romance, real eager to read this one
• Cast a Cold Eye by Alan Ryan - a gorgeous Irish ghost story, one of my favorite non-King vintage horror reads out there
• Finishing Touches by Thomas Tessier - a very praised psychological horror novel with an erotic edge by a respected genre author, also eager to get to this
• The Red Planet by Robert Heinlein - a delightfully dated sci-fi romp from 1949, and one of my first ever reads in English
• The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett - a gift from a dear friend, and a very fun (if flawed) fantasy read; not gonna review it here, because everyone and their mum knows Mr. Pratchett, but it's a respected part of my collection all the same
• Invaders From Mars by Ray Garton - a novelization of a movie I very much haven't seen, but Ray Garton had written some famously grotesque horror stuff, so I'm interested in seeing what he brings to the table here
• Dark Forces, edited by Kirby McCauley - a reprint of a legendary horror anthology from before the great horror paperback boom, I found it a bit of an uneven read but I can absolutely understand why it was so groundbreaking at the time
• Gabriel by Lisa Tuttle - I love Lisa Tuttle, this is one of her lesser-known novels, but I'm looking forward to it; great luck to snag a reprint in good condition
• The Green Brain by Frank Herbert - featured it in just the previous post, a sci-fi book by one of the genre greats with a gorgeous cover
  
• The Cradle Will Fall by Mary Higgins Clark - also featured this one, I wasn't exactly enamored with it on first read, but the cover art is striking
• The Terrified Heart by Alicia Grace - real obscure 70's Gothic romance I found in a used bookshop (miracles do happen)
• Hawk & Fisher by Simon Green - gritty fantasy about a married couple of peacekeepers in a rough city, and the first in a pretty well-regarded series
• the novelizations for Aliens (Alan Dean Foster), The Abyss (Orson Scott Card), The Terminator (Randall Frakes, Bill Wisher) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (Randall Frakes) - I live and breathe all the James Cameron movies that starred Michael Biehn (shut up, he was in T2 if you squint) and this is sort of my collection within a collection; I also own the Tombstone novelization because big fan of Mr. Biehn here, but that one is post-1990, so didn't put it on the shelf
• Vampire Beat by Vincent Courtney - a tacky crime-horror novel about a vampire cop, gotta love the concept alone
• The Lure by Felice Picano - a lurid, raunchy thriller set in the underground gay scene of the 70's, praised by Stephen King himself
  

I'll confess that I haven't read all these books yet (Cast a Cold Eye is my current read, for instance), but they all have a certain something about them - in some cases the cover art, in others the premise or the writers themselves - that makes me very eager to discover what they hold between the covers. I'm also looking to expand my collection with a few more interesting and obscure reads I hunt down in various used bookshops, so you can definitely expect more posts about Le Genre Shelf as it grows.