What are the best ghost story and weird fiction authors?

He's my favorite author too. I got into horror a long time ago, but i was never that much into weird fiction.

Ligotti is just like nothing else though.
What's your favorite book by him? I think Teatro Grottesco is his best release but Songs Of A Dead Dreamer is also a masterpiece in my eyes. Don't feel so hot about Grimscribe although both the opening and ending stories are excellent, and Noctuary is way too repetitious.

His poetry is excellent too, specially when compared to all the poetry Veeky Forums likes to rage about

A Haunted House was cute~

I've heard good things about Aickman.

Balzac is usually categorised as "classics" but nearly all his works contain supernatural/occult elements

Ikr the ghost stories written by trans black Jewish women in wheelchairs are far superior.

You meme, but Caitlin Kiernan's written some really disturbing shorts and novellas

You've listed some of the best ones. I'd add Ligotti, Klein (it's a real shame he stopped), Gavin, Le Fanu.

It's too bad the material June is reading has been censored.
Also, why not Count Magnus by James?

CAS is painfully underappreciated.

>Klein stopped
Has he confirmed this? I was under the assumption he was just an incredibly slow writer. I didn't much care for The Ceremonies, though, so if that is the case it's not much of a loss to me.

What's your favorite poem by him? Weird poetry isn't nearly as popular as the prose and over the past several months I've tossed around getting more into it after reading through that Penguin collection of Smith's.

I've been reading through Clark Ashton's Penguin volume. The short stories are superb; City Of The Singing Flame, The Vaults Of Voh-Yombis, the favourites so far. His settings are diverse, and he can do a variety of styles. Definitely a better prose writer than Lovecraft (who is still a better plotter) The twenty or so prose poems have also been revelatory, a form I hadn't been very aware of. They are little parables and tone pieces, I will reproduce one of them here:

THE TOUCH-STONE

Nasiphra the philosopher had sought through many years and in many lands for the fabled touch-stone, which was said to reveal the true nature of all things. He had found all manner of stones, from the single boulders that have been carven into the pyramids of monarchs, to the tiny gems that are visible only through a magnifying-glass, but since none of them had effected any change or manifest alteration in the materials with which they were brought in contact, Nasiphra knew that they were not the thing he desired. But the real existence of a touch-stone had been affirmed by all the ancient writers and thinkers, and so, he was loath to abandon his quest, in spite of the appalling number of mineral substances which had been proven to lack the requisite qualities,

One day Nasiphra saw a large oval pebble lying in the gutter, and picked it up through force of habit, though he had no idea that it could be the touch-stone. Its color was an ordinary grey, and the form was no less commonplace than the color. But when Nasiphra took the pebble in his hand, he was startled out of his philosophic calm by the curious results: the fingers that held the pebble had suddenly become those of a skeleton, gleaming white and thin and fleshless in the sunlight; and Nasiphra knew by this token that he had found the touch-stone. He proceeded to make many tests of its add properties, all with truly singular results; it revealed to him the fact that his house was a mouldy sepulchre, that his library was a collection of worm eaten rubbish, that his friends were skeletons, mummies, jackdaws and hyenas, that his wife was a cheap and meretricious trull, that the city in which he lived was an ant-heat, and the world itself a gulf of shadow and emptiness. In truth there was no limit to the disconserting and terrible disclosures that were made by this ordinary-looking pebble. So after a time, Nasiphra threw it away, preferring to share with other men the common illusions, the friendly and benign mirages that made our existence possible.

What did you think of The Last Incantation?

The story of the necromancer who resurrects an older lover. It's good - the problem of knowledge and memory, the fine detail of his room and person. The short stories have all been good, I'm still halfway through them.

No, and there was some talk awhile back that he's finally bringing out Nighttown, but no word since.

clark ashton smith is good even if his tales only have the depth of the arabian nights--which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

reviewing CAS is good, keep it up user. i'll be lurking. do you have a blog where your reviews could have a more permanent and consolidated presence?

also, does anyone know if there's a work about necromancy involving an army of the undead attempting to invade the world of the living? something like dunharrow, or the white walkers, except more specifically focused on the world of the dead, instead of mostly being kept to the side.

Ah, it sounds like you saw my summaries of my readling along of Smith in the SFFG thread. I edited and pulled them together into an article on my anonymous book blog cs7850.wordpress.com/

I Have A Special Plan For This World is by far his best poem
youtube.com/watch?v=lxZpEFJhO6k

Robert Aickman
Laird Barron
Michael Cisco
John Langan
Michael Wehunt
Michael Griffin

MIchael Cisco is probably the weirdest of all of these authors, but he veers more into proper surrealism, with less horror/ghost story

>Michael Cisco
never heard of this guy. sounds interesting.

Man the shadow over ensmouth

his books are very unique and imaginative but also extremely weird and pretty difficult, especially compared to other writers in the genre.

so far i think 'the tyrant' is his best but 'the divinity student' is probably the best one to start with.

gotta say Dunsay is technically far better than Lovecraft, but Lovecraft is still my favourite

My girlfriend got me the complete 5 book collection of all of his short stories for Chirstmas. I've never been happier

It's very satisfying to read Lovecraft, Dunsany, and CAS together. Their strengths and weaknesses complement eachother, and you get a sense of their overlapping influences. Lovecraft's plotting and sense of humanity's insignificance is profound and humbling. Purely on prose and visual splendor, Dunsany is perhaps the best of them, to be read aloud. CAS feels like a combination of Dunsany and Lovecraft: a poet's prose, but also more variety of setting.

oh well ain't that something. i saw that link the last time you posted it.

good stuff.

some points to improve on:

listing tropes and themes is good, but to establish a more precise tone to evaluate the author, more of them should be individually expanded on. for the city of the singing flame, i remember being entranced by the descriptions of the strange beings that inhabited that world, so i assuredly would have reviewed that aspect in detail, since i know it would have been an important selling point.

in the CAS article, you used the word 'progenitor' slightly off base. i understood your intent from the context involving vance and wolfe, since i'm aware of their relation to CAS, but progenitor is not the correct word here. influencee or protege would have been more fitting. it's bizarre that there isn't a more common general word for a discontinuous follower, so i can understand why this happened.

i also would have addressed some of the weaknesses of the author. CAS is almost overbearingly bleak--a good thing in my personal opinion--but even introverts find ultra-morose writers like Ballard a pain in the ass to read tonally, therefore i would mention that CAS is almost callous in the treatment of his characters, nor does he write in his characters much presence, similarly to lovecraft, and unlike REH, whose Conan is memorable, even if i don't like the narcissistic self-inserting. it should be made clearer that the setting, and the interactions of evil with evil, is the main character in CAS. the worldbuilding as character is especially the case with CAS.

Yes, it's not comprehensive, but at nearly two thousand words I felt reluctant to expand on each story. The second article will include some general points on CAS's qualities and shortcomings once I've finished the Penguin selection of short stories; as of now I'm still thinking on some of these ideas; as you say, his bleakness, thin characters. You're right about Howard - a worse prose writer, but his action men protagonists can feel welcome after the passive characters of CAS and Lovecraft. In RH, CAS and HPL is three facets of the perfect genre writer.

your articles are generally short so it's absolutely fine. i'd be very impressed with more elaborate 20 page studies on the etymology and genealogy of his patrician vocabulary, and his allusions to near eastern culture and myth, but unless these type of studies get exposure in publications, or the bigger sff sites, it may end up only being read by a handful of anons who are big enough fans (lol)!

Veeky Forums and your blog are good workshops to get your practice on.

what are the unique strengths of each of those three writers that you see as facets of the perfect genre writer? is it CAS's florid prose, REH's dynamism, and HPL's mythos and psychological tone?

I think CAS's unusual vocabulary is surely from his self education. I read that he taught himself by reading the eleventh edition of Encyclopedia Britannica and Arabian Nights repeatedly. As for the strengths of the three big Weird Tales authors, it's easily another several thousand page article. But I can tentatively speculate on my own reading that, generally, Lovecraft is the superior plotter, the writer whose stories better compel readers to keep turning pages. His dream cycle stories also show that he can have a poetic turn of phrase, but CAS is generally superior at poetics and writing in a way that sounds pleasing. As you say, Howard is the most dynamic writer, of action sequences and bloody thrills. CAS and REH are both good world builders but do different things with their settings, CAS witnesses while REH interacts.

Replace Jewish with Muslim and you've got yourself a bestseller.

Hpl is my favorite but if you have read all of his stuff there are many authors that have written story's to expand on his universe's but most are a hit or miss. I'm not very familiar with the outher mentioned writers any recommendations?

HPL's stories are definitely better structured. that didnt even occur to me because his elongated style makes him hard for intro readers to get into. good catch.

As for CAS's allusion, if I was doing a Lin Carter-esque pastiche of Smith then I would have to throw one of the rivers of Hades somewhere. He alludes to Lethe a lot.

>some of the weaknesses of the author
I wasn't put off by the usually morbid conclusion of his stories, nor by the fact that he kept sending me to my dictionary every three sentences or so (lowly ESL here). I enjoyed the former and was grateful for the latter. What clipped the edge of my enjoyment of CAS's stories (the Penguin volume mentioned above) was that some of them tended to become a bit too gaudy and cliché-ridden, too pulpy for my tastes--I mean the plots, not the prose. The prose is deathly florid as well but I like it that way. I suppose that's why he never got beyond being considered a pulp author of scary stories. At times it seemed to me he was selling his prose too cheap in order to advance a cheap plot and get it over with. Do you see that too, and, if yes, why do you think he did it?
I remember the introduction mentioning his frugal means and how he supported his sick, old parents--maybe he just had to sell and sell quickly just to put something on the table? Or maybe he was never taken seriously by the literary world of his time, and not much differently by that of our time? Maybe he never took himself too seriously? Is it just me or does anyone else think he could have maybe reached for (more) greatness and broken through that genre barrier the way Tolkien did, for instance?

I'm on phone, I'll get back to you f a m. I have these horrible claws for hands and can't type for long without losing my will to live.

Can't talk modern weird fiction without the current master Thomas Ligotti, he is Lovecraft's rightful heir and an innovator in his own form. He is a new pillar in the landscape of horror fiction.

I've read his first two collections and can say they are top notch, the first one being more experimental, stylistically trying more diverse approaches. His second collection Grimscribe at first felt less immediate but it ends up being an evolution, Ligotti reigning himself, not letting his very eloquent and idosyncratic narrative voices be what drives the stories forwards but instead redirecting his efforts towards creating a tremendous feeling of weirdness and unreality.

Ligotti practices what Lovecraft praised in "Supernatural Horror in Literature", the ability to set up a superb atmosphere of weirdness trough out his stories, weaving a complicated web of philosophy and horror. If you pay attention to the way he writes you can tell exactly where he tears apart the feeling of normalcy in his tales.

I should clarify my thoughts. I'm unusually attuned to the bleakness of the realm, as well as the ornate vocabulary of CAS. I think they're spectacularly done, and wish such achievements of style were done more in literature. Of course, those themes are at a remove from what normal readers can stomach, hence the cautious note that I mentioned. On Veeky Forums it's unnecessary, but I felt like I had to do it.

HPL was the face of the weird fiction group, so when Lovecraft died and CAS's parents died (as well as REH), he had little reason to stay connected with Weird Tales. So yes, I do feel that it was essentially done to pay the bills, though CAS put obvious care into his fiction.

The lack of recognition, of his forelorn child poet prodigy status, and his poverty, contributed to his situation with Weird Tales. He had to sell stories that the kind of people who read Weird Tales would read, thus I can see why he was discouraged from enhancing his work with meditative cerebral depth. Lovecraft had a more stable financial situation, and could absorb the backlash he received, as with some of his quasi philosophical manifestos. CAS didn't have as much wiggle room. So, instead he reveled in the wounds from his youth, through his literature, with themes of abandonment and decay, without making the leap toward maturity. And while the death of a close friend tends to send other types into virtuoso overdrive, which might have enhanced the depth of his plot structures and themes, he never did.

It should also be noted that CAS also dabbled with painting and sculpture (and women); he had an artist's drive, which tends to be directed at beauty, and not loftier objectives. His painting and sculpture are simple and childish, not even approaching the skill of a practiced intermediate like Blake. They echo the simpleness of his plot structures. If he didn't take his fiction too seriously, then the question of him achieving broader success isn't as important as what his temperamental successors would accomplish.

CAS didn't really have the will to even attempt to make a breakthrough. With his ties to his life's situation via his parents and lack of money, the societal constraints against him, of institutional bias, and lack of widespread audience appeal, and his own uncertain drive in life, then maybe he didn't need to. His style is overbearingly drudgy for most readers, though I consider that their loss. And while CAS has been mostly ignored in his own lifetime, Vance came along and copied his style, without properly acknowledging him, and achieved mainstream success for him. Vance's success indicates the level of recognition CAS might have gained, had he continued his fiction career.

Yeah HPL had his objective clear by prioritizing plot and form over characters and their development. He built everything to flow right into that final mind rending revelation, he often tried to finish with a bang. CAS on the other hand seemed to me to excell in the middle of his tales with his lush descriptions, witty satire and creativity.

Thank you for these thoughts. So CAS had neither the independent means, nor the inner drive, nor the outer push to pursue loftier literary ideals--whatever those might have looked like in his case. I likened him to Tolkien, now I'm thinking of Borges. CAS did have artistic obsessions--the kind every great artist needs--it's just that his touched upon aesthetics rather than ideas.
I should probably mention that I have read very little fantasy or weird fiction so far. I tried with Lovecraft and Blackwood and gave up after two stories each. I was entertained but eventually unimpressed and I had to go back to my overdue classics. Then I gave CAS a try and devoured that whole Penguin volume, beak and feathers and poetry and all. I haven't read Vance or Dunsany or Peake or Wolfe, who I hope might enchant me just as much or more. I have such a titanic heap in front of me and I started so late. So, thanks for this discussion and this thread and for making me think again about reading more weird fiction (I find that term a bit derogatory but we lack anything better, don't we?)

I forgot about Ligotti: I've read one of his collections of stories, can't remember which. I never got bored and I did feel the enchantment, but never as much as with CAS. I don't find myself daydreaming about his worlds sometimes, as I do about CAS.
Do you perhaps have other recommendations for me in light of the above?

I've been partial to Frank Belknap Long, and prefer him to Lovecraft.

If I could find some fairly recently (1990s on) reprinted weird fiction anthologies that would be great.