Sunday 30 October 2011

Me, Elsewhere, Rabbiting On

Today is Halloween, a celebration that goes mostly ignored here in Australia. People tend to divide into 3 groups here:
      1. Those who ignore it
      2. Random kids who go trick-or-treating, and are mostly disappointed because those in group 1 have no treats to hand over.
      3. Those who go into splenetic rants about American cultural imperialism whenever it's mentioned.

In any case, over at The Second Pass, I'm one of a number of persons talking about great scary short stories; to my delight, I find myself in the company of John Crowley, one of my favourite writers. Hot-diggetty, as the cool kids say. The story I chose is from the John Wyndham oddity, The Outward Urge.




If I hadn't, mistakenly, been convinced someone else would choose it, I might also have gone for Guy de Maupassant's 'The Horla': go here for details, online texts thereof, and even a Peter Lorre-starring radio play version.




Or go here and here for my ludicrously extensive John Wyndham covers posts.


4 comments:

Seth Christenfeld said...

I know he's not really all that obscure, but I do always get a frisson of happiness when someone else expresses adoration for John Crowley.

JRSM said...

He's great, isn't he? I actually wrote an appreciation of several of his shorter works a few years ago, over here: http://www.bookslut.com/small_but_perfectly_formed/2005_09_006545.php

Seth Christenfeld said...

He most definitely is--and I really need to read more. (I've read the Aegypt Quartet, Four Freedoms, and the three early novels that were reissued as Otherwise, but not yet Little, Big or any of the others. Although I have them all around here somewhere.)

Read that appreciation--nice stuff. I keep trying to figure out a way to reconceive Beasts as a musical, but haven't gotten it right yet.)

JRSM said...

Ha! What a cool idea. With Reynard as narrator, perhaps?