Re: A good weird/horror/sci-fi book to recommend
Posted by:
Dale Nelson (IP Logged)
Date: 11 July, 2019 10:51AM
I'm fond of Tim Powers's Declare, which can remind one of John le Carre in its treatment of an espionage theme, but is a supernatural thriller. I haven't had all that good luck with Powers's writing elsewhere, but this is something of a favorite.
Charles Williams's All Hallows' Eve is stranger than what some readers want when they read a weird novel, in that a couple of the main characters are dead, etc. I've read it many times. It's unusually convincing.
Two and a half years ago I started a thread at the SF & Fantasy Chronicles Forums site as follows:
Phyllis Paul (1903-1973) is, at this time, necessarily a "cult novelist" in that nearly all of her books are so hard to get hold of that those who have read more than one of them and want to talk about their reading will find few others who have read more than one.
One or two of her novels shouldn't be too hard to get hold of because in the U. S. Lancer Books issued them in paperback -- yes, at the same time the company was beginning to issue its Conan books.
I have read Twice Lost twice and agree with Glen Cavaliero that it appears to end ambiguously. I'm not sure what happened to little, pathetic, sinister Vivian Lambert. I am not sure what Thomas Antequin did and whether the three pages that might have been torn from his diary record Vivian's death in a well house (or earth closet) by a wretched accident. Did a male character die from a scratch inflicted by rusty metal, or from some psychosomatic stress condition, or from a spectral bite? Who or what were the couple Christine glimpsed in London, who looked like Ecuadorian Indians? Were they visible only to her (inner) eye? Had Christine seen little Vivian's lifeless body stretched on the grass on an overgrown English yard? I am chilled by the novel's final sentence, "But as she had never wanted the truth, but only comfort, so she had not now found it," while recognizing that by itself it is ambiguous: does "it" refer to "truth," as it appears to do, or to "comfort"?
Perhaps the author has indulged in some mystification for its own sake, or perhaps, as in Faulkner's "That Evening Sun," the deliberate inconclusiveness as regards plot is intended to lead the alert reader to see that the novel never was primarily about plot but about character and theme. I must emphasize that though I write this morning of an elusive narrative, Paul's style isn't vague and cloudy. Cavaliero uses the word "steely." She is interested in evil, guilt, evasion.
I have been saving the other Lancer edition, Echo of Guilt (originally Pulled Down) for some time when I am dying for a new-to-me Phyllis Paul novel. Before resorting to it I think I will try and see if maybe interlibrary loan can fetch up something more by Paul.
Cavaliero mentioned Paul in his book on Charles Williams, and then wrote a few pages about her in The Supernatural and English Fiction (OUP, 1995). I suppose that much of the attention Paul has received in recent years derives from Cavaliero's advocacy.
I suppose Paul's novel reminds me a bit of Walter de la Mare's fiction, of Picnic at Hanging Rock, and of The Turn of the Screw. Eh, Lancer Books, her novel certainly does not remind me of Robert E. Howard.
So here is a place where -- should anyone read her -- Chrons people can discuss the writings of Phyllis Paul. Very little is known of her life. I quote from a note on page 259 of Cavaliero's 1995 study:
"Phyllis Paul died on 30 Aug. 1973, in Hastings [England], as a result of being struck by a motor cycle while crossing the road. The account at the inquests suggests that she was not known locally as a writer, being only identified by the Cash name tag on her handkerchief. A neighbour commented that 'Miss Paul kept herself to herself. When she walked she had a habit of looking quickly to one side and then the other, and then she would look down again.' A witness to the accident was more graphic still, remarking that what he saw was 'an old lady going across the road like a sheet of newspaper.' The phrase might have been coined by Paul herself (see Hastings Observer, 8 and 15 Sept. 1973)." And that is perhaps the most full biography of Paul we will get, although publishers' files might have some information.---
Most of the follow-up entries for this thread are by me.
American readers shouldn't have much trouble getting Twice Lost from their library on interlibrary loan. I have seen prices even on used copies of this one going up, though -- though given the Lancer paperback editions, copies shouldn't have been hard to find at one time.
I ended up tracking down all eleven of Paul's books and photocopying the nine that I didn't have. In one case the book had to come all the way from the National Library of New Zealand and I had to pay $30 to borrow it (and $9.60 to photocopy it). Two or three of the others came from the Library of Congress. By now I have read six of her novels. She's really good at the more subtle kind of eerie story.