Weird Fiction discussion

As much as I like REH's stories, I can't spend that much time reading them. I maxed out this weekend reading Modessit's latest Recluce book & still wound up putting it down last night about 10pm with just 50 pages to go. I just finished it now. Too much to do this morning while the temperature was semi-bearable.

Glad I just missed the boxing stories. I thought "The Pit of the Serpent" was one of his horror stories instead of a Steve Costigan one. REH was an amateur boxer & a huge fan. He tends to use the same speech & humor in his humorous westerns. Most of those revolve around Breckenridge Elkins, A Gent From Bear Creek.

I finished the first one. It was cute. Surprising how little difference there is between a boxing story and a Conan story.

Howard wrote 18 stories for Fight Stories magazine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight_S...) apparently from 1929-1932 and three more for Jack Dempsey's Fight Stories in 1934 before giving up the genre. Don't know if I can stand to read all 21, but I'm going on to the second one.

If you want to see a Fight Stories magazine cover I was pleasantly surprised to find some here: http://www.philsp.com/mags/fight_stor...

And the polls for September are now up! They will run through Sunday night to give you an opportunity to make your book purchases Monday morning.

https://www.goodreads.com/poll/list/9...

There's not a bad book in the bunch. I can't wait to read whichever one wins. Remember, at Weird Fiction, we run not one but two, count them, two, polls per month. We put the book back into book lover!

Blackwood: A Gotheim Tale and Cold Hand in Mine: Strange Stories won the polls to become our Modern and Classic Weird books respectively for September.

Hi. It's time for October's group read nominations. Given that Halloween is at the end, maybe we can aim for more horror-like weird this month. Please remember that it does not have to be a novel or short story collection that is nominated. It's cool if it's a short story too. We read one for Classic Weird the first month this group existed after all.

Please feel free to submit one nomination for Classic Weird (written before 1990) and/or one for Modern Weird (1990 or later). I'll leave nominations open through the weekend.

For Classic Weird I nominate Frank Belknap Long's short story collection The Hounds of Tindalos. You may remember Long as one of the writers of our first Weird Classic read "The Challenge from Beyond." It was our group consensus that his contribution to that collectively written story was the best part. Since then I have been eager to read more Long. If you have too, maybe this is the time.

The book is out of print and starts at $7 for a used paperback (which includes the shipping but not the tax). If you read electronically, "The Hounds of Tindalos" short story is available in a really nice Megapack off Amazon for 99 cents. You also get about twenty more short stories here: https://www.amazon.com/8th-Golden-Wei.... There is a second megapack (https://www.amazon.com/9th-Golden-Wei...) for 99 cents that probably includes many of the short stories not in the first megapack that are in the book. I don't think I'm going to go this route. I bought a huge megapack of Howard's work and found it so overwhelming I can't bare to open it any more. I think I'd rather pay more for less and get the Long paperback version instead.

For Modern Weird October 2019 I nominate The Divinity Student by Michael Cisco. It is a quintessential New Weird text that helped define the genre.