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Murmur reviews short stories

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Murmur
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Re: Murmur reviews short stories

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The Dream of X and Other Fantastic Visions: The Collected Fiction of William Hope Hodgson, Volume 5
by William Hope Hodgson

If you've read my other reviews, you would have seen that I really like WH Hodgson's work. My opinion of this book is no different.

I loved this book. Most of the stories are good, a small number are uninteresting, and a few are just "fine". A small number of stories are exquisite.

About 80% of WH Hodgson's stories, among all of his short stories, take place on board a ship, whether it's a sailing vessel or powered. Usually it's a sailing vessel. A few of his stories in this collection are non-maritime, surprisingly. I've said that WH Hodgson likes to reuse premises for his stories. He did that with the stories in this collection too.

Here are a few notes.
  • The Valley of Lost Children. This is a tragic fantasy story of parents looking for a missing child.
  • Sea Horses. Another tragic fantasy story of a missing child.
  • How Sir Jerrold Treyn dealt with the Dutch in Caunston Cove. Civilians help defend their town from Dutch invaders.
  • "The copyright versions" are abridged versions of his other stories, intended to acquire a copyright for them in the US. This isn't 100% clear to me.
  • The Dream of X. This is an abridged version of The Night Land. The prose in this story is really dense and very flowery. It takes concentration to grasp it. I think it's worth reading. I loved it. Because of this story, I ordered the Hodgson book in this series that contains The Night Land, which is volume 4.
  • "The alternate versions" are alternate versions of some of his stories.
  • The Crew of the Lancing. This is a creepy monster story that could be made into a movie.
  • There are two stories labeled as counterfeits. The introduction to the book gives no explanation of why those stories are called counterfeits. While writing this post, I looked on another site about those stories, and it seems like they were attributed to Hodgson but neither are written by him.
  • The Raft. This is one of the two "counterfeit" stories. It doesn't resemble Hodgson's prose style at all, but the content resembles Hodgson's stuff.
Recommendation: If you like early 20th century horror / adventure stuff, you'd like it.

Here's the table of contents which I found at camelotbooks.
Contents:

* Introduction by Ross E. Lockhart
Fantastic Visions
* The Valley of Lost Children
* Date 1965: Modern Warfare
* My House Shall Be Called the House of Prayer
* Judge Barclay's Wife
* The Getting Even of Tommy Dodd
* Sea Horses
* How the Honourable Billy Darrell Raised the Wind
* The Getting Even of 'Parson' Guyles
* The Friendship of Monsieur Jeynois
* The Inn of the Black Crow
* What Happened in the Thunderbolt
* How Sir Jerrold Treyn Dealt with the Dutch in Caunston Cove
* Jem Binney and the Safe at Lockwood Hall
* Diamond Cut Diamond with a Vengeance
* Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani
* The Room of Fear
* The Promise
* Captain Dang
* Captain Dan Danblasten
Copyright Versions
* The Ghost Pirates
* Carnacki, the Ghost Finder
* The Dream of X
* Senator Sandy Mac Ghee
* The Last Word in Mysteries
* The Dumpley Acrostics
Alternate Versions
* An Adventure of the Deep Waters
* Captain Gunbolt Charity and the Painted Lady
* The Storm
* The Crew of the Lancing
Counterfeits
* The Raft
* R.M.S. "Empress of Australia"
* A Note on the Texts
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Re: Murmur reviews short stories

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The Horror of the Heights
by Arthur Conan Doyle

I read this as part of a collection of AC Doyle's short stories in the book Tales of Terror and Mystery.

The story is pretty good. It's about a pilot who wants to achieve the record for flying at the highest altitude. Something unexpected happens at a very high altitude, as you can probably guess based on the title of the book and the name of this short story.

You can read this story at this very visually busy web page here.

The story starts with "The idea that the extraordinary narrative" and ends near the text "I would commend to them his own words".

Recommendation: Read it if you're in the mood.
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The Secret Cave
or John Lees adventure

By H. P. Lovecraft

This seems to be a story that Lovecraft wrote when he was around 8 years old. It's not a great story but it has hints of his later literary direction. In my opinion, it's not bad for an 8 year old.

You can read all of the grammatical mistakes here:
https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/te ... on/sc.aspx

Recommendation: If you like Lovecraft, read it. It took me about 4 minutes to finish it.
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Collapsing Cosmoses
By R. H. Barlow
and H. P. Lovecraft

This is a very short story by the two authors. It's a sci fi / comedy type of thing. I enjoyed it. It's very silly. It seems like it could have been much longer since it ends at a sort of cliffhanger.

You can this very brief silliness here:
https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/te ... n/clc.aspx

Recommendation: It takes less than 10 minutes to read it, so sure, read it.
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Larry and the Creeping Horde
by Kevin W Cousins

This isn't a short story. I don't feel like making a new thread for reviewing novels, so I'm putting this review in my short story thread. Besides, the novel's text has a large font and is only 200 pages, so I can imagine that it's actually a novella.

This is a horror novel. This is the sequel to Mr Cousins's "Larry" story from his book Exhibition. You don't need to read "Larry" before reading this book. In fact, Mr Cousins retconned "Larry" for this book, and the events in "Larry" don't match the retconned story in this book.

In one of my previous posts, I said that when I first started reading this book, I thought that it outright sucked. Well, later, I decided to continue reading it, and I ultimately enjoyed it.

The book is very poorly written with lots of mistakes and poor changes of scenes. Even with the bad prose, I still enjoyed his book. In my other post about Mr Cousins's prose, I said that if he kept writing, he'll probably improve.

Recommendation: If what I wrote above tickles your fancy, read it. Otherwise don't.
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The Collected Fiction, Vol. 3: The Ghost Pirates and Other Revenants of the Sea
by William Hope Hodgson

If you want to get only one collection of WHH's stories, this is the one to get. It has my favorite stories that he wrote.

Here are a few gems within this collection that I reviewed elsewhere in this thread.

The Voice in the Night
The Stone Ship
A Tropical Horror


Here are a few gems in this collection that I didn't review elsewhere in this thread:

The Derelict: The crew of a ship find a derelict ship and it's covered with white stuff. This is the first story by WHH that I read. It's the one that turned me onto his stuff.
The Ghost Pirates: A ship has a series of mishaps and tragedies and the crew think that the ship is haunted.
Demons of the Sea: A submarine eruption is followed by steaming fog and unknown creatures in the water.
The 'Prentices' Mutiny: Some young apprentices are severely abused by the officers on a ship, and they decide to fight back.
The Haunted Pampero: Something is slithering on board a ship.

Recommendation: Read it if you like old horror stories.
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The Best of Amazing Stories: The 1927 Anthology

This is an excellent collection of stories from the Amazing Stories publication from 1927. All of the stories were new to me except Lovecraft's The Colour Out Of Space.

I have two complaints only. That is, the book is too short, and there are an enormous number of mistakes. The mistakes look like they're from OCR scanning. For example, one page had the word "hut" and it was spelled like "but".

The introductions to the stories use the term "scientifiction". Is that the old word for "science fiction"? I don't know.

A few notes.
  • The Man With The Strange Head: This was a great story, but unfortunately, very short. The opening scene is a guy is in a hotel room, and he's pacing back and forth across the room. His head is small and old looking, and it's resting against his chest, eyes closed, face downward, the entire time he is walking.
  • The Plague Of The Living Dead: This was fun to read. It was akin to zombie stories, but with some differences.
  • The Four-Dimensional Roller-Press: This was fun to read, but it was a bit flawed. I liked it regardless.
  • Some of the original art is included in this book. There's a picture before each story.
Recommendation: If you like early 20th century science fiction, this is a must read.
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Black Destroyer
by AE van Vogt

I read the book Voyage of the Space Beagle long ago. This story is supposed to be part of that book. I didn't remember this story at all. Regardless, I read Black Destroyer recently, and it's excellent.

Supposedly this story partially inspired the story in the movie Alien. It has some similarities, but not a lot.

You can read the whole story here.

https://www.prosperosisle.org/spip.php?article324

Recommendation: Read it if you want.
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Horrors & Heresies
By Robert M Price

This is a collection of short stories, most of which should probably be considered in the horror genre. Maybe religious fiction would be another relevant genre for this book. This is a modern book written in modern English. I greatly enjoyed it and I feel like reading it again. Robert M Price isn't the best author in the world; however, his ideas are inventive and I liked the stories a lot.

Robert M Price is an atheist, a religion scholar, a Lovecraft scholar, a podcaster, and I don't know what else. He incorporates both his love of religion and Lovecraft into the stories in this book.

Some notes.
  • The Parchment Chase. A sort of religious mystery story.
  • This is the Dawning. Cthulhu is seemingly inflicting dreams on a guy, and the guy is very receptive of the evil messages.
  • Myth Became Fact. William Lane Craig is satirized here. Christianity was false, and then it becomes real, with all that that implies. The implications of Christianity being real is something I've pondered in the past, and this is one among a few stories in this book where Christian dogma is factual, not mythical. I'll probably write a thread about this idea sometime.
  • The Caliphate of Cthulhu. Islam's relationship to Cthulhu and the dreaded Necronomicon is discovered. This story mentions some things about the origin of Islam and it makes me want to read more about it.
  • The Grey Rite of Azathoth. This is fan fiction of Lovecraft's story The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. In the Dexter Ward story, a warlock named Joseph Curwen is the villain of the story, and he can resurrect dead people. In this story, he resurrects Jesus.
  • The Nativity of the Avatar. A guy lives a life parallel to Jesus's life in the Gospels. Instead of exorcising and expelling demons, he has the demons follow him as Jesus had the apostles follow Jesus.
  • The Savage Sword of Jehu. Jewish rebels fight against Ahab and his sorceress wife Jezebel.
Recommendation: Did what I write above tickle your fancy? Then this book is for you.
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Re: Murmur reviews short stories

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Do you know of any sites that offer free short stories?
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