Emanuel Noor itibaren Kızılot/Gümüşhane, Turkey

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11/02/2024

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Emanuel Noor Kitabın yeniden yazılması (10)

2018-05-28 16:40

Sarıkamış Dramı-Alptekin Müderrisoğlu TrendKitaplar Kütüphanesi

Tarafından yazılmış kitap Tarafından: Bilgi Yayınevi

Gerald Page trots out 1978's YEAR'S BEST HORROR and while there's more of the usual, the quality is overall better this time, with fewer weaker stories and one or two absolute gems. Weak stuff first. The book ends with Russell Kirk's "There's A Long, Long Trail A Winding" which was also picked to be in the cornerstone collection Dark Forces, years later. I wasn't a fan then and I'm not a fan now. Kirk, a noted Conservative scholar, almost always writes about GOOD and EVIL and, from a technical point of view, his writing is top notch but the subject matter just seems, eh, I don't know, can I say "old fashioned" or "hackneyed" and leave it at that? Did Kirk ever contend with troublesome events like the Vietnam War (which threw his much valued conservatism into a complicated light), or was he content to have criminal hobos repenting and finding absolution? I don't know. "A Cobweb Of Pulsing Veins" (that title lurid enough for you?) by William Scott Home is on the other ends of the stylistic spectrum - a huge throbbing slice of pulp - so that means a plot you've heard before (man is hired to rob grave by mysterious individual but the thing he eventually steals is Eeeeevil!) although this one has some odd twists (the last line is bizarre!). Unfortunately, Home also writes like the old pulp writers, which means he writes as if he's being paid a half a cent a word. This leads to a Byzantine and abstruse prose style replete with multifarious verbalizings that fritter away the conscientious reader's patience for eldritch and preternatural shenanigans. Whew! Manly Wade Wellman's "Ever The Faith Endures" is a charming if slight tale about a man who returns to England to trace his family's roots and discovers a distant cousin, a stately home and the true, terrible meaning of his family name. What would a Gerald Page YEAR'S BEST HORROR be without a Charles L. Grant story? A little thinner, maybe? Actually, Grant turns in one of his solid stories here, the award winning "If Damon Comes" which is a nicely direct (for once) tale of "quiet horror" in which a man must deal with the supernatural repercussions of disappointing his now-dead son. Janet Fox's "Screaming To Get Out" is another one of those "bad people get what they deserve" stories, although the bad guy in this one, a brutalizer of women with low self-esteem, is suitably loathsome enough for the reader to relish his encounter with a quiet fat girl who's not all she seems. Michael Bishop's "Within The Walls Of Tyre" is an odd story about a baby and a strange revenge plot while David Drake's "Best of Luck" involves Vietnam, a lucky coin and a werewolf. Both are solid reads. "Winter White" is Tanith Lee doing her usual dark fantasy, to good effect (as usual) as a barbarian king finds a strange whistle and calls up a snow-white woman, invisible to everyone but him, who just won't leave him alone, which drives him crazy... Karl Edward Wagner's "Undertow" is another sword and sorcery fable of Kane, his famous "Conan as black magician" creation. Generally, I'm not a fan of this genre but Wagner is a great writer and this Kane story is a little more straightforward than last year's (while still pulling a deft narrative chronology trick) - it sketches the story of what it's like being Kane's mistress and what that means when you want to stop seeing him (psst, it ends badly!). Dennis Etchison's "I Can Hear The Dark" is a short meditation on the child of famous (and highly-strung) soap opera star who's afraid of the dark and what he finds up there at the top the stairs. Etchison is a tough writer for me - I need to give him more attention than I tend to - but this story was concise and evocative, more like something from ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS than "horror", per se, but well done regardless. And the top stories? Lisa Tuttle's "The Horse Lord" is a spooky story set in an old farmhouse out in the wilds of western upstate New York where the stable has been boarded up since a trainer was eaten alive by his horses over a hundred years ago. The ending is intense and terrifying and well worth a read - an evocative horror. "At The Bottom Of The Garden" by David Campton is another entry into a sub-sub-genre of horror, the "little kid whose parents don't listen to him" story (see "Thus, I Refute Beelzy" by John Collier) - in this case a little girl who has a new friend who can do things like fix her teeth and fix the neighbor boy's withered legs and might be able to fix her headaches as well, if the friend knew how heads worked. The parents aren't listening, sadly for them. A guy named Stephen King finally makes an appearance with the classic "Children Of The Corn" - forget those cheesy movies and return to this wonderfully concise and terrifying story, part Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery", part THE DARK SECRET OF HARVEST HOME, part Midwestern Gothic. The town of Gatlin, out there baking in a sea of corn in the middle of Nebraska, is empty of everyone but children. And why is that? Finally, Ramsey Campbell turns in another spooky creep-fest in "Drawing In" as a man rents a vacation home in the country to recuperate from an accident, a home whose walls seem to be cracking, a home filled with furtive scurryings and strange, barely glimpsed hairy faces, a home of an absent arachnologist off gathering specimens in Europe. There are cupboards full of mounted spiders in glass cases and one particularly large box which is curiously...empty. And that's it. Search out this collection if anything sounds particularly compelling. It's worth the investment.

Okuyucu Emanuel Noor itibaren Kızılot/Gümüşhane, Turkey

Kullanıcı, bu kitapları portalın yayın kurulu olan 2017-2018'de en ilginç olarak değerlendirdi "TrendKitaplar Kütüphanesi" Tüm okuyucuların bu literatürü tanımalarını tavsiye eder.