THE DEEP ONES: Summer 2022 Planning Thread

This thread is for nominations and voting on stories for inclusion in the July-September reads in this group. Please feel free to draw on the ongoing brainstorming thread for nominations, but don't limit yourself to items discussed there. There is no further obligation--even to participate in the resulting discussion if a nomination is selected! It's perfectly okay to gamble on stories the nominator has never read, although also welcome for nominators to put up stories they've enjoyed and would like to revisit. In all these years, we've never been known to dog anyone for nominating a story where readers end up taking a dim view of it.

As in past rounds, any story that gets more "No" than "Yes" votes won't make the cut; otherwise they'll be prioritized according to net-yes-minus-no, and the final list will be in OPD sequence. Ties will be broken in favor of author and period variety.

To propose a story for voting, place the title and author between HTML-style angle-bracket tags. The open tag says vote (in brackets); the close tag says /vote (ditto). Multiple polls need multiple posts. If you put the name of the author in double square brackets, it will make it a linked "touchstone" for the LT database, and first publication dates of nominated stories are appreciated. Also welcome are remarks about the story, the author, and your nomination motives, and/or a link to an online version. Here is an example (from a previous thread):


A useful resource for general bibliography info including OPD and inclusion in collections is ISFDB.

You can see a sortable list of all previous discussions here. The persistent brainstorming thread is here. Nominations repeating old discussions will be disqualified, but revival of dormant discussion threads is always welcome. "That is not dead which can eternal lie," etc.

VOTING is scheduled to END on the Summer Solstice: Tuesday, June 21.

Originally published in Campbell's book Demons by Daylight and often collected thereafter. Kirby McCauley notes the "fragmented style and attenuated dialogue" of this story, along with the "terrifying ... helplessness of the child protagonist."

There are several different English translations, including the one by Andrew Hurley in the VanderMeers' The Weird: A Compendium. "Borges demonstrates that language bears no resemblance to the Real, since it is just as impossible to describe what the Aleph reveals as it is possible for language itself to alter one’s perception of reality. In this way, 'The Aleph' questions and, indeed, mocks, our construction of consensual reality."--Matthew Rettino

Recurring Lovecraft protagonist Randolph Carter in his first appearance explains to the police what he knows about the disappearance of his friend Warren.

Online in sundry places, incl Wikisource.

Haven't read this one, but it was mentioned in the brainstorming thread and Lovecraft pronounced it one of the "permanent mountain-peaks of American weird writing". A zombie tale of sorts, I gather.

Online at Wikisource and undoubtedly elsewhere.

Readily available in print and online.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10150/10150-h/10150-h.htm

A folk horror tale available online.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Grim_Tales/Man-size_in_Marble

A folk horror classic, shades of the Deep Ones. Found online:

https://pseudopod.org/2021/01/08/pseudopod-739-morag-of-the-cave/

Supposedly this is the first weird western. Widely anthologized, it's available in audio at https://pseudopod.org/2016/08/11/pseudopod-503-the-horror-from-the-mound/ and the text is online at https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0601761h.html.

A ghost calls up an old friend to ask her to help have his poems published posthumously. More humour than horror, granted, but I think it just about fits into our remit.

Online here.

It's a little while since we did anything by Dunsany. This brief, oneiric piece tells of the abandoned city of Bethmoora. It received a sequel of sorts in "The Hashish Man", which we did back in 2012.

Online here (scroll down).

Based on a Japanese folktale. A feudal era yeoman dreams - and perhaps its more than just a dream.

Online in the Gutenberg edition of Kwaidan.

"By the communion cup of Satan!" he swore. A weird pirate tale. Available online.

A very short "tale of psychological terror" (per Joshi) told in three voices. Only published in Black Wings of Cthulhu, as far as I can tell, although a search for the string "the one Julius dubbed Elaine" brings up some apparently pirated versions online.

A story of supernaturally-frustrated authorship, common in Hawthorne collections and naturally available online.

A story of the "spry, witty, brisk little spook-chasing medico" (per Lin Carter) Jules de Grandin, a priority inclusion for later editions of Quinn's hero. A clunky transcription from the original Weird Tales publication is online.

>5 AndreasJ:
housefulofpaper writes: "Have we skipped over this one because no one really knows for certain what happens in it? (We can lean on M.Grant Kellermeyer's essay on his Oldstyle Tales Press website now!)" (Bibliography here, and doubtless available online.)

Another housefulofpaper suggestion: "Hailed as the best non-Lovecraft Mythos tale by YouTuber "The Outlaw Bookseller" (Stephen E. Andrews), who appreciates the tale's South Wales setting (and echoes of Arthur Machen), and also says the double L in "lloigor" should be pronounced as in e.g. "Llanelli" (the town's Wikipedia entry includes the phonetic spelling and an audio clip). Collected in Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (1969, and the 1990? edition reprinted by Del Rey)"

>17 paradoxosalpha:

Funnily enough, I already nominated Halpin Frayser in >5 AndreasJ:.

I'm pleased to see, BTW, that the number of nominations is up again.

>19 AndreasJ:
Oops. Post edited to remove the duplicate voting and make it a reply to >5 AndreasJ:

I added a bunch of nominations last night so that people would have a couple of weekdays and a full weekend to vote before the deadline. I'm encouraged by the response to the Cisco story so far. It would be nice to know that Black Wings of Cthulhu has the sort of availability to and interest among the group we've established in the past for New Cthulhu and The Weird.

RB considered this Weird Tales sale to be his first really good short story, saying, "I remembered a girl I had played with on the beach when I was about seven years old near Lake Michigan - she went out in the water and didn't come back. What a mystery that was." Well-anthologized.

JCO has no doubt delivered many a commencement speech. I like to imagine her sitting at one such event, thinking up this story while happy grads were receiving their diplomas. Found in Ellen Datlow's Lovecraft Unbound: Twenty Stories and Al Sarrantonio's Redshift: Extreme Visions of Speculative Fiction.

Thanks paradoxsalpha for plucking my suggestions of out limbo.

I've just taken my snapshot of the vote counts. Schedule coming soon.