THE DEEP ONES: Spring 2021 Discussion Schedule

7-Apr "Let Loose" by Mary Cholmondeley (1890)
14-Apr "The Black Dog" by Stephen Crane (1892)
21-Apr "The Feather Pillow" by Horacio Quiroga (1907)
28-Apr "The Happy Children" by Arthur Machen (1920)
5-May "Kecksies" by Marjorie Bowen (1925)
12-May "The Moon-Bog" by H.P. Lovecraft (1926)
19-May "The Gods of Bal-Sagoth" by Robert E. Howard (1931)
26-May "The Black Stone Statue" by Mary Elizabeth Counselman (1937)
2-Jun "The Sea Was Wet as Wet Can Be" by Gahan Wilson (1967)
9-Jun "It Only Comes Out at Night" by Dennis Etchison (1976)
16-Jun "The Black Tome of Alsophocus" by H.P. Lovecraft and Martin S. Warnes (1969)
23-Jun "A Garden of Blackred Roses" by Charles L. Grant (1980)
30-Jun "Tempting Providence" by Jonathan Thomas (2010)

There were 5 nominators and at least 9 selectors. Counselman, Crane, and Cholmondeley tied for top vote-getter with 9 net, and there was a clean cutoff at 3 net votes to qualify. Nominations continued sparse, with one fewer than last quarter and only one more than we had weeks to fill.

Thanks for keeping the wheels turning, paradoxosalpha!

I should have liked to throw in a couple late nominations, but circumstances conspired against it.

Looks like a nice mix of new and familiar names, anyway.

There’s a bit of a mid-century drought, 1937-1967, but more remarkably by recent standards there’s only one story published in my lifetime.

Echo AndreasJ's appreciation of paradoxosalpha's longstanding commitment to Fatum ex Machina (and I welcome any improvements over my hackneyed neologism).

ETA Assume that Padawer's "The Meat Garden" automatically goes onto the Summer slate. Seeds the nomination list, at least.

Your neologism appears to mean “fate from a/the machine”, but I’m guessing that’s not what you’re trying to express?

Now entering our 39th season. Thanks, paradoxosalpha.

>4 AndreasJ:

I was trying for "Weird from the machine" but how to say Weird in Latin?

>1 paradoxosalpha:

Many thanks from me as well.

I'm going to be annoying now, I'm afraid, with a slight correction to the story dates.

According to The Weird, "It Only Comes Out at Night" was copyrighted in 1976. First publication in Frights.

Edited: fixed the Touchstone to The Weird.

>7 housefulofpaper:

Correction made (probably a typo at some point transposing those digits), and schedule amended accordingly: We'll read the Gahan Wilson first.

>6 elenchus:

Fatum is one sense of "weird," but sort of remote from the one we use for a genre label, which is more unheimlich than Schicksal, I think. Is there a Latin word for that?

>9 paradoxosalpha:

Google.translate only offered "eldritch" which is quite on point but I thought Anglo Saxon rather than Latin, and I gave up.

For ‘weird’ in the sense of “strange, unusual, uncanny”, the best is perhaps extraneus ”strange, foreign”. HPL would have appreciated the literal sense of “from outside”.

So a weird tale would be fabula extranea, or simply extranea for short.

>11 AndreasJ:

Extraneus ex machina sounds better and possibly includes a pun: "That from outside which came out of the machine" ?