THE DEEP ONES: Summer 2021 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.

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. A 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: Sunday, June 20.

Butts is said to have written surrealistic horror. This one was written in 1932 and published posthumously. It appears in four anthologies including the recent Women's Weird.

This one was discussed in the brainstorming thread as a promising next foray into Lee's oeuvre. Online here.

I'm wearying of thinking this and imagine it's tedious to keep hearing it, but How? How can it be time to plan the Summer reading list? Didn't we just start the Spring List?!

/rant

I'm curious what the group will make of this. It's kind of a weird story though with mostly naturalistic elements.

Available in many places and free here: https://creepypasta.fandom.com/wiki/Out_of_the_Storm.

The date is, of course, when Poe left Richmond for his fatal trip to Baltimore.

This is another one I'm curious about the group's take.

Available in three Leiber collections as well as its original magazine publication.

A homage to pulp era Martian romances by the likes of Leigh Brackett, a few of which we've done; indeed we'll see a few characters we've met namedropped as inhabiting the same universe. Online here.

(It's been published both with and without a leading "The" in the title; the form without is original acc'd isfdb.)

Prompted by a review of a Kingfisher novel reportedly inspired by Blackwood's, The Willows, I looked into short stories. "Origin Story" could qualify as Faery Weird. Other stories I read were impressive and very well written, but less overtly Weird.

T. Kingfisher is a pseudonym of Ursula Vernon, evidently used to distinguish from other work intended for children.

Available online here:
https://apex-magazine.com/origin-story/

Seems like the touchstones were lost in my previous posts. Out of a sense of completeness: Tanith Lee, Michael Moorcock

Time for another CAS?An early, eerie story, online here. Quite short.

This is a bit of a shot in the dark, but it occured to me I've enjoyed the KEW stories we've read, so I check Free Speculative Fiction Online, and this collaboration is the only thing by him they list as freely available online, namely here.

Originally published in Dark Forces, and often republished thereafter. Kirby McCauley praises this tale for its "grim humor, with the tenor of modern-day urban life, its dirt and squalor alongside opulence, its economic and racial tensions, and the sense of life on the edge of danger."

Dedicated to fellow weird writer Kit Reed, this story is one of Ford's weird horror pieces that features himself as the protagonist. Originally published in F&SF Nov/Dec 2015, but newly republished in Ford's collection Big Dark Hole and also collected in The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Ten.

After the return of Our Lord, there are no psychotherapists. Online here.

An Egyptian Mythos tale. Found in Mysteries of the Worm.

A gothic one from Twice-Told Tales.

http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/WeddingKnell.html

Weird Fiction Review calls it "a weird classic, often reprinted, including in the Joyce Carol Oates-edited American Gothic Tales and our The Weird compendium." They also put it online.

https://weirdfictionreview.com/2012/05/replacements-by-lisa-tuttle/

A semi-random pick from The Weird; VanderMeer's introduction compares it to Ford's "The Beautiful Gelreesh", Arnold's "The Night Wire", and Campbell's "The Brood", all of which we've done.

Speaking of the VanderMeers, for all the stories from The Weird we've done, we never seem to have done any story by them themselves. Included in The Weird is:

Etchison's pitch-dark take on an infamous piece of Carlifornia folklore.

A quick reminder: I'll be tallying votes and preparing the summer list tomorrow.

I’m afraid I owe you all a bit of an apology - turns out KEW and Drake’s Killer above is a much longer work (270pp in one edition) than I realized when nominating it, and therefore dubiously suitable as a Deep Ones read. Sorry all.

>21 AndreasJ:
No worries. I thought that might be a shorter version of the novel, which I used to own but never got around to reading. It's long gone now. Wish I still had it.

>22 semdetenebre:

We've got more than enough other nominations, so I suggest everyone who don't want a novel on the reading list simply change their vote to "No".

OK, I'm starting to pull the vote numbers now.