Re: Eerie, for sure, but not sf or supernatural horror
Posted by:
Dale Nelson (IP Logged)
Date: 22 August, 2020 02:17PM
My intention, Platypus -- if this helps -- with this thread is for us to develop a bibliography (with accompanying "annotation") of stories that get across an eerie sensation without, at most, doing more than to suggest the supernatural or the fantastic. Personally I'd probably shy away, here, from stories like "The Monkey's Paw" that seem to be stories of the supernatural even if the supernatural element isn't quite undeniable.
This is a pretty specific category of stories we're talking about, then, but that's just it. Here we have assembled readers who may have a lot of experience of the literature of the strange and who find that they can indeed identify some stories as belonging to this type of group. It must be something that only a few authors have done and done well.*
I would encourage the curious to read "The Hour After Westerly" and The Ice Palace, which I mentioned as examples of what I have in mind in the original posting. The latter (a short novel) is something I might want to reread yet this year. If I do, perhaps I'll set up a thread on it for anyone interested.
*Possibly it dates back to Wordsworth. He and Coleridge agreed, as young men, that STC would write poems of the supernatural, and he did -- "Christabel," the "Rime," "Kubla Khan." They agreed that WW would write poems (and I forget precisely how STC put it) that have the effect of the supernatural or the preternatural without clearly departing from the natural, and so we get poems like the one about the rural wanderer who heard the girl singing in a tongue he couldn't understand, something, he was sure, coming out of long cultural memory and so on -- was that "The Solitary Reaper"?